The Government and Christcurch residents are luckier today then they were before Roger Sutton was hooked to lead Christchurch. They know it, as David Farrar notes.

He has a man's appetite for risk. But this is a traverse, not a climb. He starts at the top of a peak. He'll plan and expect to end on another peak, but the odds are low of getting through without serious frostbite.

Despite the wide powers of CERA the job has all the exposures of politics except the need to fight elections. Coming from the constructive world of business he'll be astonished at the behaviour of his climbing partners. People with political power are much more likely to be flawed. Despite genuineness in wanting him to lead now, they'll soon be arguing about the route. Many will try to change where they're heading at every change in weather. Worst of all will be those waiting for crevasses. They'll let him fall in if he's not seen them, some will leave him to climb out without a helping hand, or even step on him as they go past. .

He probably knows of the risk that the job could end with ingratitude.

But he's always liked adventure and exploring.

I hope he uses his current popularity capital early and decisively. He'll know he must get government out of the way of the people who want to regain the initiative in their lives and businesses. . He must end the appalling risk aversion of the last 6 months of Christchurch's over-management.

A good start would be to simply dump all RMA constraints on what property owners do with their land, provided it does not cause nuisance to their neighbours, and complies with code requirements for safe, healthy occupation. 

The scale of the problem that could deal with is shown by this week's NBR report that Christchurch City Council and Ecan are still objecting to residential subdivisions even though Christchurch section prices at $220k median are the second highest in the country after Auckland, despite the large migration away, and the uncertainty of the future.

No revival, no city,  can withstand such grinding stupidity among those holding political power.

[3 hours later]  Roger Kerr has just blogged on house prices in Houston. Trust him to stay on the job while there to investigate cancer treatments.

When it is as cheap for a family to buy a house in Christchurch as it is in Houston the Jades and other Christchurch businesses competing in a global market can feel that their Council is there for them and not against them. That can't happen until Christchurch people are free to use their natural advantage of enough land for all conceivable future needs. Roger Sutton should apply the DDT to his city's planning parasites as soon as he can.

Interesting to review blogs and newspaper commentary on the Supreme Court's decision that Victoria Morse should not have been prosecuted for flag-burning and tooting to drown out an ANZAC dawn service.

Cathy and I were there, with one of our children, within a few metres of Morse and her mates. We were offended when the speaker was drowned out. If the Police had not arrested them so promptly I think even my polite wife (the daughter of a father and grandfather each awarded the Military Cross) might have been part of the crowd movement to end the interruption physically. 

So  I understand the anger at Morse, though I do not find flag-burning especially offensive per se. The offense lay in her intent, which was to upset people by showing how she despised their reverence at our country's only widely shared solemn ceremony.

And now that offense is compounded because she has exposed both our constitutional fragility before activist judges, and inadequacy in our top court at its work.

I say the Supreme Court judges have not done their job because their reasoning is opaque. I've read it carefully. I think I know what they are groping to say. Bill Hodge may not summarise it entirely accurately in his comments reported by Stuff.

"I had always thought constables could take action pre-emptively to prevent a breach of the peace, this seems to say you've got to wait till it happens and, to me, that's not terribly efficient"

He gets close, but several of the judgments expressly say that they do not mean that the conduct must actually provoke disorder in order to be legally offensive. It is too hard to work out what rule they think does or should apply. So they've not acheived the simple purpose of a final appeal court – to clarify the law and to draw together threads of reasoning to make it predictable, to guide lawyers and  the conduct of ordinary non-lawyers in the future.

They've left instead  a morass of big words and significant looking contrasts of possible meanings and concepts, without finding guiding principles. Try reading it.  They fail a simple test. Could a constable draw from their wordy pages a conduct-guiding  logic to tell when they can, or cannot, arrest a person setting out to cause offense to their fellow citizens? I can't.

I respect the care the Supreme Court judges have taken. I welcome their affirmation that freedom of expression is so valuable that citizens must tolerate being offended from time to time. There is no doubt that the apparent simplicy of the words of the charge must be qualified to uphold freedom of expression. But none of that excuses leaving conclusions that can not be applied practically. We now have what Willie Young J warned against in the Court of Appeal judgments overturned.

"I am distinctly unenthusiastic about any … approach under which every public disorder case which engages rights protected under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) must be resolved by an evaluative exercise which is legal in character and thus capable of being re-litigated through the appeal system."

Sadly, Ms Morse has given us evidence that our Supreme Court may not be as good at its job as the Court below it.

On the activism point, there is a history which I've not seen explained in the recent media commentary.

The Police had to lay the charge of disorderly and offensive conduct because an earlier High Court decision had gutted the legislation designed specifically to cover the issue, I took this issue up as an MP in 2004. Here is my media statement at the time: 

Flag Burning Is Not Speech

There seems to be wide acceptance of the need to kill bin Laden  despite legitimate anxiety about undermining international rule of law. As Russel Norman and John Pagani recognised yesterday on Q & A, small countries like New Zealand have most to lose if the tender shoots of international law are trampled by martial elephants.

But we cannot have it both ways. If we support procedural law so refined and delicate that it ceases to deliver the protection and  justice that the people demand from their governments, those governments, in democracies at least, will have no alternative but to find ways to deliver extra-judicial justice. They may dress it up. "Shot while trying to escape" is an age old cover for rough justice as well as a common tactic of brutal oppressors.

Now the general applause for killing bin Laden raises the question whether Amnesty and others who rule out the death penalty score an own goal. If a due process penaly can never match the evil, so that the justice scales can never be balanced there will be irresistible pressure for alternatives to evade the law. There is undeniable moral inequality when mass murderers live in comfort long after their terrified victims. Their comfort creates a political inevitability for pre-judicial killings of "necessity".

Live terrorist murderers in custody are also focus points for further murder and hostage taking. By insisting on constipated ICC processes for trials, irrespective of cost and delay even where guilt has been established for all to see, we lawyers will leave leaders with little alternative but to connive at real-politik pre-judicial killings and disappearances.

I predict that we will soon see this balance reasserting itself in another area. The  world's navies have been emasculated by their on-board lawyers (or those over-ruling the commanders on the spot from safe offices far away) in the fight against Somali pirates. Soon we will see shipowners engaging genuine private defenders. They'll sink pirate attackers and leave them to drown. The defenders will then melt away.

There will be widespread official connivance to allow the appearance of continuing observance of the foolish international law and conventions that have created the opportunity for the pirates.

The hand-wringing will resume. Those who've created the irreconcilable tension will never admit that their disdain for the morality of ordinary citizens is ultimately responsible for corroding and causing the loss of the rule of law they desperately desire.

The same dynamic drives many domestic law changes that are so upsetting our legal establishment. People of goodwill are right to be concerned about the erosion of procedural rights – because they are going instead of the sacred cows that create the judicial injustice.

 The solutions are in the hands of the legal establishment but they will never accept that.

The deer-stalking roar is over. Being uncomfortable about the ethics of duck-shooting, I'm reconnecting with Q & A.

Is it just the effects of  months of Sunday morning TV abstinence or  was this morning's show as superb as it seemed to me?

The Peter Arnett interview was coolly authoritative and the Hide interview asked the right questions. Hide's false answers were not the fault of any want of direct questioning.

Guyon Espiner's primary questions of  the Green's Russell Norman, with penetrating supplementaries went straight to what I wanted to know about the Greens.  Though I disagree with most of them, Norman's replies were reassuringly rational.

His were the most penetrating comments during the week about the new Mana party of Harawira. Russell pitched Bradford and Minto into the 1980s and 1990s. Sooner or later they'll have to decide whether they want to live there, or with Harawira, in the 1930s. Harawira is resuscitating the atavism and "blood privilege" entitlements and state capitalism practice of the national socialists, whose leader's name he is so fond of applying to his opponents. 

Espiner today drew out in Russell Norman an assured leader segueing the Greens from their knee-jerk anti-market socialism and anti-Americanism, and back toward their natural middle class supporters, privileged enough to be able to dismiss economics as "immoral". The Greens will seriously worry Labour this election. They'll be a much more satisfying home for what Russell identified as the educated "progressive liberals" (plainly using liberal in the US sense). Progressive liberal politics is a mix of secular theology (sanctimony) and angstlust. Easing the Greens gently away from automatic support for class war and race privilege concepts will let them take privileged liberal votes much more comfortably. 

I say that Norman is also easing away from anti-Americanism despite his essentially pacifist criticism of the US for killing Bin Laden instead of taking him for trial.  Paul Holmes identified it as pacifism when he asked how war could be conducted without ugly things happening.  

Norman's points are nevertheless important. This right-wing commentary (Rules for killing rogues) illustrates the anxiety we should all feel, with a tongue in cheek grope for principle from empirical observation.

Assassination by a super-power uninvited in another country should be controversial. On balance Obama's men did what they had to do. There is no question that proper process was not followed and that it would be better if it could be universal. On the other hand nor is there any doubt about justice being done -Osama's public gloating and threats for the future left no doubt about his guilt. More lives would be lost from the incitements Osama would have been able to release from the platform of a trial.

Holmes and Espiner are now a must watch. If Q & A can keep up today's standard my Sunday mornings are blocked out for much of this winter.

Don stuck to his guns, but how depressing that Closeup did not insist on less braying rudeness from the bully, and more testing of his fanciful claims.

Insisting on respect for the Treaty, on a colour-blind state, offered thousands of sensible questions the chair should have insisted on allowing Brash to put to Harawira. The history of the treaty and the race seats is enough to show Harawira as the racist fantacist, but Closeup did not have the strength or the preparation to impose order.

I suspect that I would have let the session run too, as Don did, in the same situation, in the hope that the debate chair would eventually insist on equal speaking rights so that we heard facts from the polite man, but the result was sadly the familiar outcome of wrestling with a pig –  mud smeared on both as people got sick of the rudeness.

But for those who could  –  Don standing up for our political inheritance of one person one vote. Harawira flowing with racist rhetoric.

Stephen Harper at last has a governing majority after a dramatic election defeat for the LIberals, and even more stunningly, the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

Having governed so successfully in minority governments I wonder whether he'll find it hard to control his party's hubris now they at last have a majority. 

The near elimination of Bloc Q reminds me that pre-emptive pessimism may avoid disappointment, but that does not make it reliable.

Some years ago Canada seemed to be headed to permanent decline. Pandering to Bloc Q had sapped morale, the left controlled the Canadian media and intellectual life, and the dry economics of Stephen Harper were seen as doomed to rejection.

I'm optimistic that New Zealand will similarly  confound the pessimists though I'm not sure yet whether we've found our Stephen Harper.

The most recent Infratil newsletter commenting on its Greenstone petrol station investment, mentioned a slight reduction in sales of premium petrol and increase in lower octane regular and diesel sales. To give context they went on::

"Over the year to the end of March 2011, the NZ$ price of crude oil rose 30%, the average retail pump price of petrol increased 22% while the price of diesel increased 46%. Government levies on petrol rose 18% and on diesel 90%".

What a lucky country we live in. In many places such price changes would cause street riots, especially if they were associated with government levies.

More interestingly, when use shifts trivially despite such huge price changes, the Greens' expectation  looks rather unreliable, that we will be weaned into public transport by by taxes and ETS price shifts. No conceivable level of tax would have alone created the price changes seen this year. Our needs and desire for the speed, convenience and security of travelling in personal bubbles is powerful indeed.

A gradual conversion to fuel efficient cars, probably electric, using upgraded road networks is the most likely future. Thankfully it will disappoint those who long for us all to sit in mass transit, heads nodding in unison as we bump over unimproved roads in congealed streams of  buses. Glorifying the idea of waiting at platforms for the next rail car, and walking nervously home from the train station will never get most of us out of cars, and it looks as if price changes too will need to be huge to have more than a gradual effect .

 John Key's announcement that our SAS were to stay in Afghanistan for another year aroused curiousity. He said they asked to stay.

Tumeke thought that was an odd reason to mention, even if there were others.

 I heard recently, but am not in a position to verify, that what the government was told by its troops was even more interesting.

They believe they are doing a job worth doing. But the government was also told that if they pulled them out, so many of our SAS would resign to join the Brits, that it would seriously undermine our SAS.

Given that the SAS are carrying us in terms of a fighting reputation, that was a serious matter. I'm told that when the government previously withdrew the SAS, we lost a significant number to Britain and Australia at their first available opportunity.

Don Brash's challenge for the leadership of ACT would have been ludicrous a couple of decades ago. It would have been unthinkable that a non-member could challenge for the leadership of  a Parliamentary party. Yet today it is credible. Why?

I think it shows MMP parties evolving to fill a policy debate vacuum.

Western democratic parties were once crucibles of citizen participation in policy development. Today in New Zealand party members are largely  impotent. It is not surprising that party membership is little prized.  Party conferences are rigidly stage-managed. Policy remits are anodyne, if they are permitted at all, confined to topics with little long term party branding effect.

The credence of the Brash challenge is tacit recognition of inter-party competition as the replacement for the competition of ideas we formerly gained from debate among party factions. We no longer expect open policy debate within parties. It may be MMP or it may be the reflection of an impoverished media.

Whatever the reason open debate over ideas must now be across the safe insulation of party boundaries. 

Without any formalised internal party  'faction' system neither National nor Labour have a hygenic mechanism for  internal dissent over policy. I posted earlier this month on this  problem for Phil Goff''s Labour.

Parties can not risk allowing humble members to impose policy discipline on their  MPs. Political journalism is now pre-occupied with the mechanics of leadership, not ideas. Permitting obvious internal debate is interpreted as a failure of political management.  It is reported only as division, disunity, and loss of authority to govern.

Twenty years ago we had Sir Douglas Graham and John Banks comfortably within one party,  defining the spectrum of opinion on  criminal justice policy, for example. Today all must pretend to unanimity, lest the media fish school up to feed on "weakness" and "disunity".

Yet we know we need policy challenge. Hence the widespread anxiety among National rank and file members for ACT to do well, even many who do not like particular ACT MPs.  

Under MMP government coalition dynamics, a long term ruling National leadership will need  other parties to own and 'force them into" necessary policies that will scare the middle voters. John Key can even be strengthened, if  to those middle voters he alone can moderate the extremes  without himself being extreme or  exclusionary. He may seem to be all that can protect them from the Maori Party , or ACT or Winston, or the Greens, without driving those parties into wilderness extremism.

The commentators show clear consciousness of the appeal to National activists of an ACT without the confounding Hide factor.

Tracey Watkins is leading the pack. John Armstrong is surprisingly unequivocal in urging Rodney to go,  Whale oil is, as usual, penetrating. Lindsay Mitchell fairly rebuts the age slur on Don Brash.  Blair at  Clint Heine  and friends is left to express the old  fogey view:  

 " I remain of the firm belief that the best, and probably only way to fully implement good laissez faire government in New Zealand remains through the National Party….you are never going to get an ACT (or Brash Party) Government, and it is always going to be through National that laissez faire policies will be implemented. It then becomes a question of how you get National to do it. Do you work within National and take them along with you? Or do you pummel them from the outside and hope to bully them into doing it? "

Kiwiblog is from the same school. His posts show the responsibility that might be expected from a house organ of National .

To the traditional tribal party member a challenge for leadership from outside a party will still seem bizarre, even from a person who embodies the party's values.

I'm reminded of a formative early legal engagement. In the mid 1980s I advised Richard Carter (who recently died as Sir Richard) on his extraordinary hostile takeover of AHI, to form what became Carter Holt Harvey Ltd. It was the boldest takeover in Australasia in its time. Against most of his professional advice, and to near universal puzzlement if not derision from the financial media, Richard insisted on launching (on market initially) a keenly priced bid for a company in which the majority of shares were held by a major Australian conglomerate which had publicly stated that its holding in AHI was not for sale.

Richard's victory, after months of siege, was due to his disregard of the received wisdom, and his view that the internal compelling logic would prevail in the end.

Presumably Don Brash hears similar music. He is genuine when he says he regards Rodney as a friend. But he presumably sees little alternative, and the downside from trying is trivial compared with the stakes.

The ACT Constitution shows the odds, nevertheless.

" 12.1 The Party shall have a Leader and a Deputy Leader appointed by the Board. When the Party is represented in Parliament by at least three Members of Parliament, a majority of the members of the Party’s Parliamentary caucus may make such recommendations to the Board from time to time as they see fit concerning the exercise by the Board of its powers of appointment, removal or replacement of the Leader or Deputy Leader, and the Board shall act on such recommendation accordingly unless at the meeting of the Board at which such recommendation is being considered at least eight (8) of those persons attending and voting otherwise resolve.

Don needs a caucus majority , or a hung caucus and a board simple majority, or 8 members of the board.

A long shot. Whatever the outcome of the ACT challenge, the respectful attention it is receiving suggests more long term stability for minor party participation in government. Constellations of parties may compete for the same activists in semi-respectful symbiosis.  In effect "broad church" parties  will become the parties of the middle, and the most vigourous democratic debate will be external, between aligned parties

Is there more to this morning’s careless driving charge story? If not what sort of callousness is needed to charge a father when he’s lost his 5 year old. Even if he did fail to apply the brake properly before the family vehicle ran into the water what possible extra deterrence or other official message could he need?