Utopia, you are standing in it!

A Supreme Court judgement in August last year has led to the Department of Conservation undertaking partial reviews of the Conservation General Policy and the General Policy for National Parks, to give better effect to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

And what are these principles?

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage told Point of Order:

“The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are not explicitly stated in the articles of the Treaty itself.”

Nope.

“They have evolved primarily though jurisprudence…”  

They also have significant governance and constitutional implications.

Another stage in this evolutionary process was the Supreme Court’s ruling which   buttressed an iwi’s claim to exclusive rights to conduct commercial tours for at least five years on the Rangitoto and Motutapu islands in the Hauraki Gulf.

Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki went to court to challenge DoC’s issuing five-year tourism concessions to Fullers and the Motutapu Island Restoration Trust on the…

BBC host Andrew Neil exposes the inaccurate and alarmist claims of Extinction Rebellion.

Last week a group calling themselves the Sustainable Finance Forum –  itself a creation of the self-selected left-wing environmental/political lobby group The Aotearoa Circle –  published an interim report.   The report is 70 pages long, but don’t let that deter you as there really isn’t much there.

Of course, this is not just any lobby group.  On the board of the Aotearoa Circle, for example, sits Vicky Robertson, chief executive of the Ministry for the Environment, and supposedly an apolitical public servant, advising ministers of whichever political stripe.  Oh well, never mind those old conventions…..   And one of the two co-chairs of the Sustainable Finance Forum is Matt Whineray, chief executive of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, and supposedly an apolitical public servant charged with managing a large pool of taxpayers’ money from one government to the next.   Somewhat surprisingly (but welcome) the Reserve Bank Governor…

Written with Aurélien Saïdi

(draft version with more footnotes and full references here)

The 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was given for “addressing some of our time’s most basic and pressing questions about how we create long-term sustained and sustainable economic growth.” It was shared by Yale’s William Nordhaus for bringing negative externalities due to greenhouse gas emissions in growth models and New York University’s Paul Romer “for integrating technological innovations into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” The press release concludes that their contributions are “methodological . . . Laureates do not deliver conclusive answers.” Yet the methods rewarded are very different in kind. Nordhaus is praised for his development of a quantitative “integrated assessment model” of how climate and economic growth affect each other, a model then largely used to run simulations. Romer was crowned for a 10-years effort to endogenize growth culminating…

The Guardian is adept at amplifying, and failing to critically scrutinise, the unsubstantiated claims and accusations of anti-Israel NGOs, and today’s article about the Israeli Supreme Court decision on Human Right Watch’s regional director Omar Shakir – a long time BDS activist – follows this pattern.

First, as we predicted in a tweet before the article by Oliver Holmes (“Israel can deport Human Rights Watch official, court rules”, Nov. 5th) was published, the piece uncritically cites Shakir’s simply unhinged response to the court’s decision:

Shakir wrote on Twitter that if he was kicked out, Israel would join the ranks of Iran, North Korea and Egypt in blocking access to Human Rights Watch staff. “We won’t stop. And we won’t be the last,” he said.

The truth is that democracies all over theworld reserve the right to deny entry to those seen as intent on harming the state. Moreover…

It’s a year to the US presidential election.  With an unconventional president, a crowded field of Democratic party hopefuls and the possibility of an impeachment trial, American politics appear even more uncertain than usual.  

But a survey of 15,000 American voters undertaken by opinion polling guru Lord Ashcroft (a rich and maverick member of Britain’s Conservative party) throws up some interesting nuggets.

You might not be surprised that the poll finds Trump is unpopular (56% disapprove of his performance versus 40% who approve) – or even that 44% of all those polled strongly disapprove.