In 2009 I investigated the background to the Police use of a LAV in the Molenaar siege, after debate about its constitutional propriety.  That reminded me that in a "tidy mind" fit 20 years ago our naive leaders deprived ourselves of a long tested and effective law that could be a vital part of suppressing the kind of wild destructive glee now on show in the UK.

We lost the Riot Act. That Act was simple and effective. Essentially it said, you are now warned that if you do not disperse and cease threatening riot, normal rules governing your rights to be in the street, and the state's relationhip with you are suspended, and you may be shot.

We no longer have that capacity.

 It should be reinstated, in all its simplicity, updated only to allow for modern methods of communicating the message, so that Twitter, Facebook, radio, TV could be used as well as the Mayor reading the proclamation to the citizenry.

Because the sight of David Cameron vowing to be tough just discredits authority. It means nothing while he is at the same time ruling out simple effective measures, like making it plain that the authorities will not be straitjacketed in responding to riot with at least the same level of force.

Even more simple for us, would be to restore to New Zealanders the right  only  lost in 1980, to protect their own property by force if necessary. The right of self defence is now restricted to yourself and others, not property.

John Ansell is angry about the Maorification of Everything. He hates the hypocrisy of  self-censorship, and what he regards as the cowardice of the Dominion Post, that refused to run an ACT ad. John says it had 40 statements of truth and no untruths.

John deserves support, even from those who do not agree with what he says, because when truth-telling is punishable by ostracism we all lose.

But, as one of our best ad-men ever, he might understand that mis-chosen words can make a huge difference between public support and failure.

His target is right (I think) but he's misdescribed it.

 I respect blunt courage. I want the truth told.

But in attacking "maorification" he does not engage me, or speak any truth for me, or even communicate clearly.  “Maorification” is not a self evident criticism.

 I welcome some “maorification”. I'd like to see more of it. I've blogged on this many times.

Smart Maori kids realise how easily  suckered are guilt ridden Pakeha.. But they’re tempted into the wrong game. They’ve traded the simple clear classical property rights of the Treaty for political power, co-guardianships and rights to veto or hold out for ransom money. Maori have accepted rights to be negative, to force their neighbours to pretend respect to get permissions. But they’ve lost the real power, to the full exclusive and undisturbed possession and use of their land.

They accept the pretended respect for custom by holding trials with marae protocol, but accept that as a substitute for genuine cultural respect. Our stupid law of name suppression and secrecy and laws about recompense would have been dumped if there was genuine respect for the commonsense of Maori tradition. Criminal law was based around public and family shame – whakaama. How can that survive in the face of the “leave it to us” secrecy of the justice and welfare insiders.

I want Maori to be more assertive of traditional values. I want them to stand up against the nanny lawyers in defence of courage, being contemptuous of systems that accept pathetic excuses for hurting others. What about defending muru, and utu?

 The real Treaty  focussed on what we would share for the future. As Hobson said 170 years ago, “he iwi tahi tatou” now we are one people. He summarised the real Treaty. That was inconvenient to those who want a lever to power without having to persuade, so it has been supplanted. It is not good for New Zealand.

A genuine respect for our heritage, and a genuine desire to protect innocent people from criminals, both maori and pakeha, would see rapid 'maorification' of criminal justice – with no apologies for renewed centrality to utu (punishment or retribution), whakaama (shame) and muru (compensation, including from the families of offenders).

I'm delighted by the maorification of our defense forces. I'm grateful that we are protected by so many people exhibiting Maori valour. I like the fact that in the army at least machismo is still respectable. The PC crowd are too scared of causing cultural offence to try to stamp out the Maori warrior inheritance.

Similarly, I like the licence that the Maori broadcasters have to be non-PC, and to reflect us as New Zealanders in ways that the pussies and ignorami of main stream media could not do even if they had the courage. As an MP I appreciated Maori broadcasters' wish to hear directly from those they thought they might disagree with. I welcomed their willlingness to find things on which we could agree.  I enjoy Julian Wilcox on Native Affairs more than any other current affairs interviewing.

 So I'm happy to see our culture becoming more maori, if that occurs because we, individually and as families are persuaded or attracted to move in that direction by its inherent appeal or warmth or merits.  

What I object to is the use of the levers of the state, the perversion of our constitution  to promote and to enforce such moves. I object to the cynical or naive drive to replace colour-blind law, and equal vote democracy, with the privileges of political power by inheritance.

 I hate what it does to both sides to racialise appointments. Throughout the country we dumbly accept political privilege and token power spots for often incompetent and corrupt “representatives” of a parasitic brown elite.

Jayne Clifton in the Listener mocks those who worry about such things. To get there she has to pretend we have no constitution. She knows better. She would not have the freedom to mock if she was not on a vessel paid for in the blood of those who thought principles and fine distinctions mattered. She seems to want to be a non-paying passenger on that vessel.

I will fight the subordination of our ideals (for a secular egalitarian/meritocratic democracy) to the cynicism of power negotiated among the elites of competing races. But not under a banner that decries "maorification".  It smells of a dislike I cannot share.

It is racialisation I'm against, not maorification. I think relatively few New Zealanders want to be adversarial to each other on race grounds. But we are being steered into it. We just object  to political privilege for Maori being stuffed down our throats using our money and tolerance.

Several months ago I posted on the New York Times' amazement at "wonderfully puzzling" declines in US crime rates.  When "everyone knows" that increases in poverty force people into crime, why is US crime is falling steeply, they asked.  Why is robbery, for example, falling even while unemployment increases and unemployment insurance runs out?  

In fact that link between unemployment and crime that "everyone knows" is simply not established by the facts. I find it hard to accept myself.  I'm sure most of us have ourselves got up to no good more when idle, than when busy. We know there is more crime in poor neighborhoods than in affluent suburbs.  So we assume that if a community becomes more prosperous, crime rates will go down, and if incomes go down, crime rates go up.

The assumption is treated as axiomatic in an interesting post on the Standard. It throws some light on the common claim that crime rates are falling. But the assumption in the first paragraph is probably false.

Police Minister Judith Collins’ announcement that crime dropped last year left more than a few people scratching their heads. The economic conditions, especially high unemployment, should mean more crime, not less. Now, we’re starting to learn the answer: procedural changes that have wiped thousands of crimes off the stats

Three years ago Prof James Q Wilson summarised for the LA Times, what was known then about the connections between poverty and crime. James Q. Wilson is  is the author of "Thinking About Crime," the  coauthor of "Crime and Human Nature" and the co-editor of "Crime: Public Policies for Crime Control." He was the key intellectual whose work underpinned the revolution in US criminal justice policy that largely preceded their huge drop in crime rates.

His book  "The Moral Sense" was influential on me when I was ACT's Justice spokesman.  In 2004 I went to talk to him in Santa Barbara. He answered my questions about three strikes and other criminal justice matters but his interests had moved on. He told me he was pre-occupied with understanding the Moslem world, working out how a liberal state might cope with a growing illiberal religion.

The LA Times piece shows he had not abandoned criminal justice policy entirely. It summarised economic studies showing that the popular assumption (connecting crime rates and poverty) is sometimes true, but not always.

For example, up to 2008 it was safe to conclude that  the US burglary rate goes up by 2 percentage points for every 1-percentage-point increase in the unemployment rate. So if the unemployment rate rises from 6 percent to 8 percent (which is about what it was in California then), the burglary rate would increase by 4 percent.  Because burglaries aren't measured accurately (some are never reported, and police vary in how they report the statistics) it's not certain that people would even notice so small an increase.

 A lot of other factors affect the crime rate as well. It often goes up when the population gets younger, and when drug abuse becomes more common. Murder rates are profoundly influenced, at least in big cities, by gang activity.

Wilson emphasized that studies don't necessarily tell us why gang activity changes, though changes in behavior can be heavily influenced by what the police do, whether gang truces have worked and whether gangs are fighting over drug and other illegal transactions.

 Such uncertainties make it hard to be sure why crime rates rise and fall:

•  In the 1960s, the US national homicide rate rose by 43 percent, even though the country was in a period of great prosperity and low unemployment.
•  The homicide rate fell in the 1980s, even as the economy was wobbling, with high interest rates and a steep rise in business bankruptcies.
•  In the 1990s, the murder rate fell by 39 percent at a time when unemployment also was declining.

So can the economy help explain fluctuations in crime?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no, says Wilson.  It would be difficult to link rising crime during the prosperous 1960s to economics.  On the other hand, a declining economy provides plausible theory to explain increases in crime during the 1990s.  Yet some rates began to drop significantly, even ahead of President Clinton's reforms in 1996. Matters become even more complicated if one goes back to the Depression of the 1930s.  There was no FBI data on crime rates at that time, but several studies of individual cities suggest that crime rates fell even though one-quarter  of all Americans were unemployed.  Why?  One reasonable hypothesis is that the Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime.

 Wilson does not mention it in "Crime and the Economy Don't Tell the Whole Story," ( Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2008) but that Depression experience was paralelled in the UK 50 years later, as some crime rates fell significantly during the bleak years of rising  unemployment when the Thatcher reforms first took effect.

One thing is reasonably sure for New Zealand. Our disgraceful crime rates are not attributable to 'Rogernomics'. The rocketing growth was noticeable in the early 1970s, shortly after publication of  "Crime in New Zealand". That book set the scene for three decades of reforms to focus our criminal justice system away from punishment, and on to therapy for the offender.

My conclusion, from all the reading and visiting and listening which was for me the greatest privilege of being an MP, was that unfounded belief in the State's power to cure criminal tendencies, and loss of focus on what the State clearly can do (punish to deter), explains more than any other factor.

On Jim Mora's Panel (Radio New Zealand) a fortnight ago I mentioned a case which higlighted the contrast between the efficiency of criminal justice in 1967 and today. A Radio New Zealand reporter told me that Convery/Cowley had been convicted and sentenced within 2 months of the murder of his five year old victim. A typical case today would take over 10 times as long.

The discussion also touched on the huge increase in crime rates since 1967.

 IIt is quite true that murder rates have fallen, since the peaks of the 1990s. Some of that fall is in line with falls in many countries overseas (not perhaps the UK). But there are significant differences for New Zealand's crime rate patterns. The most worrying is the persistence, indeed increase, of serious violent crime among young people.

Jim (and I) I got emails challenging the notion that crime is more serious today than in the past. One referred me to a 2009 Herald article by Simon Collins, stating that we'd had a steep fall in our murder rate. It cited material apparently given to Mr Collins by the Victoria University Institute of Criminology. Among other figures the article claimed that our annual murder rate from 1926 to 1970 was 6 per million people. 

 I wrote to Herald writer Simon Collins because I could not reconcile figures in his report with what I know of Justice Dept statistics.

"I'm intrigued by your piece on the murder rate. I wonder whether whoever supplied your figures decided to simplify definitions without mentioning it to you. I can understand that because some people prefer to work on culpable homicide figures (excluding traffic accidents) instead of murder, to avoid the effects of things like shifts in convictions between murder and manslaughter. Some too try to adjust for insanity killings (where there will be no conviction) attributing some relatively standard ratio to adjust the conviction figures.

But even with all those allowances I cannot see how your table figure of 1926 – 1970 = 6 murders per million of population was derived for New Zealand. Indeed if the table is for culpable homicide then it appears grossly to understate the figures for more recent periods.

The 1968 Government book "Crime in New Zealand" states (page 23) that from 1920 to 1966 105 persons were found guilty of murder, an average of 2.2 per annum. Total deaths by violence reported to the Police over 60 years up to 1966 rose from 66 per decade before the first world war to 107 in the ten years up to 1966. Note that – per decade! That is just over 10 per year. It is hard to see on any measure how the article's reported figure per million was derived.

The "Crime in New Zealand" book was the Hanan (Minister) and Robson (Secretary of Justice) attempt to educate the public with facts, to justify their planned (and carried out) scheme to transform what they regarded as an unnecessarily punitive criminal justice system, but I've seen nothing to indicate any warping or fiddling with the figures in it.

Accordingly I'm curious about the accuracy of other statements in the article."

 I did not explain more in the note to Simon, because he is a good journalist. He's followed crime rate issues for many years. I think that when he has time he'll follow up and check himself. Perhaps the VUW Institute of Criminology led him astray. I've not found them to be objective or helpful.

I've tried to think of reasons for the discrepancy. Other adjustments to the reported "death by violence" figures that can influence the significance of changes in the murder conviction rate include insanity killings and killings by suspects who commit suicide, so do not stand trial.

Over the long period up to the mid 1960s the rate of insanity killings averaged a little under half of those for murder. The adjustment for suspects who commit suicide is not specified. It was lower than the insanity killing rate, but it may have been higher than today, because suicide was a rational reaction when the penalty for murder was hanging. Typically it seems that murders are less than one third of the reported deaths by violence.

 I focussed on the earliest figures in Simon Collins' article simply because I had the book Crime in New Zealand handy in my bookshelf at the office, but I'm puzzled by other figures reported as well. I hope he has another look at what the VUW academics gave him.

Jo Knowlsley's excellent Herald article in May this year reviewed cases where attempts to gain name suppression backfired. They attracted more damaging attention than without the attempt to gain suppression.

Now we have another example, with a Court of Appeal decision that could be a final straw. The decision on 20 July has so far attracted only desultory attention but  I predict that within a week or two the names of the offender and his family will be known to many more than would ever had been interested without the suppression orders.

Currently, section 140(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 1985 gives the Court broad discretion for granting name suppression, but without criteria. Minister Power has a Bill awaiting passage, which purports to restrict name suppression.

It may do little more than savagely increase sentences for the brave characters who let us know the truth despite suppression orders. Under the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill 2010, as reported back by the Select Committee (Part 5 subpart 3), the Court will remain able to prohibit the publication of a defendant’s name and details likely to lead to their identification where it would be likely to:

1. Cause extreme hardship to the accused or people connected to the accused.
2. Cast suspicion on another person that may cause undue hardship to that person.
3. Cause undue hardship to any victim.
4. Create a real risk of prejudice to a fair trial.
5. Endanger the safety of any person.
6. Identify another person whose name is suppressed by order or by law (eg a victim).
7. Prejudice the maintenance of law, including the prevention, investigation, and detection of offences.
8. Prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand.

The Court of Appeal's latest decision looks like the start of a bizarre line of reasoning to exploit categories 1, 2 and 7.

They've decided to suppress a name to protect the reputation for integrity of the offender's' former wife (apart 11 years) and adult children, because they have jobs in the justice sector. The judgment talks of "incalculable hardship" should the truth out, and the need for confidence in the integrity of  court staff. It seems not to have occurred to the judges that none of us can have confidence in the integrity of anyone whose reputation depends on not being allowed to know the truth about them or their relatives.  The judgment reasoning is an excellent reason not to trust the instincts of the judges about integrity.

Are the  judges consciously setting out to make sure the pending law changes mean little?  Perhaps that is what the Law Commission and the Minister expected. They may have meant to look as if they were responding to public outrage, but really prefer the status quo. .

Because instead of a simple reform to restore the openness of our courts and freedom of speech, by ending name suppression with only two exceptions, the complicated new provisions could let the Courts continue as they do now. The exceptions should be only at the uncoerced request of a victim who would otherwise be further hurt, and to protect the conduct of some other case still continuing.

The Select Committee did not act on the Law Society's view that:

" the circumstances listed in the Bill for making suppression orders are wide. There could be a risk that the principles of open justice and freedom of expression are not given appropriate weight in determining whether name suppression should be granted.

“The process would be improved by including a requirement for the court to consider the principles of open justice and freedom of expression, to ensure that these values are given appropriate weight,” Mr Krebs says  except at the un-coerced request of the victim" 

The real losers when free speech is subordinated to the preference of the powerful to keep information from us, are us the people.  The Court of Appeal do not even discuss freedom of expression under the NZ Bill of Rights Act, despite citing passages of the judgment of the court below that mentioned it. The Appeal  Court focus was on the costs of publication to the convict's former wife, adult children, father and grandson. .

Who will not be able to dredge up some blameless, deeply ashamed and sensitively engaged relatives? It is impossible from the judgment to know where the boundary will be set. The law changes will play into the hands of people who can summon devastated relatives. Does this mean that we'll no longer be allowed to know of corrupt cops for example, if they have relatives who remain in the Force, or in Corrections, or Justice? Precisely when transparency is most needed the judges' instinct is to tell us we'll feel better about the system if we are not allowed to know.

The Bill of Rights does not give us a right of appeal. We depend for deterrence and for knowing who we should trust, on both the fact and the likelihood of disclosure of wrongdoing. 

 Nor did the judges seem to feel the need for any external evidence that the unfortunate relationship of the relatives supporting the application for suppression (because of their reputations) are not already known in their communities. I'm told that five minutes with the judgment, and Google, will deliver the name of the convict.

And how do the judges know that there will not be more sympathy than blame for those with the misfortune  to have a  paedophile porn relative.  From growing up in provincial New Zealand, I doubt that name suppression very often keeps information from anyone who has enough contact with the ‘beneficiary’ to matter to the beneficiary.

These suppression orders may be largely symbolic assertions of power, though none the less dangerous for that.  They will not achieve their stated objective of stopping knowledge in the community that matters most. They  already know.

We cannot expect lawyers to make the legal system self-cleansing. An external reality will someday end this patronising use of judicial power.  It will end when it plainly will not work, and it is too costly for the judges to keep trying. Probably that will come from something like a specialised wiki hosted offshore where people can look up truths that are suppressed here.

Tim Harford, the 'Undercover Economist" recently gave an oversubscribed talk at the NZ Treasury. It can be seen here.

But much shorter, and more topical and enlightening, given the pressure on US Republicans to continue letting Presidents know that legislated borrowing limits mean nothing, is Mr Harford's beautiful parable of the issues facing Congress. See Mum and Dad's attempted explanation to their 15 year old.

What has kept New Zealand's top pie-makers all more than 4 hours drive from here?

The Herald reports the winners of this year's Bakels Supreme Pie Awards, in which more than 380 bakers entered 4400 entries in 11 categories.  The competition entries were reported by Stuff four days ago, but not the results.

I'd travel anywhere in Wellington for the occasional top pie. But we have no category winners. And this year there are none in the South Island.

What's going on? How will we retain our best little capital in the world title without a decent pie-maker? Have the coffee snobs driven them away?

Among the reform recommendations of the Cameron Committee (the Capital Market Development Taskforce) was a proposal* to expand the availability of our accredited investor exemption. It enables companies to avoid prohibitively costly securities offering procedures if they confine the offering to wealthy or sophisticated investors.

An article this month in the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute says that a similar US  exemption is damaging and should be scrapped. The author, Prof Scott Shane of Case Western Reserve University argues:

The end result is a system that unfairly excludes those with less money from the best investments. Accredited investors may, in fact, be more at risk of being the target of investment fraud than non-accredited investors, given that many fraudsters adhere to the Willie Sutton school of target selection: go where the money is.  The accredited investor rule makes it harder for entrepreneurs to raise money for their businesses. Non-accredited investors are much more numerous than accredited investors.

The criticism chimes with my experience. There are many fewer listed companies in New Zealand now then when I became a securities law specialist in the mid 1980s. The costs and risks of being a public issuer and a director of a public issuer are much greater, all for reasons unrelated to the underlying business. And rich people are as free as they ever werre to invest. So our capital market will continue to reinforce our fast expanding class divide.

Shane's proposed alternative is:

Rather than restricting investment to accredited investors, the SEC should simply limit the amount of money an outside investor can put into a single private company to no more than 1 percent of the investor’s net worth. By basing the rule on the percentage of net worth invested per company, the SEC could facilitate investment by non-accredited investors, while simultaneously encouraging the diversification necessary to protect investors against the risk of investment failure. By setting the threshold at 1 percent of net worth, the SEC could ensure that any loss incurred would not be devastating to any investors.

Probably better than the current rule, on the theory that politicians will  not move to the best change – just dump the useless superstructure of securities law and put the money saved into ensuring that defrauded investors can implacably enforce laws of general application – against misleading and deceptive conduct, conflicts of interest and breach of fiduciary duties of loyalty. 

   *Review the Securities Act and revise current Securities Act exemptions to provide a set of clearer, broader exemptions to the Act. These exemptions should be for: ‘registered investors’; ‘those who invest money as a principal business activity’; other professional investors, with clear, quantified sets of criteria; investors who have obtained a recommendation from a conflict-free authorised financial adviser; a more clearly defined exemption for relatives and close business associates; wealthy investors; and small offers.

Where quantitative information is required, investors should be allowed to provide certification of this themselves (and the issuer should be legally able to rely on it), avoiding the need for certification by a third party, such as a chartered accountant.

Exclude from the Financial Advisers Act people advising investors who are outside the scope of the Securities Act.

It is amusing to hear Grant Robertson MP slagging ACT and National for letting the Epsom voters increase the effective vote of the centre right.

He understands it perfectly. In Wellington Central in 2008 he gained vital votes from Sue Kedgley's effective steer of her Green supporter electorate vote to him (and away from her).  

Of course I tried hard to head that off. But I could not complain that is was unfair, or somehow an insult to electorate voters as Mary Wilson tried to get Mr Goodfellow to agree last evening.

In the 2002 and 2005 campaigns I openly steered ACT supporters away from me and toward Hekia Parata, then Mark Blumsky, with their electorate votes.

We did not invent MMP but we have to work under it.

When the dust settles after the political hyenas have closed in on the leaders of the press jackal pack we  on-lookers could find our pockets have been picked. The hyenas have an opportunity to ensure that the jackals are 'better regulated'.  "Properly regulated" jackals will coexist more comfortably with the hyenas. Future lamenters for a genuinely free press may even wonder if the melee was staged, so obvious will it be that it suits the purposes of those who would benefit from less disclosure.

I will not defend paying the police for information. That kind of corruption is scandalous.

But does the rest justify the gasps and cries for the end of the media world? Phone hacking is rightly illegal. Offenders, caught, should be punished according to law. But there are many laws that we rather hope people will occasionally  have the courage to breach, so long as they accept that they will pay the price. Would we ever have known about Watergate if Deep Throat had not been willing to breach his duties of confidentiality.

First warning sign – the participation of the left and the Greens in this phone hacking frenzy. Given their  adoration of Julian Assange's publication of stolen information, does morality drives this feigned outrage? Or just hatred of Murdoch's capacity to speak to and for the masses who detest the left's PC sanctimony?

Second warning  –  The right's craven willingness to join in without articulating solutions in competition with the left's drive to regulate. Privacy law essentially asserts that people are entitled todecide what reputation they have, and to suppress unflattering information about themselves. It is a great new weapon for the powerful to hide behind.

Those who established free speech knew that important truths would rarely be uncovered if disclosure was either voluntary, or regulated in advance. Defamation was the constraint on infamous reporting, but truth was an absolute defence.

Licencing and prior regulation by the authorities is a completely different matter.  If you want to know what regulated disclosure produces, try getting the Police, for example, to obey the Official Information Act.

So what exactly is wrong with newspapers paying private detectives? We can't rely for the truth on official frankness. The courts would rather we never knew much of what the judges hear. So hearing Rebecca Brooks being hounded by MPs this morning, via BBC is no cause for celebration. They were pursuing the use of private detectives. I wish our media used them more.

 I can share the contempt for many purposes for which they were hired by News of the World. Mostly putrid gossip about passing celebrities.  But the outcome of all this could be new regulatory tools for truth suppression and intimidation of the media. This hysteria is a chance for the great to punish the impudence of our media, to confine them more to what is chosen for us, in our own best interests of course.