Utopia, you are standing in it!

Lack of information sparks speculation

Rather coincidentally as I was preparing my Ombudsman compliant (actually there is no such thing as coincidence) against NZTA’s refusal of my Official Information Act request on the City Centre to Mangere Light Rail project (CC2M) (see: Inadequate Response from NZTA on City Centre to Mangere Light Rail sparks Ombudsman Complaint) a fellow Tweeter shared a link from Interest.co.nz on Treasury being at tension with Transport Minister Twyford over CC2M and its complexity.

For the full article see: Treasury report shows tensions with the Minister of Transport Phil Twyford over ‘extremely complex’ Auckland light rail project

That article was published yesterday the same day I got my OIA request back and it looks like NZTA were showing the same level of contempt in withholding information to Interest as I got with my OIA request.

Let’s break down the article as it is a pile of…

The claim that wind and solar guarantee falling power bills is being revealed for the big fat lie that it truly is. It’s a reality that is catching up with a vengeance for Australians gullible enough to have bought it. Tens of $billions have already been squandered on subsidies to chaotically intermittent wind and solar and, under the truly deranged leadership of Anthony Albanese and his Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, there is much, much worse to come.

Retail power prices are already amongst the highest in the world; the hot tip is for power bills to jump somewhere between 30 and 50% in the next 12 months.

What that means to small businesses and households is the subject of this timely piece by the Australian’s Gemma Tognini.

Green zealotry will not save battlers from power pain
The Australian
Gemma Tognini
12 November 2022

Up the road from where I live…

*Editors’ note: this post is part of a series on ‘The Human Rights Act After 22 Years’, following theSLS Annual Seminarheld in November 2022.You can read the first post in the serieshere.*

With the reinstatement of Dominic Raab as Secretary of State for Justice, the Bill of Rights Bill, currently before Parliament, is once again a possibility only weeks after Liz Truss halted its progression on account that it was a ‘complete mess’. This post examines the Bill’s provisions on overseas military operations, how they compare with the UK judiciary’s approach, the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence. Also highlighted  are other extraterritoriality issues outside overseas military operations that the UK will have to consider. 

The main extraterritoriality issue that the Bill addresses explicitly is overseas military operations. Clause 14 states that a…

Mary and her husband Felipe

In September 1554, Mary stopped menstruating. She gained weight, and felt nauseated in the mornings. For these reasons, almost the entirety of her court, including her physicians, believed she was pregnant. Parliament passed an act making Felipe regent in the event of Mary’s death in childbirth.

In the last week of April 1555, Elizabeth was released from house arrest, and called to court as a witness to the birth, which was expected imminently. According to Giovanni Michieli, the Venetian ambassador, Felipe may have planned to marry Elizabeth in the event of Mary’s death in childbirth, but in a letter to his brother-in-law Maximilian of Austria, Felipe expressed uncertainty as to whether Mary was pregnant.

Thanksgiving services in the diocese of London were held at the end of April after false rumours that Mary had given birth to a son spread across Europe. Through May and…

It doesn’t take a genius to connect calm weather with total collapses in wind power output. Even the functionally illiterate have the capacity to understand just how incapable wind power is of delivering power on demand.

For example, depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid in June 2020. Back then, all of the wind turbines connected the Eastern Grid had a combined notional capacity of 7,728MW. Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia these whirling wonders routinely deliver a risible fraction of their capacity.

During June 2020 there were lengthy periods when the combined output of every wind turbine connected to the Eastern Grid struggled to top 400 MW (5.1% of total capacity). Such as: 11 June when output collapsed to a trifling 86…

We have a database of high-speed rail construction costs up.

Separately, because of Noah Smith’s opinions about high-speed rail, today there is going to be an event featuring me and him in which we are going to discuss the issue in an American context, alongside a presentation of the database and what lessons can be drawn from it. You can register here; it’s at 13:00 Eastern US Time, or 19:00 Berlin time.

A few notes regarding our database, because I’m being asked on Twitter, and also because it’s relevant for our research:

This is a well-studied topic

Literature on comparative HSR costs already exists, and some of our internal cost references are to studies on the subject. This is not like subway costs, where the biggest databases I know of prior to ours are a Flyvbjerg paper and a Spanish analysis each with a number of items in…

Following on from our recent events and blogs marking the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the secret ballot, Dr Philip Salmon explores some of the Act’s lesser known and unintended consequences.

The Ballot Act of 1872 sits alongside the three major Reform Acts of the 19th century (and various Corrupt Practices Acts) in helping to transform British elections into their recognisably modern form. As some of our earlier blogs have shown, it ended a system of open voting and public nominations that had become increasingly associated with bribery, the intimidation of voters and disorderly behaviour, often fuelled by drink.

The calmness and order of Britain’s new secret elections, by contrast, was striking. At the first by-elections to be held in Pontefract, Preston, Tiverton and Richmond, it was widely reported that there was none of the usual ‘horse play’ and ‘excitement’. Some…

Few regimes in the world are more despotic than the current rulers in Iran. Sadly, there is little sign yet that the Iranian population can be freed from it.

New Zealanders got a glimpse of the conditions under which Iranians are living when earlier this year two NZ travellers were detained by the regime, and were only freed after tense negotiations by NZ diplomats.

A deeper insight comes from Green MP Golriz Ghahraman who in an article that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekly wrote that being an Iranian woman is a heavy birthright.

“It comes with knowing a true, deep, feminism,while also knowing violent oppression at the hand of the government ruling our homeland.

“And for millions of us, it means displacement”.

She goes on to relate how she and her parents were granted political asylum in Aotearoa New Zealand when she was 9 years old. “We were never…