The 1991 Building Act, passed by the new right National government but designed by the previous new right Labour government, took a laissez faire approach to regulation of the building industry.

The ideological assumption behind the 1991 Building Act was that markets always work perfectly and state intervention makes them work less well. Consumers have perfect knowledge of the products they are buying and govt rules just add costs. Communism is indeed a rule that says houses must keep the rain out.

So developers should be left to put up and sell whatever crap they felt like and consumers should be free to buy it, and as we hear from the same crowd now, the nanny state should butt out. And it did.

The result was that we had thousands of houses built that didn’t keep out the rain, they were rotting from the inside out and have made many thousands of people sick as they moulds and fungi produce various toxic spores. One estimate to fix the propblem is $11 billion and that doesn’t include the health costs.

Even John Banks now appears to have a rudimentary grasp on the issue:

However, Mr Banks said the Crown had to remember it was responsible for the slack building rules that let leaky homes be built.

“It was a previous government that put in the legislation that allowed for untreated timber, cavity-less walls, chicken wire and plaster. So they should at the least accept an equal liability with local government.”

Mr Banks believed National ministers understood this but he accused officials of behaving like ostriches whenever a hint of legal liability arose.

Perhaps we should send the bill to those who started it all – the National and Labour ideologues of the hard right who told us that markets always work perfectly and we shouldn’t have regulation – Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Or their ideological heirs in Act, a good proportion of National, and a corner of Labour?

The Cancer Society is calling on our government to follow Australia’s lead by making the new standard legally binding here. I’m inclined to agree. The real question is this; Will a government who ran a big part of their election campaign against the so called “nanny state” have the courage to do what is right and protect the public not only from the physical harm from misuse of the beds but from the soaring health costs that comes with it?

What do you think?

The Greens secret policy on showers will require armed, masked police officers to enter each person’s bathroom, one by one, and forcibly remove their showerhead.  In its place will be a piddly little dribble of warm water, somewhat reminiscent of standing under a pissing toddler.  That’s our official policy.  Of course, the way we have worded it, and indeed implemented it, is more deceptive:

Instead of mentioning the invading storm troopers and their liquored up ready-to-pee toddlers, the policy claims only to apply to as yet un-built homes or renovated homes.  And it notes installing modern new low flow showerheads is only one way of many to meet an energy efficiency standard while still having powerful warm showers.  And of course it will save households an average of $300 per year in electricity bills. In other words no one is being forced to do anything or deprived of anything.

Nanny state I say! It’s forcing (well, really more like ‘encouraging’ than ‘forcing’) people to save water and money while still assuring they will have hot showers and good water flow.  Next thing they’ll want to take away my right to breathe polluted air and swim in contaminated rivers.

If Key keeps on smiling through personal attacks – and reassuring New Zealanders that, under his watch, this country won’t go belly up – National might win the election.

Which, in these crazy MMP times, is not the same as being the next government.

The election is not about winning and losing.  It’s about ensuring different political views are fairly represented, proportionally in parliament.  And hopefully where those views share commonalities working together to debate issues and develop legislation and policy. That’s not crazy, that’s a strength of MMP.

The Greens have a record working with all parties in parliament where our views coincide with theirs.  If we were to treat parliament as a game of winner takes all  we can head back to the Muldoon-Douglas era where governments could pass policy without building any coalition of consensus around it.

Oh, and while I’m writing about Coddington, what about this bit:

The Nats’ “handmaiden” Act deserves trust because they’re not scared to state unspeakable truths, such as global warming being a hoax. Rodney Hide was uncharacteristically understating when he said we’re overly nanny-bossed – in Taranaki, residents are stockpiling saveloys and condensed milk, fearing the products – like lightbulbs – will be banned.

Pu-lease!  Can anyone name me one person who has had their lightbulbs taken off them, or has been refuse the right to eat the food they want to eat?  Let’s move on from this distortion of the truth.  Expecting schools to stock healthy food is not the same as forcing children not to eat pies.  Phasing out production of inefficient lightbulbs in favour of efficient ones is not a serious breach of the Bill of Rights.  After all it is the Coddington-right who always talk about technology moving on and cars replacing horses and carts because they are more efficient.

And this:

Last week Sir Roger Douglas intimated Act’s bottom line for supporting National is Hide and himself in cabinet, and Key could do worse than give Douglas education. His unfinished business could stare down the strident teacher unions and nasty principals’ federations, and lift standards by giving choice and power to parents and families.

Gotta love Act’s honesty on education policy. It’s like; we’ll have some good schools and some bad schools, and you get to choose which to go to, and it will be first in, first serve.  Sorry, too slow. You missed out on the school you wanted because it’s already full of wealthier, less-melanin rich children, but don’t worry, your voucher is also redeemable at McDonalds.

What Stokes and other apologists, like the Black Power’s confrere Denis O’Reilly, preach is that gang members are human too. That they have rights. Yet these claims are, surely, questionable.

This is the flawed foundation of all of Law’s logic. That certain human beings are not really human after all. We know from both living memory and ancient history where such logic leads. I hear goose-steps and it gives me goosebumps.

When did outlaws – who exist to defy the law – deserve its protection?

Now we get an idea of which humans are not really humans after all – the outlaws. So I’m safe from being declared ‘not human’, as long as I am not an outlaw. (Or of a certain faith, or wearing particular colours) Who determines who is an outlaw? The courts? No. Michael does. And he says that all gang members are outlaws. People who wear patches are, by Law’s definition:

… staunch, an outlaw and a pseudo-warrior – all rolled into one. Penniless but pitiless. And then there is the P, the dak, the booze and the companion psychos addled by years of such combination. Vilified by normal society, targeted by rival gangs and required to subsist on the state’s largesse – be it benefit, state house or legal aid.

Having painted all gang members with the same brush, Laws closes the loop on his logic. No gang members are human. All gang members are outlaws. Outlaws don’t deserve the protection of the law. Outlaws do not get any rights.  Therefore, and in conclusion, those inhuman, outlaw gang members have no rights and

Gang rights are silly sophistry.

With this impeccable logic in hand, we can now legislate what it is that people can and cannot wear in public. What is almost as galling is that Michael Laws actually believes that having a public dress code is going to help solve the problems associated with gangs!

Do you think that creating a new power for the police force, let’s call them the fashion police, is really going to put a dent in the very real social issues and challenges that our communities face? Or is this the top of a very slippery slope leading to the destruction of the civil rights we have spent the last century fighting for? I don’t claim to have the answers to the social issues we are facing. But I can say with confidence that creating the fashion police in New Zealand is just a little bit daft and no solution at all. In fact, it is downright dangerous.

ACT leader Rodney Hide said it was an example of the “nanny state gone barking mad”.

In an e-mail over-riding their protests, ACT staff were told to prepare for an hour-long “changeover”, an operation that was conducted with military precision on Monday.

In a show of defiance, some ACT staff have turned their recycling cubes into pen holders and are ignoring the instruction to sort their waste.

Green parliamentary staff and MPs have had this system in place for over a year and have been getting along fine – without any sign yet of nannies needing to tell us what to do.  It’s not that hard Rodney. Your rubbish cube would not be overflowing if you took the piece of paper out of it and put it in the paper recycling bin.

Photo Credit: Dominion Post