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.
  

Afternoon roundup

It's been a busy few days. The tabs, they've accumulated. Some worthies:

• Bans on paying surrogates are a bad idea. 


• California might break the internet. 


• Where Rob Campbell is Chair of Health NZ, do we even still pretend that we have a politically neutral public service?


• BusinessDesk on Effective Altruism in New Zealand. 


• A Newsroom roundup on population and immigration, including a bit on Clive Granger's visa difficulties. If I remember right, they'd figured they had no chance of getting through Immigration New Zealand's points system because of age, so were deterred from applying in the first place rather than being turned down after applying. If anything, that's a worse problem - who knows who else might have been deterred from even trying?


• A suggestion that learning Te Reo will become necessary for getting to the front of the queue for working in the public sector. I do remember those sorts of policies causing no small amount of discord in Western Canada, and being part of what got us the Reform Party. 


• Simeon Brown is not wrong about problems in transport policy.


• If the Rail and Maritime Transport Union is right that "KiwiRail is not going to make a profit, not in my lifetime - and probably never", isn't that an argument for ending the thing?


• Sounds like it's time to flip all vehicles onto RUC, including electrics that currently get a free ride.


• The Building Code is bigger than you thought. 1500 pages, plus 20,000 more web pages and documents. 


• The new Google News showcase is decent. Lots of coverage of regional papers I'd otherwise have missed. 
  
  

Electric trains

In 2016, Kiwirail decided shift to an all-diesel fleet. At the time, it made some pretty compelling arguments for the change:

• Running an electric bit in the middle of a diesel network meant shifting everything from one set of engines to another set of engines;
• Running two sets of maintenance yards is expensive;
• Shifting to an all-electric North Island system would cost at least a billion dollars for the trunk lines and would still need diesels on the feeder lines that didn't have the electric infrastructure, so you'd still have all of the engine-switching problems. And the Wellington power system is different from the Auckland system in ways that matter for setting this stuff up;
• The overall costing of diesel engines over the operational life was 20-30% lower than the cost of electric engines;
• Rail emissions are only 1% of all transport emissions, and transport is 17% of overall emissions. 
• So - things that make rail less attractive as compared to trucks can wind up doing more harm than good (my point rather than theirs)

This week, Labour decided that Kiwirail should keep its electric railway-within-a-railway, keep switching engines mid-course, and refurbish its old electric engines. Because climate change. A Massey prof said they should have gone further and electrified the whole system. 

All of this seems insane. If we care about climate change, as we should, the best way of dealing with it is by working through the ETS. If the costs of diesel went up because the carbon charge in the diesel went up enough, maybe switching to an all-electric fleet would make sense. But if it didn't, then the government playing at political football with a State-Owned Enterprise means we're paying over-the-odds in mitigating carbon emissions. 

Does it really seem likely that the government can do the most good in mitigating emissions by pouring this kind of cash into the electrification of the rail system rather than by buying up NZU on the ETS and retiring the credits?

Update: A reader runs a few back-of-the-envelope numbers on this, copied below. It gives a rough measure of the costs of abating carbon emissions by electrifying rail. Add some appropriate confidence intervals around it, but it's at least an order of magnitude more expensive than current carbon prices - you could abate emissions by about ten times as much by putting comparable resource into buying and retiring NZU in the ETS.

Here goes.

NZ Gross emissions: 78,700,000
Transport share of gross: 17.3%
Rail share of transport: 1%

Rail emissions then on the order of 136,151 tonne per annum.

Cost of diesel conversion: $1 billion, minimum
At 6% discount rate, annualised cost: $60,000,000
Cost per tonne emission reduction: $518/tonne.

(assumes 15% fossil fuel based electricity generation, but also assumes complete rail carbon abatement but for that 15% - which won't happen because the feeder lines still have to be diesel). 

A resumption of your scheduled service

Apologies for the brief hiatus. Kids being kept home sick from daycare pushed a few other commitments around and updating the blog, alas, was bumped temporarily.

We now resume your scheduled service with a short note lauding KiwiRail's decision to go with China CNR for provision of new rolling stock. The NZ bid wasn't competitive.

CNR built 100 wagons which went into service in late 2008, and was building KiwiRail's 20 new diesel electric locomotives.

The union representing rail workers said KiwiRail's decision risked sending skilled trades people overseas.

"Of course New Zealand workers will never be able to compete on cost with China but our quality of work is second to none," Rail and Maritime Transport Union general secretary Wayne Butson said.

"Rail workers who negotiate in good faith for their terms and conditions at KiwiRail are now effectively being told that their wages are the main barrier to New Zealand getting its own rail manufacturing work."

In May, KiwiRail decided it would not bid to build $500m worth of new electric trains for Auckland, a project that was estimated would have created up 1270 jobs and added up to $250m to gross domestic product.

"What needs to change is KiwiRail's tendering rules, and this change needs to come from Parliament, to make it clear for crown entities like KiwiRail that buying local must always be the first option where possible," Mr Butson said.

Recall that the benefits number cited above was produced by BERL, an consultancy firm that is very good at producing numbers large enough to satisfy client demand.

I'd put no more than a ten percent chance that Key caves and puts local purchase requirements on state-owned enterprises -- unless Sir Roger puts up a private member's bill affirming that the Government will not interfere in SOE buying decisions. In that case, Key's chances of doing something stupid increase by rather a lot.