Will @NZLabour have any list MPs in 2017 after deal with @NZGreens?

There is a memorandum of understanding agreed yesterday between the New Zealand Labour Party and the New Zealand Greens. There is some speculation that there will be more coordination over electorate votes so that the Labour Party wins more electorate seats.

Labour has five list MPs at the moment. Winning a few more electorate seats will mean that the leader of the party and a future leader may be out of parliament if there is more tactical voting.

Unless this tactical voting leads to an overhang in parliament with Labour holding more electoral seats than it is entitled to on the basis of its party vote, it seems to be shooting itself in the foot.

$5.2 billion in rail spending since 2003 budget @JulieAnneGenter @JordNZ

$5.2 billion in rail spending since the 2003 budget! This $5.2 billion does not include any spending on urban rail, commuter train networks or their electrification. The $5.2 billion since the 2003 budget is for the passenger and freight network, not the urban metro contracts

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Source: New Zealand Budget Papers, various years.

Desperately waiting for that dividend the taxpayers lose if any of these assets are privatised. The spending listed below in the two charts includes loans, capital injections and the purchase of the track and of the train operator itself. The latter was purchased for $690 million which was soon written down to zero.

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Source: New Zealand Budget Papers, various years.

There is no table because the table format breaks down when blogged.

At various times, OnTrack and KiwiRail was subsidiaries of the New Zealand Railways Corporation, which was the holding company. Now OnTrack is a division of KiwiRail.

Sensible Sentencing Trust mistaken to oppose plea bargaining @sst_nz

The sensible sentencing trust wants to greatly curtail if not abolish plea-bargaining. Its petition is motivated by a recent plea bargain where a particularly horrendous child murder was pleaded down to two manslaughter guilty pleas.

I have no knowledge of the details of that case or the plea-bargain other than a male and female caregiver were charged with the brutal murder of a 3-year-old child in their foster care.

image My speculation is two guilty pleas to manslaughter is better than one of the accused getting off through a cutthroat defence.

In this defence, the co-accused blame each other for the worst and minimises their own culpability. Sometimes this backfires. The jury convicts both on the evidence of the other but ignores self-serving testimony. But sometimes a cutthroat defence works and a guilty goes free.

A few years ago a father was accused of murdering his 3 month old twins. The chief witness against him was their mother.

By the end of the trial, his defence counsel made the mother look far more guilty than the accused. So much so that the jury returned a not guilty verdict in 10 minutes.One of the two did it,  but the jury could not work out which one so there was reasonable doubt.

In the case motivating the petition to abolish  plea-bargaining, the accused pleaded down to manslaughter pleas. Both are certain to be punished rather than one perhaps get off.

Plea-bargain are a compromise but they are still justice. The punishment is less but is more certain. Plea-bargaining allows scarce prosecution resources to be better targeted, which means more convictions in those cases that do go to trial.

Following Landes (1971), plea bargaining is a rational response to the costs of trial for prosecutors intent on maximizing the sum of punishments imposed on defendants as a class and for defendants seeking to minimize the expected costs of punishment to them as individuals.

A plea-bargain spares witnesses the ordeal of a trial; justice is speedier, less a severe but more certain as there is no chance of the not guilty verdict at trail. Testifying against an accused found not guilty because a reasonable doubt rather than actual innocence must be disheartening.

Who said mobile phone networks were not contestable?

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Source: New Zealand Commerce Commission.

Gap in GDP per Australian, Canadian, French, German, Japanese, New Zealander and British hour worked with the USA

This data tells more of a story than I expected. Firstly, New Zealand has not been catching up with the USA. Japan stopped catching up with the USA in 1990. Canada has been drifting away from the USA for a good 30 years now in labour productivity.image

Data extracted on 28 May 2016 05:15 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat from OECD Compendium of Productivity Indicators 2016 – en – OECD.

Australia has not been catching up with the USA much at all since 1970. It has maintained a pretty consistent gap with New Zealand despite all the talk of a resource boom in the Australia; you cannot spot it in this date are here.

Germany and France caught up pretty much with the USA by 1990. Oddly, Eurosclerosis applied from then on terms of growth in income per capita.

European labour productivity data is hard to assess because their high taxes lead to a smaller services sector where the services can be do-it-yourself. This pumps up European labour productivity because of smaller sectors with low productivity growth.

“GMO’s are Dangerous!” – Not  

Source: “GMO’s are Dangerous!” – Not – Cafe Hayek

What is freighted by road? @TransportBlog @JulieAnneGenter

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Source: Ministry of Transport (2014). National Freight Demand Study 2014.

What is freighted by rail? @TransportBlog @JulieAnneGenter

The Greens want to expand rail freight but stop mining coal which is 1/5 of rail tonnage.

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Source: Ministry of Transport (2014). National Freight Demand Study 2014.

@jamespeshaw what do coastal ships ship when they ship 4.2 million tonnes per year?

If coastal shipping is going to double its freight capacity, and certainly going to need some new ships because the existing ships are unsuited to taking over the current business of road freight.

image

Source: Ministry of Transport (2014). National Freight Demand Study 2014.

@JulieAnneGenter only 21% of freight is contestable by rail

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Source: International freight transport services | Productivity Commission of New Zealand.

image

Source: International freight transport services | Productivity Commission of New Zealand.

@jamespeshaw only 8% of freight is contestable by coastal shipping

Shipping offers only a tiny bit of competition the rail freight but barely any with road freight

image

Source: International freight transport services | Productivity Commission of New Zealand.

@JulieAnneGenter road, rail & ships are not substitute modes

image

Source: International freight transport services | Productivity Commission of New Zealand.

@jamespeshaw how many domestic shipping services in NZ? 16!

Of the 4.2 billion million tons of annual coastal shipping in New Zealand, 2.32 million tons of that is petroleum products. The majority of coastal shipping is petroleum products redistributed from the one refinery in New Zealand to the rest of the country. You can’t double that which the Greens wanted to because it is already at its upper limit.

image

Source: Coastal shipping and modal freight choice | NZ Transport Agency.

@JulieAnneGenter doesn’t know what is shipped through ports

The Greens today announced a policy to double the amounts of cargo moved by train and shipping. It seems to have forgotten that most cargo moved by ship is bulk cargoes such as cars. Nothing can change the fact that once the ship is unloaded, the cars have to go by truck to the car yard.

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Source: New Zealand Institute of Economic Research. Port study 2 Final report NZIER report to Auckland Council (3 February 2015).

Tax bracket creep in Australia

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