Utopia, you are standing in it!

Electricity generation started off as an extension of science. These days, it’s all about vanity and virtue signalling. Not least those millions of shiny solar panels, which we’ve all helped subsidise – to allow our neighbours to bask in their own virtuous glow.

At the theoretical level – when the sun is up and the sky is cloud free – solar panels are generating electricity around 6.5 hours a day (on average). During their most virtuous cycle, they’re dispatching power back into the grid, and reducing their owner’s power bills (attracting feed in tariffs multiples greater than the value of the electricity itself – initially some states were paying figures in the order of $540 per MWh – coal-fired power costs less than $40).

Those without panels pick up the tab for the subsidies gifted to their neighbours (whether in the form of feed in tariffs or renewable energy certificates)…

In a press statement headed Shock at Minister decision to defer birth certificate change, trans community organisations have expressed shock at Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin’s decision to defer legislative proposals to introduce an administrative process for changing gender markers on birth certificates.

Ahi Wi-Hongi, National Coordinator of the transgender organisation Gender Minorities Aotearoa, said this issue is not new.

“It is over 11 years since the Human Rights Commission’s Transgender Inquiry called for a simpler process.”

It might surprise Wi-Hongi to learn there was shock in the general community when the public learned what MPs on a select committee had done.  They had endorsed proposals not only to allow public records to be changed at the behest of an individual who wanted the change, but to allow these changes to be made without any check on the validity of or justification for an applicant’s request for change.  

Introduction

As is well known, the Government’s Withdrawal Agreement was voted down in Parliament last week by 230 votes in a ‘meaningful vote’ mandated under s 13(1) of European Withdrawal Act 2018 (‘EUWA’). This led to the Opposition tabling a formal vote of no confidence in the Government under the Fixed-term Parliament Act 2011 (‘FTPA’). This is the first formal no confidence motion tabled for a quarter of a century. The motion was defeated by 325 votes to 306 votes. The survival of the Government despite the rejection of the central plank of its programme has led one leading commentator to describe the Government as ‘in office without being in power’.

For some MPs, notably the ERG group of backbench Conservative MPs, the rejection of the Withdrawal Agreement is unproblematic. This is because, as a matter of law, Parliament gave its approval to Brexit when it passed the European…

I wrote recently on this blog about the issue of Royal Assent. This post concerns the wholly separate issue of Royal Consent which is a requirement for those rare Bills that would affect the royal prerogative.

The possibility of a no deal exit has led Yvette Cooper MP to propose a Bill, the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 4) Bill (‘EUWA2019’) to mandate the government to delay exit day if no deal is agreed by Parliament. The latest iteration of the Bill can be found here. Previous iterations of EUWA2019 have either been dropped or Cooper’s proposal has been rejected by the House of Commons in a vote. Three Cabinet ministers have now publicly threatened to support the Bill.

Technically, Cooper’s Bill would be a Private Member’s Bill. As is well known, such Bills normally have no chance of passing without executive sanction because the Government controls the business of…

At lunchtime I went to hear Reserve Bank Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand make the case for his boss’s proposal to require the locally incorporated banks operating in New Zealand to fund a much larger proportion of their balance sheets with equity capital.  I will write tomorrow about a range of other points that were, and weren’t, made.  But for now I wanted to pick up just one number he used in making the case.

In the course of his presentation, Bascand used a slide which reported the Bank’s view that these changes in capital requirements will lower the long-run level of GDP by a bit less than 0.3 per cent.  I hadn’t seen the number before (maybe it was in the documents, in which case I missed it), but what struck me was Bascand’s suggestion that this is “not a very big number”.

Looked at quickly, perhaps that is true. …

Bill Shorten: ready to swing 50% RET wrecking ball.

Australia’s renewable energy policy is already a disaster. But Labor’s Bill Shorten promises total catastrophe with his National 50% RET.

In yesterday’s post, STT picked up on economic analysis put forward by Dr Brian Fisher, which provided a wake-up call to Australians.

The economic cost of current so-called ‘climate and energy policy’ is in the tens of billions, in terms of reduced growth, lower incomes and higher unemployment.

Should Bill Shorten snatch government come May, his Labour/Green Alliance will introduce a giant carbon tax (aka a mandated cap on carbon dioxide emissions) along with a 50% RET – ie the same policy that throttled South Australia and turned it into an international laughingstock.

On that scenario, the economic cost will be in the hundreds of $billions and the results from blue-collar workers (once championed by the ALP) will be an unmitigated…

In this video, geologist and engineer Tony Heller reviews the Democrats’ Green New Deal – shows why it is both scientifically baseless and based on very irrational, dangerous thinking.

The second issue that Andrew Sullivan takes up in his New York Magazine column this week is that of transgender athletes and transphobia. The inspiration for his piece was the actions of Martina Navatilova, an openly gay ex-athlete who was a friend of the LGBTQ community. That is, until she recently declared that it was unfair in some instances for transwomen to compete in sports against biological women. That, as you know, is enough to brand someone as transphobic. The Guardian reports what happened to Navatilova:

The tennis player and gay rights campaigner first drew criticism from equalities activists and trans athletes when she tweeted in December: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”

Writing in the Sunday Times, Navratilova said she…

I went back to my apartment from which no policeman could evict me now. There was no one home, and finally I was able to weep freely. To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatised as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai, who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.
(Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, labour economist, arrested in 1936, released in 1954, describing her formal exoneration in 1956, quoted on page 461)

Applebaum is not just a leading researcher and scholar of 20th century Russian history, she is also a senior journalist, having worked for The Economist