Corporate Welfare for Hollywood

So, the government has announced a fat package of corporate welfare to attract Hollywood filmmakers to New Zealand. I can see why they're doing it - to try and establish us us a production centre in the global film industry - but my gut reaction is that it's a bad idea. Not because I'm any sort of market purist, but because I think corporate welfare is a mug's game, and because I hate the idea of giving money to wealthy foreigners. That's just not how government redistribution is supposed to work.

Hollywood is rich enough already, and it's not as if we need to offer them a break to get them to come here - The Last Samurai is proof enough of that. If we can compete in the global market for film production, then that's good - but let's not subsidise the entertainment megacorps simply so Helen can have more photo ops with Tom Cruise.

Who's looking for the WMD?

Via Daily Kos, Electrolite, and half the web by now: not only does Bush not know where the mythical Iraqi WMD are, he doesn't even know who's in charge of looking for them:

Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.

Either this shows how much he really cares about those WMD, or it shows how much of a clueless stooge he is for people like Cheney and Rumsfeld. It'll be interesting to see how his defenders explain this one...

BBC set to sue Minister over Iraq 'lies' claim

Gilligan, the defence correspondent for Radio 4's Today programme, said that he would take legal action against Phil Woolas, the Deputy Leader of the House, unless he received a full apology for allegations made against him.

Good to see the Beeb sticking to its guns and resisting government intimidation.

New Fisk

How British troops became a soft target

Bringing democracy to Iraq?

Remember all the bold prewar statements from the US about how they were going to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq? Well, it looks like they have strange ideas about what "democracy and freedom" actually means. A few weeks ago they announced they would be censoring the press, and now they've decided to dispense with elections as well:

U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.

The reason of course is that if elections were allowed, "rejectionists" - people who want the US gone tomorrow - will win. The US can't allow that, as it would give a voice to that growing public sentiment - fuelled by incidents such as this and this - that the occupation has already gone on too long, and that it is time for the Iraqis to enjoy some of that freedom they were promised.

How does this gel with President Bush's prewar promises that

Any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them

and

The United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq's new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people

...? It doesn't, and the Iraqis know it. They're not stupid or illiterate; they have access to the global media and know that these promises were made. They know what they are missing out on. If the US doesn't deliver, then they'll do it themselves, with guns and bombs.

Satire or prophecy?

The Bush administration seems to be getting its foreign policy from The Onion these days, with Rumsfeld's suggestion to form a world peacekeeping force - under US (rather than UN) control.

The chief purpose of such a force would be to do the dirty job of occupying countries that the US has knocked over, like Iraq. In other words, getting foreigners to die in the place of US soldiers.

While I think there's a role for a dedicated international peacekeeping force, it should be under the control of the legitimate international authority (the UN) rather than the hegemon, and should be used for actual peacekeeping, rather than as a foreign occupation force for countries that don't want to be occupied. Timor, not Iraq or Palestine.

The rest of the world should tell Rumsfeld where to go, and make their contributions (if any) via the UN, rather than signing up to enforce a US global order.

The party of hypocrisy, part 2

In an email, Gordon King of NZPundit thinks I'm being too hard on ACT:

I think Frank's was pretty clear why he voted against it. He was very concerned about the administration of the law not the principle of liberalisation.

Which is all very well and good (though a strange position for someone from what purports to be the "party of freedom"), but what about the rest of them? Prebble? Eckhoff? Newman? What's their excuse?

If so many ACT MPs think that freedom (or indeed, actual human welfare) should take a back seat to administrative purity, maybe they should be thinking of rebranding?

The predictable response

Circling Apollo has this to say about prostitution reform:

However, this bill is a double-edged sword. It gets rid of the hypocracy of state-licenced 'massage parlours' which everyone knows are knockshops, but it unleashes hoardes of IRD, DOL and OSH etc etc et al bureaucrats upon the prostitutes.

And that's so much worse than effectively being outside the law and fair game for anyone who wants to exploit or abuse you.

I just don't understand the thinking behind this. Employment rights and the ability to enforce safety standards against those who run unsafe workplaces are a Good Thing, not something to be feared. Unless you're running a massage parlour, I guess.

Making more conservatives scream: The US Supreme Court has overturned Texas' anti-sodomy law. Boy, can the American Right scream loudly...

Grasping at straws

Sludge is grasping at straws by suggesting that Helen Clark may be guilty of contempt of Parliament if she lobbied MPs on a conscience vote. I think this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "conscience vote" is all about.

A conscience vote is one where a party declines to enforce the whip, and leaves its MPs to make up their own minds rather than voting as a bloc. It doesn't have any formal constitutional standing AFAIK, and is simply a matter for the parties concerned. In the case of prostitution reform, some parties (Labour, National) treated it as a conscience vote while others (United Future, the Greens) didn't.

(Cynics might also add that a conscience vote is one on an issue that a party is too cowardly to take a stand on, and wants plausible deniability for regardless of the outcome. "Moral issues" are precisely this sort of hot potato...)

The important point is this: simply because the whip is not used does not mean that the dirty business of politics takes a holiday. It does not mean that everybody flips their ambition-switches to the "off" position. It does not mean that they ignore the views of the segments of the electorate they are trying to appeal to, and it does not mean they ignore the views of their fellow MPs. Most importantly, it does not mean they don't think of their future, and how they can get that higher list placing or cabinet spot by voting with the ruling clique. Anyone who thinks it does mean those things is a fool.

This is how the game is played. Laws, like sausages, are something you don't really want to see being made, no matter how much you like them.

The party of hypocrisy

I was taken aback by how many ACT MPs voted against prostitution reform last night. According to this morning's Dominion-Post, Donna Awatere Huata, Gerry Eckhoff, Stephen Franks, Muriel Newman and Richard Prebble all voted to criminalise a voluntary transaction between consenting adults. And they call themselves "liberals".

Rodney Hide may be the face of irritable bowel syndrome (thank Spindoctors for that immortal line), but at least he manages to do a passably good job of sticking to the principles he purports to support. Most of the rest of ACT represent the worst of both worlds: social conservatives in fiscal liberal's clothing, promoting freedom for the rich and slavery for the rest of us. Fuck that, with knobs on.

[Yes, I know the Libz beat me to it]

Prostitution law reform passes

But of course, you already knew that.

I was expecting it to fail, but obviously I was wrong. And now we can relax in the warm glow of screaming moral conservatives...

Fat tax

The big news story of the night (other than prostitution reform, of course) is the government's proposed "fat tax". Unfortunately, the media seem to be ignoring the fact that the government isn't actually, well, proposing it.

The story seems to have come from an ACT press release, trumpeting the fact that in answer to a parliamentary question, the Health Minister had confirmed that

the Public Health Directorate is currently working on an internal paper on differential food taxation and food advertising, to reduce obesity in New Zealand. This paper is to be completed by September 30

What everyone seems to be ignoring is that an internal paper is a long way from a government proposal. Government departments do these sorts of studies all the time as part of the policy review process (both to consider alternatives, and to be prepared in case a minister has crazy ideas), without it ever being anything more than an academic exercise. As a case in point, you can bet your bottom dollar that Treasury has people thinking about what would happen if we substantially lowered or even eliminated income taxes, without there being any suggestion that the current government has any plans to do so (or even that Treasury will formally reccommend such a policy).

But I guess this is what happens when everyone is waiting for the big story, and you've got a few minutes or column-inches to fill. Take a press release, report it uncritically, and don't stop to think about what you're actually reporting on...

Interesting stuff from Hard news on the late debate surrounding prostitution reform. meanwhile I'll be flicking back and forth between Buffy and TV1 to see how the vote went. At this stage it looks like it will go badly, but we can always hope.

Atomic Secrets? Pah!

Those who lie awake at night terrified at the thought of nuclear terrorism will be comforted by the Guardian's story on how two students built an A-bomb. Yes, the US army has done some research on the matter (the "Nth country" project), and while its non-trivial, it's not exactly hard either - any well-resourced physics PhD can do it, given the right materials. I'm just waiting for Bush to declare physics students a precuser to WMDs, and start killing them all off...

On a lighter note, geeks will be pleased to see that the scientists chose to build a plutonium implosion device (rather than a simple gun) because it was a more challenging problem...

Troops to the Solomons?

Cabinet is apparantly considering sending troops to the Solomon Islands to help the government there restore order and end ethnic unrest. Is this a good thing? Well, it seems like a worthy cause, and we would certainly be able to make a greater difference than our token contributions to Iraq or Afghanistan. The government's conditions for sending troops - a formal invitation by the Solomons government; a mandate from the South Pacific Forum - are reasonable enough, and we're not going to be supporting a corrupt dictatorship as we were in Vietnam. So yes, we should help out. It's not as if the Americans are going to...

ACT spreading hate

OK, so my lampooning of Stephen Franks as a black-helicopter seeing conspiracy theorist is probably a prime example of a member of the "latte set" poking fun at a "rural oaf" - except he's from Auckland, and I prefer a flat white. But seriously, I found his press release troublesome, not least because it's pushing two obvious lies about gun ownership in New Zealand:

• It's about town vs country: Franks posits a divide between rural gun-owners and urban gun-grabbers (the "latte set"). But how many urbanites own guns? A lot more than you'd think.
• It's about class or wealth: In Britian, the anti-hunting movement really is about class antagonism - specifically antagonism towards a wealthy rural aristocracy, who haven't had the sense to die out yet. We don't have one of those in New Zealand, and our farmers don't seem to be markedly different in wealth from the rest of us. In fact, gun ownership or enjoyment of sport shooting doesn't seem to be tied to wealth or social class at all. For every Range-Rover driving duck shooter, there's a guy in a beaten-up old Toyota going pig hunting. And (as mentioned above), they don't just live in the country. So what's specific about gun-owners, other than the fact they own guns? Nothing.

Franks is pushing these lies in a deliberate attempt to frighten gun-owners, and to create the very "class-antagonism" he accuses others of harbouring. He wants to create paranoia and hostility towards the government, because that is ACT's chief platform. In the process he's creating hostility towards gun-owner's fellow citizens as well, but what the fuck does he care, provided he gets re-elected?

It's fairly disgusting politics on every level, but exactly the sort of thing I've come to expect from the "party of principle".

Franks seeing black helicopters

Is it something about gun ownership that makes people froth at the mouth and posit bizarre conspiracy theories about how everybody wants to take their toys away, or is it just Stephen Franks? His latest press release is the sort of black-helicopters-UN-evil-gun-grabbing-government fnord that you'd expect from militia nutcases in America. In fact, all he needs is a reference to ZOG, and it would be indistinguishable.

But the best bit is this:

In New Zealand, there are votes to be won by making shooting sports people squeal for the delight of the latte set. This is primitive class antagonism.

Hmmmm - "Latte set". Now what was that about "class antagonism"?

Farmers bleating for a free ride

NZPols has a couple of excellent posts on the proposed livestock "fart tax". I really don't see what all the fuss is about. We tax cigarettes and petrol to offset the costs to society of their use; why should sheep and cows get a free ride?

The farmers in fact are getting off lightly. Farm animals contribute over 50% of our greenhouse emissions, but they're being slapped with a measley $0.09 a sheep. That's because the government doesn't want to discourage farming, but instead wants to pump some money into public good science to research whether those emissions can be decreased. And in the long-term, it's good for farmers, because those emissions are lost energy - any decrease in them means fatter sheep, and therefore more money.

But instead, the farmers would rather externalise their costs. Fuck that. I'm not going to be allowed to externalise the cost of my fossil-fuel usage for much longer, so why the fuck should farmers get to dump their emissions for free?

Participate in the democratic process!

KiwiPundit has a post about the Prostitution Reform Bill, which includes email addresses for undecided MPs. Apparantly they're getting a blitzed by Christians urging them to vote against; how about letting them know what you think?