Misunderstanding the policy process

Policy development happens through a complex interplay of politicians' directives, civil servants' work, and civil society input. 

Bryce Edwards is director at The Integrity Institute, which has been pretty critical about anyone's involvement in policy processes other than the bureaucracy and anyone considered to not have a financial stake in an outcome. 

Last week, BusinessDesk found the Institute's trust deed. Or, rather, decided it was worth checking over at the Company's Office to see what it says. And the whole document is really weird. Things that ought to be operational decisions for the Director are instead hard-coded into the deed. The rest is a combination of direction to do the obvious and specific targets they want investigated, like going after Transparency International. 

I'd threaded the thing; you can't link directly to a Companies Office filing. 

There's been a fair bit of tu quoque over this. But the best take I think thus far is from Deb Te Kawa. A snip:

Sometimes, those who claim to defend democracy are the ones who misunderstand it most. The Integrity Institute’s recent campaign, ostensibly about exposing undue influence over policy, has revealed something more troubling: a fundamental confusion about how policy advice, participation, and legitimacy actually work in democratic systems.

The policy advisory literature has long since moved past the myth of the neutral bureaucracy. As Craft and Howlett (2012) argue, modern advisory systems are pluralised and layered. Policy advice no longer flows solely from within the state. It emerges through dynamic interaction between political actors, ministerial advisers, public servants, and external stakeholders: including iwi, hapū, academics, commentators, lobbyists, consultants, contractors, industry and community interest groups, and civil society. This is not a breakdown in integrity. It is a shift in how democratic knowledge is produced and contested; a shift that has been underway since 1996, when we began correcting for the distortions of the 1980s’ new public management reforms.

Rather than engage with this shift, the Integrity Institute appears to reject its premise. In targeting Federated Farmers, the Institute frames visible, declared advocacy as inherently suspect. Yet publishing policy platforms, meeting with ministers, or advocating for sector interests is entirely within the bounds of democratic practice. As Craft and Halligan (2020) remind us, robust advisory systems must accommodate both internal and external sources of advice. To treat advocacy as corruption is to misread the core architecture of modern policy-making.

This conflation is not just technically inaccurate. It is democratically dangerous. Legitimacy in policy does not come from insulation. As I have been exploring in the Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays series, and arguing in The Practical State, it comes from contestability, transparency, and deliberative engagement.

Whether it’s iwi asserting rangatiratanga, unions calling for fairer conditions, or academics and researchers offering empirical insight, the presence of diverse voices is a safeguard, and not a threat. As the policy advisory literature insists, multiple advisory channels are vital for balanced decision-making in complex societies.

The real question, then, is not whether influence exists. It always does. The question is: what kind of influence, under what conditions, and with what visibility? The distinction between transparent, procedural engagement and opaque, privileged access is not semantic. It is constitutional. Effective oversight requires more than tracing contacts. It demands a grounded understanding of procedural fairness, institutional independence, and the layered nature of advisory input.

With that particular critique in mind, let's have a look at a different campaign. 

One that Guyon Espiner has been running, on the public dime, at Radio New Zealand, and at RNZ-Newsroom co-production The Detail. 

In his telling, shadowy alcohol industry influence stymied admirable public health efforts to adopt new and stricter Canadian low-risk drinking guidelines.

He's had a lot of airplay on this. If you're reading this in New Zealand, you've been forced to pay for it. 

So what is that shadowy influence?

David Farrar has the correspondence. 

The Brewers Association wrote to Ministry of Health asking for details on a review of the low-risk drinking guidelines. And there was also correspondence on the use of the alcohol levy - a small levy imposed on every bit of alcohol sold, used to fund various harm-reduction efforts. Producer levy schemes tend to have producer involvement. 

The Brewers also pointed out what looked like an error on the Health NZ website (recall that Health NZ is the operational arm, Ministry is policy). They thought that some proposed Canadian guidelines had actually been implemented. 

Health Canada had commissioned a third party to produce revised alcohol guidelines. That was a couple of years ago. Those proposed guidelines have not been adopted or ratified by Health Canada. And two different Ministers of Mental Health and Addictions, in late 2024 and early 2025, have confirmed that the 2011 guidelines remain the ones in place. 

Health NZ thought that Canada had tightened its guidelines and was taking this as basis for tightening ours. 

The Brewers pointed out an error. The Ministry of Health saw that error corrected. And Guyon Espiner deemed the whole thing an example of influence that needs to be stopped. Of course, on his podcast interview with The Detail, he hedges a bit - saying he's only raising questions and noting how interesting it is that a framework convention bars industry discussion with government in the case of tobacco but not for alcohol. Not that he's campaigning to get the framework convention extended to alcohol. 

Let's go back to Deb's piece. 

As Craft and Howlett (2012) argue, modern advisory systems are pluralised and layered. Policy advice no longer flows solely from within the state. It emerges through dynamic interaction between political actors, ministerial advisers, public servants, and external stakeholders: including iwi, hapū, academics, commentators, lobbyists, consultants, contractors, industry and community interest groups, and civil society. This is not a breakdown in integrity. It is a shift in how democratic knowledge is produced and contested;

The Brewers found an error. Min Health made the same mistake Espiner did, potentially based in motivated reasoning - wishing that the Canadians had given NZ an excuse to tighten guidelines here. 

That error was corrected, because we don't stick bureaucrats in towers and ask them to hand down advice from on-high. There is interaction. It is helpful. It makes things suck less. 

Some campaigners, like Edwards, and like Espiner, seem not to like it when that interaction results in policies that they like less. They seem to view it as inherently corrupt. At least Edwards isn't doing it on public funding. 

David Farrar's post with the correspondence went up on the 25th. 

The day before that, I submitted a column to Newsroom on the topic, because I'd first caught this on their site - they co-produce The Detail. I sent it through on Wednesday of last week for my usual slot on Tuesday - earlier than usual, because it was critiquing some of their work and I wanted to give them time with it. 

After asking that I add a lot more detail on the evidence around moderate drinking, they decided not to run it. There was an in-house view that Espiner had sufficiently couched what he'd said on The Detail. Perhaps there was a background worry that publishing a critique would make a likely press council / BSA complaint about The Detail piece more viable; I wouldn't know. 

I brought the piece back to 800 words; it was in Monday's Post as a full-page print piece (and presumably Press etc). An ungated version is here. I confirmed bits of the correspondence with the Brewers Association in the interval. 

The full piece I'd sent to Newsroom is below; it's a lot longer than the version at the Post, in part because they asked me to add a fair bit of content. 

I only saw Deb's piece after all this. But it's been rolling around in my head since then. The policy process really isn't what some of these campaigners seem to wish it were. 

Anyway - the piece that Newsroom declined. I declined to write a substitute piece for them for this week. 

Watching Mediawatch

Massey University's Journalism school put out a survey of the nation's journalists. 

Mediawatch's story on it focuses on gender and ethnic diversity, as well as journalists' reports of taking abuse online, after an opening that casts things this way [updated to insert link that I forgot the first time round...]:

These days, there’s no shortage of the same sort of scepticism – and cynicism – among a group of New Zealanders convinced the media are biased and agenda-driven, even without any firm evidence.  

Cranky claims of pro-government media bias have been amplified by increased public funding of media and journalism under this government, twinned with declining trust in the media and journalists as captured by opinion polls and surveys.

... One startling finding from the latest survey was that when journalists were asked whether "supporting government policy" was part of the role of reporting,10 percent agreed. 

Does that not confirm the suspicions of critics who feel that the media isn't impartial and journalists are often biased?

“There's always going to be journalists that think their role is to change society and advocate for one thing or another," Hollings said. 

"It may be that sometimes that aligns with government policy. But there's a difference between journalists actively propagandising for a particular point of view and doing the ‘watchdog role’ of asking difficult questions about something that's going on.

"They can often be mistaken for having an agenda when their agenda is really to find out what's going on – and not necessarily to push a political party. I think one is sometimes mistaken for the other and it's easy to label a journalist as being an activist who is, in fact, just asking difficult questions which some people don't like."

With that kind of opening, you'd expect that the survey either found no evidence of ideological or partisan bias among journalists, or didn't ask about it. Surely the claims are only 'cranky' if they aren't borne up by the evidence right?

They helpfully link through to the study at least, so you can check for yourself. And here's an interesting chart.  

For some reason, RNZ's Mediawatch decided that this chart, showing that there are more self-identified extreme-left journalists as there are "Hard Right", "Right", and "Mild right" combined, and that "Hard left", all on its own, outnumbers everything to the right of "Middle leftish" by a massive margin, wasn't worth noting. 

Probably just an innocent oversight by the always politically and ideologically neutral team at Mediawatch. 

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?

Morning roundup

Today's closing of the browser tabs is also a bit of an inbox roundup. A lot of these wind up being from BusinessDesk's excellent news summaries.

• Tyler Barugh aims to either be the monopoly supplier of milk to Wellington, or to have Wellington Council abolish its antique and unused century-old milk supply legislation. 
• NZ's natural gas shortage has eased a bit, but there's still risk that industrial users will be asked to curb their production if electricity companies need the stuff. Meanwhile, Red Radio worries that NZ's ban on oil and gas exploration isn't tough enough. 
• The Auditor General isn't happy about how the NZ Govt handed out tourism grants. It looks like there was ample opportunity for dodginess given the lack of process.
• Mastery, then innovation.
• Seventy of some 400ish Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand have signed an open letter wishing that the Royal Society return to favouring science - and noting that more would have signed on except they said they feared reprisals. Something is deeply wrong with the Royal Society. 
• RBNZ is reviewing its monetary policy remit.
• More on the traditional media (ie Murdoch) using government to strong-arm tech platforms. 
• The government continues to ease official Covid restrictions. My personal restrictions remain in place:
• Wear a solid N95 mask when indoors; wear a decent mask (like my Cactus Outfitters one) when outdoors in more crowded spaces;
• Avoid indoor places that attract unmasked people;
• Prefer places that continue to enforce vax passes, as they will discourage riskier people from attending;
• Do not dine or drink indoors unless very sure that the ventilation is very good indeed.

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."

Stupid government tricks

Last night's chat with Bryan Crump on RNZ Nights covered the ComCom supermarket inquiry.

Remember the old Johnny Carson Stupid Pet Tricks bit?

This stuff should be classed as stupid government tricks.

Here's the trick.

First, set a pile of rules that make it neigh-on impossible for new competitors to really set up. If you want to open up a new supermarket chain in New Zealand, just think through how impossible it would be. Not many sites have the right zoning. Of those that are zoned, many will be tied up in covenants preventing them from being supermarkets.

If you find a network of sites that might work, you face impossible-to-gauge months to years of consenting processes before you find out whether you'd be allowed to put a supermarket on the spot. So you can't plan out a distribution network. And remember that consenting processes treat competition as a harm to be mitigated rather than a benefit to be sought. 

And who knows whether the Overseas Investment Office would decide that, because your proposed site is adjacent to a reserve, everything gets additional holdups. 

Small countries with difficult logistics can't set up these kinds of regulatory barriers to entry if they want people to consider opening here.

The whole thing is set up to make it effectively impossible to enter. Maybe that wasn't the intention of anyone along the way, but it's the effect.

So government sets a pile of rules that act in restraint of competition. 

Then it observes that grocery prices are higher than government would like.

So it sics the Commerce Commission onto the supermarkets to run a two-week beat-up of supermarket chief executives about the apparent lack of competition. They didn't haul a single Council Planner over the coals for making it impossible to build a new supermarket. Funny that. 

Government gets to play the hero coming to the rescue, and nobody much notices that there'd have been no monster there to fight in the first place if government hadn't put it there. None of the proposed remedies will help either, except ones that free up entry. That's the underlying problem. Some government-backed KiwiGrocer would fail for exactly the same reason KiwiBuild failed - it didn't address the underlying problem. 

So that's the stupid government trick. Cause a problem in a way that nobody will blame you for, then come charging out with a bunch of nonsense populist purported solutions that draw plaudits from those who neither understand the underlying problem nor care that the proposed solutions won't work. All they care about is the perceived monster-fighting. 

Bit depressing. 

But makes for a fun chat with Crump. You can listen here.  

Three headlines

Maybe RNZ has a CMS with a short headline character limit and subeditors under time pressure. 

Or maybe this is RNZ doing its usual RNZ thing. 

Compare the three headlines on this excellent piece by Prof Norman Gemmell, former Chief Economist at Treasury, on the tax mess that Labour announced on housing. 

When he wrote it for The Conversation, the headline was "New Zealand's new housing policy is really just a new tax package - and it's a shambles".

Now I don't know if Norman wrote the headline - sometimes the outlets do that. But that was the original. 

When The Herald syndicated it, they changed the headline a little. For The Herald, it was "New Zealand's new housing policy is really just a new tax package - and it's a mess". This version's gated. 

Mess is a bit shorter than shambles, but they're about the same thing. Or close enough.

Here's what Radio New Zealand did with it. "Opinion: New Zealand's new housing policy is really just a new tax package". 

The article is worth reading. I suppose we should be grateful that Radio NZ gave it any space at all. 

RNZ and the damage done

Last spring, Radio New Zealand engaged in a lot of scaremongering about vaping. 

Whether it was deliberate, or whether it was due to hurried journalists relying on bad reporting by the CDC, who knows. Probably the latter, but that they refused to consider contrary evidence may suggest the former.

But RNZ's reporting would have left Kiwis with the distinct impression that regular nicotine vaping in the United States was causing fatalities. Those fatalities were really due to use of contaminated illicit THC cartridges. And it was obvious really early on that this wasn't a vaping thing. Vaping had been around for a decade prior to this fast outbreak in the United States. Why did it show up all of a sudden? Why in the US and not the UK? It very quickly looked far more like poisoning from a contaminant rather than some long-term consequence of vaping finally showing up.

Public Health England's now released a report on the damage done by media scaremongering about the US outbreak. The Otago Daily Times covers it well. I haven't seen anything on it from Radio New Zealand. Alas.

Some relevant findings:

The spate of lung injuries and deaths in the US is not attributable to the regulated nicotine vaping products currently sold in England. But all suspected adverse reactions or suspected deaths need to be assessed.

The conclusions of our previous reports are still important messages for preventing harm. These can be broadly summarised as:

1. Vaping regulated nicotine products has a small fraction of the risks of smoking, but this does not mean it is safe.
2. Smokers should be encouraged to try regulated nicotine vaping products along with smoking cessation medications and behavioural support. This will greatly increase their chances of successfully stopping smoking.
3. People who have never smoked should be encouraged not to smoke and not to vape.
4. Vapers should be encouraged to use regulated nicotine products only and stop smoking completely.

...

The data presented here suggest that vaping has not undermined the declines in adult smoking.

Increasingly incorrect perceptions among the public about the harms of vaping could prevent some smokers using vaping products to quit smoking.

A ban on flavoured liquids could have adverse effects and unintended consequences for smokers using vaping products to quit. It should only be considered with caution. 

The study also suggests youth vaping is rare; fewer than 1% of young people who have never smoked are current vapers. And there has been substantial decline in youth smoking. But:

Current smoking prevalence (weekly or less than weekly) among 11- to 15-year-olds halved between 2009 (11%) and 2018 (5%) but has remained relatively steady since 2014.

Young people’s perceptions of the relative harms of vaping compared with smoking are increasingly out of line with the evidence. The proportion of 11- to 18-year-olds who thought that vaping was less harmful than cigarettes declined from 68% in 2014 to 52% in 2019.

Increasingly incorrect perceptions among the public about the harms of vaping. Whatever could be causing that?

I wish there were similar data here.

Previously:

• Don't get your vaping news from Radio New Zealand
• Keeping up with the state of play on vaping
• Public health and risk communication 

Radio Games

It looks like RNZ's trick to fund both RNZ Concert and the new Youth station would also have worked on former Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey, who writes:

For now, Concert FM is safe. When the news broke that Radio New Zealand (RNZ) was considering turning Concert FM into an automated station on an AM frequency so it could use the FM frequency to establish a ‘youth oriented’ station, discordant notes immediately emanated from classical music fans all over the nation.

For those new to the story, let me recap. Radio New Zealand has for some time, under the capable leadership of its CE Paul Thompson, been trying to make itself more interesting to 21st century audiences: particularly younger audiences who will, hopefully, turn into lifelong faithful listeners.

This is a reasonable objective but not easy to implement when you have no money (1).

As any good CE knows if you are looking for real money from a tight budget the place to go is people. Accordingly, RNZ made it known that Concert FM staff would be made redundant, a new automated classical music service would take its place and new staff would be employed to run youth programming.

That any of the folks at RNZ thought this would be an easy sell is difficult to understand. They might have realised their mistake if they had made it clear to their Minister and the wider Government. It is a fact of political life that to touch Concert FM is akin to peeing on an electric fence.

It appears that RNZ thought that they told their Minister, but they now say the communication might not have been clear enough.

(A note about communication at this point might be useful. Informing someone is not communication. At a minimum, communication requires feedback from the person being communicated with to be sure they both got the message and understood it).

Back to the story. As a former Broadcasting Minister (disclaimer!), I learnt about the need to tread carefully around Concert FM from the formidable Right Honourable Jonathan Hunt. Rt. Hon. Hunt was the Minister who oversaw the market based reforms to broadcasting during the heady days of the fourth Labour Government. Significantly, despite the preferences of the day for throwing everything open to the market, Concert FM survived unscathed. When I asked how this happened, I was informed that the audience for Concert FM made it political suicide to do anything other than leave it alone.

I really don't get how folks see this play and go "What was Radio NZ thinking, threatening to knife something that is politically untouchable in order to fund a daft youth thing? How could they think it would be easy to convince anyone they could do that?"

It looked, from the start, like an obvious play to extort funding for both programmes. No government would let them kill Concert FM. The government freaking out and funding both Concert FM and the new youth thing seems a daft response though. Or, at least, you'd think that the government could convey back to RNZ that its entire Board would be sacked for running this kind of game against the government if the Board allowed it to proceed. Operational independence is one thing. Creating hostage situations for the government is another.

But the play worked. It'll be interesting to watch to see what other government agencies learned from this episode.

I covered things in my column this week for Newsroom. You can get it here now, ungated; they're worth the subscription though. I conclude:

As Newsroom reported last week, RNZ’s chief executive Paul Thompson worried that going down normal channels to secure the use of the 102 FM band would “bog down our plans for five years and nothing would happen.” A game of chicken in an election year would be much quicker.

It has been a bit strange to see this episode reported as a “debacle” on RNZ’s part, and the reversal of the planned cuts at Concert FM as “embarrassing.” It would have been daft to vandalise Concert FM in favour of a new youth service. That now looks unlikely. But was it ever really the intended outcome?

Rochester University political scientist William Riker studied what he called ‘heresthetics’ – the manipulation of the context or structure of a political decision-making process to get the outcome one wants. Political entrepreneurs are attuned to seeing heresthetical moves, reshaping the political environment to make possible that which was previously impossible.

Rather than castigate RNZ’s boss for the “debacle,” we might instead recognise and even, perhaps, applaud his spectacular feat of political entrepreneurship. If getting everything one wants is a debacle, we might ponder just how wonderful a catastrophe might have been. Sir Humphrey would be proud.

The Government may now have a bit of a problem if other Crown agencies take the appropriate lesson from this little episode. Successful entrepreneurs often attract imitators.

Should the Government not wish this play to be repeated, it might need to find ways of demonstrating these kinds of moves do not pay off for those who choose to play them.

Public health, risk communication, and vaping

The editorial in the January 2020 issue of Drug and Alcohol Review worries that poor communication around illness caused by vaping illicit THC-based products in the US has risks:

The US investigation is still ongoing and the health authorities investigating the outbreak have not definitively identified the exact chemical that has caused the lung damage, which may be a chemical formed from vitamin E acetate. However, over the past 6 months, the evidence has strengthened considerably that nicotine vaping products are not the cause of EVALI. This has been reflected in the updated official communications from both FDA and CDC which have strengthened their warnings to avoid THC vaping products, particularly those purchased from informal sources. However, accurate, timely and complete reporting of these developments by the media has sometimes been lacking. The potential consequences of this misreporting include public misunderstanding, mistrust and potentially cases that could have been avoided if the correct information was widely communicated.

They worry about the risk of people continuing to use illicit THC products when much of the the media coverage was around nicotine-based vaping as potential cause.

Misreporting of the US epidemic continued after the CDC concluded that the outbreak was attributable to vaping contaminated illicit cannabis products. In Australia, the ABC television show 7:30 aired a misleading story on vaping (5 November 2019) that heavily featured nicotine vaping in Australia after a lead on the US outbreak of lung injuries ²⁸. There was no mention that the CDC and FDA had linked the outbreak to the use of contaminated illicit THC products.

Nor did 7.30 mention the absence of cases in the UK, where nicotine vaping is widespread among smokers, but the vaping of cannabis oils is not. Dr Chris Zappala, from the Australian Medical Association claimed, ‘We've seen a significant increase in recent months of vaping‐related illnesses. Patients who, unfortunately, are becoming so unwell that they're ending up in intensive care and as I'm sure people are aware, there have been some deaths related to vaping’. Neither he nor the reporter clarified that no EVALI cases have occurred in Australia. By omitting the role of THC vaping products, 7.30 withheld critical information from the public on how to avoid these injuries.

Australian standards of press reporting include the principles of accuracy, balance, clarity and avoidance of harm ²⁹. These principles are important given that the media is frequently cited by the public as a source of health information and influence health behaviour, however they are often found lacking ³⁰-³². The failures of the Australian and international media to accurately convey the facts about this outbreak put public trust in the media, and the health authorities in these reports, at risk and may encourage the public to ignore future warnings in the midst of serious health emergencies. Many of the responses to the outbreak proposed in these stories, such as banning flavoured vaping products or preventing access to nicotine vaping products, do not address the cause of the outbreak identified by US authorities, namely, the vaping of illicit cannabis products cut with vitamin E acetate.

Things weren't better here, and I've been particularly disappointed in Radio New Zealand's coverage.

One fun one: on 12 November, the Science Media Centre rounded up commentary from local scientists about what was going on in the US and the results of more tests on lung tissue samples.

Their round-up included (my paraphrases):

• Auckland University's Prof Chris Bullen, who noted that it was 'widely known' that the mess was associated with contaminated black-market THC cartridges a month earlier;
• Dr Kelly Burrowes at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, who noted that Vitamin E in THC cartridges could be the problem but that with more than 15,000 flavours out there in e-cigarettes, it is just too hard to tell what is to blame;
• Dr George Laking at End Smoking New Zealand who said that everyone had known for two months that the problem was Vitamin E acetate, that the CDC was too slow to catch up, and that the reports should not raise concern for NZ nicotine vapers;
• Dr Murray Laugesen, Adjunct at U Canterbury and long-time tobacco harm reduction advocate, who pointed to Vitamin E acetate and the need to get the regulatory framework around vaping set quickly;
• Prof Julian Crane, Otago Uni at Wellington, who pointed to Vitamin E acetate, noted that it was a possibility since the beginning of the problem, and that there's no worry for NZ nicotine vapers.

All up, 4/5 said that nicotine vaping has nothing to do with the US problem. 

Guess who RNZ picked to talk to about it? Go on. You don't even have to click the link, do you?

I just don't have a good model of why RNZ has been like this.

Radio NZ on vaping, again

The Washington Post notes the growing consensus around just what the heck is going on with 'vaping-related' illness and death. Like I'd said last week, dodgy additives in THC vapes look to be the issue. You don't have to be paying massive attention to this file to know this.

Oregon health officials said last week that a middle-aged adult who died of a severe respiratory illness in late July had used an electronic cigarette containing marijuana oil from a legal dispensary. It was the first death tied to a vaping product bought at a pot shop. Illinois and Indiana reported deaths in adults but officials have not provided information about their ages or what type of products were used.

State and federal health authorities are focusing on the role of contaminants or counterfeit substances as a likely cause of vaping-related lung illnesses — now up to at least 450 possible cases in 33 states.

Officials are narrowing the possible culprits to adulterants in vaping products purported to have THC.

The sudden onset of these mysterious illnesses and the patients’ severe and distinctive symptoms have led investigators to focus on contaminants, rather than standard vaping products that have been in wide use for many years.

One potential lead is the oil derived from vitamin E, known as vitamin E acetate. Investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the oil in cannabis products in samples collected from patients who fell ill across the United States. That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said.

On Monday, New York state officials said they are issuing subpoenas to three companies the department has identified as selling “thickening agents” containing high levels of vitamin E that can be used in black market vaping products that contain THC. Dealers have been using thickening agents to dilute THC oil in street and illicit products, industry experts said.

I like that the Post uses the basic plausibility check. If this really were about nicotine vaping, which has been around for a long time, why would there suddenly be a pile of hospitalisations? This is new over the past year. They might yet find cases that look certain to be nicotine-only, but it's a tough one to prove: they've certainly found dodgy stuff in the THC cartridges that sick folks have brought with them to hospital, but not everyone who has used a THC cartridge will want to admit to it.

The best advice remains to buy your vaping product from a source you can trust. And to follow Michael Siegel (Twitter) and Clive Bates to keep up with the state of play. I like Action on Smoking and Health NZ, but they haven't really been putting up updates on the US state of play.

Meanwhile, here's how Radio NZ has continued to play the story.

US President Donald Trump has announced that his administration will ban flavoured e-cigarettes, after a spate of vaping-related deaths.

Mr Trump told reporters vaping was a "new problem", especially for children.

US Health Secretary Alex Azar said the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would finalise a plan to take all non-tobacco flavours off the market.

There have been six deaths across 33 states and 450 reported cases of lung illness tied to vaping.

Many of the 450 reported cases are young people, with an average age of 19.

Michigan this month became the first US state to ban flavoured e-cigarettes.

Joining Mr Trump at the White House on Wednesday, Mr Azar said it would take the FDA several weeks to distribute the new guidance on e-cigarettes.

Everything in the RNZ reporting makes it seem that the illness is around e-cigarettes rather than vaped dodgy THC.

I expect this is deliberate. It is lying through omission. So I've put in another complaint, this time around accuracy.

RNZ has been on a campaign against vaping for some time. RNZ demonised Marewa Glover's harm reduction efforts. They gave ample airtime to attacks on her. Their reporting on vaping is consistently conflating illness in the US due to dodgy and counterfeit THC product with the kind of vaping people in NZ are familiar with. And they are doing it when the regulatory framework is soon to be announced, helping to fuel a moral panic that will lead to worse regulatory outcomes.

I don't know why RNZ is like this. But RNZ is like this. I wish that I weren't compelled to pay, through my taxes, for their dishonest reporting.

Don't get your vaping news from Radio New Zealand

There have been a lot of news reports out of the United States over the past month on people coming down suddenly with severe lung problems, with those news reports often linking the problems to vaping.

Sometimes the story would note that the vaped substance wasn't the typical nicotine e-liquid, but rather a THC-based one. And even more rarely the story would note that the THC cartridge had been purchased from a strange street dealer, or was counterfeit.

More stories started coming out noting that the problem-causing e-liquids were dodgy-as. They were often finding vitamin E in them as a thickening agent. I was seeing a lot of those stories come out last week.

The media reports in the States were fodder for a lot of scaremongering. Most stories didn't note just what was vaped. Where it was a younger person who fell ill, there was little checking of claims of that the vaped substance was nicotine rather than a dodgy back-alley THC cartridge.

And all of that fuels demand for tighter regulation of normal nicotine e-liquids.

The Washington Post finally caught up with the play last week:

State and federal health officials investigating mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping have found the same chemical in samples of marijuana products used by people sickened in different parts of the country and who used different brands of products in recent weeks.

The chemical is an oil derived from vitamin E. Investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the oil in cannabis products in samples collected from patients who fell ill across the United States. FDA officials shared that information with state health officials during a telephone briefing this week, according to several officials who took part in the call.

That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said.

Now there's still work to do in checking that that's what's causing the problems, but Prof Siegel seems to have a smoking gun here:

There has been a major breakthrough in the investigation of the outbreak of more than 300 cases of a "mysterious" lung disease that the CDC and many other health agencies have told the public is due to the vaping of electronic cigarettes. And now, everything is starting to make some sense.

Illicit THC vape carts that were obtained from a number of case patients that were tested in federal and state laboratories have tested positive for vitamin E acetate, an oil that just started to be used late last year as a thickening agent in bootleg THC vape carts. Apparently, for every single case in New York State for which testing is complete, vitamin E acetate was found in at least one of the THC vape carts that were used by the patient. Almost simultaneously, testing of recovered THC vape carts by the FDA revealed vitamin E acetate in 10 of 18 tested samples. Importantly, the FDA reported that it found no contamination in any of the nicotine e-liquids tested.

The Rest of the Story

While there are still a lot of unknowns, the pieces of the puzzle are just beginning to fit together. One the great mysteries about this outbreak is "Why now?" Nicotine e-liquids have been on the market for many years and are being used by millions of vapers but there has never been a problem. Something must have changed to result in the outbreak occurring at this time. But what?

Now there is a possible explanation: it turns out that there was a major change made in the bootleg THC vape cart drug dealing industry late last year. It appears that a new thickening agent started to be used in bootleg THC vape carts. Very possibly, that new agent was vitamin E acetate. Tocopherol acetate (the fancy name for vitamin E acetate) is a thickening agent that is typically used in cosmetics like skin cleansers. But late last year, it apparently began to be used for thickening the THC oil (presumably to hide the fact that it had been highly diluted, which is a clue to some buyers that they are not getting much product). Here is what leafly.com has to say:

"Peter Hackett of Air Vapor Systems and Disinger and Heldreth of True Terpenes both mentioned the recent introduction of a novel diluent thickener called Honey Cut. The product swept through LA’s pen factories late last year. Honey Cut maintains a website, but the identity of the product manufacturer remains unknown, as does the chemical makeup of the substance. Leafly has made many attempts to reach officials at Honey Cut, but they have chosen not to respond.

Honey Cut’s introduction last year proved so popular that competing products by other diluent makers soon began appearing."

What was the new diluent thickener in Honey Cut?

You guessed it ... tocopherol acetate.

Siegel started warning about this mess in late August.

This emerging story shows the dangers of bias in public health. The long-standing bias of the CDC against vaping has resulted in the agency failing to warn the public in clear and specific terms about the risks associated with the use of bootleg THC vape carts and instead, issuing warnings against "vaping" and "e-cigarettes" generally and making meaningless statements like "e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless water vapor."

On my blog, I first issued a warning about the use of black market THC oils on August 25, and then on August 28 I blogged and tweeted an unequivocal warning, since the CDC had failed to do so. It is now 11 days later, and we are still waiting for the CDC, HHS, and other health groups to issue a clear and specific warning against the use of bootleg THC vape carts. We are still waiting for these groups to stop blaming the outbreak on vaping or on e-cigarettes. Although we cannot completely rule out any role of e-cigarettes, it now appears very unlikely that they have anything to do with the outbreak, which appears to be due to e-cannabis, not e-cigarettes.

The truly unfortunate rest of the story is that in their zeal to demonize e-cigarettes, the CDC and other health agencies have put the lives of our nation's youth at risk. They should have issued a warning 11 days ago. During the past 11 days, how many youth continued to vape THC oils because of the failure of health agencies to accurately convey the known information about the potential causes of the outbreak? The CDC and other health agencies and some anti-tobacco groups have gone to great lengths to protect the illicit cannabis industry. But they have no problem with attacking the e-cigarette companies and telling ex-smokers to return to smoking rather than continuing to vape. Why?

This stuff is or ought to be common knowledge among anyone half-way paying attention to the vaping file.

Meanwhile, here's how Radio New Zealand headlines and leads a story on a death in the US subsequent to another THC vaping issue - although this time bought from a dispensary rather than a roadside stand.

Second person in US dies from vaping https://t.co/vV6ohcuG9B

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) September 6, 2019

I put in a press council complaint about a misleading headline, as the story does acknowledge that in this case the death was linked to a THC cartridge rather than to nicotine containing e-liquids.

RNZ is really failing on this. It is very important that people who vape know the importance of buying products that they can trust from manufacturers who wouldn't add oil-based ingredients. Instead, RNZ gives them scaremongering about vaping in general, and none of the detail needed to help consumers make informed decisions.

I've not heard of any of the dodgy products making their way here, but it's impossible to guarantee that it won't happen - again, though, the US cases are primarily around dodgy THC-based products. A responsible version of Radio New Zealand would have warned vapers to make sure they're buying their product from trustworthy sources.

Have you considered using prices?

Talk about an elephant in the room.

Radio New Zealand's story on unregulated informal sperm donor networks is a great chronicle of what happens when you ban payments for sperm donors, without once mentioning that the whole thing is consequence of a ban on payments for sperm donors. It's like a murder mystery where all the facts are laid out, but nobody has figured out who the obvious killer is. It really is the butler! Why hasn't anyone arrested the butler!

What do we find in this story?

• Waits at official fertility clinics of 18 months to two years (blamed in part on increased demand from single women);
• High costs at fertility clinics: $300 for an initial consultation, donor's testing costs of $1500...
• Men shunning clinics because donating at the clinic is costly to them: "The clinics, they just don't simplify the process. The donor has a life too. If I have to go through a clinic, I have to do a consultation and therapy and it takes six months to help one person. It's too much."

What don't we find in this story?

Section 13 of the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004:

13 Commercial supply of human embryos or human gametes prohibited(1) No person may give or receive, or agree to give or receive, valuable consideration for the supply of a human embryo or human gamete.
(2) Every person commits an offence who contravenes subsection (1) and is liable on conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 1 year or a fine not exceeding $100,000, or both.

If the clinics could pay the donors for the increased hassle they face in going through all of the rigamarole required for that process, supply would increase. If demand increased, clinics could up the offer price to encourage greater supply. There wouldn't be 18-month queues.

It isn't like not paying the donors saves the customers a lot of money. The clinics just get the money instead - though it is a puzzle that they haven't increased fees by even more: Simple AI is cited as (only) $1500 per cycle.

The article notes the risks in the informal sector (potential lack of disease testing, etc). Maybe, just maybe, if the clinics could pay the donor at least enough to cover the hassles they face in going to the clinic, things would change.

Previously:

• The most predictable thing ever
• Unintended consequences: Assisted reproductive technologies edition

Sweet talk

Last night, I chatted with Bryan Crump on Radio New Zealand Nights about sugar taxes. When I pitched the topic a couple of weeks ago, I hadn't pegged that it would have been quite so topical in New Zealand. I was rather happy to be talking about sugar taxes the same night that the government here shot them down. I had worried that they might follow Britain's lead.

Next week, Jenesa Jeram launches her report on lifestyle regulations. Her report covers smoking and vaping, drinking, and sweet sweet sugar. The panel discussion includes IEA Fellow Jaime Whyte, Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox, and Treasury's Chief Economist Girol Karacaoglu. There may still be a couple of seats available; do come and join us if you're interested.

I usually put together a few notes for myself before my chats with Bryan. I've copied these below. They provide some of the references to studies I mentioned in the chat, and bits that we didn't get to talk about as well.

Sweet thinking: Notes for discussion with Bryan Crump, 12 April 2016

Tax and Choice

What’s the evidence on the effects of sugar taxes on consumption in the first place?

It depends on what you mean by ‘effect’. If what you want is a reduction in consumption of the taxed thing, taxes can do that. But if you want a reduction in obesity or improvement in other health outcomes, that’s harder to find.

Why? People respond to taxes in ways you might not want. If you tax sugar-sweetened beverages, but not other sugary things, then you can get a drop in SSB consumption but a rise in consumption of other sweet things, or other tasty and fattening things. You can then succeed in reducing SSB consumption but not in affecting obesity. Is it then a success or not?

Evidence? Work by Fletcher and co-authors found that soda taxes led to a moderate reduction in soft drink consumption by children and adolescents, but that this was entirely offset by increases in consumption of other high-calorie drinks.

This then leads to big problems when people start talking about the potential effects of soda taxes. It’s easy to find studies showing some effect of soda taxes on soda consumption. And that then leads folks to figure that the tax would reduce total caloric intake by that amount, but that’s just wrong: people eat other things instead. Could be other sugary, but not fizzy drinks; could be other sugary non-drink things; could be other stuff entirely. The effect of the tax on health will then depend on how much people respond to the tax, and what they shift to. Good studies will look not just at the effect of taxes on consumption of the taxed thing, but rather on obesity outcomes. And there just isn’t much there there.

But, it gets even worse.

There aren’t that many surveys out there that measure how much soda people drink. But what we do have is the Household Economic Survey. Respondents there say how much their household spent on different categories of expenditure. If you know how much a household spent on soda, and divided that by the going price for soda, you might think you have a measure of how much they consumed. And some studies use that to measure the effect of price changes on consumption. But one thing that people can do when prices change is decide to buy a discount brand instead of a named brand. The supermarket’s own brand of soda costs a lot less than Coke or Pepsi. If people shift to a lower cost product when prices go up, then you can’t really infer consumption from expenditure any more. If, after a price change, you see expenditure went down, you can’t tell if that’s because people are buying less in total, or because they’re consuming just as much as before (or possibly even more) of a discount brand instead.

If we want a specific NZ example, a HRC-funded study in the NZMJ estimated that a 20% tax on soda would avert or postpone 67 deaths per year. But that was all based on an assumed reduction in the quantity of soda consumption that comes with a 20% price change, out of that HES data. We can't really say what's happened to total consumption of something in response to a price change if the only thing we know is how much they spent on it – if they can shift to lower quality and cheaper options.

All of this means that people strongly overestimate the effectiveness of soda taxes, and do not think hard enough about what effectiveness means.

Mexico's sugar tax has been more comprehensive, with a peso-per-litre tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (not including alcoholic ones) and a relatively small tax on other sugary solids. There are a few holes in how they estimated things, but let's just take the results at face value because the technical stuff depends on whether you believe Duan smearing is appropriate in heteroskedastic data [seriously – just too technical to get into].

First, a peso per litre sounds like not very much, but if we compare it to the daily salary earned by the poorest workers in their study, it works out to 1.7% of the daily wage. The equivalent in New Zealand, as compared to a day's work at the minimum wage, would be $2 per litre. A $2 per litre tax here would likely have pretty large effects on consumption, especially among poorer people.

What did the study find? People in poor households reduced their consumption by a little over a litre of soda per month: 600 mL every 17 days. There wasn't really much effect among richer households.

And they have no way of knowing whether poor households shifted to buying sugar (which while still taxed, is more lightly taxed than sugar in a litre of soda) and making lemonade at home.

Under that kind of tax, the first thing I'd do if I were a manufacturer would be to start selling soda concentrate for people to mix at home. Why? Because 1 litre of concentrate that could make, say, 10 litres of soda attracts the same tax as 1 litre of diluted product.

What happens then when we look at the studies that do properly look at the effect of prices on obesity?

A paper in Health Economics looked at soda taxes across U.S. states. Now there aren’t really “soda taxes” per se but soda is often, but not always, exempted from generalised food exemptions from state-level sales taxes. Because of that, soda can have tax rates, relative to other food products, that range from 0 to 12%. They found no relationship between soda taxes and soda calorie intake but a small increase in caloric intake from other beverages.

BioMed Central in 2013 published a metastudy (compilation of the effects reported in lots of different studies) looking at the effects of SSB taxes. Most studies found no effect distinguishable for statistical noise. But the biggest one there reported that did find an effect argued that a 20% tax on soda would result in a 0.065 reduction in average BMI. Now the healthy BMI range goes from 18.5 to 24.99. A 0.065 change, in a range where "healthy" covers a range of 6.5 units, really isn't much. If we take someone of my height, it would be the equivalent of about 180 grams. That's maybe the difference you get if you weigh me after a meal instead of before a meal: not enough to make any kind of difference.

But even that is very likely an overestimate. Why? They looked at how a panel of households changed what they bought at the supermarket when the prices of things changed. If Coke were on special, people would buy more Coke. And so on. And that would make sense if people bought things for immediate consumption. But you can store the stuff after buying it on special, and that will look like people are highly responsive to prices – but it's not their consumption behaviour. It's purchasing when cheap for consumption over time.

So, why does the data show so little effect?

First, taxes are pretty low. Everybody says "Oh, well, taxes worked to reduce smoking, didn't they?" And they did – although the most recent tax hikes haven't done much in New Zealand. But remember that a $20 package of cigarettes has about $8 in cigarette costs and $12 in tax: the tax is 150% of the cost of the cigarettes. Is anybody talking about soda or sugar taxes anywhere near 150%? No. There's "Well, we have to start somewhere" talk, citing the tobacco precedent, but if the ultimate goal is to get to a soda tax that's up around the $1.50-$2.00 per litre mark, then I wish they'd be honest about it.

Second, soda's just different from tobacco. If you're a smoker and you're addicted to nicotine, and the price goes up, there aren't really other things you can easily switch to if you want to keep getting nicotine. You can switch down to cheaper cigarettes, and if you can navigate the crazy regime New Zealand has for importing nicotine cartridges for vaping, then you can do that. But otherwise, there aren't things people can easily shift to, so reductions in consumption mean real consumption drops. But if there's a tax on soda, there are plenty of other sweet things that people can switch to.

So, what happens if we just tax all the unhealthy things and subsidise all the healthy things?

There was a great field experiment run by Cawley, Hanks et al. Participants got a purchase card they could use at one grocery store, where all their purchases would be tracked. To encourage everyone participating to do all their shopping at that store, they gave everybody a 5% discount on any food that had any kind of health-star rating (healthy or unhealthy). During the experimental treatment period, some people then got a 15% rebate on everything combined with a 10% tax on unhealthy food, or a 5% rebate on everything combined with a further 10% subsidy for healthy foods. They amount to the same thing but the researchers wanted to see if framing mattered.

They found no significant effect on actual purchases overall, but an interesting puzzle among poorer households. Those poorer households wound up spending much more on both nutritious and less nutritious foods (spending on both went up by about $7 per week): the subsidy meant they could afford more of both, and so there wasn't any shift towards healthier eating.

This suggests that, among poorer households, the main effects of these kinds of taxes or subsidies runs through their ability to afford things in general: subsidising healthy foods may let people afford more unhealthy stuff, and taxing unhealthy foods may reduce consumption of healthy foods as people tighten their belts.

A bigger puzzle

Obesity is increasing in New Zealand and has been for a while. But if we look at the data from the 2008/2009 New Zealand Adult Nutrition Survey, the most recent one, and compare it with the 1997 survey, total caloric intake is down, and sugar consumption was either down or unchanged, depending on which kind of sugar you looked at and whether it was for men or women. See Table 9.3 at the linked report. But mean BMI increased by about 1.5 points over the period, and the proportion of overweight and obese people increased from about 50% to about 60%. If sugar is the villain, why did obesity rates jump while sugar consumption stayed stable or declined a bit?

But what is the justification?

If the problem is costs to the health care system, then we need to be careful: there's some decent international evidence that, over the long term, healthy people are the most costly: they live longer and collect more in social security.

But even without that, is the government really justified in forcing you to be part of a public health system, and then taxing and regulating you to make sure that you impose the smallest cost possible on that system? Why do we only ever seem to target health behaviours that are disproportionately engaged in by poor people? Smoking, soda, and the kinds of cheaper alcohol that are targeted by public health campaigners – those are predominantly consumed by poorer people. But consider rich people activities that have rather high per-activity costs: horseback riding, mountaineering, scuba diving, sailing, mountain biking and adventure kayaking. ACC costs of this kind of thing add up to less because fewer people do them. But 2007 stats had almost 3% of horseback riders making an ACC claim.

Further, if it's obesity and obesity's costs that are really the thing people want to worry about, and if people respond differently to different diets, then does it make more sense to tax sugar or to tax obesity directly? It sounds terrible, but the Washington Post's Catherine Rempell made the case last month. She wasn't making the case seriously: she was pointing out an underlying problem in the arguments around fat and soda taxes. If taxing obesity directly is unfair because obese people cannot control their weight, then taxing sugar can't get rid of obesity.

But all of this comes back to what works, and what you think works means. Suppose you think other people consume differently than you do because they just don't know any better. If you explain things slowly, and they don't change their behaviour, should you conclude that your information campaign failed and that you then need taxes or other harsher measures? Or that the people you were talking to never really expected that soda was a health food in the first place and didn't really want to change their behaviour?

Crossposted from The Sandpit

Nights trouble

Radio New Zealand's proposed substantial changes to Bryan Crump's Nights programme.

Currently, Nights offers long-form interviews with a rather diverse array of locally based researchers and pundits, along with radio documentaries from overseas and excellent musical selections.

The change would scrap Crump's interviews in favour of a newsreader linking together externally sourced content. RNZ is shifting resources over to the digital/multimedia side, like the newer John Campbell checkpoint offering.

It would be rather a shame. There aren't really other slots out there that offer the longer form conversations that Crump hosts. Kim Hill's Saturday morning interviews are great, but lean more to the international guests and are rather a different style. Crump's style works well in the evening slot, and I don't think there's anything else like it out there.

Self-interest watch: I'm one of the pundits in Crump's stable, and I'd miss our regular chats.

Update: I've been pointed to a Facebook page for supporters.

Some useful context

I'm sure it's only the confines of a short radio news blurb that had Radio New Zealand miss a bit of context in this story. The full text of the RNZ bulletin:

The Government is being urged to consider whether it is time to ban alcohol advertising and sponsorship of sport.

Kerry O'Brien, a behaviour studies expert at Monash University, told an alcohol marketing conference in Wellington on Thursday, that alcohol advertising is everywhere in both New Zealand and Australia.

He said sport is a major way in which the alcohol markets its product to young people and current advertising codes aren't protecting children.

Mr O'Brien said new research shows if adults receive alcohol sponsorship in their sports club, their children may also be influenced.

Ok, an expert addressing an alcohol marketing conference wants to ban advertising. What kind of conference? Alcohol marketing. Could be some industry thing, could be an academic thing, who knows. Sounds pretty neutral and impartial though.

Here's Alcohol Action New Zealand's blurb on their conference:

THE PERILS OF ALCOHOL MARKETING - Thursday 7th March 2013 at Te Papa, Wellington

The upcoming conference titled The Perils of Alcohol Marketing is shaping up really well, with excellent keynote speakers confirmed - Professor Sally Casswell, Massey University Auckland, Professor Janet Hoek, University of Otago, Dr Kerry O'Brien, Monash University, and Associate Professor Antonia Lyons, Massey University. This will be the first conference post the Alcohol Reform Bill and focusing on this fundamental commercial issue of alcohol marketing is very apt. The draft programme is available to view and download below.

We welcome abstracts for short presentations (3-5 minutes) that illustrate the most "evil" examples of alcohol marketing. Feel free to submit an abstract that focuses on one pertinent example or, alternatively, one that skims over multiple examples. Please see the call for papers application form below.

Don't miss this critical conference on alcohol marketing - New Zealand's most socially damaging drug. Register now by completing and returning the registration form below.

So a conference, titled "The Perils of Alcohol Marketing", and hosted by Doug Sellman's Alcohol Action New Zealand, specifically went out asking people to submit abstracts illustrating "the most "evil" examples of alcohol marketing" and had a keynote speaker who thinks alcohol marketing should be banned.

Here's the conference flier:

NZ continues to be one of the most unregulated societies in the OECD for the supply and sale of alcohol. Alcohol is our most socially damaging drug yet the global alcohol industry enjoys enormous freedom to market alcohol to New Zealanders - as if it were an ordinary commercial product. 

The Conference will feature: 

Stimulating and informative keynote presentations from experts on alcohol and alcohol
marketing: Prof Jennie Connor, Prof Janet Hoek, Prof Sally Casswell, and A/Prof Antonia
Lyons. Dr Kerry O’Brien from Australia’s Monash University is a special overseas guest.
A series of short presentations illustrating the most “evil” examples of alcohol marketing.
A political panel with representatives from the main parliamentary parties outlining their
respective party policy on how to deal with “The Perils of Alcohol Marketing”, in the light of the Law Commission’s recommendation to dismantle it over a five year period. 

The draft programme included:

• Otago's Jennie Connor on Alcohol Harms
• Otago's Janet Hoek asking whether responsible alcohol marketing is a "public health oxymoron?"
• SHORE's Sally Casswell asking "Where would alcohol companies be without alcohol marketing?" 

A bit of context can sometimes be of assistance.