Those Canterbury Plains - many centuries of change

All environments are local, and the Canterbury Plains have been through many centuries of vast change - affecting climate, sedimentation, rivers, surface water bodies and of course soils. A quick history:

1. Originally, forest from mountains to sea. Check the Forested Areas map in 'Tangata Whenua'...
2. Extensive 12-13 century burning of the forest cover, as the early Maori chased moas and other forest dwelling grocery items - inducing a much drier east coast climate over the ensuing centuries and leaving remnant bush only in foothills, valleys and isolated patches on the Plains proper.
3. Revegetation - low growth, tussock, spaniards, matagouri
4. Burning round #2 as the early Europeans cleared tussock and began to farm
5. Extensive sheep farms and some minor cropping, but limited by access to water until the race schemes of the 1870's onwards
6. Water races, fed from the Waimak, Kowai, Selwyn, and the foothill streams behind Windwhistle, for reliable stock water. This recharged aquifers as well as providing household water: the races eventually spanned fairly much the entire Plains excepting the dry stony Te Pirita corner. Farming extended to cropping on the deep silt loams where feasible.
7. The irrigation era - wells to 2-300m deep, and then the river-fed canal schemes of recent date. Uses expanded as well - seeds, more and different animals

To think that it is even possible to adjudge climate, river flows, optimal uses, and livelihoods, against such a background of continual change, is quite simply hubris.....some such changes (vegetation cover being a classic example) affect climate very slowly - on a scale of centuries.

The Rush to Judge is not assisted in terms of likely acceptance by the High and Mighty pronouncements from the We Know Best pulpits. There's more than a hint of Millenarian Fever about most of these, and like any other monomaniacal fixations, there's always the awful but (of course unacknowledged) possibility that despite the Perfection of their Vision, they are Quite Wrong.....

A Tale of Two Gabbys

Gabby Hakoops, esteemed slack-key guitarist to the King of Diamonds, stood before the Witchsmeller Pursuivant, accused of playing Gabby Faure's 'After the Dream' instead of the programmed 'Ride of the Valkyries' at a recent State Banquet for the Queen of Hearts.

Hakoops averred that the sheet music was, in his words, 'Pukaroo', that it had been safely stored in a Music Shack with a locked, strong - albeit somewhat rusty yet still impressive - iron front door with many Big Bolts, that Dark Forces in the Land were to blame, and then referred the matter to the Grand Inquisitor.

The latter had returned after a fifteen-second Conflab with his minions, stated that no Dark Forces were involved, and that he 'does not appreciate Frivolous Litigation and can he please have another Inquisition Chamber, as he is perennially Under-Resourced'. He was also heard, sotto voce, to complain that he had not been invited to the State Banquet.

The MinionQuisitors have revealed that, after failing to open the Music Shack's front door despite many repeated attempts to hammer out the weakest-looking Rusty Bolt, they thought to try the Back door. This was not only wide open, but seemed never to have had locks or, indeed, Hinges. They concluded that Starveling Waifs, who may have included a noted Cellist in their number - or perhaps all were wearing Stillettos - to judge by the marks on the floor, may have conducted a rehearsal for a Symphony, which included Gabby Faure's piece, and had left behind the 'After the Dream' music. This was, in their summation, then picked up by the esteemed, but perhaps short-sighted, Hakoops, who then faithfully rendered it in mellifluous slack-key fingerings, to the assembled multitudes at the State Banquet.

As the theme of the Banquet was to have been 'Victory and Livery' - hence the Wagner on the playlist - the rendition of 'After the Dream' completely spoiled the occasion. Not only was the King of Diamonds mortified, but the Queen of Hearts had to endure a mild Inquisition after the Witchsmeller Pursuivant was summoned and immediately smelt Something Fishy. She, we are informed, was Not Amused.

Hakoops has been sentenced to a long gig in a Folk Band in a far-off land over the Edge of the Earth. He departs on the morrow. The Music Shack is currently the subject of demolition and re-build, hopefully, this time, with only one entry, and with code-compliant, non-rusty, Big Bolts. But, being as how it's being rebuilt by the very Minions who assembled the Last Shack, and despite including the very Latest Technology, we are reliably informed that Dark Forces, via the Afeared Five-Eyed Raven, are this very minute Watching and Waiting.....

A Baseline for Wellbeing Accounting

In a scoop, Interest has been made privy to an important advancement in the Wellbeing Accounting space.

All wellbeing measures, to be credible, require a baseline from which to adjudge progress in the various indicators.  This is not easy to establish:  the requirements include solid records, a sufficient sample size, and a time lapse of well over a century to let the noise in the data settle down.  The Department of Statistics has established just such a baseline, and by a novel technique.

There is no immediately usable baseline within New Zealand itself.  It is a young country, records of sufficient size and credibility are sparse, and with rapid rises in population over the century-plus time lapse deemed necessary, data from the early years cannot be taken as being at all representative. Drawing on settled science techniques from other disciplines, infill data from a close and analogous neighbour has been used to establish this baseline.

The data comes from several large Tasmanian organisations.  These meet the stipulated requirements:  records, sample size, and age.  The work involved to shape this data into a form suitable for use in a 21st century public accounting context is substantial:  raw data, as for other disciplines, needs to be viewed with 21st century eyes, rather than be taken at face value or have 19th century concepts of 'wellbeing' simply echoed verbatim .  There have been several streams of work to refine the original records along the alignments mandated by the Wellbeing Budget now being finalised.   These have reached conclusions, and some observations are reported in precis form below.

The Tasmanian data reveals two main threads reported in the quite voluminous records kept at these institutions: falling under the following broad Wellbeing headings.

Social:  the general impression is that social interaction was muted to an extent rarely seen today.  And such interactions as did occur were formal, short, and evidenced high levels of power imbalance.  There is little to no evidence of much informal interaction, and similarly, diversity of gender, race, and religion is minimal.

Environmental:  the records reveal that there was strong self-sufficiency and little reliance on external inputs.  The populations gardened, built using local materials, extended existing, older buildings and generally 'did for themselves'.  Interestingly, and not unlike the present day, they seem to have been subject to tight supervision and control in these activities, albeit of perhaps different types.

The result of this baseline establishment is vital to the Wellbeing Budget which forms the cornerstone of  the forthcoming 2019 Budget.  Current-day soundings are compared to this baseline, and rates of progress can, with some caution, be assessed.  The infill technique, novel but certainly well-established in other settled science, has been a vital instrument for this purpose.  Once again, New Zealand leads the world in placing Wellbeing Growth at the heart of its Governmental activity.

Millenarial Movements

The Historian Norman Cohn, in his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, found that Millenarian movements always picture salvation as:

• Collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity.
• Terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven.
• Imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly.
• Total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself.
• Miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.

It might have been expected that millenarian thinking would disappear with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. But Cohn found that these ideas and the manias they inspired reemerged in the twentieth century’s secular totalitarian and revolutionary movements.

In what could be a description of the Green New Deal (USA), Cohn argued that these movements felt themselves to be engaged in a struggle of unique importance, “different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed…this is the essence of the recurrent phenomenon of revolutionary millenarianism.”

Now tell me that this does not largely describe those young, easily-led, desperate-to-be-Liked Youf who recently lay about various places to draw attention to Weather in 2100.....

The bitter fruit of the 'Personal is Political'

Jeffrey Tucker writes that

"The attempt to turn every subjectively felt personal issue into a collective cause with a collective action has hatched a brutal form of identity politics that has generated no end to social conflict, with vast carnage along the way."

The 60's slogan has morphed into a profoundly divisive attitude, with the predictable result that 

"in practice .. to have as little human contact with others as possible, especially in a business environment. Literally, anyone can be accused and play-it-safe companies would rather toss out the targetted employee rather than risk bad public relations and an unwinnable lawsuit. The toll adds up daily."

How does it all end up?

The demand that we politicize every personal grievance presumes that people only exist as part of groups and those groups must be defined politically and such groupings can be infinitely complex as intersectionality theory demonstrates. One group’s winnings come at the expense of everyone else, and thus does every advance create the conditions for more oppression, disgust, outrage, condemnation, activism, and power grabbing, even as those groups are constantly changing in composition depending on political influence. There is no safety for anyone under this moral code; there is only fear and dread of exposure, and a miserable life overall.

The mathematical futility of long-term climate projections

The entire climate-prediction edifice as currently promoted, is founded on quicksand, as time-series research at LSE demonstrates - the Hawkmoth Effect rules. The issue comes down to several Inconvenient Modelling Facts:

• Complex systems do not generally have the mathematical property of Structural stability. This leads to quite different projections, using the same initial conditions, even if two models differ to a minute degree - the poster at the link graphically illustrates this.
• Models used for projections simplify real phyical processes (for tractability) and make assumptions (for tuning) - both of which cause structural inadequacy by incomplete description of the phenomena being modeled.
• Turbulent/chaotic systems are pointless to model over long time series if accurate projections are expected: each time-slice depends on the output of the former slice as initial conditions and projections thus rapidly depart from sensible physical-result boundaries as model-time progresses
• The real physical world, as best can be gleaned from observation of history, has close-to-absolute boundaries on temperature = +/- 2-3 degrees Centigrade, and two dominant Attractors: Ice Age and InterGlacial. There have been more than enough long-tail (extremely low- probability) perturbations in the past (vulcanism, comet strikes) to supply a record of any vast excursions from these boundaries. The bounds seem to hold, regardless
• The 'Escape from Model-land' LSE paper suggests that consistency with the past, use of long-tail (very low probability) inputs and expert judgement as to model applicability and utility in the first place, is the only way out of Model-Land
• "The utility and decision-relevance of these model simulations must be judged based on consistency with the past, and out-of-sample predictive performance and expert judgement, never based solely on the plausibility of their underlying principles or on the visual “realism” of outputs."

The two turbulent/chaotic systems which climateers attempt to model are, of course, Atmosphere and Ocean. 

Essentially, they are trying to predict the weather on 27 March, 2119, when predicting the weather on 27 April 2019 is clearly a nonsense: a coin-toss or a dartboard are more useful Models. Next weekend's weather - a reasonable prediction is likely. Tomorrow - the prediction will be close to spot-on. 

Models are always wrong, but mostly they are Useful.....except for the Far Future.  Mathematics rules.

Zoning Causes Commutes

 "We must strive to provide employment close to where people live” Parfitt (of Auckland Council) says. “Long commutes place a huge, unproductive strain on both people's quality of life and our transport infrastructure."

Well, the Plannerz insist on separating all sorts of uses by zonerating to the nth degree. No longer can the shopkeeper live in the flat above the store, the temporary construction crew live in a donga at the latest site, the mechanic trade from a three-bay garage at home, or the budding fashion designer sew and trade from the spare bedroom.

Well, at least not legally. In practice, good neighbours, high fences and quiet work habits mean that all this and more activity is happening anyway: people simply can't be arsed dealing with the Clueless Councils and their minionz.

Planning which enforces separation of uses causes Commuting. It's as sad and as simple as that. The RMA was designed to handle incompatible uses by examination of Effects. This doesn't need spatial Zoning to be present, but the Town and Country Planning Actorz simply could not conceive of a future without squiggles on maps.

So here we sit, locked into spatial use-mandates created by unelected bureaucrats, in our cars, mostly at idle, as we transport ourselves, slowly and expensively, to our Place of Work......

Christianity and Islam - the differences

The difference between the Christian and Islamic systems is that the former has had a Reformation, and the latter hasn't. During the course of the schism in Christianity (dating roughly from Luther in 1517 and Henry VIII in 1538 when the Dissolution was ordered) the texts were gradually re-examined over the next couple of centuries, and the Old Testament was largely consigned to the dustbin. Sam Harris (End of Faith) expounds upon this point with his usual enthusiasm.

Islam neither allows any such re-jigging of its texts (that's blasphemy), nor any withdrawal from the Ummah (that's Apostasy). Both have severe penalties. That's why most rational thinkers regard the whole edifice as an oubliette - easy to get down into, impossible to get out of, thus to be avoided. 

This then is the main root of the disquiet about things Islamic: it cuts right across Enlightenment values of self-determination, personal freedom within a polity, and rationality. To be sure, as long as adherents stay within the guardrails set by the wider non-Islamic society, no issues. But unfortunately for that happy prospect, there's the uncomfortable fact that the Islamic texts regard that wider society as infidels, to be converted if possible.

We've largely abandoned Christian evangelism because of its long history of abuses, mis-steps and ultimate futility. So we are not about to embrace a newer, evangelistic, and intensely patriarchic imperialism......

Angelo M Codevilla on the new American Revolution

Two articles, both by Angelo M. Codevilla, both in a distinctly elegiac tone regarding the fate of the USA. His core theory is that a revolutionary threshhold has been crossed, and that what happens next is uncertain in the extreme. The links are in date order, and need to be read in sequence in order to make much sense.

• Short Bio
• After the Republic
• Our Revolution's Logic

Tertiary Funding

In answer to a question about why SIT needs an Auckland branch...

The zero fees model (I was there at the inception) depended on the original bums-on-seats EFTS funding: mo' Bums, Mo' Munny. It's easy to see that, with the injection of an initial capital sum to enable the show to get through the first year or three, the EFTS funding would let it wash its face thereafter provided sufficient bums - er - students - were garnered. The funding came from the community (Mayor Tim had a hand in that), the students came - good advertising, tight cost control and well-delivered courses, and the rest is history. The students, needless to say, came at the expense of competing institutions. And the Auckland branch? It's the same reason as banks used to get robbed - it;s where the Munny (students, carting student per-EFTS funding like little dollar balloons over their heads) is/are.

Of course, it was a classic first-mover-advantage - er - Move. It could not easily be replicated, not least because there were no other tightly knit communities like Southland, prepared to stump up the millions needed to get over that initial hill.

But that explains the Auckland branch.

Oh, and the Management. Well, SIT never got itself embroiled in the wilder reaches of Credential Mania. Unlike, say, Aoraki, which at one point had a Diploma in Aromatherapy on the course list....... never lasted (the course or the institution).....pity the suckers students who Believed....and then Enrolled. Because if yer didn't, ye'd be Larfing yer head off....

A Fly on the Wall of the 9th floor...

An imagined Fly-on-the-wall conversation:  The PM and the FM.

PM:  Granters, I've just come back from talking to those Teachers.  Can't we shake that Money Tree you have, and give them a few raises?  I mean, who's gonna edumicate little Neve if the teachers cannot afford houses in Auckland?  And I'm sure as heck not gonna Buy in Wellers....

FM:  Jace, Jace, Jace.  I'm none too sure it was a brilliant move to munge your schedule and go talk to them in the first place.  Neve, teaching, you've been reading those Signs, haven't you.  You know a good chunk of them were painted by Children at Art period - I've already had Ian LG chewing my ear about Child Labour.  And as for schoolkids being paraded about the streets with signs - I know it is supported by a few Parents but the optics - oh, dear, it really does seem like Child Abuse...You of all people have gotta parrot the Party Line - we cannot fix Nine Long Years of Neglect in a single term oops I mean year.  And I've just had to spend a quarter of a billion on more freakin' Trees, to keep He Who Must Not Be Named away from our throats (golly, that man makes me Quake).

PM:  But Granty-poo, if there's that much in kitty that we can shell out scads of it out to Vol - I mean, you know who - then everyone in the queue - Teachers, Tertiary, Police, Defence, and I'm told MBIE and IRD although I must confess not to have noticed - they went Out too, or something? - where was I, oh yes, everyone in the queue, which seems to be growing daily, can See the dosh getting spread around and I sense that they are getting that FOMO thing - they are worried that the cupboard might be bare soon, and so they wanna get in Now, and with Big Percentages.  Oh, Grant, what are we gonna do?

FM:  Well, we have got the Cullen Tax Grab - I mean, the TWG - working away in the background, and perhaps we could advance the pace a little there.  Don't let this get outside the room, but the TWG is basically a Rich Prick's Squeeze, and all he, I mean They - haveta do is to get the definition of the RP's down low enough that we'll have a few more tens of billions.  Let me have a quiet word.  But please, for Financial Prudence' sake, don't go addressing howling mobs of tax-funded employees.  That's what Unions are for....

Gubmint tax-funded balm tor spiritual cancer

Contra to Jason's article wherein a weary acceptance of MMP is argued for,  it needs to be recalled that Godzone has no Constitution (unlike the US and Britain), no Upper House to allow measured reflection on legislation, and a tendency (shown all too clearly in the case of the Taranaki Hari-kiri re Oil/Gas) to sweeping, precipitate and (so it seems) completely reflexive action.  This is to be sure, occasional.  But it is nonetheless extremely unsettling, especially for the targeted groups.  This sort of action is fairly much what is behind the continued slide in business confidence:  the question that all think but few say out loud is simply 'what will these clowns do next?'.

It can fairly be advanced that the sort of populism we see now in NZ is an attempt to substitute State action of one sort or another for a fractured sense of national culture and the sacred.  Feelz, the faith-based Green initiatives, the raw narcissim of the Winstone Ganders of our Parliament, the inchoate visions of Maori resurgence, the general retreat into solipsism have become the standard fare, and a thin gruel it is.

The results:  a plethora of mindless acts (especially by youth, who feel all this anomie most intensely), suicides and self-harm, a deep series of fractures and the start of the demonisations we though were behind us - boomers vs Millenials, rural vs urban, Greens vs our present level of comfort, renters vs landlords, Awkland vs the rest of the country, cities vs provinces, makers vs takers, vegans vs omnivores, and on and on ad infinitum.  There is nothing here to unite us if these chasms widen.  And attempts by Gubmints to rub Statist balm, using our own extorted money,  into these essentially spiritual communal wounds, miss the mark so completely as to be farcical.

David Goldman argues that a sense of the sacred is needed to give purpose to life:

These all are manifestations of what is commonly called the identity crisis of the West, but might better be termed the West’s struggle with the sacred. By “sacred”, I mean that which endures beyond our lifetime and beyond the lifetime of our children, the enduring characteristics that make us unique and will continue to distinguish us from the other peoples of the world, and which cannot be violated without destroying our sense of who we are. The sacred is what a country’s soldiers are willing to die to protect; unless there is something for which we are willing to die, we will find nothing for which we are willing to live.
Tradition surely is part of this, but not every part of our tradition is sacred to us: we find within tradition elements that have prevailed through the ages and which we expect to prevail, if our present existence is to have a purpose, beyond our lifetimes. These elements of tradition cannot exist except through a nation: contrary to Hillary Clinton, it takes not a village but a nation to embody the language, customs and ethos that found our identity. The invariant feature of the various expressions of nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic is an attempt to recapture the past in order to envision a future. “Identity” as a concept is meaningless, except as it is rooted in the past and pointed toward the future. Who we are at the moment depends on where we came from and where we expect to go. Our present, as Augustine argued in Confessions XI, is a composite of memory and anticipation.
Augustine (in City of God XXIV) famously took issue with Cicero’s definition of a res publica as an association founded on common interest, arguing instead that it was founded on a common love. It might be more accurate to say that it is founded on a common sense of the sacred, for the sacred embodies not only love but also awe and fear, specifically the fear that by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves.

"..by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves" - but what, any more, Defines Us in the here and now?

Politicians, whatever their personal characteristics, do reflect something of the zeitgeist.  And it is not a pretty image that we see in that dim mirror.  After all, just ponder the various comment threads here on Interest, for confirmation......

Coos, Culls, and the effect on NZ Inc

Michael Reddell has a good point to make, although the phrase 'gifting' could also be applied to beneficiaries, pensioners, Waiheke ferry off-peak users and other non-productive attachments to the ever-generous Gubmint Munny Teat.

Despite announcing yesterday a plan that aims to eradicate mycoplasma bovis from New Zealand, there was no sign of the pro-active release of any background papers or analysis. We don’t have copies of the relevant Cabinet papers, or the relevant advice from The Treasury or MPI. Not that long ago, the incoming government talked of its commitment to open government, and now it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money – without, it appears, any additional legislation – without giving us, up front, any of the relevant papers.

One of the more obvious consequences of the cull is that real, productive units - 400KgMS per unit per season - are being turned into burgers and pet food with a much lower unit price. This is like replacing factories with coffee shacks, although, come to think about it, That's already happened: the foundry and machine shop I worked at in Invergiggle as holiday employment for a mechanical engineering degree (unfinished, y'all are quite safe) is now a bowling alley.

Another consequence is that, while entire farm herds are being culled and earnings fall, the debt load does not. Cue Boomer's Story.

We worked through Spring and Winter,
through Summer and through Fall
But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all
It worked on nights and Sundays,
it worked each holiday
It settled down among us and it never went away

So lenders will be anxiously poring through their dairy client's contracts, and trying to estimate what effect the cull will have on everything from provisions for defaults, to downstream effects on contractors, equipment sales and repair outfits (dependent on financing for sales) and the wider rural communities. For a marked-to-market loan on (say) a typical dairy farm in MPI's cross-hairs, this has gotta be a substantial write-down. Enough of these on the loans ledger, and the banks themselves are vulnerable to a credit downgrade. And we can guess what that will do to both the cost and availability of credit for - well, almost anything, as DC notes in the article.

The final (and there are more, as common taters may care to append) aspect is that there will be reduced economic activity as between farms: transport, sales, calf-rearing, the casual neighbourly offer of excess milk to next-door's calves, the annual Calf Day at rural schools, breeding herds, and the list can be extended far and wide. Reduced activity means less transactions, less tax, more calls on benefits and other support schemes, and everyone entering hunker-down-and-sit-it-out mode. This could easily last 3-5 years.

So Michael R's question about the basis upon which this whole scheme has been entered into, by the Good Intentions Paving Company (2017) Limited, is a very valid one. Transparency is sorely needed, not hand-waving.

Government cluelessness about the Time Value of Money

The issue with Gubmint large-scale anything which has to be built physically (as opposed to redistributed with a hefty ticket-clip) is that the entire public service has not Clue One about the Time Value of Munny.

Propose a project for $100m in Year 1, with an initial cost outlay (say, for Land) of $30m, Years 2-4 at $20m each nominal, and Year 5 at $10m, a WACC of 6%, a construction cost inflation rate of 9%, and a five-year schedule. The Gubmint wallahs then gape in wonderment as the thing (without contract variations) ends up costing $143.7m. Cumulative interest carry is $20.4m, construction inflated by CCI (which to be kind is limited to years 2-5 only) is $23.3m. So 100+ 20.4 + 23.3 = 143.7. The time value of munny....

This sort of non-thinking is absolutely rife through all levels of government. They never have to sell enough on Friday to make payroll on Wednesday following, never have to chase debts, never have to juggle cash flows to make the 20th of the month payments to creditors. Their world is literally cossetted: salaries arrive with the regularity of a sunrise, revenue falls into their ledgers like Sky Food off the edge of the bench for a dog, cash-flow is non-existent, and the only exception to this happy existence is IRD, who certainly know the Time Value of Munny if that's unpaid taxes....

Imagine, (strike up the John Lennon chorus about now) that Local Gubmint had to pay consent applicants the IRD UOMI rate on project value for every day they dragged the chain on the consent. Imagine... but enough already. T'will nevah happen.

Christchurch CBD - lack of development therein

.. a lot of people financially lost businesses as business interruptions claims often are not successful.

Therein lies a tale. Folks who are Shocked, Shocked (Captain Renault?) about the state of the Old CBD are missing the local knowledge and the history of the quake sequences. A by no means complete list:

1. Businesses were locked out of the Old CBD for months, and as Speckles quite rightly notes, this led, quelle surprise, to a chain of failures as owners were unable to retrieve inventory, records, plant or equipment. It would have been possible to 'mine into' dodgy buildings to do this, had authorities been less stupid, and some smart guys immediately signed themselves onto demolition crews with precisely that retrieval in mind. But most owners did or could not.
2. The 'Precincts' idea - block-size spatial areas devoted to one purpose - Health, Justice, Innovation, yada yada, has proved a massive failure for three reasons:
   • It's hard enough to build and lease a single building on a modest plot. Trying to do that on massive floor plates on huge land areas is nigh-on impossible.
   • It took so long to aggregate titles to produce the Precincts that some - Health, Innovation - just went elsewhere. Health is now centred around Bealey Ave, Innovation is a fizzer, and the only successful Precinct in its original conception is Justice, which of course is funded by the person you can spot in any mirror.
   • Ground conditions are patchy but uniformly shocking. Justice building cost Fletchers a cool $100 milly in over-runs, and the engineering plus remediation required for foundations alone is so expensive just to get a stable platform, that rents, always subject to ECON101, have to be way higher than suburban or other centre averages, to afford to start digging.
3. Other TLA's have proven themselves far more adept at soaking up the residential and commercial munny that flowed from insurance coffers. IZone at Rolleston (Selwyn DC), a plethora of residential subdivisions in outlying but perfectly commutable areas, and the business opportunities that come with greenfield development, have, quite simply, eaten Christchurch City's lunch.
4. The immediate answer for businesses that wished to survive was to relocate. This coincided with a wave of land developments due not to quakes but to reconsideration of space requirements (e.g. Riccarton Raceway). This provided business parks and high-end plots, all outside the Old CBD. None of the new office tenants is in any hurry to relocate back into the Old CBD, because most have found that the 'doughnut city' - a ring of businesses around the Old CBD - actually suits themselves, their customers, and their staff extremely well. So the Old CBD is gonna struggle to attract anything but hospo, high-end retail, and consultancies firmly attached to the Gubmint Teat.
5. The earthquake sequence was handled so badly in business survival terms by authorities that there is considerable animus out there, about exposing businesses again to either the Old CBD, the City Council, or in general, to any development which appears to have the cold dead hands of Gubmint anywhere near it. This animus will take a generation to diffuse.

Budget Exclusions = Holes....

Unfunded or uncertain or pure Exclusions - listed without comment.....Page numbers are from the HYEFU.

• New TV station P71 
• Conservation funding not included P71 
• Customs upgrades P72 
• America's Cup P72 
• Tertiary Ed P73 

"The behavioural assumptions, and therefore the impact on future costs are unquantifiable at this early stage but there is an expected general increase in demand for tertiary education beyond the forecast period" 

• ECE Funding Review P73 
• School of Rural Medicine P73 
• Hosting APEC 2021 P73 
• Development Assistance P73/4 
• Public Housing P75 
• Refugees Quota P75 
• Justice Commitments (Access) P76 
• LINZ LandOnLine P76 
• Welfare P77 

"The behaviour change associated with such changes, including the removal of section 70A of the Social Security Act 1964 (which reduces the amount of benefit payments owed to sole parents who do not disclose the identity of the other parents of their children) is unknown." 

• National Land Transport Fund P78 

"Crown funding may need to be provided for projects if they do not receive NLTF funding and the scope, timing and costs of some of these projects are still being finalised." 

• Auckland Transport Alignment Plan P78 

"...[Gap] is between $5 billion and $6.5 billion. The Government and Auckland Council are currently considering how to refresh ATAP in order to align the priorities of the new Government with the existing priorities of Auckland Council. This work will also include consideration of options to address the funding gap." 

• Investing in Children Transformation P79 

" To the extent that the costs associated with the new Ministry cannot be funded from a tagged contingency or from reprioritisation, additional funding is likely to be required." 

• Clothing Allowances P79 

"[Act] comes into force on 1 July 2018. The fiscal implications of this Act have yet to be fully assessed and incorporated in the fiscal forecasts" 

• Learning Support P80 

"..[If building cost] pressures cannot be managed within agency baselines, additional funding is likely to be required." 

• Southern Response Earthquake Services Support P81 

"The ultimate cost to the Crown of settling earthquake claims remains subject to significant uncertainty" 

• Primary Care Services P81 

"The implementation details and funding arrangements for these commitments are yet to be finalised." 

• Transitional Housing P82 

"The average cost of providing transitional housing support services is significantly higher than funding appropriated in Budget 2017...Additional capital is required to meet the existing supply target of 2,155 places, which might require adjusting upwards." 

• Addressing the Gender Pay Gap in the State Sector P84 

" Fulfilling this commitment may involve costs to the Crown." 

• Changes to Institutional Form of Government Agencies P84 

" commitments are likely to involve a number of changes to the composition and structure of existing government departments. Where the additional resourcing (and other costs of these changes) cannot be met through baseline expenditure, further Crown funding may be required." 

• Increasing the Minimum Wage P85 

".. increased costs to State sector employers. Funding may be sought where costs cannot be absorbed within baselines without resulting in unacceptable impacts on service delivery. " 

• Pay Equity Claims following the Care and Support Worker Settlement P85 

"The resolution of such claims within State-employed and State-funded sectors may involve significant costs to the Crown." 

• Variance in Costs of 100-Day Plan Commitments P86 

" forecasts include funding for the Government’s 100-Day Plan commitments, including First Year Fees-free Tertiary Education and the Families’ Package. Where costs are different to what has been reflected in the forecasts, the resulting fiscal impacts will need to be managed."

This is Treasury CYA - gently pointing out that this is not a full Budget and that there are considerable...Lacunae,  no, Gaps,  no, Omissions - oh, let's just settle for HOLES!

Free Tertiary Education

As a former CFO (although we had no such lofty titles in them days) of a major Polytech, I saw the effects of dragging entire cohorts of unprepared entrants into the system, and the effects of undirected (bums-on-seats) funding at first hand, because I had to corral Budgets for the hot mess:

• Foundation courses to get the worst cases literate, adequately numerate, and able to comprehend English. Pure overhead as little to no funding was directly available until well along in the piece.
• The start of a proliferation of 'soft' courses designed expressly to mop up EFTS-based funding by getting Mo' Bums.
• The realisation, very late in the piece, and I was out of it by then, that by seriously limiting Class Materials expenses and Teaching Hours, certain courses generated massive internal subsidies for Other Stuff. Because the EFTS funding took no account of Costs, only Bums, and was generous to a fault.
• Students from privileged backgrounds who constantly applied for Hardship Grants despite rocking up in cars, expensive mountain bikes, or motorbikes. I did make some of them cry (sat on the Approving or in these cases Disapproving Committee). But a nice little rort.
• It took a decade or two before the EFTS funding model (it came in in 1989/90 IIRC) started to distinguish Costly versus Costless courses. It was brought into sharp relief when one Polytech which shall remain nameless, dished out a CD to the students. That was the entire course cost....but the EFTS fundling even on the lower scales was only a little south of $10K per Bum.
• Then Degree courses started to come in (why? because the EFTS funding per Degreed Bum was much higher), so we saw Degrees in Naturopathy and Diplomas in AromaTherapy start to proliferate to take advantage. That did not last long because they were so Luminously Bonkers. But the issue was that they could Start in the first place.
• The race for funding also pitted institutions against each other, as they vied for the same student base, and duplicated, often badly, courses run better elsewhere.
• The Good Times effectively came to an end with EFTS limits per study category, directed funding for certain institutions, and incentives about Cooperation to cut out the hideous duplication and waste that was apparent. The result was TEC, which now (I understand, far away from the game now) exerts an Iron Fist over who offers What, to Whom, and at what Cost.

But I bet TEC won't have much of a Xmas Break. Because our idealistic crew, shopping for the Youf Vote as always, has perhaps taken us right back to the Old Schemozzle. I'd put a bob each way on the fact that many of the New Starry-eyed Entrants to Tertiary as a result of the massive incentives now offered, will need just as much Pastoral Care to get them Fit to Teach, as PT's Housing tenants are gonna get to sort their appalling lifestyle choices.

Allegedly.

Chasing down the BOM's

This post was prompted by a plaintive cry of vehicles which are
"manufactured almost entirely without human input, sold online with no human input, and ultimately driven without human input. They would seldom crash, and need virtually zero maintenance."  The implication is that Workers disappear and with them their Incomes and with that, their Taxes....

Lets chase the BOM down on each of these.

1. Manufacturing is the end product - metal-bashing and assembly of a plethora of components, every one of which has been: Designed, Prototyped, Materials Mined, Transported, Refined, Shipped, Cast, Moulded, Machined, Painted, Warehoused, Sold, Financed, Transported again, all before getting to the TSLA factories. Every single one of those activities has their own BOM, into which humans are an essential input. Who else Brands, creates a compelling website, decides on Finance, writes up the Contracts, Programs the CNC tools, Builds the manufactories, and passes the bills for payment. I've been involved in automating finance-related jobs out of existence for forty years, and quelle surprise, there is still wetware at the root of most of finance activities.
2. 'Online' is the visible result of literally person-centuries of clever coding, marketing ideas and entrepreneurial individuals (Jack Ma...). It's wetware all the way down for the Ideas. As to the 'automation' possible, well, Compilers, which take away the burden of writing in binary, have been around since the 1950's, yet, quelle surprise, IT in general is part of the STEM explosion in careers.
3. 'Driven with no human input' is an aspiration, not a fact. Caterpillar has had self-driving mine trucks for three decades, yet wetware is still employed to spot them for loading, and to dump them at the top of the haul road. And self-driving in winter ice, snow, fog and other very common North American road conditions is certainly gonna create work for panel-beaters: because ABS, vehicle dynamics adjustments and environment detection are useless in such conditions, as many tourists discover up our NZ ski access tracks....
4. Last I checked, TSLA vehicles have Tyres, Suspension, and other moving parts which wear. So zero maintenance is another myth. There may well be less mechanics. But then where are the buggy-whip makers and wagon wheelwrights of yesteryear? 80% of employment in developed countries 150 years ago was agricultural. Now 2% is. What happened? Yes, too many barista and aromatherapista.....

In short, we need not worry about Workers and their Income just yet. Heck, even Bicycles need Mines, Refineries, Ships, and Tyres to supply their very simple BOM's. Mines need Miners and before that Stone-gazers who can look at an outcrop and say ' yup, there's Cu, Fe, Sn or Pb in that there Rock'. I'll stop now but y'all get the drift....(mining pun right there)

Awkland housing - the Ongoing Stooory

Awkland Architects will have a perfect insider's view as all of this unfolds.

I think (despite my VRWC tendencies) that the whole Awkland Affordable Hoosing schemozzle probably cannot be even partially fixed any other way than by Gubmint intervention. But to take up a couple of points from elsewhere in the thread:

• The 'expert group' are 
• Shamubeel Eaqub - respected independent economist and commentator, and author of Generation Rent, 
• Philippa Howden-Chapman, Professor of Public Health at Otago University. She has led groundbreaking research on the health impacts of cold, damp housing, and 
• Alan Johnson, Senior Policy Analyst for the Salvation Army and author of The Salvation Army's State of the Nation report, which highlights effects of the housing crisis
• This group is anything but Expert. An economist, a Sallie SJW, and an academic are hardly a Brains Trust, particularly as the conundrums of fast, abundant, affordable housing will include the two most thorny issues of all: land costs and automated building methods. One would have expected some Builders, Engineers, Manufacturers and Overseas folks in the group. But hey, the old Labour/Greens mantra reasserts itself: 'We Know Best'.

• The other salient point is about the inherent risk involved in socialising all the moving parts of the solution. In Christchurch, f'rinstance, no construction company with any economic sense will put its hand up for the now-foobarred Metro Sports Facility, because the Gubmint has just tossed the head contractor (Leighs-Cockram) under the bus. I foresee something quite similar to this caution in the Hoosing Debacle: with such a swirling mess of Regulation, Land issues, Construction Methods and attendant risks, what CEO is gonna say to the troops - 'hey, this looks juicy, lets spend a coupla mill and get in on the action' ??

I think we all are gonna need a Contract with Popcorn suppliers, to sit comfortably on the sidelines and watch the Great Game unfold. And as Popcorn may well be GST-Free soon (being an Essential Food), perhaps a Popcorn Futures Contract of some sort to minimise tax......

Ah, GST, I hardly Knew ye....

While the Rate of GST is excluded from the ToR, Exemptions from it are evidently not. And from the loose lips of several pollies over recent days, you, dear reader, should be aware of the following candidates for Exemptions:

1.     Female sanitary products
2.     Fruit
3.     Vegetables
4.     'Essentials' (definition?)
5.     New houses

And any exemptions (from which GST is mercifully comparatively free at present) will have the following effects:

•     Decrease revenue streams from GST
•     With corresponding effects on Gubmint finances overall
•     Cause immediate compliance costs on businesses dealing with mixtures of exempt and non-exempt goods (FMCG retailers, especially)
•     With corresponding claw-back through (say it quietly) cartelised price adjustments to end consumers
•     With greatly increased scope for mis-description of goods ('Liquor', in the bad old days, was frequently sold as 'Drench' out in the back-blocks). So what's to stop yer local Baked Potato outlet selling you a $4 Raw Tater, which you promptly hand back to them for a 10c Filling and Heating fee?
•     Greatly increased non-tradeable activity in lawyers, tax accountants, and other advisory consultants
•     Increased software demands as the 'exempt product list' needs to be kept up to date and applied across all affaected businesses, to say nothing of the back-end Gubmint GST Return handling
•     Increased need for tax audits, Inspectorates and ancillary regulation to ensure that noses are being kept clean
•     Greatly increased non-tradeable activity for Gubmint to create, maintain and adjudicate over exempted categories of goods - vide the ATO's extensive guides for food-related businesses here 
•     The economic effects such as the squeeze-outs of smaller businesses in favour of franchises, big-box and corporate retailers: imagine trying to decide which of These food retailers you are.

Once a first step onto this slippery slide is taken, the basis of our current GST - free of exemptions for the most part, single or zero rate for the most part - is foobarred.

The exemptions list, being essentially political in the first place, is of course then open to pressure from identity groups for their favoured set of products. And all of them will have a justification, and some apparently sound reasons for arguing their cases. And all of them can Vote......

Which will, in short order, turn the Exemptions List into an essentially pork-barrel politics exercise. The result will be a fatal and probably irrevocable infection of a hitherto internationally recognised best-practise ad valorem tax system.

We probably have a Gubmint whose idealism, fearlessness and energy could induce them to take that first step.

I'd suggest bringing Popcorn, but am unsure as to the amount of GST it will attract in future......