Canary in the Mine

The gap between what we spend and what we earn internationally has widened to Grand Canyon proportions - with the current account deficit for the year to March topping $10 billion for the first time. The annual deficit was pushed to $10.3 billion by the combined effect of weaker export volumes, declining earnings from tourism and bumper profits for foreign-owned companies. Measured against the size of the economy, it is 7 per cent of gross domestic product - the worst that ratio has been since 1986. ANZ economist Sean Comber described the result, which was worse than any market economist had forecast, as "another shocker, which will throw market attention back to the sustainability of New Zealand's recent spending-driven growth surge".

The Government is in retreat over race-based funding. It will change more than a third of its ethnically targeted programmes and well over half of the rest could be altered or axed once further reviews are done.

Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton talked tough to farmers protesting against new land access rules yesterday - but signs are emerging that legislation introducing the controversial changes may not be seen until after the election.

The Auckland city council is turning into a disaster zone, riven by factions, in-fighting and a power struggle between the Mayor and deputy mayor. Perhaps that's what you get when the Mayor was voted in because he was not John Banks.

There was a good programme on TV last night showing the problems with prostitution of under-age girls in Manurewa. Deborah Coddington's comments are so good I have appended them in full below.

The US response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has dangerously undermined scientific enterprise and national security by abridging the constitutional and academic freedoms that have long fostered the nation's technical superiority, the American Civil Liberties Union charges. A dramatic increase in the designation of scientific documents as "classified"; the emergence of new, vaguely defined categories of "sensitive but not classified" information; inordinately strict constraints on foreign students -- a mainstay of American science; and restricted access to equipment crucial to the advancement of U.S. research all represent overreactions to the terrorist threat and have left the nation less prepared for future challenges, its report says. The report also highlights several initiatives aimed at keeping potential terrorists from entering the country but that, the report asserts, have done little more than keep thousands of innocent foreigners, including countless scientists, out of the country. As the government responded, much of the report has more to do with politics than fact, but there's still enough left to be cause for concern.

After heated debate, the Spanish Senate has vetoed a bill that would make homosexual unions equivalent to marriage. Now voters are demanding the bill be completely killed in the Senate rather than being sent to the House of Representatives and that a referendum on the issue be held.

But Slovenia has passed a bill on same sex partnerships, backed 44:3 after the centre-left opposition staged a walk-out early in the debate. It allows same-sex couples to register their partnership, and gives partners equal rights and obligations in relation to property and earnings, housing and inheritance, healthcare and information.

Meanwhile, in the US, Rep. Jerrold Nadler has introduced legislation that would give same-sex couples who are not US citizens marriage-like rights to help them remain together. This would circumvent many of the laws passed by States specifically to bar same-sex marriages.

Tail-out: South Korea's baseball authorities have banned a star pitcher from wearing frozen cabbage leaves in his cap to keep cool during games. They ruled that cabbage was a "foreign substance". Players may now only wear cabbage by presenting a doctor's note in advance.

Deborah Coddington's reflections on prostitution

There was a good doco on TV last night. Can’t remember the name, or which channel, but it involved stakeouts to catch men trying to buy sex from young girls of 14 or 16. No, this wasn’t in Bangkok, but in Auckland. South Auckland. It’s now illegal to buy sex from anyone under the age of 18, but since the law was changed last year, there have been no prosecutions, or even arrests, by the police even though we keep being told that more and more under-age girls are working the streets. Apparently in Auckland they work around Manurewa because they get beaten up if they go into Karangahape Road or Fort Street in the central city. Manurewa happens to be George Hawkins’ electorate, but George wouldn’t answer any questions last night. At least, not as Minister of Police. He eventually did as the local MP.

A local senior policeman was interviewed. He said they prefer to try and keep the girls safe by picking them up and taking them home. Given the background of these kids, I doubt they stay home. ‘Home’, for these poor girls, is usually more dangerous than the streets. That’s why they’re on the streets in the first place. But the disgraceful admission on the programme from the police was that because they believe men go to pubs before they go out and pick up prostitutes, breath-testing them or picking them up for bad driving means they get caught before they commit the crime. Oh please!

This is not fault of the police on the beat. It is purely and simply this Government’s policing policy. George Hawkins has proudly stated in Parliament that because burglars, rapists, crooks often drive too fast, they get caught when they’re speeding! No wonder this country’s in the midst of a crime wave. No wonder 111 calls are abandoned. George Hawkins, who draws a Minister’s salary, gets driven around in a limousine, takes all the other Cabinet perks, is a failure as a police minister and should resign.

Meanwhile these poor little girls – and they are only girls – get left out there in extremely vulnerable situations. The doco team easily set up several stings. If they were police they’d have arrested several men that night who knowingly agreed to pay $80 for sex with a 14-year-old girl. But this Government would rather have the cops outside the pub carpark, breath-testing the men just in case they decide to buy an underage girl on the way home.

This is worse than lunacy. It’s child abuse and it’s an outrage.

There are some baffling contrasts between New Zealand's planned cricket tour of Zimbabwe, and the Springbok Rugby tour of the early 1980s. Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff says the Government has no legal means and would not try to exercise any means through the law to physically prevent New Zealanders from leaving this country. The Springbok tour caused close to civil war on our streets, but protests over the cricket tour have been almost muted. In both cases, we are talking about highly repressive regimes with a long catalogue of extreme human rights abuses. When the Cavaliers pseudo-All Blacks went to South Africa, they were vilified, and it cost some of them their careers. The Black Caps have been given the opportunity to withdraw without penalty, but none have done so, and there is nary a bleat on the streets. What has changed about New Zealand in 20 years?

City councils all round New Zealand are watching closely the outcome of the case in the Christchurch High Court this week, in which the owners of several brothels are challenging the Christchurch City Council's brothel bylaws. Forget all the flimflam about whether there are sufficient sexual services in Christchurch. There is only one real point at issue: did the City Council have the right to make its bylaw? The Council made its bylaw under several Acts, including the Prostitution Reform Act, the Local Government Act, and the Resource Management Act. The judge will be considering essentially whether those Acts gave the Council the power to do what it did. And this is why other councils around the country are intensely interested. If the judge rules against the CCC, it's going to be back to the drawing board for pretty well every council.

Classic Kiwi fundraisers - the sausage sizzle and the cake stall - are under scrutiny as part of a sweeping review of food safety regulations. The Food Safety Authority is making the first major review of food controls in 25 years so it can set up regulations whose objectives would include reducing the food-poisoning rate, which is the highest in the developed world. That means the humble sausage sizzle, cake stall and school gala - where food is sold to the public - are under inspection. The review, which was first announced two years ago, has raised the ire of some community groups who fear their fundraising will be overtaken by red tape. Mad Butcher Peter Leitch says it's another nail into the coffin of freedom in this country.

Real estate agents could be unhappy about this move. Trade Me has launched a new property site. The company claims that only 3% of kiwis visit the biggest real estate site currently, but seeing 48% visit Trade Me, it can do a whole lot better. And they allow almost unlimited space for photos and description.

Meanwhile, The Economist says it has been warning for some time that the price of housing is rising at an alarming rate all around the globe, including in New Zealand. "Now that others have noticed as well, the day of reckoning is closer at hand. It is not going to be pretty. How the current housing boom ends could decide the course of the entire world economy over the next few years. This boom is unprecedented in terms of both the number of countries involved and the record size of house-price gains. Measured by the increase in asset values over the past five years, the global housing boom is the biggest financial bubble in history."

Figures from the world of UK culture and entertainment will launch a last-ditch campaign this week against the religious hatred bill, a law which they fear will encourage religious bigots to go to court every time their sensibilities have been offended.

The black cleric appointed last week to the second-highest office in the Church of England boasts that he sent innocent people to jail as a young magistrate under Idi Amin, the Ugandan tyrant. Shock, horror! But there is a twist. It was a ploy by John Sentamu, the new Archbishop of York, to save the accused from summary execution. The 56-year-old primate has explained that he was acting in the spirit of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazis.

A couple has been wed in Britain's first legally recognised humanist ceremony. The ceremony for Karen Watts and Martin Reijns at Edinburgh Zoo was led by a humanist celebrant, one of 12 members of the Humanist Society of Scotland granted the right to legally conduct marriages by the country's registrar general starting June 1. Previously, wedding ceremonies had to be conducted by a religious minister or a civil registrar. Incidentally, humanism was declared a religion in a US Supreme Court case of 1961. Prior to that, in 1933, John Dewey and others wrote the humanist manifesto, A Common Faith.

Allan Carlson, the head of The World Congress of Families, has launched a campaign for a Parents Tax Relief Act in the USA. Calling it "the most important piece of pro-family legislation to be introduced in decades", it's aimed at making life easier financially for families. The large majority of parents, Carlson noted, believe that having at least one parent in the home is the best arrangement for the care of young children. However, the US Census Bureau reports both parents are in the workforce in nearly two-thirds of households with preschool children. The PTRA would end fiscal discrimination against parents who choose at-home child care instead of commercial day care, and increases opportunities for parents to spend time with their children through employer-sponsored telecommuting and home-based businesses.

Does anyone else see the irony in the ACLU demanding that the detainees at Guantánamo get a Koran, yet asking that all references to Christianity be removed from American life?

"Inquiring minds may be urged to study every failed prophet from Karl Marx to Che Guevara, but they're told not to eat of the Tree of Life in the midst of the garden. The most profound of books, both deeply conservative and genuinely revolutionary, is the one declared off-limits. Yes, strange. And sad. How did we get to this pass? Through a series of vague, confusing court decisions that left educators fearful of crossing some imagined line."

Tail-out: A folk dance tutor claims he has solved the mystery of illustrations in the Book of Kells that has puzzled historians for generations. Alan Nowell says the interwoven patterns depict monks performing ancient mystical dances.

Some changes to jury trials are afoot. The Criminal Procedure Bill introduces majority (11 to 1) verdicts in place of unanimous decisions, which will reduce the prospect of hung juries – something that has become more frequent in recent years. "Jurors will only be sequestered in hotels overnight while deliberating in exceptional cases, and although jury tampering or intimidation is not common in New Zealand, trials will be able to be conducted by a judge alone when there is evidence of attempted intimidation," says Justice Minister Phil Goff. [The latter is a significant alteration of the right to trial by jury and has been largely unheralded.]

A forestry lobby group is planning a $2 million dollar election year advertising campaign attacking the Government’s handling of forestry in regard to the Kyoto protocol. The budget for the anti-Government campaign is nearly twice that spent by the largest opposition party last election.

Despite brief pauses for breath, the price of oil keeps rising. Over the past year, rocketing demand from Asia and turbulence in oil-producing nations have combined to push crude prices above US$59 a barrel, defying forecasts and spreading fear across the global markets.

Britain is facing an infertility crisis, with the number of couples who experience problems conceiving expected to double within the next 10 years. A leading fertility expert has warned that, by 2015, one in three couples may need IVF treatment or similar fertility procedures. The low success rates of such treatments means soaring numbers will be left childless. Professor Bill Ledger blamed the soaring rates of fertility problems on modern lifestyle factors such as obesity, women delaying starting a family, falling sperm counts among men and rising rates of sexually transmitted infections, particularly chlamydia.

New Zealanders are among around 40 million credit card numbers which have potentially been exposed in one of the biggest security breaches in history. The breach centres around numbers held by a credit card processing company, CardSystems Solutions, based in Arizona. Almost 14 million are MasterCard cards, 22 million are Visa cards and the remainder are split between other credit card brands.

Once simply a little search engine that could, Google is today a diverse, mighty and seemingly omnipresent force. It is the brand name for finding stuff on the web, a master of infusing itself into our lives and is constantly rolling out innovative services to keep us hooked. Some are even comparing it with God. And it's that omnipresence that is worrying.

After Michael Jones, Norm Hewitt is now my hero. But all he got was a shiny ball on a stick!!! And it wasn't even the right shape.

Lack of free outdoor play is alienating children from nature and contributing to childhood distress, according to a new book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Author Richard Louv, a San Diego journalist, points to diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illness as consequences of alienation from nature. The causes, he says, are not only the attractions of TV and computer games, but the loss of wild space from urban areas and family back yards, as well as a certain fear of untamed nature.

An Australian baby bonus introduced by the Federal Government last year has been given the credit for raising the country's birth rate for the first time in a decade - to 1.77. The $3000 bonus for every baby born last year played a significant role in halting the nation's declining birth rate, said demographer Peter McDonald. He predicted it would rise to 1.8 this year. The bonus increases to $4000 on July 1.

Fatherless boys have a significant risk of going to prison, a study by Princeton and California researchers shows. Tracking the histories of 2,846 young men from ages 14 to 30, the team found that, even taking into account poverty and residential moves, sons in mother-only families were 73 per cent more likely to go to prison than peers in mother-father families. Boys fatherless from birth were more than three times as likely to do time as those from intact families, while the risk of those whose fathers leave home when they are 10 to 14 years old is about 2.4. The researchers were surprised to find, however, that remarriage of a divorced mother did not lessen this risk but increased it - "youths in step-parent households faced incarceration odds almost three times as high as those in mother-father families, and significantly higher than those in single-parent households, even though step families were relatively well off on average".
~From "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration", Journal of Research on Adolescence 14, 2004; Howard Centre, Jun 14, 2005

There are many ways in which the UK school system is very different from New Zealand. For instance: The Department for Education there is to boost incentives to meet a massive gap in the provision of Religious Education teachers. An estimated need for 700 teachers has been accelerated by the popularity of one-year GCSE RE courses. From September 2006, some RE teachers will see their bursaries rise from £6,000 to £9,000 and they will receive a welcome payment of £2,500 when they start their career. [In NZ, education bureaucrats are doing everything they can to kick religion out.]

But do the UK schools want this? British schools are to become community centres opening 10 hours a day and offering before and after-school care and clubs by 2010. They will also stay open during school holidays to provide care, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced. "Extended schools will not only help children in their education but also support hard working families to manage their home and work life," she said. The Government is putting in £680 million to launch the scheme, which is for children up to the age of 14. Parents will be able to drop kids off in time for breakfast at 8 a.m. and pick them up by 6 p.m.

A Nigerian-born bishop has got the number 2 job in the Anglican world. The Bishop of Birmingham, Rt Revd John Sentamu, is to be the new Archbishop of York. The appointment will make the former barrister the UK’s first black archbishop. Bishop Sentamu has been praised for his work as a "missionary bishop". [His appointment will be a strong support for those who have criticised the western church's liberalism in recent years.]

Francis Fukuyama (he who proclaimed the "end of history") points out that for the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution’s blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species. What are the social implications of this movement?

By 2050, it’s expected that only one in five Christians worldwide will be white. In 1900, 82 percent of the world’s Christians were in Europe or North America. By 2025, that will drop below 30 percent. Nigeria had 50 million Christians in 2000; by 2050, it’s projected to have 123 million — more than Germany and France combined. The Congo’s Christian community is expected to more than triple, to 121 million. There will be more Christians in Ethiopia than England, more in India than Italy.