Breaking the internet

There are a lot of metrics folks can use when evaluating policy.

"Will this policy break the internet" is an important one. At least for me and the handful of folks who were online in the 90s. 

Age-gating social media, or otherwise making platforms/sites liable if kids see sensitive content there, is one way of breaking the internet.

It has not been going well in the UK, where making sites liable if kids see 'sensitive' content has meant geoblocks on content that could be considered sensitive, pending Know Your Customer verification that the person on the other end of the web browser is an adult.

My column in today's Post went through some of those issues. New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Luxon seems very keen on setting age gates on social media. Any policy putting liability on platforms if kids access the platform will require others to prove that they're adults - the same kind of KYC mess that the UK is getting itself into.

Depressingly, a proposed bill in the biscuit tin, from Labour, suggests fully following the UK in penalising sites that don't do enough to keep kids from viewing sensitive content. 

Breaking the internet should not be a vote-winner. C'mon. 

The price of butter

When global dairy prices rise, so does the price of butter. Farmers sell milk to whoever will provide the best price. Producers will ship products to wherever returns are best. When people start seeing butter as a health food compared to stuff made of oils, demand for butter goes up - and New Zealand produces a lot of the world's trade product. 

Ministers of Finance should not be involved. 

It will whet populist demand for more of the same whenever prices rise for other things. 

The meeting this week with the head of Fonterra was set earlier, but turned into a media circus framed around the Minister holding Fonterra accountable for butter prices. It then turned into a supermarket beat-up over what the Minister thought might be ten or twenty cents on a block of butter. 

I am a very big fan of enabling more supermarket competition by easing regulatory barriers. If there are super-profits to be had in NZ grocery retail, someone can then enter to chase them down. 

I just can't see it doing much on the price of butter though. For a pretty specific reason. 

In the 2000s, there was a similar beat-up over milk prices. At the time, Al & Sons was selling much cheaper milk at corner stores (dairies) in Christchurch. I'd regularly buy two 2-litre bottles for the price of one normal-brand bottle at the supermarket. 

Some prices are particularly salient. Butter. Milk. They're the kind of thing that dairies can stick placards up at the door about. And that's how I'd go and find Al & Sons. A dairy on my drive home through Woolston had the placard up advertising cheap milk, so I'd pop in and buy some and maybe a couple other things. 

Butter is at least as salient as milk, given the current fooferah.

So. 

Let's think it through. 

Imagine you believe the problem is Fonterra. If it is, that's an obvious opportunity for anyone who might want to undercut Fonterra by selling cheaper butter. There are lots of producers out there. And there could be more. NZ regulations require Fonterra to sell milk to competitors at a regulated price. If you want to start up your own butter company, you don't have to buy a pile of trucks to go start collecting milk. You can just get it on tap. 

So it isn't gonna be a Fonterra thing.

Maybe you figure it's really a dastardly supermarket thing. They've rigged the whole game and told every butter producer that they'll never buy another block of butter from them if they sell to anyone who'd sell it at a lower price. I don't buy any of that. But suppose you believed that were the true state of the world. 

Now remember Al & Sons. They didn't bother with the supermarkets. They just sold through the dairies. If you want to set up a butter plant selling only to dairies, that's perfectly fine. Nobody will stop you - but you will have to comply with the health regs. Al & Sons folded, I think, after the combination of the Christchurch earthquakes and a tightening of health standards made everything too hard. 

But there are lots of other operators. Any one of them could decide to flip to a dairies-only strategy if the supermarkets were creaming things too much. Whatever excess margin they figure the supermarkets are taking, they could split between themselves as producers, the dairies as retailers, and customers through lower prices. Dairies could set up the placards outside. Cheap butter would attract punters in. 

I expect that the government has to understand this, otherwise they wouldn't have referred to about ten to twenty cents in potential savings on a block of butter costing in the $8-$10 range. That may not be a margin large enough to encourage anyone to flip to a dairies-only distribution strategy. Which seems prima facie obvious given that nobody is putting up 'cheap butter here' placards outside of dairies. 

And surely this isn't the reason to oppose poking holes in GST. It must be the journalist not quite getting it right, right?

Both Australia and the UK do not apply GST (or its equivalent) to basic goods including milk and butter. For example, an $8 block of butter in New Zealand would cost about $6.96 if GST were removed. However, Willis has ruled that out, arguing it would effectively act as a subsidy for supermarkets, with no guarantee savings would be passed on to consumers.

Taking GST off butter would be a terrible idea regardless of incidence. 

Meanwhile, our grocery commissioner considered that Woolworths was being sneaky in pointing to GST as something that needed to be accounted for when making international price comparisons.

"Just as an aside on that pricing; It's a bit sort of sneaky, to say if you take GST out, and if you do this, and if you do that, and do a few fancy arithmetics, we are cheaper than others are."

The Commissioner is just bad and wrong here. If the object of the comparison is to tell whether prices in one market are roughly competitive with prices in another market, you have to adjust for differences in tax. 

Greater supermarket competition could well reduce prices to consumers across a large shopping cart full of goods. But it's not likely to do as much on any individual product - and particularly not one like butter where prices are particularly salient. It's more typically the kind of thing where a retailer might run thin margins to get punters in the door - and potentially risk being damned for an anticompetitive 'aggressive loss-leading' practice. And taking a international spike in butter prices as reason for raking companies over the coals is a bad idea. It whets demand for populist responses to other price changes. 

Bring on the price control boards, because that's where this path leads. Some days, I wish National and ACT were in opposition, simply so that there would be push-back in Parliament on this sort of thing. 

I drew the third slot in our Insights newsletter this week; it's meant to be a satirical take. 

I wrote this. It has been such a stupid week. 

Buttering up a slippery slope

You might not remember 2025, even though it’s only two decades ago. AI was only just getting started. Looking back, it is easy to tell where the path back to price setting boards started. 

This was before synthetic fermentation, when New Zealand still exported a lot of butter and global markets set the price. Whenever butter prices dropped, consumers barely noticed. Whenever they rose, people screamed. 

The orthodox economics still practiced elsewhere, and back then, sometimes even in New Zealand, offered an obvious solution. When global dairy prices rise, farmers make more money and pay more tax. Government collects taxes and gives money to poorer people, with payments adjusted for inflation. People then decide what to buy. 

Unfortunately, some prices draw a lot of attention. The spike in fuel prices during the 2020-2022 pandemic saw the government subsidise road users. People started to think that the government should step in whenever prices increase.  

That populist turn solidified under the 2023-2026 National government.  

A July 2025 meeting between the Finance Minister and the head of a large milk company caused a media frenzy about butter prices, followed by condemnation of supermarkets. Both drew popular applause. 

Things slid from there. People came to expect public excoriation of businesses whenever prices increased unexpectedly.  

In short order, the Minister was having to devote two or three days every week to these circuses. It was seriously impeding other government business.  

So, the Minister delegated the job to a new Board established to supervise prices and to bring a more formal bureaucratic process to the inquisitions.  

The new Labour-led government in 2026 kept the Board but broadened its role. It was more convenient for everyone involved.  

Previously, anyone reducing prices risked prosecution for predatory pricing. Anyone increasing prices had to be gouging. And keeping prices the same was obviously collusion. It was a risky time. 

In the new order, the Board and the businesses it supervised agreed on prices for the next year. Officials viewed government-enforced price coordination as obviously beneficial.  

The real cost of everything rose considerably. Shortages of some things and surpluses of others abounded.  

Government had first call on short supplies of butter and often used it for industrial purposes. It is a fine lubricant, useful for making slopes more slippery. Most of the rest was exported. 

But at least the prices listed on the empty supermarket dairy shelves were low.  

Social media slippery slopes

Yesterday, I went through what I see as a trilemma for age-gating social media access. 

A system putting obligations and liability on social media providers to keep kids off the platform will have at least one of the following three problems:

1. Easily worked around by those under the age limit;
2. Cumbersome for those over the age limit;
3. Ends internet pseudonymity. 

I think the proponents of the proposed Member's Bill that National has endorsed envision the system being light-touch and consequently leaning on the first part of the trilemma. It's about 'sending a message' as much as it is about developing a workable regime. 

The Bill is broad enough to encompass all kinds of ways of running it. It depends what you think counts as "reasonable steps". 

Consider the lightest-touch version. 

The Minister designates only Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - leaving everything else alone. And the Minister signals that they don't want the platforms going overboard on what's 'reasonable'. 

The platforms then require users to confirm that they are over the required age. They use various AI tools to watch for accounts that might be under-aged. Some of them, like Instagram, already do this - they try to push teenaged users onto a teen-version of the platform. 

If they suspect a user is under-aged, the platform will issue a challenge. "We think you're actually under the age limit. If you can't prove otherwise, we'll suspend your account or punt you into the kids' version (if that kid version is still legal)." 

For users falsely identified by the automated tools as being under the age limit, the trilemma applies. Either the challenge is easily worked around, or it is cumbersome for those over the age limit, or it's the end of pseudonymity. Being a light-touch regime, it leans on the former.

This does not seem like a political equilibrium. 

People will forget about the tradeoffs when it is obvious that kids are still on the networks. The Minister will put the platforms "On Notice!" that they have to do more to close loopholes. 

That pushes the designated platforms to tighten up. More users will face cumbersome checks confirming that they are over the age limits. It will be harder to maintain pseudonymity if those accounts need to be verified with a real ID. 

The more the regime is successful in keeping kids off of the regulated platforms (at cost to adult users), the more that kids will be pushed onto platforms that have not yet been designated. Those platforms will then be designated. Discord. WhatsApp. Various videogames that have chatrooms or that enable chat. 

Compliance burdens continue to rise, except on platforms outside the reach of New Zealand regulators, like 4Chan. 

The stable equilibrium at the end of that? Substantial hassles for users over the age limit and/or the end of pseudonymity, some kids deterred from using platforms, others out on forums that are far worse than where they are now. 

Recall that John Key's ban on pseudoephedrine-based cold medicines remained in place for more than a decade after it was very obvious that it had done nothing to stop meth while inconveniencing everyone with a cold. 

A social media trilemma

Australia has required social media platforms to come up with ways of excluding under-16s.

Chris Luxon has followed suit for New Zealand, backing a proposed Member's Bill that is now in the ballot.

I think the evidence on social media harms for kids is strong enough for parents to keep an eye on things, but not strong enough to justify bans. 

But leaving that aside, suppose you wanted to implement one. 

I think a trilemma applies for any system that puts the obligation on platforms. If you want to set penalties for kids found to be on social media, that trilemma wouldn't apply - but I doubt effective penalties would be credible.

Anyway. The trilemma. Or at least my asserted trilemma. Disprove me by providing a system that does not suffer from at least one of these problems:

1. The system is easily circumvented by those under the legal age. 
2. The system is onerous for those over the legal age.
3. The system means the effective end of social media pseudonymity/privacy.

Consider solutions grounded in zero-knowledge proofs. 

A verifier confirms my credentials are consistent with my being aged 16+. I authorise it to reveal that to anyone providing it with a key that it generates for me. I give that key to my preferred platform. The platform isn't required to disclose that it's Twitter or Facebook or whoever. There's just an API that takes keys and confirms whether the person associated is over the age or not. 

The platform doesn't know the identity associated with the key. The verifier doesn't know which platform has asked about my age. All good, right? 

I'm 16. My 15 year old friend hands me their phone. I log into the verifier on their phone, presenting my credentials. It generates a key. My friend takes back the phone, logs into Twitter, asks it to authorise using that key, and it does. 

Zero-knowledge proofs are great for a lot of purposes but they aren't going to help you much if the person seeking authentication is happy to have someone else take that authentication. 

So we have the first tine of the fork. And a bit of the second tine - there is a burden imposed on every person using the platform, not just those under the age limit. 

Govt says aha! We will require frequent verification challenges or you will not be considered as having taken all reasonable efforts to keep kids off the platform. 

Well, now you're firmly into fork tine 2. It's a recurring hassle for users. 

Maybe the platforms use AI tools to restrict the challenges to those who it thinks might be underaged. Tine 2 then applies to a narrower set of above-age-limit users. It'll be a big hassle for a few years after you pass the age limit. 

Want to make it simpler? Here's an easy way. The platform gives you the option to just upload your driver's licence; it then occasionally takes a picture of your face to make sure that the user is the person who presented the credential. No having to log into other sites, none of that. 

But now we're on tine 3. The end of internet pseudonymity. And the Chinese Government now has everyone's ID from TikTok. 

The legislation as drafted winds up with a mix of all three. Platforms can use whatever method they like for verifying age. And they have a defence against $2 million dollar liability if they provide evidence that they relied on a presented ID that wasn't right.

So it's easy for kids to circumvent - get a friend's ID.

It's a hassle for adults, who all have to provide ID.

And it's the end of internet privacy/pseudonymity, because the system Chris Luxon's endorsed will find it simplest to collect and store everyone's passport or driver's licence. 

And those can always be subpoenaed later, if anyone says anything wrong on the internet. 

Let's ban Mazda Demios and put an end to ram-raids

The post title is obviously stupid, right?

Mazda Demios are pretty common in ram-raids but:

1. Ram raids have started coming down off their peak;
2. People can use all kinds of cars for ram-raids;
3. Most Mazda Demios are not used in ram-raids. Other people drive them too.

Now consider the National Party's proposed "Let's ban disposable vapes and vapes that use non-refillable pods or tanks to put an end to youth vaping" policy.

Disposable vapes are pretty commonly used by youths who vape - more than tanks or pods. But:

1. Youth vaping has stopped increasing (and came down a bit in the most recent Year 10 survey);
2. Youths can use all kinds of devices, not just disposables and non-refillable pods and tanks;
3. Adults use these too. Adults who used them to quit smoking, and who were attracted by the convenience and cost of non-refillable systems. 

The proposed ban is so stupid. 

In late August, I had a column over in the Post on it [ungated here]. I noted the very obvious problems with the proposed ban. The vape systems that are hardest to use would be the only ones left on the market, which will screw things up for adult vapers who can't handle those systems while making it easier for screw-ups to happen. 

The Government will ban vaping products that are more affordable and that are easier to use – for everyone, adults included. The measures seem to be aimed at reducing youth vaping by increasing the cost of vapes. But if the Government wanted to increase the cost of vaping, excise would make more sense than banning specific types of vapes.

Vaping is a lot less risky than smoking, but there are ways for vaping to go wrong. If someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing mixes their own vape fluid in a tank-based system, they could get a higher dose than intended. Or they could experiment with adding things into the mix that should not be there. Or they could let the tank run dry, resulting in overheated coils and potentially noxious fumes.

Self-contained disposable vaping products and pod-based devices avoid those risks. They are designed to avoid hot dry heating coils. The vaping fluid is pre-mixed and cannot be adjusted. But those are the vaping devices that the Government is going to ban.

Let’s say that again. The Government is proposing to ban the safest devices while leaving the potentially riskier ones on the market, and says it is doing this because it wants to protect kids.

The Ministry hadn't yet put up the RIS on the ban. It was fun to read through it - they'd written it before my column, but hadn't released it yet. And they said much the same that I'd said: if you want to target cost, excise or minimum pricing make more sense but there are tradeoffs with that. Banning pods and single-use tanks goes beyond what's needed and will have adverse consequences for adult vapers. 

What did the Ministry say? 

1. Daily vaping has been stable for three years but is high in international perspective;
2. Youths who vape most frequently choose disposables: twice as common as pods, three times as common as tanks)
3. "There is risk that reducing youth access to vapes will lead to higher youth smoking rates"
4. "Actions to reduce youth vaping need to be targeted towards young people and minimise any barriers on adults wanting to access vapes to quit smoking"
5. "While banning disposables may prevent further young people taking up vaping, it may not stop vaping in those cohorts who are already doing it regularly."
6. Existing rules that came into effect end-December ban disposables without removable batteries; this removes most traditional disposables from the market already.
7. Broadening the ban on disposables won't be a material barrier to adults; three quarters of adults use pods and tanks.
8. Cabinet's preferred broad ban brings safety concerns because you're forcing everyone to refill tanks. 
9. "There is also the potential risk that a more comprehensive ban incentivises an illicit market. Whilst not directly comparable, tighter regulation in Australia has seen the rise of a significant illicit market with 87% of Australians who vape reporting sourcing vapes illegally."
10. "accessibility of use for adults who smoke and wish to vape to quit smoking would also be impacted."
11. If the government wants to increase the cost of vapes, excise and/or minimum prices make more sense but have trade-offs when thinking about encouraging adults to shift away from smoked tobacco.

The Ministry preferred the much narrower ban. 

And it's great that they pointed to the risk of illicit market access under a broader ban. Otago's public health people like to pretend that those worries are invented by industry. 

I went through the Ministry's RIS over at Newsroom this week. This will wind up biting National unless they fix it at Select Committee:

And here is where we shift from the measures just being poor policy to also being a political mistake.

Under the previous Labour government, then-health minister Ayesha Verrall had legislated a ban on cigarettes that contain any appreciable amount of nicotine, an annual increase in the age limit for smoking, and reductions in the number of retail outlets allowed to sell cigarettes.

Measures from that legislation had not come into effect by the time of last year’s election. And, to some surprise, the incoming Government’s coalition agreements reversed that legislation while committing the Government to considering a broader range of reduced-harm alternatives to smoking.

Labour strongly opposed the Government’s reversal of its legislation, claiming its legislation was needed to continue the path to Smokefree 2025.

Many ex-smokers use the vaping systems that National is due to ban. Smoking rates could well be increasing again in the lead-up to the 2026 election. If smoking rates are on the rise, Labour will have its choice of rod with which to beat National. It could point to the vaping rules, or to the coalition’s reversal of Verrall’s legislation, or both.

The legislation may provide the Government with a temporary reprieve from parents and teachers worried about youth vaping. But the Ministry of Health’s Regulatory Impact Statement suggests the ban is far broader than is really necessary. If the government does not reconsider its options through the select committee process, it may yet find that bad policy becomes bad politics.

Labour's been curiously silent on this one. 

In other instances in which National set tobacco/nicotine policy that MoH disagreed with, Labour and Radio NZ have been sure it's because National/NZ First are corrupt. Haven't heard from them yet on this one - probably because they're following Napolean's warnings against interfering when an enemy is making a mistake. 

Food waste

There are some areas where it's hard to get a solution without government intervention. Carbon prices, for example. Not saying it's impossible, it's just hard.

There are also plenty of areas where policy is probably wrong and could use advice from a Chief Science Advisor. For example, setting an air quality standard for schools that balances cost of cleaner air against benefits from fewer teachers and kids out sick. Seems important. Naomi Wu's put up interesting stuff on far-UV light. Does the science stack up? What would it cost to put those in schools, if government ordered at scale for every school in the country? Would doing so bend the cost curve and set an example for others to follow?

Little things like that. Might matter. There have been a lot of illness-related school absences, and the government has claimed to be keen on reducing school absences.

The Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor just put out a report on the critical issue of... food waste.

Normally you want to start with whether there's a potential policy problem. 

But every part of the system has strong incentive to avoid food waste.

A cabbage that doesn't make it onto the truck to get to market is money that the farmer doesn't get. Farmers like having money. They will invest in getting food to market up to the point at which getting the next cabbage onto the truck costs more than it's worth. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Farmers have to balance things. They are best placed to do so on their end. Who could know better than they do?

Transport companies that can't get their act together to deliver food in good condition wind up losing customers to those who can. That also means money. Transport companies prefer having money to not having money. They will invest in reducing spoilage up to the point at which the expected costs of doing so are greater than the benefits. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Shipping companies have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Grocers that throw out a lot of spoiled food are throwing away money. They paid for the goods, and get no revenue from the ones they throw out. Grocers like having money. Didn't we just have an inquiry into whether grocers like having money too much? Spoiled food is wasted money. Grocers will invest in reducing spoilage up to the point at which the next dollar invested in it saves less than a dollar's worth of food. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Grocers have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Households that throw away spoiled food are throwing away money. They paid for the food, and don't get to eat it. Households like having edible food and like having money. Don't we regularly hear news stories about people not being able to afford enough food? Spoiled food is wasted money. Households will invest in reducing spoilage and avoiding waste up to the point at which the next dollar's worth of effort in doing so saves less than a dollar's worth of food, as the household values things. Reducing spoilage and waste isn't free. Households have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Spoiled food winds up in a few places. If it's in a household's compost bin, it can result in GHG emissions that aren't priced. But government seems to like composting. If it goes down the waste disposal, it winds up in the city's sludge plant along with human waste. I'm pretty sure those plants are in the ETS. If it goes into the trash can, it winds up at landfill. Landfills pay for their emissions, and have every incentive to reduce those emissions. Some capture and use the captured methane. If it winds up being fed to pets or to livestock, it displaces other feed and needn't be worried about.

And then we get the press release on the PMCSA's report from NZ Food Waste Champions. Where do you even start? 

They want a national food waste strategy with Targets! and Structures! and Systems! and Mechanisms!. 

The recommendations delivered to the Government include the need for a national food loss and waste strategic action plan, a reduction target, and structures and systems to empower stakeholders to act on them; mechanisms for ensuring more New Zealand-specific reliable and comprehensive food waste data; better strategies aimed at preventing food loss at  source; and enabling conditions that promote food rescue and upcycling to ensure edible food is never treated as waste.

The report gives a bullet-point list of first steps in preventing food losses in production. One of them was "exploring the potential of cooperative business models to improve farmers' market power." 

It is ...not obvious... why a coop would be preferable or how market power enters into any of this. The report seems to worry that buyers with market power can insist on high standards for delivered food, resulting in diversion of 'nutritious food' (ie potentially unpalatable to their customers, but still edible, and could be on-sold to Wonky Box) away from tables. There seems little consideration of that high standards by grocers might encourage producer practices that avoid bruised fruit that has a shorter shelf-life. 

There was one sensible bit in the press release.  

Dawson cites food packaging decisions as an example. “Moving to more sustainable packaging solutions is important, but what if that packaging means the food inside has a shorter shelf-life, which leads to higher levels of waste with greater levels of emissions?”

If grocers have chosen those options because consumers want them, they've made the balancing. If consumers want dumb-forms of packaging because they falsely believe those versions are somehow better for the environment, then maybe government could decide to run fewer anti-plastics campaigns. If grocers have chosen those options either because compelled by regulation or under threat of regulation if they do not, or because of misguided government-sponsored messaging around sustainability, then government has skewed the balance and done harm. Regulation doesn't do the comprehensive balancing that grocers would otherwise do. 

Similarly, the report recommends evaluating the Grocery Supply Code on "trade term driven food loss and waste." If the regulator sets supply terms that aren't what willing parties would contract to on their own, there's again the risk that government has skewed the balance and done harm. Regulation doesn't do the comprehensive balancing that grocers and suppliers discover through negotiation. 

Highlighting how regulatory mandates can inadvertently create waste is great. It's the kind of thing a new Ministry for Regulation could be doing. 

Another potential area for investigation - not sure whether it's in the report, though - would be the darned restrictions against building things on Precious Agricultural Land. Where those things can include restrictions against putting processing facilities on that land, they wind up requiring that food be trucked farther away before processing, which increases damage and waste. It's one of the things that National promised to look into; the restrictions on use of agricultural land are entirely a government-caused problem.  

The rest seems madness.

They apparently wrote four reports on this stuff. In this government budget situation. And with rather more important areas where scientific advice could improve government policy where there is an actual policy problem. With 500 "experts and stakeholders across the motu" having had to spend time on it. 

It all does make one wonder about waste-reduction.

The Uncompetitive Urban Land Markets Theory of Everything

The Housing Theory of Everything has one of those wonderful self-explanatory titles. A good title matters. The recent and thorough essay explains how the anglosphere’s unnecessarily expensive housing affects, well, everything. Or at least almost everything.

Zoning makes it too hard to build houses where people want to build. Urban containment policies block new subdivisions, so downtown land no longer competes with land further out for developers’ attention and for residents. Land prices then inflate across the whole urban land market. Zoning that blocks new townhouses and apartment towers in places where people want to live further worsens scarcity and affordability.

It's at the root of a host of pathologies.

People aren’t left with much to live on after housing costs; inadequate housing causes misery.

The most productive cities could be even more productive if more people were allowed to live near each other. Bans on density are then taxes on productivity improvement, with existing landowners reaping the rewards. Those bans also make it harder than it should be to reduce carbon emissions.

The essay is superb. And it has been influential.

I’ve heard it cited by both Labour and National MPs, which shouldn’t be surprising as it explains a whole lot about New Zealand.

Uncompetitive urban land markets are at the core of the problem. Current practice requires council plans to demonstrate that they have zoned for about twenty percent more housing supply than expected demand. But expected demand will depend on whether housing is affordable, and tight zoning means unaffordable housing. 

Me over in Newsroom this week. 

I riff on a chat I'd had with Kevin Counsell on our podcast series about the economic consultancy reports that developers have to put up showing that there's massive excess demand if they want to get a building consent. 

A new supermarket then has to prove that there is so much excess demand that the new supermarket will not impinge on existing competitors’ viability.

And maybe that kind of outcome sounds great to the kinds of people who get involved in town planning. There’s already a supermarket, why should there be another one unless there’s enough customers for it?

The result is the neutering of competition, and substantial harm to consumers. If an existing business is seriously underperforming, a new entrant provides a service by driving it out of business. Even the threat of that kind of entry provides competitive discipline.

However, in New Zealand, that kind of entry would have a hard time getting a resource consent. The government likes to wring its hands about poor productivity performance while, at the very same time, making it almost impossible for new competitors to drive unproductive incumbents out of business.

Last week, I chatted with NERA director Kevin Counsell for the Initiative’s podcast series. When councils require evidence that a new development provides overwhelming benefits, someone has to write the economic analysis. Counsell writes a lot of the reports demonstrating whether there would be sufficient demand.

It isn’t just supermarkets. Consider potential entrants who need land at the edges of town.

In 2022, the government set a National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land. That statement sets a very high hurdle if anyone wants to do anything other than farming on the 14% of the country that is classified in the top three soil categories.

Most of that protected land is dairy and sheep paddocks. Converting it to any other use requires proving a substantial benefit from that conversion.

Counsell has been working on a proposed new industrial park outside of Morrinsville. The National Policy Statement on Highly Productive Land requires that there be substantial benefit before anyone can build anything on a paddock.

How can you demonstrate substantial benefit? You have to prove that there is huge demand for the new use. The dynamic benefits of competition in forcing everyone to strengthen their game aren’t enough. They would be harder to prove in any case. Entrants wind up having to show that there is excess demand given current supply.

The effect is harshly anticompetitive. If a group of existing businesses organised in a smoke-filled room to block a new competitor’s entry, they could face criminal cartel prosecution. But resource management provides even stronger protection against competition whenever resource consents are required.

I titled this column ‘The Uncompetitive Urban Land Markets Theory of Everything’, but it’s never easy to tell whether a columnist’s draft headline will survive. The uncompetitive urban land markets theory of everything subsumes the housing theory of everything. Just about everything wrong in housing is downstream of uncompetitive urban land markets. But the same processes that block new housing also block new supermarkets, new commercial premises and new industrial parks. 

Go listen to the podcast. Our resource consenting systems entrench anticompetitive effects by making it difficult to set a new competitor unless the incumbent's existing rents are above a threshold, and dynamic Schumpeterian competition is largely blocked. 

Maybe, just maybe, if the government is worried that NZ markets are often less competitive than they'd like, and if they're also worried that the country's less productive than it should be, it could have a look at this?

Maybe would-be competitors shouldn't have to produce reports like this?

I swear a good third of government activity is creating giant problems, not noticing that they caused the problem, then running endless inquiries about the consequences. 

Canadian cautionary tales

My column in the weekend Dom went through Canada's messes in trying to make Google and Facebook subsidise Canadian newspapers. 

The Canadian Government passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act. And now, Canadians wanting to link to a news story on Facebook see this notice instead.

Earlier this week, I interviewed the University of Ottawa’s Professor Michael Geist about the problem. He’s the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law and has been following C-18 more closely than anyone.

The New Zealand Initiative · Podcast: Media funding and regulation

Bill C-18 requires Facebook to pay whenever a user puts up a link to a news site. It is not a cost that Facebook can easily control or predict. It brings potentially unbounded liability.

News links are not particularly valuable to Facebook. If anything, links to news stories encourage users to click away from Facebook rather than stay on the site scrolling through pictures of relatives’ pets and children, and seeing ads delivered through Facebook while they’re there.

Facebook provided plenty of warning that they'd sooner stop allowing user links to news on their platform than be subject to unpredictable and potentially very large payments for allowing such links. 

Willie Jackson says the NZ government will have legislation in the background in case Google and Facebook don't fork over enough money to NZ media companies. It would go to arbitration. 

Listen to his interview, above-linked, and tell me this isn't a tin-pot shake-down. There can be defensible public-goods arguments for subsidising news production, but I just can't see why that ought to be funded by some tax or shake-down of tech companies.  

It sounded like he figures that Google fronting up $50 million might cover it. Who knows. 

But threat of going to arbitration with unknowable potential liability is what's had Meta pull news links in Canada. Listen to my chat with Michael Geist on it, or read his substacks. 

From my column again:

Finally, on August 1, Facebook began pulling the plug. Canadian Facebook users will no longer see news links and content. It affects not just Canadian news sites but also international news for Canadian readers, because the Online News Act can also be read as requiring payment for links to international sites too.

The big newspapers are getting exactly what they asked for. They thought that Facebook was stealing from them by linking. It’s always been nonsense – even the report commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage found that “digital platforms provide considerable commercial benefits to news firms”.

But, like Trump, they’d convinced themselves that they could have something for nothing. They could have media funding and make Big Tech pay for it. And it’s worked out about as well as Trumps’s wall.

Professor Geist explained that some of the biggest losers from Bill C-18 have been small independent news sites that have relied on links from Facebook for traffic.

I hope that our Minister for Broadcasting and Media, Willie Jackson, is paying attention to Canada’s cautionary tale.

Extorting payments from platforms to meet the Government’s news funding objectives isn’t just thuggish. It also doesn’t work.

 Will look forward to seeing the eventual legislation...

Stupid government tricks

Before we get to the latest from Energy News, a few aide memoires.

1. The NZ Govt, in 2020, declared a Climate Emergency
2. The NZ Govt is holding to a 100% renewable electricity target, despite being advised that the last couple percent are impossibly expensive and will hold back progress toward Net Zero by making electricity way too expensive. 
3. The NZ Govt set policy to prevent 'highly productive soils' from being put to other use. Submissions emphasizing that this mostly prevented conversion of dairy paddocks were ignored. 
4. The NZ Govt really doesn't like dairying on the Canterbury plains. It isn't just the methane, it's also the effects on aquifers and river quality. 

Putting all of that together, you'd think that one of the very best things that anybody could do would be to take a dairy paddock and turn it into a solar or wind farm. That it would be the kind of thing that the government would be just throwing cash at, even though there's no need to do so. 

Right?

And now, the latest from Energy News. 

Selwyn solar project declined consent

Jacob McSweeny - Wed, 5 Apr 2023

The Kea X site in Brookside

A major solar farm proposed in Canterbury has fallen foul of new planning rules designed to protect productive land.

Selwyn District Council’s appointed commissioner Anthony Hughes-Johnson KC declined Kea X’s application for resource consent for a 160 megawatt solar farm on the basis it should have been publicly notified but wasn’t.

Hughes-Johnson says given the size of the land – 258 hectares – and that it was highly productive with good soils, the consent application should have been open to more public scrutiny.

“I have formed the view that there is a wider effect which requires consideration, namely the effect on the district and the region of the loss of the opportunity for full productivity as a substantial area of land over an indefinite term,” he says.

Kea X – owned by parent company Kea Energy – wants to build a 160 MW solar farm in three stages across 258 hectares of rural farmland about 16 km southwest of Rolleston.

The company hoped it would launch stage one of the development – which would have generated 13.7 MW – this year. The second and third stages were expected in 2024 and 2025.

Managing director Campbell McMath says he’s not sure how the decision will affect those timelines, but the company will try again for the consent.

If you read the whole thing, you'll see that the land is currently being used as dairy paddock. The National Policy Statement on highly productive land gets cited in the decision. Remember that NPS-HPL mostly protects dairy paddocks. 

They'll try again for the consent, but it'll be a more drawn-out process. 

Government is just the word we use for the things we choose to do together. Like blocking the conversion of a dairy paddock on the nitrate-rich Canterbury Plains into a solar farm in a climate crisis.

Daft idea of the day

Without anyone planning it, Paris gets fed. And so does Auckland.

Not good enough for some people. 

There's demand for a national food strategy. 

It seems completely unnecessary. And ludicrous. 

If you think that poor people cannot afford nice things, there are a couple useful things you can do. Most substantially, finally fixing housing would bring down living costs. But if that didn't solve things entirely, giving poor people money lets them decide what to do with it - without screwing up the rest of the food system. 

Just look at this mess. 

This has been the state of the country's food system since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and experts are calling for a national food plan to help increase food security.

So what is a national food plan?

A national food plan is a policy that would guide food-related decisions and actions in the country.

It is an approach to understanding and addressing issues within food systems and a plan for making decisions around food.

Who would make the national food plan?

Iain Lees-Galloway of Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance (AFRA) said ideally a food plan would be developed by all stakeholders including producers, manufacturers, retailers, food rescue and relief organisations, welfare organisations, environmental organisations, and others.

“They can bring all the various interests together and have the power to see it implemented,” he said.

It would then be led by the Government.

"Increasing food security and reducing food waste should be just as important as growing the value of our food industry. A food plan could set out that vision and present a roadmap for how we could get there,” he said.

Chief executive of Eat New Zealand, Angela Clifford, said ideally the plan would embrace treaty obligations and reflect te ao Māori.

“It should be co-designed by all participants in the food system including farmers, fishers and eaters. It should be run by a collaboration between government, industry and community.”

Go back and count the buzzwords. Then go back and tell me if you can figure out what precisely they're proposing. The buzzword-to-actual-content ratio is infinite. Not a good sign. 

I'm just glad it's being proposed now rather than last year.

A year ago, Ardern would have appointed Rob Campbell to Chair the thing before anyone had worked out details.

Now, the Hipkins-led government's trying to get rid of some of the costly unworkable stuff Ardern loaded them with and won't be keen to take on new nonsense. 

But how much would setting this up cost taxpayers?

This really depended on the final design of the plan, Clifford said.

“The real question is the cost of not implementing a plan. The current situation leaves us hungry, unwell and ecologically diminished. That’s its true cost.

“All it takes is government will and re-alignment towards our domestic food system. Given it’s an election year I would fully expect political parties to have a food security plan as part of their offering to voters. Hungry people do not make happy citizens.”

All it takes is government will, people. And clicking its heels together three times while wishing really really hard.  

Breaking the internet

Google News is getting pared back in Canada in response to Canadian legislation that would force platforms to pay news platforms for links.

Remember that one of the founding principles of the web, right at the start, is that linking is free. People can put up paywalls if they want. They can set robots.txt to block indexing. But you can't charge somebody just for linking to you.

Canadian media platforms, like failing New Zealand media platforms, want to put a link tax on platforms.

So they're getting fewer links to Canadian news. At least as a test, so the platform's ready if Canada passes the legislation. 

The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories.

I still think this is extortion. And the right response to an extortionist is not to pay. 

Me on this stuff from 2021... 

Cost of living absurdities

Peaches come from a can.

They were put there by a man.

In some factory in Greece.

When they made their little way

out to brighten a Kiwi’s day,

they got hit with a 34% punitive anti-dumping duty.

Prime Minister Hipkins made the cost of living the government’s number one priority. So I checked which anti-dumping duties are still in place.

Anti-dumping duties rarely make sense. The theory is that a foreign company will sell here, below cost, for long enough to drive Kiwi competitors out of business, and then jack up prices. 

It’s more than a bit bonkers. Consider coated steel from Korea – a kind of steel used in roofing. From 1 January this year, imports from one Korean company were hit with a renewed 12.6% punitive tariff, and two other Korean companies are subject to smaller tariffs. 

Under anti-dumping theory, they were selling steel here below cost to drive the Kiwis out of the market, so they could profit when those Kiwi competitors went under. But a quick Google search finds 998 suppliers of the stuff across 55 countries. The 997 other suppliers would be the ones to benefit. 

And, of course, if it really were being sold here below cost, anyone, including Kiwi steel producers, could put up a shed and store tonnes of it for later resale. 

Inflation is high and the government says we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, with groceries and building materials front and centre. But those Korean companies’ roofing steel, along with galvanised wire from Malaysia and China, are hit with anti-dumping duties. So you’re protected from affordable building products. Doesn’t it warm your heart? Tariffs are love. 

And consider the peaches. Everyone loves canned peaches. The '90s band The Presidents of the United States of America even wrote a song about them. I ripped it off to lead this post. 

In May last year, the Government reimposed antidumping duties on preserved peaches from Spain. In December, they started investigating Chinese peaches. And the peaches from Greece? 34% duty. 

Meanwhile, the Commerce Commission’s been investigating why groceries and building materials are so expensive. And the government is subsidising petrol while taxing peaches. 

So I’ll end with another bit of theft from the Presidents. 

Government lingered last in line for brains

And the one that it got was sorta rotten and insane.

Precious agricultural land

Radio New Zealand provides an apologia for the government's National Policy Statement on High-Value Soils. 

It seems pretty emblematic of broader problems at the public broadcaster. 

It isn't that they're Labour party-partisan, or at least not generally. It's that they're so ideologically uniform, deeply sharing a Labour/Green consensus view of the world, that it often doesn't occur to them that there are contrary views out there. 

This one's a half-hour interview with a soil scientist on the importance of highly productive soils and, consequently, the merits of regulations preventing building on them. 

No sense of the trade-offs involved. Very minor discussion of that housing matters, but people can build houses elsewhere. The heritage people say the same thing. And the character area people. And the viewshaft people. And when each group's view of the sacred and inviolable gets turned into policy, you can't build anything anywhere.

Here's what Treasury had had to say on the draft National Policy Statement. I'm still waiting on my OIA request for Treasury's work on the current version. 

No account of substantial losses from uncompetitive urban land markets

• Protecting LUC 1, 2, 3 land would substantially reduce land supply required to enable competitive urban land markets, and bring land prices down to marginal opportunity cost. For an example of the extent of land on which this policy would potentially restrict development, see the first map of Hamilton below, and to a lesser degree the second map. Although the NPS-HPS would not strictly prohibit development, it could severely curtail it by creating substantial transaction costs and uncertainty about planning permission. Absolute economic impacts can result even when policy makers didn’t intend for the policy to be implemented absolutely. Economic investment can be highly sensitive to uncertainty⁴, especially in relation to planning permission and the mind-sets towards growth and development by regulators.


• The excessive cost of urban land (perhaps in the order of $600 billion nationally) is a key national challenge, and the NPS-HPL appears likely to exacerbate this, which would undermine the achievement of the central government’s primary objective for the Urban Growth Agenda to “improve housing affordability, underpinned by affordable urban land”. 

Nobody who listened to The Detail on this one would have any inkling about these problems. 

Or that it mainly protects dairy land, or that the value of ag output on an average bit of land equivalent to an urban lot is on the order of $25. You're banning a house to protect $25 worth of produce per year. Even if you double that or triple it to account for streets and parks and stuff, does it make any kind of sense?

The Wellness Regime

The excellent NZ series Creamerie imagined a future New Zealand in which the Wellness People had truly taken over. It was more than a little dystopic.

The Wellness People really have taken over policy though. Sadly, Treasury led the corruption here. And, as cancers do, it spread.

Wellington Council has, time and again, proven to be among the more incompetent of the country's councils. The water pipes keep breaking. The Mayor participates in protests against building housing, in the middle of a giant housing shortage. Let's Get Wellington Moving seems to be about everything other than enabling transport. They say it's about reducing transport emissions, but transport is in the ETS. It can't affect the country's greenhouse gas emissions. 

Wellington Council put up its own economic wellbeing strategy. Because of course it did. 

It's about as good as you'd expect. 

They want central government to provide more subsidies to the local film industry. Wellness demands it. I wonder whether Treasury could find a way of supporting film subsidies under its rather flexible Living Standards Framework. 

My column for the Dom this week. A bottom line:

Until Wellington is able to get things right in the core traditional areas of council responsibility, improving economic wellbeing is going to be a tough job.

I'd also put in a submission on the blasted thing.  

In summary, we submit:

• Council should focus first on ensuring it is competently and cost-effectively delivering core council services before expanding into other policy areas that are more traditionally handled by central government;

• Council must fundamentally reconsider how it thinks about carbon emissions. Urban emissions are covered by the Emissions Trading Scheme. Council action in seeking to limit local emissions may have no effect at all on national-level emissions. But Council has a critical role in facilitating its residents’ responses to rising carbon prices in the Emissions Trading Scheme;

• Rather than lobby central government for measures like subsidies for the local film industry, it should lobby central government to provide Council with the tools it needs to enable urban growth. In particular, better infrastructure financing options would let Council do a lot to improve the whole city – but require central government’s assistance. Housing and the infrastructure required to support it are far too central to wellbeing to see so little attention in this plan.

Fixing supermarkets with Gosplan

Somebody at Radio New Zealand really really hates the supermarkets, has absolutely no clue about economics, or both. 

Last year, they'd put up a pretty daft news story quoting some Otago marketing lecturer on how supermarkets should be regulated as public utilities. It's dumb off the start; there's no natural monopoly component here, nothing suggesting subadditivity in costs. He wanted rate of return regulation. 

Whoever wrote the piece for RNZ didn't sign it. 

This week, they decided to syndicate a column from The Conversation, from the same marketing lecturer, again pitching that the supermarkets be regulated as public utilities.

As public utilities, individual supermarket sites should only be allowed to charge a single fixed and publicly stated margin on the goods they sell. This is a novel requirement, but it is core to the process of regulating a supermarket as a utility.

...

Producers and suppliers should not be overlooked in this new regulatory regime. The concentration of wholesalers allows large businesses to dominate non-retail food sectors such as restaurants.

The primary outcome of this - a lack of difference between supermarket retail and wholesale prices for food products - is noted in the Commerce Commission's materials.

Wholesalers should not be allowed to discount products for individual buyers. At the same time, wholesalers should not be allowed to decline service to any buyers at that price unless they can demonstrate that the goods in question are not available and cannot be procured.

Where to start.

A big part of the fight at ComCom was around calculating rates of return. How capital costs get treated matters. How land costs under the supermarkets are counted matters. There are piles of complex lease agreements around those that need to be worked through, and would themselves be endogenous to whatever stupid rule you set to regulate rates of return. 

It isn't straightforward. 

And then this guy wants to run it product-by-product as some kind of mark-up regulation with a fixed mark-up on each good? How's that going to work? Different goods have different turrnover. A foot of shelf-space that turns over three times a day pays for itself differently than a foot of shelf-space that turns over once every three days. 

The policing of this kind of thing would be impossible. If you force a single markup on all products based on the price at which the retailer bought it, you force slow-moving goods off the shelves. If you allow some measure of the cost of shelf-space to enter in, you're going to be chasing your tail forever in policing it. It's just so impossibly stupid.

But Radio New Zealand loves that kind of thing. The editor who picked this one longs for Gosplan. 

Wellington water is a regulated utility. Who'd look at that and say, "Wow. If only the supermarkets were every bit as good."

Triage

Not enough hours in the day.

The government is consulting on a pile of ways of making the country a worse place.

A container deposit scheme that would have us all hauling empty bottles to machines in supermarket parking lots to get $0.20 deposits back, rather than having them collected in our regular recycling, backed by a report claiming that Kiwis would get $912 million in intangible benefits from willingness to pay for that more trash is recycled. I put a lot of value on not having to haul trash around in the car, but the report doesn't care much about that. I'll wind up just paying the couple hundred bucks a year in forgone deposits. On the plus side, while I currently would never litter, the new scheme would mean that starting littering would provide some kid an opportunity to earn $0.20 per bottle. Maybe I should start. I'm a charitable guy. 

A reimagining of the entire research funding system that seems more concerned about addressing ethnic and cultural concerns than about science. It looks like it was written in a rush. It's going to wind up breaking things. It's hard to know where even to start on this one.  

Breaking the Road User Charging system by trying to make it also deal with climate change, when transport emissions are already in the ETS and covered by carbon charges in fuel.

The Commerce Commission is entertaining suggestions from the media companies that they should be able to collectively bargain with Google about their inclusion in search results. Submissions closed in December; I don't think I had time to hit that one except in a column. The Ministry for Culture and Heritage seems to love the idea, but seem to be ignoring the report they'd commissioned that concluded there was no strong case for following Australian approaches. 

Will be sure to stock up on drink before the stupid container scheme comes in. Expect I'll need more of it. 

Solutions in search of problems

Proper policy starts with problem definition. Define the problem that needs to be solved, establish that it really is a problem, assess alternatives including the option of just leaving things be, and go from there.

If you start instead with a solution, you then have to go looking for problems. 

And so we come to New Zealand Post's new fleet of electric vehicles. 

Stuff reports that NZ Post is shifting to electric vans. And that could be a great move - they're currently not paying road user charges, and could work out to be a bargain for the state-owned delivery company. I certainly wouldn't second-guess that commercial decision. 

NZ Post isn't a small shop. They've recently invested $170m in processing infrastructure. 

But to get the vans, they're going through another state-owned outfit. NZ Green Investment Finance. Here's how they describe themselves.

New Zealand Green Investment Finance is a green investment bank established by the New Zealand Government to accelerate investment that can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in New Zealand.

NZ Post is working with NZ Green Investment Finance to fund the fleet vehicle purchase though a complicated lease plan. 

The state-owned postal service and the state-owned green finance investor will each put up $10 million through Sustainable Fleet Finance to provide attractive and competitive finance for electric vans or low-emission vehicles. Sustainable Fleet Finance is majority owned by NZ Green Investment Finance.

The investment will initially be used to finance an order for 60 Mercedes eVito panel vans for the NZ Post fleet which will arrive in the second half of 2022. Under a four-year tiered lease plan, the vehicles will first be leased by NZ Post and then offered by Sustainable Fleet Finance to NZ Post’s delivery contractors at more affordable rates as second and third owners.

Ok. So one SOE with the implicit backing of the Crown against losses, and with a balance sheet big enough to handle fleet renewal, is running financing for fleet renewal through a finance company part-owned by another government outfit, all aimed at preventing 7.8 tonnes of emissions per diesel van per year.

Every tonne of which is already covered by the ETS, which has a binding cap.

And the annual value of the emission reduction, per vehicle, is about $500. 

So if NZ Post, backed by NZ Green Investment Finance, fails to purchase 8 carbon credits per vehicle per year, somebody else will buy the credits instead. 

I've occasionally heard arguments around credit market barriers that might be some kind of market failure. They seem ridiculous when there are plenty of non-government outfits that will finance your car for you, whether privately or for a company fleet. There's a whole industry association of the outfits that finance peoples' cars for them. And EVs being expensive isn't a market failure. They're just expensive. 

Using a government-backed investment fund to finance vehicle purchases by an SOE that doesn't have obvious barriers against just buying its own vans - that's the kind of mess you get when you set up a policy without really thinking through the problem you're trying to solve. 

This place is rapidly losing its "Outside of the Asylum" status. At least they haven't yet gone for anything as absolutely stupid as cash for clunkers. 

Regional naming rights

Appellation d'origine contrôlée rules make some kind of sense when they prevent what might otherwise amount to false advertising because the geographic name is so intertwined with the product. 

It does seem to be getting a bit out of hand.

The European Commission recently granted exclusive use of the term 'halloumi' within Europe to cheesemakers from Cyprus, using the intellectual property rights system called "geographical indications".

The move to register halloumi follows behind the recent registrations of cheeses like havarti.

... 

In its Free Trade Agreement negotations with New Zealand, the EU is looking protect 2200 of its food and beverage GI's, including well known cheeses such as feta, gruyere and gorgonzola.

What other name are you supposed to give those cheese styles? Will somebody wind up deciding that nobody can use the word cheddar unless the cheese comes from a small village in Somerset? 

I suppose Kiwi cheesemakers could start just adding NZ to all the names, so we'd have halloumiNZ, havartiNZ, fetaNZ, and gruyeNZ. 

Maybe we could claim gorgoNZola as our own unless the Italians start referring to their own product as Chinese Gooseberry rather than Kiwifruit? It seems a lot more likely that someone would mistake something labelled Kiwifruit as being from NZ than that someone would mistake a local feta as really being from wherever the Europeans think feta is from. I have no clue where any of those cheeses are meant to be from, and I bet you don't either unless you google it. 

What a ridiculous system. 

"You can't call yourselves hip-hop artists unless you were born and trained in the hip-hop region of America. You have to call yourself something else. Oh, and K-pop has to change its name too because everyone knows pop music only comes from the 3 square block pop region of Los Angeles and it could be confusing to complete fricking idiots. But whatever they change their name to, nobody else in the world can ever use that name either. Only artists from Gangnam. We're going to have infinite numbers of names for each thing in the world, and it will be great."

I hate that accepting this nonsense seems required if NZ wants to be able to export to Europe.