National Party’s South Island hillbillies steal $1.7 billion from Kiwi taxpayers

TIME TO QUIT THIS BANANA MONARCHY

The Government has spent $1.7 billion of taxpayers’ money to rescue a rabble of South Island National Party members, sorry, farmers, who put their money into a shonky Timaru finance company that paid them unbelievably high interest rates while charging hardly any interest to the shonky people and companies it lent the farmers’ money to.

Where are those who bewailed as “the train set” the rescuing of the country’s railway system after it was looted and destroyed by the National Party’s mates? Why, they are cheering the National Party Government for spending twice what the trains cost on rescuing a rabble of South Island National Party members, sorry, farmers, from their own greed and stupidity.

That South Canterbury Finance was able as recently as April to join the Government’s retail deposit guarantee scheme — a scheme established to protect the banking system during the global financial crisis — despite its shonky state being well known, then go on a profligate spree of borrow-and-spend, says everything one needs to know about there being privilege for the inside few and the harsh rule of law for everyone else.

When the National Party’s South Island rural rump can help themselves to $1.7 billion of public money like this — money they can then “invest” in another shonky finance company to “earn” high interest until it collapses and the taxpayer rides to the rescue again — it is truly time to flee this banana monarchy while one still can, methinks.

IPCC told to stop lobbying and restrict role to explaining climate science

UNWELCOME BREAKING NEWS

• Update: One of the commenters below this article alerted me to this interesting report, which documents New Zealand’s actual temperatures since 1850, available publicly on the NIWA website, compared with NIWA’s “adjusted” temperatures, which show a warming trend not apparent in the “actual” data.

The story below is in most of the media all over the world, but at the time of writing was nowhere to be found on such local taxpayer-funded propaganda outfits as Sciblogs, nor any of the latter’s warmist echo chambers, such as Hot Topic, Code for Life and Open Parachute. I await their eventual spin on what for them is this latest unwelcome, unfortunate truth with a great deal of interest.

I’m taking this unedited and without comment from the Telegraph, London, because the local AGWarming cabal will put a very different spin on it, when the Team get their key lines together.

The investigation referred to followed the Climategate scandal, which revealed a core Team of IPCC researchers worked behind the scenes to prevent any other view of global warming than their own being accepted in peer-reviewed scientific literature:

By Stephen Adams and Robert Winnett

An independent investigation into the UN’s climate change body has warned it to stop lobbying and to restrict its role to explaining the science behind any changes in global temperature.

Senior officials at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have also been ordered to disclose their outside financial interests to avert any allegations that they may have profited from policies to tackle global warming.

New controls should also be introduced to ensure that the scientific claims made in influential international reports are robust in future.

The independent inquiry which delivered the rebuke was ordered after the IPCC admitted it had exaggerated the pace at which Himalayan glaciers were melting. Several other errors in its recent report were also uncovered.

The admission threatened to undermine the scientific basis used by Governments around the world to justify spending billions of pounds tackling climate change.

The report published yesterday found that although the IPCC’s findings were generally sound, parts of its conduct had “dented the credibility of the process”.

It warned that “straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC’s credibility”.

However, it did not call into question the main findings behind the 2007 report, and said that overall its assessment process of the rate of, and risks from, climate chance had “been a success and served society well”.

The review, by a prestigious group of international scientific academies, will put pressure on Rajenda Pachauri, the Indian head of the IPCC.

He said last night that he would step down if the Governments in the IPCC backed calls for him to be replaced.

Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor and chair of the committee that conducted the review, said that a report by an IPCC working group “contains many statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence.”

Professor Shapiro said the IPCC’s response to errors when they were subsequently revealed was “slow and inadequate.”

Asked about the Himalayan glaciers error, Professor Shapiro said, “At least in our judgment, it came from just not paying close enough attention to what [peer] reviewers said about that example.”

He added that there was concern about the U.N. climate panel’s lack of a conflict of interest policy, as is standard in most Government departments and international bodies.

The report called for development of a “rigorous conflict of interest policy” and made detailed suggestions on what should be disclosed. Mr Pachauri has previously acted as an adviser to green energy companies.

“It’s hard to see how the United Nations can both follow the advice of this committee and keep Rajendra Pachauri on board as head,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado.

In future, the IPCC should be overseen by a new executive committee which will include people from outside the organisation, the report recommended. The organisation’s head should also be limited to serving one six-year term.

Disgraceful National Party dog-whistling to say Maori youth issues comparable to why Aborigines “sit around waiting for the pub to open”

The article below was originally published in December 2007. I reprint it today because of my infuriation at the usually pleasant Ele of Homepaddock publishing a sad little piece of dog-whistling comparing the state of Maori and Australian Aborigines, based on a short visit to the Northern Territory, where she saw a “large number of Aborigine people wandering round without purpose, sitting in gutters or on the grass of parks, many waiting for the pubs and bottle stores to open at 2pm, all apparently with nothing to do and nowhere to go.”

The reason for the plight of the Aborigines, she suggested, was it cost too much to employ them. If only they and Maori youth could be paid less for doing the same job as someone else, they would quickly be in work.

Ele is a senior, influential office holder from the National Party’s rural wing and many of her readers would see her comments as floating a party balloon, just as they see David Farrar as always dog whistling potential policies to see what happens.

It wasn’t long before some of the worst bigots from Mr Farrar’s troll farm were spewing with delight. It made me so angry that I left some quite intemperate comments on her blog: “Your preference for paying low wages to Maori or any other New Zealand worker has not one fucking thing to do with the plight of the indigenous people of Australia, most of whom can’t get a fucking job at any fucking age,” I wrote. “They are the most dispossessed people on the face of the planet, living in squalor beyond the remotest fringes of one of the wealthiest countries on Earth.”

And convinced me to repeat my December 2007 article:

Kevin Rudd’s newly elected Labor government in Australia is pledged to apologise to the country’s indigenous people over the “stolen generations” scandal which saw thousands of Aboriginal children taken from their parents and put in internment camps, orphanages and other institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. This has been one of Australia’s biggest race relations issues since the 1997 publication of the Bringing Them Home report on those grim historical events. “Sorry” became the hardest word in the English language for Liberal prime minister John Howard to say. In the face of public pressure, Howard put forward a motion of “deep and sincere regret over the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents” which the Federal Parliament passed in August 1999, but the “S” word would not pass his lips, despite him acknowledging that “the stolen generations” represented “the most blemished chapter” in Australia’s history. An unofficial “National Sorry Day” has been staged each May 26 since, the anniversary of the release of Bringing Them Home.

Viewing such events from this side of the Tasman highlights some of the major historical differences in race relations between New Zealand and Australia, two countries colonised by Britain in roughly the same era but in markedly different ways.

The Australian Aborigines were basically regarded as sub-human by the settlers and their governments and treated abominably. Their lands were seized with impunity and without payment, they were allowed few civil or political rights and they existed as outback-dwelling outcasts of society. Intermarriage was virtually nil. Generations of white Australians grew up in the cities rarely, if ever, seeing an Aborigine, or indeed anyone who was not white. From federation in 1901 until 1973, the country operated an openly racist immigration regime colloquially and semi-officially known as the White Australia Policy which allowed entry only to Europeans. In 1947, Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell infamously told Parliament that “two Wongs don’t make a white.” Aborigines were not even legally Australian citizens until 1967 and were not able to vote until the 1969 federal elections.

The contrast with New Zealand could hardly be greater. Pressure from the missionaries, among others, when Wakefield’s New Zealand Company settler convoys were being put together in 1839 saw the Colonial Office accept that the Maori must be treated substantially better than indigenous Australians. Captain Hobson was despatched to negotiate a formal treaty with Maori to allow British settlement to take place legally, in an orderly way and with Maori interests protected.

Though the Treaty of Waitangi’s protection of Maori land rights only lasted until the demands for land by the settlers exceeded iwi willingness to sell, much that happened in New Zealand was still far and away better than what happened in Australia. When constitutional government was established in 1852, Maori men were granted the vote on the same basis as settler men (votes for women did not come until 1893 but even this was the first in the world). As that was basically an individual property franchise, and most Maori land was owned communally, it effectively excluded most Maori men (but most settler men were also excluded), and so, in 1869, a century before Australian Aborigines first voted, the New Zealand Parliament extended the franchise to all Maori men, at a time many settler men remained excluded. To be sure, Maori had to cast their votes in the four special seats created for them, which severely limited their political influence at a time when their numbers were large compared with the settlers, but the fact they were allowed to vote has to be seen as an important and enlightened development for the time. Elsewhere, settler governments were highly reluctant to allow non-whites to vote. Beyond Australia, the Black majority population of South Africa was unable to vote until 1994. Despite the abolition of slavery in the US after the Civil War ended in 1865, most African Americans were unable to vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a century later. Indeed, the former southern slave states in the “land of the free” operated an apartheid-style system known as “segregation” until it was outlawed by a series of landmark Supreme Court judgements in the 1950s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

New Zealand was never blighted by laws overtly discriminating against Maori or preventing them from taking part in civil and political life. Intermarriage has been common and accepted here since Europeans started arriving, to the extent that most people of Maori ancestry now also have European ancestry. Since 1970 there has been a remarkable renaissance of Maori culture, language and participation in the political process. The creation of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 led to the continuing, honorable settling of land and other grievances dating back to colonial times, a process Australia has barely begun.

Just how marginalised Aborigines are even today can be seen from their numbers. Of Australia’s total population of 21.2 million, just 517,000 (2.4 per cent) are of Aboriginal descent. Maori are more numerous – of New Zealand’s population of 4.3 million, 633,000 (14.9 per cent) are of Maori descent. Another 73,000 actually live in Australia.

But. But. There are always “buts.” Our race relations have not been as rosy as the legal history and a comparison with other countries might make them seem. For the first century after the signing of the Treaty, most Maori lived on or near their marae in rural areas. When they started moving to the cities after World War II in search of work in the factories then being established to industrialise what had been a mostly agriculture-based economy, they soon met outright racism from many Pakeha. Newspaper situations vacant and house-rental advertising often and blatantly added the line “No Maoris” right up to the passing of the Race Relations Act in 1971. Some businesses refused Maori custom, such as a notorious barber shop in Pukekohe that would not cut Maori hair. Some cinemas made Maori sit upstairs, separate from Pakeha audiences. And while Australia openly had its White Australia Policy until Gough Whitlam ended it, New Zealand had a covert White New Zealand immigration policy until 1990. We would not even allow in the Greeks and Italians who so enriched Australian culture in the post-war decades. We allowed a few Dutch families in the 1950s, but they were abused and criticised for working too hard, so the only migrants we encouraged were British, who did not even need passports to come here until 1974. We grudgingly brought Pacific Islanders here to work in the factories when there were not enough Maori willing to staff them, but as soon as the economy soured after 1973 we called them “overstayers” and rounded them up in dawn raids for expulsion. And when Bill Birch ended our whites-only “traditional source country” immigration rules after the 1990 election, many of us became apoplectic when thousands of highly educated people started arriving from China. It is far from being ancient history that Winston Peters built his political career first on attacking Maori Treaty claims, then on demonising Chinese immigrants, before turning more recently to Muslims.

Despite these buts, there is much to be proud of about New Zealand and much to give hope that our future will not be riven by the kind of ethnic discord and even violence that exists in many parts of the world. And it is of some comfort that when we look enviously at Australia’s booming economy and feel unease at the number of Kiwis moving there, there are still some very important things we do much better.

NZ media still banging on about the swine flu Armageddon that never happened

The lead story on Stuff at this moment says that 15 New Zealanders have so far died of swine flu this year.

Nowhere does this alarmist story state that swine flu is the mildest seasonal flu encountered since… since…. maybe ever.

Or that around 420 New Zealanders die on average of seasonal flu each year, putting into glaring perspective the 16 who died last year of swine flu.

Or that the embarrassed World Health Organisation has quietly declared the swine flu “pandemic” over, after claims that it would be worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic (which killed 50 million people) failed to come to pass. Instead, 18,000 died world-wide, compared with the 250,000 people on average who die of seasonal flu.

In fact, this confusing Stuff story (which in one part says only 11 deaths were associated with swine flu) still claims there is a swine flu pandemic, despite even WHO now admitting the “pandemic” is “over.”

“Swine flu deaths are climbing in New Zealand, with 15 linked to the pandemic influenza H1N1 so far this year,” Stuff says.

Stuff it all. There is no hope left for serious, responsible journalism.

Warning! Aspartame not only causes cancer, it was originally developed as a very effective ant killer

ANOTHER TRUE STORY FROM THE HOOD

Many people sincerely believe things that are simply untrue. Take my experience today at the supermarket.

I wanted a packet of 500 tablets of Equal (the aspartame-based sweetener). It’s by far cheaper overall to buy the 500-pack than the dispensers of 100 or 200. As usual, the space for the 500 packs was empty but there was half a shelf of the less economical kinds. I am half sure the supermarkets do this on purpose, knowing most shoppers are in such a hurry they will pay more for less rather than ask the staff to go out the back to fetch the better-value product that is rarely on the shelf.

I asked one of the shelf-stackers to find some more 500-packs out the back. He went away to look. As I waited, a couple with two young children came up to the Equal shelf and started looking.

Thinking they may, like me, be wanting the 500-packs, I pointed to the empty space and said the shelf-stacker had gone to find some.

“No, we want the powder,” the man said. “We use it for the ants.”

“Ah,” I replied. “You use it to scatter a trail of sweetener to encourage the ants out of your house?”

“No! Equal is an ant killer. It kills ants very effectively. And you should not use it in your coffee because it is proven to cause cancer.”

Of course, I’d heard the “aspartame causes cancer” myth countless times and no longer waste my breath trying to argue with its True Believers, but I’d never heard the stuff killed ants. Superficially, I considered it was possible it might be true, and thanked the gentleman for the information. He took a pack of 200 sachets of Equal powder and moved on with his family.

I typed “Does Equal kill ants?” into Google and 38,100 results came up in 0.2 seconds. Top of the list was a Yahoo Answers item that states, in fracturered English: “Sweet n low and Equal contain aspartane. Aspartane was originally formulated as an ant poison. Since it is sweet, the ants carry it back to nest and it kills them.”

Recognising bullshit the moment I saw it, I went straight to the trusty Snopes Urban Legends site, which revealed this “aspartame is ant killer” myth as stemming from a satirical 2006 article in The Spoof that claimed the US Food and Drug Administration had certified aspartame as an ant poison because it was “originally developed as an ant poison and it was only changed to being non-poisonous after it was realized that a lot more money could be made on it as a sweetener.”

Says Snopes: “The appearance of this article on a site called The Spoof, along with its disclaimer that ‘the story… is written as a satire or parody, it is fictitious’ should provide most readers with sufficient clues for discerning that the article is, in fact, a spoof. Unfortunately, the mistaking of parody for factual information is representative of the dubious quality of much of the anti-aspartame information to be found on the Internet.”

The Snopes team conducted a test, recounted in the same article . They established three ant farms. One was fed with sugar and sugar products; one with aspartame and aspartame products; and one with “natural” foods.

“The ants that were fed aspartame not only survived but thrived, digging as many tunnels and appearing just as active as their counterparts from the other two habitats.”

This is skepticism and science at its best, and one of the reasons I trust the wonderful Snopes site. Sadly, I have little doubt had I been able to explain this debunking of the “aspartame is ant-killer” myth to the nice man in the supermarket, he would not believe me.

Some people will believe anything that is not true, even if confronted with the evidence. On the other hand, many of the same people will not believe something that is true. I never cease to be amazed at how many people I meet who dogmatically believe no humans have ever been to the moon, or that the Twin Towers were destroyed not by hijacked aircraft but by explosives planted at the orders of the Bush Administration.

Something else that never ceases to amaze me is how often Murphy’s Law proves right. After I waited 10 minutes at the Equal shelf, the shelf-stacker returned to say they were out of 500-packs of Equal until next week. Back to sugar in my Earl Grey till then, then.

Quietly, not with a bang but a whimper, the great swine flu scare of 2009 is declared over — except by the NZ media

Last year, to the massive enrichment of drug companies, the media scared the hell out of almost everyone with screaming headlines about swine flu. Now, quietly, and with barely a mention in the New Zealand media, the World Health Organisation has declared the swine flu pandemic to be… over. In fact, it never began.

Swine flu was confidently predicted by WHO and the media as being bigger than the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, in which 50 million people died. Faced with media hysteria terrifying the public, governments in New Zealand and many other countries bought massive stocks of the over-hyped, ineffective Tamiflu and spent a fortune of public money on swine flu vaccine.

As the months went on, the media dutifully ran screaming headlines each time someone, anyone, was reported as having swine flu. When someone actually died of it, there was media apoplexy. My normally very healthy eldest daughter (she runs marathons, and climbs mountains in South America) got a head cold last year and went to the doctor, who told her, without even an examination, that she had swine flu. It was farcical.

The cold reality has yet to dawn in the media. Swine flu proved to be the mildest seasonal flu since… since… probably in history. A total of 16 New Zealanders died of it last year, compared with the hundreds who usually die of seasonal flu. World-wide, 18,000 people have died of Swine Flu, compared with the 250,000-plus who usually die each year of seasonal flu.

The media (and politicians and members of the public) in many other countries are now asking hard questions about links between WHO advisers and the drug companies that made billions of dollars from selling vaccines that were not needed, and which now sit unused, in refrigerators all over the world, fast approaching their expiry dates.

But the real culprits are the global media in their race to the sewers and gutters beating out of all proportion the facts of virtually every issue they cover.

New Zealand’s media continues to beat up a pandemic that never happened. This Stuff article (which does not even mention WHO’s declaration), says “three swine flu deaths in Auckland and the Waikato have lifted this year’s tally of influenza fatalities to nine,” without saying if the other six flu deaths were swine flu or some other strain.

While media beat-ups have been with us ever since there has been a mass media, the beat-ups of the past decade have become increasingly egregious. They have a commonality – a ghastly problem or a threat that is likely to become SO BIG that millions of people WILL DIE unless HUGE SUMS OF MONEY are spent fixing the problem… that typically proves not to have been anything near the scale claimed in the screaming headlines.

Thus we had the lunacy of the Y2K Bug. Planes were going to fall from the skies on the stroke of midnight of December 31 1999. The banking system would collapse. The world’s computers would fail. People stocked their food cupboards in preparation for the end of civilization. And then… nothing happened, not even in Russia, which was so bankrupt it could not afford the millions that gullible First World companies, governments and people threw at computer techies who happily pocketed the loot.

As the decade progressed, we were all going to die from Bird Flu, something called SARS, and then global warming, which the media reported in even more stridently Armageddon tones than the rest. Global warming remains the only Armageddon the media still globally bangs on about, because it is supposed to happen some time later this century (or is it in the 23rd century?), which means the media can still try to scare us shitless over it, while suffering amnesia about past predictions.

Because of today’s unprecedented media cacophony – fuelled by the “24-hour news cycle” made possible by the growth of the Internet since the mid-1990s – politicians the world over have become too scared to say “hang on a minute, let’s look for some evidence” before committing fortunes of public money to doubtful causes like swine flu vaccines and Y2K Bug fixes.

If the governments of New Zealand and all those other countries that wasted billions on swine flu vaccine and Tamiflu in their knee-jerk reactions to the WHO and media beat-ups last year had not wasted all that money, the media would have crucified them. The politicians know it and yet they let themselves be browbeaten into enriching, with public money, whoever and whichever corporations are the beneficiaries of the latest media and/or pressure-group Armageddon.

The evidence suggests that neither the media, nor politicians, nor pressure groups, nor outfits like the UN and its agencies are good at all at predicting disasters. They predict catastrophe all the time, but their catastrophes NEVER come to pass. The disasters that do happen are shocking and unpredicted – the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26 2004, the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis come instantly to mind as the most unpredicted but terrible events of the past decade.

Interestingly, every time I try to point out such inconvenient truths, I get pounced on by people who should be intelligent enough to know better, but obviously prefer to “believe” the beat-up rather than recall the story of the boy who cried “wolf” – just look at the comments section in this article I wrote in April last year, suggesting the swine flu scare then at its height was déjà vu all over again.

I’m not trying smugly here to say “I told you so” regarding the swine flu panic. I’m no more able to predict the future than anyone else. What I am trying to get across is the fact that media beat-ups are just that, media beat-ups. If the media the world over grabs some cause, like swine flu, and screams we will all die unless we spend a fortune on Tamiflu and vaccines, then the evidence — based on every Armageddon scare to date — suggests those predictions are unlikely to come to pass.

Horrible events do happen, but they are never predicted and cannot be predicted. Chaos theory and Murphy’s Law are testament to this.

Much of the world’s media is now owned by a small number of global corporations. With very few exceptions, your local newspaper is no longer owned by a local family firm with a dedication to responsible, accurate journalism. Today’s media is little but beat-up, celebrity, crime and scandal, with the Armageddon beat-up the worst of them all because it costs taxpayers so dearly every time it’s trotted out.

I’m not at all saying that the individual reporter ot the Herald, DomPost, Newstalk ZB, One News or wherever is part of any conspiracy to hoodwink the world. There is no such conspiracy. If there were, journalists would be exposing it. Most journalists at heart see their mission as reporting the news and righting wrongs. But the internationalisation of news and the relentless drive of news editors to have their outlet be first with the story, even if it’s wrong, means journalists everywhere now are caught on a treadmill that goes ever faster, leaving them scant time to do other than report what everyone else is saying. The dull old journalistic requirement for fact checking rarely happens in the big, global beat-ups where every media outlet in the world is running the same questionable story.

But, next time you see the media screaming you are doomed unless you pay gazillions to someone, ask yourself who the someone is likely to be, and if that someone, or the corporate media, has a vested interest in scaring you and your members of Parliament shitless enough to parting with those gazillions, then I advise you to doubt, very much, the scare story you’re being told. It’s likely to be crap.

Act — the shameful truth about my part in its birth, and a parent’s lack of tears for its unlamentable death

I’m watching the self-destruction of the Act Party with a certain amount of parental interest. You see, according to Derek Quigley, its official co-founder, I am its father.

Way back in 1992, by when the combined efforts of Muldoonism, Rogernomics and Ruthenasia had trashed the New Zealand economy and given us an unemployment rate of 11 per cent, I wrote a book charting the country’s long slow decline, which I posited began with the First Oil Shock and Britain joining the European Union in late 1973 and carried on through the massively destructive spending sprees of Muldoon and Think Big to and beyond the casino that engulfed the then-newly deregulated financial sector in 1987.

My humble book attracted the interest of people who were friends with Roger Douglas (the Lange Labour Government’s finance minister from 1984 till his sacking at the end of 1988) and Derek Quigley (a minister in Muldoon’s National Party cabinet who was sacked for criticising Think Big in 1982).

I was asked to address a public forum alongside Douglas and Quigley at the then-Regent Hotel in Auckland to talk about the miserable matters documented in my book (as an author I was expected to go on such author’s tours) and this duly happened. There were scores of people there, many of whom I recognised as the movers behind the “Backbone Club” that set out to undermine David Lange after he sacked Douglas, others people interested in politics whose names I recognised from letters to editors in the newspapers, and a smattering of others I had never heard of.

At the end of the session, after I had been able also to sell a good many copies of my book to the appreciative audience, someone suggested that those of us present meet again to discuss ways to get New Zealand out of its sorry predicament.

There was great enthusiasm for this course and within a week I found myself at the first gathering of what those present decided to call Vision 2020. Douglas was also there, as were identities such as former talkback host Gordon Dryden and many of those from the Regent forum, including the Backbone Club crowd.

I attended a few of Vision 2020’s meetings but they quickly became too political for me. I was, after all, the impartial political editor of a major national magazine, a supporter of no political party but a journalist who had to be able to maintain the confidence of politicians of every hue while reporting objectively to the public. Some of my journalistic colleagues have no problems flying their political colours high above them but I am not such a journalist. When it became apparent that the aim of Vision 2020 was to be a vehicle for the Unfinished Business of Rogernomics, I stopped attending.

Some time later, Vision 2020 became the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, a kind of lobby group to promote Rogernomics and Ruthenasia. Its Backbone Club faction was also the shadowy force behind businessman Peter Shirtcliffe’s campaign against the referendum on the MPP in 1993. When the referendum was passed, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers became the Act New Zealand politicial party, its co-founders being Derek Quigley and Roger Douglas.

In 1996, shamelessly using the MMP system its core members had opposed in 1993, Act ran a ticket for Parliament with Richard Prebble, another former Lange cabinet minister, as its leader. Prebble, Quigley and six other Act candidates were elected to Parliament, winning 6 per cent of the vote (and Prebble the Wellington Central electorate).

Every time I saw Quigley after that, he never forgot to remind me that I was the father of the Act Party thanks to that meeting in the Regent in Auckland after the publication of my book. I really like Quigley. He stood up to the bully Muldoon when few others dared, but he is a pleasant, affable man without a shred of malice. No wonder he quickly decided to get out of Parliament and Act at the 1999 election. I was sure from the genial manner in which he reminded me of Act’s fertilisation that he was genuine in ascribing it to me, though to this day I am not sure whether I should have taken it as a compliment or a damning accusation.

It’s certainly something I have not admitted publicly until today!

Act in its lifetime attracted a number of candidates and MPs of quality as well as its good share of the political harlots that gather round political parties. It attracted fraudsters like Donna Awatere Huata and naked opportunists like my former colleague Deborah Coddington, a lifetime left-winger who became a blazing convert to Rogernomics after a Ponsonby Rd lunch with Richard Prebble in the 1990s. Like Quigley, one term as an Act MP was enough for Coddington.

It did worry me, when visiting Act’s Auckland offices before, during and after the 1996 election campaign, that many of the people wandering in and out were the fantastically wealthy new-right businessmen (they were all men) who had made their fortunes by looting New Zealand and were now backing Act to loot New Zealand some more. But they drifted away in subsequent years (to Australia, Switzerland and various tax-exile countries) as Act proved impotent, taking their funding with them, and the party became a financial basket case, propped up only by the fact it managed to keep a few MPs and thus a handy source of parliamentary (public) funding to keep it going, a master of hypocrisy, ferociously milking the perks it so loudly attacked other parties for.

Act should be an irrelevance by now. After all, its current leader, Rodney Hide, came to fame by appearing on Dancing with the Stars then leaving his wife of many years for a woman not much older than his son. Straying far from its founding goal of liberalism, Act climbed into bed with the Senseless Sentencing Trust at the 2008 election, allowing one of the trust’s fruitcakes into Parliament as a result. It also resuscitated Roger Douglas, or else his Davros look-alike ghost. This was a party that once stood proudly for identifiable beliefs, but now stands for nothing beyond jerking knees and hanging on to its taxpayer-funded perks.

After the election, the Nice Mr Key, in one of his stranger moments of inclusiveness, decided to give Act two ministerial posts in return for a formal agreement to support National, thus giving this ragtag remnant of a party a position it did not deserve.

It is obvious to everyone but Cactus Kate that Act is finished. Its five present MPs – Hide, Douglas, John Boscawen, David Garrotter and the just-dumped deputy Heather Roy – are a pack of hyenas circling each other waiting to pounce for the death.

When the party dies at next year’s general election, I certainly won’t be shedding a tear, even if I am, as Derek Quigley told me so many times, Act’s father.

Climate stunt won’t stop science eventually winning over propaganda and media beat-ups

Science is not ultimately decided by judges

In one of the most bizarre stunts in the area of science imaginable, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition is taking NIWA to court to have its temperature records overturned.

The coalition, which is a group of New Zealand global warming skeptics, is alleging NIWA manipulated the country’s temperature records to promote the theory of global warming.

The allegation may or may not be true. There is growing evidence from around the world that much temperature data has been cherry-picked, manipulated, sourced from “urban heat islands” where temperatures are higher because of the heat-retaining effects of cities, and the like.

But it is absurd to try to get a court to declare what is correct science. Science is a system where hypotheses are put forward and tested by evidence that proves or disproves them. To try to have a court declare the country’s temperature is hot or cold is just a stunt.

Science is basically self-correcting because of the requirement for testing of hypotheses and the requirement for replication by others of scientific claims. No matter how wrong any scientific claim is, eventually it will prove to be wrong because of the way the evidence is continually tested.

Global warming is the media fad of the moment. Its believers say that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions are taking the world literally to hell in a handcart. These claims are based on rises in global temperatures at the minimum since around 1950 and at best since the mid-1880s. They ignore strong evidence that the world goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling.

The latter evidence shows that around 2000 years ago, at the height of imperial Rome, the world was at least as warm as today. The same evidence suggests the world cooled into the Dark Ages, then warmed to the Medieval Warm Period of 1000 years ago, when the Vikings settled Greenland and named it that because it had grass then. The same evidence suggests the world then cooled to the Little Ice Age, which was at its peak around 1750 when rivers such as the Thames froze for months each winter and New Zealand’s glaciers extended forcefully.

Personally, I suggest the scientific evidence shows the world has been warming since the Little Ice Age and that current temperatures are not unusual. I may be totally wrong but there is ample scientific evidence to back the observations I have made.

The Climategate scandal has done much to rescue climate science from the political morass into which it had fallen. The quest for funding by cash-strapped universities and the transformation of some climate scientists into politically backed political advocates had thoroughly compromised the science of climate change by the time of Climategate.

Since Climategate – and especially since the derisory whitewashes of this scandal by the elite warming establishment – many climate scientists all over the world have become less dogmatic and more open to expressing doubt about the extreme Armageddon scenarios the media and politicians had been promoting.

It’s particularly sad that the Climate Science Coaltion is continuing its vendetta against former NIWA scientist Jim Salinger, who was sacked in suspect circumstances for “talking to the media,” which was one of his jobs over the many years I interviewed him in my job as a journalist.

While Jim Salinger appeared to me to be a supporter of the man-made global warming theory, he also never hesitated to say in reply to my questions at his press conferences that there were 30 to 50 year cycles in climate and that Wellington in particular was enjoying a warm period from the 1970s to about now that would reverse and go back to the cold bad weather.

To cite him as the bad guy in a court case is even more a stunt, I say.

Science will continuously win out. Stunts such as taking NIWA to court will get nowhere and will possibly discredit science because of the political fanaticism of the litigators, just as the political fanaticism of the Armageddon-pushers collapsed in the revelations of Climategate.

There is a god

It looks like the egregious Jonathan Marshall is about to do one of his egregious hatchet jobs on none other than the egregious Micael Laws.

Rarely have two such egregious people been so made for each other.

• Update Sunday: As I predicted above, the egregious Marshall is indeed the egregious “journalist” behind this hatchet job on the egregious Micael Laws. However Marshall has obviously done a “journalistic deal” with Laws, and not published the texts of the txts, in return for Laws giving Marshall an “exclusive” on Laws seeing the woman in question only yesterday. Such is journalism.

Whoop whoop! The nice Mr Key is now moonlighting as a civil aviation investigator

According to Stuff, the prime minister has become a civil aviation investigator. He “wants answers” as to why a Pacific Blue flight took off against the rules from Queenstown close to nightfall on June 22.

“We’ll be wanting to get answers to some fairly obvious questions,” the nice Mr Key said. “It’s obviously critically important that New Zealanders feel safe when they are travelling on commercial aircraft.”

This extraordinary Key intervention reminds me of another prime minister, Rob Muldoon, who, in December 1983, so controlled the country that he ordered the removal of a party of deaf-mute Japanese climbers from Aoraki Mt Cook.

Queenstown airport is probably the most difficult in the country, far worse than Wellington. The main appropach is flown straight at a mountain, with the cockpit alarm shrieking “Terrain! Terrain! Pull Up!” until the captain (only captains are allowed to land and take off at Queenstown) turns the plane sharply to the right and the runway just before impact.

(Commercial airline passengers don’t know this, because they can only see to the sides on the approach. I learned this nasty little secret a few years back when I hitched a ride to Queenstown in the cockpit jump seat of a 737. “You should try it when it’s cloudy and you can’t even see the mountain,” the pilot told me.)

Because the airport has no radar and is surrounded by high mountains often covered in cloud, it is closed during the hours of darkness (and much of the rest of the time too, the weather is so bad). Planes are not allowed to take off later than 30 minutes before dark falls, so the pilots can see where they are going, and find the runway again if they need to make an emergency landing after taking off.

Like the startled Japanese climbers when an air force helicopter arrived by prime ministerial fiat to kidnap them from Aoraki, I am sure airline passengers everywhere will be relieved to know the nice Mr Key is on their case.

The state of “journalism” in New Zealand, part 129

Cameron Bennett, according to Television New Zealand head of “news” Anthony Flannery, has, in his 24 years with the state broadcaster, “come to embody the classic virtues of a real newsman.” Bennett’s work is exemplary, Flannery adds.

That is why he is being let go.

Little could better exemplify why TVNZ “news,” with its silly parade of ditzy airhead know-nothing 20-year-olds performing their fatuous “live crosses” outside darkened buildings, has lost not only the plot, but also hundreds of thousands of viewers, who are nowhere near as dumb as the broadcaster thinks they are.

Stop the presses. Finance Minister’s wife buying junk food for her children in the Thorndon New World

I was in the Thorndon New World this morning. Bill English’s wife was in the queue ahead of me. She had potato chips and Coca Cola in her shopping trolley. The checkout operator said with a smile words to the effect “How do you account for that?”, to which Dr English responded: “Mind your own business.” It amounts to child abuse buying junk food like that for her young ones. I bet she even takes them to McDonald’s.

Got that off my chest. Now to see how long it takes to appear on Stuff, and for David Farrar’s troll farm to start abusing me for it.

• Update 3pm: Now this fucking drivel is the the main fucking item in the national section of the fucking Herald’s website . It is also going to feature on fucking Close Up and both the TVNZ and TV3 news tonight. That’s it! That is fucking it! The New Zealand media — and New Zealand — are completely fucked. Jesus wept. I give up.

“Earth Hour” a pathetic attempt for publicity by flat-earthers who hate everything that is good about humanity

We humans are not a pestilence on this planet. We should be proud of our achievements – art and science, jet aircraft and vaccination, space travel, computers, electricity, great civilisations, the lifting from poverty of billions of people. We live in the greatest age in human history.

Yet, we are told daily by the media, by the flat-earthers of the “green” movement, by doom-mongers such as the high priests of the global warming industry, that we have destroyed our planet, that we are a plague on the Earth, that we must repent and beg forgiveness by some kind of mix of returning to the caves from which we came millennia ago while simultaneously paying trillions in indulgences to the Russian mafia. Forgive me Father Gaia, for I have flown.

This fanatical, secular religionist view of humanity as the destroyer of the planet rather than the creator of so much that is marvellous and good is highlighted by the nonsense that is “Earth Hour”.

Yes, this annual act of bizarre penance is rolling around again. At 8.30pm on Saturday March 27, we are ordered by WWF – the organisation that fabricated the IPCC’s “peer reviewed” claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 – to turn off the lights that make our nights so bright and liveable.

Last “Earth Hour,” some people who seemed almost as fanatical as the promoters of this pap boasted they had turned on every light and electrical appliance they could find as some kind of protest. That only bloats the bottom lines of our rapacious power companies.

Personally, I will ignore Earth Hour. But a reader of this blog sent me the following chain email asking that I send it to friends. I don’t send chain emails but in the spirit of rebutting the fanatics who want us returned to the Dark Ages, I am happy to publish it here. I don’t think much of its more abusive language but I support much of the sentiments:

Earth Hour bullshit comes around again.

Once again the miserabilist anti-human anti-progress greenist wankers of Earth Hour are urging the civilised world to express shame and guilt for the progress it has made in making our world a better place to live in.

And this year, 2010, this sick campaign to throw us into darkness (literally) has TV3, Toyota, TradeMe, Powershop and MoreFM to thank for their sponsorship and support in their advertising (Herald On Sunday 14/3/10 and no doubt other media).

Do these companies have no brains? Will they jump onto any pathetic bandwagon just to gain publicity or do they really believe this nonsense? If so, they deserve to fail as businesses because they are denigrating the very technology which makes their existence possible. Idiots.

I urge you to copy this and email it to as many people as possible. Boycotting all their products and services immediately might just tell these organisations where to stick their misguided propaganda and send them the message that intelligent New Zealanders don’t appreciate being preached at.

This stupidity has to stop.

Richard Dawkins shines before non-smoking audience in marvellous green Melbourne

Richard Dawkins

Queuing outside the Melbourne Town Hall last night to get in to see the eminent evolutionist Richard Dawkins, I knew at once that this was my kind of green city.

An endless procession of modern electric trams passed by in all four directions through the adjacent intersection of Swanston and Collins streets – 16 tram routes at this very corner alone in the world’s greatest tram city, and not a diesel bus in sight.

Swanston St is reserved for trams, cyclists, taxis, horse-drawn carts (!) and pedestrians, but even the scores of trams going by while we queued were outnumbered by hundreds and hundreds of cyclists on their way home from work or study.

Melbourne is as flat as a chess board and laid out like one with very wide streets, so bicycles are the fitness alternative to the marvellous trams that carry almost 200 million passengers a year on more than 30 routes that radiate as far as 25km from the CBD.

Most impressive of all in the Dawkins queue, though, was that not one person was smoking, that I could see, among the two thousand or so waiting patiently to enter the town hall.

Melbourne has New Zealand-style anti-smoking laws, which means you can’t smoke in workplaces, shops, restaurants, enclosed public places, on public transport and so on, but as in Wellington it means if you see anyone stationary in a doorway, on the footpath or at the outside tables of a cafe, they invariably will be smoking.

As Melbourne is much bigger than Wellington – hell, it has more people than all of New Zealand – it means that the city’s footpaths are polluted with thick clouds of vile tobacco smoke, puffed out by the 20 per cent of the population who still suffer this foul addiction.

So it says much about the good folk come to hear Professor Dawkins that not one of them appeared to be a smoker. Praise the lord!

The sold out session (we got tickets just in time the day they went on sale a couple of months ago) was entertaining and educative, on many levels.

Inside the cavernous, ornate town hall, the show itself began very much as any similar event would begin in New Zealand.

The Melbourne Writers’ Festival official who introduced the proceedings began with an extended statement of recognition of the indigenous people (from whom Melbourne was stolen about the same time as the Treaty was signed; and of whom I saw no sign either at the Dawkins session or anywhere else in Melbourne). A man and a woman sat on stage translating the entire event into sign language for the deaf. And the ABC man who “interviewed” Dawkins throughout the show in the form of a question and answer session made the obligatory compliments to the gay community (he said a third of his workplace was gay) to great applause.

So much like home and so welcome.

Dawkins was in Melbourne promoting his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, rather than his previous The God Delusion, which has become the atheists’ bible.

This meant he stayed very much on message, giving an erudite and very informative account of the evidence for evolution (which scientifically, is impossible to refute). As the former Oxford University professor for the public understanding of science, he is very, very good at communicating his message to the public, including the public that, this night, was, like me, very much wanting to applaud what he had to say.

Or did not say. Some in the audience seemed to be there to hear him denounce organised religion. When he failed to do so in the main part of the show, audience members queued at the microphones to ask him to do so. Dawkins is, after all, the high priest of atheism and is promoted wherever he goes as “Darwin’s Pitbull.”

He was, as befits such a respected academic, considered in his responses to such leading questions. Some deeply religious scientists believed in evolution, he stated. He took issue with those who believed God made the Big Bang.

But back to smoking. I had an epiphany moment during question time when a blazing-eyed zealot took the mike and railed at how global warming supporters were under attack from Big Tobacco and Big Oil, who were, the zealot said, funding “creationists” to denigrate climate scientists.

Huge cheers erupted from the audience at this man’s fulminations, much like the cheers that erupted from the assembled throngs at Copenhagen in December when the Venezuelan madman, Hugo Chavez, denounced the capitalist economic system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty in the past 100 years.

I was so surprised to learn of this extraordinary conspiracy between Big Oil, Big Tobacco, creationists and climate skeptics that I can’t quite remember what Dawkins said in response (let alone work out what it had to do with Dawkins), but I think he said something about Sarah Palin.

Moments later, however, much became clear to me. Until that moment, I had noticed from time to time that many militant global warming activists were also militant atheists who supported the Gaia religion. I suddenly recalled from the queue to get in to this fascinating event that none of the attendees smoked, despite 20 per cent of Australians still being addicted to tobacco, meaning that, statistically with such a large number of people, at least a fifth of them should be smoking during the long wait to enter. That none were not spoke volumes.

I have nothing against non-smokers. I am the most militant anti-smoker you will ever meet. I want to see all public use of tobacco banned. A smoker’s “right” to smoke ends at my nose. As far as I am concerned, if someone wants to smoke, then it should be confined to the privacy of their home.

What suddenly became blindingly clear to me last night in that zealot’s rant to Professor Dawkins was that the non-smoking habits of many of the people in the audience was likely to be based on their underlying beliefs about Big Tobacco’s apparent part in a conspiracy to undermine their secular religion, rather than any distaste for tobacco because of its inherent filth and stench.

I wondered momentarily if most of them smoked dope in the privacy of their homes, dope being clean and green, as we New Zealanders are told every day. And not controlled by Big Business.

I feel a thesis coming on here.

• Update March 9: More tickets have become available to hear Richard Dawkins in Wellington tomorrow (Wednesday March 10) at 6.30pm as part of Writers and Readers Week. Tickets originally sold out when they went on sale last November. The venue has been moved from the Town Hall to the Michael Fowler centre to make more room.

GST rise will have no real effect. Really. Business effectively absorbs GST as a business cost

The political debate and the public anxiety over the proposed increase in the rate of GST to 15 per cent is misguided.

Such a rise in GST will have little or no effect on the prices of goods especially but also many services.

This is because virtually all goods and many services in New Zealand are sold at prices that normally end in .99c or suchlike. Something costs $1.99 or $199.99, with the price set that way to attract custom.

GST at this kind of margin is basically absorbed by businesses as one of the costs of doing trade.

A rise in GST to 15 per cent will not suddenly see the price of something rise from 99c to $1.02.

Just as when GST rose from 10 per cent to 12.5 per cent in 1989, there would be no noticable change in retail prices should this proposed rise happen, but the government would get a measurable increase in revenue. That could be used to bring us even more quickly back to the budget surplus that for the decade until the global financial crisis reduced our public debt to among the lowest in the OECD, where it still remains, by the way.

I am a very strong opponent of reducing GST, abolishing it, or of removing it from such items as food.

My opposition is from the same observations that cause me to believe a small rise in GST will have little effect on consumers — because of the way business price their products, prices would not fall at all were GST abolished or removed from foodstuffs or other products.

GST is effectively a hidden tax absorbed into the selling price, not an American-style sales tax added on to the selling price. Most New Zealand retail prices are GST inclusive, not a shelf price that GST is added to at the cash register as in the US.

This means, for example, that steak which now sells for $14.99 a kg including GST (and might cost $17.99 a kg next week and $13.99 a kg the week after at the present GST rate) would cost exactly the same if it no longer attracted GST. That is how business works. To the other extreme — domestic air fares. They are sold at such prices as $49 to wherever. That would not become $49.28.

It’s also why I counsel everyone not to rush into any “beat the GST rise” sale. You won’t save anything. If anything, retailers will pad their prices to take advantage of consumers being fooled into thinking they will save some money by buying before the GST rise.

Every retailer in the country ran “beat the GST” sales before GST was introduced in 1986 and they made a killing from it. The prices of most consumer goods have actually fallen since then, many in actual dollars as well as in real terms for many products.

Australia does not impose GST on some basic food products but there is no obvious difference in their prices and those of similar products subject to GST. Having exemptions simply makes it more expensive to administer the tax system.

New Zealand introduced GST as a major tax reform. It was in return for abolishing often punitive sales taxes on many consumer goods, and in return for reducing the top marginal income tax rate, which at the time was 66c in the dollar.

The most important cost for many New Zealanders is the interest rate on their home mortgage — and that is one of the very few products that are not subject to GST. For New Zealanders who rent, there is no GST on home rentals.

This is a debate that we won’t even remember having even one week after a rise in GST.