Utopia, you are standing in it!

Thank you for the opportunity to make a submission on the Natural and Built Environment Bill.

In my view the strongest part of the Bill is the central place it gives to te Oranga o te Taiao as a concept. This is defined in the legislation as:

(a) the health of the natural environment;
(b) the essential relationship between the health of the natural environment and its capacity to sustain life;
(c) the interconnectedness of all parts of the environment;
(d) the intrinsic relationship between iwi and hapū and te Taiao.

(a) to (c) inclusive warrant support, however the wording in (d) needs reconsideration. As drafted it implies that the only New Zealanders with intrinsic relationships with the natural environment are Māori who are affiliated to specific iwi and hapu tribal structures. This excludes the 84% of New Zealanders who are not Māori, and those Māori for whom iwi or…

The Dorchester Review recently published my article last month “Party Discipline and the King Doctrine”, in which I recount a brief history of party discipline in Canada over the last century, the Reform Act, and the significance of what we witnessed one year ago in January-February 2022, when Conservative MPs ousted Erin O’Toole as leader and when two backbench Liberal MPs overtly and ostentatiously criticised the Prime Minister, both his rhetoric and his policies.

The current minority 44^th Parliament has continued to break barriers and pierce through long-held taboos about partydiscipline in Canadian politics.

The Land of the Free is most certainly the Home of the Brave, namely those communities with the temerity to stand up to the subsidy-soaked wind and solar ‘industries’ and drive them out of town.

Resolute and clearly well-organised, America’s rural folk have been taking on wind and solar developers (so-called) for years now, and consistently smashing them.

It’s a theme that Robert Bryce loves reporting on, unlike those in the MSM who deem the story unworthy of notice, simply because it does not fit their ‘green energy transition’ narrative.

Solar Energy Rejections Soared in 2022
Real Clear Energy
Robert Bryce
12 January 2023

You won’t read about this in The New York Times or The New Yorker, but 2022 was a record year for the number of solar energy projects that were rejected by rural communities in the United States.

As I show in the Renewable Rejection Database

The U.S. “stock market” is represented by various collections of stocks, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (30 stocks), the NASDAQ Composite (securities listed on the NASDAQ; weighted towards information technology), and the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index. The S&P 500 is an index of the largest 500 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, weighted by capitalization. The version of the S&P usually cited just takes into account stock prices. History shows that, over a reasonably long-time frame, the U.S. stock market rises. Here is a chart, using a logarithmic axis, of the S&P from January, 1950 to February, 2016. It shows a rise in value by a factor of about 65 between 1950 and 2016.

S&P 500 daily closing values from January 3, 1950 to February 19, 2016
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index

Below is a chart of S&P values from 1980 to 2021 on a…

The sudden shutdown of much of the economy of the U.S. and of the world starting in February and March of 2020 led to deep concern, if not panic, in world financial markets. Millions of people were suddenly unemployed or furloughed, millions of small businesses faced bankruptcy, and stocks plunged some 30% in the fastest fall of global markets in history. Demand collapsed, and prices for nearly all financial assets fell. Trillions of dollars of financial transactions were in danger of unravelling.

The Federal Reserve immediately rode to the rescue, slashing interest rates and buying up all kinds of financial assets. These purchases of bonds and similar products injected cash into the markets to provide much-needed liquidity, and kept the system on track. In late March, the U.S. federal government authorized trillions of dollars of payments to individuals and businesses to stave off bankruptcy, and forbade foreclosures on mortgages, to…

(Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush)

With the rollout of Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Jon Meacham’s new book DESTINY AND POWER: THE AMERICAN ODYSSEY OF GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH what emerged in the media was the elder Bush’s criticisms of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s poor service in the administration of his son.  Many pundits have questioned the senior Bush’s judgement since another son, Jeb is in the midst of his own presidential campaign.  Whatever motivated the senior Bush it has created a great deal of buzz around Meacham’s latest biography.  After successful histories of Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and the relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Meacham’s latest effort is not quite on the level of his previous work.  In Meacham’s defense it is difficult to write a critical biography of a subject that is still alive, and as…

Harry White and the American Creed: How a Federal Bureaucrat Created the Modern Global Economy (and Failed to Get the Credit), a new book by James Boughton, was my weekend reading.

Boughton, now retired, was formerly the official in-house historian of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). White was a fairly senior official in the US Treasury, a key adviser to Secretary Henry Morgenthau, from the late 1930s to 1945, and has a fair claim to have been the technocratic father of the IMF (and was then for a short time the first US Executive Director of the IMF). It was a short official career and he died quite young, but has an interesting – and contested – story nonetheless.

What of the book? Well, ignore most of the title. I’m still not at all sure what the “American Creed” is supposed to mean in this context, and the bit…

Yesterday’s Herald had an interesting article on the reappointment late last year of Adrian Orr as Governor of the Reserve Bank. The article appeared to have been prompted by the Bank’s response to an OIA I lodged last year asking for background material on the reappointment. A link to that OIA response is now on the Bank website.

The key quote was this, from the letter from the Board chair Neil Quigley to the Minister of Finance recommending Orr’s reappointment.

“The governor will also model the highest standards of behaviour in promoting a safe environment for debate and in treating with respect those people with different views from their own, consistent with Public Service Commission guidelines,” 

The best that might be said for that claim is that it may represent wishful thinking that somehow their leopard once reappointed might change his spots. So many people who have interacted with Orr…