I've just come home from UnionAid's fundraiser screening of Inside Job. 

The film is a superb model of angry polemic. It could have been even more if it had just acknowledged more of the complexity – like silly regulation's role in expanding the sub-prime mortgage pool, and the part played by political and citizen desire to keep the cash flowing, despite US citizens knowing that they were collectively spending more than they were earning, for many years.

The film railed against increasing inequality, and managed to convey the impression that living standards had declined for all but the super-rich. In fact the building boom that has come to an end has been fuelled by an enormous increase in the expectations of all citizens of the space they need to live in. Relative decline is not absolute decline.

But key questions are correctly raised by the film. Why do the excess returns extracted by investment bankers not get competed away? There are thousands of competitors for their places, and their superior wisdom has not much to show for when so few of them could call the end of the musical chairs they were playing. Why did the government bailout designers not recover more of the obscene bonuses as a condition of rescue? Why have so few prosecutions begun?

Alan Bollard's commentary at the end was a drawcard. He managed to keep it inconsequential. I wish he had reminded the audience smugly goggling at US cupidity and foolishness in allowing the bankers to put them into such debt peril, that we are supporting a government that is borrowing $200m per week, with no practical plans to get into net credit.

  When the howl went up over Henry's question to John Key about Anand Satyanand's successor on Jim Mora's Panel I defended Henry's right to ask the question. Several people I respect emailed their dismay to me.

I've thought more about this after considering Wallace Chapman's admirable piece on the issues, and the comments it attracted.

Classical liberals may prefer to make themselves colour (gender/religion) blind, but we cannot require the people, or our public speakers, to work at or to share that selected blindness. It is our law and the state that must treat all as equal before the law, giving favour to none.

Now the state is under the control of people busy peddling race obscurantism – the notions of inherited relations with land and spirits, inherited specialness. Those who have supported a state sponsored search for “national identity” can scarcely complain when this is translated by ordinary people into seeing merit in promoting as our symbolic leader someone who seems to them closer than others to embodying whatever that identity is.

It is hypocrisy to bawl at Paul Henry for highlighting the dissonance in appointing people on the basis of the 'statements' thus made about 'diversity', then pretending that representativeness does not matter.

I'm surprised to have seen nothing from any of Wellington's Mayoral candidates, or Wellington MPs, on the risks in  allowing unions to end one of the few reasons why we've had a film industry here. "Mexicans with cellphones" is a dated description of what cheap labour offers, but if that is all that stands between work in the industry and no work, there will be plenty who would rather be Mexican.

The Minister of Finance will have mixed views. If the 'creatives' manage to drive away big budget production he'll see much less wasted on the subsidies that have made our film industry of dubious financial value to the country as a whole. But for Wellington the departure of the industry will be an unmitigated loss.

'Creatives' are notoriously foolish in political matters. There is a long history around the world of driving their own jobs away  with suicidal industrial claims. Perhaps the industry self selects for people prone to over-estimating their own importance and underestimating the supply of alternatives – people willing to do as asked by those who pay the bills.

I'm glad to have lived long enough to see a Minister of Transport courageous enough to risk returning us to left turn priority – for me the intuitively correct position.

I was overseas decades ago when New Zealand went right. I've never been confident at intersections since, one of those who just waits to see who will take the initiative and go. I politely wave other drivers to go, not because I am genuinely more patient, but simply because I can never be confident that I know who should go.

It does not help that I do not immediately know left from right. I know what side of the road I should be on, but have to imagine myself at the piano to be sure of which is my left hand and which is my right.

How embarrassing to be a New Zealander, watching our media search for New Zealanders to include in the blame for India's shame.

If only today's Q & A had spent more constructively the time it wasted on trying to extract a mea culpa from a New Zealand official. The usual media line on relationships with peoples who have been colonised deplores any hint of 'judgment' or being patronising. Officials who fail to "understand" the excuses for failure (including the cultural 'necessity' for bribery and nepotism) are held to be nasty relics of imperial arrogance. Yet what can be more arrogant than blaming sports officials for failing to supervise as for children, the performance of a government in one of the world's most powerful countries, a nuclear armed nation with a prickly pride and some of the world's leading businesses.

Of course in reality we know that India has been hobbling itself for generations with socialist governments, but exactly how were our officials supposed to command Delhi to do better?

I wish Q & A had found one or two penetrating non-pc observers of India.  What makes India's democracy so venal and its love of red tape such a drag on its hard working and intelligent business people?  To what extent should businesses share the blame? Or does the blame rest with the Indian intelligentsia, which (like here) perpetuates hostility to the values that create wealth, through dead minds in the commanding heights of education (the failed inheritance of the London School of Economics)? Is it simply that there is a tipping point of Chris Trotters and Matt McCartens and Finlay Mcdonalds, which no amount of business competence can outweigh?

Or are there aspects of the business culture that contribute to the licence bad politicians exploit? Some of the great modern Indian literature (but also modern Chinese literature – see my 'reviews') remains more hostile to business success than to political corruption, explaining both as attributable to the same moral ooze. Does India demonstrate the results of persistent suspicion of business that becomes self-fulfilling? If people are taught to expect venality and corruption from business people does that make it more inevitable?

What are the conditions that make corruption so hard to combat in India? Why do such appalling failures persist alongside such extraordinary talent? Is there something about being Indian that makes them collectively a soft touch for bombastic, oily, lying politicians?

I do not know whether there was scientific polling behind it, but the received wisdom among politicians in New Zealand was that our Indian population were incorrigibly left voters, despite many of them being small business people. I had some wonderful support from New Zealand Indians, but they warned how few of their community were likely to vote anything other than Labour.

On the other side, the political folk wisdom is that the Chinese community would vote National or ACT almost whatever we did, if they voted. The issue was said to be persuading them to vote.

China too is corrupt. But it does not manifest itself in such fatalistic incompetence. Why not?

These issues could be important to us, and not only because of immigration. Is there an effect of persistent film, literature and news expectation of corruption, failure and cupidity that ultimately drives out virtue?

Thank goodness the sad people at the Historic Places Trust were not able to interfere in the planned demolition of three of Wellington's thousands of earthquake risk buildings. And spare a thought for the people who will be killed by those trustees and their dopey supporters in the next earthquake,  by impeding the replacement of such buildings.

The  three Willis Street ones to come down are no doubt dangerous. They were cramped, and a waste of some of the most valuable space in the country.

There is no reason to think that people liked to be in or near them. The shops in them had become sad reminders of a poorer age, and their owners could not make enough out of them to justify the space they occupied.

Chews Lane across the road is an example of how much more pleasant and usable new buildings can be in that area.

This is no loss of heritage. It is an affirmation of it. The heritage I value in my country is the heritage of faith in the future, of willingness to welcome and try the new, the confidence that Napier property owners showed (without the palsied Council hand to steer them which Christchurch owners now suffer) as they demolished the failed buildings after their quake and rebuilt entirely in the then latest mode, which we so much appreciate now.

There was nothing to commend those Willis St buildings except that they had been there a long time. I want to live in the kind of country my forebears came to , that expected to improve its circumstances at each cycle of replacement, instead of what we now have, a country of maudlin nostalgia, dominated by politicians who feel obliged to pander to the matriarchal precautionary principle (better to do nothing than run a risk that the unknown could be dangerous).

The sadness in this case is that elected officers are facing election by constituencies of nannies, so some will have to pretend (or in the case of the drips among them actually feel) some kind of ‘grief’ at their inability to interfere further with the overdue decisions of the owners of those buildings to make better use of land served so expensively by our transport network.

We had a family voting session this evening. Between us we could just about muster enough personal knowledge of candidates to get through the Council voting with confidence, but even drawing heavily on the candidate profile booklet I feel cheapened by the few votes cast for DHB and Regional Council candidates.

There is no reliable media coverage of the performance of individuals on those bodies. One only hears accidentally about who are the passengers on those bodies, or even the nutters.

There is something deeply wrong with a system that pretends there is value in votes cast for or against people of whom one has never heard, or if you have heard, of whom you have no recollection whether it was favourably or otherwise. Yet I suspect that I would be among those most likely to know or to have heard of candidates.

The money spent on encouraging low grade votes in local authority elections is even more wasted than money spent for the purpose in central government elections.

We are lucky nevertheless in Wellington's Lambton Ward. There are enough high calibre candidates to cast at least three votes without regret. Ian McKinnon was obvious, and John Bishop and Adam Cunningham have both impressed me in candidate presentations. I know John and believe he would make a good councillor. I've heard similar praise for Adam.

If they had not been there I might even have cast a vote for Iona Pannett, just as a thank you for sticking up for dog owners. But the risk of impoverishing ourselves with nutty Green sentiment for  trains ('light rail') ruled it out.

Last evening I heard Guillermo Altares, Editor of "El Pais", Spain's newspaper of record.  Espousing free speech it has become the world's greatest Spanish language newspaper though it was only born after Franco's death in 1976.

I expected insights into Spain's future, and the contrasts between the Anglo-sphere (in language terms) and the Hispanic.

Instead the whole address was about preserving the values of journalism in a world where people do not want to pay for news. He believes in the social importance of newspapers ('a people talking with themselves').

Altares' address might have been delivered by Pamela Stirling (Editor of the Listener) or any of a number of New Zealand journalist friends I've heard reflecting on their industry. Their world view is overshadowed by anxiety about whether the craft of journalism remains financially viable.

Altares acknowledged that he had no particular insights. He referred to a 2007 address by New York Times Editor Bill Keller – "Not Dead Yet".

"At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, "How are you?" in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce."

I'm grateful for the prompting to look up Keller's address, though on following it up I was surprised to see just how much of Altares' views came straight from Keller. 

Though he claims to be optimistic, Altares' address boiled down to a declaration of adherence to Keller's faith, expressed as: 

"For all of the woes besetting our business, I believe with all my heart that newspapers – whether they are distributed to your doorstep, your laptop, your iPhone or a chip implanted in your cerebral cortex – will be around for a long time. Newspapers, including at least a few very good newspapers, will survive, simply put, because of that basic law of market economics: supply and demand. The supply of what we produce is sadly diminishing. And the demand has never been greater."

I think they are right. But the survival may be only after a new generation of journalists have supplanted the current ones. En masse their minds are too narrow.

I think Keller underestimates the extent to which 'mainstream' citizens turn away from 'serious' MSM journalism because of its implicit bias against their views and values. The success of Fox in the face of elite hostility, and the near universal scorn it attracts from lumpen journalists has a message. Instead of scorn it should be attracting intelligent analysis.

My market survey of one says that a Fox NZ would find a similar market here. I find myself listening to Sport radio, or Classic Hits or anything other than Radio New Zealand's whining predictability over a weekend. I have little interest in what I turn to, but at least it spares me the dreary conformity of the 'public service' alternative.

Have I become frivolous and escapist? Or is my indifference to another harangue about caring for failed people and states and causes and the environment the same sensation that leads people under 30 to do without news and commentary at all, other than as they find it on the web?

A TV 3 request for comment on the proposed roll out of a formal warning policy distracted me yesterday into thoughts on the pros and cons of the policy.

Among  the details as the Police explained them to TV 3 are:

“· The offender must be 17 years or over.

· The offence must carry 6 months imprisonment or less.

· Victim considerations must be taken into account.

· Reparation considerations must be taken into account.

· Family violence  and meth possession offending is excluded.

· Over three quarters of all pre-charge warning cases are victimless crimes.

· Offenders are still held to account by arrest, processing at police station and police recording their warning for future reference.

· Allows more time for police to focus on preventing offending and more serious offending.

· Reduces the pressure on the court system.

· A large proportion of offenders for minor offences never re-offend.
· Fewer withdrawals results in improved ratio of successful prosecutions.

· Current delays in the District Court will be significantly reduced.”

My opinion, in summary

The policy is a jug full of excuses for failure.

It seems likely to increase crime, despite the reduction they’ll claim from fewer reported convictions. And not just vandalism and minor anti-social behaviour. The likely cost will be paid in more serious crime. A lesson from countries that have cut serious violent crime is that ending a climate of acquiescence in low level anti-social behaviour works. Targeting trivial offences shows that the law applies everywhere, and has been associated with astonishing reductions in serious crime.

If the warning policy is genuinely confined to trivial infractions, where the courts already avoid significant penalties the new policy may just recognise the revolving door reality. If so there may be little increase in offending. We are already paying the high price of not punishing minor offences promptly and with certainty at the only time when it can be effective, that is at the apprentice stage of a criminal career.

Reduced shame

The new policy could mean less concern by offenders about public identification. Over 17 year olds are usually identified after conviction. Shame is still the biggest sanction against offending in most healthy societies. Under the warning-only policy they will not be convicted.

If the policy sends a new message that the Police don’t care or are too busy to worry about minor offending, it will increase offending over time.  The cases saved from Court could  be paid for many times over in additional cases that must go to court.

A fair comparison may be with the "break off the chase” policy. Once it became known, there appears to have been more willingness to try to escape from Police.

Any policy to reduce crime long term must focus on kids. Once a person has an established pattern of offending there is not much the system can do to cut their offending except lock them up till they reach criminal retirement age – now around 40.

Some stop earlier spontaneously, but sadly there is no proven rehabilitation magic, even if there was all the money people want to spend on “interventions”. Though this policy does not affect kids directly, the message it sends about how offending is perceived will pervade the Police, whether they agree with the policy or not. It reflects the current approach to youth crime. The direction of change should have been the opposite

Background

From my MP period research some countries, the US most notably, have managed to cut serious violent offending very materially, and especially youth violence, while ours is getting worse.

In essence certainty matters most of all. Speed and certainty of punishment are more important than severity. Indeed we could and should have lighter formal punishment for most offending. Reinstating speed, certainty of punishment and shame and its normal social consequences could let us reduce formal penalties.

But when punishment is slow and uncertain it has to be more severe to have any effect at all.

If the population most likely to offend gets conflicting messages and concludes that it is likely to be worth the risk, then crime will keep rising. Great efforts to detect and secure convictions for serious crime, and severe sentences,  could earn NZ nothing more than the notoriety of the worst of all possible outcomes – very high numbers in prison and very high crime rates, with the consequent loss of trust and other costs to the rest of us.

Certainty that crime will not pay must be part of the atmosphere. It can be strengthened in many ways:

a) by a high likelihood of detection (more police);

b) fewer technical defences, and so higher conviction rates;

c) prompt decisions;

d) long sentences; and 

e) the abolition of parole and other chance factors that lead a gambler to think they will duck the price.

It appears that the right atmosphere can also be created and sustained by establishing a law abiding climate (what the literature calls norm observance). Broken Windows policies recognised that people look for cues as to whether they are likely to have to pay a price for misconduct, for failing to comply with “the way things are done around here”.  Graffiti and broken windows and non-enforcement of minor offences give the opposite message (like unpunished littering, casting offensive matter, offensive language, threatening behaviour etc).

The architects of Broken Windows wanted all law to mean what it says. So they urged getting rid of law that was not going to be effectively enforced or punished. The law should be seen to apply and to be enforced, or it should not be law. They chose some apparently trivial offences that could be easily enforced (like law against jay-walking, and begging and littering) to show their seriousness. Others they announced would not be enforced or would be removed.

The stunning outcome of the Broken Windows policies was that serious crime responded much more to the perception in the community about the attitudes to lawbreaking generally, and in particular enforcement of routine minor rules, than it did to dedicated campaigns against serious crime.

It appears also that a major part of the effectiveness of substantially increasing penalties for headline offences might come mostly from what it says about the resolve of those in charge of enforcement. If that message is diluted by contrary signs, (like the new “warnings” policy) all Crusher Collins’ severe sentencing rhetoric could be wasted.

The Police should instead be getting agreement with the Judges and Corrections to send a simple consistent and certain message to young people at the recruitment stage of criminal careers. They should deliberately choose indicator offences that are easy to enforce. The consequences should be almost automatic.

The law should be developed with what is known about offenders in mind. Their common differentiating characteristic is that they seek risk and believe they are better gamblers than the rest of us.

With a formal warnings policy they get another message that the law will not affect them. It feeds the belief they they will beat the odds, already fed by name suppression, long process delays, laughable penalties, discharges without conviction, non-punishment of fine non-payments, concurrent sentencing, no consequences for breaches of community work sentences. They all tell the offender that breaking the law is not really a serious matter.

Stuart McCutcheon in today's Herald describes the spade that student politicians will not touch – the stupidity of pouring tertiary education spend into interest free student loans and other student 'welfare' instead of into things that ensure their degrees are worth more.

A continuing slide in the ranking of our universities has been reported in a world survey which controversially bounces Cambridge ahead of Harvard.

With Auckland slipping 7 places to 68th, and only Otago (135th) and Canterbury (189th) remaining in the top 200 (but lower), our kids' qualifications are losing value. That will likely cost students over their working lives far more than they ever gain by being able to party more and work part-time less than their counterparts overseas.

And the problem compounds, as our universities slide so does the revenue they can generate from paying foreign students in the international education market. For Wellington the low ranking of Victoria and Massey should spur our leaders into pushing for an end to the student loan rort.

What about spending some of that political capital you are so carefully hoarding Mr Key (and Mr Joyce) by telling students (and their feckless parents and grandparents) that  the 9 year old election bribe has done enough damage. You've started the conversations that will limit it.

Why not use the earthquake shock to announce an end to the bribe after the next election, and redirect the money into restoring our rankings, at least for those of our universities that are still credible enough to stay in the top 200.

Disclosure of interest – I have four kids with student loans who may not thank me if the interest holiday goes.