The accounting lesson has been learned from Australia

Don’t tell anyone. But New Zealand’s Labour coalition is tooling up for the world’s first successful climate change election which means winning it.

The lesson has been learned from Australia’s all-party attempts to do the same thing.

The lesson learned is this.

Do not price the components costs of a single-issue climate change election because if you do this then the central policy of climate change will be lost in a welter of arguments mainly about the cost to the taxpayers.

Australia recently emerged from its most recent and fourth climate change general election and the proponent, on this occasion Labour, lost its sure-fire projected win doused and extinguished as it was in a tsunami of costings.

In New Zealand, in contrast, next year’s climate change general election, will steer clear of clogging and distracting accounting minutiae and instead will rely either implicitly or explicitly, it is still too early to tell, on the constellation of other issues attendant upon it.

The oil and gas embargo in New Zealand’s most prosperous province, Taranaki, emboldened the Labour-led coalition.

Ruthlessly and suddenly imposed on the heels of its general election win, the coalition in its bid to lock in its Green Party component, can justifiably hug itself and say to itself “we got away with it!”

Acquiescent and quiescent the newspaper chains have happily published glowing articles from government agencies to the effect that things like craft breweries and pastry shops will fill the vacuum in Taranaki left by the energy industry, oil and gas version.

Climate change in Australia has consistently as an election clincher failed because its proponents with names such as Gillard, Rudd, Turnbull, and Shorten allowed their talisman to dissolve into accounting disarray.

The real-life debits gave the electorate the impression of exceeding the more abstract credits.

Premier Malcolm Turnbull demonstrated that devotion and singularity of purpose are not enough to bring about a successful climate change election.

In various recent times he lost a general election in this belief and also the leadership of the Australian Liberal Party.

If devotion, singularity of purpose and even sincerity cannot swing a successful climate change election then what will?

In Australia cooler heads suggest that the nation use its gigantic reserves of uranium to create nuclear energy.

In New Zealand with its still untapped reserves of hydro power, it is suggested that more dams are constructed.

To the climatists this kind of argument has as much appeal as a cup of baby’s blood.

So the Labour coalition knows that it needs to stick relentlessly to the central policy, the climate change branding, which in being branded needs no explanation and certainly no apologies.

The Labour-led coalition has been allowed to walk away from its operational policies such as the mass house construction scheme and also the capital gains tax plan.

It correctly sees its strength now as a moral one blended with empathy with an overlay of UN-style global conscience, all of which anyway sound rather phony emanating from anyone in the National Party.

A climate change election with all its virtuous subsidiary policies over for example transport, and nutrition will consistently keep the Labour coalition on the moral high ground.

The aim is to keep the National Party on the dark and nasty boggy ground below.

Here, the planning goes, the National opposition, not exactly brimming with charisma in the first place, will tie itself in knots and public disdain over the spoiling what-will-it-all-cost numbers?

And as a concurrent and especially unprofitable diversionary sideline, the decimal points and fractions of the computer-modelled climate change narrative. `

This pending climate change election will tell us that there is no Plan B.

Removing the opposition’s Plan B, the accounting one, features the simplicity so essential to success.

New policy setting ---Premier de-activates activists

Australia’s immense public service has been told to pull its head out of the ideological clouds and instead focus on supplying the everyday necessities of life such as water and power, however tedious these tasks are, points out our Australian correspondent.

When Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison told the nation’s public servants to be more diligent in serving Australians he was delivering a message to the bureaucracy to concentrate on essential if rather dull services instead of being distracted by and dissipating their energies on the pursuit of ideals.

The message to cease being diverted by causes was only lightly encoded by Mr Morrison in terms of the public service imperative of looking after everyone instead of activists of various descriptions, the “noisy lobbyists.”

This was reinforced by his call for public servants to cast their efforts and concerns beyond the “bubble” which is the Australian colloquialism for the political class concentrations described elsewhere as “beltways.” In the line of fire is the public service’s preoccupation with climate change lobbies which exert a strong and distracting pull over the imagination of the bureaucracy’s administrative class.

This influence and the corresponding misjudgements induced are directly associated with the fall of federal premiers Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, and Malcolm Turnbull on the two occasions in which he sought to straddle the climate lobby. More recently still Labour’s Bill Shorten lost the “unloseable” general election seeking to appease the lobby with open ended promises. Mr Turnbull especially saw the issue in quasi messianic terms.

Only now are Australians realising that during his premiership and at a time when Darwin’s port was being transferred to Chinese control that a public sum of money equivalent to the Darwin acquisition price was ex gratia placed at the disposal of Queensland climate friendlies.

The shift of the bureaucratic administrative class in Australia and throughout the Commonwealth, the one based in London, toward activist-grade ideology can be traced to the election of Donald Trump. This by itself was not enough to trigger the ensuing intensity of the Commonwealth administrative class partisanship. President Trump’s rubbishing of the Paris climate agreement was followed by his overt support of Britain crashing out of the EU.

His trashing of these two bureaucratically-driven and covenanted transnational creations ensured that a cross-section of the administrative class everywhere set out to do everything it could to capsize president Trump’s hegemony.

It was now that it found its instrument of retaliation in the form of climate change which had mutated from a scatter of alarms such as food miles and peak oil via the greenhouse effect and global warming through to a status as an exalted and inclusive rallying call for the high-minded.

As recently as two years ago the dominant issue in Oceania for Australasia was the practical one of the supply of mutton flaps from New Zealand and the ensuing diabetes amid the island population. The issue now could not be further removed. It is now one of cash endowments and the gigantic enabling financial transfers which are conducted under the climate change banner.

Commonwealth bureaucratically controlled state television broadcasters the BBC and Australia’s ABC now ensure under shared contents arrangements that the climate change banner is constantly unfurled, visible. Leaked diplomatic communiques between the British Embassy in Washington and Whitehall portray the Trump White House in terms of a Wild West saloon serve to underline the administrative class’ scoffing attitude to the Trump regime.

The prospect of the not-so-quiet American president securing another four years to indirectly influence the lives of Quiet Australians, as they are described by premier Morrison, enrages and inflames the politico-media class.

Australia has an unusually high percent of its workforce in the public employ and it is considered to be in the 18-20 percent range. In the event, the premier’s words can be seen now as extremely focused. The warning is aimed at the rapidly expanding branch of governmental service in the policy and advisory category, the realm of researchers, analysts, and officials especially those in the diplomatic category.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has fired a warning shot across all their lofty brows. He has told them to pull their heads out of the ideological clouds and do the work that they are paid to do

Who knew what and when? Asks our Australian correspondent

If Australia’s federal exchequer had a spare half billion or so dollars sloshing around in the vault, might it not have been a better idea to use it to secure the ownership of the strategic port of Darwin instead of earmarking it for a vague investment in Pacific islands aid; aka climate change?

The government’s willingness to allow the port of Darwin to end up in China’s control for want of the same amount of money it has just topped up in the name of climatics its existing billion dollar contributions to Pacific islands welfare is just one of the bizarre outcomes of the recent Pacific Islands Forum in which Australia must surely have learned the lesson that virtue is not its own reward.

No government on the planet on a population basis has such a comprehensive foreign service as Australia’s, yet in regard to the Tuvalu meet the nation still gives all the signs of walking around in the dark.

Was Australia not warned for example by its high commission in Wellington that the dominant Labour wing of New Zealand’s governing coalition is doctrinally compelled to see everything through a climatic filter?

What about the equally comprehensive United States embassy listening post in Wellington?

Did nobody in Wellington or Washington, or, at a pinch, London, convey the message to Australia about the true nature of the reception that was building up for it at Tuvalu?

How was it that with China’s known expansionary designs on the region and especially so in regard to Port Moresby, was Australia still allowed to wade into the Tuvalu brinkmanship encounter believing that it was dealing with a compliant “family?”

Did nobody know, and then let it be known, that China has associate membership of the Pacific Islands Forum?

And so it goes on. More questions than answers with the only certainty that there will be no answers.

The episode has hallmarks of the end product of a western and certainly Westminster zone intelligence breakdown.

Intelligence has just one single purpose and it is to avoid surprises.

Australia, with perhaps the single exception of Canada, is the Commonwealth nation most closely aligned with method and order. In other words, planning.

Yet it wandered into the Pacific Island Forum exuding paternalism and blind to the fact that its “family” members were ready to lynch it, and had, unseen and unheard, carefully laid the groundwork in preparation for the shakedown.

There are though in fairness several explanations.

One is that the parties involved knew what the true agenda was at Tuvalu and decided to let Australia do a walk-through to draw the sting, and also with the additional purpose of disguising the existence of embedded sources of information.

Still another explanation is that Tuvalu was a pre-arranged pantomime set piece.

One designed to let the island leaders reinforce their own base by showily letting off steam at the expense of a well-intentioned Australia which as the world’s 13th largest economy could happily absorb and sustain a bit of a pasting.

In the normal string of events the ensuing unintentional comedy about gagging piety from New Zealand with socks, followed by island survival through Australian fruit picking would have reinforced pre-knowledge and thus these let-it-happen explanations.

As it is the train of events leading up to this Pacific Islands Forum indicate that the course that the meeting in fact took came as a surprise.

This is just because the seriousness of the evolving alignments, the ones involving China, would have been considered too critical to accommodate such tactical show boating, letting off steam.

Federal prime minister Scott Morrison’s current and subsequent exhortation to Australia’s public service to sharpen up its footwork and to focus on Australia as a whole instead of on sector interests may or may not be connected to events in Tuvalu.

The determination though of Official Australia to continue to refer through gritted teeth to the now unruly Oceania archipelago as “family” carries new weight just because in real family life the head of the household is so often the last to know……..

Island Leaders applied concise and concerted use of linkages

Big hearted Australia in the end got the slap in the face reserved for all generous donors when a more powerful and deeper-pocketed benefactor materialises.

After its immense contributions to Oceania topped up by a half billion dollar bonus, Australia’s premier Scott Morrison was bluntly told by Pacific leaders to shut down its coal mines, the source of its open-handedness, writes our Australian correspondent

Australia’s premier Scott Morrison maintained his stony fixed smile as he and his country were publicly put in their place and compelled to coldly digest the resentment that beneficiaries feel for their benefactors when they have reasons to believe that they are no longer dependent on them.

Nothing fades more quickly than gratitude but the awkward events in Tuvalu unrolled against a background of several shocks hardly yet understood in Australia, and even less understood outside it.

Shock Number One. The discovery that Australia’s back-door the port of Darwin had been leased to the Chinese for 99 years.

Shock Number two. The revelation that China was standing by to securitise and otherwise assume the debt of Papua New Guinea.

Shock Number three. The loss at the general election of Bill Shorten’s Labour Party which was considered by the political class unbeatable due to its climate change at-any-cost policies.

The lease of Darwin’s port and its delayed discovery is explicable only in the context of Australia being the world’s most over-governed country. It has in fact 14 houses of parliament. So the much-quoted belief that the nation at large discovered the lease deal only when a quiz question on national security was broadcast carries a degree of truth.

The assumption by China of Papua New Guinea’s governmental debt similarly burst unexpectedly on the political consciousness.

The utter conviction in political class circles in Australia and New Zealand that Labour’s Bill Shorten would win the general election under the climatic banner was behind much of the trilling from New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern to the effect that Australia had to “explain” itself to Oceania and in addition “take responsibility” for its coal mines.

What actually just happened in this story book Oceania setting was the presence of two elephants on those coral strands.

The Pacific Island yearly forums suddenly became a proving ground for great-power politics.

On the one side there was China yearning for the Oceania atolls and their gigantic economic zones.

On the other side the United States and its proxy Australia.

Napoleon said “Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.” 

What nobody on the Australasian side had anticipated was that China would island hop quite so quickly all the way to the South Pacific and its atolls with their hitherto undervalued vast maritime jurisdictions.

No wonder the chieftains of this far-flung pattern of islands simultaneously discovered and flexed their new found muscle and did so under the code word of coal.

Their concision, precision, and unanimity in levering the advantage presented by China, coupled with their swift grasp of the encoded significance of the word coal was a lesson to diplomatic-governmental practitioners everywhere.

Compare the clarity of action of the Pacific leaders with for example the display of bumbling and fumbling, leaking, and general dissonance displayed by their counterparts in their efforts to extricate Britain from the EU.

Information is power, said Sir Francis Bacon. Once again it is here that the Pacific leaders had the edge, unlike, say, the Australians who collectively only in the last week woke up to the fact that they no longer owned their key northern China-facing defence port.

The Pacific leaders knew they were being handed a bargaining ace and more importantly still, they knew when and how to play it.

Their firm diplomatic professionalism was a lesson to the unready Australians with their touching belief in enduring gratitude, and also to New Zealand equipped with its anticipated statements to the effect that it was on the side of the angels.

Still unacknowledged by either of the somewhat disarrayed Australasian participants in the landmark forum remains the way in which the Pacific leaders understood and applied the techniques of divide and rule.

Airline anticipated susceptibility to progressivist ideologies

Faced with having its newspapers chucked out of Air New Zealand’s Koru lounges the Fairfax chain could only respond by claiming that its newspapers were made from otherwise unwanted offcuts and were thus sustainable.

No mention was made about the value of the information such as the actual news held in the newsprint.

Neither was there any mention of the unique benefits to the airline’s premium travellers in for example the crossword puzzles, quizzes, word games, anniversaries and other such intellectual minutiae still favoured by newsprint buffs.

Instead of castigating the airline for its thoughtless action in dissing its high-end passengers, the newspaper chain in its own newspapers chose merely to claim that in terms of being “sustainable” its newsprint titles in the materials used in the manufacture of them were just as progressive as anything Air New Zealand was doing.

The incident was mentioned by National Press Club Peter Isaac as symptomatic of the Fairfax chain’s determination to see everything in terms of climate change. It had become so fixated on the issue that the chain in this instance had allowed it to obscure its own priority to protect and promote its titles.

Isaac had been talking to farmers at a meeting of South Wairarapa Rotary.

They could only barely comprehend the pervasive grip that climate change notions had on the contents of daily newspapers, and especially those under the aegis of the Fairfax chain, he said, noting that the chain had been honest enough to disclose its refusal to run anything at all that could be construed in the denier category.

Any moves by the Labour coalition government to identify farmers as primary movers in human-induced climate emissions would be warmly applauded by newspapers, claimed Isaac in a speech entitled “Newspapers Today.”

He said that agricultural reporting in a few short years had made the trajectory from helpful farming pages to a demonization of the industry at large, and which had left the once all-powerful farming lobby voiceless, directionless.

Greenpeace had taken over much of the abandoned ground claimed Isaac, a founder member of the Guild of Agricultural Journalists, and especially so when a new piece of climate change legislation was imposed on the productive sector.

Greenpeace in this orchestrated duet now chimed in to the effect that the restrictions were trifling, should be much tougher….harsher.

This said Isaac was a cute piece of political triangulation designed to encourage the productive sector on the receiving end to believe that they had got off lightly…that the penalty could have been much worse….harsher.

So the productive sector thus simultaneously duped and dealt with got the message: it had better toe the line, or else……

Farming lobbies seeking to cope with this ideologically-driven state of affairs sought to do so from a logical standpoint with the result that they further enmeshed themselves in the barely calculable decimal points and abstract data used so effectively by the climatists.

The factual focus was never going to rise above the media noise level just because farmers and the rest of the productive sector were confronting a moral movement.

Underpinning this claimed Isaac was the accelerating trend for media people to be recruited from a narrowing socio-economic background, far removed from the common herd, and one long defined in social mobility studies which in contrast to other university outputs were ignored by the media.

Therefore it was futile for productive sector lobbies to talk about the nation’s loss of competitive edge when they found themselves slugged with these unilateral productivity restrictions.

Climate change had become the prevailing moral conviction of the era and with it an entire package of associated and elitist beliefs claimed Isaac. This “devoutly” held catechism of assertions suffused the daily newspaper and state broadcasting.

This common media allegiance was shared openly “and even enthusiastically” with the Labour-led coalition which saw this creed as the password to United Nations approbation, and thus to electoral victory in this same activist domestic constituency.

Confronted with Air New Zealand’s “rather petulant” announcement to cease stocking its newspapers in its luxury airport lounges, Fairfax’s response had been to lose its own argument in dwelling on the physical composition of the newspapers, instead of on the value of the contents, the information contained by these same newspapers.

Isaac claimed that the advent of climate change was the overarching media moral issue of the era and it had turned upside down the traditional agribusiness-newspaper relationship.

This was underlined by the Fairfax chain passing up the opportunity to promote the value of the contents of its own titles in the Koru lounges.

Instead and because of the self-hypnosis induced by climate change activism, the chain meandered into a meaningless and weird dissertation devoted exclusively to what it saw as the climate-friendly physical composition, componentry, of the paper newsprint.

The airline had been aware of the chains’ susceptibility to progressivist ideologies and had used this knowledge to slickly rid itself of an unwanted housekeeping chore in its loyalty lounges.

Fairfax had swallowed the climate bait “hook, line and sinker.”

Fairfax allowed itself to become diverted in spite of the chain being particularly vulnerable to restrictions on physical newsprint outlets just because it had “valiantly” kept its web site open, without any pay walling.

Hunt for Mole Futile Because Leaked Memos Widely Circulated En Clair

The faith-based conviction that Donald Trump would lose the United States presidential election led New Zealand into awkward foreign policy fumbles in the aftermath of the Trump ascendancy.

These embarrassing and very public stumbles were compounded by, for example, continuing government donations to the Clinton family foundation.

The utter partisan conviction that Hillary Clinton would win baffled many observers at home and abroad but following the leaking of the British Embassy in Washington memos there is a glimmer of an explanation which is that New Zealand was taking its lead in a shared groupthink with the British foreign affairs apparatus.

The leaked papers demonstrate that from the outset that at a professional level, if not a political level, Britain was utterly hostile to president Trump who they saw as a major and even the ultimate facilitator of Britain’s exit from the EU.

Westminster has sought to obfuscate the leaks in a fog of disinformation centred on the idea that they were the irritable personal value judgements of one official, in the case the British ambassador Sir Kim Darroch.

Yet these same leaked memos also contain strategic estimates of United States policy in for example the recent Straits of Hormuz shadow war with Iran.

Westminster has similarly tried to sustain the belief that the transatlantic memos were decrypted and then broadcast via foreign intervention.

It is now emerging that the memos, by now in clear text, were handed around on a circulation list of hundreds.

The memos are genuine.

This is certified by Whitehall’s failure to invoke any plausible deniability claiming for, example, that the streams of consciousness that have come to light so far were part of a what-if scenario, or some kind of brain storming exercise in a hypothetical vein.

Diplomats are taught only to allow themselves to disclose an opinion on a need to know basis, and this applies especially to written ones.

Excerpts of these communiques, of which there will be more to come, have centred on the florid metaphors used to describe the Trump motives.

Absent is analysis on what exactly is the trade deal that president Trump has in mind for the UK post Brexit?

Whitehall in its fashionable anti-Trump fervour refuses to accommodate the fact that by birth president Trump is as much British as he is American.

His mother was a Scottish emigrant to the United States.

Similarly Whitehall seeks to cloud president Trump’s advice to British prime minister Theresa May.

This was that as long as Britain said it would only leave the EU under a deal with EU, then the EU would never give it a deal just to keep t in the EU.

The smokescreen in its current iteration is to spread the blame around under the generalised collateral that such leaks are the price paid for free and frank discussion, and in doing so ignoring the wikileaks experience which demonstrates the open-letter nature of diplomatic transmission.

Still, the Darroch leaks with their declamatory excerpts has revealed the extent of the partisan idealism allowed to penetrate the UK foreign apparatus and allowed to do so at the expense of technical proficiency in analysing the opportunities presented to the UK by president Trump.

The question remains though as to exactly why en clair memos incorporating such obviously high level inflammatory contents were allowed such free circulation and for a duration of several years?

Not since the civil war of the Cromwellian era has Britain found itself so sundered as it is now by the EU reformation, and this may be one reason for Whitehall failing to understand that this linkage in the Trump context was itself a multiplier on the need to enforce the use of the most measured language, however tempting hip activist words such as “dysfunctional.”

The Darroch Papers confirm that Britain’ public sector in all its forms has found itself vulnerable to the tug of loyalties.

It is a susceptibility that Commonwealth governments need to price into guidance they receive from Whitehall.

Mogul-directed industrial-scale plant-only diet strategy brings premium branding value scope to commodity exporting nation…

Animal foods substitutes made from plants and on an industrial scale will be produced by an enterprise led by Canadian-born New Zealand resident James Cameron who anticipates that the scheme will have the eventual effect of shifting diets from animal to vegetable.

Mr Cameron’s fellow film mogul Sir Peter Jackson is also said to be involved with the scheme.

Both are land holders in the sparsely-populated Wairarapa Valley which is an hour’s drive north of Wellington, centre of the nation’s film industry.

Go-to operations guy in the strategy is Jasper Robards (pictured) who is Mr Cameron’s stepson.

Mr Robard’s grandmother was Lauren Bacall who was married to Old Hollywood star Jason Robards.

Jason Robards, the grandfather, became famed for such films as Tender is the Night, All the President’s Men, and Raise The Titanic.

Raise The Titanic co-incidentally was an earlier version of the genre that was to lay the foundation of Jasper’s stepfather James Cameron’s own global success.

Lauren Bacall was a visitor to New Zealand later in her career

Miss Bacall is remembered for her candid responses to questions she had spent much of her life fielding, notably those about her earlier marriage to Humphrey Bogart.

She was in New Zealand to take part in the fund-raising Telethon charity and sportingly pitched into the televised extravaganza, the pre-eminent broadcast event of its era.

Mr Cameron has invested in plant food substitution research and development in the Wairarapa region for quite some time, since in fact he set up his Avatar special effects processing in Wellington.

Mr Cameron never loses an opportunity to extol the virtues of a vegan diet, crediting it for bestowing upon him the energy to maintain in his later years the energetic output required of an explorer, agronomist, and film maker.

The range of products from the announced venture will go far beyond such well known protein replacements as soy types and will encompass a full slate of substitute extracts and even plant versions of hitherto synthetic and animal-derived garments.

In the meantime Mr Cameron will benefit from his vertical integration in the form of a retail store in one of the Wairarapa’s fashionable tourist hamlets.

It has the capability to render applied market research on contemporary upscale consumer tastes.

There may be in this vegan drive some ironic advantage to New Zealand food exporting in animal products.

This delicatessen approach to foodstuffs will offset the perennial disadvantage of bulk commodity exports in which New Zealand is a price taker, unable to take advantage of branded and processed added value and thus loyalty.

So the promotional possibilities in the foodstuffs produced under the direction of the moguls will be a valuable pointer to the traditional side of the industry which has twisted and turned to obtain global retail premium finished product value on dairy products especially.

The venture chimes with the policy resonance from New Zealand’s governing Labour-Green coalition.

This is especially so in the venture’s forestry emphasis on foodstuffs such as nuts and fungi.

New Zealand’s emphasis on organic cultivation remains fragmented under the critical mass imperatives of volume export demands.

Mr Cameron notes that plant cultivation and processing will re-invigorate rural settlements and it is here that the moguls’ venture harmonises with a government vision that surfaced 55 years ago.

This was to transform New Zealand into the “Switzerland,” of the South Seas.

This, so the notion went, would be accomplished by selling to the world intensively processed and high value products.

This theme would be accomplished now under the announced animal replacement vegan products scheme by producing a greater range of higher value products wrapped and ready for overseas retailers’ shelves in an expanded number of importing nations.

These high value foodstuffs will introduce Swiss-watch grade retail price elasticity simply because consumers will buy them regardless of the price.

The scheme also points to an avenue opening up in by-passing bulk quotas and tariffs both official and unofficial of the type which for example have restricted an established New Zealand plant export, apples.

Import substitution of high value grocery niche products is another benefit of the plant derived foodstuffs diversity scheme.

The cinematographers mission statement in substituting plants where animals once grazed elicits not so much shock and horror from animal graziers as simple disbelief.

And yet…and yet….those promoting the pastoral conversion scheme are in the ideas business and their ideas have so far been, well, fruitful.

“Emergency” Status used to counter low turnout and galvanise younger voters

The climate alarmist proclamation of civic emergencies in Auckland and in other municipalities is centred on a belief that climate alarm is the key to securing the allegiance of the younger vote in New Zealand’s pending local government elections in October.

In the 2016 local government elections voter turnout was 42 percent.

Public information pre-election campaigns to lift the turnout to the 50 percent experienced in the 1980s have failed to lift the turnout.

These new civic emergency declarations follow on the heels of a series of millennial apocalyptic proclamation scares often traced to the Y2K one ushering in the new millennium.

Peak oil was an example of these scares..

In the event when the oil drought was scheduled to make its appearance there was a surplus.

So great was the surplus in fact that one of the first moves of the New Zealand Labour-Green governing coalition was to put an embargo on future exploration for it.

Food miles was another example of this same excitable tendentious computer modelling.

As the logistics of international cargo transport and its economies of scale eventually broke through the artifice of this alarm, it too dissolved into the atmosphere.

In doing so it also saved the New Zealand economy which is based on exporting bulk milk and meat products.

The round of municipal climate emergencies is connected to United Nations winding back its climate doomsday clock to a mere 10 years away.

Another cause is the utter conviction in these municipalities that if only Bill Shorten in the Australian Federal Election had put more campaigning into climate that he would now be the prime minister

Then there were the school-hour extinction marches which further confirmed climatics as the overriding and encompassing dominant moral cause of the hour.

Declarations of emergencies until this round of declarations were reserved for immediate ones.

Emergencies were existential events such as an earthquake, fire or flood.

These were Civil Defence emergencies carrying defined statutory priorities, implications.

The recent round of politically motivated emergency declarations and the events leading up to them remain unchallenged by the mainstream media in New Zealand, anxious itself to accumulate support in a distracted youth market..

Government broadcasting maintains a drumbeat of alarmist reports on polar ice

The Wellington-based chain has candidly announced a deliberate policy not to publish anything in the denier category.

The Auckland-based chain is similarly cautious.

New Zealand’s focus on its top heavy socio and liberal arts at the expense of science education means that there is widespread ignorance on the difference between carbon monoxide (poisonous) and carbon dioxide (beneficial.)

In New Zealand the presence of other reflecting canopy (greenhouse) gases such as water vapour is omitted and the “warming” condition is said to be due simply to “carbon.”

Neither is the dangerous diluting of the word emergency likely to be examined by the social and liberal arts, notably the explosively expanding political-science wing.

The emergency nomenclature applied by the municipalities politicians is technically known as a dialectic.

This is a proposition.

One in which the purpose of a statement however forcibly delivered has several meanings not necessarily connected to the face-value meaning.

Thus an interpretation of the emergency in question could be understood, for example, as saying that unless the young vote is mobilised under the climate cause banner then there will be an electoral emergency in that we, the proclaimers, will lose our seats……

In Washington and Wellington the Fading vendetta for scalp of Megaupload Founder now looks more like Trouble than a Trophy

The tightly knit and warm pattern of alliances which inaugurated the seven year campaign to send Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom from his domicile in New Zealand to the United States to face piracy charges have now chilled and evaporated.

These close sets of relationships converged on the Obama era White House and the keystone alliance was then the one between Hollywood and the White House.

Since president Trump took office this relationship has turned sour.

It is characterised by the open feud demonstrated by the coruscating tweets about the Hollywood galaxy transmitted by president Trump and which dumps the celestial souls so influential in the Obama era into a collective black hole of ignominy.

Wellington and Washington were governmental soul mates at this congenial time between Hawaiian vacationing golfing mates president Obama and New Zealand prime minister John Key.

This friendly relationship curdled the moment that incoming president Trump described man made climate change as a “hoax.”

Then he withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, much to the anguish of the incoming New Zealand Labour-Green coalition government

An epoch in power and influence has flowed under the political bridge of both Washington and Wellington since the original airborne raid on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion.

Then the Hollywood lobby the Motion Picture Association of America was led by insider former Democrat senator and onetime White House hopeful l Chris Dodd.

He was determined to make his mark in smoking out Hollywood’s main foe of this era which was copyright infringers, pirates, and working in close harness with the FBI to hunt them down wherever they were.

Then the FBI was among the most revered institutions in the United States.

Now the FBI is severely contaminated and is condemned by both winners and losers in the 2016 presidential election.

Chris Dodd is gone and now the Motion Picture Association is focussed on mending fences with an alienated White House, instead of the showboat corralling of copyright suspects.

The Kim Dotcom saga now well into its seventh year has lasted much longer than World War 2.

Like an Appalachian blood feud its origins are becoming shrouded in the mists of time.

It began when Kim Dotcom was identified as someone who in setting up shop in New Zealand would massively boost New Zealand’s digital technology comprehension base, an immersion style of industrial promotion in vogue at that time.

Which is what happened.

Though not in the anticipated direction.

The gung-ho aerial assault on Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion office did convince the Motion Picture Association that New Zealand meant business on cinematography.

Local digital effects flicks such as the Tolkien and Avatar series surged onward.

So too did the cost to the New Zealand taxpayer in funding the litigation in the long running extradition proceedings bouncing between the courts and which have racked up the equivalent of the cost of a Hollywood-grade international feature film.

In some ways a mystery film because so much in this real life Jarndyce versus Jarndyce process remains unexplained.

Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload servers were based in the United States, thus putting him in the United States jurisdiction.

If he was knowingly doing anything illegal why did he settle in a nation, New Zealand, which has an active extradition treaty with the United States?

Why didn’t he simply stay in Hong Kong which is where he started Megaupload?

Did it have something to do with these very server farms which more than anything else require cooling?

An idea at the time that Kim Dotcom was encouraged to settle in New Zealand was that server farms could be embedded into the chilly if not frozen Southern Alps

Any alliance that Kim Dotcom had with the National government of the time went the way of all the other alliances in this saga which is into anti active hostility.

In a scattershot charge he is also charged with infringing United States RICO statutes designed to combat organised crime.

The notion of a company by definition employing geeks being in a position to deploy the muscle needed to run protection and extortion rackets remains unclear and is thought to be based on a plea bargain deal struck by the US Department of Justice.

Such freedom-for- information deals are standard in the United States in order to secure convictions.

The case reminds us that seven years ago under the Hollywood- White House alliance of that era piracy was the bugaboo of the era in the same way that social media is the political pressure point of today.

In its heyday Megaupload featured a piracy reporting option giving copyright holders the ability to hunt for illegal content. It registered with the U.S. government under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law aimed at fighting piracy.

Government extreme social equity posturing degrades performance and authority

The New Zealand Treasury’s failure to encrypt its pro-forma models of the actual budget can be traced to an engrained governmental procedure of elevating contemporary social sensibilities at the expense of applied practical ability.

This was further emphasised at the time of the budget “hacking” flap when it became clear that a cross-section of departmental officials failed to understand that the budget models had been accessed simply by intruders applying permutations and combinations to the Treasury’s home page search bar and doing so without recourse to passwords.

The access to the budget details at the time was instantly sheeted home to a massive and concerted hack and given criminal status.

The police were called in to investigate some time before the search bar legerdemain was identified and sheeted home to National Party, Opposition, geek-capability operatives.

The deeper implications of the incident were however overshadowed by still another pre-budget drama.

This one centred on the release, authorised, of an official report on “bullying and harassment” within the bounds of Parliament.

Again, the police were called in.

Again the police withdrew.

This time when it was discovered that the events luridly proclaimed involved incidents already long procedurally investigated and settled.

Curiously, and this also was overlooked, a search bar and its application was again involved, indirectly.

This is because had a search been conducted into the Parliamentary Services HR exception incidents archive, the existence of these cases and their procedural outcomes would have been revealed.

The issue remains that the contents of the 2019 Wellbeing Budget, the nation’s first branded budget, became subsumed by the combined drama that attained hysterical levels over these two incidents.

Embedded in all this remains the issue of how Parliament and the government as a whole has the capability to administer its own accelerating matrix of inclusion, diversity, and social equality, and do so without diluting operational efficiencies.

For example, and in quite recent times, one government agency propounded a scheme of the type calculated to sidestep the distracting morality fervour that so spoiled the release of the government’s own landmark and emblematic budget.

This was by promulgating a keep-your-distance edict in which male staff were required to literally ensure that at all times they kept themselves at arms length from their female counterparts.

Such an edict it was believed would enshrine personal space into a no-go zone

At first opposition to this scheme focussed on personal-space necessary infringement occasions such as handing over paper documents, positioning oneself in a lift, sharing a car, participating in a queue, seated at a conference…….

The scheme however ultimately dissolved in a morass of gender boundary eroding initialism characterised today in, for example, LGBTQ2+.

Bluntly, in terms of literal situational ethics alone it had become impossible to define who needed to keep their distance from whom.

HR specialists, psychologists, counsellors abound in the Parliamentary Precinct, so do consultants in areas such as gender and bias studies.

The two torrid events of budget week, the pre-release of the budget itself, and the weirdly-timed release of the official report on bullying and harassment within Parliament, share in common the need for comprehension of the nature of administrative computing.

Such a comprehension would have lowered the temperature of the budget leak episode.

A simple search into the archive would have revealed that the headline incidents in the bullying and harassment disclosure had already been resolved internally.

A curiosity about these fringe budget events was the manifestly excitable behaviour of several of the parliamentary protagonists.

They seemed unable to comprehend connections between cause and effect and even expenditure and value delivered in terms of the immense investment in human resources specialists and also information technology

Parliament deliberately advancing itself as the showcase for workplace social justice activism seems a factor underpinning the anything but calming response to the bullying /harassment report which in its broadcast form pictured parliament actively digging for its dirty linen and then, on discovering it, waving it from its rooftop.

Similarly we can now understand how this same posturing has degraded performance in managing its own publicly accessible departmental networks.

Candidates for senior jobs in government information technology are frequently selected on their ability to promote social equity instead of on their proven ability to deliver area digital services.