Free Press 29/6/15: The Harmful Digital Communications Bill   29 Jun 2015

Free Press

ACT’s new regular bulletin

The Harmful Digital Communications Bill
David Seymour fears this will be another case study in bad law-making and outlines why he opposes this Bill here. You have some dramatic event, to which people rightfully feel something should be done. Politicians feel compelled to do something. Creating a new law is doing something. It’s easy to assume it’s the right thing to do.

Revenge Porn
This is a serious issue which should be dealt with by extending the intimate covert filming provisions in the Crimes Act, and not relying on the “general causing harm” offence in a new Bill.

Asymmetries
The Bill creates a strange asymmetry between the ‘online world’ and the ‘non-digital world’. The ten communications principles would be a good guide to desirable behaviour on a school camp, but are problematic as written in this Bill. The Harmful Digital Communications Bill could itself be used to bully people or the media into taking down legitimate material.

Free Speech
This Bill will be ineffective in protecting vulnerable kids and will very likely be used as a weapon to curtail free speech. As stated famously by Voltaire, free speech involves adopting the view that while “I may disapprove of what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

More Fatuous Stunts
The Green activists were at it again last week, climbing onto Parliament House with eight solar panels. Why not do something useful for a change? How about dropping them off to some schools in a poor but sunny part of the country?

We all Love Solar
Anybody familiar with the relentless decline in solar module prices can see an energy transition is ahead. The dumb thing is to think we should all rush out and buy solar modules now. The rational thing, the Smart-Green thing, is to wait until they are genuinely cost competitive in your little patch of the world. Or to wait even longer, because they will keep getting cheaper.

Investors are on to This
Financial markets have been buzzing over this for years now. For example, just last week Bloomberg had a story titled, The Way Humans Get Electricity is About to Change Forever. So quit the stupid stunts, just let the entrepreneurs and scientists sort this out. Let’s avoid the shambles that has resulted in Germany and elsewhere.

Germany
Last week a Green MP tweeted: If you follow 'extreme' Green policies...Actually, you get an enormously successful exporting economy like Germany. Germany a green success? Really? That country best known as an export success in heavy industrial machinery, fossil fuel using vehicles, pharmaceuticals etc?

Germany and Renewables
If you have been following the energy news from Germany you will have read things like this, regarding Germany’s Green energy experiment: The cost of government subsidies for green energy is passed directly through to consumers. As a result, German households pay twice as much for electricity as their US counterparts. Prices for industrial customers have risen more than 30 per cent over the past four years (Financial Times).

And Bad for the Environment
Then you see articles in the Economist magazine titled: What has gone wrong with Germany’s energy policy? An unintended side-effect of the policy has been that renewables have undercut relatively climate-friendly natural gas on price. To make up for the loss of generation as nuclear was taken offline, traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal. CO2 emissions have increased. Talk about unintended consequences!

The Result
German consumers are facing steeply rising power prices. German newspapers feature stories of people stealing wood for fuel from lumber yards and forests.

The Point
It’s not that solar is a bad idea, it’s just that for most places it’s not yet cost competitive without subsidy. But it won’t be long before it is. Timing is everything. Start in places where it is very sunny. As costs keep falling, and if and as battery storage improves, it will become a no-brainer to install. Let the market drive it. Keep government out of it. And especially keep Green politicians away: they don’t understand markets, and they don’t understand the network supply and demand complexities of electricity generation and distribution. Inner-city, green leftie types have a knack for creating policy shambles that make ordinary people poorer. Beware.

The TPPA
The TPPA roadshow has stuttered back into life. The economist Tyler Cohen, co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, wonders what it would take for him to change his mind, and oppose the TPPA. Given all the studies showing the huge welfare gains to come from expanded free trade, he concludes he would need to see a study which used a better trade model, used better data, and/or added in the neglected costs of TPPA (which are real), and that overall showed the welfare gains going away and becoming negative. But there aren’t any.

Opponents of the TPPA
Instead of Cohen’s test, all we get from opponents of the TPPA are various assertions about possible negative consequences of the TPPA. As Cohen says, “the more desultory lists I see of possible negative consequences of TPPA, the more likely I am to think it is a good idea after all.”

Oh not Again!
An enthusiast tweets: Moana Jackson and other Maori leaders have filed an urgent claim in the Waitangi Tribunal alleging the TPPA negotiations breach the Treaty. Will this nonsense ever stop?

Speaking of Nonsense
The PPTA seems to be channeling the old-style militant unionism of the 1950s, as their blog writers utterly lose the plot. At least it’s clear whose interests they represent – it sure isn’t children or student teachers. Read it here for yourself: http://www.ppta.org.nz/resources/ppta-blog/big-shout-out-to-ppta-members-in-northland

Labour Milking It
Labour are outraged about milk costing more than coke. But of course. Milk is the product of a wondrously complex biological, economic, and logistical process, limited in its production by environmental and regulatory constraints, and constrained in its provision by its perishability. Whereas coke is essentially sugarwater. Why is milk more expensive in New Zealand than in London? Simple. British supermarkets use milk as a loss leader to signal low prices.

Auckland Council
Well, they did it, they voted for the big spending plan. We wonder how many of the ten councillors who voted for this 9.9% rate increase will still be councillors after the next election?

Schadenfreude
Apparently “The Conservatives are not dead”. It’s a reworking of the parrot sketch.

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