Blogging on liberty, capitalism, reason, international affairs and foreign policy, from a distinctly libertarian and objectivist perspective
30 March 2006
Israel seeks peace
27 March 2006
Outdoor Recreation abandons United Future
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United Future has kept Labour in government for two terms now, so why gun enthusiasts would want to support it is beyond me. The United Future website continues to refer to Outdoor Recreation. ACT is now inviting Outdoor Recreation on board, which means ACT will need to be clear on its gun policy. I'd say Libertarianz has a lot to offer them too, with its belief in the right of peaceful people to own firearms.
Dunne the sports socialist
Sue Bradford hates Chinese workers
Commonwealth Games
BBC public service parties
25 March 2006
New Zealand and North Korea
Wishart vs. Cresswell
“There is more evidence for the existence of Christ and a contemporaneous belief of his deity than there is for virtually any other historical figure of his time.”
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Well we know people believe in Christ, but that clever use of language doesn’t get you very far. Christ may well have existed, but just because people believe in the ghost doesn’t mean IT exists. The notion that there is MORE evidence for the existence of Christ than others “of his time” is ludicrous. More than Cleopatra or Caesar? This is like saying that there is more evidence for Churchill than of Stalin or Hitler.
The end of the articles states:
“Increasingly, scientists suspect environmental hormone pollutants caused by human agriculture and industrial waste are working into the animal food chain and creating more instances of so-called “gay behaviour” by animals. The question is, what are the hormones doing to humans?”
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Well the only case cited is of seagulls, and before that of a WWF zoologist more generally concerned about the effects of hormonal contaminants on animals. Fair enough, but the implication here is that hormones we consume through pollution or food could be making people gay. So how is this relevant to New Zealand? How valid are these concerns, or are they just scandal mongering with a joining of the dots as noted by PC?
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It starts with:
"Hormone Growth Promotants .... Known in the industry as HGPs, the official line is that the sex hormones implanted into the ears of cattle are natural or nature identical substances that simply replicate nature, mimicking the hormones lost through castration and equating to other natural dietary sources of hormones such as eggs or soybeans. But how do New Zealanders feel about growth promoting hormones implanted in their meat patties?"
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The "official line" well no Ian, it's the line of the farmers and the producers. You have a better explanation than this? He effectively rubbishes fact by implying the "official line" is like some press statement from Belarus, then "how do New Zealanders feel" should be the test? Well Ian, after reading articles like this, they will feel scared because you were remarkably selective.
“Compudose is implanted only in the skin immediately beneath the ear of a cattle beast. Disposal of ears of implanted cattle is an issue. NZFSA says they are discarded as waste, rendered or used in gelatin production.”
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Ok so the main issue is that the ears may be used in gelatin, though the hormones spread through the beef. Nothing much more is said on this and then...
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“A further issue is the use of antibiotics. Elanco acknowledges that the implant may be dusted with the antibiotic tetracycline. Derek Moore is unsure if the New Zealand version contains any antibiotic. He suggests that perhaps the implant is coated in talcum powder.”
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Ohhhhh “unsure” and “perhaps” smells of a cover up now, scandal, especially since...
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“In the United States the needle used to insert the implant is also often coated with an antibiotic. Vet Services in the Hawkes Bay are adamant they do not use antibiotics to cleanse needles. But either way the trace use of an antibiotic for non-therapeutic purposes is concerning.”
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Says the non-scientist – even though there isn’t evidence it is used in New Zealand and no evidence of it being harmful if it was used, as the article itself states. The facts are hear, but with a sprinkling of skeptical fear pepper makes it taste a bit foul, so all you non-scientists can go – whoa I don’t use antibiotics unless I’m ill, something wrong here – except by now you’ve forgotten that there is no evidence antibiotics are used in New Zealand at all for this process. In addition...
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“Elanco says it has yet to be demonstrated that non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has a detrimental effect on humans.”
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BUT that’s ok, the whole tone is “can’t be too careful” and you can't trust industry can you now? You know what THEY are like.
Then we have the comfort that if you really are concerned about it, you can take this advice:
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So first you can avoid beef with hormones in it, then you have an organic producers claiming that producers have vested interests, as if organic producers don’t have a vested interest in raising questions about the safety of their competitors’ typically cheaper products? No, that isn’t even raised. However, organic producers like to raise issues with non-organic produce, especially scaring people into believing what is "really in their food". The whole industry is based on scaring people into thinking non-organic food is bad for you, so why should you be surprised? Wishart ignores this.
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So why are HGPs used?
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“The industry calls them ‘quality enhancers’. In a local trial cattle treated with Compudose had an average weight increase of 23.5% (9). Cattle treated with HGPs grow faster enabling them to be sent to the works in shorter time, lowering the farmer cost of beef raising. It’s estimated that for every dollar spent on an HGP there is a five-dollar return.”
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“Consumer choice is promoted as the ultimate freedom. It is the market that must test the validity of claims in support of HGPs. It is the market that must sort out whether consumers really want to eat meat grown with growth promoting hormones.”
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“A University of California, Davis, study by avian toxicologist Michael Fry in the 1980s determined that estrogenic pollution lay behind the “lesbian behaviour” of seagulls. Significantly, to test their theory, they injected normal seagull eggs with estradiol, the additive being pumped into some New Zealand and Australian beef.
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Pumped into? Injected into ears – but then hyperbole sells more magazines.
“To connect these effects with estrogenic pollutants, Fry and his colleagues conducted a number of experiments during the 1980s. In one, they injected eggs of contaminant-free gulls with estradiol…When the hatchlings emerged, they exhibited the same array of feminized sex organs as DDT-contaminated Western gulls on Santa Barbara Island, off the coast of California.” The estradiol, and a range of other estrogenic pollutants like DDT, effectively “chemically castrated” the males, Fry says.
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So there you go, because some seagull eggs were injected with estradiol and were chemically castrated, and some NZ cattle use HGPs and this is the same substance, it could chemically castrate your children, maybe turn them (horrors!) gay! See the "joining the dots" that PC mentioned? That is what you may surmise.
So what ABOUT these hormones anyway? Well they actually are about increasing the amount of naturally occurring hormones in cattle that may be reduced due to castration. This article below from Clemson University South Carolina claims that no residues remain in cattle treated with it through the ears.
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The US Department of Agriculture states:
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“The amounts of estradiol, progesterone and testosterone in animals raised using hormones as growth promotants are extremely low compared with their production in humans. Even a young boy would need to eat more than 7000 grams (about 16 pounds) of beef raised using estradiol daily in order to produce a one percent increase in his production of this hormone. A 500-gram portion of beef raised using estradiol contains approximately 15,000 times less of this hormone than the amount produced daily by the average man, and about nine million times less than the amount produced by a pregnant woman.”
Or is Ian going to claim that the USDA is in league with the producers of these drugs?
24 March 2006
Belarus protest shutdown
Kember, Sooden and Loney freed
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As much as I disagree with IFR and CPT, I am pleased that peaceful people have been freed. To paraphrase Voltaire’s famous phrase, I disagree vehemently in what they believe in, but I defend their right to freedom and their own lives. The soldiers who risked their lives for these misguided fools are the true heroes - the soldiers have been thanked after some outrage that it was reported the hostages were "freed" (as if the kidnappers had chosen to do it).
The so-called “peace movement” is always keen to advocate peace between countries, to exercise moral equivalency in treating evil murdering totalitarians with the semi-free world and to ignore peace within countries (it is “ok” for Iraqis to be attacked by Saddam’s government, but not US forces). Had the peace movement had its way, you wouldn’t be reading blogs, you might be speaking German or Russian, as Europe would be divided between Hitler and Stalin, and the USA may have sat back and negotiated “peace” with evil. War is the second greatest evil in the world, the greatest in when governments turn on their own people.
UK Budget yawn
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For all I am grateful for with Tony Blair (reforming Labour to not be an outpost of the Warsaw Pact and a solid commitment to enlightenment values and Western civilisation), Gordon Brown reminds me a lot of Michael Cullen, except I think Cullen is better. Brown doesn't ridiculously overspend or ridiculously increase taxes, he doesn't rock the boat, but bit by bit he adds on extra spending, little discounts on taxes here and there, making the state ever more complicated and ever more intrusive. The idea that people should pay for what they use where practicable, and be taxed on a fairly uniform basis is light years away from Brown or Cullen. It is a trend since the end of Thatcher and Ruth Richardson that Budgets have been about satisfying interest groups with axes to grind. Axes they grind at the expense of the silent majority.
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Britain has had its halcyon days of heady reform, which brought it back from the brink - the only thing stopping it being the poor cousin of Europe is that France, Italy and Germany are worse.
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Look at this load of pork and thieving from the budget:
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- free off peak bus travel nationwide for pensioners and disabled people;
- establishing a £1 billion health research fund;
- establishing an International Business Advisory Council;
- increase to Enterprise Capital Funds scheme;
- Money for Elite athletes training for the Olympics
- Increase road tax for large so called "more polluting" vehicles
- Fiddling of stamp duty to increase net revenue (increase threshold, remove exemptions)
- Money for developing microgeneration technology
23 March 2006
ETA to end terrorism
22 March 2006
Libertarianz influence
Muslim religious teachers abusing children in the UK
Diesel tax evasion in the UK
French socialists punish ipod and itunes for success
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Apple, after years of being ranked as the poor cousin of the IT sector, has had stunning success with the iPod, because it offered people a convenient, easy to use way of storing and listening to vast quantities of music. In association with that is iTunes, Apple’s online music store providing a legal way to buy songs to play on your iPod. However, the French Parliament says this is “anti-competitive” – as if the French Parliament ever produced a single thing that made people’s lives better without stealing it from someone in the first place.
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CNN and the NZ Herald reports The French Parliament has passed a law forcing Apple to effectively open up its anti-copying technology so that iTunes songs can be played on players other than iPods, the same would apply to Sony and its Walkmans and music store.
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Thieving Vichy-like bullies. France has produced much that is good in the world, and has food and wine that is immeasurably better than much of the salty sugary fat laden slop in Britain. They have healthier attitudes to alcohol, sex and aesthetics - I understand why the French can be arrogant about what is French. The language is far more beautiful than most and the passionate "joie de vivre" of the French is an example to the world, compared to the inert mind numbing nihilism of Anglo-Saxons, unless they are drunk and become either obnoxious or perverted. The French don't have page 3 girls in grotty tabloids, because it is no big deal for a woman to show her breasts off on the beach - it is just a fact of life, neither repressed nor obsessed.
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France wants the Eurosocialist Union to support such a law – given France’s less than enthusiastic adoption of most European liberalisation measures (ever wondered why France has virtually no low cost airlines?) – the EU should tell France to bugger off and consider liberté as least as much as fraternité and equalité.
Abortion
Auckland's socialist transport czars
Bush will defend Israel
The Daily Telegraph quotes him "I see a threat in Iran. The threat is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. I've made it clear and I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel,"
This should be wholeheartedly endorsed by the EU and New Zealand, among others. Iran’s threats to eradicate Israel are contrary to the much loved UN Charter, and hardly peace-loving. May any leftists who hate Israel consider that attacks on Israel don’t discriminate between Jews, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Israel has never had aggressive intent against Iran.
The point of Bush’s message is clear – it is futile for Iran to develop nuclear weapons, for if it does it will at the very least face war with the US if it uses them, at the very least may risk air strikes to destroy them. The mullahs in Iran should be overthrown by the Iranian people, but barring that there should be a clear deal – open up your nuclear programme to inspections, make peace with Israel, cease supporting international terrorism – and an end to sanctions and renewal of diplomatic relations. There is a path to peace, Iran can embrace it - the so-called "peace movement" should be encouraging it along that path.
Quotes from Stalin
21 March 2006
Brave people in Minsk remain defiant against duckling strangler
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It is unlikely that this protest will achieve change, too many Belarussians are resigned to their lot, and it is a hefty ask to sit in weather that tops -2 degrees Celsius during the day and as cold as 13 below overnight. However, there are some determined to defy the evil bully Lukashenko’s declaration that he would strangle them like ducklings. Besides being an evil thug, saying such a thing upsets small children – who wants to visualise ducklings being strangled?
Socialist Britain protecting who
20 March 2006
It's for the children - state surveillance is only to protect them
Fly from Iran to relocated cities in Asia
Paris riots not political - just thugs
Call for state funding of UK political parties
Ken Livingstone blames Jeremy Clarkson for armageddon
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Of course, the fact Ken uses London citizens' council tax to pay for buses to run, empty or not, doesn’t help either. The Strand is full day in day out of nearly empty buses clogging up the lanes – bus subsidies promote bus companies running services regardless of demand. Ken’s policy of free bus rides for under 16yos also encourages them to bus instead of walking – hardly environmentally or health friendly (or passenger friendly).
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London would reduce emissions if a network of toll highways was built as originally planned (planned to be free, but tolls would ensure demand was reflected with user pays), completing the inner circular highways, even if tunnelled to avoid impact on the local environment. The tolls would restrain growth and the highways would remove cars from local streets, speeding up bus travel and reducing health impacts – but don’t expect Transport for London or Ken to support that – roads are evil after all. Far better to have pedestrians and cyclists choking with exhaust fumes from buses, trucks, cabs and cars.
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Don’t say people should catch public transport, only 13% of peak commuting to central London is by car, it would be difficult to increase the public transport share much more. London public transport is excellent, although at peak times is at crush capacity (and it isn't efficient to provide more capacity). Most motoring in London is suburb to suburb, where it takes far longer to bus than to drive (a bus takes a more circuitous route and stops a lot after all) and these orbital movements will continue to grow. London has one of the worst roading networks of any major city in the world – it simply needs to let the private sector provide, and to let it toll freely to pay for it.
Belarus on tenterhooks - freedom or bloodshed
Putin is backing Lukashenko, in fact if it wasn’t for the cheap gas and oil he provides, the regime would be a goner. Lukashenko has repeatedly called for reunification with Russia, but Putin is smart enough to not want to be brought down with Minsk.
Tonight as I write this, snipers have been placed around Minsk, so Lukashenko can aim at demonstrators as the results come out, which of course, appear to support Lukashenko’s overwhelming re-election. The latest report indicates no violence, although the regime has been good at ensuring the disappearance of opponents.
The UK Liberal Democrats are supporting the campaign for liberal democracy in Belarus, as is No Right Turn (the LibDem Youth wing has a magazine called the Free Radical hmmmm), and I agree. The first step towards freeing Belarus is freeing politics, allowing dissent and elections – beyond that we’d probably disagree.
I hope the people of Belarus can effect change, as has happened in Ukraine and Georgia, but I am not optimistic. If they try, many will die – as Lukashenko is not shy about shedding blood. Belarus threatens no one, except its own people, all that western countries can do is support the opposition and continue funding broadcasts of uncensored news from sources such as Deutsche Welle, BBC World Service and Radio Liberty. I wish the people of Belarus freedom – they deserve nothing less, I hope if they stand up against the heartless, lifeless evil of the current regime tonight - the puppets of Lukashenko turn their guns against the regime instead of the people. I doubt much will change.
Iran - such a nice regime
She has a book listing the 21,676 died resisting the Iranian regime, and another 120,000 executed since the 1979 revolution. She talks of a 15yo boy flogged to death for eating during Ramadan, and a 13yo girl buried to her neck and stoned for a similar offence. None of this should be a surprise. It executed two men last year for homosexual conduct. Human Rights Watch reports “Iranian law punishes all penetrative sexual acts between adult men with the death penalty. Non-penetrative sexual acts between men are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are punished with death. Sexual acts between women, which are defined differently, are punished with lashes until the fourth offense, when they are also punished with death. “ How about charging with batons a peaceful march in celebration of International Womens’ Day on 9 March? The US State Department notes “The testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man in court. The blood money paid to the family of a female crime victim is half the sum paid for a man. A married woman must obtain the written consent of her husband before traveling outside the country”.
Nanny State UK
Don Foster, a Liberal Democrat demagogue said people expressed concern about More 4, a commercial digital TV channel owned by Channel 4. Well frankly those people should get a life – take their nosy little beaks out of what isn’t their business. Free to air commercial TV is something you get for nothing, a range of entertainment, news, information that through capitalism brings happiness to millions – if it didn’t it would fail. People are forced to pay £126 a year to pay for the BBC, what commercial TV does should be nothing to do with the state. Particularly now where there are 36 digital free to air channels broadcast.
18 March 2006
Popular government of Clarkistan cannot be corrupt
Auckland road pricing report released
Well the government’s study into road pricing in the Auckland region is out, and it raises a number of questions. It is motivated, rightly, by the desire to reduce congestion, but some want it to raise money to pay for trains (wrong) or roads (right as long as you aren't wasting the existing money collected). It is fairly well accepted by liberal free marketers and by environmentalist lefties that road pricing makes sense – after all, it is just people paying for the use of a scarce resource – road space.
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The way you currently pay for roads doesn’t bear any resemblance to demand, just the cost of maintenance. It is right that, like phones, hotels and airlines that if you want to use a road when demand it highest you should pay for it – and as a result, you are guaranteed a certain level of service (uncongested road). The quid pro quo is that when the road is quietest you should pay very little – to encourage people to spread journey times.
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Think about it like airlines. Most business people fly at the beginning and end of the work day, simply because their time is valuable and their plans can change quickly, so they pay expensive fully refundable fares. There are a lot of them flying at the same time, so fares are expensive, rarely will you get cheap fares on those flights. On holiday most people make plans well in advance, and are price sensitive. They will fly in the middle of the day or later in the evening because they are prepared to adjust their trip around flights they can afford – they pay less, but the planes get fairly well filled. The peak time business travellers make airlines a lot of money, but off peak leisure travellers don’t – but they pay enough to make it worthwhile to keep the planes flying and offering a frequent service. With road pricing the same would happen.
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Now I could argue the case for road pricing till I am blue in the face, so what about this report?
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The Greens' reaction is the usual “need more public transport”. This is the same as the ARC which is obsessed with trains. Of course with road pricing, you don’t need to subsidise public transport – the roads are priced according to space taken up by vehicles. As buses take up less space per person than cars, then buses pay less on average. Trains pay nothing (as they should be paying the cost for using the track). Uncongested roads mean buses can travel freely, but cars travelling on those roads are paying for a good level of service – in short, you’ve levelled the playing field, letting private bus and rail operators provide service where and when there is demand. The Greens don’t want money raised from road users spent on roads – which is economic nonsense. As long as motorists are paying for the efficient use of the roading network (which at peak times would be expensive) then it is not their business at all. The Greens advocate the silly and Orwellian parking levy option, that would have every single parking space in central Auckland, on private or public land, taxed for a small period of the day. It wouldn’t work very well, except to encourage more businesses to shift out of the city to places where public transport is even less suitable for commuting to. It is wrong to think good public transport is a pre-requisite to road pricing - road pricing exists now, it's just very blunt (petrol tax) and 20% of the pricing is spent on activities other than transport. It is also wrong to think Aucklanders became "car dependent" because of poor public transport, more like Aucklander's got poor public transport because they chose to use their cars. Auckland's tram and rail systems wound down in the 1950s and 1960s because cars were more convenient and quicker - they still are in many cases. The socialist philosophy that people are forced to use cars is nonsense, as long as you have open entry for commercial public transport services (which has only existed since the early 90s).
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National has fortunately been balanced in its response, wanting to look at the report carefully. Hopefully it wont reject it outright, but consider how road pricing can be used to replace rates for funding local roads – though if that happens then governance of local roads would have to change radically to avoid local authorities gouging consumers like their gouge ratepayers.
Brian "Red"Rudman doesn't think it will happen, although he is wrong about the system for charging being expensive - it would be far cheaper per transaction that the system for the ALPURT B2 toll road being built to bypass Orewa. He is right about ARC's profligacy in seeking a $400 million more expensive version of the Avondale extension to SH20 though.
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The option not being considered in the report is network charging. There already is a form of this with road user charges, which could be extended to all vehicles using new technology – you could have a prepaid smartcard that deducts funds for distance travelled over the network, with premiums for travelling on the busiest roads at peak times, and discounts for off peak travel. However, this requires a sophisticated on board system, and should replace petrol tax altogether.
I don't believe anything will happen on this, for now. Congestion charging is very risky politically, and Labour wont want to do it, although it may encourage more toll roads or new motorway lanes being toll lanes, as exists in some states in the USA. It will be a brave government that introduces it and motorists will want something in return; far less congestion and money dedicated to roads or worthwhile alternatives. Until the SH20 western ring road is built, and of the seven segments that need completing only four have guaranteed funding (and three are actually under construction right now, and to be fair one section Auckland local authorities can't even agree on) so that it probably ten years away.
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There will probably be a populist lobby opposing road pricing, and given the options in the report I wont be surprised. There are better solutions that having a local authority controlled central cordon to raise extra money to pay for pet schemes – road pricing should be about motorists paying to use roads with the money being spent on roads. However, this is when debate should occur - Auckland's congestion wont be fixed by building new roads paid for by people who aren't using them or by building railway networks also paid for by people not using them. The roads are run by Soviet style central planning - that is what needs to change, pricing is one step along the way.
15 March 2006
Nationalist radio quota bluff
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Firstly, CER. You see for several years, the NZ film and television production industry argued in court in Australia that the Australian local content quota for commercial television (55%) should treat NZ programmes on a non-discriminatory basis. It won, and so New Zealand programmes have national treatment in the Australian market. Of course this is quid pro quo, and any New Zealand content quota for radio would have to treat Australian music as if it were New Zealand. There is no getting around this, unless CER is renegotiated, and I doubt the Howard government would want to give up one form of trade access, unless New Zealand could offer another – and there is precious little left to offer. It would also be incredibly bad form for New Zealand to withdraw access after arguing for it in Australia only recently. The CER Trade in Service Protocol is here.
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So a New Zealand quota would, at least, have to be an Australasian one.
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Secondly, New Zealand’s WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) commitments include a multilateral commitment for open entry into the audiovisual services market. This includes for TV programmes and music. In short, it grants national treatment for overseas produced content. Now the Clark administration has been trying to negotiate a “cultural carveout” to trade away this commitment, along with Australia and Canada (two other culture nationalists), but it means New Zealand would have to liberalise something else in return.
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The threat to impose a compulsory quota was effectively a threat for private radio stations to get a foreign government to argue in a WTO panel dispute on its behalf. That isn't easy, but not impossible. It is also very bad form to pass laws that are against your treaty obligations.