Utopia, you are standing in it!

While the PM and her team were setting out their programme to reconnect us with the rest of the world, Amazon was advising the government of its plans to pull the plug  – both from our film-making facilities and from the government’s generous subsidies.

And whereas yesterday’s “Latest from the Beehive” posts included two speeches and a press statement on (eventually) the reopening of our borders, today’s posts include news of the Government’s response to Amazon’s withdrawal.

Amazon’s decision was reported more than 12 hours ago by The Guardian (which wasn’t necessarily the first to break the news).

Amazon has made the surprise decision to move production of its $1bn-plus Lord of the Rings series from New Zealand to the UK, rejecting tens of millions of dollars in incentives to shoot the TV show in the same location as the blockbuster films.

And:

The government was informed of Amazon’s decision…

By Paul Homewood

Statistician Dr. Matt Briggs on IPCC report: “You can never be fired for being wrong in the right direction. The Experts making statements about how dire the climate is have been wrong for decades, and they are still wrong in their sparkling new IPCC Climate Assessment Report 6 released Monday. Now, as then, they warn that “extremes” are on their way. They haven’t got here yet, but they’re coming. They’re always coming.” … Or they have got here, but you need to have the kind of specialized training mentioned above to recognize them.

The difference between AR6, and ARs 1-5, is not so much in the kind of errors made, for these haven’t changed at all, but in the certainty expressed in them. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that somebody did a “Find & Replace” of every instance of “very likely” in AR5 and changed…

My opening remarks to the Environment Committee this morning on the Natural and Built Environments bill, which will replace the RMA:

Any planning system must allow trade-offs between competing outcomes.

Property rights confront owners with some but not all of these trade-offs.

The reforms should be based on understanding which trade-offs the planning system needs to solve, who is best placed to make decisions, and how.

This bill proposes the Minister for the Environment can decide everything using regulation.

This is not a credible approach. With the best will, the Minister cannot deliver a framework which makes sense of so much complexity. Decisions should be devolved to the lowest level, and with checks and balances, which regulation does not do.

The main goal of these reforms should be to improve housing affordability. The RMA has substantially contributed to the housing crisis. Quite simply, the new system must make it easier…

Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul of BIS in this paper gives an assessment:

This article provides an interim assessment of the macroeconomic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Estimates suggest a median output loss of about 6.5% in 2020, a gap that is expected to narrow to around 4% of the pre-pandemic trend by the end of 2021. There is however a high dispersion of economic losses across economies, reflecting varying exposures to the pandemic and societies’ responses. High-frequency indicators and epidemiological models provide some insights into the interactions between the evolution of the pandemic and societies’ strategies for combating it, including the role of vaccination. The article draws lessons from experiences thus far and discusses challenges ahead.

In a related voxeu piece, Jean-Charles Bricongne and Baptiste Meunier point to five best policies to fight the pandemic

Greenpeace recently objected to the Philippine government’s recent approval for the country’s farmers to grow genetically modified golden rice. The rice variant will contain enough Vitamin A and beta-carotene that can feed andmnourish starving children in poverty that lack those vital nutrients.

Greenpeace, on the other hand, has long been involved in campaigns to demonize and slander any form of genetically modified foods. Consequently, people starve or even die because of the group’s opposition to GMO foods that give people the food they need to live. This PBS Newshour report from 2014 gives a very good overview of the controversy.

PHOTO CREDIT: Golden rice as compared to white rice. By International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricephotos/5516789000/in/set-72157626241604366, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14908001

I have seen the following figures at three different places this morning under three different posters and while it is very definitely possible that they all stem from the same source – in fact I know they do because these figures are said to be Labour internal polling – they are well worth further publication. Date of the poll is not known but I think I read somewhere that the main parties poll weekly so they are probably fairly current and later than the last Roy Morgan and Reid polls.

Labour 38

National 31

ACT 13

Green 8

NZ First 4 – Lazarus stirs again.

No mention of any other parties.

The removal of Winston Churchill from the public area of Parliament Buildings and Mallard sounding off about the Hurricanes owner can only help a worthy cause.

I bet the language on the 9th floor is colourful and I cannot…