New laws on hate speech: An honest attempt to protect people or a sinister effort to erode free speech?

As a libertarian my instincts are for the highest levels of freedom of speech. However as with all freedoms its limits lie where they infringe on the rights of others. Libertarians aren’t anarchists, you can’t “do what you want” when it initiates force or fraud against another. As your rights are to be free from violence against you or your property (and your property includes intellectual property and your reputation), then the appropriate limits on freedom of speech are those that violate the rights of another. There are laws on these violations already.

That includes threats of violence, it includes inciting others to inflict violence (including property damage) and includes recording a crime as an accessory to that crime (this covers child pornography and filming rape or someone being assaulted “for fun”). One claim is that the law doesn’t cover threats of violence against groups, but a group is a collection of individuals, and if this is true then a simple amendment of the Crimes Act can be made, with S.174 adding to “person” the words “or group of persons”. S.306-308 also contain provisions around threats that are relevant, so they idea that somehow there is some yawning gap in the law that allows people to threaten others with violence is simply false. 

Is expressing hatred of someone a violation of that person’s rights, or more generally is expressing hatred for a group or class of people a violation of their rights? In and of itself no it isn’t. Hatred has come to be an emotion that the “kindness” state of Jacinda Ardern wants banned, but it is not an emotion without merit. In the right context, it is not only appropriate, but almost a moral imperative. Why would any decent person not hate Fred and Rosemary West, or “Dr” Mengele, or Saddam Hussein? If a defined class of people are waging violence against you or your loved ones, or even complete strangers why should you not hate them? Actual Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Stasi, Japan’s wartime Imperial Army, a mafia family, a criminal gang.  

You don’t have a right to be protected from someone hating you as an individual or a member of a group. Indeed, this is a position held by many people across the political spectrum. Religious zealots hate non-believers, communists hate the bourgeoisie, trans-activists hate those they call TERFs, socialists hate “neo-liberals”, environmentalists hate fossil fuel producers and buyers of large utes, crime victims hate criminals, etc etc. You see hatred of others is a normal reaction to a passionate set of beliefs or a passionate belief in injustice. The issue is when such hatred is expressed as a threat, whether it be a direct threat to imminent violence or an implicit threat of violence or other action to prevent someone going about their lives peacefully. The fear generated by those expressing such threats, and by those touting bigoted views is palpable and contrary to the values of a rational, moral and liberal society.  The question is how to address such threats. Criminal law should protect people from threats of violence, but I’m very cautious about how far to take that. 

So there is hate speech law now, but the Ardern Government wants to go further. The stated purpose is to help prevent a repeat of the Christchurch Mosque Attack, but this hypothesis is questionable at best. Let’s look at the direct purpose of the proposed changes from the discussion document:

The proposals target the types of communication that seek to spread and entrench feelings of intolerance, prejudice, and hatred against groups in our society. All people are equal, and our society is made up of people with many different aspects to their identities. The incitement of hatred against a group based on a shared characteristic, such as ethnicity, religion, or sexuality, is an attack on our values of inclusiveness and diversity. Such incitement is intolerable and has no place in our society.

The idea that inciting hatred against a group based on a shared characteristic that is inherent to those people is certainly an attack on the values of a free liberal society and should have no place in a free society. However, if a shared characteristic is simply sharing an opinion, there that is a whole different situation. You can’t help race, sex or sexuality, but you can help what you think, and what some people think does not entitle them to be immune from hatred.

So the proposal is not about threats of violence, but about communications that are intended (intent matters after all) to spread and entrench (i.e., sustain) “feelings of tolerance, prejudice and hatred”. Now it’s easy to work out what these might be, the problem is what some might think these are. 

Is the column by Karl Du Fresne in the Spectator that talks of “Maorification” one that “entrenches” feelings of prejudice, or is it legitimate political commentary?

How about when Debbie Ngarewa-Packer describes in the NZ Herald NZers as either being tangata whenua, recovering racists and racists? Does that seek to spread feelings of intolerance against non-Maori?

Clearly there is no point asking Kris Faafoi, who doesn’t have a clue as the least qualified Minister of Justice for 13 years. The man's an idiot. Furthermore,  Jacinda Ardern thinks she shouldn’t be responsible for explaining what Cabinet’s decisions on new laws should mean in practice.  The nodding dogs of the Labour left and the Greens are all filing in behind her, so it is better to just read the proposals.  So in this post, I'll look at just one.

Proposal One: Change the language in the incitement provisions in the Human Rights Act 1993 so that they protect more groups that are targeted by hateful speech. Under this proposal, more groups would be protected by the law if hatred was incited against them due to a characteristic that they have.

This is about Sections 61 and 131 of the Human Rights Act. Section 61 prohibits publishing or distributing written matter, or using words in a public place that are “threatening, abusive, or insulting” on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic and national origins. Section 131 prohibits “with intent to excite hostility or ill-will against, or bring into contempt or ridicule, any group of persons in New Zealand on the ground of the colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”. 

The Government wants to expand the groups this law “protects” from “insults” or from “contempt or ridicule” far beyond race and nationality. Consider the categories it wants to include:

• Sex (so no jokes about men, or women)

• Gender (no jokes about men who self-identify as women and look absurd)

• Marital status

• Religious belief (so yes that IS Life of Brian. Don’t intend to ridicule religion)

• Ethical belief (so don’t be ridiculing people who think abortion is murder, or who think pornography is good or evil, or that smacking is good practice, or etc etc)

• Disability (including carrying an infection)

• Age (don’t ridicule stupid young or old people)

• Political opinion (don’t bring communists or libertarians into contempt or else)

• Employment status (don’t bring into contempt people who are receiving taxpayers money)

• Family status (which includes “being a relative of a particular person” so you can’t ridicule a husband/wife/partner of a psychopath?)

• Sexual orientation.

Some of these are less objectionable than others, but the idea that there should be a prohibition on bringing into contempt or ridicule people because of their opinions is entirely outrageous.

Intending to bring into contempt any group of people on the grounds of their religious belief will be banned. That’s frankly outrageous. Fundamentalists of any religion should not be immune from insults or being brought into contempt because their beliefs are worthy of contempt.  This is blasphemy law through the back door. It goes further, you can’t ridicule entire groups because of their ethical belief (i.e., blood transfusions are evil, or vaccinating children is evil), nor can you ridicule people for their political beliefs.

This is frankly extraordinary. 

Given the Christchurch shooting was entirely motivated by religious hatred, if the law were to be about change to cover this, it would be simple enough to only prohibit threatening language regardless of the basis because nobody should be threatened.

This proposal alone should cause anyone who believes in liberal democracy and freedom of expression to go cold and simply reject this nonsense. 

To add insult to this, the discussion document assumes that there isn’t a legitimate point of view that outright opposes this proposal. It’s proposed questions are:

Do you agree that broadening the incitement provisions in this way will better protect these groups?

o Why or why not?

- In your opinion, which groups should be protected by this change?

- Do you think that there are any groups that experience hateful speech that would not be protected by this change?

The first question begs the question “protection from what”? From being ridiculed? Is the question ever asked why some groups should be protected from ridicule?

The second question is just “what groups” should this apply to.

The third question is “who else can we protect from being laughed at”?  I can see some saying “fat people, thin people, redheads, blondes, short people, people wearing revealing clothing, people wearing hats, types of occupation, types of recreational activity”.  I mean the list of groups is ENDLESS.

To hell with this Orwellian social-engineering philosophy to “protecting” people based on their opinions. There is a shred of value in asking why sex, disability and sexual orientation are not included in the current law, because those are characteristics that are essentially immutable, but almost every other element listed is a conscious characteristic.  At the very least this proposal will have a chilling effect on humour, but at worst it will make it illegal for me to say communists are either morons or psychopaths, or that Salafist Muslims are stone-age cretins, or that the Green Party are a bunch of loony leftie authoritarian control freaks.

And that’s just Proposal One….

It alone should cause you to make a submission before 6 August (see here for details).

By the way, good on both David Seymour and Judith Collins for taking this on, and also on the left, for Martyn Bradbury, who I scarcely agree with on anything, but he's right on this one.

Te Huia - a nice idea, but a lot of money to achieve very little

The launch of the Te Huia commuter train from Hamilton to Papakura has obtained a lot of publicity today, showing how journalists love an excuse for a train ride, and the lack of any high profile easy to understand positive news in New Zealand.

It is easy to see why some would be convinced this might be a good idea.  After all, there has been a daily commuter train from Palmerston North to Wellington (the Capital Connection) since 1991, running until very recently, as a commercial (unsubsidised) service, although it carries more people from intermediate stations like Levin and Otaki especially, than from Palmerston North.  However, experience for passenger rail travel from the Waikato to Auckland has been not so good.  The last time this was attempted was in 2000, commercially, by the then private TranzRail with a train called the Waikato Connection.  It ran once daily from Hamilton to Auckland, but had most of its passengers boarding at Pukekohe (which then had no service) and Papakura (because it basically offered a faster/non-stop more luxurious option than the basic diesel commuter trains), so that at the end less than a seated bus load of passengers used it from Hamilton. 

The latest attempt is not even a train from Hamilton to Auckland, it is from Hamilton to Papakura, to connect with the electric commuter train to Auckland, so it actually takes 2.5 hours from Hamilton to downtown Auckland.  This isn't exactly competitive with driving, which is around 1hr 40-50 minutes from station to station (and realistically almost everyone isn't starting or finishing their trips at either) although congestion can worsen that towards 2hrs.  The train has two stations in Hamilton and one in Huntly, with no other stops, so it offers nothing for any commuters in Ngaruawahia, Taupiri, Mercer or Pokeno for example, although those in Ngaruawahia or Taupiri might drive to Huntly to leave their cars.

The cost is eye-watering, at $67.6m in capital spending, $58.5m from road users' taxes and $9.1m from local authorities. Another $29.3m in being spent over 4.5 years in subsidies, mostly $22.1m from road users' taxes.  Over $1m has been spent to make Huntly Station operational in itself.  Given $55.1m is being spent on public transport subsidies for all other Waikato services in 2018-2021, this is a lot of money to take from road users and ratepayers for one service, operating two times a day weekdays.

The media reports indicate it could remove 73,000 cars off the road... a year.  The train has capacity for 150 people (not much at all bearing in mind that the Capital Connection has 448 seats).  Now given there are 262 working days a year, this means it should take 279 cars off the road each weekday return. Page 16 of the last Household Travel Survey 2015 indicated mean NZ car occupancy per trip is 1.51 so if we optimistically assume this is car occupancy for potential users of the train, that means that the train need to carry 421 people per day (which is significantly above its capacity of 300) to remove 73,000 car trips a year.

Media reports today variously indicated 90 people arriving or 70, but even if 90 all drove a car each, for each service (and don't now) it would still only be around 47,000 car trips a year removed from the road.  However, it is highly unlikely 90 all drove or would drive separate vehicles, so it all seems a bit far-fetched.

Even if it DID do this, at what cost? is it worth nearly $100m to take 279 cars off the road a day? In emissions terms it is meaningless, because the ETS means that the emissions from cars simply get consumed by someone else (and if the cars still drove someone else wouldn't be using those emissions).  In congestion reduction terms it might make a small difference to travel times, but it isn't worth $100m

Water - the last utility of the Soviet era

You could hardly not notice the growing list of scandals seen in local authority supplied water, sewer or stormwater services in recent times and wonder what has gone wrong.  From lead in water supplied by Dunedin City Council in a number of small towns, to the Havelock North water supply contamination and the breakdown of multiple parts of Wellington's water networks.  Imagine if a private water bottler had been caught with the contamination of supply seen by some local authority systems, the howls of outrage from politicians would be palpable, but it isn't quite that way - you see water in New Zealand is perhaps the last bastion of what socialists call the "democratic control of the means of production, distribution and exchange" of the key utility networks.

Unlike electricity, gas, telecommunications, ports, airports, railways and even roads, water (outside Auckland) in New Zealand was shielded from any serious economic reform during the 1980s and the 1990s. That was a time, which seems so long ago now, when there was widespread commercialisation and in some cases privatisation of utility networks, and either liberalisation of market entry or the application of independent oversight and regulation of the management and supply of the services concerned.

Before then, local electricity distribution was led by local authorities, which managed them much like water and the results were underinvestment in power line networks in some places, gold plating in others, and frequent power cuts as parts of the networks failed.  Now these networks are either privatised or run by local trusts, but all subject to regulatory oversight around capital spending and how much they can charge consumers for maintenance and renewal of their assets. 

You see local authority issues with infrastructure don't mean all infrastructure, because they actually have little struggle at all with the infrastructure they are not responsible for owning, managing or funding.  Electricity, gas and telecommunications networks all grow, expand and get maintained with little recourse to ratepayers or indeed the "democratic control" that the left is so keen on.  Now that isn't to mean that there isn't some government intervention, such as the vast spending on fibre optic networks funded by central government but undertaken by private enterprise, but this is not the model by which water networks are funded or managed in New Zealand - you see water remains the last bastion of the Soviet style era of socialist management of a utility.

If you want to take a nostalgic trip back to the era of Rob Muldoon, the era that the late Jim Anderton and his Alliance Party, and indeed at one point Winston Peters, pined for, you need only look at how the "three waters" (supply, waste and stormwater) are supplied and managed in New Zealand today.  Indeed, it is a case study in exactly how the principles of democratic socialist economics work in practice.  You can see the vestiges of this thinking in Green Party policy today, which says "Ensure Council Controlled Organisations are only used where this has benefits over direct service provision by local authorities".  

Leftwing opposition to reform of water is long standing.  It is almost laughable today to recall when former Green MP (and still Wellington Regional Councillor) Sue Kedgley regarded reforms to the Local Government Act allowing local authorities to choose to contract private companies to provide water infrastructure for contract periods of longer than 15 years as  "the potential to be hugely harmful to the public".   She much prefers a democratically controlled water supply that sees lead enter it, with the ultimate penalty being... you might not get re-elected as a city councillor.

However, it is the late (conspiratorially minded) Penny Bright, who founded the wittily named "Water Pressure Group" in Auckland that for many many years was the squealer that regarded any private sector involvement in the water sector as beyond the pale.  She regarded water as "a basic human right", albeit one that she thought was best delivered by a bunch of politicians re-elected every three years directing a bureaucracy.  She was passionate about her beliefs, but wrong.

The problem with water is the problem that was seen with telecommunications when it was run by the Post Office, or electricity when it was run by the Municipal Electricity Department of Wellington City Council (or whatever council) et al, which is that political control of the funding and of the taxation needed to maintain and renew a complex utility was extremely poor at being accountable to those who "own" the infrastructure and consume its services, because there is little link between what you pay, where that money is spent and how much is spent on the water networks.  The NZ Post Office once thought it was a great idea to install "triple twisted copper cable" for telephone lines in the Wellington suburb of Khandallah, despite it not being the international standard for phone lines, because some engineers thought it would improve its robustness - at the same time upwards of 50% of coin operated public phone boxes did not work (there were no mobile phones then).  Bureaucratic service delivery agencies don't get driven by customer needs, but their own internal imperatives and those of their political masters, which understandably are pulled in many different directions - but customer service (being a monopoly, funded from taxes) isn't upper most (unless of course, in a few cases, it is to help a Councillor or his mates out).

Local politicians almost never campaign for election on issues like renewing water infrastructure, but they sure like big shiny showoff things like convention centres, sports stadiums and "visions".  After all, why campaign on something that involves digging streets up and nobody really notices, when you can get your name put on a park or a building instead?  Imagine if the issue of installing more mobile phone capacity were up to local government and it were paid for by rates, would it ever get done?  Water supply pipes, wastewater pipes, stormwater pipes, none of them matter much to most people most of the time, until their service stops or their property is flooded - so they are easy for politicians to defer spending on. 

There is one exception in New Zealand, which is Auckland.  Watercare Services was set up in 1991 as an example of how to commercialise water delivery (albeit not stormwater), and it is from this that the leftwing backlash against water reform arose.  Opposition to commercialisation, opposition to people paying for the water they use was central to this.  The idea that it is somehow fairer for the single pensioner who uses barely enough water for a few cups of tea and a shower a day to cross subsidise the water used by a family of four was not an argument worth having with the organised, almost hysterical, opposition to reform.  So Watercare Services was not replicated elsewhere, albeit that local government reforms did allow local authorities to do so if they wished - but rare is the local politician willing to relinquish control.  It's notable that Auckland doesn't seem to have the issues with supply or wastewater of other cities, although stormwater remains a major issue (and is outside Watercare's remit).

So water, as it remains, has all of the symptoms of a centrally planned, "democratically accountable", bureaucratically delivered service.  It's funding for capital is entirely dependent on local politicians choosing to allocate rates money to it or to borrow to pay for large investment, and so it has to plan from year to year based on how councillors manage their priorities - whether it be convention centres, minimising rates increases or getting elected.  It is only when water infrastructure gets critical (i.e. pipes bursting, supply running out or being poisoned) that political attention is given, and that is frankly too late. Water in New Zealand is socialism in action, and it demonstrates that it is profoundly difficult to get politicians to focus on long-term priorities that are not seen as trendy (note that some are extremely eager to make interventions under the auspices of trying to stop climate change, even though the impact of those interventions is infinitesimal, it's much more about being seen to do the right thing).

Ironically, the recently elected Labour Government has decided to reform water in a way that a previous Labour Government refused to do so for roads - by encouraging local government to take water out of its control altogether and putting it into a handful of centrally government controlled organisations.  Yes it is arguably nationalisation, but it is a transfer from barely capable local control to something else.   It is almost admitting that local democratic control of a critical utility has failed as a delivery model, and that having arms-length professional organisations (let's call them State Owned Enterprises maybe?) that charge consumers for the services they provide, recover capital costs from consumers over the lifetime of those assets and seek to optimise costs and service delivery (with regulatory oversight) is a much better model - i.e. the model that many politicians on the left would have called "neo-liberal" and a precursor to that nastiest of words "privatisation".

However, NZ has had decades of water being supplied "not for profit" and with "democratic control", maybe it's about time it was left to professionals, with the political role being to set up the legal framework to ensure that water is run as a business like other utilities.  The Government's proposals are encouraging, although I would be much more draconian and just take it off of councils and legally require them to cease charging water rates or cut general rates that fund water, and then establish a mix of metered or uniform charges for water consumers.

Of course the UK privatised water many years ago, and hasn't looked back. Some stats on that experience (source: Statement of Professor Chris Binnie, former President of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (not uncritical of the water privatisation process):

• Drinking water quality measured at tap increased from a 99% pass rate to 99.96%
• Properties at risk of low water pressure reduced from 2% to 0.001%
• Properties subject to unplanned water supply interruptions of 12 or more hours reduced from 0.4% to 0.003%
• Leakage dropped from 4,980ml/d to 3,306ml/d by 2000, but is still too high (3,183ml/d) in 2018
• Residential water meter use raised from zero to 55%, with a target of 80% by 2040.
• Per capita water consumption dropped from 155 l/h/d to 141 l/h/d (with more households, each household using less water)
• Household properties at risk of internal sewer flooding reduced from 32,000 to 3,000.
• Non-compliance with the EU Bathing Water Directive (regarding dumping of wastewater at sea) reduced from 16% to 1%
• Failures to respond within 10 working days to complaints dropped from nearly one third to 0.4% failure within five working days.
  

Sure there is plenty to criticise (e.g. Thames Water remains slow in addressing leaks, but it has reasonable incentives to address it, because it can't charge consumers for water leaking from its system and it is generally more costly to provide more capacity for storage than to fix leaks), but it is notable that the water problems are as much about an ideological resistance to reform as they are due to the failings of a system that is not well set up to incentivise investment, supply of services to consumers and deliver long term outcomes.

It looks like New Zealand (except Auckland) is coming to an end of its Soviet-style/Muldoonist era in water management, thanks to a left-wing Labour Government acting to implement reforms that are not far removed from what the Lange/Palmer/Moore Labour Government or the Bolger/Shipley National Governments might have done. It's also telling that the much vaunted "power of general competence" that the first term of the Clark Government granted local government has proven to not be competent in managing the three waters in so many cases.  

Perhaps there are other compentences that local government should be freed from as well?

Damien O'Connor - Beijing's new handmaiden

Last week was meant to be a point of triumph for Damien O'Connor as Trade Minister. As a member of the more conservative "right" faction of this Labour Government, he was happy to crow as to the success of the "updated" free trade agreement between New Zealand and the People's Republic of China (PRC).  

Stuff, RNZ  and TVNZ all largely reported the press release from his office about the "upgraded" agreement and for sure, for New Zealand trade access to the PRC it is largely good news, with 98% of NZ exports to be tariff free (by 2024 for dairy, notwithstanding the government's apparent tolerance for suggestions that the dairy sector be partly wound down to meet Paris Agreement commitments).  There will be reductions in compliance costs and overall on the face of it, it seemed positive from the point of view of a believer in free trade.  

However I was curious as to what the PRC gained from this, because none of the NZ news outlets seemed to ask any questions about that side, but repeated O'Connor's assurances that (RNZ):

"Protections in the existing agreement that are important to New Zealanders, such as our rules on overseas investment and the Treaty of Waitangi exception, remain in place"

Stuff report: "Rules for Chinese investors in New Zealand would not change in light of the agreement"

The flavour of it all is that the PRC is just like any other country, except of course we all know that it is not.  It is an authoritarian one-party state that brutally suppresses dissent, is one of the world's biggest cyberwarfare actors, is engaging in military expansionism in the South China Sea, is regularly threatening liberal democratic Taiwan and most recently has effectively destroyed the liberal rule of law in Hong Kong.  Most recently it has engaged in aggressive trade retaliation measures against Australia, NZ's closest ally, for it simply seeking an international investigation into its handling of Covid 19 - a pandemic that originated in China and was almost certainly mismanaged by the PRC. It isn't just another trading partner, but a regime that is antithetical to the values espoused by the NZ government, you would think.

So why not query further, given the context of relations between the Western allies and the PRC has gone downhill markedly under the rule of Xi Jinping?

Yet it takes little curiosity to find out what was being reported by the PRC's series of state news outlets about the free trade agreement:

China Daily published the following image:

It shows that NZ has effectively removed tariffs on ALL imports from the PRC, putting it on a parallel with Australia.  Now I'm no opponent of eliminating tariff barriers, but you'd think that there would be at least some querying of this. PRC businesses can now export to NZ on the same basis as those from Australia, and with no further barriers NZ has little more to "give away" to Beijing in future negotiations. 

The PRC gets new market access in legal services, project and management consultancy services in NZ, which may not seem like a big deal, but do NZ companies have equivalent access in the PRC?  Well it's a bit complicated as it depends on the sector, but NZ is much more open than the PRC on this.  For example, for project management, it HAS to be a joint venture in the PRC, but not in NZ. In construction NZ is already open to PRC firms, but the PRC wont let NZ firms enter unless it is a project fully foreign financed (i.e. you pay for it, you can work on it). One wonders why it was seen to be so important to let PRC firms enter markets in NZ that they are unlikely to add much value on, other than perhaps obtain experience and IP that they can use elsewhere.  

Yet there is something far more alarming in the agreement, which is the provision on foreign investment.  

Global Times, which might be described as the "aggressive" arm of the PRC state news propaganda apparatus said that:

"Under the new protocol, New Zealand will not investigate Chinese government investors with investments of no more than NZ$100 million ($71.82 million) or non-government investors with investments of no more than NZ$200 million, China News Service reported."

Now sure, that does mean that PRC investment is on a parallel with the CPTPP threshold, but let's pause a moment.  All PRC owned businesses invest in NZ with the explicit or implicit authority of the PRC and the Communist Party of China.  Experience elsewhere indicates that this intent may be anything but benign. PRC companies are known to engage in industrial scale Intellectual Property theft both domestically with foreign partners and internationally. This is hardly a surprise, as it is the core of Marxist-Leninist belief to use the systems of capitalist countries against them, with IP theft used both to advance its own industries and for military purposes.  For example, Siemen's entered into a JV in China to produce high speed trains, only to find that its majority PRC JV partners now re-exporting its technology to compete with it in Germany.  By law, all PRC citizens and businesses are required to comply with directions from the State security services wherever they may be, which is seen to be one reason why Australia's supplies of PPE were raided by PRC companies and citizens to be exported to China at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic (which resulted in Australian law being changed to stop this). 

PRC government entities can spend NZ$100m buying any property or business in NZ without any scrutiny or oversight, and non-government but government endorsed entities can invest NZ$200m.  Sure there are many laws in NZ to deal with intellectual property theft, after the fact, but the trade practices of the PRC internationally show that it has little interest in rule of law, given how quickly it has embarked on dubious sanctions against Australia, because Australia simply wanted some questions asked. That's how sensitive the tyrants in Beijing are.

So there are some serious questions to be asked as to the upgraded NZ-PRC free trade agreement that haven't been asked by the media.

Yet O'Connor went much much further.  On CNBC he played a tune that is familiar to China-watchers, which is to get the ally of an adversary to take on the adversary in foreign relations. Besides saying "nationalism is not the way forward" (being absolutely blind to the PRC's hyper-nationalism in recent years), he decided to give Australia some "advice":

“I can’t speak for Australia and the way it runs its diplomatic relationships but clearly if they were to follow us and … speak …(with) a little more diplomacy from time to time, and be cautious with wording… hopefully (they) can be in a similar situation"

"Speak with a little more diplomacy" presumably means ignoring the PRC's grotesque mismanagement of Covid19 that resulted in it being spread globally, not signing up with allies on a statement on the breaching of the Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, not complaining if PRC businesses and citizens buy up the PPE and medical equipment in your country to export it to China during a pandemic and then finger-pointing at your closest ally on command.  O'Connor supported mediating between the PRC and Australia because:

"We have a mature … relationship with China, and we’ve always been able to raise issues of concern"

Of course in part he is echoing Nanaia Mahuta who in December said that NZ could mediate between the PRC and Australia - which is exactly a tactic that Beijing wants.  This call is utterly disgraceful, and essentially represents the tyranny in Beijing peeling the NZ government away from its most important trading and defence partner, to effectively imply that the differences between Australia and the PRC are as much Australia's fault as the PRC.  It is Beijing asserting that there is moral equivalence between Australia and the PRC.  

"Raising matters of concern" is how the PRC likes things to be, for there to be diplomatic back-channel talk, whilst not publicly changing the relationship at all.  It means the PRC can break international treaties, threaten its neighbours and engage in aggressive actions internationally whilst the front window looks like a new free trade agreement and all is well. 

Beijing already used the NZ government as a pawn to attack Australia in this report by saying:

"The current difficulties facing bilateral relations are of Australia's own making. Only a real change in Canberra's hostile attitude towards China can ease the tensions, and reset bilateral trade ties between the two sides."

furthermore:

"Australia's provoking and smearing will only damage its reputation among Chinese enterprises and people, and hurt trade relations, Chen said, noting that "Canberra should consider Wellington as model and restore its relations with China by taking concrete action."

In short, Beijing claims that Australia's concerns, over Covid 19, Hong Kong, investment, South China Sea and Taiwan are not issues New Zealand shares similar concerns about.  "Wellington is a model" of obsequiousness.

The extension of this is that New Zealand is also not aligned with the United States, which looks like seeing little change in policy with Biden compared to Trump over China. 

NZ is, after all, almost irrelevant to the PRC, because NZ has virtually no military capacity to project and its trade potential is minimal, but NZ does have a great deal of intellectual property around agriculture and capacity to provide education for its elite. Australia is more important because its mineral reserves are vast and arguably the easiest to access of any major mining country given its legal/political structure, proximity and infrastructure, but also because it is strategically important militarily.

Beijing thinks it has turned NZ into a "neutral" party between itself and NZ's two biggest allies, and the fact that it has so easily played Damien O'Connor, and to a lesser extent Nanaia Mahuta should cause concern in the government and to New Zealanders more generally.

So what Beijing got out of the updated FTA with NZ was much more than unhindered trade access to a small economy, and almost unhindered investment access, it got a new friend that has broken away from Australia - that's worth much more strategically than access to a market the size of part of Shanghai.

So the next time Jacinda Ardern chooses to berate Australia over either its treatment of New Zealand citizens resident in Australia, or climate change, or indeed any other foreign policy issue, she might just wonder why the great ANZAC ally might just tell her to go ask the government's new mates in Beijing to help out, then she can wait and see if O'Connor might have enough time to spare once he has washed himself up after being ever so gratifying to the Communist Party of China.

President of the US 2020?

In the song Mrs Robinson Simon and Garfunkel say:

Going to the candidates' debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose

This US election looks like that.  I'm far more tempted to take this article from Reason by John Stossel, which is to note that the most important parts of life are outside politics and we should be SO grateful for that, because in totalitarian countries, this is not the case.

You're meant to care about it, because it is for the leadership of the world's largest economy and military power, and as a result the great leadership of world institutions and norms.  However, it is a contest between two incredibly flawed individuals, neither of whom care much for the freedom of the individual, neither of whom care much for the rule of law and neither of whom have visions beyond the attainment of power.  It is hardly impossible to note how most media comment and news reporting on Trump is negative, and this is in part because it isn't hard to see the negative in a man who is utterly counter-cultural to the narrative as to what is good in a political leader or even a human being.  It is difficult to look past that, but that is what has to be done.

It is difficult to not take into account John Bolton's (a hawk if ever there was one) critique of Trump as being amenable to foreign leaders flattering him, even if nothing is ever achieved.  Sure, his wooing of Kim Jong Un achieved virtually nothing, and was never likely to, but Trump has not been afraid to confront the PR China, largely on very sound grounds (although China is all too keen to portray him as being racist to undermine this).  Sure, Syria remains a mess, as does Yemen even moreso, but the Middle East in general is more peaceful than it has been in many years. Iran is more contained than it has been, and Russia remains in retreat.  The biggest critique of Trump on foreign policy is his opposition to multilateralism, which has given China huge inroads to fund and populate such institutions with their own people, by paying off smaller countries to back their candidates.  Trump's withdrawal is a blunt mistake. He would be better off leading the WTO and pushing UN organisations to be more accountable and transparent. He was right to critique the WHO, because of its woeful performance and disgraceful isolation of Taiwan (and its disgraceful leader, former Ethiopian dictatorship Minister Dr Tedros who peddled accusations of racism against Taiwan).  Biden is likely to be more amenable to international institutions, but he is as much a protectionist as Trump. Given the Obama Administration's largely passive approach to China and the Middle East, it is difficult to expect Biden to be better overall, other than he might be able to get more US influence internationally because he isn't Trump.  Bigger questions have to be whether Taiwan would get military support more from Trump than Biden? Frankly, who knows.  On climate change, there is an obvious difference, because Biden is willing to surrender this issue over to multilateralism, although he might be able to do that with little actual change in domestic policy on the issue, given reductions in emissions in recent years.

A lot is made of Trump being racist (talking about many Mexican immigrants being criminals and rapists secured that accusation), and him appearing to be not be 100% critical of far-right extremists, although some wont think this blundering of his isn't just that, there isn't much evidence policy wise of this. As a President who is vehemently in support of Israel, and has been a part of peace deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE and Sudan, he's no neo-Nazi (although he has not been effective at deterring white nationalists).

The biggest criticism of Biden recently is allegations of corruption linked to his son Hunter, none of which is a huge surprise.  Corruption is endemic in much of US politics, in both parties, the difference is Trump is less susceptible because he doesn't need the money, but his appointment of relatives to high level jobs in the Administration is ludicrous, although much less toxic than some of the allegations against Biden.  What it does show is that both men are more than willing to use power to advantage their families, which is one reason why I think there isn't much between them.

Domestically, Biden has had to embrace some of the socialist agenda that part of the Democratic Party has embraced.  He'll increase taxes (on those on high incomes), but of course wont reform taxes in any meaningful way.  He'll subsidise the rent-seekers in the renewable energy sector and promise that his big spending will be better than Trump's. It's all mindless stuff, it will largely be a waste and be captured by businesses that will make a lot of money out of it.  He's feeding a Marxist style battle between capital and labour, which will be bad for education in the US, and bad for employment and economic competitiveness.

And on Covid? Trump has been chronically inept, that's no doubt and it's difficult to believe Joe Biden could be as worse (at least he wouldn't be diverted down all sorts of dead ends). 

So really I don't care. I'll have residual schadenfreude if Trump wins, because it will so upset so many on the left, but if he loses his ego will take a hit, assuming that he ultimately accepts defeeat. 

More importantly, whoever wins wont make a big difference.  What I DO hope is that no one party wins the House and Senate and Presidency.  So if Biden wins, the Republicans should retain the Senate, and if Trump wins, the Democrats should retain the House. Both men will grow the debt, will feed the monetary policy addiction bubble and neither will accomplish anything significant.  If Trump wins, he will at least not kneecap the economy with more regulation, taxation and climate change sacrifices, but there will no doubt be agitation from BLM and Antifa.  If Biden wins, he will at least rebuild multilateral institutions to move them away from Chinese dominance, but he'll waste more money and engage in follies that are futile and there will be some agitation from a few far-right groups.  

and no, Jo Jorgenson isn't worth it either.