Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies:

• If you want to know why rail in NZ is all messed up, look at how the thing's structured. Egads. 


• New York going back to phonics, after noticing that whole-language ideology caused a lot of illiteracy.


• Matt Nolan on inflation and the Australian budget.


• A National Party candidate out on the campaign trail, handing out flyers for a Law and Order public meeting, walks in on a dairy robbery. Wonder what'll happen when a Labour candidate walks in on one. Seems higher odds than it ought to be. 


• The Motor Trade Association wants vehicle emission checks as part of the Warrant of Fitness. Not crazy for vehicles generally used in places with air quality problems. 


• Alberta's NDP are picking up a policy that was tried and failed at the Federal level: a tax credit for kids' sport. The thing mainly subsidised families who already had kids in sport. 


• Another council leaves Local Government New Zealand. 


• I'm not the only one expecting at least some inflation-adjustment of the tax thresholds. I'd hope that they'd be announced in the budget next week. 


• Worries about government deciding to censor whatever it considers to be disinformation aren't just fever-swamp ravings. Look at what Canada's Liberal Party is putting up for consideration.
  

  The story, it is now admitted, was true. Mr. Chong’s family was being targeted. The Globe’s sources were right, and The Globe was right to report what they had to say – even if they remained unnamed. Had it not, the matter would never have come to light, Mr. Chong would never have been told, and no Chinese diplomat would be going home.
  
  And yet even as the Liberal government was tacitly endorsing The Globe’s use of unnamed sources, the Liberal Party was busy demanding the practice be outlawed. Resolution 472 at the party’s national convention, passed without debate, calls on the government to “explore options to hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” How very tidy.
  
  Understand: the government has no more business “holding” anyone “accountable” for the “veracity” of anything. But the second part, urging the government to ban all material whose sources cannot be “traced” – material like, say, The Globe’s reports – is frankly chilling. Any crank can present a motion of course. But it was the party at large, the party in power, that passed it.

  It really feels like appetite is being whetted about pressing need for crackdowns on whatever a government can consider to be disinformation, and that it will end very badly if it's allowed to happen.