Nicole Pryor at Stuff reports:

Sick people are more likely to be out of work and have money problems than injured people, says new research.

A study from the University of Otago, which has been published in Social Science & Medicine, compared over 100 stroke victims under 65-years-old with 429 people who had a similarly debilitating injury.

Both groups were followed for one year to compare their standard of living under the ACC system and means-tested benefits.

Under the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), injured people could get up to 80% of their weekly wages while recovering, as well as treatment and rehabilitation support.

Sick people could get treatment costs, but no compensation for lost wages beyond limited means-tested benefits.

There is a huge variation between those who have accidents and those who are sick. This even extends to situations that if you are born disabled (say with one leg) you get far less support than if you lose a leg in a car crash.

McAllister said at the very least there needs to be better income support for people with illnesses.

“For years people have been saying how unfair this is, the two quite different systems, and that just because someone has the misfortune of having an illness, rather than an injury, they have greater financial consequences.”

She said another option could be to extend ACC to cover illnesses.

While the disparity is a problem, the proposed solution could be more of a problem.

The first is that ACC premiums would increase massively. Every employer and employee would be paying more into ACC.

The second is that the whole basis for ACC was for accidents, and the no faults system was in return for removing the possibility of expensive lawsuits to determine compensation. That rationale does not apply for sickness. You can of curse get income protection insurance to cover the possibility of lost income due to illness.

Is it better to have one government run income protection scheme for illness that is compulsory or competing ones that people can choose to be in?

Finally look at the growth in even the sickness benefit by those who prefer not to work (of course not all or even most, but a significant minority). Think of the incentives if the sickness benefit is effectively set at 80% of your previous earnings? Especially consider that many people are on the sickness benefit due to alcohol or drug addiction. Do we really want to pay people 80% of their previous wages to remain an alcoholic or drug addict?

[UPDATE: According to MSD 7% of sickness beneficiaries are there for substance abuse, so not as many as I thought. Still a reasonable number. Also around 40% are due to psychological or psychiatric conditions which may have a substance aspect to them as the data records primary reasons only – not all reasons.]

So yes there is a disparity and a problem. But the solution is not extending ACC to illness. There could be merit in taking a more integrated approach to accidents and illness but it has to be an affordable one that doesn’t provide bad incentives.

Tracey Chatterton at Dom Post reports:

A prominent Napier lawyer has admitted to carelessly driving into the car of lobbyist Garth McVicar.

Defence lawyer Nigel Hewat, 65, collided with a car being driven by the Sensible Sentencing Trust chairman on July 26 last year.

McVicar, of Te Pohue, was driving the trust’s sponsored Hyundai on his way to a meeting about 5.50pm when the incident happened.

Hewat had been driving along the 100km/h-zoned Napier Rd, the Napier District Court was told today.

He drove into the driver’s door of McVicar’s car while turning right into Lawn Rd.

The impact spun McVicar’s car full-circle before it crashed into a power pole, bringing the power lines down.

Hewat parked his car about 75 metres away from the intersection and walked away from the scene.

You send another car into a power pole, bringing power lines down and you walk away?? I’m sorry but that is criminal.

McVicar, who was not injured, and another motorist found Hewat and brought him back to the scene.

Hewat left again only to be picked up by the police walking along Lawn Rd.

And after he was brought back, he again left the scene. And this is not a dumb 19 year old. This is a lawyer.

At the time Hewat told police he did not know he had collided with another vehicle.

Really? You did not notice the crash?

Appearing in the Napier District Court this morning, Hewat pleaded guilty to careless driving and failing to stop to ascertain whether anyone was injured.

He had intended to defend the charges but changed his plea to save the court time and money, his lawyer Roger Philip said.

Love to hear how he could defend them.

Mr Philip said Hewat was an experienced criminal lawyer who knew he was obliged to check if anyone was hurt. However, he was traumatised and confused from the impact.

‘‘Even today he can’t explain his actions,’’ Mr Philip said.

I think the word we are looking for is won’t, not can’t.

Hewat was fined $850, ordered to pay court costs and disqualified from driving for six months.

That’s an appallingly light sentence for twice fleeing the scene.

McVicar was next to a cyclist, and it would have been all too easy for her to have been killed if McVicar’s car had been pushed into her.

In Quebec it is actually an offence to have a sign in English (or any other language) and not in French. Personally I think this is ridiculous and we have seen why. The Economist reports:

On February 19th, Massimo Lecas, co-owner of an Italian restaurant, Buonanotte, in Montreal, wrote that he had received a letter from the office warning him that there were too many Italian words (such as “pasta”) on his menu. This was a violation of Quebec’s language charter, he was told, and if they were not changed to the French equivalents (pâtes in the case of pasta) he would face a fine.

Think how much money they spend on enforcing this stupid law. I wonder if they’d warn a place that has a quote in Latin!

Other restaurant owners who had received similar letters—a fish-and-chip-shop owner who was instructed to call his main offering poisson frits et frites, a brasserie owner who was asked to cover the “redial” button on his telephone and the “on/off” button on his microwave—came forward, an indication this was not an isolated incident.

You can’t make this up!

Journalists happily uncovered more extreme examples, such as the owner of a sex shop who tussled with inspectors over the English-only instructions on a sex aid. She offered to translate the safety instructions into French and place a sticker over the English warning, but this did not satisfy the inspectors. The case went to all the way to the Superior Court of Justice. (I wonder if the lawyers were able to keep a straight face.) The owner ended up with a C$500 fine.

She got fined $500 because the sex aid only had English instructions! I love this extract from the more detailed story:

The product in question, she wrote, is a ring used on the male sexual organ to enhance a female partner’s pleasure. During Mr. Picard’s first visit, he noted that the packaging and safety label were in English only. Ever vigilant, he made three subsequent visits and noted “partial corrections” but not enough to make the product conform to the law.

The poor bureaucrat – had to visit the sex store three times and inspect all the gear for correct language instructions!

In testimony at trial, the store manager said no similar product was available with French text. Under cross-examination, the Crown inquired about a Trojan product sold in drug stores with bilingual packaging, but it was established that the Trojan product was different because it vibrated. Store records introduced as evidence established that 16 of the Super Stretch Sleeves were sold over 12 months.

What a great trial this must have been.

Chris Rennie blogged in June 2010:

If Pope Benedict XVI doesn’t get a good priest-offender communication strategy underway pretty soon, he’ll be resigning. Preposterous, you might say – it’s unthinkable a Pope could resign. 

When popes Pontian (230-235), Marcellinus (296 – 304), John XVIII (1003 – 1009) Benedict IX (no exact dates due to confusion), Celestine V (1294) and Gregory XII (1406 – 1417) put on their funny hats for the first time probably the last thing on their mind would have been the prospect of resigning. 

But resign they all did and rather messily. So Pope Boniface VIII who succeeded Celestine thought he’d better tidy up the resignation process and put it into Church Law. 

What we don’t know is whether the resignation will now be seen as a precedent for future Popes.

Talking of Popes, I have to say that so far the new Pope seems to be making a pretty good impression. His strengths (for me) are:

• Excellent inter-faith relations in Argentina
• His name – I like St Francis of Assisi
• Appears relatively down to earth
• A focus on helping poor people, and that the Church should be poorer
• Not from the Curia, so may help clean up the corruption

Patrick Gower has tweeted:

David Shearer has corrected MPs Register of Pecuniary Interests after not disclosing United Nations bank account. Says it was mistake.

This means that his declaration to the Registrar has been incorrect for 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Mistakes of course can happen, and maybe it only had a trivial amount of money in it, such as $50.

But it would be good to know how material the non-disclosure was and how it was over-looked.

UPDATE: Trevor Mallard blogged in 2010 that Chris Finlayson must be stood down for a minor non-disclosure that year. I can only presume that Mr Mallard regards failing to disclose an entire bank account as far more serious and also warrants a stand down. Also note that the Finlayson incident was entirely technical and non-substantive. What we are still awaiting is how large was David Shearer’s forgotten bank account.

UPDATE 2: NRT on Twitter has pointed out the bank account must have had at least $50,000 in it to be required to be disclosed.

UPDATE3: I/S at NRT has blogged:

 Shearer clearly knows the rules around bank accounts, because he already declares one (a term deposit with Westpac). So he can’t claim ignorance as a defence. If he deliberately tried to deceive the New Zealand public about his assets, then he’s morally unfit to be leader of the Labour Party, or an MP for that matter. But even if we accept his excuse, and ascribe it to sheer forgetfulness (something which I think the New Zealand public would find extremely difficult to believe), then he’s too incompetent for the job. 

Meanwhile, its worth pointing out: knowingly making a false return is Contempt of Parliament, and the argument that this was not knowing requires superhuman credulity. Will Parliament hold its own to account? Or will they once again collude in their cozy conspiracy of silence around these matters?

I’m not as harsh as NRT. I am assuming it is an honest mistake. But it is a pretty big omission, so there is a need for David Shearer to fully explain the omission.

UPDATE4: Cactus Kate has raised an interesting point. Did Shearer declare the bank account to the IRD? If he did not, then that is even bigger trouble. If he did, then how was it included for tax compliance but not for transparency requirements? If every year you are filing a tax return that includes income from the foreign bank account, that should prompt you to remember it for the Register of Pecuniary Interests.

Some free campaign advice from me.

If one of your major arguments against same sex marriage is that it will lead to polygamous marriage also being made legal, it’s not a great idea to state that polygamy is more justified than same sex marriage, as a natural institution.

Interesting of the three sorts of polygamy, polygyny is most common – a man with multiple wives. As Liz points out it is already legal in around 60 countries. Polyandry is not really legal anywhere and exists in a just a few far flung places.

Also of interest is that the Nazis looked at making polygyny legal because WWII killed so many men. Their reasoning was that with such a shortage of men, some men have to have multiple wives so that all German women could have children.

The Telegraph reports:

In a rare interview, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal tells Christian Sylt about his anger over the Forbes Rich List, which estimated that he is worth $20bn – $9.6bn less than he claims and not enough to place him in the coveted top 10.

Heh, most people claim these rich lists over-estimate their wealth. Not often someone is angry that they say the estimate is too low!

Prince Alwaleed is the 58-year-old grandson of the founder of Saudi Arabia but not one drop of his fortune comes from oil or inheritance. Instead, he made his money by investing in global brands at a time when their share prices were depressed. Along the way he has built up significant stakes in trophy assets such as Apple, Citigroup, Disney and the Savoy Hotel in London. His portfolio spans the globe and he likes people to know it.

I admire people whose wealth is earnt, not inherited.

The dispute has drawn attention to the extent of Prince Alwaleed’s influence. His career was kick-started with a $30,000 loan from his father after graduating with a degree in business administration from California’s Menlo College in 1979.

His father also gave Prince Alwaleed a house which he mortgaged, raising about $400,000, and each month, as a grandson of Ibn Saud, the first king and founder of Saudi Arabia, he receives a $15,000 allowance. The prince was no pauper, but it was business savvy that built his wealth.

They say the first million is the hardest but even without that initial assistance, he’s done pretty well. But he does seem obsessed with having his worth seen as high as possible. The Wikipedia article on him quotes:

Kerry A. Dolan, the editor of Forbes billionaires list wrote the article Prince Alwaleed and the Curious Case of Kingdom Holding Stock upon the 2013 publication of the list.^[6] Dolan wrote of the importance of the list to Al Waleed, most notably detailing the leap in the share price of Kingdom Holdings in the time leading up to the publication of the list.^[6] Al Waleed would blind copy Dolan on text messages he sent to prominent people to impress her, she also spent a week with him in Riyadh in 2008, at his behest, touring his palaces. In 2006 Forbes estimated his net worth as $7 billion less than Al Waleed claimed. He telephoned Dolan at her home, with Dolan claiming that he sounded “nearly in tears”.^[6] Al Waleed also had Kingdom Holding’s chief financial officer fly to New York before a previous list had been published to ensure that Forbes used his stated numbers.^[6] Dolan wrote that “…for the past few years former Alwaleed executives have been telling me that the prince, while indeed one of the richest men in the world, systematically exaggerates his net worth by several billion dollars….The value that the prince puts on his holdings at times feels like an alternate reality, including his publicly traded Kingdom Holding, which rises and falls based on factors that, coincidentally, seem more tied to the Forbes billionaires list than fundamentals.”

If I had $30 billion I wouldn’t get upset if people said it was only $20 billion!

The Herald editorial:

A tax on carparks provided by employers might be justified on the principles of fairness and consistency that ought to govern all taxation. A carpark has a clear monetary value and it is puzzling that it was not part of the 2007 legislation which introduced fringe benefit tax to cover benefits that employees receive as part of their employment. Why, after all, should those with free staff carparks receive a substantial untaxed advantage denied those who commute to work by other means?

I agree. The best tax system is one with few loopholes, low rates and a broad base.

The pursuit of principle can, however, be undone if the costs of a policy outweigh the benefits or if it is tainted by its own inconsistency, as this proposal is.

Let’s look at that.

Among other things, the group suggested the tax would net just $17 million for Inland Revenue, while generating additional compliance costs of about $30 million for businesses.

If that is the case, the tax extension should not increase. If compliance costs are greater than revenue it is economically inefficient. I would add a note of caution though that the estimate of compliance costs is one commissioned by opponents. I’d have to read the assumptions to determine how robust it is. So I wouldn’t take it as holy grail. But we should rightly be concerned about compliance costs.

 If tax purity is the reason for this exercise, the impost should be applied throughout the country. An employee carpark, like other non-cash benefits such as petrol vouchers, is an advantage whether it is applied in Akaroa or Auckland. It is a perk for the car-driving workers of Whangarei as much as those of Wellington, and one denied those who get to work by bicycle, foot or public transport, even if the last of those modes is also subsidised.

I think the issue her is again benefit to cost ratio.  Take the fact IRD does not apply GST to anything you purchase from overseas unless the GST is over $50 in value (off memory). Now that is not purist, but it is sensible as if they tried to impose GST on every overseas purchase the compliance costs would be massive – far more than the revenue.

The same go with the proposed regional differentiation on the car park issue. In many areas the value of a car park is minimal – say $300 a year. It would be as silly to insist on paying FBT on those parks as it would be to insist every employee must account for every single personal phone call on their work phone.

So it is quite legitimate to say we’ll only ask bsuinesses to go to the hassle of calculating FBT on car parks when they are located in an area where the value of a car park is high. If you did not do that, then the compliance costs would absolutely exceed the revenue.

The revenue this tax would gather, $17 million, is a drop in the public bucket. It could be justified only if there were no significant adverse consequences. Accountants Lock & Partners estimate the costs of gathering the carpark tax would be almost double the take.

If their analysis is robust, then the tax should not proceed. Maybe one of the economist bloggers could scrutinise their analysis?

Then there is the damage that may be done to the city centres of Auckland and Wellington.

The capital has already been affected by the layoffs in government departments. Like Auckland, it also faces a struggle to retain businesses. Many small companies, in particular, are constantly assessing whether they would find it cheaper, and no handicap to their business, to move to suburban locations.

I don’t see that as damage. It can be economically beneficial to have a business not be in the CBD. Decisons on whether to be in the CBD or not should be based on the actual costs of doing so, and not false subsidies such as exempting parks from FBT.

The Unite union has warned that if nightshift employees lose their work carparks it would force them to walk to cars parked some distance away at unsafe hours.

I think they have raised a valid concern there.

It should not come to that. Opposition to the tax is widespread and well-founded. The Government sounds no more than lukewarm on the idea. It should drop it.

Oh the tax change is as dead as a doorknob I’d say. I’d just make the point that not all the criticism of it is well-founded. There are some valid issues of concern, but some of the issues cited are over-blown.

UPDATE: And the Government has announced the tax change will not proceed.

Adam Dudding at Stuff reports:

Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has broken the habit of a lifetime and said something nice about a foreign country – namely New Zealand.

Clarkson, who has referred to Mexicans as “lazy, feckless, flatulent” oafs, given a Nazi salute in an episode about BMWs, and labelled Australians “convicts”, raves about New Zealand in his column in today’s London Sunday Times.

New Zealand, he writes, is “absolutely stunning; bite-the-back-of-your-hand-to-stop-yourself-from-crying-out lovely”.

It is. I think we take what we have for granted sometimes.

With characteristic humility, Clarkson uses his newspaper column to advise God that he made a mistake when choosing the Middle East as his religious base.

“If you were God and you were all-powerful, you wouldn’t select Bethlehem as a suitable birthplace for your only child because it’s a horrible place.

“And you certainly wouldn’t let him grow up anywhere in the Holy Land.

“What you’d actually do is choose New Zealand.”

If God really were all-knowing, continues Clarkson, “children at Christmas time today would be singing ‘Oh little town of Wellington’ and people would not cease from mental fight until Jerusalem had been built in Auckland’s green and pleasant land.”

Perhaps the most startling compliment, however, is Clarkson’s claim that if God had got it right, “Jesus would have been from Palmerston North”, a stark deviation from the verdict of his countryman John Cleese, who once said the North Island city should be renamed “suicide capital of New Zealand” because “if you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick”.

Where would they find a virgin in Palmerston North?? 🙂

This is a real letter written by a father who overheard his son talking about how to come out to his parents. Nate took a photo of it and sent it to FCKH8. On Facebook it has had around 81,000 likes and 49,000 shares.

Andrew blogs at Grumpollie:

The problem with calling cell phones doesn’t really lie in the cost of calls. For a polling company, calling a cell phone doesn’t cost that much more than calling a landline. The problem is the complexity and cost of employing dual sampling frames when the proportion of cell phone users without a landline is still very low. If the purpose of calling cell phones is to reduce non-coverage of likely voters, then you may actually need to ‘screen out’ those you call on cell phones who also have a landline (because they are already covered by the landline sample frame).

If we assume (hypothetically) that 6% of eligible voters have cell phones and no landline, that means that 94% of the people you call on a cell phone will not be eligible to take part (again, because they are already covered by the landline sample frame). This is where the cost would really begin to build up – all those interviewer hours required just to screen people out (eek!).

It is worth recalling the stat – you’d have to call almost 17 cell phones to find 1 person who doesn’t have a landline.

At the moment such a small proportion of New Zealanders have a cell phone with no landline that party support would need to be dramatically different among those people for this particular type of non-coverage to influence the poll results for party vote (eg, support for Labour among cell phone only voters may need to be twice what it is among landline voters for the party vote result to shift by more than, say, the margin of error).

Also a very useful point to recall when people raise the cellphone issue.

Let’s say National is at 48% amongst landline users and only 40% amongst cellphone only users. If you poll landline users only then you get National at 48%. If you poll both landline and cellphone only users you would have National at 47.5%. Not a huge difference.

Also worth noting almost all polling companies weight by age so any differences between landline and cellphone users which are due to different age profiles get compensated for anyway.

When the proportion of people with cell phones and no landline is considerably larger than it is today (like it is in some other countries), then it will definitely make sense to employ a dual sampling frame approach.

The results of the census will be interesting to see how the proportions have changed.

Neil Miller writes in the HoS on 10 benefits of drinking beer:

1. Beer lessens the constant anxiety of watching the Black Caps bat.
2. After beer, Gareth Morgan’s constant lectures become slightly less annoying.
3. Beer enables people to hold strong opinions on every issue without resorting to research.
4. Without beer, no one would date in the provinces.
5. Television beer ads employ all young Kiwi actors not talented enough to be on Shortland Street.
6. The Government gets lots of money from beer through excise tax, GST and company tax on anyone who manages to make a profit.
7. Frank Zappa said “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons.” Without beer, New Zealand would only be half a real country.
8. The late-night takeaway food industry depends on beer for patronage.
9. Beer production provides the main ingredient in Marmite.
10. Drinking a frosty beer annoys President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Professor Doug Sellman.

Heh, an excellent list.

Another HoS article focuses on the drop in beer consumption in NZ.

Statistics NZ figures reveal beer sales have dropped from 181 litres per adult in 1973 to 79 litres last year. This figure marks the lowest level of beer sales since World War II.

But what about the drinking crisis in NZ?

And before you claim people are just drinking more of other alcoholic products, overall alcohol production is down also.

Rodney Hide in the HoS describes 10 ways Government policies hurt poor people:

1. The Government funds the very best schools for rich kids’ education. The price of entry is the cost of a house that’s “in-zone”. Poor families can’t afford it. They are locked out of decent schools and their kids are consigned to third-rate institutions.
2. Rich girls are subsidised to attend university and become teachers, accountants and lawyers. Poor girls are subsidised to drop out of school and have babies.
3. The rich teach their kids to work hard and be smart to succeed. The Government teaches poor kids their land was stolen and that to prosper they must work on Treaty claims in hope of winning it back.
4. Rich boys start work on graduate wages. Poor boys are shut out of the job market by the minimum wage.
5. Solo mums face the highest effective marginal tax rates in the country. The rich have tax planners and offshore accounts.
6. Metropolitan Urban Limits restrict the supply of land and inflate the value of existing homes. That’s great for families who already own a house or two. It’s bad for the poor. The Urban Limits shut them out of ever owning a house. The poor are never able to accumulate capital and establish the sense of pride and belonging that home ownership brings. They are tenants for life.
7. The Government subsidises the winnings of rich horse owners. The gambling of poor people is taxed through the TAB and pokie machines.
8. The ballet and the orchestra are subsidised. Smoking and drinking are taxed.
9. Poor neighbourhoods are crime-ridden. The rich live behind locked gates and security patrols and say tougher sentencing and increased policing don’t work. The poor struggle to protect their meagre possessions and to keep their children from the clutches of gangs and drug dealers.
10. The Resource Management Act, occupational safety and health, and our labour laws protect established business from upstarts who can’t afford lawyers, human resources consultants and three tiers of management devoted to compliance.

A fair bit of truth there.

Bevan Hurley at HoS reports:

A peace activist was detained for 48 hours before being sent back to New Zealand for trying to enter Israel on a tourist visa.

The point being she was not a tourist and lied.

Amy Thomson, 26, was held at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on February 26. She tried to enter the country for a three-month voluntary internship at a non-government organisation promoting peace.

Thomson said the Israel Palestinian Centre for Research and Information told her she should claim to be a tourist.

Well that says a lot about them.

Israel, of all countries, has every reason to be vigilant about who can enter their country. Lying is a bad way to get in.

Suspicions were raised when Israeli immigration authorities saw she had recently visited Lebanon, which is in ongoing conflict with Israel.

Ha, I had just come from Iran when I entered Israel and had also been to Kuwait, Egypt and Turkey. so I also got a lengthy interrogation. I didn’t mind so much as she was cute 🙂

Thomson was questioned for eight hours about her visit to Israel, who she knew, and her intentions.

During which time she lied. They can spot liars. And how stupid is this – Her Linked In profile refers to her intended internship.

One interrogator mockingly congratulated her for winning a $500 prize for an essay she had written on Iranian politics which appeared on the Massey University website.

Oh my God – Mossad know how to use Google. The fiends.

“I felt humiliated and ashamed. Eventually it seemed to me that he had found something out and knew that I had lied about something.”

Exhausted, after a 24 hour flight and 12 hours questioning, Thomson admitted that she was to work for a non-governmental organisation.

Should have said that from the beginning, and applied for the correct visa.

She said she regretted not being honest but it was a valuable experience.

“I know what it’s like for the Palestinians to deal with what they deal with every single day.”

Oh Good God.

Rob Portman is a Republican US Senator. He was short-listed to be the Vice-Presidential candidate in 2008 and 2012 and is seen as a credible contender for the GOP nomination in 2016. He has held numerous senior executive roles in the US Government and is an influential figure.

He has just become the first Republican US Senator to back same sex marriage. He explains why in his own words:

Two years ago, my son Will, then a college freshman, told my wife, Jane, and me that he is gay. He said he’d known for some time, and that his sexual orientation wasn’t something he chose; it was simply a part of who he is. Jane and I were proud of him for his honesty and courage. We were surprised to learn he is gay but knew he was still the same person he’d always been. The only difference was that now we had a more complete picture of the son we love.

At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.

I wrestled with how to reconcile my Christian faith with my desire for Will to have the same opportunities to pursue happiness and fulfillment as his brother and sister. Ultimately, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.

Love and compassion is far more attractive than bile and hate.

One way to look at it is that gay couples’ desire to marry doesn’t amount to a threat but rather a tribute to marriage, and a potential source of renewed strength for the institution.

Absolutely.

I’ve thought a great deal about this issue, and like millions of Americans in recent years, I’ve changed my mind on the question of marriage for same-sex couples. As we strive as a nation to form a more perfect union, I believe all of our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joy and stability of marriage.

Nicely put.

Portman’s change of view is sincere, I have no doubt. There is a wider political aspect to this though. If the Republicans don’t moderate their positions on some of these issues, then they will find it harder and harder to win elections.

In the US, support for same sex marriage is:

• 18 – 29 70%
• 30 – 39 60%
• 40 – 49 55%
• 50 – 64 48%
• 65+ 32%

Now I can near guarantee you that those 70% of under 30s who support same sex marriage will not decrease as they get older. If anything, it will increase. So in just 10 years I expect we’ll see something like:

• 18 – 29 75%
• 30 – 39 70%
• 40 – 49 60%
• 50 – 64 55%
• 65+ 45%

Nick Smith said:

It is essential that more land is made available for housing to improve supply and affordability in Auckland, Minister of Housing Dr Nick Smith said today in releasing the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report ‘Residential Land Available in Auckland’.

“This report shows a worrying trend of reduced land availability and soaring section prices in Auckland over the past decade. It highlights that with projected population growth, Auckland will need about 13,000 additional homes per year over the next three decades and that with changing household make-ups, the biggest growth in demand will be for smaller households,” Dr Smith says.

So how is the Council doing?

• The number of new sections available to be built on today is 1900 – significantly less than the 15,000 previously reported.
• The land ready to be subdivided has a capacity of 14,500 sections, compared to the Council’s development strategy target of seven years supply of 32,550 sections.
• The land in the pipeline for subdivision has a capacity of 54,500 sections, with the Council’s development strategy target being 20 years supply of 103,500 sections.
• “This report shows Auckland needs double the supply of land to meet the Council’s own targets.

That last point is crucial. They are not even on target to have half the land they need for their own targets. And their own targets are well below what is needed also.

The draft unitary plan projects:

• 280,000 new homes within the current urban limit
• 90,000 new homes in greenfield areas outside the current limit

So they are not on track to have even half the land they need for their draft unitary plan. But how realistic is it to have 280,000 new homes within the current urban Auckland?

The Government’s further concern, detailed in this report, is that Auckland’s plan will require the building of 4000 high-density dwellings every year for the next decade and 10,000 per year after that. This compares to 830 higher density dwellings consented last year and an average of 2674 per year over the past decade.

Does anyone think Auckland Council can consent 4,000 high-density dwellings a year let alone 10,000 a year?

Officials are cautious that this can be achieved, particularly when previous intensification targets set by Auckland planners a decade ago were not met.

In other words they’ve failed to meet even past modest targets, so its madness to think they can meet their targets either for intensification or for greenfield developments.

Lindsay Mitchell blogs:

The private members bill legislating for an increase of taxpayer-funded Paid Parental Leave (PPL) from 14 to 26 weeks is back in parliament today. Bear in mind, if lobbyists get 6 months it’ll only be a matter of time before they want 1 year.

The main argument goes that bonding and breastfeeding are so important they should be encouraged as much as possible.

If you look at how mothers are behaving after a birth most already appreciate that.

NZ statistics analysed data from 2002 -2005 when the provision was for 12 weeks PPL.

Did most mothers return to work when their leave entitlement ran out?

No.

4 months after starting PPL only 12.5 percent were back working – at 5 months, only 33 percent.

30 percent had not returned to work after 18 months.

So very very few mothers go back to work the moment PPL runs out. Hence the arguments about giving more bonding time are over-hyped. An extension will simply be another tax and spend income transfer.

The Telegraph reports:

Sources have confirmed that the Coalition will not attempt to implement the Prime Minister’s plan for a 45p per unit minimum price.

Is that all? Labour MPs here were talking $2 a stand drink minimum price!

One Treasury source described the Prime Minister’s plan as “a remarkably stupid idea”.

I’ll just point out that the public seem pretty supportive of same sex marriage, and they can vote for or against MPs on the basis of their vote. 41 electorate MPs voted for it, and 30 against.

This week’s quiz is here. No guesses!

Amelia Wade at NZ Herald reports:

For the first time, Aucklanders will this year have to request a copy of the White Pages telephone directory.

The decision came after 75 per cent of Aucklanders wanted the chance to “opt in”, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen and commissioned by Yellow.

Every year, about 6.5 million phone books are distributed around New Zealand.

Research from Nielsen in 2010 found only 41 per cent of people aged 15 and over used the White Pages.

Mine go straight into the recycling box.

The pilot is being run just in Auckland this year, and the company is watching the reaction before deciding whether it will be rolled out nation-wide.

They should.