Afternoon roundup

The closing of a few tabs. 

• Tim Harford's cautionary tale about the Sydney Opera House and how megaprojects bring heartbreak is a must-listen. One bottom line: if you're not real clear at the outset just what problem you're trying to solve, you're going to be causing problems. 
• My weekend column in the Stuff papers compares the current draft Government Policy Statement on Transport to the old 1998 proposed reforms - Better Transport Better Roads. The column also echoes a lot of what turned up in my submission on the draft GPS - which I don't think is yet on our website.
• Central Banking covers The Initiative's proposals around RBNZ: split prudential regulation off into its own separate institution, focus the monetary authority on inflation-alone, and not go ahead with deposit insurance. With comments from former RBNZ Chair Arthur Grimes and Mike Reddell. 
• Labour promises rebates for rooftop solar. Weird thing to promise when there's a lot of grid-scale solar going in without subsidies. The balance between grid-scale and rooftop shouldn't depend on subsidies to the latter. 
• Great piece in Quilette on the 2003 BMJ controversy over passive smoking and mortality. I remember having pointed at this literature when the Helen Clark Labour Government was banning smoking in pubs; I'd figured it should be for the venue owner to decide, especially where the risks from second-hand smoke really seemed nebulous. Not a popular view it turned out. The trendy 'let's get more government grants' people had banked their wins on second-hand smoke and were trying to argue that third-hand smoke (residue on surfaces, basically) was its own new terrible thing that needed a lot of grants. Ah well. 
• Kainga Ora is doing some really neat work in getting construction cost and build times down. The kind of thing that you'd normally expect the private sector to have led ages ago. But when councils allow very little building, who'd have the scale to front that fixed cost in process systems? Nobody would have invented automotive assembly lines if the global market for cars was a thousand a year...