Entitilitus epidemic alert

The Ministry of Economic Health has issued a status four warning about the spread of entitilitus.

Ministry spokesperson Dr Truly Serious said the outbreak was widespread and approaching epidemic proportions.

“It started in deprived areas, spread to places where people have just enough and there has been an insidious spread from there to more affluent locations.

“It appears that natural immunity provided by self reliance has been undermined by successive attacks on earnings through over-taxation. This has weakened income streams and inflated perceptions of unfairness.”

Dr Serious said medical centres have been overwhelmed by patients and treatment of the most serious has been delayed because of the difficulty in differentiating between those who have the benign condition of eligibility and those with full blown entitilitis.

“Research suggests that entitilitis may in fact be a mutant strain of eligibility which is weakened by misguided ideology. That allows self interest to develop and erodes the will for self sufficiency,” she said.

“Diagnosis isn’t simple because there are a variety of different factors we have to consider with each patient. We don’t want to subject people who have eligibility to unnecessary treatment but it is important we administer a sharp dose of reality to anyone with entitilitis before the epidemic worsens.”

Dr Serious said a great deal of effort has gone into developing a vaccine but researchers have been hampered by the difficulty of developing something strong enough to withstand cross infection from voter pressure and political expediency.

Symptoms of entitilitis vary but patients who test positive for the condition usually have high expectations, difficulty distinguishing between wants and needs and low levels of personal responsibility.

“Anyone who recognises these symptoms in themselves should start by consulting their conscience, and examining their social responsibility,” Dr Serious said.

“I make no apology for making a plea to people’s better nature and asking those who can look after themselves to make every effort to do so. Otherwise, if the epidemic worsens we will run short of resources. We must be mindful that every cent spend dealing with entitilitis will compromise our ability to look after patients with genuine eligibility.”

August 19 in history

On August 19:

1745 the second Jacobite rising began when Charles Edward Stuart returned from France and began marching on London.

1853 Edwin Gibbon Wakefield was elected to parliament.

1883 Coco Chanel was born.

1902 Ogden Nash was born.

1919 Afghanistan gained full independence from Britain.

1930 Irish writer Frank McCourt was born.

1944: Pilot Officer Pilot Officer James Stellin avoided crashing into Saint-Maclou-la-Brière, a village of 370 people in the Seine-Maritime region at the cost of his own life. The villagers gave him a hero’s funeral and have honoured his memory ever since.

1946 Former US President Bill Clinton was born.

Sourced from Wikipeida and NZ History Online.

Wanted: road safety suggestions

Transport Minister Steven Joyce is seeking suggestions for improving road safety.

Five road safety features we noticed in Spain might help:

* Rumble bars a few metres before intersections of main and minor roads.

* Painted islands in the middle of main roads at intersections with major side roads. These enabled drivers of vehicles turning left (the same as making a right turn here) to give way to traffic on their side of the road, move to the painted island in the centre of the road and give way to traffic on the rights side of the road from there. That is safer than having to give way to traffic coming from both directions as we do here when we make a right turn from a side road.

* islands with round-abouts at either end, separating main road traffic from entrances to, and parking for, groups of businesses on the side of the road.

* More motorways.

* A requirement to keep to the right hand lane (left hand lane here) unless passing.

The discussion document is here.

Tuesday’s answers

Monday’s questions were:

1. Which are New Zealand’s second and third highest mountains?

2. Who wrote The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency?

3. Who said: Thinking Men Cannot Be Ruled”?

4. What is a grampus?

5. Since it’s International Languages Week:  which languages do the following greetings come from:

a) haai

b) bula vinaka

c) namaste

d) fakalofa

e) talofa

Paul Tremewan who must be reigning champion, gets the electronic bouquet – is it too early for a sprig of daphne? – for getting 4 4/5 correct; Gravedodger gets 2 2/5 for honesty, Paul L can have a bonus for amusing me ( when work avoiding as I am because of an essay due tomorrow I’m very easily amused) and Paul Corrigan gets a bonus for additional information.

Anyone who finds a link between the name Paul and ability to answer quiz questions can have a bonus too.

Tuesday’s answers follow the break:

Night follows day

Yesterday we learned that some people on benefits receive more than the average wage. Today we discover that Labour’s tax increase and welfare for working families has also resulted in rorts.

The only surprising thing about this is that it has taken so long to make headlines when it is the logical outcome of policies based on political ideology and a desire to retain power rather than an understanding of economics and human nature.

Night follows day and people offered incentives take them.

When National reduced the tax rate on higher incomes in the early 1990s the tax take went up. One of the reasons for that was that people stopped wasting time rejigging their finances to reduce their tax burden and concentrated on making money.

Labour’s increasing the tax on incomes over $60,000 had the reverse effect of encouraging people to arrange their finances to reduce their liability, especially when there was the added incentive of qualifying for a benefit.

The advertisements for Working for Families were clearly targeted at people who already earned enough to afford luxuries.

National swallowed a very big dead rat before the last election in agreeing to keep WFF. But that was before the full extent of the recession and forecast deficits was obvious.

When the government’s aim is to take the sharp edges off the recession it is unlikely to dismantle the scheme in the short term. But this report gives it the ammunition it needs to torpedo it in the long term.

All but the rabid right wing accept that welfare has a place for helping those in genuine need but these rorts show only to clearly the stupidity of extending it to those in want.

ETS defacto tax on food

Australian retailers are warning that the Emissions Trading Scheme is a defacto tax on food which will push prices up by four to seven percent.

Australian Retailers Association executive director Russell Zimmerman said the ETS would lead to a sharp increase in grocery shelf prices as costs increased at every stage of the production and distribution process.

“It’s going to be a high cost to the consumer – the food manufacturer gets an ETS charge, then there’s delivery, and the retailers use refrigeration and lighting, and the cost of that is all going to be handed on,” Mr Zimmerman said. “Retail is a very competitive business. There’s not a lot of margin in grocery retailing, so these costs can’t be absorbed.”

That’s in a country which isn’t planning to include agriculture in its ETS. The increase in the price of food will be even greater here because agriculture is included in our Kyoto commitment.

The figure mentioned is for the direct costs. There is no mention of the indirect costs involved in, for example, the negotiations about such inane matters as to where trees are planted.

One of the very silly things agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol was that harvesting trees won’t attract a carbon tax if the land from which they were taken is replanted in trees but it will if the replacement trees are planted anywhere else.

New Zealand is now trying to get agreement that the tax exempt status will be granted for replanting whether or not it is on the same land from which the original trees were harvested.

You’d think someone with a little common sense could run an eye over the agreement, highlight clauses like this and get the matter sorted without having to waste time – not to mention expend all the carbon on travel – on negotiations.

August 18 in history

On August 18:

1587 Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America, was born.

US postage stamp issued in 1937, the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare’s birth

1935 Sir Howard Morrison was born.

1936 Robert Redford was born.

1971 Prime Minister Keith Holyoake announced that New Zealand’s combat force would be withdrawn from Vietnam.

Sourced from Wikipedia & NZ History Online.

Required, reasonable and robust regulation in . . .

. . . unnecessary, ineffective and excessively costly out.

That’s the news from Miisiter of Finance Bill English and Minister of Regulatory Reform Rodney Hide who made the first Government Statement on Regulation today.

They said better and less regulation is essential to boost New Zealand’s productivity growth, international competitiveness and living standards and made two commitments:

to introduce new regulation only when the government is satisfied that is required, reasonable and robust; and to review existing regulation to identify and remove requirements that are unnecessary, ineffective and excessively costly.

Mr English said the two commitments responded to the Job Summit’s recommendation that the government delay introducing any new regulation that imposed extra substantive costs on business during the current difficult economic conditions.

“We have a clear plan to make New Zealand a more productive and higher income country and we believe that better and less regulation is essential to achieve that goal,” Mr English said.  “In our current financial situation the quality of the regulatory environment is even more important.”

Having a government that is willing to wrestle with the red tape which ties up time, strangles initiative and sabotages productivity is refreshing.

I am particularly encouraged by the expectation of a culture from government agencies that:

recognises the importance of productivity in enhancing New Zealand’s economic performance;
- respects the value of individual autonomy and responsibility;
- does not see regulation as the first resort for problem solving;
- provides fearless advice on whether a regulatory proposal is consistent with this policy statement and meets appropriate standards of impact analysis and consultation; and
- continually looks for opportunities to make existing regulation more effective, easier to access and understand, and easier and less costly to comply with;

Some of that will seem like a foreign language to bureaucracies which have been inculcated with the belief that government knows best and the rest of us can’t be trusted to think and act for ourselves.

There are no miracles in politics. There is a long way from these commitments to the freedom from unnecessary regulation we require but this is a very encouraging start.

Holcim wins Environment Court decision

A new cement plant near Weston in North Otago has come a step closer with the Environment Court dismissing appeals against the consent granted for the plant by the Waitaki District Council.

 The court ruling is a hurdle jumped but it’s not the end of the race. Holcim New Zealand now needs to prepare a case for its parent company which will make the decision on whether or not to build the plant.

The company was keen to build a plant on the same site in the mid 1980s but decided not to when the recession led to a downturn in building. The current recession and its impact on the need for concrete will be among the factors the company considers when it makes its decision.

I have been one of the supporters. The plant would have economic and social benefits for the district and I was reassured that the resource consent process would safeguard the environment.

One of the factors which reassured me was the number of people from Westport who opposed the consent because they wanted the company to stay there.

I couldn’t believe that a company which obviously plays such an important and positive role in the economic and social life on the West Coast would suddenly turn in to a bad corporate citizen if it moved east. Even given the difference in climate, particularly wind direction and patterns, I didn’t believe that if an old  plant had operated for decades without adverse impact on the health and wellbeing of people, stock; air, soil and water  there, then a new one, built with up to the minute technology;  would cause problems here.

Palm oil out of chocolate, camel milk in

Consumers rule – Cadbury has bowed to pressure  from customers upset by the company’s decision to add palm oil to its chocolate.

They’re dumping the oil and reverting to the original recipe which uses cocoa butter.

They are also sticking to the glass and a half of milk of which they boast and as far as I know that’s dairy milk.

On the other side of the world that’s not the case. Al Nassma  a Dubai-based company is producing camel milk chocolate.

If the good people of Dubai can do it with camels, why can’t we do it with sheep?

Whitestone and Blue River Dairy both produce tasty sheeps milk cheese, Blue River also makes sheeps milk ice cream.

There might be a niche for sheeps milk chocolate too - it would have to be good for ewe

Hat Tip: The NZ Week.

Monday’s quiz

1. Which are New Zealand’s second and third highest mountains?

2. Who wrote The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency?

3. Who said: Thinking Men Cannot Be Ruled”?

4. What is a grampus?

5. Since it’s International Languages Week:  which languages do the following greetings come from:

a) haai

b) bula vinaka

c) namaste

d) fakalofa

e) talofa

Helen Clark was a disastrous leader for Labour

Of course I’d say that.

But Rob Hosking has too and backs it up with reason:

Helen Clark was a disastrous leader for Labour and until the party realises this it will remain mired in low polling nostalgia-land.

The most significant political event of Clark’s time leading Labour was the party’s loss of the Maori vote. A large chunk of it vamoosed to New Zealand First in the first election Clark fought as Labour leader.

Labour had been able to count on that vote since the early 1930s. Although it came back in 1999 and 2002, the bond was broken.

Her successors will eventually be able to put most of the other black marks against her leadership behind them: lack of integrity over the pledge card, the Electoral Finance Act, and her support of Phillip Field and Winston Peters; turning middle and upper income families into beneficiaries . . .

However, the loss of Maori support is more serious and John Key made it even more so by including the Maori Party in his coalition.

That established it as the only party which stands for something in the political centre, able to move left or right. It gave the party more power than it could have hoped for based on the number of votes or members it attracted  and showed Maori that they can achieve more away from Labour than with them.

The only poll that counts is the election

Politicians wishing to put a good spin on a bad poll, or appear modest in the face of a good one, say the only poll that counts is the election.

They are right, but only partially.

No matter what the polls say, the election is the only one which can change things. However, while individual polls might be ignored as rouges and we’re not even a third of the way into this government’s expected term, the trend matters and it is consistent.

National is favoured by more than 50% of respondents; Labour by a little more than half tha tnumber. Phil Goff comes a distance third to John Key who gets similar support to his party, and the former leader who isn’t even in parliament any more.

In spite of the recession, the growth in unemployment and the prospect of up to a decade of deficits the latest TV3 poll shows the government’s popularity and Key’s have risen while Labour’s and Goff’s have fallen, again.

A Listener story on Labour reported a caucus pact to retain Goff until the next election.  But even if they did dump him it probably wouldn’t make a difference. The leadership of a party which has lost an election after nine years in government is a poisoned chalice. It is difficult for either the leader or the party to make any traction and the party’s low appeal is at least as much in spite of the leader as because of it.

The incoming government is able to blame the outgoing one for many of the problems it faces. If Labour criticises National it looks carping and if its MPs offer alternatives, they’re asked why they didn’t implement them when they had the chance.

But Labour’s problems go deeper than this.

Its philosophy pushes it towards policies which require spending and redistribution of income. Any plans it comes up with will require an increase in tax and borrowing, neither of which will be popular.

It has fewer than 10,000 members. If that includes union affiliates the party is in even more trouble because that means there are a lot fewer than 10,000 active members. Minor parties get by on far fewer but that is a very small foundation on which to support a major one.

Memberhship matters for money and votes. If membership is dropping income and supporters will too.

It happened to National after it lost power in 1999 and it’s happening to Labour now.

It’s still more than two years until the next election. But if the trend in the polls continue 2011 could bring back the ghosts of elections past with Labour facing the same loss of fortune National did in 2002.

New prescription for health

Health has an insatiable and growing appetite.

Inflation in costs in the health sector outpaces that in the economy as a whole. Improvements in life expectancy, medical science and technology all add to costs.

In spite of that the heat had gone out of health as an issue in 1999 which left the incoming Labour government with a choice: improve services or change the system.

Instead of extensive improvements to services they chose expensive changes to the system based on ideology rather than best practice.

The result has been a lot more money spent on health with little to show for it.

National has been very cautious about changing the system when the health sector is suffering from restructure fatigue but Minister of Health Tony Ryall has given a very clear message that more money needs to go to frontline services.

Speaking on the release of the Ministerial Review Group’s report on health, he said:

“‘Meeting the Challenge’ is a comprehensive report, with 170 recommendations on how to reduce bureaucracy, improve frontline health services, and improve value in the public health and disability sector,” Mr Ryall says.

“The Ministerial Review Group included some of the leading clinicians and managers in the health sector. Many of their recommendations have been well discussed in the sector already.”

“The report recognises that to improve frontline services we need more input from frontline staff, and there are recommendations to strengthen clinical leadership and clinical networks.”

The report proposes consolidating back office functions across the 21 District Health Boards (DHBs) to harness the power of bulk purchasing. It also proposes reducing the number of committees that advise the Ministry of Health from 157 to 54.

He also says the report requires careful consideration; and that the government isn’t interested in recommendations which increase bureaucracy or don’t improve services.

“We made a commitment before the election that DHBs would not be forcibly amalgamated because of the disruption it would cause frontline staff and services. The recommendations focus on reducing duplicated back-office bureaucracy, while ensuring minimal disruption in the wider health and disability sector.”

“We want reduced health bureaucracy with greater focus on delivering more frontline services for patients.”

“It is worth remembering that any saving in health will be reinvested in health – we are not cutting health spending. In fact DHBs have more money to spend this year than ever before on improving front line health services to patients.”

The last point is an important one. The aim isn’t to spend less on health, it’s to spend more where it makes a difference.

Links to the MRG’s report and five annexes are at the bottom of the page linked to above.

The MRG’s recommendations are here.

August 17 in history

On August 17:

1786 Davy Crockett was born

1839 The New Zealand Company ship Tory arrived in New Zealand.

1893 Mae West was born.

Mae West in I’m No Angel (1933

1943 US actor Robert De Niro was born.

1944 Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison was born.

1945 Indonesian indpendence was declared.

1959 Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, the best selling jazz album yet, was released.

1982 the first compact discs were released to the public.

Sourced from Wikipedia & NZ History Online.

If you eat meat from one animal . . .

. . . why not another?

I know where lamb and beef come from and have no qualms about eating them providing the animal from which the meat came was killed humanely.

I wouldn’t choose to eat dog, horse or rat and I’ve never eaten meat from an animal I’ve known by name. Our pet lambs died of old age unless they accidently got mustered with the general flock and sent to the freezing works.

That is an emotional reaction not a logical one and that’s the best that can be said of the SPCA’s concern over the dog which was barbecued.

The manner in which an animal is killed might be the SPCA’s business, whether people choose to cook and eat it once it’s dead is not.

As Roarprawn says SPCA are not cultural arbiters.

Bonds better than interest free loans

Minister of Health Tony Ryall said on Q&A this morning that 950 health graduates have accepted the voluntary bonding scheme.

They get their student loans written off if they stay and work in hard to staff areas.

They have a financial incentive for staying, which is some compensation for the lower salaries they’ll get here compared with those they’d get if they went overseas; and the country gets much needed health professionals.

The voluntary bonding has been offered to only health professionals and vets.

I’d like to see it increased to other groups with a view to replacing interest-free student loans with bonds.

That way scarce public funds would go to people who graduate and stay here to work, not just anyone who starts studying at a tertiary institution who may or may not complete their studies and may or may not work in New Zealand when they graduate.

Chocolate Rough

Chocolate Rough

125 g butter                            125 g sugar

1 cup flour                               ½ cup coconut

1 tsp baking powder                1 Tblsp cocoa

Cream butter & sugar, add dry ingredients & mix.

Sppon into baking dish, and smooth surface.

Cook at  170 degrees for 15 -20 minutes.

When cool ice with chocolate icing (with coconut added or sprinkled over).

I usually double the mixture when I make it.

Sometimes I add hazelnuts or walnuts.

How free are they?

We were wandering round Duomo Plaza in shorts and short-sleeved shirts appropriate to the mid summer temperatures when we noticed three women encased head to foot in black robes with only their eyes peeping out.

“How awful to have to dress like that,” one said.

“It’s their choice,” another replied.

But is it? Do the women who wear these all-enveloping clothes freely choose to do so?

Even if they do, what does it say about the attitude of their men, if a glimpse of flesh is regarded as obscene or an incitement to lust?

And what happens to women who choose to dress in less concealing clothes?

When the law follows the religious dogma, they risk punishment. Lubna Ahmed Al-Hussein, a Sudanese journalist faces 40 lashes because she wore trousers to a restaurant.

She could claim UN immunity but she wants to be tried in the hope of proving there is nothing in the Koran which makes it wrong to dress as she did.

She’s not alone. The Arab Network for Human Rights Information is backing her.

ANHRI calls on “all human rights NGOs interested in freedom of expression and women’s rights to back up Lubna and make efforts to stop this charade trial that violates all international treaties defending freedom of expression and women’s rights asserting that the Sudanese government persecutes antagonists in every possible way and would not refrain from using the worst laws and practices.”

The women of Vejer de la Frontera in southern Spain used to have to wear the cobijada.

 

It wasn’t a desire to give women more freedom which led to it being banned, it was security issues. During the Civil War in the late 1930s, men used the cobijada to disguise themselves and conceal weapons so it was outlawed.

First words you learn in a foreign language

 

No hablo español and hola, ¿cómo está? were among the first phrases I learned in Spanish.

I still can’t say let’s get drunk (though do know that resacar is hangover.  It also means undertow and some suffering the former might feel they’ve been caught in the latter).

But I’ve managed to get to an intermediate level with only a couple of naughty words in my Spanish vocabulary. One of those is pajero, pronounced pah hey roe. Mitsubishi didn’t do their homework well when they came up with this name for one of their vehicles, though some think it’s a fitting description of the people who drive them.

Graph from GraphJam.

Inspired by this post at Cactus Kate on International Languages Week.