Yes, yes yes – at last those who our masters would make into worms have turned.

All of us who want to live on our feet and not our knees owe thanks to the business people who today stormed the cordon to regain the right to their own properties.

The humiliation piled on them since the earthquake by the lords of emergency, "in their own interests, of course" is humiliation we should all have felt. Lets now hope tomorrow's revolt is bigger, and the next day until the oppressors are shamed and slink away.

The left fondly thinks that working class warriors established our freedoms. In fact it was the merchants of London and other property owners who needed freedom and respect for the rule of law to protect their properties as well as their consciences. Unions and the left have been on the side of repression more often than not.

 I salute you merchants of Christchurch, as worthy inheritors of a noble tradition of merchants.

Is the unhappily surnamed Bernard Whimp’s preparedness to pick off the weaker members of the capitalist herd evidence of Whale’s silly name theory at work, so that we should hold his Whimp ancestors to blame for his misanthropy?.
Or should we excuse hiim on the grounds that someone has to do it, if the capitalist tribe is not to become irredeemably degenerate – too credulous to deploy capital to best effect, which is capitalism’s defence against socialism?
I incline to the view that such heartless predation is revenge for a lifetime of titters.

It will stick in your throats Justice insiders, but buy Penguin's new book – writer Michael Larsen channeling the Sensible Sentencing Trust's Garth McVicar.

It's called Justice – Speaking up for Crime's Silent Victims. That title is one of the few misleading statements in the book. Because New Zealand's victims are no longer silent. As the book explains that is thanks to Garth, his wife Anne (McVicar) Wendy (Pedler) and her husband Graham, Alan Monk, Peter Jenkins, Louise Parsons, Eva Bradley, Sir Russell Pettigrew and now hundreds of other Trust activists and supporters few will have heard of.

The book is like the victim conferences SST organises every year. Objective anticipation says “why on earth would I go there, how can it be anything other than sad, depressing and enraging?"  So I steel myself to duty – and after the first I know that the conferences are not at all depressing.

The conferences are actually inspirational. It is a pleasure to be among victims supporting each other, exchanging experiences with others who genuinely have walked in their shoes. They realise that they need not remain powerless. Instead they can turn into practical politics their rage and disgust at the system of injustice run so smugly for lawyers by lawyers. They learn not to feel helpless. They can help to change the system.

Michael Larsen has done a superb job with the book. It feels more like listening than reading. You hear a professional interviewer more interested in drawing out his subject than his own ego. It is biography or auto-biography – but it is a biography of an organisation as well as of the McVicars.
I know Garth and Anne well enough to tell you it is a shimmering reflection of what SST is about, what they are like. Time with the book conveys what it feels like to spend time with Garth and the people he draws together. That is why I headed this review with the suggestion that his opponents should read it if they want to know their enemy.

The book bounces with Garth's mix of deadly serious purpose, non-stop movement toward the goal, courtesy, enjoyment of life, and celebration of what it should mean to be a New Zealander.
The chapters vary greatly in length. That too imitates time with Garth. There is a narrative, a story thread that connects it all, but also time for exploration of side paths, picnics with ideas, and to get a flavour of his constant encouragement to draw what is valuable (if possible) from everyone who offers something.

Garth's personal integrity is seen in his refusal to distance himself from David Garrett despite his fall from grace (and Parliament)  because of what David achieved.

The victim stories flow naturally, without labouring the point they explain what SST does in addition to the media statements. They give some explanation of why Garth does what he does. Horrible as some of the victim stories are, they draw the reader in to share and enjoy helping.

The apparent simplicity of the book is also insidious. Like Garth's “countrified” air it can mask a mind that has been absorbing and learning and becoming more effective and shrewd with every media experience.

If they can bring themselves to read it Garth's opponents will grind their teeth. With its mix of victim anecdote and policy history it does not even bother to engage them in the abstract discussions they so love.

Fortify yourself for some hero worship.

For more on the Sensible Sentencing Trust, search this blogsite for Sensible Sentencing

The Attorney General must appeal the pathetic 11 month home detention sentence for Malcolm Mason,  the corrupt ACC official.

With what I've heard for months about the scale of corruption concerns generated by his activity there should have been a denunciatory and deterrent jail sentence without parole. It should have been at least 4 years.

John Key expresses frustration at the idiotic delays in releasing the names of the Christchurch dead, many of them days after media identification. The Police excuse boils down to –  "we will follow our safety first protocols". In this case "safety" though couched as protecting families from the 'horror' of a mistaken identity is no more than "our fear of being accused of a mistake is more important than the feelings of all those waiting, more important than the impatience of the Prime Minister, and more important than any public interest in freedom of speech".

This morning an industry representative says the Sovereign building company collapse is likely to be the first of many because there is not enough work. Not enough work!  When there is a city to rebuild, not to mention $10bn of work repairing leaky homes. Why are they not at work?  Because owners of properties, with all the incentives to get things underway, must wait for soft handed lawyers and 9-5 planning staff and myriad inspectors to wind through their blood-sucking processes before practical people can work. Of course there should be building codes for safety. There should be inspectors to enforce them. But otherwise all this "planning" talk is code for paralysing ordinary people in fearful respect for their effete masters.

I can't think of many planned cities people want to live in anyway. Canberra and Brasilia come to mind. Let the owners of Christchurch land build what they can afford, provided it is safe. We are becoming beggars. It is too late to pretend we can spend years being choosers. At first what people build may be humble. When prosperity returns, in a vibrant city without planning blight the temporary will come down, and edifices will go up, because that is what people do in their prosperity and pride.

On the last day of February, during a trip to Christchurch, I raised with a Minister the plight of a friend who needed his computer server to get his business back on its feet.  He was with a Christchurch business leader. The friend had new premises sorted. The 14 staff were ready. The government was saying it was going to subsidise wages, but they did not need that to forestall redundancy – they needed to know when they could restart work.  

The server was in his car, shut behind a carpark gate within the cordon area. 

Both men were utterly frustrated, having been bounced back and forth between Civil Defence and the Police. They'd offered to put together and pay a specialist team, including engineers and safety experts to go to premises where critical records could be retrieved. They would distract no rescue worker or other official.

No one could give them a decision or even tell them who would make such a decision.

The Minister undertook to enquire, and called back promptly, I was told I could reassure the business people that a plan would be announced that Monday evening that would cover organised access.

Yesterday the friend dropped in to our office in Wellington. He is still not operating. 10 days later his car is still where it was, ready to drive out from the carpark. He has not been allowed to take his own experts in to retrieve the material. You can read about his efforts here and here and here.

Ministers spend what will be hundreds of millions in grants to help employers keep their employees in Christchurch, yet do not have the courage or the drive to insist that ordinary people get access to their own property and capacity to operate.  All are terrified of being held "accountable" should anyone permitted to do so make the wrong personal decision to take a risk in order to get their business going.

This morning we hear that the lords of Christchurch will allow access to a third zone, but not much of the "red zone" of  the central city. No one dares suggest there might be a human rights issue at stake. In words of Boris Johnson I've cited previously  there is a "new divinity that commands the adoration of the governing classes, as nannying and multiple breasted as Diana of Ephesus. Her name is Phobia and sacrifices are being made at her altar"

Am I the only person to find all this strict control evidence of our national weakness and disgrace? Is anyone else sick of stirring tales of the effectiveness of the control of the city, and "the authorities" plans to look after the helpless people, while those who want to help themselves are treated as the problem.

Many of the stories are thinly disguised boasting about having and wielding the power to boss others around. Politicians on our screens every night talk about their plans and their roles. Meanwhile, the people who must do the reinstatement work, who want to get to work, who are willing to absorb the risks or manage them, if they are not to spend their next few years beholden to others, are supposed to feel grateful and respectful to their masters.  

I was sad 10 days ago to see the huge manpower occupied in making the cordon effective. All those able young muscles standing for days and nights just saying "no", when a few diggers and thousands of iron bars and shovels and brooms could have seen a transformation of their immediate neighbourhood. Why are they still necessary? Jane Bowron tells us in her diary articles – because of fear of looters. An army of people employed to stop honest people from getting their own property, out of fear of criminals. Why are the criminals not terrified of the honest, and the law? The answer is simple, the nannies have emasculated the law.

They've also emasculated themselves. They will respond with dramatic gestures – like National States of Emergency, and laws that suspend laws. But they are too scared to do the only thing that will truly restore their manhood – give it back to ordinary people first.

Lloyd Morrison posted on his Facebook page about a heartwarming, inspiring, but puzzling story from The Australian. It reports on young mother Natalie's near miraculous response to an experimental German drug treatment for leukemia. Natalie's fiance Andy arranged for her to qualify to become part of the study.The headline suggests it could cause a rewrite of "treatment rules".

But the report does not touch on the 'rules'. The law around drug experimentation is inexcusable.  I do not understand why people have accepted the huge intrusion on freedom that lies in prohibiting access to new drugs until they've been through years of testing.

For Natalie death was considered imminent and near certain. She and her fiance were willing to pay for treatment. Why should she have to qualify for a study, gain the privilege of being part of an experiment, to have this treatment.

The Australian does not explain. Perhaps in this case it was unavoidable, perhaps the drug is rare, and the team who can administer it are specialists. But it seems that often people are denied the chance to buy treatment simply because drugs are not proven. When the alternative is death, why should that be of the slightest interest to the law? The huge cost and delay of getting drugs through the registration process may be condemning thousands of Natalies who do not have husbands as effective and persistent as Andy Fairclough.

Why should not people be free to consent to any treatment they want, at any stage of testing, if their alternative is death anyway. The law can not compel them to have treatment, no one is any longer punished for attempting suicide, so what is the moral foundation for banning people at death's door from buying and using any drug they want?

This is not a challenge to the role of Pharmac – in my opinion they do a great job for New Zealand. Their effciciency masks the consequences of our continuing decline in relative wealth. It enables us to keep access for most of the population to drugs that would otherwise be drifting out of our reach.  Nor is this a demand for more to be spent on health.  I commend Tony Ryall's lifting of what I'm told was Annette King's edict banning public hospital involvement in administering drugs brought in privately by desperate families.

I'm thinking more about a human rights challenge to the incredible bureacracy around health experimentation, and the time-wasting "ehtics" committees, at least so far as they affect those with a poor prognisis. What about allowing New Zealand to become a destination for medical tourists, looking for treatments the FDA or the Australian government will not allow them to have. We could supervise for integrity, and fully informed consent. Leaving it to the individuals and their families is consistent with the right to suicide (and our freedom to drink or eat or motorcycle or mountain climb ourselves to death).

I would not hold my breath for anything useful out of our two bodies with the Orwellian false names – the "Human Rights Commission", and the "Human Rights Review Tribunal", but it would be interesting nevertheless to see if and  how they would rationalise away the right of people to seek out treatment they believed in, when condemned to die, using their own resources, without going overseas. It is paradoxical that we have less freedom than countries without the lip-service law we have, who have not given such enormous powers to their medico-legal establishment.

Perhaps reasonable arguments could be drawn from our Human Rights Act prohibition on discrimination againt those with disability. Maybe it could be founded on sections 8, 10 and 11 of NZBORA. It could be useful to run such a case through to our Supreme Court.

I think Canada has the "green eye" policy of prohibition writ in law. I should check, but I think t is simply illegal to use your own money to get medical services outside the state system. I must see how the priests on the Canadian Supreme Court have rationalised their rulers' usurpation of the individual right to do whatever one wishes that does not harm others, to say nothing of the right "not to be deprived of life except on such grounds as are established by law and consistent with the principles of fundamental justice" (as it is expressed in section 8 of NZBORA).

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice. Australian oil company AWE Ltd which has a major share in our Tui field, announced in its last half yearly report:

"Bruce McKay retired as Chairman … at the conclusion of the 2010 AGM and has been replaced by Bruce Phillips.

Bruce Clement [will] replace Bruce Wood as Managing Director of the Company on 1 February 2011"

There must be some ground of discrimination for the Human Rights Commission to investigate, or John Clarke.

 At least one Christchurch University engineering faculty member can gear up for a star performance at the inquiry. He has told his students for years that Christchurch is full of earthquake-dangerous buildings and that he does not let his family enter some of them.

According to the recent graduate engineer in our family he was specific about the risks in modern and fashionable materials and techniques, as well as masonry. If the CTV building relied on materials on his black-list I hope that is revealed soon. Even if it is premature engineers should know now to be safe rather than sorry in buildings under construction.

Engineers all over the country will want to know immediately, long before the formal inquiry reports, just what should be built differently.

For example,  us Wellingtonians, even in new buildings, are now scared of stairwells. The stair collapses in the Forsyth Barr building and the Grand Chancellor are even more disillusioning than the collapse of the relatively modern CTV building. Engineers better work out the stairwell thing quickly.  I’d assumed that it was comparatively easy to build stairs that do not collapse even if it is hard to ensure that buildings are not munted overall.

We now want ropes in our offices. Get floor wardens with abseiling certificates instead of hard hats.

Victoria's Prof Euan Smith called in  NBR 6 months ago for the demolition of all unreinforced masonry buildings. Sadly he did not know just how urgent his call should be. He said they should all come down within 10 years. Victoria University can be proud. But Wellingtonians should fear his theory that the South Island earthquake tension will migrate northward. We should feel in advance for those who will be killed by masonry falling from both sides of narrow Cuba St, with no room to flee. Other preservation precincts in Wellington will kill too if Prof Smith is right.

Hopefully the Christchurch inquiry will not confine itself to hunting for the poor professionals whose good faith calculations have proved unequal to the world as it is.

You'll have heard the accusatory tone in the interviews when engineers and others are asked why buildings were allowed to be occupied though under-code. Those questioned jump hoops to avoid the feared follow-up – "how can you put money concerns above human life and safety". Those putting the questions seem to think it self evident that money shortage is an illegitimate excuse. Yet nearly all safety issues are matters of resource priorities. We could avoid as many road deaths per year as the Christchurch quake toll, for example, if all drunk drivers were closely supervised or given free taxi chits. 

Resource choices are made every day that condemn some to die. Who's been mourning the heart patient deaths because of a government hostility to private sector contracts for prompt treatment.

The real suspicious interview aggression should be directed at those who have put their personal  preferences for the known and the familiar above the right of their felllow citizens to replace their own buildings.  The inquiry should build a register of those whose "heritage" political action has prevented the routine updating and replacement of so much of our cities. Many of those who've died in Christchurch are paying the price  of the heritage fanciers' willingness to put their fashionable aesthetics  ahead of the safety and the  lives of the rest of us. 

Astonishing!  And near my home too.

Congratulations to the WCC staff who have planted pine trees on a ridge leading up to the Mt Victoria lookout. I feared they were too enmeshed in botanical chauvinism to risk such a sensible step.

Other areas from which pines and macrocarpas have been felled have been replanted in native trees. All very well except that they grow to form gloomy dense stands. Views are then confined to slips and deliberately cut view shafts. It is only an impression, but far fewer people seem to use the paths through the native bush areas than through the open needle decked glades of  mature pines and eucalypts. 

Thank you Wellington City Council.