This afternoon I was among the throng at Athfield Architects’ sunwashed village layered as a maze between Amritsar St and Onslow Rd. We were expressing our thanks for the delight Sir Ian had added to our lives.

I’ll post a link to today’s drone video when it is available. Look at it just to see the village. For me an  inspiring thing about that village has always been the sense of freedom created by the absence of railings and other safety ninny construction. Though many kids grow up there, they can run around and practice courage over the risk of falling, as if we were still the country that created Ath.

He knew his time was limited, so he’s been stuffing it with action. Before Christmas Ath and I politely jockeyed for time in the saddle of our new jointly owned tractor. There was little pretence from either of us about necessity, or mere usefulness. His hours mowing, slashing gorse, opening pathways, excavating and and generally glorying in the combined power of diesel and hydraulics were because he remained a boy. Powerful machinery is  for joyful play.

A friend predicted funeral references to John Donne’s poetic description of our collective loss as each life is lost to our community – ‘no man is an island…’ (see at the foot). In the event no one did use that piece. Tom Scott as MC masterfully captured the irreverent commemorative tone Ath would have wanted.

But I’ve long wanted to dispute the Donne thesis. Maybe I’ve autistic symptoms,  but I’ve never heard it without wanting to argue the point, from my first exposure as a school pupil.

Ath’s death diminishes our community, and the life wealth of each of us. But Donne’s main point was different. He was asserting social relativism, claiming that everyone is valuable.

That I do not feel and it is patently untrue. There are many who make no net contribution and some whose departure is a gain for all. Saying that every death diminishes us is to derogate from the worth of those who are genuinely irreplaceable.

The world will no doubt somewhere see the like of Ath again but I do not expect to see that rarity. He is a promontory lost, not a totara falling in a remote forest.

“No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), ‘Meditation’, XVII

In an elegant 13-page decision Justice Joe Williams  applies the electricity transmission pricing methodology to the North Auckland and Northland (NAaN) network. It might yet be followed by a turgid Court of Appeal 100-pager.

Only a few lawyers will get to appreciate the beautiful legal prose. But many more could be interested in the revolutionary kicker at the foot of the decision.

The Court document records the “solicitors” on record in this case as being none other than Thorndon and Shortland Chambers.

As far as I am aware there are no firms with those names. They are of course collations (I dare not use the technical description of partnership, or practical description of ‘firm’) of lawyers who operate from the same premises, market a collective brand, and otherwise share expenses and interests in much the same way as do ‘eat what you kill’ law firms.

But barristers have clung to the anti-competitive rules that prohibit practicing in collectives, and stop clients contracting directly with them. Instead unwilling clients are forced into countless artificial contracts. They must expensively channel their ‘instructions’ to barristers through cooperative ‘post-box’ solicitors.

Have the Courts recovered their common law mojo, and seized back the power to regulate those granted audience before them (admitted lawyers)? Has Williams J decided to end the farcical ‘direct intervention’ rule, by approving barristers’ chambers as de facto solicitors firms for the purposes of the rule?

I fear not. More likely this is accidental – the felicitous outcome of a judge’s clerk drafting the way he or she has seen things actually working, without seeing the precious historical toes thereby trod.

But the oddity may attract attention nevertheless to the elegance of an arcane judgment.

Mike Yardley in Stuff nails the idiocy that even Judith Collins did not eliminate from the Ministry of Justice’s fiddling with criminal process.

Michelle Smith’s powerful letter to The Press on Saturday underscores the outright stupidity of the overcooked restorative-justice revolution that has been unleashed on our courts.

In this case, her loved one, Terrence Martin Smith, died after being doused with petrol and set alight. How unbelievably insulting to presume the victim’s family would wish to rendezvous over tea and biscuits with the killers, ahead of sentencing.

At the other end of the spectrum, The Press reported the case of the Rolleston scooter rider who last month pleaded guilty to intentionally exposing his genitals to passing women.

The female complainant made it patently clear she didn’t want to meet the offender, yet sentencing still had to be delayed for a month.

This is so inquiries can again be formally made about convening a conference, even though the woman has clearly seen more than enough of the individual.

Politicians, not the judges, deserve most of the blame for the continuing contempt of recent year reforms, for victims.

Councils throughout New Zealand depend on the accidents of election or employment of a few self sacrificing competent people to carry the busloads of nodding passengers elected every three years. It is clear that size of local government unit is no predictor of overall competence or efficiency. A good mayor, or deputy, or CEO can make a council look adequate, or even good.

John Roughan’s Saturday Herald opinion piece reports on part of a day following Auckland’s Cr Cathy Casey.

He nails it in the last paragraph and leaves us to imagine the rest of the day –

Long ago when I covered councils, elected members took time out from real jobs. These days they need to be full-time to read the volume of paper produced for them, let alone spend most of every day in meetings. If the vacuous, mind-numbing verbiage they are fed is a terrible waste, imagine the cost of writing it? Up close it’s worse than I thought.

Why do many business people think that local government will improve by amalgamating units. They would not (won’t) tolerate the days spent reading the trite drivel Councillors are fed, or listening to the predictable whines of those who hate change in every sphere.  So why is the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, and the Property Council so indifferent to throwing their weight behind the mayors willing to talk about changes that would actually change the kind of people who’d be prepared to do the job?

On The Nation on 15 November, I speculated that people might trade privacy for perceived security more readily than the commentariat think. I suspect that privacy is a recent pre-occupation of academics and lawyers because it gives them a new field in which to boss people (particularly business people) whether or not the public in whose name they claim to act would actually make the same choices if they knew the costs.

Among the reasons for that suspicion is the great mismatch between what people tell pollsters they worry about, and how most of us act. Though a few paranoids worry intensely, most ordinary people I know joke about surveillance, and allow collection of data by business without serious second thoughts. We are probably a bit more anxious about government data collection, perhaps because of well-founded suspicion that governments are much more likely than businesses to misuse date against us.

I thought I should see if there has been much recent  investigation of the topic. As it happens, there has. November 12 saw the release of a PEW survey reported here.

Daniel Solove’s summarised comment on it is here, and here.

I disagree with Solove only on emphasis and prescription, not the description of the issues.  I think he over-estimates the public anxiety about data collection per se, and is on stronger ground when worrying about misuse of it. In other words, intuitively when we trust the collectors to be only after us commercially, we are less genuinely worried than when we think data might be put to use by a coercive state, to persecute us, or to discriminate, or to permit covert or overt harassment.

To me it is idle to think that a democratic government will not be forced by public concern to collect as much information as is reasonably possible to prevent domestic terrorist attacks. That will ensue, lawfully or not, whatever the law says nominallly. Accordingly I would prefer to focus effort more on the achievable constraints on the holding of surveillance information, than on holding back the full tide of data collection.

As I said on Saturday, when you grow up in a small community, you assume general knowledge about you from most people you meet. Sometimes it would be great to know that it was better informed than gossip.  And we need to remember that we might be the first civilisation attempting to maintain mutual civility without a near universal belief that God, or angels, or gods, or other supernatural beings were monitoring and potentially holding us accountable for everything we’ve thought, let alone everything we do.

As a confirmed worrier about the likelihood of malign uses of power by the state, I suggest the following priorities:

a) first to strengthen the safeguards against surveillance data being unnecesarily accessible to politicians, to use against political enemies;

b) secondly to strengthen neutral  oversight of the  agencies that collect it, to ensure that they do not become septic independent centres of potential oppression and threat to democratic leadership (Hoover’s FBI);

c) thirdly, to ensure that transparency is general, to reduce the risks of improper privileged use of data collected by the state. the people should know most of what the state knows, if they wish, through open registers;

d) refining the Official Information Act to make it more reliably self enforcing (because the Ombudsmen are useless) but on the other hand increasing protection of communication that will be better if it is privileged, to stem the trend toward non-recorded communication and other devices to avoid the law;

e) making rights to correct more reliable;

f) beefing up protections against threats to longstanding free speech rights, including by ruling out the ‘right to be forgotten’,

g) reforming defamation law.

TV 3’s The Nation  on 15 and 16 November screened significant interviews, with the PM,  Att. Gen Chris Finlayson, and defense expert Dr David Kilcullen.  As a panellist I wanted to ask supplementary questions more than to comment despite perceptive interviewing from Paddy Gower and Lisa Owen. Each interview could have prompted an entire hour’s discussion.

Serious people will want more on Kilcullen’s repeated references to steps needed instead of the containment  policy implicit in the western ‘no boots on the ground’ policy that depends on drones and air support for Kurds. John Key was asked about the ‘green on blue’ attack risk while we train the local fighters our strategy will depend on, but did not pretend there were as many answers as there are questions.

Some of  Kilcullen’s explanations are here, in the Australian of 1 November.

“This conflict will not be over quickly or cleanly. On the contrary: it is, and will be, a multi-generational struggle against an implacable enemy, and the violence we’re dealing with in the Middle East and Africa is not some unfortunate aberration — it’s the new normal.”

Kilcullen highlights the risks from our internal responses (if the West fails to destroy the caliphate’s appeal to its own citizens):

“…if we fail to face the threat where it is today — primarily overseas — we’ll suffer the consequences at home. This isn’t to rehash some Cold War domino theory in which we “fight them there or we’ll fight them here”. It’s just to recognise the reality that a purely isolationist, defensive, policing strategy — protecting ourselves at home rather than seeking to defeat terrorism abroad — ultimately means the end of society as we know it. Mass surveillance, secret police, a national-security state, guards on every gate, a garrison society: that’s what a “defensive” strategy actually entails.”

He seems to be warning against the current mealy-mouthed approach to Islam within our countries, pretending that the conservative Islamic leaders, their schools and their doctrine are part of the solution, instead of recognising that they are fuel for the problem:

“Western governments have been their own worst enemies here: the tendency to treat Muslim communities as a special case, to think that “mainstream” society can deal with “the Muslim community” (whatever that is) only through self-appointed, often conservative, authoritarian elders and notables, is to deny people the individual freedoms that belong to them, by right, as members of our society while absolving them from the responsibilities that go with those freedoms.

It’s to set up an unelected, often illiberal intermediary between our wider society and the idealistic, motivated young people who deserve — and from whom society has a right to expect— the same rights and responsibilities as anyone else. So the right strategy for dealing with 11/3/2014 The West’s failed counter-terrorism strategy requires a complete rethink domestic radicalisation is more freedom, not less — but with it must come more individual accountability.

We badly need more discussion of this, facing up to the lie that Islam is a religion of peace. It is no more peaceful than the religion that drove the Crusaders. The Protestant division between church and state,  and secularisation after the Enlightenment defeated the Popes, has eventually leached out that religious power in most of the West.

There has been no Islamic equivalent. I want to know how Dr Kilcullen would foster a similar change among the young people of pious Islam. It has a closed culture and kills apostates precisely to avoid that risk.

This afternoon I will present to a group of lawyers who’ve been sold a seminar session that knocks off their full 10 points worth of annual Continuing Professional Development in one day.

I hope some will be interested in policy because I’m struggling to see how I can make a bare legislation update interesting, to people there under compulsion, not intellectual or professional curiousity.

With luck I’ll be drawn into argument over what the courts are telling us on directors.

We’re all now floundering without a compass in the fog of company law. Confused legislation, and conflicting judicial approaches mean lawyers can’t confidently tell directors what is left of the ‘business judgment’ rule. It was not complicated in the recent past. It said that judges should not second guess business decisions in the absence of evidence of bad faith or gross negligence.

That was then. Now directors plow shareholders’ millions into buying legal ‘sign-offs’. Subjecting business decisions to lawyer reassurance brings lawyers into the heart of hundreds of businesses that would rarely have talked to a lawyer 3 decades ago. Yet the Lombard case showed that clean sign offs may not be enough.

Despite the high profile cases, not many directors have been held liable. Even fewer have had to pay material sums. But being sued is immensely costly and outcomes are unpredictable. Directors have heard that D & O policies may be invalidated, or not cover legal costs.

So director liability cases sow disproportionate fear. They justify universal investment in rituals of overt diligence to placate the unpredictable judges.  Sign-offs are bought at the cost of shareholders, not the directors. So director liability law is profitable for lawyers and insurers.  Yet the apparent ‘failure’ of prosecutions, and the absence of any New Zealand equivalent to the multiple century ‘die in jail’ sentencing we read about in other jurisdictions lead to deep disappointment from lay people. Court cases which may be a crippling waste of money and initiative can still  fail to build investor confidence. The rarity of useful recovery of investor money in court cases makes them seem farcical to investors who’ve been lead to expect more than law can deliver.

Chapman Tripp and Russell McVeagh have recently turned their fog lights into that fog. Chapman Tripp congratulates Parliament for passing something that was not as stupid as first introduced. Russell McVeagh draws atttention to an Australian court decision that highlights how much (probably unintentional) risk our directors face from recent poorly written reform, which Australian directors are now better protected from.

Jim Farmer QC reflects on his experience defending the Lombard directors. He penetrates further than most commentary, though without showing much more than silhouttes. He draws on the respectable scholarship that our courts ought to discuss, but have not..

Farmer sets the scene referring to the constant and ludicrous cry of the regulators for

…” shorter and simpler offer documents”.

He goes on:

“Having defended the directors of Lombard in their unsuccessful appeals in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court (except as to sentence in the latter), I find that objective and, generally, the cry for less time on compliance one that has a major disconnect with the views of the Judges, which can be broadly summarised as a need for more, not less, detail.  

This may be the inevitable outcome of the statutory provision in the Securities Act that empowers the Court to find a statement misleading and untrue by omission but it is also a reflection of the way in which Judges, who seldom have practical commercial or board experience themselves, interpret that provision.  While there is invariably judicial denial that hindsight is being applied, the fact of a corporate collapse and the sense that someone within the company must be to blame – rather than external events beyond the company’s control – puts directors at risk when the offer documents are later subjected to close judicial scrutiny.”

The paper helpfully traverses the origins of company law, and the unique features that made it a key to the Anglo-sphere leaving competing economies behind. But curiously it does not highlight the key protection created by the classical era judges which modern legislators and judges have discarded. Perhaps even the best of the current judges and commentators do not remember what we’ve dumped, if  Farmer’s paper is a guide.  He does not highlight the importance of losing the distinction between dishonesty on the one hand, and foolishness or carelessness on the other. The law once assured ‘stakeholders’ it would not forgive directors who were dishonest, or who feathered their own nests at the expense of the company, but on the other hand (with some anomalous exceptions) it broadly told stakeholders not to come crying over spilt milk for losses from poor choice of directors, including if they were incompetent or negligent.

Farmer refers to

..”the famous case of Re City Equitable Fire Insurance Company in the English Court of Appeal in 1925 where it was allowed that directors’ duties had to be viewed, first, in the context of the particular business carried on by the company and, secondly, the manner in which the work of the company was distributed between the directors and management.  The Court also said that regard should be had to the fact that directors’ duties were of an intermittent or part-time nature to be performed at periodical board and board sub-committee meetings.”

He calls on judges to revive that kind of balancing assessment.

I think another approach is more likely to bear fruit. Judges already think they are balancing risks, where the legislation allows.Some show pride in decisions that require directors to continually ‘up their game’. They think they are doing God’s work in making it risky for people to take on directorships who can’t penetrate the mysteries of modern compliance accounting. They feel particular virtue in discouraging sleeping directors, and house-hold name appointments.

I’ve seen no evidence that any modern judge or legislator has taken into account the highly respectable scholarship that suggests that directors should be sleeping stewards,  lest they have a dog, and bark as well. That view of proper directorship is particularly important to justify the near universal pattern in small companies, where it would be absurd for directors to try continually to follow the activity of their general manager. Directors are often appointed solely as a probity backstop. They do their job well if they  come awake only when an agency risk is likely to materialise (the risk of management diverting company resources to their own benefit) or when it is time to change management.

Instead some judges, too many journalists and most regulators (many of them of the lawyer/cleric persuasion) may take at face value much of the voluminous ‘governance’ dogma. It seems designed to make out of directing a full time, licenced craft and mystery. It requires directors to set strategy, to oversee accounting and other compliance activity, to second guess and engage with management in myriad ways.  For many companies and investors that may now be their reasonable expectation. But that  hands on governor model has not been shown to be value adding.  It has no more empirical research foundation than ‘angels on the head of a pin’ theology.

When invited to consider whether  extra liability and diligence is efficient our judges/regulators have no tools for considering the question. Several I’ve discussed this with are puzzled by the argument that directors will demand part or, or much of the return that should be going to shareholders, if they face the asymmetric risk (having to reimburse for losses, but not receiving the gains of efficiently risky decision-making).  They understand that having to compensate shareholders (or creditors) for risk decisions necessarily made under the uncertainties of time pressure, inadequate information, and competing priorities, could be problematic, but they miss completely the significance of not sharing in the upside of such decisions that prove profitable. The director’s incentives when faced with asymmetric risk are to over-invest in precautions, especially when the cost can all fall to the account of the company (shareholders).

So a  key need is to re-establish for the clerical lawyer class the moral/economic  underpinning of classically efficient rules, such as caveat emptor, and the ‘business judgment’ rule.

Farmer’s piece heads in the right direction. But it should have a simple concluding paragraph.  There is no point in  calling for ‘balance’ from judges un-equipped to work through the factors. So we’d be better to revert to the bright-line rules of more simple days (simple rules for a complex world).

In brief:

1. Limited liability is not a privilege – it is efficient standard form contracting for allocation of the inevitable risks of loss in a business world where we know, and want, to allow for an infinite range of decision modes, ranging from simple intuition, to the most highly systematic and researched decision – making.
2. director liability should be swift and ruthless for dishonesty. Current law is disgracefully slow, and expensive in maintaining the right levels of risk for dishonesty;
3. There may be a category of negligence so wanton that it would be efficient to characterise it as deemed breach of the duty of good faith (call it recklessness as to the outcome for others).
4. But otherwise shareholders accept the consequences of mistakes in the selection of directors, and directors honest mistakes or derelictions, as just one species of the risks of investment, among all the much bigger ones they accept when gambling on the unknown future;
5. More specific ex ante allocations of risk can be matters of contract (including the Articles or constitution of the company) which can vary for the circumstances of each company.

How refreshing to see Cr Lester willing to reject a fun police role for the Council. The numbers who’ve hurt themselves on the wonderful swings that appear from time to time in the Town Belt near our home are a tiny fraction of the people who’ve thrilled themselves.

The swings are so much more spectacular than anything people will have experienced in the boring ‘play grounds’ with their dumbed down gear. I wonder if people are becoming more susceptible to panic and letting go of these ropes precisely because they are so unfamiliar with exposure.

James Delingpole’s speculates on this indirectly in his Spectator comments  on his kids learning from living in the country, including the use of  fire arms. Thanks to Whale Oil for the link.

A  good reason for Wellington fighting the uber-city like the plague, is the opportunity it creates for well meaning fools to write their wish lists into the consequent brave new super city single plan. Fran Wilde’s team, and the LGC have urged the opportunity to replace multiple plans (effectively current regulatory competition) with a shiny new unitary plan, as a reason to ape Auckland’s move to a super-city.

The Proposed Auckland Unitary Plan has many elements calculated to stop spontaneous intensification of the leafy inner suburbs, and to force new home buyers into the distant suburbs.

And even out there, the planners’ economic ignorance is at work. They’ve decided to handicap medium and large scale development. Planners and nimbys having broken the market, they then double the damage with patches over the consequences of their market vandalism.

Italics below are quoted from the 7000 pages of the draft plan:

The Unitary Plan requires 10% of all developments greater than 15 units or sections to be made affordable and be held in perpetuity with Council approval being required on resale/re-occupation. Social housing providers are excluded.

Part 3, Chapter H, section 6.6.1.1 says:

Where a new development within the RUB contains more than 15 dwellings or involves the creation of more than 15 vacant sites, at least 10 per cent of the total number of dwellings or vacant sites within the development must be retained affordable housing. Where a framework plan applies, this requirement applies to the entire framework plan area.

Part 3, Chapter H, section 6.6.1.3 says:

1. Except for retained affordable housing provided by a community housing provider, retained affordable housing must have a legally enforceable retention mechanism, including, but not limited to, a covenant supported by a memorandum of encumbrance registered on the certificate of title or consent notice under the RMA, that:

 a. limits rent or re-sale (including a future dwelling in the case of a vacant site subdivision) to an occupier who is approved by the council as meeting the eligibility criteria below, or

b. limits resale to a community housing provider approved by the council, or

 c. limits rent and resale to a formula that ensures that the dwelling remains affordable into the long term, including a future dwelling in the case of vacant site subdivision, and

 d. provides for monitoring of the terms of the covenant or consent notice and the process should those terms be breached including where occupiers have defaulted on the mortgage and lenders seek to recover their interests in the property, and

 e. is legally enforceable by the council in perpetuity.

 Part 3, Chapter H, section 6.6.1.4.2 says:

 To be eligible for retained affordable housing:

 a. at least one member of the household must be and will remain a New Zealand resident or citizen

 b. at least one member of the household at the time of the application to council must be employed on at least a part-time basis (more than 20 hours a week) with an employer within Auckland

 c. the property must be used exclusively as the household’s primary residence

 d. households that seek to purchase dwellings must have sufficient assets to provide the required deposit

 e. Households must have an income of between 80 and 120 per cent of the regional median household income.

The damage is not only from the direct ‘confiscation’ disincentives to large development. Think of the political dynamics of the consent process when developers face neighbours who not only prefer the status quo, but also fear the impact of ‘social housing’ in every significant development, however socially and economically disastrous it proves to be. The developer hands over to the Council in perpetuity the power to inflict the city’s scum as neighbours on the full paying young families. Suck that up you evil would-be providers of housing. It may be entirely unfair to  describe ‘affordable’ housing beneficiaries like that, but people will take the precautionary approach of fearing the worst. They have no reason to trust Council reassurances in planning matters.

So here is a succinct summary of what should guide the response to the affordable housing challenge.

There has been surprisingly little attention paid to the Court’s decision last Friday not “to order that [a gang murderer] serve a life sentence without parole” despite the judge’s admission that she was “required [by the three strikes law] to order that [he] serve that life sentence without parole” unless it would be manifestly unjust.

She then converted that requirement to find manifest injustice  into the standard pre-three strikes judicial quibbling about disproportionality. With breathtaking ease she slid past a previous manslaughter to focus on the ‘relatively minor’ nature of the offences that triggered the three strikes law application, managing to take into account also the ‘signs that you wish to be more pro-social as noted in the presentence report’ .

She completely turns on its head the law’s intent that offenders get greater certainty about the consequences of offending, noting that the murderer would not have known at the time of the earlier offences of the three strikes certainty.

Judicial naivete at its worst. It is only by applying the law, that offfenders believe that it will be applied. The most clear lesson  from the experience where three strikes certainty was followed by dramatic reductions in offending, was that pitiless certainty finally sent the message to offenders that they could no longer gamble on meeting soft judges and gullible parole boards.

Sensible Sentencing is correct to highlight this judgment in their Judge the Judges website.  But the judge concerned is orthodox.  Judges generally resist punishment as a legitimate and sufficient purpose of sentencing. With Parliamentary sanction they have collectively warped criminal law from doing justice on behalf of victims and the innocent, into a primary role of therapy for the criminological needs of offenders. They do not respect the common sense intuitions of ordinary people. They resent the demand for retributive, incapacitating and deterrent punishment. To them only rehabilitative objectives are truly noble.

Parliament is complicit in this. The 2002 codification of sentencing principles was deliberately opaque. It tells judges contradictory things because the politicians wanted to be able to legislate incompatible slogans. They know that people hear differentially, so that they recall only the slogans they wanted to hear, and do not remember that the same politician also legislated the opposites. Politicians fail to legislate priority ranking to the competing considerations in sentencing partly because the debate on priorities would reveal how far their values are from those of most voters.  Hiding from voters in this area is abetted by shared values with the media. We saw recently how bewildered the media were by the public’s indifference to the Dirty Politics beat up. They are even further from understanding ordinary peoples’ dislike of elite views on criminal justice.

Within the club the insiders deride voter opinions. So all parties collude to avoid open Parliamentary debates where that would become evident to voters.  Democracy relies on consensus on many such compromises, though it is reprehensible in this area.

So MPs consciously leave it to the judiciary to reconcile sentencing contradictions unaided by legislative ranking. The judges are not unhappy, because they do not want the legislators to straitjacket them either. They have more power with contradictory law. They deliberately ignore law they do not like in any event, such as the clear legislative  instruction to deliver maximum sentences for the worst cases. I cannot recall any maximum sentences for serious crime, ever.

What happens in Parliament is a reflection of the pressures of democracy, plus the normal ‘tribal identification/in-group/out-group’ mechanism among ruling cliques. Politicians want to pass law that looks as if they respect the overwhelming public sentiment. So they put words into law that appear to respect it. But most of them also wish to maintain respectable membership of the insider club. That means they must flash elite class badges at key times. The simple way is to espouse values that are different from and ‘superior to’ common values.

For several generations criminal justice has been one of those intellectual ‘lek’ areas, where the elite can boom their superior compassion to each other by ritually trampling on ordinary peoples’ instincts about justice, retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. I studied the criminological literature in which insiders reassure each other of a research foundation to their superior morality and intellects. It is flimsy bullshit. But they sincerely believe it. Because they want to, and need to.

Judges do too. That is how they feel superior to to their more effective predecessors, from periods in which our criminal justice was much more successful in protecting the innocent and upholding norms of civility. But because humans have a perverse application of the common ‘investment fallacy’ – that things are worth what has been invested in them, not what they will deliver in returns, we tend towards sacrifice in all faith based or religious behaviour. So judges and liberal politicians feel that the costs to avoidable victims, of the elite’s’ parades of  ‘compassion’, are the sacrificial price borne by ‘the community’ for holding to the higher values of the anointed. The greater the sacrifice, the more it demonstrates the anointeds’ superior virtue.

It helps that the sacrifice is largely borne by others, outside the leafy suburbs and safe offices of those making the law.