Morning roundup

The morning's worthies, from the accumulated browser tabs:

• A Manhattan Institute roundup, from last January, on the problems with rent control. What would be a fair price on iPredict for a contract paying $1 if Labour brings in rent controls. $0.60? Higher?


• Otago's tallying of the border system failures as at 30 March. Add to it this week's case of a border worker who caught it, and had somehow managed to miss vaccination appointments due to personal reasons. Minister Hipkins could issue a Public Health Order prohibiting unvaccinated workers from being at the front lines. DG Health Bloomfield could issue the same order, covering workers in Auckland. Neither has done it. They don't know which border workers are unvaccinated. The data systems are still being developed (they had to have known that they would need one since at least May of last year) and are currently a bit of a mess. Oh - and they're still not considering daily saliva-based PCR testing of everyone in MIQ, even though the capacity to do it is ready to go, right now. Instead, they're cutting down the number of MIQ spaces to reduce risk. Fundamentally, I think the problem is the one Jo Moir points to: lots of Kiwis are very happy for the country to turn into a hermit kingdom.


• NZ's unaffordable housing makes Bloomberg.


• NZ has a travel bubble coming with Australia - finally! Remember though that Taiwan has even fewer cases than NZ or Oz. We could add Taiwan to the bubble. Why aren't we adding Taiwan to the bubble? But keeping the bubble requires better practice at the border to keep the virus out.


• Jacques Steenkamp at BusinessDesk says that the government isn't bothering to process hundreds of investor visas, with billions of dollars consequently not making it here. Australia is making a better fist of it, as you'd expect. 


• I've seen a lot of snark about what counts as skilled in the skilled migrant immigration category. Brittany Keogh notes that NZ's Barista of the Year had a very hard time getting her skilled migrant visa - INZ had a hard time appreciating her skills. The result was that her employer had to go to market locally and prove that nobody local could do the job she could. It's a terrible way to run a system. It would have to be tempting to bring the award over to INZ HQ and wave it around saying "I told you!".  


• The government banned oil exploration at Taranaki. MBIE warned them that doing so would have consequence well before new fields would have started proving up. MBIE said, "any material change to the exploration side of their business may have an impact on how they view their existing producing assets, and vice versa. Should exploration opportunities be removed, it may have an impact on how oil and gas companies consider their overall presence in New Zealand, potentially incentivising them to either sell their existing producing assets or not to invest further in extending its production life." The government banned it anyway. Now, in a dry year, we're having production issues in the existing fields and gas shortages. That means old coal generators are being brought online and the cost of power has skyrocketed. And Minister Woods is shocked! that power prices are high and wants an enquiry into why. Would an official be fired for telling her that she caused it, that they warned her it would happen, and that uncertainty over the whole sector caused by this kind of policymaking combined with the potential effects of Onslow are hindering the investment in new generation that might possibly get us out of it? 


• After the government banned Taranaki, they held an utterly tone-deaf "Just Transitions" conference in New Plymouth. There, film subsidy mogul James Cameron said that Taranaki's dairy industry also needed to end, while highlighting his own more enlightened approach to farming - where he grew flax, industrial hemp, and vegetables. He now has hundreds of cows grazing in his paddocks, because what he was pitching at the conference doesn't stack up. 


• And now they're banning coal boilers. Recall that coal boilers are in the Emissions Trading Scheme. Every tonne emitted by one of those boilers is a tonne that cannot be emitted elsewhere. They're also suggesting banning other fossil-fuel boilers. Meanwhile, there's an electricity shortage caused by the Taranaki ban. So they're loading more pressure onto the power grid at the same time as they've screwed up electricity supply. The ban is in response to the draft recommendations from the Climate Commission. The Commission will barely have had time to start reading submissions on its proposals. If this government's last term includes mandating electric ambulances in the middle of power blackouts, it wouldn't surprise me. 

Public health, externality, and vaccination

Paternalism is contentious. Arguments for state action to protect us from ourselves are fraught. I come down pretty heavily on the anti-paternalism side of the argument, but I've heard respectable defences of paternalism.

But policy around vaccination is hardly paternalistic. There's a clear market failure that could be pointed to in any sound Regulatory Impact Statement.

In a place with relatively high vaccination rates, the primary benefit from your getting vaccinated goes to other people. The risk of catching anything is low, because everyone else is vaccinated. If you also get vaccinated, you very slightly reduce your already low risk of catching anything. You also very slightly consequently reduce the risk of anyone else catching anything - there's still risk among those who are vaccinated, and there are others out there who cannot be vaccinated because they either are immunocompromised, or are too young to be vaccinated. The latter effect is the bigger one. Since that benefit accrues to everyone else, you should expect undervaccination relative to a first best.

Of course, that only holds during normal times. If free-riding rates increase, then you get an outbreak - and consequent strong incentives not to free-ride but to get vaccinated and quickly. That brings a surge in demand for doses of vaccine - but vaccine cannot store for a long time and takes a long time to make.

Consequently, it is very easy to justify policy action that encourages regular uptake of vaccination. And if you're going to justify compulsion in anything health related, compulsion in vaccination seems the obvious place to start. And if you're going to start compulsion in vaccination anywhere, the very very obvious places to start are with those workers most likely to be coming into contact with the immunocompromised or children too young to be vaccinated.

In other words - people who work at hospital, and people who work with children.

I can't guarantee that compulsion is there warranted, but if it's warranted anywhere in anything to do with health-affecting activities, it's in this case.

There is already a pile of compulsion around health and health behaviours.

The government banned the sale of sodas in hospitals, for example, for the protection of the patients.

The government is considering a ban on small bits of food that public health people consider to be less nutritionally worthy, like popcorn, in early childhood centres - because of the choking risk. Radio New Zealand reports seven cases of choking in ECE centres from 2016.

If you smoke in your private automobile, and there are children in the car, then it doesn't matter if you're in a convertible with the top down driving down the highway at speed - the cops can fine you. And if you don't pay the fine, ultimately you can wind up in jail. For the protection of the children.

Bans are the strongest form of compulsion. But the list of nudges and shoves around alcohol, tobacco, and various foods, whether in place or proposed, is not small.

So you would think, with that much compulsion already all over the place in health, for the purported protection of health, in piles of areas where the justification is slim at best, that the one big thing that would most justify compulsion would already have been attended to, right?

RIGHT?

Here's what Eloise Gibson found when she went looking.

- Only two of New Zealand’s 20 DHBs know what proportion of staff are immune to measles, whooping cough or other infectious diseases.

- The Ministry of Health says health workers should be vaccinated to lower their risk of spreading serious illnesses, but DHBs don't make it compulsory.

- At least two DHBs make vaccination a condition of employment for new staff, but not existing staff. It is possible to work in a patient contact role in a newborn intensive care unit or maternity ward without being vaccinated.

- At last count, almost half of staff at one DHB had not had a whooping cough vaccine. Up to 11 percent were not immunised against measles.

- A measles-infected staff member worked at a Christchurch hospital while contagious last month and other hospital workers have also had measles this outbreak.

- In some regions, only a third of hospital midwives are accepting the recommended free flu vaccinations.

Stephen Franks pointed me to one potential reason: when Waikato DHB tried requiring that unvaccinated staff wear masks, the New Zealand Nurses Union threw a fit.

And over in the ECE centers, staff who never bothered getting vaccinated had trouble getting vaccinated come the measles outbreak.

Vaccination is the best protection against measles but because babies can't receive their first MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine until 15 months, babies younger than that are particularly vulnerable.

Becky Casale said she was shocked to learn early education and daycare providers, whom she paid to look after her infant daughter, had no legal obligation to check staff were vaccinated or to tell parents about unvaccinated staff.

Casale said she knew a receptionist at a north Auckland daycare who was completely unvaccinated.

Measles has an incubation period where you're contagious before you might even know you're sick. Parents packing an 'unhealthy' snack for their own kid's ECE lunch will get in more trouble than some antivax clown who decides to work at hospital, or at an ECE centre.

At least in ECE centres, we might hope that competition among centres for kids will have them highlighting their pro-vaccination credentials like 100% vaccinated staff and that they kick out kids who don't keep up with their vaccinations.

Harder to see that happening with hospitals. Heck, I wouldn't even have considered that hospital staff might not have been vaccinated.

How is it that we've wound up with a system that is happy to impose compulsion, for health reasons, and especially where children are involved - except in the cases where it is most strongly justifiable? A system that can tell you how many choking incidents in ECEs involved small bits of food, but that cannot tell how many ECE or hospital staff are vaccinated?

When it comes to soda, and tobacco, and alcohol, the public health crowd will insist that it's impossible to have informed consent. But, for ECE centres, and hospitals, and midwives, it's caveat emptor, with parents expected to know that they should check whether staff are antivaxxers. Like, a warning label on a pack of smokes wasn't considered enough warning about the dangers of cigarettes. They also needed plain packaging and taxes and a pile of other rules. But the person you hand your three-month-old to at ECE - not even a warning label that that person's an antivaxxer. The orderly cleaning the room your newborn is in at hospital? No label there either.

None of it makes sense - until you remember that the point of public health is not public health. If the point of public health were public health, full vaccination would be a condition of employment at public hospitals. And public health types would have dealt to vaccination at ECE outfits long before they moved to hector folks about what they put in the kids' lunches.

Previously:

• Quarantine and the State

Today's reason to hate the State [updated]

The State mandates that children attend school - either public or, if their parents are rich enough, a private or home-school alternative.

The State restricts your choice among schools through zoning. There are options for getting an out-of-zone placement, but it's not always easy.

Then, when children of Mongrel Mob members torture your children at school, including sexual assault, the school allegedly covers it up and gives the vicious little creatures five days' suspension.

Hutt Valley High School pupils were subjected to torture, extreme violence and sexual abuse, but school authorities failed to protect victims, alert parents or report numerous attacks to police.
A long-awaited Ombudsmen's Office report reveals chilling details of systemic violence at the school, intimidation and abuse. It also identifies a history of failing to punish culprits or acknowledge the seriousness of their crimes.
A gang of six teens terrorised classmates in late 2007, chasing younger boys around the school, dragging them to the ground to remove their pants then violating them with a screwdriver, scissors, branches, pens, pencils and drills.
The premeditated attacks were committed on year 9 boys during lunchtimes. There was little teacher supervision because some staff were too scared to carry out duties "for fear of their own safety", the report says.
When the offending was identified, the 1700-pupil co-ed state school did not alert victims' parents, police or Child, Youth and Family. It instead chose to stand down the culprits for a few days.

Things have gone far too far the other way in the States, where kids seem regularly to get stuck on sexual offender registries for sending each other naughty pics via cell phones. But this is awful.

Imagine this having happened instead in the private sector - suppose at an after-school programme. If there weren't lawsuits against the adults meant to be stopping the damned place from turning into Lord of the Flies, I'd be really surprised. I'd also be really surprised if the place didn't quickly go bankrupt as parents pulled their kids out. But the State protects its own. The Ombudsman's report finds all kinds of fault. But here are the recommendations (as summarised in the press):

Recommendations

• Amend school national administration guidelines to make anti-bullying programmes mandatory in all schools, rather than being simply a recommendation from ERO.
• Education Ministry to provide specific guidance to schools on what level of punishment is appropriate for various offences and actions. Improve disciplinary procedures by requiring principals and school boards to consider victims' views when making decisions on discipline in cases of bullying or violence.

Nobody's recommending that the teachers who allegedly looked the other way be fired or sued. They've already replaced the principal; the old one who allegedly covered up the abuse is now Deputy Principal. [I love how the podcast link at left uses the weasely "mistakes were made", "errors were made".] I have a hard time seeing how there isn't grounds for civil suits against a whole lotta folks, and probably criminal suit as well. Unless State employees are protected from lawsuit in case of negligent performance of duty. I'd sympathise with the teachers who feared Mongrel Mob retaliation, but they chose to allow freaking kids to be victims instead.

Mydeology has more details, here and here.

But isn't it freaking wonderful that we have the State to protect us. Give it a monopoly on the use of violence that it mostly exercises against the kinds of people against whom you could already defend yourself. For the ones where you'd really need the external help, like Mongrel Mob kids shoving screwdrivers into your kid's anus at school, the State won't do anything because it's too scared of the Mongrel Mob.

Today's one of the days I'd be pushing the button for the abolition of the State and its replacement with private security. Or at least make it easier for kids to switch out of criminally incompetently managed schools.

[I added the word allegedly a couple of times to be safe]

See also DomPost

Update2: Ombudsman's report says some of the involved youths were referred to the family and juvenile courts. Nothing is said of outcomes.

It's not a bug, it's a feature

Oh dear.

Both Nolan and I worry that the proposed income splitting regime for New Zealand taxation will reduce female labour supply.

Just listened to National Radio's 5 PM news update, and Peter Dunne reckoned that a feature, not a bug.

Mr Dunne says the proposal to allow income splitting could encourage more parents to stay home with their children.

The point is to put women back in the kitchen.

And now he's going on about how important it is for kids to be home with parents rather than in daycare.

The Reserve Bank Annual 2010 was far far too kind to him. I suppose that my understanding of the importance of rice pudding in the economy is insufficient for me to fully appreciate the merits of his position.

Hey, why don't we just set a $50/hr minimum wage for married women so that they're properly unemployable, as they ought to be on a proper progressive understanding of things.