Eddie at The Standard blogs:

Word around the traps is that David Shearer is going to use his state of the nation speech next weekend to announce that he will put his leadership to full membership vote in February. If it’s true, and it’s a big if, it’s a ballsy but smart move politically and a welcome sign that Labour’s leadership is embracing democracy.

It’s no secret that Labour’s membership is pretty pissed off with the way that the old guard launched a decapitation strike on Cunliffe the moment that the membership decided on a democratic leadership election process.

Honouring the membership’s desire to have a genuine say will go a long way to bringing Labour and its base back together. Refusing to have a vote could only be taken as a tacit acknowledgement that the old guard thinks Shearer would lose a race, and the legitimacy question of a leader who appears afraid of his own members would remain. Taking the initiative would put that to rest and earn praise from even his staunchest critics.

In fact, by taking the front foot, Shearer will probably ensure that he wins the race, possibly even without serious opposition. Winning that vote would put to rest the murmurings that would otherwise follow him indefinitely.

It will be very interesting to see if this speculation is correct.

While it is a risk for Shearer, it would dampen down the unhappy activists, and unite most of the party behind him. But what would Cunliffe do? If Shearer calls a party wide vote and wins, then Cunliffe has little hope of redemption.

So what would Cunlife have to lose by standing? The activists I think would back Cunliffe overall, but the caucus Shearer. That would leave it to the unions to decide. They’ll go with which candidate offers them the best policies to boost their finances and power.

John Armstrong writes:

It was almost serendipity that one of the last acts of the summer silly season was to throw up the Business and Economic Research Ltd report questioning KiwiRail’s mothballing of the freight-only Napier to Gisborne line.

The line costs $8 million a year to run and requires $4 million to repair according to Kiwirail.

But I have a solution. If BERL is really convinced that Kiwirail (whose job is to run rail on a commercial basis) has their numbers wrong, they should ask Kiwirail to sub-let the lines to BERL for a $1 a year. I’m sure BERL has enough confidence in their numbers that they’ll jump at the opportunity to make some money based on their projections of revenue growth etc.

Not that long ago Labour would have ducked for cover and called for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the line’s future potential and risks.

Shearer clearly believes the time for such fudging is past. Labour has to be clear about where it stands. Shearer says Labour would reopen the line. Full stop.

Labour is saying that they will force the company to operate at an even bigger loss than they already do. They are also saying politicians will decide what services are provided, not the board of the company.

Such intervention is not without political risk, however. Transporting logs by train has long been flagged as the saviour of the Napier-Gisborne line. But it has become a mirage. The reality is that for the last decade the line has carried minimal tonnages, such that closure would increase the number of trucks on the state highway by just six per working day.

Now read that part. Labour have just announced that they will spend tens of millions of dollars on keeping a rail line operating, even though it would take just six trucks a day off the state highway!

This is desperate populism, and Greek style economics. We are struggling to get out of deficit and start paying down debt. And Labour will throw tens of millions ($28 mil over three years) at a rail line that would have almost no business!

Amelia Wade in NZ Herald reports:

Almost 800 girls under 18 were married in New Zealand in the past decade, and women’s rights activists believe a number of those marriages were against the will of the brides.

It is not illegal for 16 and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent but activists suggest a number of those marriages are forced by the parents.

I wonder how many 16 and 17 year olds boys got married?

National MP Jackie Blue has drafted a private member’s bill which she hopes would help provide extra support for young women under pressure to marry.

Dr Blue’s bill would make it illegal for anyone under 18 years old to wed without first formalising their consent before a Family Court judge.

“I believe the majority of marriages under 18 are fine and above board, but this would just give an extra level of protection for those who are being forced to do it against their will,” she said.

This seems a good bill to me. I can’t imagine what harm is done by requiring a 16 year old to either wait until they are 18 before they marry – or having a judge ensure the bride is a willing participant.

I blogged a few days ago with some approval what Kim Dotcom said would end copyright piracy:

1. Create great stuff 
2. Make it easy to buy 
3. Same day worldwide release 
4. Fair price 
5. Works on any device

I said:

I basically agree with Dotcom on this. It would not end “piracy” entirely, but it would massively decrease it.

Pat Pilcher has published a response from RIANZ:

“The music industry has delivered on all five points suggested by Dotcom”

And they’ve responded to each of Kim DotCom’s 5 points with the following:

1- Create great stuff 
“Great” is obviously subjective but with legal digital services offering tens of millions of music tracks there’s surely something for everyone out there.

2- Make it easy to buy
New Zealanders have access to 20 legal digital music services, not only for buying but for on-demand and curated playback. The world leading brands in each category i-tunes, Spotify and Pandora are open for business in New Zealand.

These are available 24/7 and very easy to use. The website nztop40.co.nzprovides multiple links to the most popular international and local tracks and albums every week.

3- Same day worldwide release
The overwhelming majority of newly released music is available simultaneously worldwide. In fact due to time zone differences New Zealand is often the first country in the world to have access to new superstar releases.

4- Fair price 
Music has never been cheaper to buy or access. Some on-demand services even have a totally free option. Tracks from albums are can be purchased individually, often for under $2. Premium on-demand services are as little as $3 per week.

5- Works on any device 
Tracks and albums purchased from legal digital download services are DRM – free and all are usable across multiple devices using Android and iOS operating systems – i.e. the overwhelming majority of devices in the marketplace. Likewise on-demand services all have apps for multiple platforms and devices.

RIANZ makes the point despite this, music piracy continues unabated, and has grown every year since 2006.

It is disappointing that music piracy is at levels, when it is so easy and relatively inexpensive to buy the music online legally.  I’ve got around 380 songs purchased through itunes, and would never consider torrenting a song I can get on itunes.  People should pay for content, when they can.

Stats NZ have published the latest CPI and inflation remains at 0.9%. The graph above shows what inflation has been since WWII. It is due to inflation that we are no longer competitive as an exporter unless the dollar is lower.

And inflation since 1990, showing the tail end of the 4th Labour Government, and those since.

Inflation over each three year term has been:

• 1991 – 1993 3.7%
• 1994 – 1996 8.5%
• 1997 – 1999 1.7%
• 2000 – 2002 8.7%
• 2003 – 2005 7.6%
• 2006 – 2008 9.5%
• 2009 – 2011 8.0% (includes GST increase)
• 2012 0.9% (for one year)

Printing money to fuel inflation is like a sugar fix. It gives you a temporary rush, but makes you sicker in the long term.

The Herald reported last weekend:

Labour’s deputy leader Grant Robertson said Parliament should consider changing the process of dealing with electoral law breaches to speed it up – including giving the Electoral Commission powers to fine or penalise for some breaches. …

Mr Robertson said the Electoral Commission was the expert body on electoral law, yet it had to send any breaches to Police to decide whether to act on them.

“The bigger issue is the number of complaints they’ve sent to the Police that nothing has happened with. So maybe there is another way. For instance, could you set a threshold under which the Electoral Commission was able to impose some sort of penalty rather than have to have Police prosecute it.”

I think Grant was less keen on the Electoral authorities having prosecuting authority when he worked in the PM’s Office in 2005 and they over-spent by $400,000. In a disgraceful decision the Police totally misinterpreted the law and failed to prosecute.

But I agree with him that the Commission should be able to impose fines for minor offences. I also think the Police should be removed entirely from any Electoral Act enforcement. They have shown in 2005, 2008 and 2011 they have neither the expertise or the interest in enforcing it.

Whale points out Truth had this story some weeks ago, as they actually filed the OIA it is all based on.

[DPF: Actually the Herald article is from a year ago, so not based on the Truth article. I mis-read the date. It shows how appalling things are though that a year on, still almost nothing has happened!]

Andrew Geddis blogs on the criminal mistreatment issue. He sums up the proposal:

A prisoner is in jail serving their punishment – doing the time for their crime. Whilst in jail, they are mistreated … in a way that breaches the rights guaranteed to all New Zealanders under legislation. They then get monetary compensation (only after all other means of remedying the situation have failed). That compensation first pays any debt they owe to any person they may have harmed through their crime – assuming there is such a debt in place.

And then the Government takes back the rest of the compensation and uses it to bolster the account it uses to pay for the support of victims of all crime.

So, in essence, the Government is proposing to fund a system of helping crime victims with money that it pays to prisoners after mistreating them whilst they are in its custody. And it will take that compensation away no matter how grievous the rights breach the prisoner has suffered, and irrespective of whether the crime that put the person in prison caused any individual any loss at all.

He states:

But to go from those propositions to a solution that prisoners have no right to receive compensation for harms caused to them by the State, but instead must pay it over to help society meet its obligations to crime victims, is to in effect say that prisoners are not people. And that is wrong.

That is why I’m pleasantly surprised to see Judith Collins essentially agree with me and announce that she won’t be following through with Simon Power’s proposal, but rather moving to make permanent the existing claims system. …

Quite right. So credit where credit is due – my first words of 2013 are praise for Judith Collins.

Judith’s opponents sometimes try to paint her as one-dimensional, but if you look at her overall track record in both Police and Justice, I believe it is in fact quite sophisticated  in balancing up the various rights and responsibilities of those involved in the justice system.

Well I think he is still lying. If the interview was part of a plan of redemption, I don’t think it will work.

I simply don’t believe him over stuff such as the 2001 $250,000 donation to the ICU. He says he doesn’t like them and has no reason to defend them. But he has a reason to lie – he could face bribery charges if he admitted to it.

He seemed barely contrite over his treatment of people such as Emma O’Reilly whom he sued and called a whore and alcoholic. He says he has tried to contact her, and I noted he e-mailed just before the interview a journalist he had lied to many times (and had been one of his big defenders). To me this looks like it is all part of an organised campaign. Do the interview. Then send out unspecific apologies just before the interview airs. In the interview admit to just what you have to, and don’t give any significant details.

The second part will be interesting, but I suspect the first part had the most significant stuff. I don’t think there’s enough there for any sporting body to even start to consider a path back for Armstrong.

Two more MP profiles in the Herald. First Rimutaka MP Chris Hipkins:

What have you found most rewarding about the past year?

One of the career pluses for me has been questioning Hekia Parata [Education Minister] in Parliament over the Christchurch schooling stuff. I was able to translate a lot of concern amongst the schools being affected into questions and subsequent action in Parliament.

I think this show Chris’ background as a parliamentary staffer and straight into being an MP, that he cites question time as a highlight!

What MP outside your party impresses you?

I would say Chester Borrows [National, Wanganui] but I would have to say in brackets other than the fact that he closed our local Hutt courthouse. He is a thoroughly decent human being. I worked with him on the justice and electoral select committee when he was the chair of that and I found him to be very, very fair and able to do the job without letting the politics get in the way.

Very generous words by Chris.

Do you have a bill in the private members bill ballot?

I do. I have a bill that would require the government to produce their documentation and legislation in plain English. There is an international guide around plain language. Legislation has been passed in other jurisdictions, in the US for example, which means the general public should be able to pick up any document or piece of legislation and understand it without having to have someone decode it. It means you steer clear of bureaucratic language and jargon and acronyms and you basically write in such a way that anyone can understand.

Sounds good in principle, though I wonder if a law is needed. It does remind me of some years ago where there was some bill called the paperwork reduction bill, and the advertisement for submissions on it called for 20 copies of your submission to be mailed to the Clerk’s Office! Very ironic. Luckily now most submissions are electronic.

And Green List MP Gareth Hughes:

What have you found most rewarding about the past year?

Personally, it has been watching my kids grow up. Arlo is 5 now and Zoe’s 2. I guess politically it has been trying to put the issues of fracking and deep-sea oil drilling on the agenda. I think that well and truly is a bit of an issue nationally and we’ve seen the likes of Petrobras pull out which I think has come, in part, because of that public pressure we’ve seen.

I like the answer about the kids. Fracking is on the agenda, and thanks to Gareth we now better understand the huge economic and environmental benefits of fracking – as seen overseas. I’m not sure this is the result he wanted though!

Do you have a bill in the private members bill ballot?

Yes, I’ve got a number I have developed. I’ve got a Copyright Amendment Bill in there which would give Kiwis the ability to use parody and satire which is something we don’t have compared to many other countries. Under the Copyright Act there are a number of exemptions [for copyright] such as for literary criticism or for using for the news. Unfortunately parodying or satirising something isn’t a defence under the Copyright Act.

I’m supportive of this bill. It would bring us into line with other countries such as the US where parody and satire have a fair use provision.

What’s one of the best shows or concerts you’ve been to in recent years?

I’ve really enjoyed Public Service Announcements at Bats Theatre in Wellington. They’ve done three seasons where they just parody politics over the previous month or so. It’s rewritten. They have political characters and they have the mickey taken out of them. The last one was all about David Shearer getting advice from Russel Norman and reminiscing with the ghosts of Lange and Muldoon. I’ve had brief cameos in all of them.

That was a very funny play.

Sent in by a reader. To be fair to the PPTA they are not that anti-national standards – that is more the NZEI and NZPF. But I do wish they would spend more time on areas of agreed priority such as raising teacher quality, than trying to stop parents and students have choice.

Vaughan Elder at the ODT reports:

The future of historic Dunedin student watering hole the Captain Cook is unclear.

DB Breweries’ lease of the bar runs out at the end of June, and the operations manager of Cook Brothers Bars, which subleases the bar, believed the bar would most likely close when the lease ran out.

”I would find it hard to believe that anyone would [take over the bar],” Guy Randall said.

However, Noel Kennedy, one of three directors of Orari Street Properties Investments Ltd, which owns the building, said there was no question of the Cook closing, ”and we will be fighting to make sure that never happens under our watch”. Various parties were being spoken to about taking over the lease, including DB, but ”nothing has been finalised at this point”, he said. …

The Captain Cook Tavern, known as the Cook, was established in 1860 and stands as the last of the three main student pubs in North Dunedin. The Gardens Tavern and the Bowler were earlier bought by the University of Otago, for conversion into academic facilities.

Dunedin would not be the same without the Cook. Oh, so many hours spent there. I hope it survives.

Michael Dickison at the NZ Herald reported:

Yesterday he was honoured for his long contributions to broadcasting and charitable causes in front of dignitaries and 100 guests at his Hawkes Bay lodge. In a 35-year career Sir Paul broke new ground as a current affairs host in television and radio, was acclaimed as he expanded his journalism into newspapers and books, and championed several important social causes. He became one of New Zealand’s most prominent personalities, widely recognised for his humour and humanity.

Pam Corkery on ZB yesterday made the very pertinent point that Holmes became our most powerful broadcaster but that he didn’t use that position just to knock things down, but also to build things up such as his support over many years for the Paralympics or the humanity he and others showed to Eve van Grafhorst.

Mr Holm read out a selection of Sir Paul’s achievements: building his breakfast radio show up to No1, creating a new style of current affairs television programme in Holmes, investigating the country’s biggest issues – notably his best-selling book on the 1979 Air New Zealand crash in Antarctica, Daughters of Erebus, and winning awards for his writing.

I’m trying to recall what used to be on television at 7 pm before we had the Holmes Show, and its successors.

Sir Paul pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose.

He had got hay fever for the first time in his life, he said.

“The old cancer found me out and has started to do some funny things.

“We still have a lot of fun, a lot of good times, but soon realities have to be faced … We haven’t had a chance to meet with the doctor to discuss what’s going on, but I don’t think it’s flash.

“I don’t think Houdini will do it this time.”

Sir Paul has survived a car crash, fatal helicopter accident, light aircraft crash and previous illnesses. But last year he had surgery for cancer and then for his heart. After the open-heart surgery his cancer returned.

He said he wanted future generations to remember him as a decent bloke.

It is a sad reality that Sir Paul is in his final weeks, and won’t get to enjoy much of his retirement in the Hawke’s Bay.

Guests drank champagne and he posed for pictures with Lady Deborah. He carried his new medal proudly.

A minor point – she is Lady Holmes, not Lady Deborah as she is the wife of a knight, not the daughter of a peer.

“The plan was I would build this farm and retire here, and live a long and wonderful life basking in my former great career,” he said. “But along comes the bloody [illness].”

Still, he is living every day full of laughter, with his wife and family alongside him.

“I wake up every morning and prepare for another day of life, like you do,” Sir Paul said.

I’m glad they threw away the normal protocols and arranged for the special ceremony. It sounds like it was a very emotional day.

The Herald editorial:

The timing of the deadline for submissions on the education amendment bill is probably not as devious as the association suggests. Parliament’s select committees set these deadlines and some bill has to start the year’s work.

The editorial could have mentioned that the submission period was set for three months, almost twice the normal six to eight weeks. Also that the Government doesn’t have a majority on the select committee that sets the date.

The PPTA is attempting to widen concern by presenting charter schools as “the dismantling of New Zealand’s public education system”.

I think their worry is how popular they may prove to be.

They are, in fact, nothing of the sort. Charter schools would be fully funded from the public education budget. They would have to accept pupils on a first-come-first-served basis, they could not select them. In that sense they will be much more like state schools than private schools or the “integrated” schools that receive public grants and can charge fees.

Unlike state schools, they will not have to give preference to pupils in a designated zone. They will be able to accept them from anywhere. If a charter school receives more applicants than it is allowed to enrol, it must hold a ballot.

No hand picking of students. And best of all for students from low income families, it means that you don’t have to buy an expensive house in a school zone to get a choice about which school to attend.

Their right to employ some unregistered staff has been a point of contention for the teachers’ unions. So is their lack of accountability to the Auditor General, the Ombudsman and the Official Information Act. Those elements of the legislation should not survive the select committee’s examination.

So long as the schools are spending public money they ought to be subject to the usual instruments of public scrutiny.

If that is the principle, then can I advocate that every NGO in New Zealand that receives over 50% of its funds from the taxpayer, be subject to the Official Information Act? Also arguably any unions where more than 50% of their members are public sector, and hence they are indirectly publicly funded.

Claire Trevett at NZ Herald reports:

The number of sole parents on the domestic purposes benefit dropped by 5000 last year – a drop Social Development Minister Paula Bennett is attributing partly to her new policy requiring sole parents to get jobs when their youngest child turns five.

Figures released yesterday showed there were 95,138 sole parents on the DPB at the end of 2012 – down from 100,266 the year before.

More than half of that drop happened in the last three months of the year, after the introduction of Ms Bennett’s policy required sole parents to get part-time work when their youngest child turned five and fulltime work for those whose children were older than 14.

Ms Bennett said 3221 sole parents had returned to work since that came into force in October.

It’s early days, but that looks to be a promising start. The real beneficiaries of the policy are the kids, as growing up in a household with no adult in employment has strong correlations with negative outcomes in multiple areas.

~ by John Stringer (coNZervative.wordpress.com)

Went and saw this last night with eldest son.  It was fantastic. I recommend 3D as this film is very colourful and cinematic. You will want to enjoy its epic sweep in 3D.  I read the book a few years ago, and recommend you do that too. This is a great movie adaptation.  I wondered how they would actually do it, as the book is almost impossible to adapt visually but Taiwanese director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain; Crouching Dragon/Hidden Tiger – there’s that tiger again) and David Magee (screenplay) (Finding Neverland) pulled off an amazing job.

French (now Russian) actor Gerard Depardieu is the cook on the ship, but the others are not known.  Pi is brilliantly played by a series of various aged Pi.s  His name is really Piscine Molitor (a French swimming pool) or “Pissing” as his schoolmates call him, thus later “Pi” to avoid bullying. This is all well-explained in the movie.

I love the opening sequence where the movie moves in slowly, capturing the magic and wonder of the animal kingdom created by God.  This is quite a metaphysical film, with Pi traversing Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. It asks who we are and how God communicates with humanity.

There are some wonderful scenes. I noted particularly the dramatic sinking of the ship, the whales, the flying fish episode, and of course the drama throughout with a massive tiger in a boat just a stone’s throw away where all the canned food and water is. There is a lovely moment when the tiger is hanging on to the side of the lifeboat and the boy/tiger have a moment with their eyes.

I think Lee spent a lot of time filming an actual tiger in a lifeboat, as any CGI is invisible to detect, the tiger is completely real all the time.

The movie portrays the realities of this implausible scenario with brilliant detail, to the point you can imagine it totally happening (how to get water to the tiger; what will it eat? etc). There were no cringe moments.

The book and film have one of the best endings ever, on a par with Sixth Sense (aka I See Dead People).  Go and see it to find out, no spoiler here.

The characters are strong, including the tiger, and I liked the humans at the beginning, especially the uncle with the expanded chest and the transparent luxuriousness of the French swimming pool.

This is a movie about the power of story, and how “science” knows only some, religion knows a whole lot more.  Those who mock religion and live in know-it-all science castles with trite factual answers to everything, would benefit from seeing this great film.

For me there are some key dialogue moments that reveal what the movie is really about: the Christian priest in India (we cannot understand God in His perfection, so he came as one of us, to be accessible); Pi’s mother interpreting Pi’s father’s rationality (head vs heart); Pi’s conversations with God in the lowest moments amid the storms; and Pi’s wrap-up about what is true at the  end of the film with the writer looking for a story for a novel. “Which story do you prefer?”  “The ship sinks and I lose my family in both, so which is better?”  ”What do you see Richard Parker? Tell me. Speak to me!”.

I get that “story” is intended to be wonderful and used to portray emotions, mysteries, nuances that help us explain, see and wonder. This is what poetry, music and art are all about. The film seeks to explain to us that the meanings and function of stories can be many things, on many levels, because that is what humans are like.  This is the obvious contrast with a marooned boy named after a mathematical formula, and the number Pi which is infinite and is not divisible. Look for the conclusions about what actually happened by the Japanese insurance assessors at the end, in their report to the Japanese company who owned the ship.

There is just more to life and the universe than 1+1=2.  You could say 1+1 = phosphorescent plankton (the smallest creature in the sea feeding the largest mammal ever known). One of my favourite quotes helps sum up this movie. Pablo Picasso, perhaps the artist of the 20th century, said, “Art is a lie that helps us to understand the truth.”

I heartily recommend this film to parents of children, lovers, philosophers, people interested in the oddity of life, and probing the depths of who God is, and why this world.

Life of Pi was written by Yann Martel and first published in 2001, after suffering several publisher rejections (like Harry Potter).  It was a runaway success and has won many awards.  Now the film adaptation has collected some gongs too.

Stuff reports:

Prime Minister John Key fainted and collapsed while out for dinner last night.

He was at dinner at the Italian restaurant Tutto Bene in Merivale, Christchurch.

He was taken to Christchurch hospital in a police car and assessed. He was there for two and half hours before being released.

Key is in Christchurch to fly to Antarctica and has been cleared to leave this morning.

A spokeswoman for Key said he was seen by three specialists during his time at the hospital but they had not given a reason for the fainting. 

“They said these things happen sometimes.”

Key returned from his summer holiday in Hawaii yesterday and has not been unwell, she said.

“He was given a clean bill of health,” his spokeswoman said.

It is well known that the PM is often up soon after 5 am for a morning run before work, and is often working until close to midnight. Being Prime Minister is the sort of job where you never can say there is no more work to do, but the hours take a toll.  Even on so called holidays, you are working a fair amount of the time.

It may indeed be just one of those things, especially as it was just after a return from a break. I hope so.

One of the types of spiders that builds orbwebs, are not true orbweb spiders (Araneids). Their webs are often aligned horizontally rather than vertically. The spider also much larger jaws (chelicerae) than orbweb spiders. These spiders are the tetragnathids.

One of the most common of these spiders is the indigenous Leucauge dromedaria. This spider is native to both NZ and Australia, and I’ve been trying to get a photo I like of it for a while.  Conditions came together for this shot.  Purists may be interested to know that it is an “old school” photo, as the exposure was manually set, the flash was manually set and the focus was also manual.

Click for larger, higher res image

The link is to a much larger image.

I’m heading off into the ‘field’ on Saturday for 12 days, hence there will be no Friday photo next week.

The Dom Post editorial:

The New Zealand Transport Agency has wisely set two non-negotiable criteria for any project to ease congestion around the Basin Reserve. It must separate north and southbound traffic from that heading west out of the Mt Victoria Tunnel and it must be affordable.

If the eight Wellington city councillors who last month voted to spend $50,000 investigating alternatives to NZTA’s planned flyover have a better option that meets those criteria, now is the time to share it with ratepayers. It would be astounding if they find one.

The councillors who voted to renege on previous support for the flyover apparently know better than the roading experts who spent several years examining the best solution to unclog the Basin bottleneck. They carried the day by eight votes to seven at an extraordinary meeting called in December to decide whether the council should explore further options, despite it backing the flyover in 2011.

The proposal the Council are looking at doesn’t separate North-South traffic from that heading from the Eastern suburbs. So the likely congestion improvement is minimal.

Thank goodness we have local body elections this year.

The Dom Post reports:

Wellington might be in line to host the sequel to the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, Arnold Schwarzenegger says.

Universal Studios was looking “very closely” at using Sir Peter Jackson’s Park Road studios in Wellington for the sequel, Schwarzenegger told the website Ain’t It Cool.

“It could very well be that one of the places they’re looking very closely right now is Jackson’s studio in New Zealand,” he said.

The former governor of California has been campaigning for 10 years to get a new Conan movie made. The film, reportedly called The Legend of Conan, is due for release next year.

The script was being written. Filming was likely to begin by the end of this year, with him in the lead role, he said. 

Superb.  And think if Conan also became a massive hit. Do you think we’d see Winston demanding Arnie refund the film subsidy?

Stuff reported:

Food prices fell for a fourth month straight in December, led by a drop in non-alcoholic beverages which offset higher meat, poultry and fish prices.

The Food Price Index fell 0.2 per cent in the month, according to Statistics New Zealand following a 0.8 per cent decline in November. The current level of 1243 marks the lowest point on the index in almost two years.

I’ve calculated annual food price inflation since the series began in 1960, below.

So in one year, food prices increased 25%. I guess there was lots of money being printed that year.

If we look at post 1990 only:

So three big spikes post 1990. One was in 2001, another in 2008 and the third in 2011. The latter one being impacted by the GST increase.

If you look at food inflation over each three year approx electoral term, the cumulative annual increases were:

• 1991 – 1993: -0.1% (go Ruth)
• 1994 – 1996: 4.3%
• 1997 – 1999: 4.2%
• 2000 – 2002: 11.1%
• 2003 – 2005: 2.7%
• 2006 – 2008: 18.4%
• 2009 – 2011: 6.6%

Annual food inflation in 2012 is -0.9% so far. Useful to recall this when you see stories about the rising cost of food!

Stuff reports:

US President Barack Obama is proposing a new assault weapons ban and mandatory background checks for all gun buyers in a bid to channel national outrage over the Newtown school massacre into the biggest gun-control push in generations.

Personally I have no problem with either of those measures. You don’t need assault weapons for legitimate purposes such as hunting, target practice or even self-defence.

Obama’s plan calls on Congress to renew the prohibition on assault weapons sales that expired in 2004, a requirement for criminal background checks on all gun purchases, including closing a loophole for gun show sales, and a new federal gun trafficking law – long sought by big-city mayors to keep out-of-state guns off their streets.

He also announced 23 steps he intended to take immediately without congressional approval. These include improvements in the existing system for background checks, lifting the ban on federal research into gun violence, putting more counsellors and “resource officers” in schools, and improved access to mental health services.

Again, none of this looks bad to me. However I would note that I doubt any of these measures would have prevented any of the recent mass shootings.

Audrey Young interviews Green List MP Eugenie Sage:

What MP outside your party impresses you?
Probably Lianne Dalziel [Labour] for her commitment in Christchurch particularly to Christchurch East and the huge amount of constituency work that she does. Also I admire Charles Chauvel [Labour] for his sharp mind, cool analysis and generous spirit.

Do you have a bill in the private members’ bill ballot?
No, but I am going to draft one probably on the protection of long-finned eels

We need a bill to do this? My understanding is that the eels are already in the quota management system and the total allowable catch has not increased for many years.

The heat on the issue appears to be that some of the eels end up as petfood, but from my perspective we should not care on the end use. The issue should be what the total allowable catch should be – if any.

What’s one of the best shows or concerts you’ve been to in recent years?
Emmy Lou Harris probably in Christchurch Town Hall which is one of the reasons we need to keep the Town Hall because the acoustics there are just amazing. She was incredible. She was just such a rock chick, really. How are you unwinding over summer?Time outdoors and time in the garden. I hope to get away to the West Coast and am also visiting family with my parents on Guam. My brother lives there. I’ve never been there and he’s been there about five years. From Google Earth there’s a whole lot of marine protected areas around the military base so the snorkelling is meant to be great.

Snorkelling in Guam sounds fun!