Disgraceful

This is absolutely not how a member of a government that is trying to defend the World Trading Organisation's rules-based framework should be behaving. 

From Question Period late yesterday:

David Seymour: Has the Minister had advice in any form that some of his provincial growth fund expenditure may have to be reported to the World Trade Organization as it qualifies as agricultural subsidies—the first time New Zealand would have reported such subsidies in 25 years?

Hon SHANE JONES: Yes. Naturally, advice has been sought from the foreign affairs department. However, given that the adjudication and the appeals of so-said international trade body are in a state of disarray, I'm not bothered by that at all.

The WTO is under substantial threat. New Zealand desperately needs the continuation of a strong rules-based trading system.

It is bad enough that Shane Jones's provincial growth fund threatens New Zealand's subsidy-free agricultural system. But saying, effectively, that he doesn't care what the WTO thinks because it's useless - that completely undermines everything Minister Parker has been working for in our international trade positioning.

Update: I'd caught this on Morning Report this morning, but couldn't remember at what point in the broadcast. They've helpfully pointed me to it. Radio NZ also reports that Shane Jones's outfit had to change a press release about a loan to Taranaki Pine; a reference to the loan helping to make the factory competitive was removed.

But if that was part of the reason for providing the loan, whether or not it's mentioned in the press release should be irrelevant to whether it's something that gets us in trouble with WTO.

Labour needs to keep a closer eye on what its coalition partner is up to here. They are putting too much at risk.

Just use the darned ETS

If the government had just used the freaking ETS to reduce emissions rather than banning the natural gas industry in Taranaki, or subsidising hydrogen production, we wouldn't be seeing this kind of stupidity.

The linked RNZ story suggests the government's provincial growth fund was used to subsidise development of hydrogen options for heavy vehicles, and that that led to the proposal to subsidise a much bigger hydrogen plant in Taranaki - but that the Taranaki gas ban means too uncertain a supply of the raw material for hydrogen production. So that presumably means higher equilibrium subsidies are needed to attract the thing, to compensate for the stupid gas ban.

I have no clue whether it would have made sense to build hydrogen plants in Taranaki in the absence of the gas ban. I worry about Shane Jones engaging in the kind of winner-picking that might have even made Joyce blush. I expect the best folks to assess whether it makes sense to build hydrogen plants in Taranaki are the investors whose money would be on the line.

But if it did make sense, the gas ban makes it pretty unlikely anybody would decide to make a pile of costly infrastructure investments that depend on a reliable source of gas.

Under my preferred "Just use the freaking ETS and otherwise get out of the way" alternative, there wouldn't be a subsidy for hydrogen plants but hydrogen plants would have a lower effective cost of using natural gas because they wouldn't have to be purchasing ETS credits for GHG emissions, presuming that the stories of carbon dioxide capture are accurate.

And if the hydrogen plant stacked up without subsidy, then we've just found another way that the gas ban can wind up increasing emissions relative to the counterfactual.

GE Time

Radio NZ has a good summary of the case for allowing genetically modified plants and crops:

Parts of the farming community say they should have choice over whether to use GMOs or not.

But others, including the Minister for the Environment David Parker, argue there is no need to jump the gun on introducing GMOs into the environment.

In his last report as Chief Science Advisor for the prime minister, Sir Peter Gluckman has laid out the ways genetic modification or gene editing can benefit the agricultural sector with pasture management and emissions.

"New Zealand scientists have developed promising forages using genetic technologies that could be used to make major progress through higher energy, lipid rich rye grasses which are now in field trials in the United States.

We still don't have an answer to this question:

This matters.

New Zealand's agricultural sector could have a much-reduced carbon footprint if the government would let them use better grasses.

Do the Greens care more about global warming, or about banning GE? https://t.co/6kHGgdrmn0

— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) September 11, 2018

I suggest that, as part of any agricultural accession into the ETS, the Crown be liable for any additional costs falling on farmers because of the ban on using GE pastoral systems.

Trivialising vocabulary

A teacher provides a defence of not expecting kids to know the word trivial, and not using hard words like trivial on NCEA exams. 

And yet the incidence of an apparently innocuous word causing such consternation amongst exam candidates speaks to a number of interesting issues. The first is how quickly language changes, and how difficult it is to pick up these changes when they are intergenerational. The people setting the exam have no doubt been surprised that the word ‘trivial’ is not widely recognised by the young. So was I. I had no idea it had slipped out of common usage. But then I teach mathematics and have an interest in philosophy and trivial has an important meaning in both those fields. Even if I didn’t, I grew up in a world where the word was often used. I also grew up in the countryside and so as a child knew the difference between a cow, a heifer and a steer. None of these things speak to the general state of my vocabulary, just the context in which it was acquired.

Speaking to a history teacher following the exam, I was interested to hear that the problem with ‘trivial’ was not confined to struggling students, but affected candidates of all abilities. Top students were caught out because the examiners did not realise a word was no longer widely understood. Students were able to make guesses based on the usages they were familiar with, specifically trivia quizzes of various kinds. So some students assumed that trivial meant highly detailed and specific. And fair enough too – the questions in Trivial Pursuit are rarely trivial in the way implied by the quote in the exam. So it might be less a case that students don’t know what trivial means, and more a case that the meaning of the word trivial is changing.

I hadn't known that trivial had fallen out of common usage. If it has, it's been in the last decade. Google ngrams run through 2008. The decline in word usage since the 70s has looked fairly trivial.


A sympathetic and compassionate future policy would restrict all NCEA exams, including those for final-year students in history, to use only words that show up on the list of the 3000 most common words in the English language.

Scripts using words beyond the ones on that list should be downgraded. Not only does the use of bigger words make those of more limited vocabulary feel bad, but we should also expect that, when NCEA achieves everything it is destined to achieve, the graders themselves will only know 3000 words.

Getting down to the list of 3000 may take some time. But the Eleventh Edition NCEA Dictionary will finally have whipped the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. It will have cut the language down to the bone. There is great wastage in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. If you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them?

More than trivial

Despair:

Students sitting the NZQA Level 3 History causes and consequences paper on Wednesday were confronted with the word in a quote from Julius Caesar: "Events of importance are the result of trivial causes."

Students were asked to analyse the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with Caesar, with reference to the causes and consequences of a historical event.

...

Some of his peers thought trivial meant "significant", he said.

"Trivial isn't a word that you hear too frequently, especially not if you're in Year 13," he said.

A definition of the word should have been included in the exam, he said.

Chairman of the New Zealand History Teachers' Association, Graeme Ball, agreed.

He called the exam a "little bit of a snafu" on the part of NZQA, and said the language used in questions should be "accessible to all".

The exam was not testing comprehension, so it was "unfair" to make that part of the assessment, he said. 

New Zealand's schools are giving diplomas to illiterates. Knowing the word trivial should be trivial.

Try using it in a sentence. The failures in New Zealand's education system are more than trivial.

Uplifting?

I'm not sure quite what I was expecting out of NZ First's Regional Growth Fund, but it wasn't this. From Richard Harman's Politik newsletter (well worth the subscription):

Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has announced Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) support for a new 560-tonne travel lift for Oceania Marine Group. The new lift will better serve the growing demand for refit and building services of workboats and superyachts and will help fund civil works at South Shipyard – including new piers, hardstand reinforcement and other works. "The PGF will support this important investment with a loan of up to $4.8 million, and further discussions are taking place on terms and conditions” Shane Jones said.   

I'd thought the fund was for public infrastructure stuff that might enable regional growth, and maybe for helping out councils having to shell out for facilities for tourists who don't spend much in the area.

I don't get the justification for this one. Why is the government subsidising outfits fixing superyachts? Is there some failure in credit or capital markets that's specific to boats? Why aren't private investors seeing the opportunity and rushing to fund the project? Don't owners of superyachts pay fees for service that could cover the cost of the lift over time?

I hope that due diligence around this stuff is tight....

Bias toward action?

Kiwis so-inclined can petition their Parliament for legislative change. But they cannot petition Parliament to maintain the status quo.

Victoria University's Chris Eichbaum wants the government to ban private fireworks displays.

This is just phenomenal. With this level of support we now have an opportunity to get them issues in front of law makers and to push for the necessary changes https://t.co/Ada1CsW6xv pic.twitter.com/5bpeJgoLym

— Chris Eichbaum (@ChrisEichbaum) November 6, 2018

I kinda like fireworks, so I submitted a petition asking the government to maintain the current rules. I started from Chris's petition, added the word 'not' in a couple spots, listed some of the ways that fireworks are awesome, and submitted it.

A few days later, I got a very apologetic phone call from the Clerk's Office saying that it's only possible to petition Parliament to change a law, not to leave a law as it is. He was exceptionally helpful, listing all the things people could do if government did move to legislate in response to the petition - I already know them, but some folks don't, so that was nice.

And then I got the official email rejecting the petition.



High numbers in support of a petition signal something about the strength of support for the petition, but tell you nothing about the strength of opposition. I suppose it's nice that those opposing petitions don't need to rally the troops to counter-petition every darn thing, but when a government cites the number of letters from school-kids in support of a policy as reason for doing things....