Tuesday, 29 July 2025

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power."

 

"It’s not really about the words.

"That so many Kiwis care about [the wording on a passport] shows this is a symptom of a much bigger problem. ... a microcosm of the slow-burning cultural tension that has been building in New Zealand for years. ...

"What began as a well-meaning effort to honour Māori language and culture has, in the hands of our cultural elites, become a tool for ideological conformity and social stratification.

"It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power. ... They get to be the priest class. They can sneer at the plumber in Palmerston North who doesn’t want his kids doing karakia at school, and tell themselves they’re not just smarter, but better. ...
 
"Today, we’re swimming in a sea of te ao Māori frameworks, mandatory karakia in secular spaces, and public servants scrambling to prove their cultural credentials rather than deliver basic services. The line between recognising Māori as tangata whenua and enforcing a cultural ideology across every aspect of national life has become increasingly blurry and people have noticed.

"I am wound up that we’ve arrived at a place where people can’t distinguish between cultural recognition and cultural imposition. Where using Māori names is no longer about embracing heritage, it’s about enforcing allegiance."

~ Ani O'Brien from her post 'It's just a passport cover... except it's not'

"Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop."

"News consumers worldwide were galvanised over the weekend by disturbing photos like those of the Gazan child Muhammad al-Matouq, who appeared on the front page of Britain’s 'Daily Express' and then on that of 'The New York Times' and elsewhere as the symbol of Israel’s cruel starvation of innocents. After the photographs were seen around the world it became clear that the child in fact suffers from cerebral palsy and other conditions unrelated to starvation. The suffering child ended up being less the intended symbol of Israeli evil than of how genuine misery can be put to use by practitioners of narrative war. ...

"[This is not new.] A few weeks into the Gaza war that began on October 7, 2023, we Israelis learned from every major press outlet in the West that we’d just bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people. The devastated Al-Ahli hospital was on front pages around the world, with a New York Times headline reporting 'at least 500 dead.' Furious protests erupted, and a mob burned a synagogue in Tunisia.

"The story was fake. A misfired Palestinian rocket had landed near the hospital, which was intact.

Around the same time, we started reading that Israel’s response to the October 7 terror attack—a war that Palestinians started, and which had barely begun at the time—was actually a 'genocide,' an ideological slur thrown at Israel by Soviet propagandists, Arab dictators, and the Western left beginning in the 1970s. ...

"Reports of impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace not just since the beginning of this war but for at least a decade and a half, since Hamas seized the territory and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that supposedly turned Gaza into an 'open-air prison.' The famine never materialised. Now we hear claims that this same period of supposedly extreme deprivation was actually a Gazan idyll that Israel has cruelly destroyed in this war.

"Very little of what is reported here, in other words, is what it seems. This is nothing new. Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake massacres and rapes. The country’s actions are lied about almost daily by people describing themselves as journalists, analysts, and representatives of the United Nations, often using statistics that are themselves untrue. ...


"But one of the most awful prices [ of being unmoored from objective reality] was made clear this past week, with reports of acute hunger in Gaza.

"In a blizzard of ideological fiction, how are sane citizens in Israel, or anywhere else, supposed to know what’s true and to do the right thing? It’s not an exaggeration to say, as we’re seeing right now, that the answer to this question can be a matter of life and death. ...

"[O]ur plight as journalists is only marginally better than that of the average citizen. ... [T]here [are] nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza—certainly not the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which answers to Hamas; or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas; or the international organisations, like the UN refugee agency UNRWA, embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas. All of the above are engaged in a successful information campaign that uses Palestinian suffering, real and imagined, to catalyse international anger and tie Israel’s hands.

"The international press isn’t the answer. During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers. I know firsthand that nearly no information coming from Gaza can be taken at face value.

"But neither can ... Israelis trust [their] own government, which has regularly misled the public ....

"And we can’t trust much of the information from the army, which regularly spins information overtly or by omission. ...

"When I asked ... a senior government official, with connections at the highest levels here and abroad—if people are starving in Gaza, he answered honestly, 'I don’t know.' ...

"Ohad Hemo, the Palestinian affairs reporter for [Israel's] Channel 12 News, the country’s most widely watched news programme ... report[ed] last Wednesday [that f]ood warehouses serving Hamas fighters are still full, ... and the crisis wasn’t only Israel’s fault. However ..."there is hunger in Gaza, and we need to state this loud and clear.” ... [A] senior figure in the Israeli military told one of my colleagues at the end of last week that while there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda, Gaza really is on the brink this time.

"This explains why Israel, in panic mode, began air-dropping aid this weekend, along with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and has declared 'humanitarian pauses' to let food reach civilians—essentially unilateral ceasefires without any reciprocation from Hamas. There are now indications that food prices are dropping and that some of the scarcity is being addressed, but the situation for many civilians remains dire.

"Israel says Hamas bears the responsibility, as the group has diverted aid both to hoard for its fighters and to sell to finance the war—and then cynically uses Palestinian suffering as a propaganda tool. ... [Earlier this year] Israel began trying to conclusively break Hamas’s control of food by providing it through a new organisation, American-run and Israeli-affiliated, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

"Because the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is an acute threat to its power, Hamas has been doing what it can to foment unrest around its distribution sites, kill its workers, and intimidate people accepting its food. ... —[which] has often meant chaotic scenes of thousands of men descending on the distribution sites and picking them clean, coming into dangerous and sometimes fatal contact with Israeli soldiers who are understandably scared of disguised Hamas fighters and unprepared for the kind of mass chaos they’re expected to control.

"It’s impossible to know how many Palestinians have been killed in these incidents, because Hamas numbers are part of the group’s information war. ...

"An experienced Israeli civilian involved in the aid efforts, from an organization that works both with international aid groups and the Israeli military, said on Friday that mass starvation is not yet the reality but could be in the near future. ...

"You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true: The disaster they’ve engineered in Gaza fuels the global campaign against Israel. ...

"One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won’t act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop."
~ Jerusalem-based columnist Matti Friedman from his post 'Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War.'

Monday, 28 July 2025

Removing barriers to overseas building products, one subclause at a time [updated]

BUILDING MINISTER CHRIS PENK IS surely mistaken (or misled) if he thinks he is going to see a quick remedy to high
building costs from his announcement, already signalled, that building products from overseas may now be used in New Zealand.

The problem, you see, is that regulations here around our approvals process make it prohibitively expensive to obtain official approval for any materials, local or imported, so that most would-be inexpensive imports just don't happen. (Around 90% of products used in building or building components here already are imported, but they're generally not the primary ones requiring approval by the grey ones.Why pay upwards of $250,000 to have your primary Euro-component approved here, when it's already selling like hotcakes in your Euro markets.) 

So Penk's idea is that materials or systems already approved by the grey ones in similar jurisdictions and standards environments to ours (such as Australia, Canada, UK, US and Western Europe) can be cited in documentation to the grey ones here— and then, with some fingers crossed, be approved for use in buildings here without the otherwise burdensome cost of obtaining formal approval upfront.

Cheaper materials: cheaper houses.

Nice idea. Shame if a bureaucracy somewhere were to ruin it.

The programme will be run by MoBIE. 

I attended a webinar run by MoBIE dicks recently outlining how they intend to run it. They called it 'Removing Barriers to Overseas Building Products.' Try not to laugh as I relate their intentions.

First of all, they've started a committee. And several working groups. Large ones. Large enough, I imagine, to fill at least one floor. It will be these newly-appointed bureaucrats that will decide which standards/regulation of which similar jurisdictions will be considered for approval by these bureaucrats. And this will of course take some time. 

First of all, of course, they have to meet to define regulatory criteria. And to issue new acronyms (things like BPS, BPIR, etc.)

This is how bureaucracies work.

The committee/working groups will then make recommendations to the CEO of MoBie which standards/regulations he may recognise. May. Those deemed unobjectionable are then added to something called Building Product Specifications — a "new regulatory instrument." [UPDATE: The inaugural Building Product Specifications document has just dropped today, but dn't get excited, it's simply a compilation of standards/regulations already cited in the NZ Building Code. Enjoy.]

Following which, MoBIE's dicks will then publish a "Recognition Notice" detailing which new standard/regulations have been recognised. Once a standard/regulation has been so recognised, it will then be added to the Building Product Specifications document.

They hope ("always hoping, hope is vain") to issue their first "Recognition Notice" by year's end. That will be for one regulation/standard from one jurisdiction for one building material or system. For which the Notice will be once piece of "evidence of compliance with the New Zealand Building Code."

Still, once that Notice is published, building importers may then decide to bring in a building material or system; builders and building designers may offer the imported product in plans and specifications based on it being "Recognised" as evidence it complies

Did you follow all that?

Note the process here: it's MoBIE who decides to decide. Not builders, not building designers, not building materials scientists or building materials importers — all of whom have a large interest in the process — and nor is it the building minister. No. It's MoBIE's dicks who decide to initiate the process,  and it's they who will grind slowly through all the world's standards, regulations, codes, guidelines, approval systems, benchmarks and norms, deciding which of them they might like to spend time taking through their process and (eventually) recognise.

So we can see how this is good for bureaucrats employed within MoBIE. 

But how does all this help builders, building materials importers, would-be building owners, and me as a building designer? 

Well, nothing at all will help until at least the start of next year, when the first "Recognition Notice" might (might) have been issued for the Australian Watermark Scheme — so importers et al can start taking advantage of Australian plumbing and drainage products.

And after that, the committee/working group/bunch of overpaid bureaucrats will then begin to meet and consider whether or not  the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM International) and the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) may be considered for recognition.

Don't wait up.

They may be some time.

UPDATE:

Email from MoBIE this afternoon: 
"The newly released Building Product Specifications document lists 130 [already-recognised] product standards, including US, European and other international standards alongside New Zealand equivalents for products like plasterboard, cladding and insulation. ...
    "Soon [sic] other pathways will be in place for the Minister of Building and Construction to endorse overseas standards, and for MBIE to formally recognise certain products certified overseas as complying with the Building Code. Updates about these pathways will be made soon [sic]."

Sunday, 27 July 2025

What happened to Quiet?

 

"All our quiet spaces are getting noisier.

“When did museums stop being quiet spaces?” complains a Reddito ....

"Some museums even encourage the din. They tell families to bring their children—and get as noisy as possible. ...

"I now miss ... shushing librarians. Libraries are no longer quiet places. They’re as noisy as the pub after a football match [at which the crowd are noisily exhorted to make noise whenever a game's pause might otherwise allow them to think]....

"People go to libraries to study and read—so it really ought to be a quiet place. ... Once inside, you had access to a sacred inner sanctum of knowledge and learning. Something like this is even better than the Batcave. ... 
[Now however] books are removed, and replaced with coffee bars and spaces for socializing. In case people don’t get the message, librarians now put up signs discouraging quiet study. ...
"But... if we lose libraries as the last public space for quiet reading and reflection, what can replace it? ...

"Why is this happening. ... a theory: 'This all got worse after the pandemic. People spent months in isolation, and when they returned to public spaces, they had forgotten the basic rules of polite behaviour in these communal settings.'
 
"This rudeness feeds on itself. ... So violations of quiet spaces after the pandemic quickly escalate. And once we enter on this vicious cycle, the silence never returns."
 ~ Ted Goia from his post 'Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing

Friday, 25 July 2025

The crucial - and unappreciated - function of wealth in an industrial economy

 

“A widespread ignorance of a crucial economic issue is apparent in most discussions of today’s problems: it is ignorance on the part of the public, evasion on the part of most economists, and crude demagoguery on the part of certain politicians. The issue is the function of wealth in an industrial economy

"Most people seem to believe that wealth is primarily an object of consumption—that the rich spend all or most of their money on personal luxury. Even if this were true, it would be their inalienable right—but it does not happen to be true. The percentage of income which men spend on consumption stands in inverse ratio to the amount of their wealth. The percentage which the rich spend on personal consumption is so small that it is of no significance to a country’s economy. The money of the rich is invested in production; it is an indispensable part of the stock seed that makes production possible. ...

"In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family — and millions of other, similar families — for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow . . . . How would she know it, if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich?

“No one tells her that higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) will not come out of their consumption expenditures, but out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings); that such taxes will mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices for scarcer goods; and that by the time the rich have to lower their standard of living, hers will be gone, along with her savings and her husband’s job — and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries (there will be no such power left).”
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1974 article 'The Inverted Moral Priorities,' collected in The Voice of Reason 

Thursday, 24 July 2025

Poor logic. 'Poor' MPs.

"It’s weird that Labour MPs [paid $230,000 p.a., putting them in the top 1% salary band] complain that high-earning NZers don’t pay enough tax, yet also complain that they can’t afford health insurance because they don’t have enough after tax income."
~ David Farrar from his post 'Poor Labour MPs'

"Te Pāti Māori’s leaders are too busy preaching about Gaza to notice the blood on their own doorstep."

"While Māori children are being beaten, abused and killed right here in New Zealand, Te Pāti Māori’s leaders are too busy preaching about Gaza to notice the blood on their own doorstep. ...
    "It’s easy for [them] to shout about oppression halfway around the world, but where is [their] voice when Māori kids are dying up in Northland while under the care of Ngati Hine? Where is her anger when Māori families are trapped in gang-run communities plagued by drugs, violence and generational trauma? ...
    "Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer are demanding the New Zealand Government expel the Israeli ambassador unless Israel halts its military campaign and opens up Gaza to humanitarian aid. That’s their priority. Not the Māori kids being buried, not the Māori women being beaten, not the Māori offenders clogging up the justice system with violent crimes. Their outrage is selective and political, not moral."

~ Matua Kahurangi from his post 'Te Pāti Māori more concerned with Gaza than Māori children being murdered at home'

Wednesday, 23 July 2025

"If TV3 is worth only $1, what is TVNZ worth."

"'Sky TV is buying Discovery NZ Ltd, whose business centres on free-to-air television channel Three, for $1 in a debt-free deal.' ...

"That begs two questions:

"If TV3 is worth only $1, what is TVNZ worth.

"[And] why is that business still publicly owned?"

~ Ele Ludemann from her post 'What’s TVNZ worth?'

Rangatiratanga means "Ownership"

IT MIGHT SURPRISE YOU to know, since so much hangs upon it, that the Treaty's term 'tino rangatiratanga' is 'a missionary neologism'—one of many. [1] Its root word is ‘rangatira,’ which was of course an original te reo word meaning ‘chief.’ This new word coined by Williams then stresses the power, authority, and agency of the chief.

Article Two of Te Tiriti promises to preserve tino rangatiratanga; courts have interpreted this in various ways to mean that chiefs (Rangatira) retain some kind of chiefly power. But Te Tiriti itself fails to fully clarify of what that power consists. [2] Lawyers since have taken advantage of this imprecision by arguing that it means some kind of chiefly sovereignty (although not over the whole country, since each iwi only extended so far). Ned Fletcher and others have argued since that the English text agrees with this idea, saying that the sovereignty ceded by the Treaty was “compatible with ongoing tribal self-government,” suggesting then that “tino rangatiratanga” means Māori self-government. 

His view is both an expansion and a clarification of the mainstream view of what “tino rangatiratanga” might mean.

Context is important. Like most law, Te Tiriti is hierarchical. Article One focusses on sovereignty; Article Two has a focus on land and resources. There was a logical progression from one Article to another, with the first Article, logically and in law, taking precedence. Sovereignty first, then clarifying what that sovereignty is for.

So with this context then, what is chieftainship about? Answer: It is primarily about ownership — about ownership of that land and those resources. But it is ownership in a "chiefly" sense, analogising the control of a chief over a tribe's land and resources to that of a property right. In his book One Sun in the Sky, author Ewen McQueen explains why Williams's translation reverts to the collective to offer this guarantees:
It is true that in translation Henry Williams has taken an approach that better aligns with the more [collectivist] Māori world-view, rather than the more individualistic European outlook. As such the Māori version does not refer to individuals holding exclusive possession of property. Instead we find chiefs exercising “chieftainship over the lands, villages and all their treasures. [3]
In seeking to find a te reo word to describe the unfamiliar concept of property rights, Williams has unfortunately conflated a legitimate recognition of an individual right to property with a non-existent claim to a collective right. "But the expression 'collective rights' is a contradiction in terms.” [4]

This then makes for a disastrous confusion. Confusion, because the intent of Article Two is to impart property rights, an individual right. But the reference to chieftainship is about collective tribal rights over land.  Disastrous because Te Tiriti should have treated all Maori as individuals instead of as members of a tribe. But it really does nothing of the sort except by implication.

Instead, as written, it cemented in and buttressed the tribal leadership and communal structures that already existed here —encouraging the survival of this wreck of a system until morphing, as it has today, into this mongrelised sub-group of pseudo-aristocracy: of Neotribal Cronyism. 

Nonetheless, as [former Chief Justice] William Martin wrote in 1860,
"This tribal right is clearly a right of property… To themselves they retained what they understood full well, the ‘tino Rangatiratanga,’ ‘full Chiefship,’ in respect of all their lands…’” [5]
This is not trivial. This is why sovereignty, was ceded.

“EVEN THE 'TINO' OF the Māori version is better understood in this context,” argues McQueen. “It does not mean that the chiefs’ authority is unqualified in a government sense. Rather it is Henry Williams’s translation of how the chiefs would retain possession of the lands, forests and fisheries. The English version emphasised such possession would continue ‘full exclusive and undisturbed.’ Williams has rendered this concept as ‘tino’ rangatiratanga. It is about Māori retaining full agency over their land and resources. It is not a statement about unqualified political sovereignty.” [Emphasis mine.]

So “rangatiratanga” relates to ownership. “Tino” gives force to this relationship, giving it the force of a property right.

NOTES:
[1] Paul Moon, The Path to the Treaty of Waitangi, David Ling Publishing, (2002) p. 147

[2] Hugh Kawharu back-translates te tino rangatiratanga as 'the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship,' which doesn't quite clarify things, although the next phrase tries, the Queen guaranteeing "to protect the Chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures ..."
    In Ned Fletcher's reconstructed English text, the corresponding phrase is "full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates, Forests Fisheries and other properties ... "

[3] Ewen McQueen, One Sun in the Sky, Galatas Press (2020), p. 42-43. 

[4] Ayn Rand, ‘Collectivized Rights,’ in The Virtue of Selfishness, New York, Signet, June 1963

[5] William Martin, The Taranaki Question, The Melanesian Press(1860), p. 9.
[This post is based on the 2024 post at my NZ History blog: 'POSTSCRIPT 2: Rangatiratanga as Ownership'

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Tuesday, 22 July 2025

"$7 Trillion dollars of subsidies [sic] in support of fossil fuels"

 

“What about all the subsidies!” [What about] the Guardian headlines hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies [sic] in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF ...

"Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this 'implicit subsidies.' ... I might call it a brazen fake. ...

"The orange 'subsidies' are the total fantasies here. It really is that bad.

"Unbelievably, other parts of the '80% implicit subsidy block' even include things like the cost of traffic accidents, fatalities, congestion and wear and tear on the roads. Somehow when fossil fuels cause congestion, and we suffer a loss of productivity, that’s an implicit subsidy because the price of fuel was not efficient.

"The outrageous gall of this is so much that even hard-left Vox is uncomfortable and asks if this was a bit misleading of the IMF ... Maybe the IMF will accidentally solve congestion because everyone will give up and move to the country to grow cabbages?"

~ Jo Nova from her post 'The fantasy land of “Fossil Fuel Subsidies” where even a car accident, a traffic jam are a subsidy'

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā has become a feature of modern Aotearoa."

"The emergence of Ngāti Pākehā – that tribe of pale Kiwi with their pounamu lanyards and pained expressions – has become a feature of modern Aotearoa.
    "It is a harmless pantomime, as they cloak themselves in the culturally appropriated korowai of perpetual grievance and benefit from the Kiwi reluctance to cause unnecessary offence....
    "If half of the world’s plumbers were lost in the Rapture, we’d notice. If ninety percent of sociologists vanished who would report them missing? To which, these recent graduates find themselves competing with their equally educated peers for jobs that, a decade past, a Labrador with a good attitude could have secured.
    "This, for the entitled offspring of the muddling classes, is a shocking realisation. They are not important. They are not special. They are not, in truth, entitled to anything more than their inheritance which, thanks to their parents’ regimen of yoga and boiled legumes, is slowly receding along with their own hairlines."
~ Damien Grant from his column 'What being ‘woke’ may really mean'

Monday, 21 July 2025

The world's smallest violin

You know when they say, when you're whinging about some First-World Problem, that "here's the world's smallest violin playing for you."

And you know how you've wondered how small that might be?

Well, your question has now been answered. 

The answer is it's about the thickness of a human hair. Actually, even smaller than that. And it's made of platinum. 

Well done to the physicists at Loughborough University.

"There is a constant refusal to admit that the West is founded on the principle of individual rights."

"There is a constant refusal to admit that the West is founded on the principle of individual rights. Individualism. That Each individual ... is free.
    "This issue is always omitted.
    "It is Replaced with democracy.
    "It is Replaced with love of life.
    "It is Replaced with <fill the blank>
    "Is it constantly omitted because of evasion or because of ignorance?
    "I believe it is omitted because of evasion. Individualism requires checking the moral code one grew up with."
~ Felipe Lapyda from his post 'The Evasion that is Destroying America'

Sunday, 20 July 2025

"Strangely, an entire social class has managed to go almost completely unnoticed. It is nothing less than the ruling class. And it is the most formidable and zealous enemy of free-market capitalism and individual freedom."

"Strangely, an entire social class has managed to go almost completely unnoticed. It is not to be found in history books or in newspaper articles. It is missing from academic and public discourse. Even the Marxists, who see the world entirely through the lens of class, have failed to spot it.

"It is odder still that this particular social class should be anonymous and invisible, because it is large, loud, unashamed, and bossy. It is the most powerful class in society. It is the class that constitutes the Establishment. It is nothing less than the ruling class. And it is the most formidable and zealous enemy of free-market capitalism and individual freedom.

"The problem of this missing class first occurred to me in the late 1990s, when I visited an anti-capitalist ‘climate’ rally in London. ... According to the Socialists, it is ‘the working-class’ who have most to gain by the overthrow of capitalism. ... But where, I wondered, at this anti-capitalist ‘climate’ jamboree, were the heroic, muscle-bound, lantern-jawed proletarians? ...

"The protesters cannot simply be labelled 'middle class' because ... the commercial middle class had failed to send a single delegate. ... These practical grafters I guessed were too busy doing capitalism. ... quite out of sympathy with these high-minded, anti-capitalist radicals. So what social class are we left with?

"There is, in fact, a name for the group assembled at the Climate rally, though it is rarely used. The protesters were members, or on their way to becoming members, of the New Class. ... not easily defined but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly proportion of those college-educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a 'post-industrial society' ... We are talking about scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of larger foundations, the upper levels of government bureaucracy and so on. It is by now, a quite numerous class …a disproportionately powerful class, it is also an ambitious and frustrated class. ...

"Members of this class are remarkably conscious of their affinity with other members, they strongly identify with one another politically, culturally and intellectually, and they act, as a class, in a co-ordinated and determined way to pursue their goals. They consider themselves separate from and opposed to other classes. The ideology and worldview of this group, taken as a whole, is consistent, predictable and intractable. And those of us who value individual freedom and property rights, whether we know it or not, are at war with this class. ...

"Th[is] New Class ... has a ‘voracious and insatiable’ hunger for power. ... No other class in history has been as cohesive and single-minded in defending itself and controlling that which it holds. And this includes control of speech and thought. ...
"
As government spending has grown so has the number and size of groups relying directly and indirectly on State funding. These groups, which comprise the core of the New Class, naturally tend to look favourably on their own activities, would like to see their powers increased and their responsibilities extended over greater areas. ...

"The New Class maintains that society needs expert analysis, expert advice, direction, guidance and regulation, and they are the people who will do it. ... They demand more public spending, regulation and planning as naturally as a stream flows down a mountain, because public spending pays their wages and they are the regulators and planners.
"
Members of this class encounter one another, in the workplace and socially, and their views become honed and hammered out. ... and over time they become a coherent, distinct, moral view of the world. ...

"Members of this New Class will always call for something to be done, to solve a perceived problem, in the form of another enquiry or review or committee or institute or ministry, for more research into this or that area, for more laws and statutes and official guidance or the funding of more support groups. If there is no problem to justify an extension of their activities, a problem, or threat, or risk must be found. The problem can never be Big Government (this would be to blame themselves), it must always stem from unregulated activity, and the solution must be more State spending and control.

"To this planning class, freedom itself is an affront. ...

"But grumbling resentment and vague animosity towards the New Class is not enough. The nature of the battle must be spelled out. The need to fight must be underlined, the reasons for waging war explained, and distilled into memorable slogans.

"Most of all, the enemy needs to be clearly identified. Our failure to do so has allowed the New Class to grow and grow, and to escape responsibility for the chaos and misery it has caused. The first step must be to pronounce and advertise, loudly and repeatedly, that the New Class exists. The immense power of the New Class, as we have seen, lies in its anonymity - in the fiction that its members are neutral and disinterested experts, well-meaning ‘concerned’ scientists, high-minded intellectuals, impartial planners and regulators, rationally ordering us and our world, in our best interests. This sham neutrality must be exposed, the selfish motives called out. This invisible class must made visible. This anonymous class must be given a name."

Saturday, 19 July 2025

"This is called failure. There’s no other name for it."

"2025 has been the year of garbage culture. ...

"But something has changed in the last few days. ...

"[P]eople are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back. ...

"I’m focused here on AI’s destructive impact on culture, but there are other signs that growing AI resistance is now forcing companies to reconsider their bot mania.

"'An IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives found three out of four AI projects failed to show a return on investment, a remarkably high failure rate,' reports Andrew Orlowski. 'AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70 percent of the time, says a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce.'

"He also shared the results of a devastating test that debunked AI’s status in its favorite field, namely writing code. This study reveals that software developers think they are operating 20% faster with AI, but they’re actually running 19% slower.

"Some companies are bringing back human workers because AI can’t deliver positive results. Even AI researchers are now expressing skepticism. And only 30% of AI project leaders can say that their CEOs are happy with AI results.

"This is called failure. There’s no other name for it."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'We Are Winning!'

Friday, 18 July 2025

"First cognition was destroyed, then morality, then politics."

"Republicans and Democrats really do not care about facts, logic, truth. These people truly believe that 'if they wish, it is so.' If you bring logic, and consistency to them, they react: 'you are too idealistic. facts, logic, principles and honesty do not matter in politics. What matters is people’s feelings.' They act same way as toddlers: as if their actions had no consequence to their future.

"We live in times ruled by feelings. Some heroic intellectuals are hopelessly trying to explain the obvious. But dishonesty is rampant. People don’t care.

"First cognition was destroyed, then morality, then politics. If a sufficient number of Americans don’t choose to think…the final stage is coming: the end of the freedom of those who choose to think, because their sacrifice will be demanded to keep the insane alive. By force."
~ Felixe Lapyda from his post 'America needs therapy'

Thursday, 17 July 2025

"If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what 'our own culture' actually means."

"If you’re going to issue a cultural call to arms, it helps to have an idea what 'our own culture' actually means. Reform and the Conservatives only know what they are rejecting: Islam and Europe. As for Labour, when Lisa Nandy became culture secretary a year ago, she pledged to transform Britain into a 'self-confident' country, one where everyone can 'see themselves in the stories we tell.' On the question of what that national story is, however, she was tellingly silent. ...

"Our culture has been impoverished. There are many culprits here. Woke traduces hundreds of years of history as tainted with criminality, leading to swathes of our national story, in all its gore and glory, being lost to sight. ...

"When I asked a young Briton to summarise the dominant culture among his generation, he replied, 'an international version of American culture that can be found anywhere.' The Right demands that immigrants 'integrate' — and rightly so — but if we are not careful there will be nothing left to integrate into. ...

"[T]he cultural emergency is real. 2012 is an age ago. The Queen is dead and Bond is on gardening leave. Society has been further weakened by rancorous lunges for power by aggrieved minorities, whether ethnic, sexual or religious, and the furious reaction of their opponents. ...

"Tell the story of this country, warts and all. But tell it. Tell it and tell it again until we see ourselves in it."

~ Christopher de Bellaigue from his post 'Britain can’t tell its national story' [Q: Can we?]

Wednesday, 16 July 2025

It wasn't a “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons." It was The Inventive Period

The so-called “Gilded Age” of "Robber Barons" should be better named, says Andrew Bernstein in this guest post. It should be known as the Inventive Period of Capitalism.

The Inventive Period

by Andrew Bernstein

A recent issue of American Heritage magazine, devoted to analysing important cultural issues in U.S. history, contains an article that provides ample clues to the true nature of late nineteenth-century America. The piece, “People of Progress,” features the greatest innovators of the twentieth century, and takes as its point of departure Christian Schussele’s famed 1862 painting, “Men of Progress,” a depiction of 19 great American inventors and creative thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Schussele’s painting portrays such men as Cyrus McCormick (1809-1884), the inventor and manufacturer of the reaping machine and other agricultural equipment; Charles Goodyear (1800-1860), who created the vulcanization process that made rubber useful; Samuel Colt (1814-1862), the gun inventor and manufacturer; Peter Cooper (1791-1883), the builder of the first American steam locomotive; Samuel Morse (1791-1872), the innovative thinker responsible for both the electric telegraph and the Morse Code; William Morton (1819-1868), the dentist who co-discovered ether’s use as an anesthetic; and Elias Howe (1819-1867), inventor of the sewing machine. These, as well as 12 other equally accomplished thinkers and inventors, form the subject of Schussele’s masterpiece.

The administrators of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (founded by industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper in 18591) recently commissioned one of its leading graduates, the artist Edward Sorel, to paint a sequel to Schussele’s work—a portrait of 20 innovative Americans who changed the world in the twentieth century. Sorel, with assistance from the editors of American Heritage and American Heritage of Invention & Technology, chose the subjects. And not surprisingly, some of the geniuses depicted started their brilliant careers in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Anti-capitalist historians regularly refer to this late-nineteenth-century era as “the Gilded Age” and deride its great industrialists as “Robber Barons.” They claim that its extensive industrial development was achieved by means essentially tawdry and unprincipled. They are profoundly mistaken and have failed to identify the essence of the era. It must be known as the Inventive Period.

In Schussele’s painting, Benjamin Franklin looks down on those assembled as both inspiration and presiding genius. Sorel grants this honor to Thomas Edison. Edison (1847-1931) is the exemplar of his age. He is widely known as the inventor of the electrical lighting system, the phonograph, the electric generator, and the motion-picture projector. He also later coordinated movies with phonographic sound to create the world’s first multi-media presentation. But Edison is by no means alone in exemplifying the scientific/technological genius of the period. Sorel’s portrait projects numerous other great minds.

Among them are George Washington Carver (1864-1943), the brilliant black American botanist and agronomist, who developed a new type of cotton, Carver’s Hybrid. Born a slave, he is most famous for developing sweet potatoes and peanuts as leading crops, but he also invented hundreds of plant-based products, taught methods of soil improvement and, by means of his discoveries, induced southern farmers to grow crops other than cotton. Also included is Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923), the German immigrant who went to work for General Electric as its first director of research and development and in the 1890s pioneered the understanding of electrical transmission.

Neglected Geniuses


Since Schussele’s portrait concentrates on the early nineteenth century and Sorel’s on the twentieth, there are many great late-nineteenth-century thinkers who are included in neither painting. Here we can cite merely a few. One is George Eastman (1854-1932), who in 1884 patented the first film in roll form to prove practical. In 1888 he revolutionized photography by perfecting his Kodak camera, and in 1892 established the Eastman-Kodak Company, one of the first to mass-produce standardized photographic equipment. Another is Cyrus W. Field (1819-1892), an entrepreneur whose interest in transoceanic telegraphy led to the completion in 1866 of the transatlantic cable. Field later was instrumental in laying the cable that linked the United States to Australia and Asia by way of Hawaii.

The advances in architecture wrought by William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) must not be overlooked. Jenney, an engineer in the Union Army during the Civil War, settled in Chicago and opened an architectural office. He pioneered the use of iron-frame construction for large buildings, which he first employed in the Home Insurance Company Building in 1885. His revolutionary method of curtain-wall construction is still used today and earned him the title of “father of the skyscraper.” Sullivan apprenticed with Jenney early in his career. Later, it was his designs for steel-frame buildings that resulted in the establishment of the skyscraper as a distinctively American type of building.

George Westinghouse (1846-1914) introduced numerous inventions in various fields, but concentrated on the railroad industry. Before the age of 20, he created the “railroad frog,” an invention that permitted trains to switch tracks. His most famous advance was the air brake, invented around 1866, which became a standard feature on all trains. Westinghouse developed hundreds of innovations, acquired more than 400 patents and, together with the Croatian immigrant Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), pioneered the use of alternating current (AC) power in the United States. Tesla invented the AC induction generator in the 1880s, the first practical motor powered by alternating current. He sold the patent to Westinghouse, who put it to commercial use in the Niagara Falls power project. Westinghouse and Tesla demonstrated that alternating current was able to generate electrical power over great distances more economically than the direct current favoured by Edison.

John Roebling (1806-1869), a German immigrant, pioneered the construction of suspension bridges in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrated the practicality of using steel cables in bridge construction—and today, early in the 21st century, several of his bridges still stand, including the famed Brooklyn Bridge in New York, constructed in the 1870s. Another great creator, largely forgotten today, is the U.S. Army surgeon and bacteriologist Walter Reed (1851-1902). In the 1890s, Reed’s investigations contributed greatly to the understanding of typhoid fever, leading to the control and prevention of epidemics of the disease. In 1900 Reed demonstrated that the yellow-fever virus was transmitted by the bite of the mosquito Aedes aegypti. By exterminating the mosquitoes, the disease was virtually wiped out.

A great thinker from the Inventive Period who is widely remembered is the Scottish immigrant, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). In 1874, his work on the multiple telegraph gave him the idea for the telephone. Experiments with his research assistant, Thomas Watson, proved successful on March 10, 1876. Later that year, Bell demonstrated the telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, an event leading to the organization of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Bell’s other inventions include the audiometer, a device for measuring hearing acuity and, later in life, the aileron and other aeronautical advances.

Space does not permit even the mention of all the inventors, entrepreneurs, and groundbreaking industrialists who flourished during the period. The achievements of Frank Julian Sprague (1857-1934), for example, are no longer remembered. Sprague, a brilliant electrical engineer who graduated from Annapolis and worked for Edison, electrified Richmond’s trolley system in 1888. He demonstrated that electricity was cheap, and that it could be used on both surface and elevated cars. In 1890 about 15 percent of America’s urban transit mileage was electrified; by 1902, 97 percent.

On the eve of the twentieth century America’s technological advances were only beginning. On the morning of June 4, 1896, Henry Ford (1863-1947) battered down the brick wall of his rented garage with an ax and drove out his first car. Others, of course, had already built and run cars, but Ford began the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and made the automobile a commercial reality. Soon millions of Americans were driving cars. That same year, Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, who were self-educated regarding the principles of aeronautical engineering, accomplished the first controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Throughout the 1890s, the Wrights had been studying aeronautics and experimenting with flying devices. Both the automotive and aviation ages dawned in early twentieth-century America as a direct outgrowth of the achievements of the late nineteenth. (Ford and the Wright brothers are included in Sorel’s painting.)

The Underlying Factor


What underlying factor was responsible for this unprecedented outpouring of innovations, inventions, advances, and new products? The answer should be obvious, but unfortunately, to many historians it is not. It was the political and economic freedom of the capitalist system that enabled these inventor-entrepreneurs to flourish.

The late nineteenth century (until the proliferation of trust-busting and government controls in the early twentieth century) was the freest period of American history. The leading economists, professors, legal theorists, and judges upheld the principles of individual rights, limited government, economic freedom, and profit-making. Economists such as Amasa Walker, Arthur Latham Perry, and Francis Bowen wrote the leading economics textbooks of the day. Their works—Science of Wealth, Elements of Political Economy, and American Political Economy, respectively—championed the ability of the free market to create wealth and upward economic mobility.2 William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), the leading American social scientist of the late nineteenth century, wrote of “The Forgotten Man,” the honest labourer who supported himself by productive work. The principle of the Forgotten Man is that he needs the liberty of the American system if he is to flourish. He is the one always victimised by the socialists’ schemes to redistribute the income earned by private individuals.3

The law writers and legal philosophers of the day shared the same commitment to limited government. The most prominent, Thomas Cooley and Christopher Tiedeman, wrote their major works in the second half of the nineteenth century. The upshot of both Cooley’s A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Powers of the American Union (1868) and Tiedeman’s A Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Powers of the States(1886) was the defense of property rights.4

In practice, most American judges of the period agreed with the individualistic principles of the country’s leading legal philosophers. After the Civil War, American courts generally presumed to be unconstitutional any laws restricting property rights and the rights of both businessmen and workers to set the terms of labor that they deemed best. As one example, the New York State Court of Appeals in 1885 struck down legislation seeking to limit the hours of industrial employment, ruling that such a law violated the rights of both worker and employer to engage in a voluntary transaction.

Additionally, the American courts of the late nineteenth century repeatedly placed severe limitations on the government’s power to tax and to subsidize business ventures. The courts generally gave strong support to the capitalist principle that productive enterprise was to be privately funded, owned, and operated. One representative ruling by a Missouri court in 1898 found against governmental paternalism, whether state or federal, and proclaimed that individuals know best how to conduct their own business and personal affairs.5

In this era, the U.S. Supreme Court gradually came to be the great defender of an individual’s right to property, freedom of contract, and economic liberty. For example, Stephen J. Field (brother of Cyrus Field), for many years a distinguished Justice of the high court, issued pro-freedom dissenting opinions in such famous disputes as the Slaughter-House cases (1873) and Munn v. Illinois (1877), holding that the government could prevent neither employers nor workers from entering fields of their own choosing or violate the right of individuals to the full use and disposal of their property. The majority opinion at this time was that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the rights of the recently freed slaves only and that there was nothing in it to prevent the states from interfering in business activities. But by the mid-1880s, after the San Mateo case (1882) and the Santa Clara case (1886), Justice Field prevailed. Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite, in an oral statement, spoke for a unanimous bench in 1886, proclaiming that all the justices “understood and accepted the fact that corporations were persons within the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The right of individuals to work and to use their own labor and property as they saw fit now came under the legal protection of the Supreme Court.6

Religion and Capitalism


Religious leaders of the period characteristically upheld the virtues of work, frugality, sobriety, and wealth earned through honest effort. The weekly religious periodical The Independent, edited for a while by the noted Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), defended the free market as the means by which both capitalists and workers would achieve material gain. For almost four decades Beecher preached from his influential Brooklyn pulpit the ability of hard-working individuals to rise economically in the capitalist system.7

The intellectual, cultural and political climate of the country upheld freedom, limited government, and property rights in this era. The economic results are not surprising. The most innovative and creative minds were free to develop new products and methods, to start their own companies, to bring their innovations to the marketplace, to convince consumers that the new products were superior to the old and, in time, to earn fortunes. There were few government bureaucrats and regulators to prohibit their activities, restrict their output, dictate working conditions, or limit their market share. “The first condition of this proliferation was that the innovations did not require the assent of governmental . . . authorities.”8

Most of the innovators of the Inventive Period were entrepreneurs who sought and made wealth by virtue of their creative work. Edison retired with a net worth of $12 million, an enormous sum in those days. His inventions were profit-driven. “Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory was conceived to bring scientific knowledge to bear on industrial innovation . . . . Its inventions were goals chosen with a careful eye to their marketability.”9

Such instances were numerous during the Inventive Period. Eastman, Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Company), and Ford are all examples of innovator-entrepreneurs who developed their new products into profitable business ventures. Willis Carrier (1876-1950) invented the air conditioner in 1902, held more than 80 patents by the 1940s, and founded the manufacturing firm that bears his name. (He also made Sorel’s painting.) Bell’s most famous invention led, of course, to the founding of the Bell Telephone Company. Roebling made a fortune from his wire-manufacturing company, as did McCormick from his firm’s producing the reaping machine and other farm equipment. Colt was an entrepreneur who opened his own plant, Colt Patent Arms, in 1855. He pioneered advanced manufacturing methods such as the production line and the use of interchangeable parts, making his company the largest private armory in the world. Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) wanted a commercially practical sewing machine and brought together several related patents to create his immensely popular product. By 1860, he was the largest manufacturer of sewing machines in the world. A business innovator, Singer began such practices as installment buying, advertising campaigns, and service with sales.

Because of the climate of political and economic freedom during the Inventive Period, America’s entrepreneurs were able to revolutionise the fields of heavy industry on which general prosperity depended. Between 1860 and 1900, American output of bituminous coal increased by 2,260 percent, crude petroleum by 9,060 percent, steel by 10,190 percent, and other industries increased by similar amounts.10 Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) built Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil into enormously productive concerns that flooded the country with steel and oil products. In the 1880s and 1890s, the great railroad man James J. Hill (1838-1916) constructed the Great Northern Railroad with only private funds to the immense betterment of people in the northern plains and northwest states. It goes without saying that Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Hill earned great wealth.

The lesson of the Inventive Period can be applied today. Political and economic freedom will lead to widespread innovation. This principle can already be seen in the computer industry, in which the relative absence of government regulation has enabled such innovators as Steve Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and others to create an information revolution, and to earn fortunes in the process.

To defend freedom against the distortions of the anti-capitalist historians it is important to reject the inaccurate and opprobrious title of “the Gilded Age” for the late nineteenth century. We must recognise and celebrate the true nature of the era.

It was the Inventive Period.
Notes
See www.cooper.edu/engineering/chemechem/general/cooper.html.
Louis M. Hacker, The World of Andrew Carnegie, 1865-1901 (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1968), pp. 68-73.
Ibid., pp. 81-85.
Ibid., pp. 86-92.
Ibid., pp. 95-96.
Ibid., pp. 98-107.
Ibid., pp. 74-80.
Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rich (New York: Basic Books, 1986), p. 265.
Ibid., p. 250.
Hacker, p. xxxi
* * * * 
Andrew Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He lectures all over the world. His books include The Capitalist Manifesto, American Racism: Its Decline, Its Baleful Resurgence, and Our Looming Race War, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters, and his newly-released (and highly recommended) collection of essays Aristotle Versus Religion.
This post previously appeared at the Foundation for Economic Education.

Lessons in Collaboration #124

"We are involved in a business venture. We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives."
~ director Mel Brooks, explaining the fine points of artistic collaboration ...

Tuesday, 15 July 2025

Seems fair

"Given that level of unprecedented upheaval and restriction on personal freedom – greater even than wartime – which people went along with because they believed it was for the greater good [sic], it is now far from unreasonable for New Zealanders to expect Ardern, Hipkins and Bloomfield to appear before the Royal Commission to explain their actions in a way that they would not and could not do at the time.
    "Only then will the Royal Commission be sufficiently informed to report on 'lessons to be learned from what happened'.” 
~ Peter Dunne from his untitled post [hat tip Home Paddock]

Monday, 14 July 2025

Rocketing rates rises rightly reviled

"Look at me, I'm on a bus!" Second-prize winner in the "my council spends too much awards,"
Greater Wellington's spender-in-chief Daran Ponter unfortunately ignores the exits.

BY HOW MUCH HAVE YOUR rates gone up by this year?

If you're "lucky," they've only risen by under 3 percent — that's if you're under the regime of either the Whanganui or Waitomo District Councils, or the Bay of Plenty Regional Council. You, dear people, are the "lucky" ones. Only a 3-percent rates rise

Not so lucky however if you live under the arm of the Clutha District Council, Upper Hutt City Council, Waipa District Council, Hamilton City Council, or Hastings District Council. If you're unlucky enough to have those folk on the letterhead of your. rates bill, then you're forced to pay more than 15 percent more this year than last year.

And pity those poor folk in Hastings.  Over the last three years, under Mayor/Chair Sandra Hazlehurst, their rates demands have gone up by just under 50 percent. Fifty percent in three years! And there are four councils demanding even more over these last three years — West Coast Regional Council demanding 66 percent more than they did in 2022, and Greater Wellington 55 percent more.

Well, I guess Wellington does need to fix its pipes, right?

But here's the problem. Those rocketing rates rises haven't been going to fix the pipes, have they. Like every other council ni the country, the Greater Wellington Regional Council has found what its politicians and planners think are far more important things on which to spend your money.

Monuments. Landscaping.

Bread. Circuses. Consultants.


All paid for from your rates, which also pay (almost) for their hefty borrowing. 

You can find all these frightening figures at the Taxpayer Union's Rates Dashboard 2025, released today.


THE FIGURES ARE FRIGHTENING. BUT they still don't reveal the whole truth.  'Cos even with rates rocketing, these profligate bastards still can't pay their way. They're not just over-spending, they're over-borrowing.
At least 11 councils have net debt-to-revenue ratios of more than 200 percent.

Hamilton is on 281 percent, just four points away from the limit on councils’ debt covenants. Queenstown Lakes is on 265 percent. Tauranga is on 248 percent now, but forecasting to blow the 285 percent lid from 2030 onwards.

“Some are reaching their debt ceilings, which will have the auditors in a twist,” says [Greater Wellington's Spender-in-Chief Daran] Ponter. “That’s a real issue. If you look to the UK, Birmingham has effectively gone into liquidation in the last few weeks. There’s a city of two to three million people that basically can’t pay its way anymore.”

Hamilton’s mayor Paula Southgate 
[42% rates rises over three years]and Local Government NZ vice president Campbell Barry, who is the Hutt City mayor [45% over three years], today published research showing the wide gap between council revenues and capital spending obligations, over the 10 years of the new longterm plans.
The research, by Infometrics, shows councils had already committed to $23.3 billion capital investment from 2021 to 2024. Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen says once construction inflation is added in, that’s nearly $3 billion more.
It's all very well for Nicola Willis to say she wants councils to "stick to the basics" and "not waste ratepayers money" — "focusing on the things people expect them to do, which is the rubbish, the roads, the pipes, the basics - and not all the fanciful projects" — but she is doing damn all about it.

It's just more politico-blather.

Sandra Lee, 2002: Let's get councils
spending more, and doing less core
Nicola Willis is Finance Minister. She should have a good talk to her hopeless Local Government Minister Simon Watts about repealing the one Act that gave explicit permission for councils to begin focussing on all the fanciful projects, and to ignore the things people expect them to do, such as the rubbish, the roads, the pipes, the basics ...

That Act was the Local Government Act, which receives far less opprobrium than it should.

JUST OVER TWO DECADES AGO, in 2002, the then-Local Government Minister was the hard-left Alliance Party's Sandra Lee. And it was then that local government debt began to rise dramatically — not because councils around the country were over-investing in infrastructure; not because they were going hard on their core business; not at all because they were building, maintaining and upgrading roads, bye-roads, drains, pipes and parks as they were damned well supposed to. For the most part, instead, with some significant exceptions, they weren't. What they began building instead was a lot of expensive fucking monuments

Monuments mostly to themselves.

The culprit here was Sandra Lee's Local Government Amendment Act 2002, which granted to city councils, district councils and regional councils a "power of general competence" (I know, right?) which would enable them to enter into any activity they wished, with the only limit being their imagination and the pockets of their ratepayers.

Prior to Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, councils could only do what they were legally permitted to to, i.e., to carry out their core business. After Sandra Lee's Local Government Act, however, the leash was off. And council credit cards started straight away racking up debt for vanity projects everywhere. 

I'd like to say I told you so. I'd like to, so I will. Because I was as outraged then as I am now:

Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell is outraged at today's announcement by Helen Clark and Minister of Local Government Sandra Lee to grant local authorities "a power of general competence" in order to "enhance the well-being of their communities." "The well being of everyone in a community is more likely to be enhanced by retaining a tight leash on councils," says Cresswell, "since most councils have already well demonstrated they struggle for competence."
    "Local government throughout New Zealand's history has demonstrated its utter incompetence in handling the loot they confiscate from ratepayers by wasting it on such idiocies as the New Plymouth Wind Wand, the Auckland Britomart edifice, and the Palmerston North empty civic building." he said. ...
    "More substantially," says Cresswell, "there is a crucial constitutional principle at stake -the constitutional principle that citizens may do whatever they wish, apart from what is specifically outlawed, whereas governments and councils may only do what is specifically legislated for. The main purpose of this constitutional principle is to keep a leash on government, both central and local. It is this leash that is beginning to gnaw at local governments, and it is this leash that Clark and Lee propose to untie."
    "It is a dangerous step to take," warns Cresswell, who points out that councils are being given more 'freedom' at he same time as the Resource Management Amendments Bill threatens to take away even more freedom from New Zealand property owners. "The constitutional principle is being reversed," he says. "Even as they propose giving local government wider powers to act, they are taking away the power of individuals to act for themselves," says Cresswell. "Every property owner should rise up in protest," he says.
    "Libertarianz will be making a strong submission on the consultation document," says Cresswell. 

Which we did. For all the bloody use that it did: The Clark Government passed it, a succession of Local Government ministers since since has kept it, and every bloody local councillor ever since Sandra's "permissive" Act has spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave with a start-up founder's credit card.

The New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA) supplies around two-thirds of that council debt, and last time I looked their tab was just over $18 billion. That's about $20,000 for every ratepayer. Add to that an existing $5 billion of Auckland and Christchurch council debt. And those numbers are every year by around a billion a year as ballooning rates rises fail to keep up with even-more ballooning council spending.

And as you can now see, it's not like they've been spending much of it underground.

In Christchurch they've been turning the city into "an innovative and modern community with major facilities from Akaroa Wharf to Te Kaha Canterbury Multi-Use Arena." In Wellington they've been watching the city's infrastructure crumble while they vote to spend hundreds of millions on earthquake-prone inner-city monuments of questionable value. And here in Auckland, council have allocated yet another billion dollars (plus fuck-ups) to pour down the ever-expanding black hole of the train set with the ever-disappearing-opening date, plus several hundreds of millions more to continue transforming the place into "one of the world's most liveable cities."

A shame there are still very few plans to make it an affordable one.

What on earth is to be done?

You know, here's an idea.

Instead of keeping Sandra Lee's Local Government Act and binning Three Waters, which is where this new Coalition Government went, how's about — and hear me out, now that you've all heard the story —how's about we bin Sandra Lee's act and tell fucking councils to stop over-spending, to close down their PR departments, and to get back to their core fucking business.

Maybe you could suggest something like that to Simon Watts, who's the current Local Government minister. 

But you'll have to explain to him first who Sandra Lee is, and what she did back then to stuff things up. Because the gormless twit does appear a bit simple.

UPDATE: It's been pointed out to me that Simon Watts is trying to overturn some of Sandra Lee's Act, and argued that I've been unnecessarily harsh about him in my conclusion.

Nearly two years into his job, he is introducing an Act he says will "refocus" councils to their core jobs.

. . . .
 . . . .
. . . .
Unfortunately, however, while this is good as far as it goes, it's the Act from way back in 2002 that still needs a bullet.