- A railway infrastructure company. Have it receive Track User Charge revenue directly and let it charge what it needs to do to maintain its network. If the government wants to upgrade tracks, then it can put taxpayers' money into it transparently and have arguments in the public sphere about whether new cancer treatments are better to pay for than a faster railway line somewhere. Ensure that company has open access, and seeks to encourage new entrants into the rail industry. It may also include stations and freight terminals not held by local government, but also be willing to enable competing operators with access to those facilities.
- A freight company. Have it own the locomotives and rolling stock Kiwirail currently has to run and operate freight trains. Arguably it should also have the Interislander as it is core to that operation, and it makes more sense than it being in the railway infrastructure company or the next company.
- A passenger company. It may only be four passenger trains at present, but let it be willing to expand on a commercial basis. It might even run the commuter trains in Wellington and/or Auckland if it wins contracts to do so. It should own the locomotives and rolling stock for passenger rail, or it might seek to lease locomotives from the freight company.
Blogging on liberty, capitalism, reason, international affairs and foreign policy, from a distinctly libertarian and objectivist perspective
09 May 2023
What's wrong with Kiwirail?
02 April 2023
Two types of environmentalism
From Allister Heath, Editor, Sunday Telegraph:
There are two kinds of environmentalism. The first is the one exemplified by conservationists, nature lovers, green technologists, free-market environmentalists, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson before No 10, or my colleague Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. They love human civilisation as well as the natural world. They believe that new technologies – hydrogen, nuclear fusion, geoengineering, carbon capture, electric cars or cultured meat – are the solutions to environmental degradation. They dream of near-free, abundant clean energy and high-yielding agriculture; they seek new ways of enhancing our quality of life, feeding the world and growing our economy while not disrupting the environment. They support democracy, reason, choice, international travel, rising living standards and the universalisation of consumer goods.
The second kind of environmentalist are control freaks who have hijacked and warped a great cause (LS- Green parties of Aotearoa, Australia, England & Wales, Scotland among others). They don’t want to save the planet so much as to control its inhabitants. They love net zero – an extreme vision incapable of nuance, trade-offs or cost-benefit analysis – because it is a form of central planning. They are eternally disappointed by real-life human beings and their individualism.
Many have adopted a woke, quasi-religious worldview: we have sinned by damaging Gaia, we must repent, we must self-flagellate. They believe in “degrowth” and a weird form of autarkic feudalism. They dislike freedom and don’t want us to choose where to live, shop, eat or send our children to school. They want to reduce mobility. The Welsh government has banned road- building. One French minister called for the end of the detached house: we should all be forced into flats to minimise our carbon footprint...
14 March 2023
A small country far away of which they know nothing
It is the biggest foreign and defence policy news in the South Pacific since the end of the Cold War, that is the formation not only of the AUKUS defence alliance, but the agreement for Australia to be the seventh country to have nuclear propelled submarines. Seventh after the five formal nuclear weapons states and India (which is an informal nuclear weapons state).
It's big news in Australia. Indeed the issue is bipartisan, with it all being started by the Morrison Coalition Government, and continued by the Albanese Labor Government. It's big in the UK too. A country that from the late 1990s appeared to be withdrawing from the Pacific (having pulled out of Hong Kong), is now a key second level nuclear power operating globally. Again, it is not controversial in the UK, helpfully since the British Labour Party has sidelined its hard left tankie faction. It's also news in the US. It solidifies Western liberal democracies against the totalitarian aggressors in Beijing and Moscow, a sign that there wont be tolerance for Beijing seeking to claim the Republic of China on Taiwan.
It ought to give pause for thought in New Zealand. Remember ANZUS? Yet no. The Cold War-era policy, instituted by the Fourth Labour Government to ban nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion from New Zealand waters and territory, ostensibly to protect New Zealand from nuclear attack in the event of a world war and the fear of nuclear power, looks obsolete and childish. That's because it is.
The fact NZ Labour politicians talk of a "nuclear free moment" with pride, and neither the media nor the Opposition take them up on this is a sign of the abject paucity of any serious critical discussion about foreign policy in New Zealand politics, and it is disgraceful.
There is little from broadcasters or journalists on this at all, and it is in no small part because the National Party, which once took on this issue and folded, has given up on asserting the importance of defence and alliances. What NZ is stuck with is a policy that fits rights into the mould of the Green hard left which the Fourth Labour Government let rip (or rather David Lange did), in order to placate the left faction in the face of far-reaching economic reforms.
On the face of it, NZ's exclusion from AUKUS is primarily presented as showing an "independent" foreign policy, whatever that means. At best it means keeping our head down in the hope that all sides will trade with NZ exporters, which is simply economic realpolitik. It also means NZ having a channel to the side of authoritarianism, between the West, which is useful in itself. However, that's not really how Labour presents it (and let's be clear, the Labour Party has led foreign policy in NZ since 1984 continuously, even though it has been tended by the Nats).
At worst, this "independent" foreign policy is akin to the "both sidesism" that Te Pati Maori expresses openly. TPM stated this in its foreign policy that it wants to be enemy to none and friends to all. It effectively puts a distance between NZ and other Western liberal democracies, and pulls NZ closer to expansionist totalitarian autocracies like Russia and the PRC (and its friends in Tehran, Pyongyang and Damascus). It says NZ isn't really that concerned about having friends that get attacked, because "everyone has done bad".
Sure you can be Switzerland if you like, but be honest about it. It is not a moral foreign policy, it is one based on realism and giving up on being allied to those you no longer think are any better than their enemies.
What AUKUS means for NZ is pretty clear. Australia will soon be the nexus of military deterrence and defence in the South Pacific like never before and NZ law will ban its new submarines, in due course, from sailing into NZ ports. That is worthy of at least debate.
Why does NZ still ban nuclear propelled vessels? Is this some fear of pollution in an age of concern over climate change? Is it science based (as Labour and the Greens claim is behind their policies on climate change), or is just scaremongering? If it is the latter, why persist with it? Because politicians are scared of Greenpeace?
The nuclear weapons ban has more substance, if there remains an idealistic campaign that the world should be rid of nuclear weapons. However, it deserves debate as well. Does NZ banning nuclear weapons on its territory achieve anything? Does NZ seriously want the US or UK to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally, or does it think that peace, for example, on the Korean Peninsula would be enhanced if the US refused to use nuclear weapons in the event of war breaking out there? The notion is absurd.
I'd scrap the nuclear ban, both of them. The nuclear propulsion ban is anti-scientific nonsense, and should be ridiculed for what it is. The nuclear weapons ban should be shelved because it achieves nothing, as many NZ allies and friends are protected by the presence of nuclear weapons. From South Korea to Japan to Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Israel, India, Pakistan, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. The reason countries join NATO is to have the US and UK nuclear umbrellas deterring aggressors.
I wouldn't have NZ sign up to AUKUS - as it has nothing to add, but I would be clear that NZ is with Australia, and that NZ's moral foreign policy is that it opposes the use of force to change internationally recognised borders.
I know the National Party would run a mile from this issue, because it sees no traction in it domestically, and because Labour can frighten legions of fearful low-knowledge people raised on the religion of NZ's "nuclear free moment" as a bizarre piece of smug-nationalism. That smug-nationalism achieved nothing, because the Cold War ended a few years later because our side won. Liberal democratic capitalist economies beat the USSR, and the threat of nuclear annihilation in Europe was defeated not because of NZ's nuclear-free policy. Likewise, there is no remote reason why Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, the DPRK or any other country will surrender nuclear weapons, because a Minister in New Zealand said they should. It is because NZ is a small country far away of which they know nothing. NZ is blessed with isolation, an isolation that saved it so often in the past, but which should not be the basis of an arrogant smug attitude to the geo-politics of those without the luxury of isolation from threats.
It would, however, be nice if one or two journalists took this on, and maybe even ACT. Can someone in Parliament at least ask the question as to why NZ will continue a ban that will stop its closest ally sending its future submarines to our ports?
Addendum: As I thought further about this, NZ arguably has four paths of foreign policy to take in relation to its allies:
1. Be a full-status ally: Scrap the nuclear-free laws, contribute 2% of GDP to defence and work with Australia, the US, UK and other allies to effectively be a bulwark against neo-nationalist authoritarian aggression. There is little sign that there is a willingness to do this.
2. Fence-sitting realist trade maximisation: Claim to be an ally, but spend underwhelming amounts on defence, ban vessels and aircraft of some allies, seek to maximise economic advantage by not being tied to allies based on principle while proclaiming this fence-sitting to be "independent" and "moral" (status quo).
3. Fortress neutrality: Declare friendship with all, no interest in military aggression or in defending others, but arm to the teeth so there is no doubt that if confronted you will bite (Swiss option - no interest in that).
4. Unarmed neutrality: Declare friendship with all, giving up on military to take advantage of isolation, focus on patrolling EEZ and let Australia take the hit, cut defence spending to spend on "ourselves" (Costa Rica option - what the Greens probably really want and Te Pati Maori appears to want).
09 March 2023
Greenshirts for Aotearoa
26 February 2023
Is National's proposed water reform enough?
I've been critical of the Labour Government's Three Waters' proposals, primarily because of the bizarre excessive centralisation, the opaque accountability and the lack of any serious measures to link the provision of water services to consumers. The co-governance element has little value and is only an inching forward of a ideological agenda to change public sector governance from one monopolised by liberal democratically elected politicians to one shared with appointed tribal elites. It is the wrong solution to the right problem. Besides, it was the hard-left, in the Alliance, Greens and the post-Douglas Labour Party that stopped water reform in the 1990s, so why trust them now?
If it were up to me I WOULD take water off of local government, I'd vest it in companies, owned directly by ratepayers, required to make a profit and transition income away from rates, towards user fees (even if it is a flat fee). The bogeyman of privatisation, so carefully cultivated in the 1990s, and spread through the education system and much of the media is so stultifying that even ACT is quiet on it, but I think water SHOULD be privatised by handing it to property owners. Inevitably these companies would merge and acquire one another, going from around 60 to around 10 or fewer, but that should be led by the market, not by Cabinet directed by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and its consultants. For all of the best will in the world, the odds they know what the optimum structure of the water industry should be, are remote.
It's fair to say the two biggest reasons people are opposed to Three Water are co-governance and loss of local control.
Regardless of the various theories behind what people think co-governance is, the fundamental point is that it introduces Iwi appointments of half of the members of a selection panel, which itself selects the Board members for the four water entities (which have boundaries that appear to look like they suit some Iwi boundaries, rather than the structure for the water industry). There is a point that there is traditional Mana Whenua governance of waterways, but fresh, waste and stormwater infrastructure is not about that. It is quite different to have power over the use of waterways that might feed a water treatment/reticulation system, or may receive waste/stormwater, where there is a genuine interest in the use of the resource (and discharge into it) and the infrastructure feeding it. Indeed I think there is LESS accountability under co-governance, as it is easier for Mana Whenua to hold water entities to account if they aren't part of the management of them.
The loss of local control I care relatively little about. Local government has in so many cases demonstrated that it is incapable of taking a long-term view of water infrastructure, and certainly is uninterested in concepts like user-pays, asset management and other ideas that, I suspect for too many local politicians, are either seen as a "neo-liberal free market" conspiracy, or something confusing to rip off ratepayers.
So National has proposed the following:
Councils (TAs and unitary authorities of course) will need to deliver a plan for how they will transition their water services to a new model that meets water quality and infrastructure investment rules, while being financially sustainable in the long-term. The Minister of Local Government will approve such entities.