I was obliged to spend all yesterday on unplanned responding to calls about Dr Nick Smith’s Resource Legislation Amendment Bill. It could be passed by Parliament this week.

Yet New Zealand is just waking up to what desperately bad legislation it is. Some beneficial provisions are badly overdue, but it tries to fix other weeping RMA sores by forcing Councils  to plaster them with Ministerial acne cream. It is so prescriptive it could be a Green bill, rejecting property rights as a cure for Planners Paralysis, and instead subjecting local authorities to detailed Ministerial decrees.

So it mostly wastes time instead of cauterising the RMA bleeding.

But the more critical problem in the Bill is its transformation of local government democracy into racial power sharing. The Bill gives every local authority exercising RMA powers 18 months to reach a power sharing agreement with any iwi or hapu that asks for one. If they can’t agree the agreement will be dictated by forced mediation, with “guidance” from the Minister.

Once reached the agreements are permanent, unless iwi/hapu agree to amendments. There is nothing in the legislation to protect citizens from permanent subjection to the religious/cultural/venal demands of unelected iwi leaders with their hands on some of the most critical levers of local government. The RMA delegates to Councils powers which are legislative, semi-judicial, coercive and punitive. They have been justified on the basis that the voters’ right to eject councilors is a backstop protection. Bitter experience of abuses of power have also evolved the prescribed procedures and criteria for exercising the power, in the Local Government Act, and supervisory jurisdictions including Auditor General inspection.

So far as I can tell from the Bill there is virtually nothing to prevent power sharing agreements with iwi/hapu from by-passing democracy and diving below the current legal safe-guards against dishonesty and self-dealing.

When I heard that the National caucus were being whipped into backing this Bill, to show solidarity with Nick Smith, I was reminded of the latter days of Sir Robert Muldoon.

Not because there is any likeness between Muldoon and PM Bill English. There isn’t. Bill English does not rule by fear. He has not tried to humiliate journalists and the public service. He is not presiding over a government clinging to power with increasingly desperate expedients to block economic steam vents.

But I thought of Muldoon because taking a virtue to a foolish extreme can end both great and lesser political careers. Muldoon allowed blind loyalty to a friend named Colin McLachlan to show that he placed a friendship ahead of good government and his MPs interests. Muldoon had an incompetent (probably ill) Minister of Transport. The Minister became a target for media ridicule. It reached a crescendo with a ridiculous excuse for what appeared to be public drunkenness. But instead of distancing himself and his government Muldoon tried to force his caucus to back the doomed Minister.

It was only one among several reasons why caucus loyalty unravelled. But it told many backbenchers that Muldoon’s political instinct was no longer reliable. It told them he no longer put first the good of the country, and stable and respected government.

I’m reminded of that telling saga by the inexplicable determination to push ahead with Dr Smith’s Bill, especially just before an election. It can’t possibly get one extra house built before the election. It should be superseded early by the major reform recommended by the Productivity Commission. So its only function now is to try to salvage Dr Smith’s reputation as a ‘can do’ Minister.

It can’t do that on any objective assessment. Winston Peters will use it to mince up what is left of National credibility on RMA issues.

So to those whose calls I did not return yesterday, I apologise. I can’t explain why the government is doing something so radical and so dangerously silly (constitutionally and politically) other than to say that it would not be the first time that friend loyalty has trumped duty and common sense.

To the journalist who apologized with “Sorry to have to admit it, but I’ve only just heard about this. I couldn’t believe what I heard, but now I’ve looked into it, why haven’t we heard all about it for months. Why on earth is the government handing this gift to Winston?”

Exactly!

I feel for Greg O’Connor as the full destructive weight of low quality political journalism starts to focus on him.

When I became my party’s Justice Spokesperson I got the Parliamentary Library to feed me catch up criminology. I’d spent 20 years in commercial law. I badly needed to understand what had happened to turn the courts into awkward apologies for authority, from the oases of calm judicial and establishment confidence they were in my early practice.
But when I began to apply and discuss the findings of research, instead of the idealist fantasies that pass for policy analysis in public debate on law n order, I was immediately accused of ‘far right nasty populism’, and ‘playing the crime card’. The kindest comments would pretend to sympathise, asserting that as an intelligent man it must be hard for me to have to pretend to support criminal justice policies that just ‘pander to the worst in human nature’.

I was stunned by the complete media disinterest in the truth about crime rates. Literally no journalist ever reported on the thorough research behind our policy positions. None had the slightest interest in the astounding US success in cutting by nearly 90% the rampant vicious crime that the ‘compassionate’ elite from their leafy suburbs and gated apartments had decided was just a cost the poor must bear as a price of being in a diverse and caring society.

Few ever failed to add “far right” to any reference to me, in all the coverage of my criminal justice contributions. The fact that most of my policies were developed from hugely successful reforms of Bill Clinton in 1996, and explained in terms compellingly expressed by Tony Blair, made not a jot of difference to the ignorant media. They wanted only to report on the Punch n Judy show characters they’d invented to suit their dated class defined world view.

Greg O’Connor may never escape the stupid badging he is getting now, as some kind of policy Neanderthal, forced to tone down and live down his experience-derived understanding of policing. I know, for example, that his fresh thinking on marijuana is genuine, not something forced from him by dopey liberal Labour colleagues. He has been pondering the costs and benefits of the long prohibition for a long time. We discussed the pros and cons long before he challenged Peter Dunne in Ohariu.

Whether, of course, Labour wishes to be branded as the “soft on marijuana party” for this election is a matter that should legitimately be decided by the Party, not Greg. But the continual smug assertions that Greg is somehow learning in that area to dissemble, to pretend to views he does not hold are just normal media moral snobbery.

And even if that were not the case I’d be surprised if Greg was silly enough to think that dope policy will help him in Ohariu. Dopers may think that Peter Dunne is an icon of flopping expediency, but he too has been among the most consistent of liberal members on drug matters. It is ironic that he was forced to appear to dither over medical marijuana.

If Greg O’Connor and Peter Dunne were to debate drug policy outside an election period I’d be surprised if anyone but experts could predict the difference. But Mr Dunne is far more experienced at saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear, however non-sensical.

Whether that will save him will be one of the most interesting questions for this election

My first draft of amending provisions to repair the grave damage to personal freedoms and rational decision-making in last year’s Health and Safety response to Pike River.

Exclusion of liability for personal assumption of risk
No person shall be subject to coercion, liability or penalty under relevant health and safety legislation (within the meaning of this Act) in respect of stipulated health and safety risks and hazards, in the circumstances and under the conditions following:
a) The risks and hazards are expressly assumed personally, only by persons (“volunteers”) who qualify under this section ;
b) The volunteer is fairly informed about the risks and hazards;
c) The only persons whose exposure to the risks or hazards is affected or governed under the exclusion in this section are volunteers with respect to the same risks and hazards, including for any aggravation of risk or hazard ( or diminution of mitigation) attributable to the actions or inaction of other volunteers;
d) No person who would be liable in respect of the risks or hazards without this exclusion has financially induced the volunteer to assume the risk or hazard, directly or indirectly;
e) The volunteer’s assumption of the risks or hazards is unequivocal.

In this section:
a) Stipulated risk or hazard means all risks or hazards that
a. Are specifically described in any acknowledgement or instrument evidencing the volunteer’s assumption of the risks and hazards
b. `a reasonable person in the situation of the volunteer should reasonably appreciate to be present or inherent in the circumstances for which they wish to assume the risks and hazards; and includes
c. .[technical detail reflecting the peculiar exhaustive descriptions of the Act]
b) For a volunteer to assume a risk or hazard means to accept irrevocably that:
a. the volunteer takes full responsibility for the volunteer’s health and safety in the face of the stipulated risks or hazards and
b. recognises that persons who would be bound under the relevant health and safety legislation to eliminate or to mitigate the risk and hazards are not so bound with respect to the volunteer, and will not be liable if they mature/eventuate, and that
c. no other person will be obliged in law or in morality to place themselves or anyone else at material risk, or to expend resources in rescue or remedy or mitigation of the consequences of the risk or hazard (without diminishing the right of others to offer help)
c) Fairly informed means:
a. having information to the extent a normal adult would require in the circumstances prevailing, to decide whether the probability of adverse health or safety outcomes from taking the risks or facing the hazards were outweighed by the benefits for that person or any other person whose interests they wanted to advance or to protect;
b. being expressly advised of any particular information about risks or hazards peculiarly within the knowledge of the persons who would be liable, that would be likely to alter the outcome of the volunteer’s risk/benefit assessment referred to in the preceding paragraph;
d) Unequivocal means expressed in terms and circumstances that make it reasonable to consider that the volunteer knows and intends that no third party who would be liable without this exclusion should face liability for the maturing of specified risks or hazards and accepts that the precautions those persons may have taken may be inadequate to protect volunteers under this section.
e) Financially induced does not include a waiver or reduction of reasonable charges or costs that would apply in the absence of the assumption of risk and hazard, where it is reasonable for the volunteer to take on the personal responsibility as a rational calculation of greater benefit than the costs of the precautions the person relieved by the exclusion would be obliged to take in the absence of the exclusion.

The Kaikoura railway destruction has an economic silver lining.

There is now a possibility of less future waste on irrational and distorting transport subsidies.

Coastal shipping should have been getting much more of NZ’s long distance heavy freight. Shipping was long strangled by government fears of enforcing laws against maritime union thuggery, theft and anti-competitive conspiracy. Since union power waned shipping had been hamstrung by the unfair propping up of Kiwirail after Michael Cullen’s rescue of Toll Holdings. Political fear of challenging irrational rail sentiment has meant wasting $7k per household on Kiwirail since. The weird left political love for rail has been reinforced by understandable popular dislike of truck dominated roads.

Now that a sea link to Lyttelton will be needed for 6 months minimum, shippers will get used to the schedules, and Govt might have the courage to not waste capital restoring the uneconomic Picton to Christchurch rail leg.

Indeed shipping direct from Auckland and Tauranga to Christchurch should suit many who distribute nationwide.

Other experiments could be freed from unfair competition.
The proposed Wanganui to Nelson service could use the fast ferries eliminated by Sounds nimbyism.
We could then use much more of the Sounds for what God intended – mussel and salmon farms.

This is not necessarily good for Wellington’s Centre Port. But it has more than enough to worry about in remedying its quake damage.

And from a national perspective the less capital we have tied up under the control of woeful performer Greater Wellington Regional Council the better.

More on that in another post to come.

Have I lost touch with my country? Where am I?

When did it become an obligation on an employer to discipline an employee for what could be a fleeting airport toilet shag with a woman not his ‘partner’, thousands of miles from the ‘workplace’ with no evidence (so far) that it could affect workplace performance.

I’m especially baffled when the nation’s most economically illiterate lawyers (employment specialists) have created rules that block and reverse the most simple and efficient measures by employers to uphold honesty and other ethical standards, and even basic courtesy.  These idiots will expensively second guess the natural disciplinary steps  that have for generations made workplaces civilised (and civilising) places for association among non-kin of disparate cultures and backgrounds.

Yet today our media have been reporting the the Rugby Union’s latest venture into controlling off field conduct without a hint of irony or criticism. I feel for the rugby bosses. Last week the media rage focused on them for failing to give the justice to victims which the justice system denied. Media castigation should have been exclusively on the judging class who think they are therapists for criminals, freed from their duty to do justice by their superior compassion. Instead it turned into a witch-hunt on rugby.

And even better directed would be a spotlight on the politicians who make the rules that allow the lawyer elite to pervert justice in secret. The government was about to announce that 17 year olds would come under the Youth Court. That court is a secret court. It could not survive without secrecy. If that change had been made last year it would have been illegal for TV 3 to break last week’s story of the unpunished rugby thug. It would have suppressed the subsequent public debate. The four victims would have been gagged, lest their complaints identify the thug.

Instead of more secrecy, we need less. We only know about the two rugby cases because of the high profile of the protagonists. How many hundreds of other court cases (or “Family” Group Conferences) are telling youngish thugs they get a free hand until they are 18?

So will the media ask why that government announcement has been mysteriously delayed? Do they not care that they will be effectively confined to reporting the official pap they get on the Youth Justice system’s woeful performance?  Respectfully parroting St Andrew Becroft that the Youth Court is not a milk and milo court is not journalism. It does not defend the free speech right of the people to know who is beating up who, and getting away laughing, and which judges are too gullible for their work?

So it is perhaps not surprising that the Rugby Union is struggling to work out how it should respond to demands that it accept responsibility for the morals of its players. The neo-witchhunters now demand tangible denunciations for offences that are not even unlawful. The courts can only punish law-breaking (so far). I guess that means the clerical class must hound others to display their virtue (and to enforce their hypocritical morality).

Maybe there is more to come. One suggestion in my office is that it is relevant that it was a disabled toilet. What about the responsibility of the airport company for not supervising access to it? Will we see demands for precautionary modifications of all toilets? Welfare offices must all now be rebuilt because a judge has decided the bosses are responsible for the actions of a mad and bad shooter. Are disabled toilets too inviting? I must confess to liking all that space. Strategically located spikes like those that deter pigeons on statues might help discourage misuse.

In this new country anything is possible.

My last post mentioned the risks and problems arising when social and economic “rights” are created in law.  The Palmer/Butler draft constitution tries to allay those concerns by saying that such rights are “non-justiciable” (presumably meaning not enforceable in court). It then lays out in draft section 106 a glittering array of new rights – without solving the fundamental political problem – whose duty is it to provide the goodies, at whose cost.

106 Social and economic rights
In making provision for the social and economic welfare of the people, Parliament
and the Government shall be guided by the following non-justiciable principles:
(a) the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including
adequate food, clothing and housing:
(b) the right of everyone who requires it to social security for the provision
of financial and other support that clearly establishes the entitlements
that may be claimed:
(c) the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard
of physical and mental health:
(d) the right of every worker to resort to collective action in the event of a
conflict of interests, including the right to strike:
(e) the right of every worker to enjoy satisfactory health and safety conditions
in their working environment:
(f) the right of workers to earn their living in an occupation freely entered
upon.

Those rights could provide an entire new generation’s lawyers’ with the upkeep for pampered families, hobby vineyards, yachts and holidays overseas.  That is, if ‘non-justiciable’ fails to stop lawyers from getting to decide what taxpayers must provide.

I look forward to seeing in the book how the authors expect our courts to handle “non-justiciable”. Twenty years ago our Court of Appeal did not take long to invent cost liabilities to ‘enforce’ provisions of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, despite the clear Parliamentary expectation that it would not be enforceable directly.

So how long would ‘non-justiciable’ survive? Judges can start with a common law  assumption that Parliament must be assumed to have meant the law to have effect, and that a court’s task is to ensure it does get effect in accordance with its words.

Perhaps the Palmer/Butler draft constitution will acquire the kind of useful authority  which European courts give to eminent scholars’ texts. On many topics the draft constitution codifies the net effect of the mix of statute, common law, convention and customary approaches to the exercise of power – that is our “unwritten” constitution.

The Palmer/Butler constitution could be cited in that way, as a convenient and concise formulation of rules and prescriptions that must otherwise be drawn from a range of sources. Indeed it is such a good compilation of best practice rules on things like Cabinet composition and structure, for example, that it may fossilise features  that should remain open to evolution. It locks in a contemporary view without analytically identifying the mischiefs addressed by “best practice”.

So the draft unapologetically goes much further than codifying current practice or crystallised consensus.  It is substantially normative or aspirational. It says what the authors think the law should be in areas of substantial dispute internationally, let alone here.

That does not mean it could not serve as a guide in court, even in those areas. Civil law scholars expect good writing to steer judges in determining disputes. They resolve uncertainties left by Civil Codes, toward decisions that will enhance the consistency and power and ‘morality’ of the law. If New Zealand courts take account of the Palmer/Butler formulations when faced with ambiguity or gaps in our law, and use it to support their reasoning, the Palmer/Butler draft could be useful, without condemning New Zealand to the profitless “conversation” I wrote about here.

For example, judges have been increasingly assertive in telling the government what it should do for care-givers of disabled relatives, for special needs students in school. I predict cases where the lawyers (and the judges) will draw on EU law and UN documents, to assert a legitimate “common law” evolution in the dangerous territory of comprehensive social and economic “rights”.

And perhaps until Parliament shows plainly that it will not tolerate de facto legislating, elements of the Palmer/Butler constitution will creep into judges’ development of our common law.

I have yet to read Andrew Butler’s and Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s book.

From what I have seen of their draft constitution there are admirable elements, some badly needed, such as the proposed protection of property rights. Section 104 is well drafted, as one might expect from the intelligence and experience of those authors.

I expect the book to make a strong case for the benefits of a good constitution. I could even prefer for New Zealand to have such safeguards, despite the risks that it would increase the power and arrogance of our lawyer class.

But there are three compelling reasons to oppose this attempt to propel New Zealanders into a constitutional debate.

The first is simple – there is no guarantee that we would get a good constitution. It is highly likely we would end up with deliberately uncertain words designed to grant rewrite/trumping powers to the elite groups that already show they despise ordinary people, and democracy.

Second – even a good constitution will only be as safe as the quality and integrity of the watchdogs given the enormous power to interpret and enforce it. Our judiciary have shown repeatedly that they cannot be trusted with such powers. See for example the sophistry with which they have contrived to nullify the clear Parliamentary intention of the three strikes law.

Thirdly, the process of adopting a constitution can be highly damaging. In the absence of forces compelling us to remember our shared interests and to put them ahead of all the things that could divide us, it could end with a generation poisoned and divided into the irreconcilable ‘tribes’ we see emerging elsewhere in the Anglo political world.

I will revert in future posts to dangers in particular suggestions in the Palmer/Butler draft. The proposed bald proposition for founding (supreme?) authority to the Treaty of Waitangi has already attracted plenty of attention. It seems foolish to entrench it without anything to remedy the constitutional and practical problems  stacking up from abuse of the invented so-called principles.

But I focus here on the third objection.

The process of gaining a written constitution, if conducted without the unifying exhaustion of a just concluded civil war, or a major external threat, could distract us into division and dispute for which there is no end, and no solution.
The attempts to get a constitution for the EU ended with a vast document including the wish-list promises and guarantees of a host of lobbyists and single issue political fanatics. They all saw the chance to get their cause entrenched beyond normal democratic challenge, without having to first win the hearts and minds of a majority, let alone the overwhelming majority needed for true foundation value status.

The document was so unweildy and controversial it became an instrument of division. It was among the reasons why voters in founder members of the EU started voting against ever-closer union. That document played an important part in the respectability of some of the parties and politicians now wanting to break up the EU.

Deciding on what is in, and what is out of a constitution is a fight to ensure that courts and lawyers make very difficult and controversial decisions, instead of elected representatives. Once a rule is in the constitution, many of the policy preferences it embodies become effectively non-debateable. So, for example socialists have incorporated “rights” to adequate housing, leaving it up to courts (not elections and democratic leaders) to decide who pays, where, what contribution should be expected of the beneficiary, how they qualify, what kind of housing, and what behaviour (if any) might disqualify.

Constitutions should be the fundamental rules agreed when the constituents are closely focused on the values they share and the purposes that unite them. Nothing more This applies whether it is a club, company, or country.

So it is breath-taking naivete to steer a country (or a company or club) into trying to decide such matters midflight, without a compelling uniting objective, or external threat or pressure to compromise and agree. Every group senses the chance to get trump status for their favourite rule or privilege, getting it safely beyond normal democratic question, challenge and evolution.

A society cursed with a constitutional debate becomes consumed by the issues that divide them. It will divide over the potentially permanent consequences of a loss on an issue to the majority or ruling clique of the time.
That is corrosive of the essential mutuality ethic of democracy – that each of us accepts adverse rulings of our elected rulers for the time being, in support of a greater rule. That greater rule is agreement in advance that if some can persuade a majority of our fellow citizens to replace the current subordinate rules and rulers, the latter and their supporters will respect that decision and mechanism, no matter how passionately they feel it is wrong. They do so in expectation that the new winners will reciprocally accept replacement when they too are displaced under the same due procedure.

The procedural rules of the game are the proper primary subject of a constitution. The Butler/Palmer draft highlights the dangers of a process that as well sets out to entrench a selected sample of the policy prejudices and preferences of a current elite. Their draft makes sure the process could never be safely confined.

I was recently asked for a legal perspective on the RHOA Boat Nigger story, but told expressly not to use the N***** word when talking about it.

I declined to speak under that gag.

Nigger is not a word I’ve used for years, since it was part of Eeny Meeny Miny Mo. I have no interest in using it. But I will not appear to show respect for a gag. Not a gag imposed by people who have no problem with broadcasting words like ‘motherfucker’ in songs.

For me it would be demeaning  to submit to the media airheads manufacturing the uproar. The recent invention of new taboos around words, not even words that have been important in New Zealand, is insulting to New Zealanders. People who pander to those who claim to feel faint at the ghastliness of a verboten word are abandoning their own dignity (and accelerating the loss of freedoms to the neo-puritans).

The effete  elite have found a way to recreate the frisson they got as weedy kids running screeching to Mummy that ‘Alfie’ is using rude words after they’d got him to say “album”, and “shampoo”.

So I won’t add support to their neo-puritan religion. Accepting that kind of gag to pretend respect for an alien culture, from New Zealand, is implicit support for the book burners. It is endorsement of those who think free speech comes second to not giving “offence”. People refused to play rugby with race selected teams and decline to appear on stage in line-ups where prejudice has eliminated a view-point, for the same reason.

I abandoned that salutation in my correspondence over 20 years ago.

I notified my partners that I was dropping salutations completely. I hoped others would too, but Chapman Tripp was so tolerant of diversity that though few did (some of my staff) no one objected (at least to me).

Nor did I get any client or counter-party objections until someone on the other side of an acrimonious exchange noticed and assumed I had done it just to be aggressive/offensive.

I dropped the common salutation “Dear Sirs” partly because it seemed pointlessly discourteous to women in other firms, but also because I was irritated by my dithering over salutations generally. We agonised over just how familiar to be. We worried about being too matey, or not matey enough with addressees of lower or higher status, or of the opposite sex.

I’d seen colleagues getting letters completely retyped (or reprinted) just to change from a Dear ‘firstname’ to Dear ‘surname’, and vice versa.

I’ve got more relaxed. If a staff member has prepared a letter or message for me, I may not bother now to delete the salutation. And “Hi” seems to work without thought.

Twenty-something years ago I thought my example might catch on more widely. It didn’t.

But better late than never Freshfields – unless instead people are wasting time dithering among a slew of PC replacement terms. Just drop the pointless salutation!

The article from NZ Lawyer does not say whether Freshfields have replaced it:

“Global law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer has banned the use of “Dear Sirs” in its communications and documents.
The magic circle firm has taken the move as a “relatively small” but “significant” move designed to highlight how the language used in legal communications may alienate clients and peers.
A Freshfield’s associate in London discovered that in recent IPO activity the exclusive use of “Dear Sir(s)” was widespread among law firms, banks and corporates.

Andrea Vance and others in RNZ’s MediaWatch this weekend have been bewailing the absence of public concern about their allegations (or disclosure) of politician lying.
They are right to be anxious that democracy may not be safe if lies have no cost. The questioning in the programme tested the concern.

But most revealing was an incredible lack of elite awareness of their own intellectual limitations (or blinkers). Some journalists are intelligent enough to understand that ordinary citizens will not care what is thought by journalists who despise them and their values. But few political journalists know why ordinary people think as they do.

When they find out they despise them. A remarkable demonstration last week of elite arrogance from a Treasury pet intellectual reminded me of my experience with political journalists. Bernard Cadogan has been paid to advise Treasury on Brexit, from his English academic perch. In an extraordinary hour he sneered and preened in a revealing display of why ordinary English voters would have ceased to listen to his class. Toward the end he purported to illustrate how stupid were the Leave advocates and popular referenda generally with a comparison to the  NZ “Law and Order referendum” of 1999. According to him it “rabbited on and rabbited on and rabbited on…” and was “impossible for a judge to apply”.

It read “Should there be a reform of our Justice system placing greater emphasis on the needs of victims, providing restitution and compensation for them and imposing minimum sentences and hard labour for all serious violent offences?”. This measure passed by 91.78%.

In fact that vote reverberated in Parliament, and helped overcome the status quo defense of the Justice establishment. It played a significant role in the toughening up that may have belatedly helped reverse our climbing serious violent crime rates.

I spent my years in Parliament with virtually no media interest whatsoever in criminal justice facts, research or policy analysis. As a typical swot, I fondly thought when I entered Parliament that they would be important. Instead all the work I put into criminal justice policy was repaid by constant repetition of the media’s brand of me and ACT as “far right”. In fact most of the policy innovations I advanced were drawn from Bill Clinton’s 1996 reforms, and much of the political language from the UK Labour Party website.

None of that stopped routine reports as if of fact that our policy was cynical populism we could not possibly believe (because we were perceived as intelligent) . I recall not one attempt over 6 years to investigate the policy details or the material my digging got out of official statistics.

The journalists who are realising that most voters no longer care what the media and elite say to each other, will not find a route back to public respect. They despise the public who voted for the Norm Withers referendum too much to apply open minds and sympathy to ordinary values, beliefs and fears.

The media bubble is oblivious to how thoroughly it has suppressed the expression of ordinary people’s real opinions, even by their Members of Parliament. Only Winston Peters can defend  many common sense expressions without a collective media swoon then hysterical screeching. Even within families ordinary people often keep their thoughts to themselves to avoid derision from the bien pensant family members.

In consequence politicians and media can lie to each other without the rest of us caring much at all.