Data is good, 'mkay?

Early this month, the story broke of a study in the Netherlands that had found large inaccuracies in the measurement of "smart" electricity meters. I started writing this post in response to that story, but it's far too long, so I've broken it into parts. Part One is why 98% of the bad things people say about smart meters are wrong. Part Two will be about the Dutch story specifically. Part Three, if I get that far, will be about what is wrong with smart meters.

Even so, it's a wall of text. Sorry about that.

I like "smart" meters.

Like most houses in New Zealand, my home is already fitted with one - has been since 2013. But more pertinently: as the billing and reconciliation manager of a small electricity retailer, I handle about a million smart meter reads every month. And I am, perforce, actively involved in working to get the things deployed "everywhere". (The scare quotes are there because we all know they'll never be everywhere. Hey, there are people out there who are still running Windows 98. But for statistical values of "everywhere", it is possible.)

And so I am more than averagely aware, both of the uses of these things, and of the popular resistance to them. This resistance is well organised. It looks like a genuine grassroots movement, but at the same time I would guess it's quietly egged on by interested parties, such as electricity retailers, meter manufacturers and meter readers, as well as the usual troublemakers (journalists and self-styled activists).

Sample website here. (I am indebted to smartmeterharm.org, for providing a central repository of the more plausible arguments. It beats heck out of such amateurish efforts as stopsmartmeters.org, which earnestly argues that all wireless technology is evil because RADIATION!!!) Marginally more rational arguments are:

1. remote disconnection
2. data privacy/security
3. incompatibility between meter types and readers
4. lack of benefit to customers
5. inherent unreliability in the meters themselves.

The last of these is pretty technical, and it's really the theme of part two of this series. For now, let me consider the less geeky objections. To deal with the weakest point first:

Radiation

If your smart meter is located under your pillow, then it's just possible that you might absorb as much radiation from the smart meter, during the night, as you would during a two-minute conversation on a mobile phone. If it's located a few feet away from your bed, then the dosage will be less than 2% of that. If it's, like mine, on the far side of the house - then in terms of radiation strength, you would have a hard time even detecting it above the background radiation of terrestrial broadcasts, phone signals, alarms, car keys, baby monitors, garage door openers and all the other hum of 21st-century technology going on all around you. And don't even think about getting a wifi router, smart TV, or IOT-enabled device of any sort.

Of course there's no such thing as "totally harmless radiation", in the same way as there's no such thing as "totally harmless sunlight" - but most of us have long ago decided that the undoubted benefits outweigh the hypothetical risk. If you want to dissent from that opinion, then... I'm sorry, but I see no reason why the rest of us should have to pay for your hyper-caution. (It's not a huge cost, yet. At present, you're probably costing us something in the ballpark of $5-7 per month. But that figure will rise sharply as the number of legacy meters declines, because the economies of scale in handling them will fade away, so be ready for a substantial surcharge in a few years' time.)

Remote disconnection

Really, there are three separate fears under this heading. Remote disconnection may be done by your power company, by the police/government/similar, or by criminals (terrorists or other hackers). So let's take them in turn.

The procedure for your power company to disconnect you is closely regulated. We have to make certain efforts to warn you before we do it. There are laws prescribing the methods, wording, and timing of those communications. And - this is the key point - those laws are exactly the same, regardless of what type of meter you have. The big difference is that the whole process is a lot quicker (and easier to reverse), and cheaper, with a smart meter. This alone is a big win for customers. And if we do it wrong, either way, you can sue us.

At this point, I once had the rejoinder "for now, maybe, but what happens when the capacity is getting slim and the grid is desperate to shed load?" The answer to that is a thing called a ripple relay, which disconnects some loads in your house that are both heavy, and unlikely to be time-critical. (Generally, that means "an immersion heater".) The worst that happens is you have to go without hot water for a few hours, while the rest of your house continues to work as normal. Of course having no hot water is bad - but only until you compare it to the alternative, which is uncontrolled brownouts affecting your entire supply.

If you're worried about the police/government taking the time to disconnect your power supply - get your priorities straight. I've never heard of them doing that, and can only imagine that if a SWAT team is about to bash in your door, the power supply to your house is not going to affect things much either way. (Okay, so you may have some half-baked fantasy about standing them off with a homemade Gauss rifle or something. I recommend buying a battery. And life insurance.)

As for evil hackers/terrorists doing it: well, terrorists already have much simpler, low-tech ways of doing much greater damage (Google "northeast blackout 2003" to see what I mean). If it does happen to you - well, congratulations on being the world's first ever victim of an entirely new type of crime. Now call your power company and tell them what's happened, and your lights will be back on in a jiffy.

Data privacy/security

Probably the most overblown of all concerns. The issue here is the granularity of data.

When I look at a set of smart meter reads, I see usage per half-hour for the previous month. (Note, the previous month. We don't get the data in anything like "real time". Not even the meter owner knows how much you're burning right now. There are companies that get the data only one day late, but that's a significant amount of extra work for them.) I may be able to see, for instance, that your usage was around 0.2-0.3kW overnight, then started to ramp up at 5 a.m., peaking at 2kW at 7 a.m. and then dropping off to a steady daytime rate...

And that's all very interesting. It gives me an idea of what time your household gets up, showers and has breakfast. But - that's about all it tells me. It doesn't tell me what you have for breakfast, or whether you watch TV while you eat it, or whether you shower in the morning. There's no way of distinguishing between "a TV turned on for the whole half hour" and "a toaster turned on for a few minutes". I might guess that the 5 a.m. ramp-up is a timed dishwasher - but that's only a wild guess, it might just as easily be an immersion heater, or even an early riser getting in some quality screen time before the rest of the household gets up. There are dozens of possible explanations for any given pattern, and without more data there's no way of picking one.

And that is how I know that companies like ONZO are full of shit. In order to do what they claim to do, they would need more - much more - than your smart meter reads. I would guess that when they demo their technology, they do it on households that have a lot of interconnected and/or spying stuff in the house (an IOT-enabled toaster, or an XBox, or a smart TV, or a cable box, or Alexa, for instance - any of these would provide some serious quality spy data to supplement the meter reads). If you have any of those things in your house, then you're giving away far more data than your meter can gather.

Incompatibilities

This is a real problem in the UK. It is not, however, a problem in New Zealand, even though our technology is not all that exciting. Because it's not a technological problem at all - it's a structural or organisational problem.

There are two big companies that provide metering in Auckland. (Actually there are about eight, but only two major players controlling well over 90% of the market - Metrix and AMS.) These companies fit and maintain the smart meters, and collect read data from them. They pass that data to us retailers in (reasonably) well defined file types. If you want to be a retailer in New Zealand, you learn those file types and love them - and that's all you have to do. Dealing with the fine detail of extracting raw data from the meter and translating it into this standard format - that's the meter owner's problem (and we, the retailer, pay them for the service). If you switch retailer, the same meter continues recording the same data and it's collected by the same company - the only thing that changes is who they send it to for billing.

From what I gather, in the UK, power companies are supposed to read their own meters. That's... well, let's just say that it looks very much like a racket got up by the big, established retailers to raise barriers to entry for competition. It needs to be fixed with a clawhammer.

Lack of benefit to customers

This is probably the hardest case to argue, because it means engaging with a counterfactual: how different would the consumer's experience be, if there were no smart meters? And that, of course, drags us into a whole briar patch of assumptions.

There are some solid numbers we can point to. First, and most obviously, the cost - of all things related to meter reads and changes - drops dramatically with a smart meter. You want to get a read because you're moving in or out? That drops from $15 to zero. You've been disconnected and want to be reconnected? Price drops from $150 (hey, disconnection/reconnection is two site visits) to $40. You've paid your overdue bill and want to be reconnected immediately? The average time to accomplish that task drops from 2-3 hours to about 15 minutes. All of these are real, tangible gains for the customer.

Then there's timeliness and accuracy of billing. You may not think it's a great benefit to have an accurate bill. But when your immersion heater is playing up, or your kid has taken to leaving the heater on all night, or someone has switched your spa pool on and left it - often the first you'll know about it is when you see your power bill. If some of your bills are estimated, you may not know anything about it until two, three months after the problem has started, at which point you're already several hundred bucks out of pocket. With a smart meter, you'll at least get a chance to notice it much sooner (because every bill is based on a real read). If you ask your retailer for more data (as is your right), then you can even figure out exactly when it started, and hence who's likely to blame.

And finally, there's the competitive effect. I don't know the UK industry in much detail; but here in New Zealand, I know of at least three retailers (out of a total of about 18) who would never even have entered the market, if they hadn't seen Opportunities in the data afforded by smart meters. (One company makes a big advertising feature of "an hour of free power" every day. Can't do that without a smart meter.) So without them, there'd be at least that much less competition.

Conclusion

It's not hard to come up with superficially plausible objections to any new technology. And we live in an age when tens of thousands of wannabe activists are just itching to find a cause, preferably a conspiracy, to latch onto and tear down, to make their names and claim their place in celebrity culture. We reward people in our society for being loud, rather than coherent. Heck, look at Donald Trump.

But we shouldn't judge arguments on the shrillness of their proponents. An awful lot of what gets argued, online, is just plain bollocks, no matter how fervently the true believers cling to it. And the whole "smart meter conspiracy" story is firmly in that category.

Next instalment: the dodginess of the meters themselves. How bad are they, really? (Spoiler: far from perfect, but not nearly as bad as the press would have you believe.)

Good and bad

This story makes me proud to be a Kiwi. Police are not bailiffs. We'd all be better off if their counterparts in the UK and USA remembered that distinction more often: their job is to keep the peace, not to "enforce" anyone's rights.

This story, I am much less proud of. John Key seems determined to victimise a more-or-less blameless cameraman just because he's been embarrassed.

Nobody looks particularly shiny in this episode. Banks is guilty of campaigning under false colours - he's a National man through and through, the only reason he's standing for a different party is to abuse a quirk of the electoral system that's supposed to improve representation for minorities (of which he decidedly isn't one). The opposition parties are guilty of hypocrisy in exploiting a stroke of luck - it's what I'd expect from Labour, but I'm disappointed in the normally idealistic Greens. And even the poor old cameraman is guilty of, at best, carelessness.

But John Key, now - his hypocrisy is multi-layered, cream-filled and chocolate-coated. He has been instrumental in making the ACT party the joke it is today - and now he publicly dispenses favours, like a medieval monarch, to reinforce its dependency on him personally. He publicised the meeting and made sure there would be plenty of coverage for it.

But the richest irony is in one of his last acts in the outgoing parliament, which was to push through - under "urgency", which is New Zealand-speak for "no discussion" - measures to make it legal for police to make (and use) covert recordings of political dissidents.

What's sauce for the goose, John...

The politicians we deserve

The irony is strong in this one. Quite apart from the prospect of talking about "Colin Craig's Conservative Party" ("CCCP" seems an eerily appropriate acronym, for this instinctively statist social-conservative), there's the fact that he's breaking the law in order to campaign for tougher sentences.

This story should be funny. It's certainly embraced as funny by the big New Zealand bloggers.

But for me, the humour is overshadowed by sadness. Colin Craig sums up everything that is wrong with New Zealand. He's "a businessman" who made his money, not by making anything or providing any useful service (like a taxi driver or a hairdresser), but by renting apartments - in other words, by owning land and taxing people who do earn an honest living for the use of it. He's insular (proud of the fact that he never travels) and has no idea of what he really wants (his party platform is self-evidently incoherent). And he honestly believes, simultaneously, that he's better than the great rabble who aren't millionaires, and just as good as people who have comprehensively beaten him whenever they've contested.

On the back of these qualifications, this moron runs for office and sulks when he loses.

How will New Zealand ever drag itself into the modern world, if this is the calibre of our grassroots activism?

Mugged

In the face of extreme provocation from the media, I've refrained from venting my opinions on the astonishing implosion of western civilisation as it's unfolded, over the past month, in the USA, Europe and the UK. There's no shortage of people closer to the action who are doing quite enough commentating for all of us.

But just so's you know it's not just you...

Last Wedneday was the bondholders' meeting, at our local racecourse, for those who'd lent money to Blue Star Print Group.

(A brief diversion here: Auckland has several racecourses. Where I used to work, in Epsom, was just down the road from a racecourse. Where I now live, in Ellerslie, is just round the corner from a racecourse. Gambling is big. Sadly we don't have British-style betting shops; even more sadly, we do have the tallest freestanding building in the southern hemisphere, and it belongs to a casino.)

And since it was just round the corner, I thought I'd go along and cast our vote in person.

My first impression was - familiarity. As a magazine editor in the 1990s, I attended scores of press conferences by well-heeled consultancy firms, and those events looked very much like this. I saw a phalanx of spotless business suits. The occupants, none aged over 35, clustered in groups based on what was clearly, among themselves, a well established pecking order. With my years of journalistic training, it was the work of moments to elbow my way through the crowd to the coffee dispenser.

This crowd, however, was not what I expected to see. There had been much talk of "mum and dad investors", and my mental image had anticipated that the suits, and the bodies inside them, would be rather more worn. Clearly, these were accountants - either here as representatives of the auditors or the consultants, or simply drawn to the smell of blood in the water.

Ah, there they were - beyond this antechamber in the main conference room. A scattering of middle-aged, middle-class people, all smartly dressed. I took a moment to wonder why they troubled to dress up in order to be robbed. Must be a colonial thing. I sat down next to a red-faced gentleman in his 50s, who looked fit for a bit of barracking, and waited for the entertainment. After all, I was paying for it.

Proceedings kicked off with an opening statement from the referee - sorry, chairman - who invited some preliminary questions from the floor. Of these, the only controversial one was "will you tell us how many proxy votes you're holding?", which he twice refused to do. Looking back, we should have pressed him on that. He was, he explained, on solid legal ground - but when you're asking people to trust you, surely it's no time to hide behind legalities. He added that he didn't want to prejudice our votes, then went on to introduce a series of presentations plainly designed for no other purpose.

The presentations were slick and, up to a point, persuasive. They pointed to a glowing future for the company, if we would just help them over this little temporary difficulty. But what struck me was that they didn't really seem to be aimed at us. We, the bondholders, still wouldn't get our money back even if this rosy future came to pass. There was a clause specifying, in so many words, that even if the company was sold for its weight in uncut diamonds we still wouldn't get more than about half our money back: the shareholders would keep it.

A few people explored this clause in their questions, but it didn't get much attention, because everything we heard was designed to massage our expectations into a very narrow range - the range in which we would get about half our money back. The chairman said that he'd opposed the clause, but negotiations had been bitter and bloody and in it stayed. (So why would the shareholders fight for a clause that would not be triggered under any plausible scenario? - is just one of the questions that didn't occur to me until some time later.)

For the most part, questions and answers were predictable. Would management and board be taking pay cuts? (No.) Is this really your best offer? (Yes.) Will the banks really call in the receivers if we turn you down? (Yes.) There was a surprising lack of passion, but I was cheered by much talk - and applause - for "voting on principle". Surely, I thought, they can't muster 75% agreement from this crowd unless the proposition includes lynching the shareholders. (It didn't.)

After a couple of hours of this, the crowd dispersed more or less peacefully, and I went home to await the announcement of receivership.

Instead, about 2.30 in the afternoon, I saw the news that the offer had been approved.

I was stunned. I would suspect dirty work in the counting, but that was the job of those nice accountants, and surely if they were going to jeopardise their good name for a quick buck, they'd take it from someone who was more solvent than this? Surely...

Still, the message went out from that meeting loud and clear to the New Zealand exchange: "We small-time bondholders know our place, and will gratefully accept whatever crumbs our betters deign to throw us. There may be such a thing as an offer that is too unfair or treats us with too much contempt, but you haven't managed it yet. Try harder next time."

So there you go. If ever you're tempted to lend money to a New Zealand company, don't. You might as well take it to the races.

The population density school of lit crit

One of my favourite writers is Kazuo Ishiguro.

For a while after I read The Remains of the Day, I wondered what it was that gave a Japanese-born writer such a deep, sympathetic insight into the character of his all-too-English narrator. Okay, so Ishiguro is English by naturalisation, but still - his understanding of Stevens' mentality is infinitely more insightful than that of almost anyone I know. In just two generations, it seems, the "servant" mindset has been, pretty much, completely erased from British culture.

When I read An Artist of the Floating World - one of my favourite books - the mystery began to clear. Because that story is almost exactly the same, but for the teensy details that it's set in postwar Japan, rather than postwar England, and deals with a distinguished artist and patriarch, rather than a never-married butler. Those differences don't really amount to the proverbial hill of beans, compared with the similarities.

Why, I mused, did English society have so much in common with Japanese? On the face of it, it would be hard to identify two cultures that have had less opportunity to influence one another.

The answer I came up with can be boiled down to one word: population. Both Japan and England are densely populated, and they're both islands (well, technically England shares its island with a couple of other small nations, but let's gloss over that for the moment). That fact means that in both countries, it's very hard to forget that land (room, space) is a very limited commodity.

And that, I hypothesised, gave rise to two cultures in which "manners" play a very important role. You know that you're always going to be living very closely with other people. Therefore, it makes sense to follow fairly rigid social rules, even if those rules are not enforced.

Compare and contrast with grossly underpopulated countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Wide open spaces foster the illusion of personal independence and autonomy, the belief that the individual is somehow sovereign and has the "right" (whatever the heck that means) to ignore what others think.

My theory is that if you could come up with a way of quantifying the degree to which "manners" and "formality" are valued in a society, you could then plot that value on a graph against population density, and it would show that the more people are crammed into a limited space, the more likely they are to understand the need to get along with each other.

Granted, there's plenty of counter-examples. Big-city-dwellers, from Paris to Los Angeles, are proverbially rude and unsympathetic. But they are rude, principally, to outsiders - that is, to people who are not familiar with the city's protocols. People born and raised in the city seldom make that complaint, because they understand the reasons for city manners and values.

Values such as "keeping a stiff upper lip". When you live in a community of a thousand people, and you know by sight just about everyone you meet from day to day, it makes sense to share your feelings and support one another. When you live in a city of a million, it's a different story. No-one wants to go through every day, getting drawn into the lives of another random selection of strangers who happen to be going through rough times today. Hence it's important that people learn not to show their feelings in public, out of consideration for others.

And these are the sorts of values that Ishiguro's protagonists cling to, failing to realise that the societies around them no longer understand this need. The war has mixed everything up, and now they find themselves surrounded by people from different backgrounds who no longer understand how the old ways came about, and consequently have no respect for them.

It's a haunting and tragic story, both times. Ishiguro conveys sadness and regret like no other writer I know.

Hate to say "I told you so..."

Ah, who am I kidding? I love to say that. Who doesn't?

According to figures released by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety - an American outfit, natch - laws banning texting while driving may actually increase the rate of accidents.

The irony is strong in this one.

One suggestion is that offenders don't change their behaviour, but do start trying to conceal it, by holding their phone lower - thus taking their eyes further from where they're supposed to be.

Whatever. To me, it just highlights what I said at the time: this is a stupid law, enacted by people who were either dumb, or playing dumb, or just plain corrupt.

When a law whose purpose is to improve public safety turns out to be not merely ineffective, but actively counter-productive - what should we do about it?

If the answer turns out to be "repeal the law", I'll be amazed.

De grass is riz

Spring is - well, trying to.

The basic winter weather pattern of rain, wind and chill has given way to a more compromising rhythm, in which the rain sometimes takes whole days off. As I type this, the sun is actually looking quite friendly. Hardy European souls like me can now wander about Auckland, during the day, without even a jacket on.

The downside is, I really have to drag out the lawnmower as soon as I'm able. In this idiotic climate, the grass never really stops growing. As a result, the lawn - and even more, the communal area I take care of - are looking more than a little shaggy.

One of the neighbours was dropping heavy hints to me the other day about rats nesting in long grass. Personally, I think the local cat population should be well on top of that - we see them prowling about quite routinely. But I do want to mow it anyway, before it gets even more out of hand.

Once upon a time, my ancestors mowed the grass with a scythe - a tool that positively relished length. For the past 20 years, I've searched for such an instrument in every DIY store and garden centre I've been in. You just can't get 'em. And so I have to struggle with a powered lawnmower, which costs ten times as much, requires recharging, and can't cope with grass that's more than ankle-deep. That's progress for you.

Fruit and nuts

Priests and prophets have never got along.

Ever since Moses came down from the mountain to find Aaron cavorting in front of an ornate bookend, every prophet has made it his business to condemn the priests of his own time. And the priests have returned the favour. A prophet is basically a heretic with a following.

Since Christ's day, the term "prophet" has been out of favour in Christendom. Instead we've had various kinds of "reformers", many of whom have also been condemned by the church of their day. The rules are reasonably clear. You can have all the private communion you want with God, but your preaching and argument has to be grounded firmly and solely in scripture. Those who want to give their personal revelations a comparable status, generally have to split completely from mainstream Christianity. (Like Islam, or Mormonism.)

Sometimes it can be hard to tell, at a glance, on which side of the dividing line a given Holy Figure stands.

Brian Tamaki - or Bishop Brian Tamaki, as he calls himself - is the founder and leader of the ominously-named Destiny Church. It's a vaguely Pentecostal organisation, with branches in New Zealand and Australia. Tamaki preaches a type of prosperity theology, and accordingly lives the high life as a demonstration of his own righteousness.

Yesterday, he was in the news for conducting a ceremony in which 700 "spiritual sons" swore personal fealty to him and subscribed to a 1300-word manifesto specifying how they must conduct themselves towards him at all times.

Now, some people have been calling Destiny a cult for some time. Yesterday the Herald sat on the fence: the ludicrous Garth George broke out the c-word, but the more measured journalists and editorial writers refrained from comment. TV3 did a fine hatchet-job. Today, Destiny is complaining that TV3's anonymous commentator "misrepresented" the church.

I heard part of that report (I was cooking at the time), and it strikes me that the things TV3 is accused of misrepresenting pale in comparison to what I heard Tamaki saying in his own words.

Tamaki claims equivalence to respectable religions ("If we are a cult then the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists and the Pentecostals are all cults as well").

And I'm disappointed to see that a surprising number of supposedly intelligent atheists are willing to let him get away with that. Editing the Herald, for instance, points out that it's not in the business of criticising random nutcases (fair enough), but then goes on to grant Tamaki the equivalence he craves: "The old saying goes that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. A similar sort of thing could be said about religion: a 'valid church' is a cult with fancy robes and the favour of journalists." The lunatic-Libertarian Not PC makes the same mistake: "He's not doing anything that hasn’t been done before by other religious leaders".

Now, that's a line that could only have been written by someone who not only has no understanding of religion, but also doesn't really believe that there is anything to understand. I guess it just goes to show how un-seriously religion is taken nowadays.

Because what Tamaki claims goes far, far beyond what any of those religions claims:

"What [God] loves, I love. He loves people, he hates the world. I hate the world."

Look at that claim for a moment.

There is no wiggle-room there. No interpretation, no reference to a primary source. It's a direct, unarguable claim to know the mind of God. Even the much-mocked Doctrine of Papal Infallibility doesn't give that kind of authority to any one person.

Catholics and Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists and Pentecostalists - all claim to communicate with God, but none identify with Him. That claim - private revelation that trumps anything you know or think you know about God - puts Tamaki beyond priesthood and firmly into the "prophet" category.

Couple that with people swearing personal loyalty to him - not to the office of the bishop, but to Brian Tamaki personally - and I'd say the difference between "church" and "cult", in this case at least, is pretty clear-cut.

Heroes

It's true that the Internet is killing imagination. Consider this question, posted to WikiAnswers 26 seconds ago: "Who lived at the same time as michelangelo?"

Who indeed? Tens of millions of people. If I, aged ten or so, had wanted to know that, I'd have asked my dad - and received a lengthy lecture on how to frame a meaningful question. (Of course I didn't understand the lectures, but they lodged in my brain for later.) Then I'd have asked a bunch of other people, getting answers of varying degrees of relevance and truth, until my mind would brew up some magical version of the Renaissance in which, very likely, the Pope was locking his daughter in a tower while he led crusades, and Dracula haunted the caves of southern Italy.

But now you just post it on the Internet and wait for an answer. What use is that?

Well, it's not the first thing to kill imagination. Video games did it; TV did it; movies did it; photos did it, and printing. Five thousand years ago, I don't doubt one Egyptian storyteller complained to another "Mark my words, this writing business is going to be the end of us."

But sometimes real information can be inspiring.

Yesterday was Labour Day in New Zealand. I had thought it was merely a contender for Most Ironically Named Holiday (although we both worked damn' hard yesterday). But looking it up online, I learned about a great New Zealander I'd never heard of.

Samuel Parnell was a carpenter from London who came to New Zealand in 1840, where he encountered a shipping agent who wanted a store built in (what is now) Wellington. Parnell agreed, on condition that he would only work eight hours a day. Eight hours of work, eight for sleep, and "the remaining eight for recreation and in which for men to do what little things they want for themselves". The agent protested, but Parnell stuck to his terms, and because carpenters were scarce he got his way.

In his spare time from that day onwards, Parnell made it his business to greet new migrants arriving and tell them about the eight-hour-day rule. He lived prosperously for another 50 years, and died a national hero.

Parnell was not a typical working-class hero. He was the son of a gentleman. The fact that he was apprenticed to a trade suggests that his family was struggling, economically - but the young Samuel was raised with the secret, middle-class knowledge that leisure is a wonderful thing. More importantly, he had an instinctive grasp of economics. He knew that you don't create value by the hours you work, but by the output you produce. That's what people will pay you for, and the amount they'll pay depends only on how badly they want it and how hard it is to get. The amount of work involved doesn't enter into it.

Workers of the world, take note.

Figureheads

A bunch of Kiwi politicians are pushing to turn the country into a republic.

It's not the first time the subject has come up. It's a good old standby for politicians who want to increase their own TV face-time, or who think that the current direction of news coverage isn't going well for them. The real risk is that one day, they'll succeed...

It's one of those issues - like Quebeçoise independence in Canada, or Scottish independence in the UK, or any given EU treaty - where one side just won't take "Fsck off and die, you timewasting gits" for an answer. No matter how many times it's rejected, there's nothing to stop the next generation of hacks from raising it all over again, just as soon as a reasonable number of people have forgotten about the last time.

To me the drawbacks are obvious. The queen may not be a New Zealander, but the Treaty of Waitangi was a treaty between Maori peoples and the crown. If the crown no longer has a role in New Zealand, then those 500-odd Maori chiefs who signed the Treaty, as an agreement between sovereign rulers, may or may not consider that the agreement is transferrable - we'd need to hear from the legitimate heirs, if any, of each and every one of them to be sure. So although the republican movement's website claims that "Creating a republic does not require any change to the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand's flag or Commonwealth membership" - these being the three untouchable issues in Kiwi politics - it seems to me that it's entirely mendacious here. They can't possibly know that.

It'd be a bonanza for lawyers, and for Maori politicians on the make; existential purgatory for the rest of us.

It's not clear whether these idiots (Phil Twyford, I'm looking at you) want to see a political head of state (like France, the USA, Italy), or a purely ceremonial one (like Ireland, or Germany). Please not the former. Most politicians in this country don't exactly inspire me with trust, and politicising the head-of-state job would mean far more pressure than any of them could stand. (Look at America, for pity's sake.) No, if we must have a president, let's have someone decent - not a businessman or a politician or a lawyer. Give the job to Jonah Lomu or Tim Finn. At least they wouldn't be a national embarrassment.

Seems to me there's a hidden benefit in outsourcing the head of state's job. As well as saving the trouble, the publicity, the campaigning and expense of maintaining our own president, it also removes the temptation for the head of state to claim any sort of authority. Even if some sort of constitutional crisis in the UK forces a split between the crown and country - as in 1936, for instance - that doesn't affect us here.

Effectively, we're spared an entire series of the soap opera of politics.

But bring the job in-house, and there'll be no avoiding those little upsets from time to time. It's not a big deal, but it's a distraction we don't need.

Bye bye, blackbird

I was delighted, when we moved into our new house, to see that a pair of blackbirds were apparently nesting in the loquat tree on the far side of the garden. It's a large tree, towering above the nearby magnolia and apple, and it's leafy and dark all year round. An excellent spot to raise blackbird chicks, I thought. (Sorry, no pix. My camera is still non compos mentis.)

Blackbirds are an introduced species - brought over by the British, along with the chaffinch, song thrush, mallard and two types of sparrow, in the 19th century to make the place feel more homelike. It works. Every time I see those little critters in the garden, I feel a little more at home.

So I was none too happy when Susan found the body by the garden gate.

She didn't look closely at it, but I went out to do the dirty work. Close up, the plumage no longer looks black - it's a very dark brown, like burnt coffee. A couple of loose feathers fluttered in the air, but the bird was undoubtedly dead. Ants crawled across it frantically, as if trying to revive it, but I didn't give much for their chances. I could see no sign of violence, but then I wasn't in the mood for a detailed examination and autopsy; I suspected, and still suspect, one of the local cat community.

Unfortunately there's little chance of getting any of them to squeal.

Using a stick, I rolled the tiny corpse onto a newspaper supplement, wrapped it up, and consigned the whole thing to the rubbish bin. It's being emptied roundabout now. I haven't seen our blackbird since, so I'm pretty sure that was him.

This morning I saw a female blackbird building what appeared to be a new nest, in another, smaller tree, just outside our living-room window. If that turns out to be a good spot, we'll have a grand view of the family growing up. But I'll still miss that first bird who welcomed me to my new home.

Right-wing doublethink

Sometimes - just sometimes - I get the impression that the rest of the world, the great and good in places like the USA and Europe (heck, even Australia for that matter) - don't pay all that much attention to New Zealand politics. It's almost as if they see it as remote and irrelevant to them.

Go figure.

And so I was quite pleased to see the Wall Street Journal today devote an entire editorial to saying that we'd gone crazy. Not least because it gives me the chance to retort in kind.

Background: our beloved leader is trying to set up a "cap and trade"-type scheme to limit carbon emissions. There is a great deal of debate as to what targets should be set for reducing emissions, but almost none as to the desirability of the goal in itself. New Zealand simply doesn't have a noticeable community of global warming doubters. From where we sit, human damage to the world environment is all too obvious.

But the WSJ thinks differently. That journal belongs firmly in the camp of those who hold that global warming is some kind of hoax designed by the global Marxist conspiracy to reduce the rightful profits of rich people. I had heard that the Journal had escaped lightly from the Murdochisation process, but having sampled its writing, I no longer believe it.

Now, I'll admit there are problems with the global warming theory. And I'll be the first to agree that a great deal of alarmist claptrap has been spouted about it - much of it by Mr Murdoch and his cohorts, in their unending quest to sell the indefensible. (The Day After Tomorrow, let it be noted for the record, was a 20th Century Fox production.)

But it's a long, long way from those two concessions to the conclusion that "there's nothing to worry about". I did the maths on this myself back in the early 90s, and I worked out then that if we dug all the known coal reserves out of the ground and burnt them, we would approximately triple the atmospheric concentration of CO₂. You can't tell me that the environment could simply mop up that much change without dramatic effects.

Compare the WSJ's language:

Their report, issued last week, doesn't question disputed United Nations climate-change assumptions, nor explain the cost to the average Kiwi of taxing every corner of the economy — especially agriculture, the country's biggest export. The authors brush aside the fact that New Zealand only emits 0.2% of global emissions, calling it "small," but "not insignificant." Thus Wellington should "act now" to reduce emissions "to protect our international reputation, particularly in the areas of trade and tourism."

...

The best advertisement for New Zealand isn't to support ideas that make the country poorer. Instead, Mr. Key's government would do better by focusing on encouraging strong economic growth to support a vibrant, entrepreneurial society. That way, tourists may want to come to New Zealand and stay.

I should damn' well hope that a NZ Parliamentary committee wouldn't spend its time "questioning" United Nations climate-change assumptions. They don't have the expertise, the resources or the time for such a masturbatory exercise. The only reason I can imagine for doing so is to make sure your inquiry comes to an answer that you'd already decided on before you began.

Then the Journal goes on to tell John Key his job. Now, while I might privately believe that Key needs a great deal of help in that department, I can't help but wonder about the author's motives here. "Tourists may want to come to New Zealand and stay" - actually, that happens quite a lot already, and I have to tell you there's no great clamour among most Kiwis for higher immigration. (Personally I'd welcome it, but I'd be in a minority.) I get the feeling that the author has his (or, possibly but improbably, her) eye on New Zealand as a place to retire to, and wants it to be a tax haven.

As for "vibrant, entrepreneurial society".... whatever makes you imagine we'd want one of those? What do you think we are, Australia or something?

But the real 350kg gorilla in this argument is the curious assumption that a carbon tax will, axiomatically, be bad for the economy.

Now, I understand the basic libertarian argument that all taxes are bad for the economy, because they distort the free market. As an argument it may be dumber than a sack of bricks, but at least it's coherent. What I don't see is any prima facie reason to believe that a carbon tax is any worse for "the economy" than, say, a road tax, or compulsory employee health insurance, or a sales tax. What it does, like all taxes, is to favour certain types of economic activity at the expense of others.

But a carbon tax, in particular - what that does is to encourage efficiency. Doing more with less. The WSJ is not backward in criticising China and India for subsidising fuel, because they "thwart prudent energy consumption".

But then, of course, those subsidies are aimed chiefly at the poor...

Businesses, the WSJ assumes, need no incentives to restrain their energy consumption. It's not as if they'd ever treat externalities as "free". Surely it's sheer paranoid Trotskyite fantasy to suggest that businesses, left to their own devices, would wilfully or wantonly poison our air and our beaches, slaughter wildlife and destroy whole environments?

I'm delighted that our government is exposing our industry to harsh competitive conditions. Just as we have some of the most liberal agricultural trade policies in the world, and those haven't - contrary to many predictions - either destroyed our farmers, or forced them to go to wholesale industrial production such as used in countries like, ooh, America... so I look forward to our industry becoming leaner, fitter and stronger by having to pay the true costs of its activities.

I did say "smack", not "whack"

I blame the police.

Just so's there's no misunderstanding on this topic, I want to be perfectly clear: I'm not looking for the right to smack anyone. I have no problem with a law saying that it should be illegal to discipline children by hitting them, provided it's fairly and rigorously enforced.

What I object to about Sue Bradford is the way she has hijacked a party I approve of for her own, unrelated, agenda. She's costing us votes. But that doesn't bother her, because she's not interested in what the rest of the party thinks it should be about. She's a one-woman argument against minor parties: a two-faced, controlling, authoritarian bitch who is more than willing to sacrifice the entire Green vote if it means she gets her way on the things that matter to her.

Of course, the easiest way for her to do that is to keep herself in the limelight. Which was why I was so exasperated, last night, to see her all over the news again.

The reason this time? Someone has been making "death threats" against her on - wait for it - Twitter.

Quite.

Let's see a sample of these "threats":

"Sue Bradford is STILL a good candidate for NZ's first political assassination.(watch sue run to the police because of a death threat, stupid cow)."

Seriously. That's what the police are investigating.

Honest to goodness, if that were a threat then I'd be long dead. Is there anyone who hasn't been on the receiving end of something at least that nasty, over this "Internet" thingy?

People blow off steam online. In the comfort of what they think is an anonymous medium, they say all kinds of things they'd hesitate to say in person (although seriously, I've heard worse "threats" than that in a country pub on a Saturday night, and nobody turns a hair).

Of course, Bradford is milking the opportunity for publicity. And John Key, of course, is happy to play along, because it makes him look positively statesmanlike in contrast to her ridiculous publicity-whoring. And the media - well, they've got time to fill. To blame any of them for their roles in this would be like blaming a goat for stinking - they're all just acting according to their nature.

But the police, now - they should know when they're being manipulated by these whores. Bradford didn't get as far as she has by being thin-skinned. If the police had the sense God gave a starfish, they'd tell this drama queen to grow up.

Dumb ideas

"This US healthcare business is so boring." Thus Susan to me the other night, as we watched Jon Stewart dutifully mocking the president's wavering on the public option.

She's got a point. It's beyond irritating, how that "debate" is spilling out to the rest of the world.

Fortunately, New Zealand politics is livening up a little - as tends to happen in the first term of a new government, while there are still some fresh ideas. This month sees the frankly embarrassing referendum on the thorny question "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

I don't know if there's any official worldwide record, but I'd like to nominate this as quite possibly the dumbest question ever put to a national vote. And certainly one of the most dishonest. ("Parental correction" isn't illegal, it's discipline that is.)

I voted Yes, because I figure that's the answer more likely to irritate the referendum's initiators. But I have no illusions about the outcome.

The bright side is that the prime minister, John Key, is so mortified by the whole thing that he's felt impelled, in the closing days of voting, to make a real effort to deflect the headlines.

Yesterday, that effort took the form of a 60-page document from the Ministry of Transport listing 62 ideas to make our roads safer. A selection at random: raising the driving age to 16, raising the driving age to 17, lowering blood alcohol levels, making signs clearer, encouraging bikers to wear reflective gear, lowering speed limits, compulsory third-party insurance, ever-increasing anti-speeding/anti-drink-driving/anti-cyclists-and-pedestrians-as-targets publicity campaigns...

Much of this I'm all in favour of. But there are some truly dumb ideas in there, presumably on the basis that "everyone who's talking about this, isn't talking about That Bloody Referendum".

Making "driving while fatigued" an offence, for instance. Just what form would a roadside "fatigue test" take? The report mentions that in New Jersey, if you've been awake for 24 hours and then get in a car and kill someone, you can get 10 years in chokey. But there's a world of difference between "driving while fatigued" and "killing someone by driving while fatigued". The latter is relatively easy to detect - corpses on the road tend to draw at least some attention fairly quickly, even in New Jersey.

Then there's an idea to make child seats and restraints compulsory for all children under 148cm (4'10"), regardless of age. It's bad enough that when you drive your teenager and her short friend together, one of them will have to endure the humiliation of a booster seat. But even some adults are shorter than that. Do we have to strap them in, too? And who's responsible for that - the driver, or the adult? Can we expect to see taxi drivers turning fares down for being too short? Will short people be required to sit at the back of buses? Can we look forward to identification cards being issued to people who look kinda short, to certify that they are in fact at least 149cm tall?

All of these distractions I leafed past, in my hunt for the change that the new government hinted at last year. It's not attracting much attention right now - but it's in there, at number 17: "Change the give way rules for turning traffic". (Page 22 of the ministry's document (PDF), for completists among you.)

Not a minute before time, as the present rules make less sense than a musical about cats.

Oh wait...

The worst laws money can buy

Sometimes it seems the only advantage of a small democracy is that the corruption is more transparent. This morning's news: New Zealand has joined the shameful list of countries that ban cellphone use while driving, unless you're using a hands-free set.

All commentators agree that the evidence is quite unambiguous: hands-free cellphone use is just as dangerous as handheld. Yet no-one seems to question that part. In particular the ACT party, which makes a lot of noise about opposing government interference in private lives, is saying what a great idea it is.

Because ACT, like most right-wing "liberal" parties, couldn't care less about government interference so long as there's an option to buy your way out of it. Take away the hands-free clause, and they'd be yapping like an abandoned Pomeranian.

Memo to all governments everywhere: Good laws are ones that are just as inconvenient for rich people as they are for poor people. If you can pay to get away with something - that's not a law, it's a corruption.

Cellphone operators are in favour (well, naturally - it expands the cellphone-accessories market). Police are in favour, although their motives are less clear. After all, there's already a perfectly good law against careless driving. Talking heads are spouting incredulity that some people actually have the nerve to text while driving, taking their eyes off the road for up to five seconds at a time! What are they thinking?

Well, I've done that. If I'm sitting in a traffic jam, with no prospect of moving at all for 30 seconds or more, why exactly is it dangerous for me to take my eyes off the road for a few five-second intervals?

But does the law take account of traffic conditions? Does it hell.

It could be worse. In New South Wales, apparently it's now illegal to cross the road while wearing earphones.

Now, I'm walking to work these days. 25 minutes each way. It's some quality iPod time. In the process, I have to cross five roads. Only one of these crossings is at all hazardous; of the other four, one is at a zebra crossing, and three are extremely quiet roads - I can just look both ways, then stroll across with no moving cars in sight at all. But in NSW, I'd have to take the earphones out and interrupt my enjoyment of my podcast.

Five times. Each way.

Way to incentivise me to get back in my car, guys.

Local differences

I saw an intriguing news story this morning, about some study of the quality of husbands in various countries. Well, twelve countries anyway. Norwegian and Swedish men fared best, followed by Britons, Americans and miscellaneous other Europeans. New Zealanders came in eighth (out of 12, remember), beating Japan, Germany, Austria and, most importantly of course, Australia. Australian men, it seems, are like my ex-cat, who would instinctively flee the house when faced with a vacuum cleaner.

(Come to think of it, I don't recall him ever washing up either. But I digress.)

No surprises so far. Scandinavian countries always seem to do best in these kinds of sociological comparisons.

But there's a certain amount of, shall we say, difference in emphasis between how various agencies cover the same story. America's FOX News has a particularly novel spin. Study: American Men Make the Best Husbands, attributing the report to "Dr. Almudena Sevilla-Sanz from Oxford University in London", characterises the findings as "American men were considered the best husbands, along with men from other “egalitarian” countries such as Norway, Sweden, England and Northern Ireland."

Hmmm... I know "accuracy" isn't FOX's greatest strength, but is it asking too much of them to work out that Oxford University, surely one of the world's more famous universities - is in Oxford? Apparently. As for the loose use of "England" to describe Great Britain...

ABC Local (local to where? - Los Angeles and Southern California, apparently the only part of the US that might be interested) at least got that right, only to blow it by referring to "North Ireland".

Seriously, does nobody employ subeditors any more?

Australian coverage, such as it is, leads (naturally enough) with Australia's poor ranking. Reader responses are disappointingly muted: the only really good quote I could find was

"Do the housework and quit your whinging." - Wally R.

Way to hold the position, Wally.

The Swedes, however, do not disappoint. An English-language Swedish news site, confusingly named "The Local", gloats unapologetically, and its reader responses immediately degenerate into exactly the kind of intensely pointless bickering you'd expect.

Here in NZ, only one thing matters: beating Australia. The rest of the world is a distraction. We came higher than the Aussies, which means we win, end of story.

Isn't that nice?

Long week's journey into cold

You know where you are in an apartment. Specifically, you're on the north-facing corner of a building, 15 floors above ground level, sandwiched between neighbours southwest, southeast, above and below, all of whom are living in and, importantly, heating their own apartments. Winter is, basically, something that happens to other people.

Houses are another matter. Particularly here in Auckland, where building standards are laxer than a prostitute's knickers and about as insulating.

We moved our stuff in, with the help of the in-laws, over Saturday and Sunday, and on Monday night we slept on the living-room floor in front of the heater.

Oh yes, the house has a gas heater. It's the envy of all our friends, it has a timer and a thermostat and it gives out hot air like a session of parliament, but even so the room was colder than a charity for penguins. Have I mentioned Kiwi building standards lately? There is a special room in Hell for New Zealand builders, it's cold and draughty and noisy with an uneven floor and leaky windows. We were extraordinarily fussy - our house only has two of those defects.

Monday morning we returned the van, then went shopping for a washing machine. Buying stuff was to be a recurring theme of the week. By the end of the day, we had a working phone and internet connection (although no space to set up a computer), a high-quality TV antenna, and washer/dryer and fridge-freezer scheduled for delivery Wednesday.

Tuesday, we manoeuvred the bed into its rightful position upstairs, then I trekked back to the flat to finish emptying it, including the old fridge and freezer. We decided to store the food overnight in the dog kennel - sorry, I mean wine cellar. I don't think the food even noticed it was no longer in a fridge.

On Wednesday we slept in - lulled by the comfort of a proper bed, deceived by the heavy bedroom drapes, and not least, deterred from setting foot outside the covers by the numbing temperature. I awoke only to answer my mobile phone. It was the washing-machine guys telling me they'd be here before eleven. Checking my watch, that meant I'd better be getting dressed. A few minutes later the fridge people rang, giving an estimate (wildly optimistic, as it turned out) of between 4 and 5.

Thursday was our first morning in a Fully Functional House, which I define as one where you can both take a hot bath and make a proper cup of tea in the morning. We spent most of the day unpacking and tidying, then had the In-Laws over for a dinner to celebrate our new fridge.

Friday, we now have a large shopping list. We need bookcases, light bulbs, secateurs, dishrack, slippers and bathrobes, stepladder and so on and on and on. Much of the weekend we spend looking for all these things. A storm in the small hours of Saturday morning causes me to prioritise the stepladder, as - lying awake and listening to the weather - I conceive a strong urge to take down the canopy that covers half the deck, before the wind whips it clean away and takes half our roof with it.

By Sunday we're running out of steam. We've already spent many hours shopping and cleaning and unpacking and arranging, we've done the jobs that seemed most urgent, and now it feels like diminishing returns are setting in. I'm almost looking forward to going back to work the next day, just for a change of pace.

And that brings us almost up to date. It's still cold, but we're learning to cope with it. Pretty soon, I'm hoping, we'll be back to something like a normal life.

Vicarious road rage

Some days I don't know which is worse: Auckland's demented road rules, its drivers, or its journalism.

This offensive piece from yesterday's Herald tells the plaintive story of a motorist complaining about being ticketed for an illegal left turn. He points to the "Turn left" sign that appears just a few metres before the very clear "No left turn" sign that he defied.



What the Herald doesn't mention is what I realised the moment I saw the photograph, what is obvious to any honest person on the road, and what the journalist could've learned with three minutes of research: that the "Turn left" sign applies to a completely different lane.

See, I know that junction. I used to take it on a daily basis. At busy times, there's often a very long queue of motorists trying to get onto the motorway. And there exists the option for antisocial scumbuckets to save themselves a good seven minutes or so by zipping straight past that queue in the sparsely-populated lanes reserved for people heading to Newmarket, then making that clearly-illegal left turn. Google Streetview gives a fairer impression of the road:



And that's what this git is complaining about being pulled up for. He vows to fight a $150 fine. And he expects sympathy from us, the public, in his righteous struggle.

(Do you think everyone else on the road is just queuing up for fun, because they've nothing better to do with their time? Do you enjoy cutting into the proper lane at the last possible moment? What would you do to get home ten minutes earlier? Would you cut off an ear? How about an eye? You could wear a cool eyepatch over it and make up some tacky story about a terrifying hostage rescue, so that no-one need know it's part of a Faustian bargain to save you from missing the start of Shortland Street. No? Then why are you so happy to maim your own soul like that? Don't you feel it twitching inside you, gasping, dying a little more, every time you brag about shaving another 40 seconds off your commute? Or has it already shrivelled to a leathery, walnut husk, like that of an estate agent or a newspaper columnist? Do you feel a smug, sick pleasure in knowing that right-thinking drivers around you fantasise about dragging you screaming from your cosy driver's seat, kicking you brutally in the stomach, and leaving you by the side of the road to choke in a pool of your own blood and vomit? Or would you secretly welcome it as a blessed release? The Jerry Springer team would like to hear from you.)

I'd like to see him appeal the fine. Really I would. Then I'd like to see the court order that his car be crushed in front of his eyes, without giving him time to take his personal effects out first. This is the kind of crime we really need to clamp down on: the kind that is not motivated by anger, but engenders it; the kind not driven by fear or hate or lust or any natural human emotion, but by cold, rational selfishness.

Can someone please smack Sue Bradford?

The referendum has taken a lot of flak.

Go figure. Spending $9 million on answering a meaningless question, where both main parties have promised to ignore the outcome whatever it is? It's hard to characterise it as an optimal use of public money.

Not that the supporters aren't putting a brave face on it. "Whether or not smacking is a good thing, any law that dictates how parents discipline their children is an intolerable incursion on individual liberty and a big leap towards a totalitarian state." Thus one True Believer commenting at the New Zealand Herald.

Sue Bradford, sponsor of the original law that has caused all the fuss, has responded with another idiotic idea: that the Clerk of the House (the legal advisor to Parliament, who referees these things) should ensure that any referendum question be "not ambiguous, complex, leading or misleading".

In other words: it's not enough that 10% of the entire country feels strongly enough to sign a petition - now they've got to get the wording past an arbitrary authority who might, for all we know, be a government stooge.

This is typical of Ms Bradford's way of thinking. She's an old-school authoritarian, convinced to the very core of her being that She Knows Best what's right for us all. That's how we got here in the first place.

Here's a better idea: change the law so that the people who sign a referendum petition have to pay for it themselves. It'd come to about $30 each, which is within the reach of just about anyone who really feels strongly about the subject. Let the signatories show some commitment to their cause. If they feel strongly enough about a meaningless question to waste their money on it, who are we to stop them? It's only our money that we should have a veto over.

Lies and the lying liars who ask them

I'm not sure how it happened, but there's a referendum coming up.

See - about three years ago, a very stupid Green MP named Sue Bradford sponsored, pushed and nagged through a law saying that "reasonable correction" should no longer be a defence for parents accused of assaulting their children. The "anti-smacking bill", as it swiftly became known, coincided with a great deal of publicity about the shocking rates of child abuse in this country. And eventually it passed, in the teeth of furious opposition from conservatives of all stripes.

But it's only now that we're learning just how determined that opposition was. Someone, somewhere, has collected the requisite number of signatures - which is an impressive feat, because it takes some 10% of the total electorate - to force a referendum on the question "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

I'd like to propose: "Should New Zealand taxpayers' money be wasted on non-binding referenda with loaded and dishonest questions?"