Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's closing of the browser tabs:

• Tons of port workers have been avoiding getting vaccinated. In principle this should have been simple: have public health nurses drive out to the sites and administer it. But it's not been compulsory, antivax stuff has been influential among those workers, and they're probably (and rightly) pissed off with the regular nasal swab test requirements that could have been replaced by saliva testing over seven months ago - which would feed into a strong 'not gonna do whatcha told me' attitude. More results are out on the effectiveness of the Illinois protocol saliva tests - the one that the government doesn't want to use. And, just for fun, a plague ship berthed at Taranaki, where port worker vaccination rates are low. Let's hope we keep getting lucky, despite tapdancing on landmines. Looks now like only 11 of 98 border workers involved in this one had any vaccine. 


• Bernard Hickey has a chat with me and Oliver about Oliver's column last week. The prior link is to his column; the podcast is here. Our Insights newsletter column, reprinted in the Stuff papers, called on the government to extend residence to everyone who has been here with us since last year's March/April lockdowns - as a way of rectifying some of the harm that our immigration system has imposed since then. Oliver, Matt and I chatted about it here as well. 


• We'll be getting proof-of-vaccination that can work as a vaccine passport, but so far only intended for use in international travel. If Covid is ever here circulating, I will be happy to pay a premium to exclusively attend establishments requiring proof-of-vaccination for entry. 


• Damian Grant has a superb column on corporate social responsibility. 


• Union leader Matt McCarten on the merits of not banning speech. I agree with him. 


• The Taxpayers Union points to some odd-looking public health grants. This stuff wouldn't bug me so much if they were also putting appropriate funding into classical public health - contagious disease, vaccination promotion, the usual kinds of stuff that you might expect in the context of a global pandemic. But I could only see two grants in the whole set that seemed to have anything to do with the pandemic, and a third on measles. Just under $900k to try to get an assessment tool gauging barriers to vaccination and $1.2m looking at mucosal delivery for vaccines (not specifically to Covid, but in general). Both of those seem like really good ideas. They're also putting $1.16m toward waning measles immunity - good! But they're also putting $1.2m toward research on alcohol warning labels. It feels like infectious disease is still the poor cousin of whatever public health has more recently turned into. 


• Donal summarizes the Competition conference that was on in Wellington this past weekend. I missed it; these things usually cost an arm-and-a-leg, presumably due to cartel activity by conference organisers in preventing other conferences from emerging. Plus, I was in Christchurch Friday and Saturday teaching Canterbury's MBA students about the Emissions Trading Scheme. The session on three waters regulation would have been excellent.

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies on the closing of a week's worth of browser tabs:

• Hamish Rutherford explains why, despite Keith Ng's insistence that any mildly clever move in a Google Search that gets you something that somebody didn't want you to see is indeed a hack, the inappropriate use of the term kinda matters. Keith now recommends we use the term cyberbadtouch instead of hack - I like it. 


• Environmental monitoring and reporting at a few of our Councils could stand improvement.


• Is there any good reason that the RMA makes it hard to put up new wind farms? When oh When will have a fit-for-purpose RMA?


• The Irish Central Bank's recruitment process for its next Governor cost €70,236. I wonder whether their headhunter talked to any senior economists around town.


• Great piece from Damien Grant at NBR on the coming regulation of the insolvency industry. I'd be using it in my Public Choice class were I still in that world. A snippet:

  ...the Ministry of Economic Development proposed, in 2010, a simple bill allowing the Ministry to ban those who were acting dishonestly from being liquidators.
  
  The industry body at the time, known as INSOL, sought a far more intrusive regulatory model. It has succeeded.
  
  Parliament has adopted a ‘co-regulatory’ regime, where the coercive power of the state is delegated to approved industry bodies who will issue licences to those who want to be insolvency practitioners.
  
  This is a terrible result. In a field with 50 active firms dominated by a handful of large players, the industry will set its own guidelines, decide who can and cannot practice and will investigate complaints against themselves.

• Tom Chivers has a very nice piece reminding everyone of the risks of replacing GDP with dodgy metrics.


• I completely fail to understand a public health establishment that spends all its time campaigning to ban anything with sugar in it while it seems there's zero consequence for ignoring doctor's quarantine advice and flying from Auckland to Christchurch, round-trip, while infectious with the measles. Could the New Zealand airlines at least ban this clown from their flights in future?