Utopia, you are standing in it!

Covers quite a lot of ground, The article referenced below sets out some context to the video with Sean Plunket

July 12, 2022

Buzz from the Beehive

Transport Minister Michael Wood left the dollar signs out of his press satement when declaring   that the Hamilton Section of the Waikato Expressway has opened, marking the final chapter of a 30 year roading project.

It was terrific to see the last 22-kilometre piece of the Expressway “falling into place”, he enthused.  This reflects somewhat curiously on the work of the engineers and construction gangs.

The road connects Auckland to the agriculture and business centres of the Waikato and would improve economic growth and productivity in the region.

The full 102km Waikato Expressway will also reduce travel times between Auckland and Tirau by 35 minutes for approximately 20,000 vehicles a day.

The Hamilton section is the biggest roading project in Waikato’s history and runs from Ngāruawāhia in the north to the existing Tamahere interchange south of Hamilton.

Work on the earlier sections of the Waikato Expressway…

Renewable energy rent-seekers and politicos have been gripped by a sense of palpable panic: the mob won’t tolerate blackouts for very long, and repeated power rationing will have the same incendiary effect on public sentiment.

The destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies caused by chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar was perfectly predictable and it was perfectly avoidable.

Think of it as a malignant cancer that spreads and ultimately devours its host. Wrecking the profitability of conventional generators is integral to the model of punitive mandates and ludicrously generous subsidies, which advance the unreliables at the expense of everything else that works. A power pricing and supply calamity soon follows.

The cancer has already consumed California and is well on its way to devouring Texas, now it appears that great swathes of the US will soon experience the same kind of Dark Ages chaos that their…

Last week, the Constitution Unit published a blogpost which posed five key questions for the Conservative leadership contenders, one of which focused on rebuilding parliament’s scrutiny role. In this post, David Natzler and Charlotte Sayers-Carterargue that such scrutiny should include telling parliament about politically significant international agreements it has made and allowing for oversight and the expression of dissent.

On 11 May Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed bilateral security agreements with Sweden and Finland. At that time both countries were actively considering applying for membership of NATO, which they did together a week later, on 18 May. Once objections by Turkey to their membership had been dealt with, NATO agreed to these applications at its June meeting in Madrid. Now they have been admitted, the necessary amending Protocols to the North Atlantic Treaty will be laid before parliament. Under the terms of Part 2 of the Constitutional Reform and…

Renewable energy rent seekers keep telling us that our power bills will inevitably fall because wind and solar power are ‘free’ and getting cheaper all the time.

In the lead up to the Federal election in May, Labor’s Anthony Albanese promised that all Australian households would see a $275 cut to their power bills, as soon as he and his wind and solar obsessed Labor took the reins and put Australia’s ‘inevitable’ wind and solar transition, back on track.

Instead, households and businesses have just been whacked with an annual minimum increase in their power bills of between 18-20% on top of double-digit increases last year and the year before that, and the year before that, with much worse to come.

Australian households and businesses are now suffering power prices amongst the highest in the world; 20 years ago they enjoyed the cheapest prices on the planet. But, chaotically intermittent…

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC), without the benefit of coming from a patrician or aristocratic family, rose by hard work to become the leading Roman lawyer and orator of his day. For a generation he dominated the Roman courts, usually appearing for the defence. We know of 88 law speeches he gave and an amazing 58 of them survive in whole or in part. The Oxford University Press publish an excellent paperback containing five of his most famous defence speeches.

(Note that the Latin word pro simply means ‘for’ and takes the ablative case i.e. changes the ending of words and names to ‘o’, so that the speech ‘for Caelius’ is known as ‘Pro Caelio’ and so on – unless the name ends in ‘a’, in which case it stays the same, or already ends in ‘o’ in which case it adds ‘ne’ to the end. These are…

The arrest of the Premier of the British Virgin Islands in April and a Commission of Inquiry’s finding of ‘parlous failings in governance’ have raised questions about the British government’s relations with and stewardship of its Overseas Territories. These issues are raised in moments of crisis, following natural disasters, acute periods in the several sovereignty disputes linked to the Territories, or headline-grabbing scandals. George Fergusson argues that they merit more regular review.

The decision on 8 June of a British official to reject the principal and firm recommendation of a Commission of Inquiry by a former Court of Appeal judge has produced little political or media stir. This is largely explained by the decision being one concerning a British Overseas Territory, in this case, the British Virgin Islands (BVI).

The recommendation was that a period of…