There are many things for Wellingtonians to learn from Christchurch's experience. I'll post on them from time to time. Commenters might add others. Some day they could add up to a realists' guide, an antidote to any self-congratulatory nonsense that could emerge from an official review of Christchurch experience.

Wellington will be in such different circumstances that many of the lessons from Christchurch could be inap. But one of the universal early rules from experience could be, sadly,  to ignore orders from civil defence for as long as possible.

Christchurch people already know this. Straight after the latest big (June) shake people ran into parking buildings despite the risk, because they saw a greater risk in being forbidden to retrieve their cars. I'm told that as 'the authorities" were securing main entrances people were climbing in over walls at the back.

All self employed business people know now not to leave work until you've extracted everything you possibly can that you might need to support yourself for the next year or two. Because the gauleiters will enjoy keeping you from your own property for months, in your own interests of course,  once they've imposed "order". Do what you must while chaos reigns.

These learnings could increase losses of life next time, but they are a common sense conclusion from what has happened in Christchurch.

More formal lessons will be about insurance. I'll be out of town, otherwise I'd be sure to attend the seminar organised by the Wellington Branch of the Property Council of NZ for 3 August.  Scott MacDonald of Vero is to talk to this brief:

"The insurance Industry is now working through the aftermath of one of the largest insured events in history – and finding a minefield of major and unforeseen issues surrounding claims, ongoing insurability, increasing costs, rising premiums and uninsured losses of unprecedented proportion."

What happens as earthquake scientists get close to being able to predict earthquakes? Insurance is for events that are statistically but not individually predictable. What insurer will renew in a city for which a quake is known to be imminent? Quake insurance in that inevitable world is of no more use than umbrellas that can't go into the rain.

This morning's call for the Government to provide insurance because the industry might not, is perhaps just a stage in moving to a new order. If mortgagees demand insurance, and insurers pull out of the market, perhaps buildings will have to be built/owned without debt? Islamic banking expertise needed?

David Farrar links to a video from a just released documentary  on the feeble official report on our anti-smacking law. It skips past the constitutional corrosion in passing a law that criminalises much of the population then tells the Police, not the courts, will determine what it means. The Police must do that to determine who is morally guilty enough to be charged.

He reminded me that I meant to link to Sowell's recent column on bullying in schools . Our leaders do just what Sowell describes, doing nothing about bullying, claiming it is "unacceptable" while in fact accepting it.  See the empty rhetoric of our politicians on the same topic.

Thomas Sowell is a US economics professor famous for his plain writing on economic issues usually  shunned by the PC. He is currently a fellow at Stanford's  Hoover Institute.  It may be easier to understand why Sowell is newsworthy on such a topic, to know that he is black.

I prize my copy of Intellectuals and Society for its sustained polemic. His use of the term "anointed" I've adopted as a telling description of the self image of our intelligentsia.  As wikipedia summarises it,, Sowell claims that intellectuals, defined as people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas (writers, historians, academics, etc.) usually consider themselves as endowed by superior intellect or insight to guide power-brokers and the masses.

So Weatherston is pursuing his appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be another chance to see the kind of judgment I hoped to see from the Court of Appeal.

But the appeal is likely to be a waste of money, time and emotion. It is not yet clear whether he has leave. The Court of Appeal seemed to me to have not  left much room for the Supreme Court to express second thoughts. But even Weatherston's willingness to inflict the application costs on us, and on his victim's family, reminds us of the mumbling gummy weakness projected by criminal law that fails to deter silly appeals.

There is no point in railing against Robert Lithgow QC. He is obliged to act on his client's instructions. As Sophie's father says, "There is absolutely no cost, risk or disadvantage to Weatherston for appealing. The system just invites abuse". So it continues.

If Lithgow tried to refuse some other lawyer would have been obliged to do act for Weatherston. The lawyer’s duty is to act for the client, and as long as the law leaves open these costless abuses the lawyer would be in breach of duty not to try, because there is only upside and no downside for the client.

 The lawyer’s own opinion or preference is irrelevant, and that is as it should be. Fixing the problem lies squarely in the corner of the judges and the legislature

 Maybe this case does not leave the Court room to ensure that the offender faces some downside for the hurt caused in pursuing fanciful appeals.  But even if he was appealing against sentence, where there would be room to increase it, our judges are too wussy to use their powers in that way. I've explained earlier how it might have affected Weatherston. UK judges can deter meritless appeals, and sometimes do. So can the German Supreme Court.

Why not ours? I think they've pushed a virtue, objectivity, too far. Objectivity is imperative before guilt is established. But after conviction there is no reason to show apparent indifference to the morality of steps the convict takes.

I fear that they've become professional sooks. In too many areas they seem to dare not  'judge' lest they be thought too 'judgmental'. They remind me, when they complain of their appeal workload, of doctors complaining about thuggish ingratitude and bullying in A and E. The remedy is in their own hands. Draw distinctions in priority of service or quality of service. All service is rationed in some form. Try some rationing according to moral deserts.  

And if there is not enough power at present, where were you when the Minister was looking for reforms to cut the exploding cost of criminal justice?

A UK court hearing Weatherston's appeal could at the least ensure that time stopped running on Weatherston's sentence while the appeal was heard. That small cost seems to be enough to reduce the propensity to waste time with meritless appeals in the UK.

 As Garth McVicar said when the Court of Appeal comprehensively rejected Weatherston's arguments,  

 “Offenders must be [made] aware that while an appeal is their right there is substantial personal risk and consequence to be considered.”

An honourable soldier  was interred two weeks ago on a  freezing grey day among the other old  soldiers in Ashburton Cemetery. He wanted to lie there with the New Zealand servicemen and women of the country he adopted on his retirement from commanding 23 SAS of the British Army.

He was my father-in-law. I respected him hugely, and I am grateful to Mike Crean of the Press for the obituary linked above. . 

He was 88. His was what a Korean friend described as a "happy funeral" because we could celebrate a life lived to the full. It ended with two unexpected days in hospital, before the undignified decline that modern medicine reserves for too many.  

I can no longer make the claim that Cathy may be tired of hearing, that if we split up I get to keep the in-laws.  I first met Roddie a few years after his arrival in New Zealand (when Cathy took me and 3 friends home from skiing at Mt Hutt to stay at their farm house) . I had lank hair down to my chest and as a typical anti-Vietnam war student protester I thought I knew an awful lot about the difference between reality and political rhetoric.

Astonishingly in retrospect he did not just ignore me. An after dinner discussion ended in the early hours of the morning only when my mother-in-law-to-be Mary ordered him to bed. He was not overbearing. He made few assertions. Essentially he just pursued me with question after  supplementary question until I could no longer avoid concluding that I really did not know very much about the world and the rights and wrongs of its players.

He felt it his family duty to maintain the highest standards, including of courage. But he had so much fun in the war, and in the army afterwards, that  I think courage and animal spirits must be closely related for fortunate men of that age.  My father, who was also courageous,  confided apologetically when Cathy and I accompanied him to a Monte Cassino commemoration in 1994, that the war years had been the best of his life.

 Roddie's father too was awarded the MC, for bravery in the first World War. Our children have honourable traditions to  uphold.

 If court sentences were not made into lies by parole, then most life sentences would end with murderers dying in prison. I'm proud to have helped make at least one life sentence genuine.

Years ago I accompanied an elderly couple to a Parole Board hearing. I'd had a Member's Bill to abolish parole, like Clinton in the US, so I welcomed opportunies to see parole in practice. I was criticised for being at hearings with victims by MPs who supported official moves to end the victim right to argue before the Board.

Last Friday I got a message that made that time doubly worthwhile.

Good Afternoon Mr Franks
 
I am writing on behalf of my whole family but mostly from my parents [  ]  from [  ] in regards to your help and input into keeping a very dangerous man behind bars Mr Allan Francis Convery (AKA Cowley which he later changed his name to) for the crime of Murdering my sister Anne Elizabeth  at the age of 5 yrs old in 1967.
 
With your help and support we managed to keep him behind bars , we feel that we have prevented another tragedy happening to another family.
I am pleased to inform you that Mr Allan Convery died several weeks ago .
We feel a huge weight has been lifted off our hearts, that we now no longer have the threat of him entering back into the community .
 
Again thank you for your support.
Signed [Carolyn ]

Carolyn has authorised me to publish that message. I remember not being able to keep the tears back as her parents told of the day it happened.  They described the little girl's excitement at going to school, and the mounting fear when she was  missing. They did not need to detail the images in their minds when her little body was found in a macrocarpa hedge. I thought of my daughters and whether Cathy and I would cope.

The memory is vivid still. I remember the room we waited in, for the Parole Board. I was relieved to see that the Chairman was a friend (an early boss when I started as a lawyer) because he had common sense. The Parole Board is deliberately not allowed to keep people in just because it is outrageous for them to be out, or because it hurts the victims afresh , or because it would make a mockery of the sentence. Parole is not even a reward for good behaviour in prison.

Instead the Board has only one thing to consider. To ensure a prisoner serves the full sentence the Board must persuade itself that the public will be unsafe if they let the criminal out. A cosmetic change was made several years ago to say that parole is a privilege, not a right, but the operative sections were not changed to make that amendment mean what it says.

The parents explained their fears with dignity. When the Board decided to keep  Convery/Cowley in it did justice. I think the members knew they were stretching that law.

The law still has not been reformed. Until it is in my opinion only well-meaning fools or masochists sit on the Parole Board.

Unfortunately for them and the rest of us,  those who control criminal justice have managed to distance themselves from ordinary human compassion. From their sheltered jobs and leafy suburbs they’ve traded genuine compassion for the special rhetorical compassion of politicians (and academics). They can claim to care for abstract classes and categories (prisoners, the “disadvantaged” and  “misunderstood” etc) – the masses. But real  individuals. not them, and not abstract sociological classes, bear the consequences.

I’ve tried to work out why our criminal law has gone so seriously wrong. I think now it is just old fashioned use of power to show superiority.

There is little more satisfying for certain types of politician than to display their own public compassion by generously offering  other peoples’ money, hopes and safety,  to the deeply undeserving.  The more undeserving the better, as it shows just how deeply compassionate they must be to forgive so much and ask so little in return. It troubles them not that others pay the price and the wrongs are not theirs to forgive.

They consider it virtue to grant effective forgiveness on behalf of victims because the victims won’t. They consider the victims to be morally unsound, because they expect criminals to pay for their crimes, to balance the wrong done. Victims are embarrassing and awkward – they even plead for the price to be at least what the court ordered.

The politically compassionate types feel confident of their moral entitlement to over-ride the victims, because their cold official mercy shows they are so much more worthy than the emotional victims. 

Thank you Carolyn (and your parents) for reminding me of the real difference.
 

What a pity Air New Zealand has suffered an attack of nervous sanctimony, publicly tut-tutting at Alasdair Thompson by a presumably self damaging withdrawal from the EMA. Just when we could all feel so proud of our airline for maintaining services under the ash cloud that so terrified the Aussie airlines.

Are we seeing set theory in action. If an organisation walks the edge of traditional morality (the wonderful body paint and campy flight safety clips) must it compensate by joining more fashionable moral panics? 

Alasdair Thompson said something stupid, then repeated it. Does that make the organisation septic? He's been a courageous champion of common sense in the face of political cowardice for many years. No wonder the loons gave him no second chance. He's skewered them so often. But what about a deep breath Air New Zealand while the EMA Board works it out – if only in gratitude for long service.

The fear of ruling circles in the face of viral moral fervour reminds me of the slut walk protests. I do not know if the women on them have ever supported those of us who've been trying for years to end parole, and to strengthen other measures to uphold the enforcement of criminal law's second most serious offence. But the official respect for their lunacy contrasts with the rush to jump on Thompson. 

The Spectator's Rod Liddle captures it. His long article  says it well:

 The protests have spread around the world in very much the modern manner, like a viral non-sequitur, a meme of stupidity.

His blog piece was more crisp on the arguments

"Hordes of women screeching that they have a right to dress however they wish without being attacked.

Well, indeed. Just as I have a perfect right to leave my windows open when I nip to the shops for some fags, without being burgled. It doesn’t lessen the guilt of the burglar that I’ve left my window open, or even remotely suggest that I was deserving of being burgled. Just that it was more likely to happen. Why is this difficult to understand? I mentioned this in a radio debate earlier this week and the woman I was debating with shrieked at me: “I AM NOT A HOUSE. I AM NOT A HOUSE”.

Hearing the Auckland Unity Books spokesperson's discussion of Wishart's Macsyna book with Kathryn Ryan this morning made me sorry for the Unity folk here in Wellington. It appears that Wellington and Auckland are not under the same ownership,  Wellington may nevertheless pay a price for the feeble intellect and triviality of their Auckland associate, if, like me, people  who would never want to read the book nevertheless steer our book buying away to shops that do not presume to impose their mundane hypocrisy on us.

The Auckland spokesperson, who had not read the book,  was indifferent to the censorship and bookburning implications of refusing to sell it (saying she would destroy the already ordered copies instead of delivering them to her customers). Her repeated reason was that it was not right for someone to make money from a book about such misery. On that test she'll soon have pleny of space on her shelves.

Of course she should be free to decide what she stocks and does not stock. But I look forward to the Unity/PaperPlus/Warehouse Index Librorum Prohibitorum. No doubt they will first list moral horrors in order of deplorability, so we can all know  where they place their cut-off threshhold. They could start with a handy precedent – sins have previously been categorised from venial to mortal.

More groping by our intelligentsia toward filling the gap for a secular priesthood.

Monday – Sorry to see that Wellington Unity has expressly adopted the Auckland policy.

Green Leader Dr Russel Norman impressed members of the Law and Economics Association in his debate with Dr Jason Potts (University of Queensland) on the utility of Happiness Indexes as opposed to GDP at this evening's LEANZ AGM.  Jason Potts was worried that all measure, like GDP were simply politicians' levers and excuses for attempting to do things that ultimately could only be done "from the bottom up" by individuals.

Russel surprised many with the sophistication of his presentation and the deftness and comfort with which he dealt with questions and the challenge from Dr Potts. His crisp dismissal of National's UFB  spend up, as "faith-based infastructure policy" drew appreciative chuckles.  As I've noted before, Russel has the ability to carry the Greens to a constructive engagement with economics that New Zealand has not seen before.

Among the events of a personally eventful fortnight was a three day (two night) crossing of the Heaphy Track by mountain bike with a group of friends. It was wet, slippery (only confident riders should start) and wonderful. The greenness, variety and sense of achievement each evening were as I remembered from the previous time – 40 years ago. 

Riding a gnarly track means eyes are down more, so some scenery is missed. But the compensation is break times just looking. Riding is faster. The pressing trees were bigger and  more oppressive on the long climb from the Heaphy to the tablelands. Admittedly it drizzled much of the way, but it is time to cut more viewshafts. I've every sympathy with early Maori who burned the bush hunting Moa. We are creatures of the bush edge, and long days in the gloomy half light of the full canopy bush would have prompted celebration of every clearing they could make.

Which brings me to the suggestion. DoC staff were proud to tell us that they have spending approval for $2m to upgrade the track and facilities, including for replacement huts.

We thought the existing huts were great. As Karl du Fresne notes in his DomPost praise they were infinitely better than in the past. I endorse his enthusiasm for DoC's facilities, and the staff attitude to the bike experiment.

So what about dedicating the existing huts to bikers, and building new huts for trampers instead? Or perhaps bikers could get the new huts if they have to be further off the direct route, because it is easier for them to cover extra miles. The new huts could be on new sites, taking better advantage of views, with new sections of track leading into them. In the hundreds of thousands of acres, new huts and new sections of track could reduce any crowding effect at peak times without any disadvantages. Eventually perhaps paralell single track for bikers could separate the traffic for long stretches or nearly all of the route. Bikers need only two huts, for the two nights they should plan on.

Perhaps DoC could grant concessions to private hut operators to run  commercial "refuges" like those the Europeans have in their National Park equivalents. It would be even better to be able to bike without bedding and main meal food. The refuge concessionaires could be obliged to pay for and maintain the sections of track used exclusively by their customers. They might even be able to help finance some of the new huts. Al Morrison is clearly ready to defend more paid services as he explained last week to a Select Committee.

Or would this be too much to get past the doctrinaire Green antipathy to economically useful DoC management? They remind me of Mencken's description of Puritans – haunted by fear that someone, somewhere may be having some fun. In the Green case it is fear that the person may be paying to have fun, much worse if that fun is burden (and guilt) free.

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The DomPost reported a promising explanation by FMA chief executive Sean Hughes' of its withdrawal of civil proceedings inherited from the Securities Commission against the Lombard directors.

''We need to focus our energy and resources on the most serious areas of misconduct, and against perpetrators who set out to deliberately mislead or deceive innocent parties,'' Hughes said.

That is a pretty good test for most regulatory agency action. Litigation is expensive and risky. In the aftermath of a boom many financial bets will go wron without anyone having been dishonest. But it takes genuinely powerful people and bodies to resist the public and political clamour for prosecutions and other punitive litigation.

There are plenty of worthy targets who have been dishonest. The FMA would do well to ration its resources by applying that test to most of its current workload, however disppointing that will be to those who just want revenge for having lost money.

I've posted on this issue frequently.  Given this promising start by the FMA I would not be surprised if they  eventually drop their criminal prosecutions too, at least against some of the Lombard directors and others against whom criminal prosecution is self defeating. I hope those against Rick Bettle and Vance Arkinstall are among them.

Put this week's announcement by Minister Power that cartel behaviour will be criminalised into the same category – a grandstanding action to mimic Australia, and likely to reduce respect for competition law when it can not be enforced as readily as the current law . The Commerce Commission's recently forged weapon of the leniency assurance is of much greater effect and relevance. I had no hesitation in saying that to Hamish Rutherford from Fairfax/Stuff. Try googling cartel criminalisation for overwhelming a mass of criticism of the just announced law change.