Adding Noughts in Vain

How Hard Would Dramatic Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Really Be?

2009-08-02T10:54:00.006+10:00

As the New Zealand Government consults on a greenhouse emissions reduction target for New Zealand we are often treated to a talking point along the lines that a 40% reduction at 2020 is "obviously" not feasible. This is always coupled with pointing out that 40% means a 40% reduction on 1990 emissions and that's a 60% reduction on today, and yes Labour was in power for much of the intervening period and what a debacle that was and so on and so forth.

Here's Kiwiblog's latest on the subject for example, and Matthew Hooton gave stirring rendition on Nine to Noon on National Radio during last week.

I had some sympathy for this view, and certainly if DPF or I, neither of us with any relevant qualifications, spend a few seconds perusing New Zealand's emissions profile, it does seem a pretty tall order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% over a decade.

Allow me to point to a remarkable recent Australasian efficiency achievement as a corrective to this pessimistic view.

Many of you will know that south-east Queensland has just emerged from a prolonged drought. At its lowest point the dams that store Brisbane's drinking water were at just 17% of capacity. As a result the Queensland Government initiated a series of water restrictions and water efficiency campaigns.

Prior to the drought per capita daily water consumption in south-east Queensland was pushing 300L. Three years later at end of the drought it was down around 130L.

That's right, domestic water consumption in south-east Queensland was reduced by more than 50% in just three years! Look at the figure, from the official report here. (Click on the figure to read it clearly.)

And what is residential water consumption in south east Queensland today, roughly a year after the end of the drought? 140L per person per day. 120L if it's school holidays.

This goes to show that dramatic and permanent efficiency gains are possible if there is the public and political will to make them. You really have to ask yourself if it is that much harder to reduce our dependence on greenhouse gas emissions than it is to reduce water use? (There are some obvious possibilities but that's for another post.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again, efficiency gains are the first and cheapest way to make reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And the sooner big business stops paying lobbyists to derail change and starts paying engineers to work out how to solve the problem, the better.

The ideas in this post are shamelessly stolen from a recent lecture by Professor Juerg Keller. The line about engineers is likewise stolen from US Secretary of Energy and Physics Nobellist Steven Chu.

Media notes

2009-07-21T11:21:00.005+10:00

Finding out that Niall Ferguson is writing an authorized biography of Henry Kissinger confirms my worst fears about him.

There was a fascinating interview with George Henderson of the Puddle on Kim Hill this Saturday. His honest discussion of drug addiction, his imprisonment for stealing ether, his ready quotations from literary greats, the quarter century history of his band.

The New York Times is celebrating forty years since the moon walk. Their headline today says everything about current space exploration efforts: Toilet is Fixed on a Crowded Space Station.

For the orignal though it is worth visiting Google Moon and looking at some of the photos.

Australia to the left of this image of Earthrise.

Chris Knox: The Trick of Standing Upright

2009-06-21T20:33:00.010+10:00

I am too young to have really been there and I've never talked to the guy, but it is clear that Chris Knox is a force of nature. His recent stroke has prompted me to reflect on his role in my musical education, and his many contributions to my enjoyment of my misspent youth.

It's easy to forget today that there was a time when the emergence of a particularly New Zealand music culture didn't seem inevitable. But there was Chris Knox with his 4-track, his friends in all those amazing bands, his songs. Even the one where he recites the alphabet.

I remember him as the shambolic troubadour with the banana shorts doing gigs at the University of Canterbury in the mid-nineties. We were all too cool to admit that "Not Given Lightly" was our favourite, so we had to hide our disappointment when he pretended to have forgotten the words.

I particularly recall four of us dancing around on the grass like maniacs while Chris played the End of Lectures Stein in 93, or was that 94? It was a warm and sunny spring afternoon and it sticks in my memory as one of those perfect occasions of youth; your friends around you, your whole life before you, the best music in the world. Who knows what Chris made of it when two blokes (I won't admit here to knowing them) got up on stage for a bit of a pash with the great man. He certainly seemed game.

Before the live music, and the communal appreciation of musical greatness, there was my teenage bedroom fanboy phase.

I don't remember exactly what prompted me in 1989 to give up on the FM radio stations and take up with student radio for good. At this time the Pixies were my favourite band in the world, but student radio being what it was in those days it was inevitable that I would eventually discover New Zealand music in the shape of Chris Knox and his cohorts at Flying Nun.

I remember going on a school bus trip to Akaroa in 1990. It involved singing. Despite not being able to hold a tune I was that kind of kid in high school; the choir and the debating team. I remember being counselled about Flying Nun on the trip back by a guy who was a year ahead of me. By this stage I think I had decided the Verlaines were my favourite. He urged me to reconsider Straitjacket Fits. We talked about Chris Knox and how prolific he was, the fact he was there at the beginning with Toy Love and a 4-track for the Clean. He recommended the early Tall Dwarfs EPs and "Seizure".

Today I can't even remember name of the guy on the bus but I still have a TEAC C90 mix tape of Flying Nun music he made for me. Side A is a selection from the Clean compilation that was around at the time. Side 2 has the best bits of "Bird-Dog" and "Hallelujah All the Way Home", Toy Love's "Rebel", and a lot of other gems like "Joe 90" and "Happy Endings" from Bored Games, and "Native Waiter" from the Victor Dimisich Band.

Pretty soon I had bought myself a tape of "Seizure", and the new Tall Dwarfs "Weeville" when it came out. This weekend I've taken advantage of modern technology and bought them off iTunes. I still know every word. I still feel like Chris is looking me right in the eye during "Hallelujah Boy".

I'd forgotten how much he sang about the challenges of living a good life. Admittedly, these reflections are often phrased as invective against some character who has lost everything in the pursuit of money or fame.

The songs that recount his obsession with bodies and with bodily functions seem painfully tinged today with the awareness that the body can become a prison.

Get better Chris, there are lots of us out here wishing you all the best.

Other peoples thoughts about Iran

2009-06-17T20:00:00.007+10:00

Andrew Sullivan has completely given over his blog to the remarkable events in Iran. Even to the extent of turning his background green.

Today I came across a recent article writen some time ago by Robert Kaplan, in which he spent some energy advocating the primacy of geography over ideas in all his usual "clear-eyed realism", but concluded with Iran and the battle for hearts and minds:

As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world’s most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.

Best of all Ian Packer has a remarkable post on the situation in Iran and Obama's remarks about it, in which he urges us to trust the evidence of our eyes:

It’s remarkable how difficult it’s been for writers of many different ideological persuasions to say that scenes like this are shameful. The reason, of course, has everything to do with the wars of the Bush years, at home and abroad, which have left so many thoughtful people incapable of holding onto the most basic thought. But it’s a mistake to let your attitude toward historic events be shaped and deformed by the desire not to sound like a neo-con, or to sound like a neo-con reborn. Trust the evidence of your eyes.

Obviously crazy things they will tell you about David Shearer

2009-06-15T21:35:00.016+10:00

The people of Mt Albert have elected a very interesting and accomplished character to be their MP.

Given his varied and successful career, and his interesting written work, it's a pity that profiles of him have been so shallow.

So far as I can tell the main long form profile is this piece in the Herald, which is fine as far as it goes, but the pointy headed academic in me is desparate to know a little more about how Shearer thinks about the world. Particularly about domestic issues.

In the absence of much in-depth coverage of the candidate there have been a long list of absolutely ridiculous characterizations. Here are some of the more obviously crazy.

He's boring:

Hmm, well as he put it this morning on television "I've never been called boring before! I just came out of Baghdad and before that I lived in Beirut and in Gaza"

But seriously, this is a case of the media mistaking the by-election candidate for the man. Matt McCarten, who knows a thing or two about by-elections, outlines the sort of strategy of playing it safe and focussing on local concerns that worked for the successful campaign in Mt Albert.

The biggest stress is dreading your candidate making a boo-boo the media picks up. You'd spend hours briefing the candidate until they could recite their lines in their sleep. Contrary to what most people think, questions are pretty predictable.

David Shearer is a model candidate who had his ego in check and stuck to script. When he didn't know an answer he reverted to pleasant generalities that may not have pleased his questioner but would have reassured his handlers. That is, he didn't say anything stupid.

He needs a haircut

I'm not joking. This was one of the wilder comments on TV3's excellent overall Saturday night coverage. I'd be willing to make a bet that some backroom operative forbade the haircut. The slightly mad scientist look made him seem down to earth and sincere, and went with the focus on local issues and the desire to be boring. Besides which he should not have had time to have a haircut, given the exigencies of that kind of shoe-leather campaign.

My own presentational tip would be: get longer trousers! The ones he wore on his first appearance on Q&A were riding up almost to the knees :)

He's too NICE for politics/that nasty Labour caucus:

Heard this one from Linda Clark AND Duncan Garner on Saturday night, it goes with the previous two.

Lets just look at Shearer's most recent job: second in command in Iraq for the UN, the world's most notorious bureaucracy. Now I know those on the right think otherwise, but you don't get ahead in behemoth bureaucracies by being NICE.

I'm quite confident Shearer will soon be across the currents and cross-currents in his new caucus.

One can think about this notion that Shearer will be somehow namby-pamby and ineffectual a bit more broadly, and here I may be drawing a long bow but I see his much publicized written work on mercenaries as evidence for the defence.

One of the few comments from Shearer that came across as deeply felt is his desire, expressed on TV3 Saturday night, "to make a difference". There's an emphasis on that word "difference" that doesn't come across on the page and makes the comment step some way beyond the cliche. Judging by Shearer's written views it seems to me that he takes seriously the need to use the tools that are at hand in an imperfect world to make an impact.

Take these opening paragraphs from Shearer's article "Privatising Protection" (in The World Today volume 57, number 8/9, page 29):

`The redeployment of mercenaries in this blighted nation would be an act of genuinely ethical foreign policy,' noted Times correspondent, Sam Kiley after witnessing Sierra Leonean women and children being killed and their limbs being hacked off in January 1999.

This view shared by a growing and diverse group of aid workers, journalists, human rights advocates and even the higher echelons of the British and US armed forces - those closest to the world's frontlines. Although seldom aired publicly, they wonder what there is to lose by using military companies to shield innocent civilians when there is no other choice.

The emphasis here is very much on making a difference and not being too nice about how that is achieved. (Nice in either the modern sense of "dull, friendly, push-over" or the Jane Austen sense of "overly particular".)

At this point in his career Shearer was, after around a decade in international aid efforts in Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda and elsewhere, a Research Associate at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. This is clearly a very prestigious think tank, Wikipedia account here. It's in the mainstream of transatlantic foreign policy thought, with US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg being a former Senior Fellow and publishing in their journal "Survival", while UK Foreign Secretary went there recently to launch a nuclear disarmament policy document. It's bipartisan too, being the kind of place that invites Henry Kissinger to celebrate their 50th Anniversary. I've added their blog on Climate Change and Security to my RSS feed.

One gets a feeling that Shearer felt a responsibility to "air publicly" a community's views on mercenaries and aid, and found the right position and worked hard on the right publications in which to do so. 30 seconds on Google will convince you that his work has attracted a decent amount of interest and discussion in the foreign policy literature. Frankly this all strikes me as a good sign for his political career, but then I am a pointy headed academic in an ivory tower.

For those who haven't caught up, in this period he wrote an Adelphi paper entitled "Private Armies and Military Intervention". This is a monograph length work, published in a highly respected series. The much shorter "Privatising Protection", another piece in The World Today entitled "Dial an Army" and a piece in Foreign Policy, "Outsourcing War", would have functioned as brief, accessible, and widely read precis of parts of the argument.

His main example was apparently the civil war in Sierra Leone of which he gave an account in "Exploring the limits of consent: conflict resolution in Sierra Leone" which was published in 1997 in Millenium Journal of International Studies volume 26, number 3, p845.

I can't quite bring myself to agree with some of Shearer's opinions on these issues. Particularly when one understands exactly what sort of outfit the mercenary company that worked in Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes, was. Take a look at "Dial an Army" if you are interested. There's also a stridently "realistic" tone to much of his writing on this that doesn't sit so well with me either.

But let he who has talked down armed intruders desperate for food cast the first stone.

Besides noting that they have been overtaken by subsequent events, Shearer did not resile from the opinions expressed in these papers. Good on him. He is still prepared to go into bat for "the women and children being killed and their limbs being hacked off". But I wouldn't call him "too NICE" to make a difference.

(My university library does not seem to carry all of the Adelphi papers, so I haven't looked at the full version. I'm not giving links to these publications since they are behind firewalls. "Privatising Protection" was discussed rather more tendentiously by David Farrar here, and "Outsourcing War" here.)

He's Clem Simich

The candidate who takes over safe seat from legendary former Prime Minister, takes his message to Wellington and is never seen again. This started with Whaleoil, was regurgitated by Duncan Garner on Saturday night (now THERE'S a surprise), reprised by Whaleoil, and reheated by Kiwiblog.

Now I would have said that the excellence of Shearer's pre-Parliamentary career guarantees against this one. But there is always the salutary lesson of Richard Worth!

He's the next Labour Prime Minister

Well really. If a beginning politician doesn't want to be Prime Minister they should find another job. But I suppose it is impolitic to say it out loud. The truth is 13 people have entered the Labour caucus since November 2008 and it's overwhelmingly likely that only either one or none of them will ever be Prime Minister. It's a much more useful question to ask whether a candidate in a safe seat has a credible case for being Cabinet material. Shearer does. He's honest about wanting to serve in a Cabinet after 2011. Good.

Now Linda Clark and John Campbell worked themselve into ectasies about the prospect of a Shearer Government on Saturday night. By Monday morning it was officially a National talking point since Kiwiblog, Matthew Hooten, and Whaleoil were all repeating it.

I should have a special category for Whaleoil who thinks that Shearer is BOTH Clem Simich AND the next Labour Prime Minister.

He's a raging pinko Commie leftie

Well someone other than a Kiwiblog commenter must have said this!

But really, Shearer lost out on selection for Waitakere in 2002 because of very strong union opposition. Has anyone thought to ask why?

Thinking about his CV, he was a high school science teacher, he did a Masters degree I've only seen referred to on Kiwiblog, he did some work for Tainui that related in some way to the environment, he worked for international aid agencies including Save the Children and the UN. He wrote papers in academic journals for two think tanks, he was in charge of UN humanitarian efforts during the war in Lebanon a few years back and was second in charge for the UN in Iraq.

He should be a raging pinko Commie leftie! What do the unions know that we don't? Why do commentators like Linda Clark and Matthew Hooten believe he will reposition Labour on issues like privatisation? and what do they mean by that? Could someone please find out and write about it?

He has three things going for him: "he's straight, he's married, he's got kids"

I'll admit, this one happens to be true but Wow! Talk about putting the cart before the horse. This is a quote from John Tamihere on Q&A. When I first heard this I saw red, I hit the roof, I phoned friends and bitched about it. But I "only" read the comment as an attack on Rainbow Labour. Could we please keep Tamihere off Q&A in future?

This morning though we had Matthew Hooten, who really should know better, characterize Shearer as "a candidate who is pakeha, male, heterosexual, a father, happily married and that's not what people associate with the Labour party at the moment".

This makes clear that this line of attack runs against Maori, against Pacific Islanders, against women, against those who are for whatever reason childless, and yes against gays and lesbians.

Is it true that Labour has been taken over by any of these groups? NO!

Lets take a look at the Cabinet of the Fifth Labour Government shall we? (This Wikipedia list has only the senior ministers but I haven't been able to find a more authoritative online list to jog my memory, so it's not 100% reliable but I am going with it. Also various people come in and leave, but by counting them all I have better statistics).

If I am not mistaken we have Clark, Cullen, Goff, King, Horomia, Cunliffe, Parker, Hodgson, Wilson, Anderton, Mallard, Maharey, Carter, Burton, Samuels, Dyson.

There seem to be 4 women, 2 Maori, no Pacific Islanders, and yes one gay man. This is out of the 16 people who took the most senior positions in the fifth Labour government. I started checking to see that the vast majority of the men were indeed married with children before it began to turn my stomach.

I have news for Matthew Hooten. These proportions are not representative of the New Zealand public at large, and it's not because there are too few white, male, straight married men with children taking up the senior positions in a Labour Cabinet.

We can only hope that a future Labour government will be significantly more diverse than this one. And, by the way, that Labour might find a woman to represent even one of the Auckland electorates at some time in the future. Matthew Hooten and his comrades on the right will have to get used to the idea that they may need to take orders once in a while from Maori, women, and yes even gays and lesbians.

In the mean time, people like Shearer and Goff need to work out how to respond to this egregious comment without accepting the premise of the question.

Winners and losers in Mt Albert

2009-06-14T16:35:00.005+10:00

An utterly unoriginal theme for a blog post but here goes:

Television stations: from my sub-tropical exile over here there was no contest. The winner was TV3 which had regular updates posted to the web, a live streaming web-only broadcast for well over an hour and a web simulcast of its 10:30 show. TVNZ had only a few short clips posted to the web, none after 9pm so far as I could tell.

Politicians: Here the winners are clearly Shearer and party leader Goff.

For Phil Twyford it is a matter of swings and roundabouts. He was completely shafted by Goff and the media beat-up over Tizard and would have romped in had he stood. On the other hand he has become the effective representative for Auckland that Labour never managed to find when in Government. His work on the supercity has ruthlessly taken advantage of Government misteps.

Kiwiblog whines that this prominent Dominion Post story fails to mention that the economist who did costings and estimated job losses for the Auckland city reforms is a Labour party member. Yet Twyford who has been commissioning the research is very upfront about this, and points out that these estimates are attracting interest in the press solely because the Government has failed to do the work itself.

Moreover, I'm completely confident that Twyford, unlike the Minister for Local Government, doesn't need his mother to tell him why a city needs a library!

The list of losers is long.

John Key is an obvious one. The National talking point that the race was initially neck and neck is now a Labour talking point since their candidate got 60% of the vote to National's 17%. Key's handpicked candidate was a disaster. I am agnostic on this one, but it is possible that Linda Clark is right and the public will not react well to Key and his Cabinet dissociating themselves from the campaign and making themselves scarce on election night. There is something in the notion that New Zealanders don't like sore loosers.

Melissa Lee will sink without trace. Jonathan Coleman the ministerial handler for Lee is unlikely to be looked on kindly by his colleagues, and is stuck with the thankless task of immigration reform.

Judith Tizard was dragged through the mud, after the ignominy of loosing her previously safe seat. A mayoral campaign will not be on the cards.

I'd say that Kiwiblog and Whaleoil, and their inflence on the major media, are going to come in for more scrutiny in the future given their role in the Tizard beat-up, and Whaleoil's obviously ill-informed commentary on National's chances. This can only be a good thing.

And where was the Labour party President during all this? Either Andrew Little was too busy with his day job (General Secretary of the EPMU) or he was forbidden to show his face in the electorate by Goff. Either one reflects badly on his prospects. Duncan Garner, in reviewing possible future Labour leaders, commented that Little had missed his chance by not entering Parliament in 2008. Who knows, but his appearance on Q and A this morning was hardly scintillating.

Despite a strong personal showing by Russel Norman, the Green party should have done much better given the circumstances. 12% of the vote in an urban electorate, in a by-election, (which should be good for third party candidates,) with one of the major party campaigns totally imploding, that doesn't seem like a win. It certainly doesn't square with inner city support for the Greens in Australia for example.

The standard analysis of the Green position appears to be that in a recession Green issues recede. I would argue that the Green's long term problem in New Zealand is two-fold. Firstly environmental issues have become totally mainstream and both main parties have to spend considerable times on issues like climate change. As this trend continues the Greens will become less relevant, while green lobbies in both main parties will grow in strength. So, for example, pretty much every party in parliament supports Government subsidies for home insulation. That was a great idea and the Greens got a lot of credit for getting it in the budget but one gets the feeling they didn't have to push very hard. Secondly there is the problem that now that Donald and Fitzsimons are gone, it's very hard to convince yourself that many senior greens are motivated primarily by a passionate interest in environmental issues. Given these states of affairs many voters may ask themselves if they are really furthering the cause of the environment by voting for a party that is always going to be locked out of the Executive.

At least in this by-election voters definitely seemed to feel that they were choosing between the two main parties.

Backroom campaign managers: Winner is John Pagani. This is an interesting one since Pagani is actually a Progressive. The situation on the ground for Labour may not have initially been that favourable, I'll paraphrase Linda Clark on TV3 "It's a myth that Helen Clark had this inpregnible party machine in Mt Albert", she credited Pagani with running the show and getting the on-the-ground operation running. I'll also note the local organisation was quite probably less enthused when once head office made sure that the LEC Chair's daughter lost the nomination to its hand-picked fly-in candidate. It was a very convincing win so that goes to show that if you really need to win a single electorate badly enough you get quite good at it.

On the other hand the loser was clearly Mark Thomas. There was this great shot on TV3 of him glumly trying to get attention at the bar at National party headquarters after going over to concede to Shearer. This wasn't a great night for what Dim-Post calls his "lifelong unreciprocated loyalty to the National party"; there was even a jab from Whaleoil.

Thomas was a candidate in a very memorable contest in Wellington Central back in the day, and was famously shafted by his party's Prime Minister Jim Bolger. Is there any chance of getting Tony Sutorius' wonderful doco "Campaign" up on New Zealand on Screen? The whole thing is great, but it's worth it just for the bit where they are in the car with Thomas when he hears Bolger on the radio telling National supporters to vote ACT.

UPDATE: It turns out that I can't spell "loser" what does that say about me?

This is Just to Say

2009-06-04T21:04:00.006+10:00

So Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon was forced to resign today which is doubtless not ideal timing for the Government.

His resignation letter is pretty strange, it's sounds like a dog ate my homework excuse a teenager would tender and is bound to lead to journalists sniffing around at length.

Read the following, and ask yourself, how many meetings take place in your office without your knowledge?

You will be aware of a question in Senate estimates last night regarding meetings between Humana, my brother and the Ministers for Veterans’ Affairs and the Minister for Defence Science and Personnel.

Having read the transcript of proceedings I decided to thoroughly examine the nature of any contact between Humana, my brother and my office.

Having done so, and despite having made it clear to all parties that it was important that I not be involved, I am not satisfied that contact between the various parties leave it clear that I have entirely conformed with your ministerial code of conduct.

In particular, I have learned that one meeting between the parties was held in my ministerial office. Further, I understand that members of my staff sat in on a number of meetings ...

On that basis, and to protect the integrity of the Government, I have decided to resign as a member of the Executive, effective, immediately.

Compare this to Richard Worth, a minor New Zealand Minister outside Cabinet who resigned in unfortunate circumstances earlier this week. He approached the matter by saying much less, but this didn't keep the journalists off his back either.

It is with deep regret that I have resigned my role as a Minister.

I am resigning from the role for personal reasons.

I tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister last night and he accepted.

It has been a privilege to have been a Minister in this Government.

I will not be making any further comment to the media.

I have been granted two weeks’ leave of absence from the House.

William Carlos Williams it ain't, but there is something poetic about it nonetheless.

The Irish Comparison Reversed

2009-05-31T19:25:00.004+10:00

I was amused to hear Peter Townsend, the Chief Executive of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce, on Morning Report comparing New Zealand's economic position to Ireland's. In particular, he noted that while Treasury is predicting a peak unemployment rate of around 8%, Ireland's will apparently be north of 16%.

While we are all agreed that this is good news for New Zealand, those who spent years arguing that New Zealand was falling behind Ireland on account of failing to continue a neoliberal reform agenda may wish to ask themselves why we now find ourselves in a better position.

Let's hear it for public health

2009-05-30T21:45:00.002+10:00

Sometimes DPF over at Kiwiblog does get a little carried away. I would have thought that what with this pig flu thing and everything we wouldn't have gotten this

If the public health workforce really do use a “scream test” then I think the Government should use a “scream test” on the public health workforce. This is a good start.

The historical record of the public health workforce is pretty good.

But then not many of us actually get polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, AIDS, and so on so I suppose that public health really is a waste of money.

Vaclav Havel critical of human rights horse trading

2009-05-13T00:51:00.004+10:00

Vaclav Havel has a timely op-ed in the New York times about the failings of the UN Human Rights Council.

It's called "A Table for Tyrants" but New Zealand still comes in for some criticism:

Now, it seems, principle has given way to expediency. Governments have resumed trading votes for membership in various other United Nations bodies, putting political considerations ahead of human rights. The absence of competition suggests that states that care about human rights simply don’t care enough. Latin America, a region of flourishing democracies, has allowed Cuba to bid to renew its membership. Asian countries have unconditionally endorsed the five candidates running for their region’s five seats — among them, China and Saudi Arabia.

In past years, Western countries encouraged rights-respecting states from other regions to compete for election. This year, they have ceded the high ground by presenting a non-competitive slate for the council elections. New Zealand withdrew when the United States declared its candidacy, leaving just three countries — Belgium, Norway and the United States — running for three seats.

Australian Government responds to Cutler Review on Innovation

2009-05-12T23:41:00.008+10:00

So this budget is the first one to follow the Australian Government's review of the "National Innovation System".

The so-called Cutler report, which was released last year, and a Government response entitled "Powering Ideas", released along with the Budget, are both available here.

The main recommendations of that report were to fund research infrastructure, increase research funding, increase business research funding and improve collaboration between business and research institutions. The Government seems to have responded to many of the main recommendations of the report, with its simplification of reseach concessions in the tax code, various investments in research infrastructure (great stimulus of course) and several other measures.

One big message is that Australian expenditure on research has declined in recent years relative to GDP, while other nations have increased.

So the current budget includes a 25% increase in spending on science and innovation.

Commonwealth spending on science and innovation has fallen 22 per cent as a share of GDP since 1993–94. Business spending on research and development collapsed in the late 1990s, and while it has grown since then, we still lag many of the countries we compete with. The proportion of Australian firms introducing innovations has been stuck at one in three for years. A decade of policy neglect has hurt Australia’s innovation performance, making us less productive and competitive, and reducing our ability to meet the needs and aspirations of Australian families and communities.

Meanwhile, the bar keeps rising. China’s R&D spending has grown by 22 per cent a year since 1996, compared to 8 per cent a year in Australia. Australia spends 2 per cent of GDP on research and development. Austria, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States spend more than 2.5 per cent; Finland, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden spend more than 3 per cent; Israel spends more than 4 per cent.
While Commonwealth spending on science and innovation fell to 0.58 per cent of GDP in 2007–08, Denmark is steadily increasing government spending on R&D — from 0.89 per cent of GDP in 2008, to 0.94 per cent in 2009, with a target of 1 per cent in 2010. In the United States, President Obama has pledged to double funding for federal science agencies over the next decade.

One figure from the Budget Education overview struck me.

The Government should be happy that after years for rewarding Australian academics for every paper we write, our per capita publication rate is 20% above the OECD average. Don't inquire too closely into measures of impact of those papers!

Obviously we should be very much less happy that apparently the fraction of firms with "new products" is 30% below the OECD average. This despite very healthy levels of venture capital!

Research and Development Tax Credit

2009-05-12T23:29:00.002+10:00

It's Budget night here in Australia.

Bill English might like to pay some attention to one of Wayne Swan's wackier new ideas: it's something called a Research and Development Tax Credit.

Wait! Perhaps someone in New Zealand has already thought of such a scheme?

(The eagle-eyed will want to look at the detail of the Australian proposal. Will it encourage new research? Or will businesses be able to use it to offset the costs of existing activities?)

Reaction to Australian Defence White Paper

2009-05-03T20:17:00.005+10:00

Early reaction to the White Paper seems to be positive, the main criticism is with regard to the lack of budget planning. Budgetary questions are covered in one and a half pages of 140 or so.

The Minister says that more details of future funding will be in the budget the week after next.

But really, you can rely on Greg Sheridan to have the most entertaining account.

THE defence white paper is an almost incoherent blancmange of oddly unharmonised flavours.

It reads like a biblical commentary in which 50 Talmudic scholars, each representing an alternative school of thought, have been allowed to write alternative sentences.

The internal contradictions in the document are so staggering it looks like sentences have been bolted on almost at random, like pieces in a Meccano set manipulated by a two-year-old.

And yet, even he seems largely to agree with the decisions

For all that, the Government has mostly come up with the right decisions: 100 Joint Strike Fighters, 12 new submarines, the continuation of the army expansion program, new, big surface ships and so on.

In defence, to some extent equipment and budget are real policy, the rest window-dressing. Australia's neighbours in the Asia-Pacific will look at the equipment commitments more than anything else. They will see the air force, the navy and the army getting bigger and more capable. That's all that really counts. The white paper will reinforce Australia's reputation as a formidable defence power.

In New Zealand Defence Minister Wayne Mapp is not anticipating a matching increase in New Zealand funding.

Dr Mapp believes New Zealand's current defence budget is about right, and is confident the two countries will continue working closely together.

Neither does he seem to believe that Chinese growth poses much danger to the regional order.

Dr Mapp says China's military capacity has increased as its economic capacity has grown, but over the past 30 years the country has focused on trade and good relationships with its neighbours.

I hope a more considered response will emerge over the next few months. Not just Australia but also Japan have now announced significant increases in military spending in response to growing Chinese military capabilities. The point of a strategic review like our White Paper process would be to give this at least some thought, and to allow a public discussion that goes some way beyond just questions of trade.

Oh and there is an interesting discussion of the Australian White paper here, with an even more intriguing discussion of the possibilities for an invasion of New Zealand here. (Hint: still not very likely.)

Australian Defence White Paper released

2009-05-03T18:40:00.004+10:00

So the Australian Defence White paper has finally been released, on a Saturday.

It's available here.

There will be a significant build up in Australian defence spending.

The Government says it will keep its pledge to have 3 per cent real growth in defence spending until 2018. It says there will then be 2.2 per cent real growth in spending from 2018 to 2030 as well as 2.5 per cent fixed indexation to the defence budget during this period.

The Australian's account gives a summary of the conclusions in terms of future capabilities.

It seeks to defend the nation by creating a navy by 2030 with the teeth to deny even a sizeable enemy from dominating the northern air-sea approaches to Australia. This new navy will cost many tens of billions of dollars, easily the largest single investment since Federation. Yet it does so without broad agreement inside Canberra's defence establishment about the strategic rationale underpinning this build-up and with grave doubts hanging over the Government's ability to fund and manage this vast project or find enough crew to sail its new armada.

It also requires Australians to accept permanent real growth in defence spending for the next two decades regardless of economic circumstances. This amounts to a fundamental long-term shift in Australia's public spending priorities, a difficult proposition for any government to sell to voters, much less at a time of global recession.

The plan to double the submarine fleet from six to 12, acquire three powerful new air warfare destroyers, eight new well-armed and larger frigates, 24 new naval combat helicopters, a bigger fleet of more muscular patrol craft and to develop a serious anti-submarine warfare capability, represents a quantum leap in naval power for a mid-sized country such as Australia.

This, coupled with plans to purchase 100, rather than a smaller number, of the Joint Strike Fighters will create a formidable deterrent to any aggressor and will allow Australia to project power more deeply into the region than ever.

Of course I immediately searched for all references to New Zealand, here is the key paragraph.

As the ADF incorporates new systems and capabilities, maintaining the current level of interoperability between our separate defence forces will require a concerted effort on the part of both countries. With this in mind, Australia and New Zealand should look for opportunities to rebuild our historical capacity to integrate Australian and New Zealand force elements in the Anzac tradition. This operational integration would of course be without prejudice to our respective policy choices. It could be as modest as integrating our air transport logistics support to operations, or as ambitious as an Anzac task force capable of deploying seamlessly at short notice into our immediate region. To be effective, any integrated force elements would need to exercise regularly together as a unified capability.

There is also a mention of working with New Zealand on issues like Fiji and East Timor.

As foreshadowed by the Australian, there are indeed some sharp comments on the stategic consequences of China's rise, and more particularly its military buildup.

This from Rudd at the launch

"It's as plain as day that there is a significant military and naval build-up across the Asia-Pacific region - that's a reality, it's a truth, it's there.

"Either you can simply choose to ignore that fact, or to incorporate that into a realistic component of Australia's strategic assumptions about what this region will look like over the next two decades."

So for example this on China from the White Paper

China will also be the strongest Asian military power, by a considerable margin. Its military modernisation will be increasingly characterised by the development of power projection capabilities. A major power of China's stature can be expected to develop a globally significant military capability befitting its size. But the pace, scope and structure of China's military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans.

China has begun to do this in recent years, but needs to do more. If it does not, there is likely to be a question in the minds of regional states about the long-term strategic purpose of its force development plans, particularly as the modernisation appears potentially to be beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan.

On the question of Taiwan there are two interesting comments. This in the White Paper

Taiwan will remain a source of potential strategic miscalculation, and all parties will need to work hard to ensure that developments in relation to Taiwan over the years ahead are peaceful ones. The Government reaffirms Australia's longstanding 'One China' policy.

Secondly, at the press conference Rudd was asked about Taiwan and replied with a strong emphasis on the importance of the US alliance. I've looked online for a transcript of these remarks with no success, but they were commented on by Gerard Henderson on Insiders this morning.

Updated: Here is the exchange in question, I can't for the life of me see it as anything other than a reiteration of the status quo.

JOURANLIST: Prime Minister if China attacks Taiwan in any way, will Australia help defend it?

PM: Thank you for that question. Australia’s policy in relation to the Taiwan Straits has been one of a bipartisan consensus going back a long, long time and will be into the future. It contains two elements. One is that we do not speculate on any future contingencies concerning what may or may not happen in the Taiwan Strait. The second part of my response to your question is that Australia takes seriously its alliance responsibilities to the United States.

Shock! Antarctic Sea Ice is Growing!

2009-04-21T19:00:00.006+10:00

The Australian was so full of climate change contrarians on Saturday that it was hard to know where to start. But since both Roarprawn and Whaleoil have pointed to this article on Antarctic ice the problem is solved.

This is a particularly easy instance since the main factual claim made in the article is true. (Not always the case in discussions of climate issues that you find in the newspaper!) It just happens not to say much one way or the other about global warming.

East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week's meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown "significant cooling in recent decades".

Australian Antarctic Division glaciology program head Ian Allison said sea ice losses in west Antarctica over the past 30 years had been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea region, just one sector of east Antarctica.

"Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally," Dr Allison said.

This is not a "climate change lie exposed" as Whaleoil claims, scientists have known this for a long time and have said so. Now we just have better data. It is not even clear to me that there is "a widespread public belief" that Antartic sea ice is contracting as the article claims. (The Arctic is of course another matter, and maybe many confuse the two?)

Why does increasing Antarctic sea ice not challenge current scientific thinking about global warming? I'll defer to the US agency the National Snow and Ice Data Center

Another important point is that the increase in Antarctic sea ice extent is not surprising to climate scientists. When scientists refer to global warming, they don’t mean warming will occur everywhere on the planet at the same rate. In some places, temporary cooling may even occur. Antarctica is an example of regional cooling. Even our earliest climate models projected that Antarctica would be much slower in responding to rising greenhouse gas concentrations than the Arctic. In large part, this reflects the nature of the ocean structure in Antarctica, in which water warmed at the surface quickly mixes downward, making it harder to melt ice.

In terms of sea ice, climate model projections of Antarctic sea ice extent are in reasonable agreement with the observations to date. It also appears that atmospheric greenhouse gases, as well as the loss of ozone, have acted to increase the winds around Antarctica. Perhaps counter intuitively, this has further protected the Antarctic from warming and has fostered more ice growth.

The one region of Antarctica that is strongly warming is the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and is thus less protected by the altered wind pattern. The Antarctic Peninsula is experiencing ice shelf collapse and strongly reduced sea ice.

Why are scientists very concerned by reductions in Arctic sea ice but don't seem to talk much about Antarctic sea ice?

Unlike Arctic sea ice, Antarctic sea ice disappears almost completely during the summer, and has since scientists have studied it. Earth’s climate system over thousands of years has been "in tune" with this annual summertime disappearance of Antarctic sea ice. However, satellite records and pre-satellite records indicate that the Arctic has not been free of summertime sea ice for at least 5,500 years and possibly for 125,000 years. So Earth’s climate system and ecosystems, as they exist today, did not develop in conjunction with an ice-free Arctic. Such an ice-free Arctic summer environment would be a change unprecedented in modern human history and could have ramifications for climate around the world.

The New Zealand Option

2009-04-20T23:18:00.012+10:00

I have yet to read Hugh White's Lowy Institute paper on Australian Defence Paper.

However I have listened to his recent talk at the Institute.

As I have noted earlier, White's analysis is that during the course of the coming century the growth of Chinese economic and military power will strain the international order in the Pacific and may lead to a significant danger of conflict.

White sees three options for Australia in this environment.

1/ To recommit to the US alliance and accept that this will require greatly increased military committments from Australia.

2/ To aim for a more self-reliant defence and a more independent foreign policy stance.

3/ The New Zealand option.

Now my readers outside Australia, particularly those in New Zealand, should note that this is a laugh line.

White is arguing that the first two options, which would see Australia retain its status as something called a "middle power", will require a much greater expenditure on defence as fraction of GDP. The third alternative is, for the moment, unthinkable.

(Are there any countries other than Canada and Australia that actually aspire to the status of "middle power"?)

If this analysis of China becomes widespread in Australia surely New Zealand's "independent" defence and foreign policy would come under much greater pressure from our nearest neighbour?

Debate on Australian Defence White Paper

2009-04-20T22:57:00.004+10:00

I'm going to keep linking to discussions of the Australian Defence White Paper, largely because there will be a New Zealand Defence White Paper ramping up later in the year.

Hugh White's Lowy Institute paper, which I blogged about earlier, has now been released in full.

There have been a series of interesting and apparently well-informed comments on this in the Interpreter blog. Take a look here and work backwards.

I'm particularly sympathetic to Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan's concerns that money be spent so that actual defence capabilities are consistent with the rhetoric of defence strategy as described in the White Paper and elsewhere.

The immediate priority for the government is not to be subverted by images of heroic strategic leadership (which do not have to be funded for many years) but to the serious but less sexy duty of repairing the current defence force.

Of course there is no show without Punch, and it was only a matter of time before Greg Sheridan got stuck into White in the pages of the Australian.

White is a very faithful lover. Many decades ago he fell in love with the idea of maritime denial as Australia's strategic lodestar and from that he deduced that the force structure for the ADF should focus overwhelmingly on submarines and fighter aircraft.

In his preposterous paper, which so far has escaped critical scrutiny, White calls for 200 JSFs and 18 submarines, and an enlarged but lightweight army, deliberately not equipped to fight even in medium-intensity theatres such as Afghanistan, configured as a gendarmerie for use in policing roles in the South Pacific.

I'd been puzzling over the exact role of White's Lowy paper in relation to Government debates about the official White paper. Particularly since White was responsible for drafting the previous Australian Defence White Paper in 2000.

Graeme Dobell is very enlightening on this point, and very entertaining on Army views on White.

Hugh spent enough years in Parliament House to know how the political wheels turn. Thus, I read his Lowy paper as not just a wonk prescription.

Don’t see the paper as a faux Defence White Paper. Consider it, instead, as a particularly well written and explicit Cabinet submission. It is the sort of policy paper that goes to Ministers as the White Paper is prepared. And in the final White Paper, much of the meaty stuff — such as the tough discussion of China — gets watered down or cut out.

Who's talking about Ireland now?

2009-04-20T22:45:00.003+10:00

It became very tedious a few years ago to listen to continual unfavourable comparisons of New Zealand with Ireland coming from the kind of commentators on New Zealand economy and politics that read the Wall Street Journal.

Given that Ireland was an EU member, a short plane flight from continental Europe, I was never sure that the comparison should carry much weight.

Nevertheless it might pay to note that Ireland has, perhaps predictably, been a major victim of the global financial crisis, with GDP this year predicted to fall 10% below its peak.

Paul Krugman's description of the situation there may have some lessons for New Zealand.

How did Ireland get into its current bind? By being just like us, only more so. Like its near-namesake Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets. Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the third freest economy in the world, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore.

One part of the Irish economy that became especially free was the banking sector, which used its freedom to finance a monstrous housing bubble. Ireland became in effect a cool, snake-free version of coastal Florida.

Then the bubble burst. The collapse of construction sent the economy into a tailspin, while plunging home prices left many people owing more than their houses were worth. The result, as in the United States, has been a rising tide of defaults and heavy losses for the banks.

Run Twyford

2009-04-15T00:21:00.004+10:00

I have to say that the Dim-Post has brought me round to his compelling common sense point of view on the Mt Albert by-election. The alleged "Tizard issue" really is "pure, unadulterated bullshit".

Labour has allowed this inside the beltway issue to be framed by Kiwiblog, with the mainstream media falling into line behind. This course of events is all too familiar from the election campaign. It is time for some serious push-back.

The by-election is about who should be the electorate MP for Mt Albert and as far as I can tell Twyford is far and away the best person for the job. The Labour selection process should certainly not be second guessed in response to DPF and the Herald.

Tizard, on the other hand, is a properly selected list candidate and she's perfectly entitled to go back into Caucus if she gets the opportunity. Voters in Mt Albert will vote for the best person to represent them and the presence or otherwise of Judith Tizard on the Labour list will not be a major issue, just as National knows the identity of their next list candidate will not be a big issue should Melissa Lee prove to be competitive in the seat.

What's more, if we are going to start talking about apparently underperforming list MPs, I'd take Judith Tizard over Richard Worth any day.

Clark's Valedictory

2009-04-12T22:42:00.004+10:00

I have to say I enjoyed it. I think it's a bit early to expect Clark to be trumpeting her failings. None of us can yet give a really balanced opinion of the events of 2008 or the successes and failures of the third term of the fifth Labour government.

I recommend the extended interview on Focus on Politics.

Several points she made there, rather than in the speech, were particularly interesting to me:

Firstly, she mentioned the book "Head and Shoulders" edited by Virginia Myers in reference to her early experiences in Parliament. I've long thought that this interview was by a very great margin the single most enlightening account of Clark that I have come across. Re-reading it just now, it's remarkably prophetic of later developments. Some form of split with Anderton has already occured over his public comments in the wake of the Timaru by-election. "That caused some difficulties between us. But I have a strong sense of self-preservation. I didn't come this far to be burnt out in a hail of gunfire." She rejects being labelled as a communist or a Bennite, "I don't see myself as a radical at all, but as very much mainstream Labour --- what would be called 'social democrat' overseas." Despite being on the outs with Caucus at the time of the interview she is looking to the future "Perhaps my chance will come with the fifth Labour government. That could be about 1996 and I'll just be in my prime!". You can find copies in any decent NZ second-hand bookshop.

Secondly, I think she may have hinted at oneday writing a considered and well researched account of her time in politics. This would be an enormous service to our political culture. The fourth Labour government has so far produced only disappointing accounts from its participants. Lange and Bassett have written rushed and unreflective books, despite Bassett's remarkable notes and historical training. Meanwhile Douglas has jumped back into the political fray when it would be much more useful for him to be writing a really good book.

And thirdly, I have to admit that, yes, in response to something like the famous John Dickerson question (what were your mistakes? or regrets?), Clark really did sound more like Bush II than Frank Sinatra. But perhaps that is a mistake too small to mention.

How the Mighty Are Fallen

2009-04-12T22:06:00.003+10:00

The Sydney Morning Herald this weekend carried this opinion piece from Roy Masters on the front page above the fold. (I have already recycled the paper version but I am almost certain that the print and online versions have been edited differently.)

Apparently Polynesian players in the NRL are the big issue no one in the League is prepared to tackle. I read the whole thing but I couldn't for the life of me determine exactly what the issue is. This excerpt though says far more about Roy Masters and the SMH editors than it does about any "issues" facing the NFL.

The Pacific Island player is the elephant in the rugby league dressing room: officials, fearful of being accused of rascism, won't comment about his impact at the junior leagues, where he stampedes over lighter, whiter opponents, or the challenge he represents to the entrenched ethos of some traditional NRL clubs. He is reshaping the code's demographics at either end of the rugby league age spectrum.

Anecdotally, the number of junior players of European background is falling because they resent having to tackle the bigger, stronger Pacific Islanders in the same age group. In the senior ranks, NRL clubs rush to sign Pacific Islanders who are perceived to be more durable, recovering from injury more quickly.

Injury-prone though he is, one begins to see why Sonny Bill fled to France.

The Australian Defence White Paper and China

2009-04-12T21:19:00.003+10:00

The Australian this weekend carried a front page article on the Australian Defence White Paper.

It appears that the Rudd Government has overridden the assessment of Australian intelligence agencies. The intelligence agencies apparently regard failed and failing states in Australia's vicinity and involvement with the UN and the US in counter-insurgency operations further afield as the main challenges of the ADF in coming years.

Others in Defence wanted to see a more aggressive effort to confront China.

Senior Defence officials argued privately that the ADF needed to be structured to enable it to play a key support role alongside US forces in any future conflict with Beijing. "They saw the rise of China as the new Cold War and decided that this needed to be the focus of future strategy," said one Defence insider.

Apparently the hawks won, and there will be a significant build-up of Australian defence capabilities to combat the growth of Chinese military power.

The standoff between the intelligence doves and defence hawks has gone all the way to Kevin Rudd personally.

But the hawks have won, and Australia will spend more than $100 billion over the next two decades to boost its naval and air war-fighting capacity.

The rise of China will shape Australia's defence planning for a generation.

The Rudd Government's defence white paper, due out later this month, will call for a more potent and costly maritime defence for Australia.

The expansion of Australia's sea and air defences will include a doubling of the submarine fleet, 100 joint strike fighters, new spy planes, as well as powerful new surface warships.

The White Paper should finally emerge before the end of the month.

Also in the Weekend Australian a foretaste of Hugh White's forthcoming Lowy Institute paper on the White Paper. He seems to very much agree with expanding the submarine and fighter jet fleets. He calls on the Government to dramatically increase defence spending, in order to be able to maintain its strategic weight in the region against competitors whose GDPs are growing rapidly.

To build a focused force to achieve Australia's long-term strategic objectives as they are now defined would need spending 2.5 per cent of GDP or more. This is not unthinkable: it is comparable with our defence spending in the 1970s and '80s.

Ministers will be tempted to say we can afford all the forces we need within current funding projections if it is spent more efficiently. That may be wishful thinking. Huge efficiencies in defence are possible but they will require really forceful leadership to achieve, and that has been lacking for a long time. And even if new brooms can turn defence on its head, the long-term trends suggest that Australia has no choice but to spend more on defence or accept a steady decline in strategic weight. A mere 20 years ago Australia's economy was the second largest in Asia after that of Japan: larger than India's or China's. How quickly the balance has shifted.

I can't resist mentioning that currently the RAN is often unable to operate more than half of its existing submarine fleet due to skill shortages, and, one understands, low morale.

A side-note to New Zealand readers: to take the temperature of the current debate in Australia on relations with China you should google the names of Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon and Chinese-born businesswoman Helen Liu.

You might think that this enormous focus on the future of the Chinese relationship in our nearest neighbour and closest ally might arouse just the slightest interest in the New Zealand media. Particularly given that we are about to undertake our own Defence White Paper. Particularly given that Prime Minister Key is even now in China. As the indispensible Tailor of Panama St notes so eloquently today, that is far too much to expect of our dangerously withered media organisations.

Blacked Out

2009-02-22T23:14:00.006+10:00

I've managed to persuade Blogger to sort of black me out. We're all outraged of course by the "guilt upon accusation" copyright law about to come into force in New Zealand. That's section 92 of the Copyright Ammendment Act for those keeping track. See more here.
Update:Blackout now over. Russell Brown has a good discussion of the issue here. And Dean Knight begs to differ.

What on earth is going on with the Australian ETS?

2009-02-22T18:37:00.005+10:00

As was noted by several in the NZ blogosphere, Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan recently referred the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) to a lower house finance committee. Since the committee was tasked with considering whether an ETS was the correct policy response to climate change, and given that the committee was to report after the Government had previously stated the measure would be passed, everyone took this to mean that the CPRS was very much on the back burner.

Almost immediately the Government was stating that this was not the case. By the end of the week the move, a ploy to reduce the power of the Senate and back the opposition into a corner on climate change policy, had been reversed.

Dennis Atkins, who is pretty much the only person worth reading in Brisbane's Courier Mail, has a very good analysis of what on earth was going on here.

Atkins frames this issue in terms of the chaotic state of affairs in Canberra currently, with an enormous stimulus package going through Parliament in the week of the worst natural disaster in Australia for at least a hundred years. This is on top of Rudd's notorious work rate and instincts for micromanagement.

All of this was happening in what is now a permanent state of semi-chaos in Canberra. Ministers and public servants are stretched to breaking point, too much is being asked with too-tight timelines and ridiculously minor decisions are not being made until they are ticked by the office of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Swan's letter to Economics Committee chairman Craig Thomson sailed through this monster mash and it was apparently not given the attention it deserved, allowing a form of words too open to mis-interpretation.

Now the politics of the CPRS is clearly far from settled. Apparently the big mining companies have only recently realised the implications of the scheme for their businesses since the shine went off the global economy. As a result the Government is coming under vastly increased pressure from business interests.

There's plenty of bark left in the emissions trading dog, as an increasing number of companies and their representatives in Canberra have been telling ministers in recent weeks and will continue to do in the weeks and months ahead. While Wong repeats the mantra that carbon reduction cannot be put on the back burner because of the global financial crisis, business is not so sanguine.

Mining companies - especially those representing coal interests - have been laying what are said to be some alarming numbers on ministers' desks, highlighting job losses and potential mine closures.

On the other hand strong ETS advocates are increasingly willing to oppose the proposed scheme as being too weak. Some are even willing to go back to the drawing board and investigate a carbon tax, as in this open letter by 10 very eminent economists.

In his article Atkins also emphasizes that the Government will certainly struggle to get this bill through the Senate. The Greens oppose the scheme as too weak, and the Liberals oppose the current measure as too onerous. The Nationals are likely to oppose regardless.

Once again we are hearing that the Government may be willing to go to a double dissolution election over this issue. So the politics of the Australian ETS still have a lot of life in them yet!

The Natural Party of Government in New Zealand

2009-02-13T18:40:00.004+10:00

For the second half of the 20th Century National regarded itself, rightly one has to admit, as the natural party of Government in New Zealand. It did this, so far as I can tell, by representing the values of a certain kind of ordinary New Zealander and providing, so far as it could, good governance.

No party can hope to be the natural party of Government and stand for an awful lot. No party can be the natural party of Government without discovering a pragmatic and opportunist streak a mile wide. Sometimes it will seem that the natural party of Government is ready to use all means necessary to hang onto power solely for its own sake.

Helen Clark's enormous political achievement was to mount a credible claim on behalf of the Labour party for the mantle of natural party of Government in the new century. But after a single term in Government, that is all it is, a challenge.

It seems pretty clear now that John Key doesn't just want to be PM, he wants to lead the natural party of Government in New Zealand. This despite whatever advantage MMP voting may have handed to Labour in this regard.

This will require him to marginalize the idealists and ideologues and he seems willing to do that. It will require him to file the edges off his Cabinet's partisan enthusiasms, and he seems ready to do that. It will also require him to build lasting partnerships with other parties and he's definitely shown he's ready to do that.

In spirit I very much agree with Jordan Carter. We are seeing a very effective counterattack from John Key's government on this territory. (Although the idea that an agressive market liberal government would be National "reverting to type" seems too focussed on certain historically anomalous aspects of the most recent National government. I would argue that typically National has not stood for much, and the danger is precisely that they may be able to achieve this again, while forming a historic alliance with Maori politicians that could allow them to regain the electoral advantage even under MMP.)

I have this picture of John Key going off to the beach over summer with a copy of "Kiwi" Keith Holyoake's biography.

He had a pretty good holiday and it's keeping the smile on his face as he over-rules his minister and increases the minimum wage. When he goes to Waitangi to be jousled by youths and bossed around by Titewhai Harawira he's still smiling. Thoughts of his holiday are definitely keeping the smile on his face when he dances around with the drag queens at the Big Gay Out.

Being so approachable, so available, and such a good sport. It all seems of a piece with Holyoake down at the train station looking for lost luggage:

As Prime Minister he lived a few hundred yards from Parliament's gates and insisted on listing his home phone number in the directory. Gustafson records that on one occasion someone rang to report their luggage missing at Wellington railway station and the Prime Minister walked down to help look for it.

Key wants to be PM for a long time and it's going to be hard to stop him.

To answer Jordan's question:

Question is: where's the left? Do you lot agree with my view, of steely pointless pragmatism? Or do you think there is a Douglas ghost ready to ooze out? Or some combination? Or another answer altogether?

The "ghost of Douglas" won't be oozing anywhere if John Key has anything to do with it.

Finally -- surely the big question for Key this year is should he have been out getting himself a "stimulus package" rather than reading biographies on the beach?

Where Next? Conservatism is Dead

2009-02-13T18:13:00.003+10:00

You really do have to read Sam Tanenhaus's essay by this title in the New Republic. It's a brilliant account and analysis of the rise and fall of movement conservatism in the U.S.

In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Review, the movement's first serious political journal. Ten years later, the right's next leader, Barry Goldwater, suffered one of the most lopsided losses in election history. Yet the "draft Goldwater" campaign secured control of the GOP for movement conservatives. In 1976, the insurgent challenge by Goldwater's heir, Ronald Reagan, to incumbent president Gerald Ford was thwarted. But Reagan's crusade positioned him to win the presidency four years later and initiate the conservative "revolution" that remade our politics over the next quarter-century. In each instance, crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory.

Today, the situation is much bleaker.

Tannenhaus hopes that the final demise of Bush will create a new opportunity

There remains in our politics a place for an authentic conservatism--a conservatism that seeks not to destroy but to conserve.

His view of authentic conservatism he regards as Burkean

What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the "organic" unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke's conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums.

And he is not blind to the fact that the Democrats have just elected a guy who seems to fill this sort of description.

In the end, movement conservatives got the war they wanted--both at home and abroad. It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right.

As always the Atlantic bloggers are essential reading. Andrew Sullivan is of course a dissident conservative of long standing and concurs at length here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that, to hear Tanenhaus and Sullivan tell it, it would appear that many of us lefty pinko social democrats are classical conservatives too.

This is a conservatism that has militancy and radicalism, not liberalism, as its antitheses. It seems to say very little about specific policy, but a lot about how to think about policy. Martin Luther King was despised by the right-wingers of his time, but by these lights, he was likely more conservative than the people who opposed him. Moreover, Obama would be, almost certainly, a conservative. As, I think, would I.

But party coalitions are built around issues these days--not ways of thinking about issues. It's more policy, than philosiphy. Like I said, in that Burkean sense, I don't have much problem calling myself conservative. I just happen to be pro-choice, to believe government should, and can, help people, to be pro-science, and perhaps most importantly, to have a visceral disdain for bigots and people who try to manipulate bigots to suit thier ends. That goes for small town elitist, gay-bashers, and Mooslim haters.

Where Next? Kevin Rudd and the Historic Role of the Social Democrat

2009-02-13T18:00:00.003+10:00

The Murdoch press in Australia has been in a tizzy over Kevin Rudd's seven thousand word essay on the global financial crisis in the Monthly. It declares neoliberalism dead and gives a call to arms for social democrats.

I was struck by this warning about the possible rise of various kinds of extremism if social democratic governments fail to make progress.

Social-democratic governments across the world must rise to the further challenge of developing a practical policy response to the crisis that rebuilds shattered economic growth, while also devising a new regulatory regime for the financial markets of the future. This is our immediate challenge. But if we fail, there is a grave danger that new political voices of the extreme Left and the nationalist Right will begin to achieve a legitimacy hitherto denied them. Again, history is replete with the most disturbing of precedents.

But much of the rest of the analysis is, by now, fairly conventional. The politics of tarring the Liberals with a "failed ideology" is too good to resist though of course.

Not for the first time in history, the international challenge for social democrats is to save capitalism from itself: to recognise the great strengths of open, competitive markets while rejecting the extreme capitalism and unrestrained greed that have perverted so much of the global financial system in recent times. It fell to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rebuild American capitalism after the Depression. It fell also to the American Democrats, strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes, to rebuild postwar domestic demand, to engineer the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and to set in place the Bretton Woods system to govern international economic engagement. And so it now falls to President Obama's administration - and to those who will provide international support for his leadership - to support a global financial system that properly balances private incentive with public responsibility in response to the grave challenges presented by the current crisis. The common thread uniting all three of these episodes is a reliance on the agency of the state to reconstitute properly regulated markets and to rebuild domestic and global demand.

The second challenge for social democrats is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the global financial crisis unfolds and the hard impact on jobs is felt by families across the world, the pressure will be great to retreat to some model of an all-providing state and to abandon altogether the cause of open, competitive markets both at home and abroad. Protectionism has already begun to make itself felt, albeit in softer and more subtle forms than the crudity of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Soft or hard, protectionism is a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression, as it exacerbates the collapse in global demand. The intellectual challenge for social democrats is not just to repudiate the neo-liberal extremism that has landed us in this mess, but to advance the case that the social-democratic state offers the best guarantee of preserving the productive capacity of properly regulated competitive markets, while ensuring that government is the regulator, that government is the funder or provider of public goods and that government offsets the inevitable inequalities of the market with a commitment to fairness for all. Social democracy's continuing philosophical claim to political legitimacy is its capacity to balance the private and the public, profit and wages, the market and the state. That philosophy once again speaks with clarity and cogency to the challenges of our time.

Economic crisis to delay U.S. carbon trading?

2009-02-13T17:50:00.001+10:00

In more recent comments Chu is open to considering a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade, a good thing perhaps.

More importantly perhaps he seems to indicate that the current economic crisis will delay either cap and trade or other carbon pricing mechanisms.

He said that while President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders had endorsed a so-called cap-and-trade system to control global warming pollutants, there were alternatives that could emerge, including a tax on carbon emissions or a modified version of cap-and-trade.

Dr. Chu said reaching agreement on legislation to combat climate change would be difficult in the current recession because any scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would probably cause energy prices to rise and drive manufacturing jobs to countries where energy is cheaper.

“The concern about cap-and-trade in today’s economic climate,” Dr. Chu said, “is that a lot of money might flow to developing countries in a way that might not be completely politically sellable.”

Chu Back to Speaking His Mind

2009-02-13T17:30:00.011+10:00

It's great to see Nobel Prize winning physicist and U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu back to speaking his mind. Here from an interview in the L.A. Times he discusses the effects of reduced snow-pack on California.

In the pessimistic scenario, the snow pack will decrease by 70 to 90 percent. Well, let me tell you what California does when there's a two-year in a row 20 percent decrease in snow pack: They water-ration.

Q: So you're looking at a scenario of permanent water rationing?

CHU: No, you're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California.

You may have noticed that during his confirmation hearing he walked back an earlier comment that coal was his "nightmare", describing it only as a bad dream, (NYTimes) but maybe one only needs to be circumspect in front of the Senate committee?

In the L.A. Times interview Chu presents the case for action against climate change despite uncertainties in our knowledge. He has a particularly good analogy to the dangers of old electrical wiring.

Carbon dioxide is a global problem. The cost of the carbon emissions are things that, number one, won't show up immediately in one year, or even in 10 years. They have begun to appear. The real costs are hard to estimate because we don't know to what extent, how bad it's going to get, in all honesty. There are projections... You can make a best guess on what might happen. I prefer - there are people who say, since we're not sure, we really shouldn't do about it - I think, in my opinion, a more measured way of dealing with this is, it's all about the risk, the potential risk, the downside risk of not doing something, or maybe doing it in a very moderate way.

The analogy I like to use is, suppose you buy a house, and then in the inspection, the structural engineer says, well, this House is a fine house, but understand, you have to rewire the house, because it's an old wiring and there's a chance of an electrical fire. It's going to cost a lot of money, but you should rewire... So you get an estimate of whether you really need to rewire the house, or whether you can go another, safely for another 20 years or 10 years. Suppose, just pretend, that the next person comes and says, essentially, I think the wiring is shot. I can't guarantee if it's going to be this year or five years from now, but you run the risk of an electrical fire. So now you have many options. You can continue to shop for the answer you want: your house is safe. Or you can say, I know the solution.... let's pretend it's $20,000, a lot of money, that's going to come out of your budget, an you can't - you're going to have to forgo a lot of other things. You could say, well, I could just get better fire insurance. You're probably not going to do that. Because there's a chance the house could burn down when you're asleep and your kids are asleep in the house. So eventually, you might be led to say, if there's a 50 percent chance my house might burn down in five years, I better do the rewiring. Then you have to bite the bullet. No one is telling you there's a 100 percent chance this is going to happen.

Finally this

Dr. Chu said he was still adjusting to his surroundings and title after most of a career spent as an academic scientist. Asked whether he preferred to be called “Dr. Chu” or “Mr. Secretary,” he answered, “Steve is fine.”

Given what I have heard about the workrate Chu expects, I wonder if some at the Department of Energy will be in for a period adjustment also.

U.S Coal Reserves

2009-02-13T17:02:00.004+10:00

I've noted before that people such as David Rutledge at Caltech and the Energy Watch Group believe that economically extractible world coal reserves are enormously overstated. Rutledge believes the situation is sufficiently serious that it will ultimately limit CO2 emissions to below the IPCC scenarios.

The EWG has emphasized the enormous writedowns in recent years of coal reserves by many countries, who have been motivated to look into the matter by declining coal production.

Climate Progress notes that the United States Geological Survey have finally joined this trend. They have done a thorough analysis of a single coal field that provides 37% of U.S. coal production.

Coal reserves are the portion of the recoverable coal that can be mined, processed, and marketed at a profit at the time of the economic evaluation. With a discounted cash flow at 8 percent rate of return, the coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total) for the 6 coal beds evaluated.

In 2006 production at the Gillette coalfield was 436 million short tons or 4% of the economically extractible resource. Unsurprisingly then that the National Research Council is calling for research into the size of reserves.

It is clear that there is enough coal at current rates of production to meet anticipated needs through 2030, and probably enough for 100 years, the committee said. However, it is not possible to confirm the often-quoted assertion that there is a sufficient supply for the next 250 years.

The report recommends a federal-state-industry initiative to determine the size and characteristics of the nation's recoverable coal, with the goal of providing policymakers with a full account of these reserves within 10 years. The initiative should be led by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, states, and industry, and will require additional funding of approximately $10 million per year.

The group Clean Energy Action has just released a pessimistic report on U.S. coal.

In an extensively resarched report using publicly available data, Clean Energy Action member Leslie Glustrom says "we were quite shocked to find that most of the coal in the United States is buried too deeply to be accessible in large quantities or at reasonable prices."

Assumptions about the cheap price of coal figure critically in utility planning decisions including the option to choose renewable energy to generate electricity.

She documents that US coal supplies are not in the 200 year range as commonly assumed, but more likely in the 50 year range. Key supporting data includes a US Geological Survey report - Open File Report 2008-1202 - indicating that only 6% (or about 10 billion tons) of the original coal resource in the Gillette Coal Field of the Powder River Basin of Wyoming is economically accessible.

Expansion of Nuclear Power in Europe

2009-02-13T16:53:00.004+10:00

The combination of aggressive carbon emission reduction targets and concerns about the security of gas supplies from Russia is driving a pretty rapid expansion of nuclear power in Europe.

The Swedes have just repealed a law requiring them to phase out nuclear power and seem likely to join the list of countries building new plants.

Several European countries are opting for nuclear energy and there is concern about the reliability of Russian-supplied fuel after Moscow's gas dispute with Ukraine last month.

Poland wants its first nuclear plant by 2020 and Britain decided last year to replace its ageing nuclear reactors and create new sites. France has ordered its 61st nuclear generator and Finland is building the largest reactor in the world, which is expected to open in 2011.

Sweden has some of the most ambitious greenhouse-gas targets in the world and plans to become carbon neutral by 2050. It wants to abolish fossil fuels as a heating source by 2020 and use half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

"The nuclear phase-out law will be abolished," a government spokesman said yesterday. "The ban in the nuclear technology law on new construction will also be abolished."

As Larvatus Prodeo notes, even the enormous cost blowouts we associate with nuclear power are not dampening enthusiasm in Finland.

The Australian Liberal Party and Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions

2009-01-25T19:05:00.006+10:00

Yesterday Australian Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull gave an interesting speech on climate change policy to the Young Liberals conference. The associated change in policy direction was leaked to the Saturday newspapers, here for example.

Turnbull has been under pressure from the Nationals who are opposed to an emissions trading scheme. As a result we get this:

The Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, will announce a three-pronged policy of greenhouse gas reduction that will impose no direct costs on businesses or homes and require no behavioural change, and aims to eradicate divisions in the Coalition over climate change.

It's astonishing that a serious response to climate change can be advertised as requiring "no behvioural change" but there you go.

The speech itself is interesting, with three major policy proposals.

Our plan captures three gigantic opportunities for CO2 abatement that the Rudd Government has ignored:
· A Green Carbon Initiative - a comprehensive biocarbon strategy ofinvesting in the health of our landscape, restoring soil carbon by reversing over-grazing and excessive tillage, embedding CO2 in biochar (charcoal fertiliser), tree planting, and revegetation;
· Dramatically increasing energy efficiency, especially in buildings;
· Constructing at least two industrial scale carbon capture and storage power stations deploying industrial scale solar energy and geothermal energy and harnessing the energy of the oceans through tidal and wave power.

The Green Carbon Initiative aims to address the issues of terrestrial carbon sequestration discussed in my previous post. Turnbull has been talking to serious people about this and the measures he proposes seem worthwhile. Of course the small matter of the structure of the incentives in the Kyoto protocol and its successors needs to be addressed so that Australia gets full credit for any moves in this direction. It's hard to know how to weigh the contributions of serious thought and political opportunism in this proposal.

As to the second point, increased energy efficiency should be the FIRST priority of policy makers and politicians in response to the twin challenges of climate change and the need for economic stimulus. Here I would fault Turnbull only for inappropriate emphasis.

His third point which mainly emphasizes carbon capture and storage at coal fired power stations needs a serious caveat. CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE IS AN UNPROVEN TECHNOLOGY. On the other hand the various sources of alternative energy generation are already technologically feasible and even economic in the right circumstances. Again the emphasis is all wrong.

Finally the implication that the Rudd Government is not thinking about any of these approaches seems a little unfair!

Nevertheless the politics of climate change and emissions trading in Australia look to be very interesting in the coming year.

Things I've Learnt About Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions

2009-01-25T17:30:00.006+10:00

While on holiday on in Nelson I engaged in some blogging back and forth with Charles Finny at Dear John on the subject of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and Kyoto.

Since then I have been trying to get up to speed on some of the questions we discussed so as to reach a non-holiday, informed, opinion on the issues.

One good resource for information is the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's 2006 report Livestock's Long Shadow. Despite being a product of the dreaded UN, and one that has come in for some political criticism, this seems to me a generally informative and well referenced report. In particular Chapter 3 addresses agriculture's impact on the carbon cycle.

Firstly: we spent some time on arithmetic. Charles wanted to estimate the savings if agricultural methane emissions were discounted under the assumption that every atom of carbon in emitted methane originated from grass that had recently absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. This resulted in a reduction in CO2 equivalent emissions equal to about 10% of agricultural methane emissions.

Whatever the merits of the premise I would argue that this shows that New Zealand policy makers should pay very close attention to the provisions related to agriculture in any Kyoto successor with a view to improvements that could also constitute significant savings to the New Zealand taxpayer. And it goes without saying that more attention could probably have been paid in the negotiation of the original treaty.

Finally on this point I'll just mention that Kyoto apparently regards the CO2 emissions from livestock respiration as being offset by the CO2 absorption of the grass they eat but charges in full for methane emissions from enteric fermentation and the decomposition of dung. This is addressed in section 3.2.2 of the report.

That said, I still don't know what is wrong with the argument that every C atom in CH4 emitted by livestock also originated in CO2 recently absorbed by the grass they ate.

Secondly: this discussion assumed farming was going on in a steady state. The report highlights the fact that land use changes, in particular cutting down forests for agriculture, result in much of the carbon emissions related to agriculture. Deforestation in New Zealand in favour of dairy farming has been a significant source of carbon emissions as we all know.

Thirdly: on a related point we also ignored the fact that farm land, like forests, can be significant carbon sink and the stored carbon can be increased by appropriate farming practices. It's estimated that one quarter of the international response to climate change could involve storing carbon on land (terrestrial carbon sequestration). Of this it seems that about a third could be carbon storage in agricultural land rather than new forests or avoided deforestation. (For information about this you should take a look at the recent Lowy Institute talk by Ralph Ashton, video here and podcast from the Lowy Institute.)

Typically the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture results in the loss of 20 to 50% of the stored organic carbon in the top metre of soil. However there is evidence that at least 50% of this lost carbon storage can be restored by appropriate farming practices. These include agricultural intsensification, conservation tillage and erosion reduction. This is discussed in section 3.5.1 of the FAO report. It seems that Professor Rattan Lal at the University of Ohio is at least one of the world experts on this and those of you with access to a Science subscription may be interested in his review article on soil carbon sequestrtion, global warming and food security.

The hook here is that, unlike sequestration in forests, avoided deforestation and agricultural sequestration are not included in Kyoto. So while they have a positive effect on climate change they do not contribute to a nation's responsibilities under Kyoto. A high level group the Terrestrial Carbon Group, which includes Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery, have a proposal for how to fix this in any Kyoto successor. This proposal is discussed in Ashton's talk.

Surely if the New Zealand government wishes to put flesh on the bones of its statement at Poznan it should be advocating for efforts like this and in particular a fuller accounting of agricultural emissions and carbon storage?

Recent Reading: Where Next?

2008-12-30T00:08:00.005+10:00

The New York Review of Books has had interesting comments on the literary personae of Barack Obama. Colm Toibin compares his autobiographical writings to those of James Baldwin.

It seemed important, as both men set about making their marks on the world, for them to establish before anything else that their stories began when their fathers died and that they set out alone without a father's shadow or a father's permission. James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, published in 1951, begins: "On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died." Baldwin was almost nineteen at the time. Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, begins also with the death of his father: "A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news."

While Zadie Smith in their most recent podcast claims this comparison is obvious and contributes many further interesting comments.

Michael Tomasky reviews one item on Obama's reading list "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" by Larry M. Bartels.

But the importance of these and some other findings in the book—for example, the aggressively negative impact on equality of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts—is that they use scholarly methods to provide political explanations for economic problems. Social scientists don't usually see things this way. To most economists, income levels, like periods of expansion and contraction, must have explanations rooted in the business cycle.

But Bartels now joins Paul Krugman and others—Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson come notably to mind[7] —in the growing number of liberal social scientists who acknowledge the power of the conservative political apparatus aimed at achieving ideological goals such as minimally regulated markets and low taxes for the well-to-do. That such goals could not be justified as socially fair or economically effective did not matter. In his book The Conscience of a Liberal,[8] Krugman announced his conversion to the view that political decisions by Republicans, not the vagaries of the economic cycle, were the cause of inequality, and he pressed the need for a major political challenge to the conservative forces responsible. Now, writes Bartels, "the most important lesson of this book is a very simple one: politics matters."

Agriculture and Kyoto

2008-12-29T23:15:00.002+10:00

Most scientists would argue that the Kyoto agreements have many serious deficiencies but are the only framework we have for international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and minimize the risk of catastrophic, or just very damaging, climate change.

From New Zealand's point of view the most serious questions about Kyoto and its successor agreements relate to the impact of agriculture on greenhouse gas emission.

Readers of this blog, if there are still any, might like to take a look at my discussion about some aspects of this with Charles Finny over at Dear John.

Can I Just Say?

2008-12-29T22:26:00.007+10:00

Bad news as always from the Middle East, take a look at the Washington Note, and commentary by Michael Oren in the New Republic.

If I say that this New Year's I willl try to be mindful of the people of Burma, Darfur and Congo as well as Palestine, you will know that I regard much of the reaction to the tragic events in Gaza as, yes, disproportionate. I remain more than a little queasy about those of us on the left that rail against "the Zionists" avoiding mention of that well-known UN member "Israel".

Yes, my attitudes to Israel are based on personal factors, "tribal" if you like; those factors include my friendship with residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and with many American Jews, the fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where gays and lesbians can live together in safety with their relationships properly recognised by the state, the fact that Israel is a secular liberal democracy.

Be that as it may.

Again, take a look at Daniel Levy's account of where things are going wrong.

Update: And Mustafa Barghouthi also at the Washington Note.

Political Emissions

2008-12-22T10:44:00.005+10:00

The soft Australian target of a 5% reduction of year 2000 emissions by 2020 has been received with dismay in many quarters. The various corporate hand-outs for "trade exposed emissions intensive industries" along with various offsets for the consumer that look like yet more middle class welfare, also seem pretty unappealing to me. The whole point is supposed to be to create economic incentives to reduce emissions and achieve increases in growth while reducing carbon dioxide emissions per dollar of GDP. This scheme looks to be minimizing those incentives at every turn.

I don't agree with everything there but Anna Rose has a good summary in New Matilda. There have been dramatic shifts since the Green paper, for example

It's worth noting that LNG companies like Woodside and Santos are huge winners from the scheme, as they had been excluded from receiving assistance in the Government's Green paper in July. Now, they'll receive 60 per cent of their permits for free, despite being well positioned to make windfall gains from emissions trading since LNG is a less polluting fuel than coal and oil.

Writing in the Australian Financial Review, John Quiggin, takes issue with the Garnaut/Rudd-Labor argument for low per-centage but high per-capita emissions reductions. The AFR has some pernicious new trick though that stops me cutting and pasting the most apposite part. Shame!

Where next? First in an occasional series.

2008-12-13T16:40:00.002+10:00

The global financial and economic crisis is only one of the developments that make 2008 appear to be a bit of a watershed. There's clearly a lot of thinking internationally about this new era and I'm just going to link to some of it.

In the realm of ideas, things are up for grabs in a way they haven’t been for several decades now. That is what makes the present both an anxious and an exhilarating time.

That from Francis Fukuyama, courtesy of The Washington Note.

Fukuyama is among those who see a possible end to the Reagan era in US politics. Specifically on financial deregulation, tax cuts and foreign policy. The first two aspects might be relevant to other countries.

There are three core Reaganite ideas that need to be reformulated or discarded altogether if the United States is to navigate the current crisis and restore its credibility in the new era. The first has to do with deregulation and the role of the government in the economy more broadly. The Wall Street collapse and the big recession we are heading into occurred for reasons intrinsic to the Reagan model, that is, because the government had permitted the emergence of an enormous, wholly unregulated shadow finance sector under the belief that this sector would be self-correcting. Financial market liberalization had proven highly dangerous in any number of earlier cases, most notably the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 and the Swedish banking collapse of the early 1990s, but these warning signs were not heeded and no one imagined that this could happen to the United States itself. In this the Democrats were fully complicit, not just in their support for loan expansion by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but in Clinton Treasury Secretaries who pushed financial market liberalization on the developing world. The current crisis of course has many other causes, such as the more than $5 trillion of excess savings pouring into the country from China and other Asian countries after 2002, but the idea that history was on the side of ever-expanding deregulation was ultimately an important cause of the collapse. The Reagan-era joke, “Hi, I’m from the government and I want to help” doesn’t sound so ironic in light of the Fed and Treasury’s heroic efforts to keep the economy from walking further off a cliff.

The trick in redefining the model is not to overdo it on the regulatory side. The financial sector is very different from other parts of the economy because failure there imposes enormous spillover costs on everyone else, and is why Congress ended up having to vote for the $700 billion bank bailout in September. Labor market deregulation, by contrast, has had very beneficial effects in driving down unemployment rates and permitting much more rapid adjustment to changing conditions. American income distribution has gotten excessively skewed towards the wealthy, but we don’t want to fix that problem by returning to a trade union dominated labor market.

The second big Reaganite idea that needs to be rethought concerns taxes and spending—i.e., fiscal policy. Reagan introduced the notion that tax cuts would be self-financing because all taxes smothered growth; he was also responsible for promoting the idea that virtually all new government spending outside of defense would necessarily be wasteful. While there is some rate of taxation for which this is true, the actual tax cuts enacted both in the 1980s and in the early 21st century have simply served to deepen fiscal deficits and further skew income distribution to the wealthy. The impact of these deficits was for many years masked, however, by the fact that foreigners were wanted to hold their ever-mounting reserves in dollars, a phenomenon that put off the final reckoning but ensured that the fiscal crisis would be much more severe when it finally arrived.

This attitude towards taxes and spending has rendered the American political system incapable of confronting, first, the huge looming entitlement crisis over social security and Medicare, and second, energy. The single best thing we could have done for ourselves in the past generation was to impose a stiff carbon tax in periods when energy prices were relatively low; it was also something that no politician had the courage to take on. No one is going to be talking about increasing taxes until we are out from under the current recession, but in the long run Americans will have to learn to pay their own way.

Secondly, take a look at Ian Macfarlane's lecture to the Lowy Institute last week. Macfarlane was for a decade the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia. He reviewed the financial crisis and its effect on Australia before discussing possible regulatory developments.

When it is time to rebuild the regulatory system, I have no doubt that it will have to be more all-encompassing than formerly, but I don't see any likelihood of us returning to the old price-control type system that we had 30 years ago. To me the major challenges will be to:

- rein in what is left of the "shadow banking system";
- be able to measure the aggregate gearing ratio of the financial system and use this as a guide to policy;
- incorporate the risks arising from the reward structure of management into the regulatory framework;
- do something to address the inherent pro-cyclicality of conventional risk management frameworks and systems of bank supervision;
- resist the calls for self-regulation. As one astute commentator observed -- "self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance";
- bring some of the derivative instruments, particularly credit default swaps back onto an exchange so we can at least measrue their extent and the risks embedded in them, as well as reduce counterparty risk.

Australasian Contributions to International Climate Change Negotiations

2008-12-13T16:07:00.004+10:00

While we await Kevin Rudd's statement on the Australian Government's carbon emission targets on Monday, much attention has turned to the international negotiations on future climate change agreements.

Ross Garnaut wrote a very useful op-ed in the Australian this week. He notes that these negotiations will be much more difficult than either trade or arms control agreements, and proposes some warning signs for difficulties in such talks.

If you hear negotiators from the respective countries arguing that Australia needs high per capita entitlements because it is big and lightly populated, or Canada because it is cold, or Japan because it has few opportunities for geo-sequestration of emissions from fossil fuel combustion, or China because it is the workshop of the world, you will know that the world has lost the battle to avoid dangerous climate change.

It's a cheap shot but I can't resist pointing out that some of New Zealand's statement in Poznan sounds exactly like this

New Zealand is unique among Annex 1 countries. With nearly 50% of our total emissions coming from agriculture, no other developed country comes close to having such a large percentage of its emissions arising from food production.

(Hat-tip: Charles Finny)

Given the ACT party's clutch on climate change policty, some aspects of the New Zealand statement were reassuring. But would Rodney Hide agree with this?

As a consequence we are reviewing our suite of climate change policies. The objective here is not to step back from Kyoto. The Government fully understands and accepts its long-standing international obligations under Kyoto for the first commitment period.

Prior to the election Hide stated his preference for leaving Kyoto.

In any case, Garnaut has become convinced that the eventual target for international negotiations must be equal per capita emmissions from all nations, and that progress should be measured in terms of per capita emissions reductions rather than reductions of particular nations or groups of nations from benchmarks in 1990 for example. This seems pretty sensible to me.

I was happy to see the mention of research on agricultural emissions mitigation in New Zealand's statement, and the emphasis on forms of agreement that will be satisfactory for developing nations. These aspects are very consistent with Garnaut's thinking about ways in which developed countries can contribute initially.

My work on The Garnaut Climate Change Review (Cambridge University Press, 2008) has led me to the view that any allocation of emissions entitlements with a prospect of being accepted by most developing countries must be based on convergence towards low levels of per capita entitlements at some time in the future. There will need to be headroom for rapidly growing developing countries. Through a transition period, the commitments of lower-income developing countries would be one-sided, with compliance encouraged through incentives rather than penalties.

The agreement over emissions entitlements would need to include developed country commitments to public support for research, development and commercialisation of low-emissions technologies. The agreement could embody firm commitments by developed countries to cover additional development assistance for complying developing countries to adapt to the climate change that will inevitably be faced in the period ahead. It could be supported by a proposal for World Trade Organisation rules to constrain individual countries' measures to restrict trade with countries that are not reasonably complying with the requirements of an international mitigation effort.

At the centre of the agreement would be an understanding on the allocation across countries of a diminishing total of annual emissions entitlements. These would be allocated on the basis that emissions would converge towards equal per capita entitlements at some time in the future.

The difference between the basis of allocation of emissions entitlements proposed here, and the Kyoto approach of fixed but differentiated reductions, is large. Within principles designed to reduce global emissions through convergence over time towards equal per capita entitlements, a reduction of 10 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020 in Australia would represent a full proportionate contribution to a global effort to hold concentrations of carbon dioxide equivalents to 550 parts per million. It would represent a larger per capita reduction than was required of the US or the European Union. It would represent a larger per capita reduction for Australia than the EU's implementation of its proposed unconditional commitment to reduce emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels.

Chinese economy

2008-12-13T15:56:00.002+10:00

There is increasing concern in Australia over the health of the Chinese economy and the impact this will have here. The collapse in commodity prices seems to suggest rough times ahead in Australia.

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens this week suggested that the striking economic fact of the past few months was not the expected downturn in the US. It was that "China's economy has slowed much more quickly than anyone had forecast".

China reports many of its key indicators in ways that obscure what has actually happened most recently. Stevens said the Reserve Bank's analysis indicated that Chinese industrial production went backwards over the four months to October. He was "not sure that many economic forecasters have fully appreciated this yet". "There is every chance that the rate of growth of China's (gross domestic product) is currently noticeably below the 8 per cent pace that is embodied in various forecasts for 2009," he said.

Stevens did not spell out what "noticeably below" meant but the word is that this could be as low as 4 per cent. That's a very big deal for a mega-economy that, until only months ago, was supposed to be marching ahead at a double-digit pace but which already had been clubbed by a home-grown property bust.

Select committee terms of reference

2008-12-11T14:49:00.006+10:00

It seems that since the order paper was published earlier in the week the following clause has been added to the terms of reference for the climate change select committee

identify the central/benchmark projections which are being used as the motivation for international agreements to combat climate change; and consider the uncertainties and risks surrounding those projections

Good on you Rodney! And a great performance on Morning Report this morning, arguing as usual that there is no rational evidence for human impacts on global temperature.

Some would call this arse-backwards when many years of scientific observations and modelling have led the world's climate scientists to exactly the opposite conclusion. But as we all know the entire scientific community has been captured by an unthinking infatuation with Al Gore who invented the idea of climate change (along with the internet) while conspiring at the UN to institute a world socialist government back in the Clinton Administration.

Seriously, this clause is much better than the original one in the confidence and supply agreement. It should be possible to get reputable scientists and economists to greatly enlighten the committee about the observations and projections that form the basis of international concern on this issue. It is also true that there are uncertainties and risks in our current knowledge. Many of these are on the "down-side" as John Key would say.

The previous demand for opposing views on the science was merely an invitation for poorly credentialed cranks to waste the select committee's time.

Great News on Climate Change and Energy

2008-12-11T14:34:00.003+10:00

President-Elect Obama is set to appoint Nobel Prize winning physicist Secretary of Energy.

For those of us in the science community wondering how to communicate the urgency of the situation to politicians and the wider community this seems to indicate that scientists who dedicate themselves to working on this issue can have an impact.

I hope it is also a sign that the Obama administration will be able to make some progress, despite the global financial and economic crisis.

Chu used to work in my field of atomic, molecular and optical physics before shifting to the top job at Lawrence Berkeley Labs to work on alternative energy sources several years ago. Some of Professor Chu's thoughts on climate change can be found here.

Kirk to return to NZ?

2008-12-09T18:00:00.004+10:00

David Kirk has lost his job as Fairfax CEO. The troubled company looks set to appoint his deputy in his place. The Australian speculates that Kirk may wish to return to NZ politics.

There is growing speculation he will pursue a career in New Zealand politics. The National Party, led by his friend John Key, last month won power after a long period in the wilderness.

Reviewing the Science of Climate Change.

2008-12-09T17:48:00.002+10:00

This is just to reassure Rodney Hide that while the select committee on climate change will not be reviewing the science of climate change, scientists will continue to.

I spent last week at the Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Adelaide. There were several great plenaries. One of them by Professor Marvin Geller of Stony Brook University in New York reviewed the effect of variations in solar intensity on the earth's average temperature. He told us that this effect is not large enough to explain observed warming. The Australian (which often runs infuriating articles on this issue) reported on this and I particularly liked this little comment from Geller

According to Professor Geller, sceptics are incorrect when they claim CO2 cannot cause warming as it comprises only a small, though increasing, fraction of the atmosphere.

In fact, CO2 is highly reactive in the atmosphere, he said. "Just because it's a small fraction doesn't mean it's unimportant. If you don't believe me, try surviving in a room with a small concentration of cyanide gas."

ACT in Government: Wasting your taxpayer dollar

2008-11-27T19:09:00.005+10:00

Lets be clear. The Select Committee review of emmissions trading is a waste of money and a broken election promise on the part of National.

National was quite emphatic before the election that the ETS would not be repealed, that emissions trading would go ahead, and certainly that "the scientific aspects of climate change" were no longer up for discussion by New Zealand politicians.

We appear to be back to square one, at least if the select committee Terms of Reference in the confidence and supply agreement are final, or if Murial Newman gets her way. Here she is in the NBR spouting the "warming stopped in '98" canard and calling for a select committee review "of the science". As if scientists were not continually engaged in reviewing the scientific aspects of climate change!

It's breathtaking that ACT want to hear "competing views on the scientific aspects of climate change from internationally respected sources" when pretty much every scientific association in the world, including our own Royal Society of New Zealand, has carried out a careful review of the science and concluded that anthropogenic global warming is real.

I challenge ACT to find an internationally respected source to disagree. (And no, Thatcher-era UK cabinet ministers don't count. I'm interested in a scientifically respected source.)

In any case everyone is in agreement on this point so write a letter to John Key already.

My Election Theories

2008-11-13T12:35:00.005+10:00

The Labour party will be dismayed at how few electorates still have a list vote lead for Labour. An alarming number of Labour-held electorates had National ahead on the party vote. This includes not only New Lynn but also Mt Roskill. In almost all Labour-held seats the MP is more popular than the party.

Since it is the home town, lets look at the Christchurch list votes. Increasingly rural Waimakariri looks like a safe National seat. There was just enough personal vote for Clayton Cosgrove for him to barely hold it. Christchurch Central was a very narrow win for Labour on both MP and list vote so you should think of that as a marginal(!) Labour seat. Port Hills looks marginal National and Wigram(!) looks to be only marginal for Labour. Only Christchurch East still looks like a pretty comfortable Labour seat. That's not the electoral map that I grew up with to say the least.

Oh and I almost forgot Ilam is still a National safe seat.

We were told by Mike Williams on election night that the get out the vote efforts developed in South Auckland last election were implemented nation wide this election.

Indeed I myself was prevailed upon to go door to door encouraging people to vote in Mana and there were certainly many Labour people out on the streets of Wellington Central getting out the vote. Based on experiences in Porirua I can only agree with the Labour leadership, many heartland Labour voters are still remarkably positive about the party.

Clearly though the get out the vote efforts were not as successful as might have been hoped, particularly in Auckland but in other centers also.

Here's my working theory.

There is a difference between knowing in principle how to organise the party vote, and having enough enthusiastic volunteers to execute.

Were Labour party operatives really working that hard on Saturday?

A question for an investigative journalist?

Iran and the Solomons

2008-11-13T12:32:00.002+10:00

It seems like it's not just China, Taiwan and Japan practising checquebook diplomacy in our back yard Lowy Interpreter

Tehran and Honiara have little in common, but as Taiwan found out a long time ago, the Solomon Islands’ vote in the UN General Assembly is worth as much as that of the US. Hence the interest Iran has started to show in the welfare of Solomon Islanders. The two countries recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding, which may eventually lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations.

Key's first mistake

2008-11-08T23:04:00.007+10:00

Last election I was appalled by the sight of Don Brash's grinning face surrounded by a posse of Diplomatic Protection Squad members as he entered the National party function to make his concession speech. I'm amazed that we saw a rerun of this disastrous image tonight. It spoke volumes at the last election that we saw Helen Clark's protection staff only in so far as they were required to help her parents into a car, and in tonight's efforts to protect Clark the DPS was similarly circumspect.

This is not an easy issue. I have heard that those who were charged with protecting Clark sometimes felt that she asked them to stand off at considerable risk to her person. They did not see this just as a risk to her but also as a risk to them and their reputations.

However, I don't believe that the New Zealand public wants to see its Prime Minister designate separated from the press or from the party faithful by the kind of linked arm squadron we saw tonight. This is an appalling look for the leader of any democratic country and should not be countenanced by the Prime Minister designate of New Zealand. Key should get up the courage to a put a stop to this sort of image.

I wonder whether the choice of venue has contributed to this situation. National Party organisers should select election night venues with a view to allowing the DPS to protect its leader while keeping out sight of the TV cameras.

A Vote for Generational Change

2008-11-05T23:06:00.005+10:00

For various reasons I've been thinking this year about the messiness and necessity of generational change. I think I might finally be beginning to understand all those Greek myths where the son kills the father.

For the moment at least, I am planning to cast my electorate vote this year against my sitting MP. This means voting for a young, allegedly liberal, woman from the National party. It's not an easy decision and I may yet change my mind.

The Labour party is still my political home and I'm giving them my party vote trusting that in six years time everyone who sat around a Cabinet table or in a Labour party caucus room in the 80's will have retired and we will be electing a talented and enthusiastic new Labour-led Government.

In the meantime social democrats should be contemplating the extraordinary testimony of Alan Greenspan.

We will agree with John Quiggin on this point

Coming to substance, quite a few people have argued that the crisis doesn’t really signify very much, and that, once it is resolved, things will return to pretty much the way they were a couple of years ago. I disagree.

This concession of error by Alan Greenspan is, I think, pretty strong evidence against the view that the crisis is not so significant, in policy or ideological terms.

We'll also agree that news of the "great moderation" was premature.

As taxpayers we will want a say in the running of banks or other private businesses that we underwrite or take shares in.

In contemplating the future it seems to me that like many Australians, including the current Treasurer, we should be thinking about Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley in these times of financial crisis. (There is a new documentary on his fascinating life to show on the ABC.)

Chifley took over from wartime Labor Prime Minister Curtin who is credited with forming the Australia-US alliance and who died in office. He lost power in the early fifties after trying to to nationalize the banks, after sending in the army to break up a mining strike and after failing to totally overcome Communist influence in the Australian union movement and Labor party. I've been learning about him from Bob Ellis's book "Goodbye Jerusalem".

Near the end of his life Chifley said

I remember when in the thirties because of the banks hundreds of thousands of breadwinners were thrown on a pitiful dole. Farmers were sold up and shopkeepers closed their doors, and insecurity, misery and want were forced upon our people. We are determined with all the power that we command that that shall not happen again.

"A new dawn of American leadership is at hand"

2008-11-05T22:57:00.005+10:00

I spent the day with a score of physicists trying to get work done while they scanned their Blackberries for the latest vote counts. Having gotten home and watched Obama's speech my relief has been replaced by excitement.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

My friends on the left, particularly in New Zealand, have a sometimes deserved reputation for anti-Americanism. At the end of four years living in the United States I was an enthusiastic combatant for the contrary view in any and all private discussions but I finally shut my mouth after the first photos from Abu Ghraib. From tonight I'm back on the team.

Will the Greens never learn?

2008-10-22T18:05:00.005+10:00

A prominent feature of recent Australian politics has been the growing influence of the Green party in inner city electorates. Particularly in state elections where tired and unpopular Labor governments are opposed by state Liberal parties that, particularly in NSW, are a shambles populated by the barking mad.

At the weekend the Greens got the balance of power in the ACT.

Why is the Green party not doing better in inner city electorates in New Zealand?

Because they continually display the political nous that led them to declare prior to the election that they would not support the National party in Government. This despite the fact that an exactly similar declaration saw them kept out of the Cabinet after the last election. Russel Norman sometimes seems to understand the issue.

"Labour taught us a good lesson: you can't trust Labour to do anything except look after themselves, and I think National's the same. So you have to be tough."

Then they go and walk into the same old trap a second time. Twice seems like carelessness.

The Greens desperately need electorate seats so that they don't continue to rely on the 5% margin to get them into Parliament. These seats could well be one of the three with "Central" after its name but the Greens would have to break some eggs to get them.

However they persist in 'campaigning for the party vote' at least in Christchurch Central (where my parents live) and Auckland Central (where I have to decide who to vote for). I couldn't name the Green candidate in either electorate.

In both seats if they stood a warm body with a good list place and a long term committment to the electorate and campaigned agressively for the electorate vote they would attract significant support. This could damage relations with Labour in the short term, but as I have noted the Greens should have punished Labour for last election's shenanigans and this seems to be one way they could have made the point. Better still with effective challengers from National standing in both seats it might possibly have had the effect of giving the seats to the Nats.

This would be ideal for the Greens since these seats will never be safe for the right of politics and a warm Green body with the advantage of list incumbency and growing urban support would maximize the possibility of eventually winning the seat.

I can't resist pointing out that this was a particularly good year to initiate this strategy in Christchurch Central. The popular Labour MP has retired and Labour has seen fit to nominate in his place a spin doctor who has never previously lived in the city. I can assure you that Christchurch people very much dislike having to vote for these Labour carpet-baggers. (I was naive enough to believe that MMP had put a stop to the practice.) Moreover in last year's local body elections Green candidates unseated several Labour incumbents representing central parts of Christchurch on the regional council. They did this by running against Labour-led council and Government support for an enormous irrigation project on the Canterbury plains. This shows that local environmental issues could be big winners for the Greens, and the issue could have been revived for the general election by an enthusiastic campaigner.

The Green party of New Zealand is asleep at the wheel.

Just as well the anti-science Greens are one of my least favourite parties in the New Zealand Parliament. A genuinely Green, genuinely political, Green party would however be an asset.

Small town activism

2008-10-22T17:33:00.004+10:00

I lived in South Pasadena for a couple of years. Despite being in the middle of the conurbation that is Los Angeles, it's a beautiful little enclave of California bungalows and tree-lined streets. There's a great little coffee shop next to the park in the middle of town where you can overhear students discussing their projects and scriptwriters their scripts. You can buy the best Baja fish tacos at Senor Fish and get your groceries at the original Trader Joes. It's the kind of place where people still take little kids trick or treating and the whole community lines up to cheer the fire department at the 4th of July parade before heading to the fireworks in the evening.

It's probably not the kind of small town Sarah Palin thinks of as breeding good people but it's a wonderful small town all the same. It's great to see some in South Pasadena getting behind the effort to defeat Proposition No 8 which would overturn the California Supreme Court's decision that same sex marriages are legal in that state. Their ad which features many gay and lesbian families and marriage ceremonies has appealed to many who are dissappointed with the oblique approach of the main "No on 8" campaign.

Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan

A question for our politicians as they stand for re-election. Is it still the policy of New Zealand to recognise marriages performed in other jurisdictions?

Say what?

2008-10-22T17:25:00.002+10:00

A colleague passed through the Qantas lounge in Auckland at the weekend and brought back a copy of the Sunday Star Times.

I find that they have started a "Wise Heads" column alternating Doug Graham and Margaret Pope.

Good for Doug Graham, I nearly voted for him as President! This week he called for an independent anti-corruption authority. A wise and timely idea.

But Margaret Pope?

Trans-Tasman contrasts in response to financial crisis

2008-10-22T17:11:00.004+10:00

The Australian government dedicated half its surplus or $10.4 billion dollars to a stimulus package. The money goes out before Christmas to those most likely to spend it; pensioners and their carers, low income families and first home buyers ($14,000 from the State when you buy a house! That's twice the Howard government level.)

This was done without any detailed Treasury modelling because both officials and politicians were of the opinion that immediate action was needed. In particular it appears that Australian and international experts are not very confident of the continued health of the Chinese economy which is the main driver of growth in resource rich Australia.

The economy is still dominating the front pages and Rudd has announced the goal of avoiding recession and developing regulations in response to the crisis that will be a model for international developments. This is consistent with his extraordinary ambition to be seen as a player on the world stage.

I suppose that it is no surprise, given the Election season, that by contrast the front page news on the New Zealand Herald website at the moment is that Lockwood Smith has been known to make a dick of himself. Who knew?

Cullen will be happy to find that fishhooks in the detail of the Government's bank guarantee were big news in Australia this morning. So Australian moves are not without percieved missteps.

Meanwhile the outcome of the NZ election is not a topic of great interest.

US Presidential Race

2008-10-12T11:56:00.003+10:00

McCain's campaign is currently in tatters, that never seems to last long though!

Last weekend he allowed his campaign operatives to make the extraordinary statement, to the Washington Post I believe, that they wished to "turn the page" on the financial crisis and move to attack Obama's judgement and character. They let all and sundry know that they would raise the Ayers issue, possibly even in the debate Tuesday. Reviews, even from conservative commentators like Peggy Noonan on Meet the Press, were very negative and polls have continued to move in Obama's direction.

Sure enough Ayers was not mentioned Tuesday and everyone agrees that Obama came off best. McCain-Palin events are whipping up quite nasty rhetoric from the more redneck element though, which is again creating concern among commentators like George Packer, for example. This has led McCain to once again dial back the rhetoric and another outbreak of playing nice.

On the other side I think we saw a trademark Chicago shove from Obama. (This whole "Bambi" thing was always a fiction. The reason to like Obama is that he is very considered and also tough, I hope his more dewy eyed supporters are not too disilluisioned, they should definitely reader the Lizza profile in the New Yorker as well as the earlier one.) After McCain announced his intention to increase the negative attacks we saw Obama release a 15 minute account of the Keating Five scandal on the web.

Last weekend also saw (with suspiciously apt timing) the release of an extraordinary polemic against McCain in Rolling Stone. It'll take a while for you to get your jaw back up off the floor after you read it.

Some good quotes: this one from a fellow prisoner of war in Vietnam (and I am leaving out the best bit)

Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

And in honour of local corruption hawks this one:

There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain's crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain's committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company's proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: "Appearance of corruption, anyone?"

But really read the whole thing.

Oh and the NYT has finally noticed Obama's extraordinary ground operation.

Preparing for worse if that's possible

2008-10-12T11:31:00.008+10:00

The response to the G7 communique and Paulson's subsequent press conference seems to be very negative. Many commenters hoped that the G7 would move to a British style scheme of partial nationalisation of the banks. Paulson's press conference suggested he is moving ahead with that but is still looking for private capital to assist also and the G7 communique is very vague. (The authority to buy equity in the banks was not in the original rescue package put forward to congress but clearer heads prevailed and it now seems that the bailout package will look very different.

It's really not reassuring when Paul Krugman says "Paulson sounds terrified" and others comment that he is loosing all credibility. But given that he has downplayed the crisis at every turn for the last 18 months this is perhaps not surprising.

Lets hope that Morgan Stanley does survive the weekend.

Australian Response to Financial Crisis

2008-10-12T10:58:00.004+10:00

Treasurer Wayne Swan is in Washington and New York this weekend, attending the G20 meeting and lobbying bigwigs. I've just listened to his interview with Barry Cassidy on Insiders, and I don't think you could really describe him as calm and collected. It seems that there is no government program that will not be reconsidered in light of the financial crisis.

Back in Canberra the Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has announced that the finance subcommittee of the Cabinet will meet later today.

What are New Zealand's alleged leaders doing this weekend?

THE government's cabinet budget committee will meet later today to take any action deemed necessary from key meetings of the International Monetary Fund and Group of 20 finance ministers in New York today.

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said there was a growing realisation that the international financial crisis was worse than originally thought.

Update: Account of Clark's campaign opening speech just up, she does at least announce a deposit guarantee scheme.

How are New Zealand's banks really doing?

2008-10-12T10:36:00.007+10:00

We were told on Morning Report Friday morning that the Reserve Bank believes that New Zealand banks have $60 billion of overseas debt to turn over in the next 40 days. I've listened to that several times to be sure that is really what was said.

That figure appears to be nearly half of New Zealand's GDP.

My limited understanding of the situation at the moment is that internationally banks are simply not lending money to other banks.

Worse still other nations are moving to guarantee or buy stock in their banks. Australia seems likely to increase its guarantees on its banks (which admittedly own ours) in the next few days.

We're told that the Reserve Bank has moved to allow banks to borrow from it secured by the value of mortgages. However I can't help noticing that the total value of New Zealand houses is about $2.11 billion, so there better be some hefty mortgages on commercial property out there if that's really going to solve the problem.

Could someone, preferably the boss of a bank and the leader of a major party, say something reassuring but convincing about the position of New Zealand's banks?

Finally, if you were Jim Anderton and you'd set up a government owned bank that doesn't borrow overseas you would have to be pretty happy with yourself.

Update: Clark has just announced a deposit guarantee scheme.

The Dilemma of Attribution

2008-10-08T18:44:00.006+10:00

It's been a great decade for Nobel Prizes in theoretical physics. In 1999 it was awarded to 't Hooft and Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics", in 2003 to Abrikosov Ginzburg and Leggett "for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids", to Gross, Wilczek and Politzer in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction", and in 2005 to Roy Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence" (that contribution amounts to creating, out of the pretty much the whole cloth, my field of theoretical quantum optics and proceeding to do a frightening amount of the interesting work in it).

This year's prize is more cause for excitement since it goes to three more theorists: Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

All of these well-deserved prizes recognise wonderful advances in our knowledge. Theoretical physics is an activity undertaken by a relatively small community of researchers and it's in the nature of ideas that often a large number of people have made significant contributions to any major development. When it comes time to award the prize only three names can be up in the bright lights. Those of us who have read enough physics texts to recognise the terms "Nambu-Goldstone boson" and "Cabbibo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix" might wish that there were a better way to reward the great ones among us and achieve for them appropriate public recognition.

It's probably fair to guess that David Politzer's Nobel Address got his co-recipients offside from the first paragraph. It does, however, provide a fascinating if bleak assessment of how science really gets done and the challenges facing those who decide on who gets and who does not get a Nobel Prize.

Keep Physicists Off Wall Street

2008-10-08T18:36:00.003+10:00

I've long been of the opinion that overly complicated and insufficiently commonsensical analysis of risk by theoretical physics and mathematics Ph.D's may have played an unfortunate part in the creation of the incredibly complicated arguments that dressed sub-prime mortgages up as AAA investments and thus contributed to the current parlous state of international credit markets.

Dave Bacon seems to agree and has a great idea to avoid this state of affairs in future; increase science funding to keep theoretical physicists away from money markets!

The State of the Free Market

2008-10-02T22:09:00.004+10:00

Could I second the Hive's plea that we all take the US financial crisis more seriously?

I can't resist arguing the cause of social democracy though. John Quiggin here in Brisbane has a great trade for those who argue that the current difficulty is not some failure of "the free market" on account of the US not being a free market. I'll have to quote it almost in full

I will agree that
(a) the US is not a free-market economy, and its failures do not constitute evidence against the claim that a pure free-market economy is the best possible form of social organization
(b) no other actually existing society is, or has ever been, a free-market economy, and no actual or conceivable events anywhere constitute evidence against the claim that a pure free-market economy is the best possible form of social organization
(c) In discussion with parties to the agreement, I will not contest the claim that a pure free-market economy is the best possible form of social organization

All I ask in return is that the counterparties to the deal agree not to advocate, oppose, criticise, or comment on any policy or political position that might actually be implemented, to ensure that the purity of the free-market ideal is not compromised by actual experience.

John is also willing to make the same offer to Marxist-Leninists for pretty obvious reasons.

He also thinks we might have seen the back of neoliberalism, I'd post a link including his assessment of the New Zealand situation but his site seems to have crashed just at the moment.

The Dark Side

2008-10-02T22:00:00.003+10:00

TPMCafe is discussing Jane Mayer's book the Dark Side currently (both Christopher Hitchens and Slate's Emily Bazelon are part of the group). If you are interested in the Bush administration's use of torture you should read the book, not just the New Yorker articles.

In the discussion Mayer asks about the possibility of war crimes prosecutions in the next administration. Since such prosecutions are unlikely she also asks what effect this precedent will have both on future US administrations and the international standing of the US.

Mayer succinctly outlines the facts on which such a case would be based

In secret dungeons, U.S.-held prisoners were waterboarded, stripped naked, kept chained and near frozen, bombarded with unbearable sounds, deprived of daylight, kept isolated from human contact for months, fed barely enough to live on, beaten, confined in dog cages, and deliberately mistreated in other carefully-regulated ways under a policy set in place by the highest-ranking officials of our country. An unknown number died. A larger unknown number simply disappeared. We know that the Red Cross -- an independent non-partisan organization - warned the President and other top officials that at least fourteen of the individuals currently held in Guantanamo -- people who the Red Cross was able to interview -- were tortured. Not maybe. Definitely. The Red Cross also warned the President that he and others in his administration were in danger of being held liable for war crimes

We know an increasing amount about the intelligence community's division on this issue. Scott Horton has some very interesting comments on the state of affairs at the CIA.

In my mind, Jane is asking the most important question--the accountability question. I also have had a run-in with a senior CIA official who described to me in some detail being briefed on the new policies. "I decided that afternoon that I was taking an early retirement," he told me. He went on to note that "it seems quite a few people took early retirement after getting that briefing." He also told me his thinking was simple: "It's not that this was bad policy. It was a crime. Black and white." It's clear that these moves were very controversial within the intelligence service. Although the pushback in the military is now very well documented, the pushback at CIA remains anecdotal. It will come in time, I think.

US Senate passes Indian nuclear deal; where next for nuclear non-proliferation?

2008-10-02T21:34:00.006+10:00

The NYT made one last desperate case against it but the Senate was unusually busy today, and passed the US-India nuclear agreement that got through the Nuclear Supplier's Group with New Zealand's reluctant support.

At the moment this move by New Zealand looks like a very good tactical retreat. Firstly we have the move by the US to sign a free trade agreement with the P4 nations. Secondly there may be secret side agreements in Vienna that would make us happier, or maybe not. Thirdly US lawmakers seem to be clear that a nuclear weapons test by India would end the US supply of uranium (but can the same be said for France and Russia?

In private correspondence with Congress that was made public last month, the administration said the United States would terminate nuclear trade with India if it conducted another nuclear test. But the administration refused to add such terms to the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver, and an amendment to the bill that would have made them explicit failed to pass last night. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that the amendment was not necessary because U.S. laws made it clear that the deal was off if India tested again.

"There should be no doubt" because of the floor debate, Kimball said. "There will be practical consequences if India tests."

Both presidential candidates are in favour of the deal.

But the agreement had the strong support of both presidential candidates, helping grease the way to victory. The House approved the bill Saturday, 298 to 117.

Just to throw the cat among the pigeons. If India is to become part of the "mainstream" of civilian nuclear trade then it seems only fair that so should Israel.
(While we are at it Israeli "nuclear opacity" may have run its course.)

Given the current parlous situation, good luck to Kevin Rudd's efforts to reinvigorate international non-proliferation efforts I say and lets hope Gareth Evans is serious about his efforts to bring India, Israel and Pakistan under some form of restraint.

Australia's former foreign minister, Gareth Evans, will co-chair the event with Yoriko Kawaguchi, an ex-foreign minister in Japan, the government said. Senior Indian diplomat Brajesh Mishra and Pakistan's ex-army chief Jehangir Karamat are to be among the delegates.

Evans has recently said all nuclear powers _ including those who have refused to join the nonproliferation treaty such as India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel _ must be included in the new process if the world is to ever achieve disarmament.

Shock: Global Warming Still Happening!

2008-09-25T19:01:00.010+10:00

Poneke is the local advocate for the view that global warming stopped in 1998. This canard is related to the fact that 1998 was just a shockingly hot year, the hottest on record.

It is true that warming in the last decade is slower than in the previous
decade due to a dramatic El Nino event in 1998 and La Nina conditions in the last twelve months or so.

However if you get the global average temperature data and fit a line to the last ten years then sure enough it has a positive gradient indicating a warming trend. For what that is worth on such a short timescale.

There is as yet no evidence that the underlying warming trend in global average temperatures has changed.

The Met Office in the UK has just released a press release to go along with this plot of their latest data (their methodology for this data is indeed described in a 2006 peer reviewed article.). (Hat-tip Climate Progress)

Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. The evidence is clear – the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last, natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler.

But once again a picture is worth a thousand words. Here is a plot of global average temperatures (relative the the average temperature during 1961-1990) for the last thirty years or so.

It's really the thirty year trend that you should pay attention to, that is about the shortest period you should be looking at to determine long term trends related to climate rather than weather.

In their discussion of the current La Nina related "low" temperatures, they note

despite this temporary cooling, 2008 is still likely to be the seventh warmest on the global record.

As a result of such fluctuations, global average temperature trends calculated over ten-year periods have varied since the mid-1970s, from a modest cooling to a warming rate of more than 0.3 °C per decade. Similar behaviour is also seen in individual model predictions of future climate change where the long-term warming trend is forecast to exceed 2 °C per century. Even then, due to the natural variations in climate, we expect to see ten-year periods both globally and regionally with little or no warming and other ten-year periods with very rapid warming. This complex behaviour of the climate system shows why we need to examine much longer periods than ten years if we are to fully understand and quantify how the climate is changing.

Retirement Project for Katherine Rich

2008-09-25T18:52:00.004+10:00

Maybe after the election, Katherine, you could write a decent Wikipedia page for Flying Nun? Give your Parliamentary colleagues some inkling of the significance of this Kiwi cultural landmark.

This effort is a pretty poor stub at best.

Better still though, a well informed muso could return Rich's favour and get onto it right away!

Punk Rock Fan Leaves Parliament Her Way

2008-09-25T18:14:00.008+10:00

I might annoy some friends if I gush too much about Katherine Rich's valedictory speech. But here goes.

Rich has been a champion for causes dear to the hearts of social liberals, like civil unions and the repeal of Section 59. She is right to place her politics in a liberal tradition in the National party that includes Marilyn Waring among many others and has been responsible for much social reform in this country.

One of my most satisfying political memories is playing a part in the Section 59 debate, although it was not an easy time.

Some said parenting would become illegal, CYF would steal our children and that good parents would end up in jail.

It hasn't happened. I believe the Bradford law will become another chapter in our gradual move to social enlightenment, alongside other seminal pieces of legislation which brought women's suffrage, homosexual law reform, and the recognition of civil unions.

Initially, I supported Sue's bill because I wanted to close the legal loophole that allowed some parents to batter their children and escape conviction.

By the end of the debate I supported the message that hitting children for any reason was not OK - a turning point was listening to another MP talking of the "loving smack" and merits of using an instrument to beat children.

Secondly she seems to take at least one sideways swipe at her caucus. Her assessment of the state of New Zealand's democracy is clear-eyed but hopeful, I wholeheartedly agree with this

I leave positive about New Zealand, and our parliamentary process.

We live in a robust democracy and one of the least corrupt societies in the world.

We should remember that when the daily small scandals threaten to distract us.

Rich's worst year is also one of her finest moments, and she eloquently put on record her views on forcing those on the DPB back to work for a pittance

Every MP has their annus horribilis and mine would have to be 2005.

Members might recall a slight difference of opinion over a welfare speech.

Demotion clearly wasn't a career highlight, but it was preferable than trying explain why I, a well-paid mother with all the supports in the world, intended telling a DPB mum to leave her baby in child care to net less than half the minimum wage.

There is also this plea to New Zealand's next Prime Minister

I know that under your leadership National will not forget those less fortunate.

It's a great pity that Rich will not be at the Cabinet table to argue their case.

Finally I was struck by the slightly incongruous fact that Rich is a huge Flying Nun fan. I am now officially in love. It's hard to tell on YouTube but I couldn't help thinking that many in the House didn't seem to have heard of Flying Nun. More reason for Rich's plea for the funding of New Zealand music.

They had heard of Sid Vicious though so she got a laugh at the end

Mr Speaker, looking back on many valedictories delivered in this Chamber, I find a popular choice for retiring MPs is to quote Frank Sinatra's My Way.

Well, I can't abide crooning.

I've always preferred the Sid Vicious version.

There is a very nice post on Rich from the other side of politics at Homepaddock. Tony has a brief appreciation here.
The ODT has most of the text of the speech here.

Kiwiblog notes that the liberal wing of the National party is being much depleted at the end of this term. I really hope DPF is right that new admissions to parliament will right this balance.

Science journalism and the methane "time bomb"

2008-09-24T18:48:00.009+10:00

It must really suck to be a science journalist at a high profile international newspaper. It's a genuinely difficult area to get up to speed on but unlike your colleagues covering Britney Spears you have essentially no chance of getting a scoop.

All the big science news and quite a lot of not very big news gets published in the refereed journals Science and Nature. But both of those journals prepare their own media materials and strictly embargo articles published in them. These embargoes are very tightly enforced by the journals, sometimes even to the extent of sending staff to scientific conferences to check that the authors do not spill the beans in advance of publication. Every week you can find out what's big in Science or Nature by reading the press release regurgitated in the NYT or on CNN's web page.

If you want to make a splash as a science journalist though you should get some hapless fool of a scientist to talk to you about their recent work prior to acceptance, prior even to writing a scientific paper. As No Right Turn and Hot Topic have noted, Steve Connor at the Independent has recently pulled this wheeze. (Note the proud billing "exclusive") We are told that frightening amounts methane are being emitted from ground exposed by thawing permafrost.

Unfortunately it is totally impossible to assess the merits of this research without a scientific article. What I can guarantee is that Orjan Gustafsson's scientific colleagues are spitting tacks at this display of science by press release. And yes, we learn that the enterprising science writer at the Guardian has already found one of them to describe Gustafsson's work as "speculation". The wonders of journalistic competition!

These kinds of articles are part of the problem not part of the solution. Science journalists could make themselves more useful but reporting on the settled scientific knowledge about our changing climate and thinking seriously about difficult issues like "false balance" in their reporting.

Arctic Sea Ice

2008-09-24T18:33:00.005+10:00

This year Arctic sea ice has contracted to essentially the same level as last year's dramatic and poorly understood record low. Read about it at Dot Earth but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words:

This picture of the area of floating ice is stolen from the Dot Earth blog and was prepared by William Chapman at the University of Illinois.

Now Poneke describes this as "good news". Call me a pessimist but that may be overstating the case.

Adding Noughts on Climate Change

2008-09-24T17:47:00.008+10:00

When I started writing this blog I thought that I would talk quite a bit about climate change and climate change policy. Partly I was struck at Christmas time when my cousin, who works for a bank in a fairly senior capacity, announced that climate change was just a fraud perpetrated by politicians. Perhaps he was even serious but I was too stunned, and indeed ill-informed, to pursue the topic! In any case, I had the impression that the disparagement of the scientific consensus that human activities are heating the earth, particularly by those on the right of politics, was proving more stubborn in New Zealand than in the US for example. The emissions trading legislation was shaping up as one of the big issues of the year.

I haven't really said much for several reasons. Firstly I don't know enough about economics to get down in the dirty details of emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes. Secondly I am not a climate scientist so I don't have a lot to say about the detailed science. If you want to hear about climate change from climate change scientists read Real Climate and the refereed scientific literature. Thirdly embarking on this issue seems to be a great way to attract cranks and trolls. There is often a tone of barely controlled hysteria on both sides.

So all in all it often seems that there are too many challenges in attempting to communicate effectively on the subject. Instead I've hatched a plan to run a course on the physics of climate and energy. This is probably a better use of my time, and provides an excuse to learn more about the details of the science.

However the Kiwi blogosphere has been replete with discussions of this issue and at some point I just want to get stuck in. I've been trying and failing to write the one perfect blog post about the physics of climate change but I am going to leave that for now and just get stuck in on some recent issues in true reactive blog style.

So henceforth I will be joining the "climate change jihad".

Cloak and Dagger: DIO targets Japan

2008-09-24T17:38:00.004+10:00

I'm a bit of a sucker for real life spy stories. But I missed this interesting report in the Canberra Times on the Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation's targets. They focus on the interest in Japan since Japan is such a close Australian ally. The shock that one would spy on an ally seems pretty naive but adds to the story!

According to briefings seen by The Canberra Times, DIO's Transnational, Scientific and Technical Intelligence branches keep a close watch on Japan's nuclear power industry and civilian space programs.

According to one Defence intelligence analyst, this is more than a watching brief. ''We put quite a lot of effort into the Japanese target,'' he said. ''After all they have lots of nuclear reactors, an advanced space sector and an enormous stockpile of plutonium.

Of course if you write such a story you can expect a bunch of guys in dark glasses to arrive at your house and turn the place upside down.

Short Selling in New Zealand?

2008-09-24T17:09:00.004+10:00

A propos of yesterday's comments on short selling in New Zealand, it appears that neither the Australian newspaper nor the regulatory body ASIC are of the opinion that the practice is insignificant.

In a hurried decision yesterday, ASIC revealed covered shorts could be taken in dual-listed stocks such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, ANZ Bank and Lion Nathan, as the stocks were at risk of being savagely shorted on their secondary exchanges in London and New Zealand.

This is in marked contrast to the points of view on Morning Report Monday. Not my bailiwick this issue, but it must be possible to find the truth one way or the other.

In general the ban on short selling seems to be attracting increasing criticism.

Who has their eye on the ball in New Zealand?

2008-09-23T17:56:00.007+10:00

The Peters censure and the start of the election campaign make it difficult to focus on external events.

But it would be a pretty good bet that the consequences of the financial meltdown in the US will have some impact on the public consciousness in New Zealand before November 8.

It seems that the buy-up of bad mortgages in the US may go ahead in some form, despite being criticized on all sides. The US stockmarket's rush of blood to the head on Friday has faded, the dollar is down and oil prices are way back up.

According to Nouriel Roubini in the Financial Times, who has been right before, the next victims of the crisis will be the hedge funds and then private equity firms.

The next stage will be a run on thousands of highly leveraged hedge funds. After a brief lock-up period, investors in such funds can redeem their investments on a quarterly basis; thus a bank-like run on hedge funds is highly possible. Hundreds of smaller, younger funds that have taken excessive risks with high leverage and are poorly managed may collapse. A massive shake-out of the bloated hedge fund industry is likely in the next two years.

Even private equity firms and their reckless, highly leveraged buy-outs will not be spared. The private equity bubble led to more than $1,000bn of LBOs that should never have occurred. The run on these LBOs is slowed by the existence of “convenant-lite” clauses, which do not include traditional default triggers, and “payment-in-kind toggles”, which allow borrowers to defer cash interest payments and accrue more debt, but these only delay the eventual refinancing crisis and will make uglier the bankruptcy that will follow. Even the largest LBOs, such as GMAC and Chrysler, are now at risk.

But we should all be thinking about the effects on the real economy in the US and elsewhere. Roubini again

The real economic side of this financial crisis will be a severe US recession. Financial contagion, the strong euro, falling US imports, the bursting of European housing bubbles, high oil prices and a hawkish European Central Bank will lead to a recession in the eurozone, the UK and most advanced economies.

European financial institutions are at risk of sharp losses because of the toxic US securitised products sold to them; the massive increase in leverage following aggressive risk-taking and domestic securitisation; a severe liquidity crunch exacerbated by a dollar shortage and a credit crunch; the bursting of domestic housing bubbles; household and corporate defaults in the recession; losses hidden by regulatory forbearance; the exposure of Swedish, Austrian and Italian banks to the Baltic states, Iceland and southern Europe where housing and credit bubbles financed in foreign currency are leading to hard landings.

Thus the financial crisis of the century will also envelop European financial institutions.

By the way, New Zealand did not ban short selling over the weekend, unlike the US, the UK and Australia among many others. We were told by several people on Morning Report Monday that this is because the practice is rather limited in New Zealand. I hope that either that is the case or that the people arguing that the short selling ban is a bad idea are right.

Shared Values and Common Purpose

2008-09-23T17:02:00.008+10:00

John McCain has an opinion piece in today's Australian. McCain's real connection with Asia and the South Pacific and committment to free trade are the best reasons why bloggers like The Hive, for example, are so excited about McCain's candidacy. The argument for McCain from an Antipodean point of view is put pretty well by Andrew Shearer at the Lowy Interpreter here.

It's heartening that as well as canvassing the long history of the Australia-US alliance and issues such as terrorism McCain includes a strong statement backing US leadership on climate change and against torture. The foreign policy statements seem to me to have a considerable neo-con, rather than Republican realist, flavour. (I can't resist noting that while it's true that Australians have "suffered terrible terrorist attacks" it shouldn't escape our attention that Australia has not.)

New Zealand readers of course will skim for that all important "Z"

In Asia this means engagement must begin with our allies. Our alliance with Australia sets the standard. Our ally Japan has proved a strong and reliable partner to the US and Australia. South Korea is taking on new global responsibilities. We can reinvigorate our traditional alliances with Thailand and The Philippines and build on newly strengthened partnerships with Singapore and India. And we should recognise our shared values and common purpose with New Zealand.

Now is that the same as small-a "allies"? Having run through 'allies' and 'partners' we get 'and we should recognise'? The tone is quite grudging.

US credit market woes

2008-09-15T07:27:00.004+10:00

I haven't read the commentary but the larger than expected Reserve Bank interest rate cut probably doesn't result from an optimistic assessment of the world economy.

The woes in the US did not end when the federal government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman Brothers are on the verge of bankruptcy. People are worried about the financial health of AIG, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual. It seems that the best place to read a digest of the business pages along with informed speculation is naked capitalism

Still waiting for final whistle on US-India nuclear trade

2008-09-14T10:33:00.003+10:00

It appears that the backdown last week at the Nuclear Suppliers Group may have been associated with some private side agreements restricting the sale of fuel enrichment and reprocessing technology to India and other countries that are not signatories of the NPT. The report in the Washington Post is here.

The Arms Control Wonk discusses it here and here.

Kessler cites “sources familiar with the discussions” making two claims:

1. “[The NSG] privately agreed last weekend that none of its members plans to sell sensitive technologies to India .. [to] persuade several skeptical member states to support a waiver authorizing nuclear trade with India…”

2. “The NSG separately is nearing consensus on a total ban on sensitive sales to countries such as India that have not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty … [This was] another factor in persuading countries such as Ireland, New Zealand and Austria to end their effort to write such trade restrictions into the waiver for India.”

This doesn't seem to address the question of what happens if or when India tests a nuclear bomb but it definitely represents a significant win over the public version of the deal.

Those of you interested in Kim Jong-il should be reading the Arms Control Wonk also.

Trust?

2008-09-13T17:30:00.009+10:00

Sorry not to be down with the talking points but I hated this 'trust' line as an election 'theme' from the begining. I'd much rather Labour run on, oh I don't know, some policy initiatives???? But this morning's SMH helped reinforce this for me. Helen Clark has called an election they note

THE New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has taken a leaf out of John Howard's book, calling an election and immediately defining it as being about trust.

Then they explain why Australian readers may find the line familiar

When he announced Australia's 2004 election, Mr Howard said: "This election, ladies and gentlemen, will be about trust." He asked voters to trust him with the economy and interest rates and in the fight against terrorism.

Now I've been banging on in private about the parallels between Clark and Howard for ages. If you want to learn about the condition of Labour in two months time you could I believe do a lot worse than reading Judith Brett's account of Howard's demolition derby with the Australian Liberal Party. Or if you can get your hands on Black Inc's "Best Australian Political Writing 2008" read Pamela Williams article "A Right Royal Mess: How Howard led Libs into chaos"

If you want to test this analogy though, listen to Peter Costello who is all over the Fairfax papers today spruiking his book. Can't find it online but here is his assessment of Howard from the SMH magazine Good Weekend

Leadership is not only about winning; it is also about departing. ...

Unlike Menzies, Howard never managed a transition. He did not accomplish generational change.

After the best economic record of any Australian goverment and after an Age of Prosperity from a golden era of continuous economic growth, the Coalition was defeated in the spring of 2007. We lost because we failed to renew. We mismanaged generational change. We did not arrange the leadership transition. The electorate did it for us.

Sound like anyone we know?

Not to be outdone the Australian has more Costello

Howard identified the interests of his party with his own. After so many years at the top, separating the two became difficult.

At the peak of his power, it was difficult to disagree with that assessment.

Glenn taking another turn

2008-09-10T08:45:00.004+10:00

Clark deserves this

"She is very self-serving," he said.

"I wouldn't want her in the trenches next to me."

Asked if he would support Labour in future, he replied: "I am not exactly cheering for Labour now, not when they turn the dogs on you."

It's a wonder he didn't say something like this after the Business School opening.

And he is trying to head off the "it wasn't Winston on the phone defense" too

He introduced his executive secretary Laura Ede to say she will sign an affidavit saying she put in the cell phone call to New Zealand First leader Winston Peters.

I just don't understand why Clark has not already pulled the plug on Peters but surely the time has come? Better late than never.

Obama still ahead?

2008-09-10T08:31:00.002+10:00

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic is starting a weekly assessment of the electoral college map in the US presidential elections. This is based on polls and extensive reporting.

There are a lot of big states currently too close to call, including Pennsylvania, and we are still too close to the conventions to get any idea how the candidates are travelling but it looks like this will be worth following.

Don't mock the constitution

2008-09-10T08:24:00.003+10:00

The worst applause line in Palin's often hilarious convention speech was this

"Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."

Not so much because of the rights reading as because the Americans having mounted a rather more thoroughgoing assault on the rights of terror suspects and prisoners of war.I really hope that McCain will protect habeas corpus and end torture as president, but we'll see.

Obama has finally come out with a strong attack on this line. After reiterating his determination to target and kill those involved in planning 9/11 Obama mounts a defense of habeas corpus and pleads "don't mock the Constitution".

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting," Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. "Don't mock the Constitution. Don't make fun of it. Don't suggest that it's not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It's worked pretty well for over 200 years."

Did we back down on the nuclear agreement? Yes

2008-09-08T14:45:00.009+10:00

If you are interested in this issue there are now blog posts at Kiwiblog and No Right Turn.

DPF argues that Clark backed down on this one. I think this is true but I am not sure that I blame Clark greatly. Would a National government have been more resolute on this issue? Even once we were the only country on the NSG to remain opposed to the agreement? At the cost of improved trade access to the US? No I thought not.

Idiot/Savant on the other hand argues that we did not back down because we got most of what we wanted. In this he relies on the Herald's summary of New Zealand's goals in the negotiations.

New Zealand had wanted:

* Action to be taken should India resume nuclear testing;

* For India to sign up to an International Atomic Energy Agency protocol extending its monitoring powers;

* A review of the exemption.

(The full text of the waiver is available here, and a complete analysis from the arms control point of view here.)

It's certainly true that the three points mentioned by the Herald are addressed in the waiver as I/S notes. However this list is drawn up after the fact.

In interviews prior to the NSG meeting Goff was very clear; New Zealand and other nations wanted it written into the waiver that a nuclear test by India would end the supply of uranium. Avoiding this was the goal of US and Indian diplomacy and we backed down, the waiver is not conditional on India refraining from testing.

Here is Goff in an interview by the ABC

LOPRESTI: So with the safeguard agreement would you like to see tighter controls over India such as with the nuclear tests?

GOFF: Well we'd like to see what's already built as part of the United States Hide Act, which allows the United States to undertake nuclear trade with India, which requires that the deal would cease immediately in the event that India would conduct a nuclear test. India's not currently conducting tests; it says that it's made a domestic decision not to do so. We'd like some certainty around that and should not be an impossible ask of India to say that as long as you, in fact it's not even an ask, it could be built unilaterally into the agreement that this exemption would only apply so long as India did not again test its nuclear weapons.

This is a very unfortunate development but I blame the Bush administration rather than New Zealand and the US congress may still act to require such a conditionality at least for US sales.

Particularly unfortunate is the situation whereby countries like New Zealand have had to put their concerns in national statements that do not form part of the waiver. The Arms Control Association notes:

Because of the negotiations were tough and the real differences not fully resolved, there will likely be serious differences between India and most of the NSG about the interpretation of what the guidelines allow and don't allow and what the consequences of any violation of India's nonproliferation and disarmament commitments would be. This outcome is a failure of the NSG as a whole, the U.S. delegation, and the NSG chair Germany.

Also the Arms Control Wonk

I worry this sets up a potential trainwreck:

* Indian officials believe they have what they seek: the legal commitments at the core of a strategy that will mitigate the consequences of a resumption of testing. (The fuel reserve, access to the international marketplace, etc.)

* NSG members, on the other hand, believe they have a political commitment, however weak, from India to refrain from testing and options to isolate India again in the event that it violates the pledge.

One of the two parties is wrong. I am not eager to find out which.

The Increasing Importance of Uranium

2008-09-07T14:59:00.003+10:00

It's going to be very interesting to see whether Australia now moves toward selling uranium to India. But even without that a lot is going on with respect to the politics and economics of uranium at the moment.

The week before last we had the extraordinary spectacle of Peter Garrett approving the expansion of the Beverly uranium mine in South Australia. Apparently the joke about Garrett now is "every appearance a sell-out."

Last week the Chinese company Sinosteel placed a bid to develop a large uranium mine in South Australia. This places the totally opaque foreign investment rules here under still more pressure. If the Right in New Zealand thinks it is unclear what is and is not a strategic asset they should take a look at the situation in Australia.

The Foreign Affairs minister Steven Smith threatened to reneg on a deal made by the Howard government to sell uranium to Russia in response to the situation in Georgia with a predictably stern response from the Russians.

Why all this interest in Australian uranium?

There is an urgent need to expand world uranium production which currently stands at around 64% of consumption. (Whether this is a serious problem for the nuclear power industry is debatable. The Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents depressed demand in the 80s to the extent that there are currently very large stockpiles.) China in particular is rapidly building nuclear power reactors and needs to assure its supply of fuel. Australia has about 23% of known reserves. Canada and Kazakhstan are the other countries with large reserves and mining industries.

Garnaut's new report

2008-09-07T14:09:00.003+10:00

Ross Garnaut has released a supplementary report on emissions trading in Australia. He is recommending a very slow start to the program with a target of a 5% reduction on year 2000 emissions by 2020 unless a deal that includes all nations emerges from Copenhagen.

Paul Kelly notes that this takes the heat off Rudd

There are two main stories in the Garnaut report about the 2020 target. Garnaut is advising Rudd to run on two tracks: what Australia does with a comprehensive global agreement and what it does with an ongoing ad hoc post-Kyoto global compromise.

Taking the second scenario (absent any all-in global deal), Garnaut advises Rudd to settle on a 5 per cent Australian reduction by 2020. He stresses this would be consistent with reaching Rudd's non-negotiable 60 per cent reduction target by 2050.

The reason 5 per cent is the most likely target in practice is because, as Garnaut argues, there is only a chance the world will reach a comprehensive deal any time soon. Given this likely failure, Garnaut wants a modest start for Australia.

Because it is inconceivable that Rudd would choose a more ambitious target than Garnaut's, the best calculation under this scenario is that the Rudd Government will settle somewhere between zero and minus 5per cent from year 2000 levels.

NSG agrees to India waiver

2008-09-07T13:23:00.005+10:00

In a dramatic last minute agreement the NSG has agreed to the waiver for the US-India uranium deal. Details of the waiver are sketchy and the deal must now get through the US congress.

According to the Hindu, New Zealand was the last to concede in a classic divide and conquer strategy by high level US diplomats.

“It was clear to us that as long as these countries were a group, they would remain a problem,” a senior Indian official said. “But we also knew none of them wanted to be the last man standing.” So between the United States and India, a determined political effort was made late Friday night to ensure each of the four came on board. The first to agree was China, said the official, and the last New Zealand, with Ireland and Austria also dropping their objections in between. Though the last three communicated their decision to Washington, the official said the Chinese side directly informed India that it intended to back the consensus.

It seems that little has been done formally to modify the original waiver, but that a statement on September 5 from the Indian Foreign Minister reiterating their moratorium on testing has been mentioned in a 'chapeau' to the waiver. New Zealand is also one of several countries to make a national statement expressing disquiet at the deal. From the Hindu again:

Though several minor changes were made in the India waiver adopted by the Nuclear Suppliers Group on Saturday, the most important change from the point of view of those countries with non-proliferation concerns was the incorporation of a reference to the September 5 statement made by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee reiterating India’s stand on disarmament and non-proliferation.

Among the commitments the statement highlighted were India’s voluntary and unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, its “policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons” and several initiatives the country has taken in recent years to press for the elimination of nuclear weapons at the global level.

For a feeling of the pressure that has been exerted there is this:

Asked for his assessment of the waiver, a diplomat from a European country which initially wanted much stronger conditional language said his government had joined the consensus “very reluctantly.” “I wouldn’t say we’re happy,” he said, adding that his country and several others had been “leaned on at the highest levels.”

I take it we can assume that we have been "leaned on at the highest levels" also.

The Washington Post has run an impassioned critique of the deal here.

Why the Palin pick is still demoralising

2008-09-05T20:17:00.004+10:00

She doesn't believe that human activities are causing global warming, she believes creationism should be taught in science classes and she has no pre-existing interest whatsoever in foreign affairs. That's just for starters. This nomination seems like a continuation of the glorification of incuriosity and trumpeting of faith over reason that started with Bush II.

McCain's bold pick

2008-09-05T19:49:00.006+10:00

It's becoming very clear that by the end of the Democratic convention the McCain campaign decided that they could definitely not win the election on experience. The desire for change is too great. To win McCain needed to reclaim his maverick reputation, but could not do so by picking his preferred VP, Joe Lieberman, since that would enrage the Republican base, particularly on the issue of abortion (Lieberman is pro-choice).

As a result of this we will see much more talk of McCain the fighter, McCain the reformer and McCain the maverick. Without being a complete U-turn this emphasis should go a long way towards restoring his standing with independents, and Palin fits this picture almost perfectly.

But the Palin pick is brilliant because by choosing such a socially conservative reforming Republican as VP McCain has totally restored his connection to the base of the party while reinforcing his appeal to independents. The people who do all the hard work in the Republican campaign (many are conservative evangelicals) appear to have fallen head over heels in love with Palin. This guarantees a good Republican turn-out and an enthusiastically run campaign, something that the McCain campaign has conspicuously lacked so far. This appeal results from Palin's red-state just folks hockey-mum image and her evangelical Christian faith. The politics of abortion and the fact that Trig Palin has Downs syndrome are very far from being irrelevant here. (On the focus on Trig during the telecast of the speech see here.) Also relevant has been the strong tinge of elitism in the media reaction to Palin's background and qualifications. This allows her to portray her self as wronged by the liberal media. It helps that Palin is such a good speaker. She is a superstar already, 37.2 million people watched her speech, nearly as many as watched Obama.

It's remarkable that the one national issue on which she is well informed, drilling for oil, is one of McCain's best issues with the electorate. (Ironically she appears to favour windfall profit taxes for oil companies, like Obama.)

Finally of course there is the chance that disgruntled Hilary voters in the backblocks of states like Pennsylvania will want to see a woman in the executive rather than Obama.

When you look at it, it's really remarkable that there is anyone out there that could solve so many of the terrible problems the McCain campaign has been having.

On the other hand she will also be like a red rag to a bull for the Democratic base. Apparently Obama's campaign apparently made 8 million dollars in the 24 hours after Palin's speech.

The risk of bringing someone straight from a state of 600,000 into national presidential campaign remains breathtakingly high and could still backfire. It helps though that the overheated reaction to her nomination means that Palin will hardly ever have to do an interview or a press conference and will not need to have a good relationship with the press.

Whatever happens from here Palin's nomination and speech could well be as important to the Republican party as Obama's was to the Democrats in 2004. She will be a major feature of US politics for some time to come.

This campaign just got really interesting again.

Lets hear it for the Temuka RSA tearooms

2008-09-05T19:45:00.004+10:00

I keep checking the government web pages for any further press release from Phil Goff on the uranium issue. Every time I do so I am struck by the fact that Goff was just in Temuka where he gave a speech on the occasion of the the 50th anniversary of the RSA tearooms there.

Sometimes it's just great to be a New Zealander!

The Group of Six Still Making Trouble in Vienna

2008-09-05T19:40:00.004+10:00

The first day of the NSG meeting is now over. The Hindu has talked to diplomats representing countries opposed to the US-India uranium deal and the prospects for the deal do not appear bright.

The six countries holding out for tougher conditions to be written into the draft proposal granting India an exemption from the NSG's rules are Austria, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland. But the coalition is a shifting one and the six are getting support from other countries on some of the demands they are making. At the same time, the number of countries pushing for approval of the exemption has also grown, say diplomats.

The biggest issue appears to be the requirement that any nuclear test by India would result in a cessation of uranium sales. Interestingly this may be most strongly opposed by the big uranium supplying nations (France and Russia for example) than by India itself.

Automatic cut-off of supplies in the event of India abandoning its moratorium on nuclear testing "has been our absolute bottom line from the beginning," said the diplomat, "and there is no question of it being dropped". At the same time, he conceded that more than India, it was the "big supplier nations" like Russia and France that were opposing automaticity of termination. "We know the U.S. is committed to terminating supplies [if India tests] but we don't want to leave the decision within the NSG to each individual PG [participating government]".

Eight is Enough

2008-09-05T19:31:00.004+10:00

It's a commonplace observation now that the similarity of West Wing Presidential candidate Matthew Santos to Barack Obama is not a case of life immitating art but rather of art being modelled on life.

However I haven't seen anyone notice that the much commented-on line "Eight is Enough" in Obama's acceptance speech last week is taken from a fictional convention speech on the TV series. The Republican vice-presidential candidate uses it in his own convention speech to attempt to tie Santos to the two-term Democratic President Bartlett. This corny appeal to the family entertainment seventies TV show causes Josh Lyman to loose his cool in a bar.

Presumably this is Obama's speechwriters having a little fun with us?

Contrary view on US-India uranium deal

2008-09-02T14:36:00.005+10:00

The New York Times editorial has prompted a response from the Times of India, putting the case for the waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group to go ahead.

Realistically speaking, what a ban on nuclear trade with India would achieve is keeping it out of the loop on civilian nuclear technology. That means it'll have to rely primarily on coal-fired plants to meet the electricity needs of an expanding economy, increasing the stock of greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing India into the non-proliferation tent, on the other hand, has its advantages. It's a democratic and transparent country that can't be placed on the same footing as, say, North Korea. That's why Japan, whose non-proliferation credentials can't be doubted, is now in favour of granting India an NSG waiver. So are France, the UK, Russia and the US. Important countries like New Zealand, Ireland and Austria should follow.

Good to hear that we are an "important country"!

Contrary to my misapprehension yesterday it seems that New Zealand and Austria are not satisfied with the new draft agreement being circulated to NSG member. Not only this but China, which had previously acquiesced to the deal is now voicing doubts. (Somewhat cynically given its own record on proliferation issues.) (Times of India, Economic Times.)

Second Nuclear Suppliers Group Meeting this Week

2008-09-01T10:09:00.006+10:00

The second meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group will be this week. A revised draft of the proposed agreement on supplying uranium to India's civilian nuclear power industry is currently being circulated.

After weeks of following this closely I am beaten to the New York Times editorial supporting New Zealand's stand by Russell Brown. It's definitely worth a read.

I am unsure how Goff's leadership on this issue would be affected by an early dissolution of Parliament. It might be interesting to know what National's position on this issue is.

Update: one comment removed, I had failed to read news report carefully.

Did she act fast enough?

2008-08-30T18:03:00.002+10:00

It's inexplicable to me that the announcement that Peters was to be stood down from his Ministerial responsibilities while the Serious Fraud Office investigates his party's finances was allowed to miss the early evening television news bulletins.

Perhaps though there is hope that this move will in itself be enough staunch the bleeding.

Against that however, is the very good hand that John Key has been dealt in this affair. I've never understood the attraction of John Key but in a series of media performances, presenting his increasingly definite stand on Peters, he has for the first time appeared Prime Ministerial. There's not a lot of appeal in giving "I know our policy but if I told you I would have to kill you"-type interviews. The Peters scandal has finally given him an issue on which he can appear decisive and show leadership. He's been very wise to remove the ifs and buts and ands from his stance, it should be a vote-winner.

The anti-Peters vote is very much larger than the pro-Peters vote. Key's next move should be to attempt to identify a vote for Labour as a vote for Peters.

The Labour leadership should be moving this weekend to head off such an attack.

Sarah Palin

2008-08-30T17:46:00.005+10:00

McCain's choice of running mate is perplexing.

The first big problem I see is that the big McCain message of experience appears to be completely blown. Apparently the cable talking heads are hitting McCain surrogates very hard on this issue. Ezra Klein:

Watching the McCain flacks in a continual state of meltdown on CNN, it's striking how swiftly their central defense of Palin is backfiring. When the anchors question her experience -- 19 months in the Alaska statehouse, and before that the mayoralty of an 8,000 person town -- they question Obama's experience. Game, set, match? Not really.The problem for the McCain campaign, as Campbell Brown pointed out, is that Barack Obama doesn't think four years in the US Senate and eight in the Chicago statehouse are insufficient. It's the McCain campaign that believes Obama is inexperienced.

The second big problem seems to be that it's simply too much to ask someone, no matter how talented, to go straight from the Alaska governor's mansion into the heat of a presidential campaign, there will be a lot of public misteps. James Fallows at the Atlantic:

Let's assume that Sarah Palin is exactly as smart and disciplined as Barack Obama. But instead of the year and a half of nonstop campaigning he has behind him, and Joe Biden's even longer toughening-up process, she comes into the most intense period of the highest stakes campaign with absolutely zero warmup or preparation. If she has ever addressed an international issue, there's no evidence of it in internet-land.

The smartest person in the world could not prepare quickly enough to know the pitfalls, and to sound confident while doing so, on all the issues she will be forced to address. This is long before she gets to a debate with Biden; it's what the press is going to start out looking for.

Thirdly, I wouldn't be picking someone who was currently undergoing this kind of inquiry.

What's next for Labour?

2008-08-30T17:40:00.002+10:00

I'd like to sign onto ex-expat's Letter from a Labour voter (almost without reservation)

And that's what is missing from your constant bluster about 'slippery' John Key and his band of evil Hollow men with no policy, a vision for me and other left wing voters to vote for rather than a dystopia to vote against. ...

But thing is, I and other voters still want more. The reason we want more is because we didn't elect you to maintain the status quo, we elected you to build a better society and we know that there is still so much work to be done.

Hostage to Fortune

2008-08-27T13:58:00.002+10:00

If Clark pushes Emissions Trading through the House with Peters' votes using the figleaf of a Privileges Committee inquiry she creates two enormous hostages to fortune.

The historical view of her Government will be strongly coloured by the eventual seriousness of the charges against Peters and the outcome of the Privileges Committee and SFO inquiries. She will also need the ETS to be an enormous success. If there are too many unintended consequences she will stand accused of driving through the most thoroughgoing and radical economic reform since the first term of the Bolger government without proper care and due process. The more so if it emerges that Clark's support for Peters keeping his job has the explicit quid pro quo of Peters' support for the ETS.

Like Prime Minister Howard in Australia she could find her standing much diminished by failing to leave politics on her own terms and by seeming at the end more interested in retaining power than in exercising it wisely.

New Zealand position on US-India Civil Nuclear Arrangement

2008-08-27T13:44:00.004+10:00

Sorry for my continuing obsession with this. My reading of Goff's comments to media outlets in Australia and India on the US-India civil nuclear agreement seems to be confirmed by this press release from Goff. New Zealand is not expecting India to sign either the NPT or the test ban treaty. This is contrary to the surprisingly scant reporting I have seen from New Zealand sources. This release has been widely reported in India.

“While New Zealand remains a strong advocate of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and would welcome India’s accession to these treaties, we have not included these elements in our package of proposals.

“New Zealand engaged constructively in the discussions, acknowledging potential benefits involved in the Agreement and its good relationship with both countries, while noting concerns and the need for consistency in pursuing the objective of non-proliferation.

Rather the Government is seeking stronger protections in the sale of nuclear equipment and technology. These are characterized as 50 amendments to the proposed text rather than an outright rejection of the intent of the US-India deal which was to bring the Indian civilian nuclear industry into the mainstream without India joining the NPT.

Around 50 amendments have been proposed to the original text, with many countries speaking in favour of amendments.

“The key function of the NSG is to formulate guidelines for managing exports of nuclear material, equipment and technology to ensure that this trade does not contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation.

Update: Contrary to my disparaging comments just now Audrey Young did have a good article on this issue prior to the NSG meeting last week.

Public Private Partnerships

2008-08-26T17:09:00.003+10:00

Since both the major parties are very keen on public private partnerships for transport infrastructure I take it that everyone is well aware of their mixed record of success in Australia and that both parties are equipped with ideas for how to avoid the well-known pitfalls in these schemes. Take for example the debacle of the Cross-City Tunnel in Sydney which resulted in the bankruptcy of the consortium running the tunnel and significantly increased costs for the taxpayer. (For want of a better link, Wikipedia)

Many of these projects are expensive to use and consequently underutilised since commercial imperatives typically require projects to make money over a fairly short period. The state can afford to take a much longer view of infrastructure needs.

Such a long view should these days take into account the likely high price of petrol in the future, I'd much rather we were talking about public transport rather than new roads.

More on Nuclear Suppliers Group

2008-08-26T16:56:00.002+10:00

The Financial Times has an editorial supporting the moves by several countries, including New Zealand, to add several conditions to the US-India agreement on sale of uranium to India for nuclear power.

Mr Bush’s allies say it is a pity the international community is dragging its feet in this way. They argue that the deal is strategically smart because it has ended 40 years of hostility between India and the US and balances the rising power of China. But the costs far outweigh any benefits. This deal makes a mockery of the non-proliferation treaty. And it threatens to accelerate the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan. This is because every pound of uranium that India is allowed to import for its power reactors frees up a pound of uranium for its bomb programme.

The NSG will again convene next month and must apply as many conditions as possible to India’s nuclear programme before giving the deal the go-ahead. Better still, the next US president should ditch the entire policy. He should opt for an approach that reforms the rules of the nuclear game both for America’s friends and foes.

While the Fairfax papers in New Zealand report that Indian officials are applying pressure in the other direction. Added safeguards would very likely lead to the collapse of Indian political support for the deal.

India Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar said his nation will not be pushed on the deal.
"The NSG exemption should be clean and there should be no additional condition," Kakodkar said.

"They may want to push, but India can't be pushed. Civil nuclear cooperation is important, but that doesn't mean at any cost....

"Should we allow ourselves to be pushed? Are we not Indians? Are you not proud of yourself and what you are doing?" Kakodkar said.
India's ruling Congress Party is demanding the deal go ahead with a clean waiver.
"Nothing which impinges or seem to impinge on India's national interest will be acceptable," party spokesman Manish Tewari said.

Last of the Olympics

2008-08-24T16:58:00.004+10:00

Like all right-minded people I was happily engaged yesterday in cheering, one last time, for the sporting representatives of the liberal democracies against all those dreadful commies.

I was particularly happy to see this guy get one over the Chinese, even if, as the good folks at Morning Report will surely note, he was just as much a cry baby as the other Australian gold medalists.

Although it seems that Australia just beats New Zealand on medals per capita, we beat Australia on gold medals per capita. Since any red blooded Ozzie will assure you that loosing begins at silver, we clearly win the all important trans-Tasman medal rivalry.

Biden

2008-08-24T16:19:00.002+10:00

So Biden it was. Ezra Klein makes a very effective case for him here.

Some of the issues that will arise have been canvassed by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic in a series of posts like this one.

Read his 2005 New Yorker profile of Biden and other national security Democrats.

Clocks!

2008-08-24T15:56:00.004+10:00

Given this ancient scandal, I quote without comment Sasha Frere-Jones' account of the Coldplay song 'Clocks' in the August 4 New Yorker.

“Am I part of the cure? Or am I part of the disease?” is a line from “Clocks,” perhaps the group’s loveliest song. The music evokes the song’s name, revolving around three circling and falling piano arpeggios. The payoff comes when Martin stretches out the words “you are” in a falsetto sung over the piano figure. You are what? Go figure, and I haven’t the slightest idea what is going on with the “tides” and the “clocks” in the lyrics. Doesn’t matter. “Clocks” is a big-budget “Ooh!” with lots of pretty lights—it works. At the end of the song, Martin repeatedly sings, “Home, home, where I wanted to go.” There’s the only part you need take note of—an essentially conservative sentiment, and probably a comfort zone for a guy who grew up thinking he wasn’t particularly cool and lost his virginity at the age of twenty-two.