Closing time

The University of Otago's public health department has been pretty prominent in pushing for tighter alcohol regulations in New Zealand. But it's a little surprising that the University there would let that group near anything that might matter, like student enrolment figures.

Here's The Wireless on Dunedin's proposed Local Alcohol Policy.

However, [unlike the Students' Association] the University of Otago supports all the council's suggestions. It goes further in places, including to suggest that all alcohol sales in Dunedin should end at 2am.

Much of the Dunedin City Council's plan seems to stem from the police, which proposed a range of bans from midnight including that on liquor shots.

But all this has spurred a big reaction from local bar owners, who believe bars will be driven out of business, especially the student haunts. About three-quarters of the nearly 4300 submissions are against the alcohol plan - more than in any other city so far.

Only about 13 per cent of submitters support it.

Inner-city bar owner Richard Newcombe said that is because the council hasn’t done its homework.

The contrast with Wellington is interesting: here, Council has proposed a 5 am closing time - an hour later than the default 4 am time that obtains in the absence of a specified local closing time. I love that I've moved to one of New Zealand's more liberal cities, even if my bedtime tends to be much earlier than either of those times.

In Dunedin, it looks like the Police are pushing most of the restrictions, and that Council just gave the Police what they asked for. The Police also have objected to Wellington Council's more liberal regime. I served as expert witness for the Hospitality Association in Wellington, reviewing and assessing the literature around the effects of pub closing times; I'll blog more on that when Wellington's LAP decision comes out.

It will be interesting to watch whether the LAPs have any effect on student numbers across the different Universities.

Mandatory voting remains a bad idea

Andrew Coyne thinks voting should be mandatory in Canada*; Dylan Matthews makes a similar argument for America.

The best argument for compulsory voting, Coyne's, is that it could shift politicians away from campaigns based on getting out the vote: if everyone has to vote, then GOTV matters less, as does playing to the party's base.

While that's one notch in favour of compulsory voting, there are a few considerations against it that might give us pause.

Blood donation is almost entirely a public good. Were we to implement a mandatory blood donation regime, we would have to couple it with a tick-box allowing "donors" to indicate that their blood probably shouldn't be used or at least should undergo heavier screening: a Hepatitis B patient's blood probably shouldn't enter into general circulation.

But nobody seems to worry much about the quality of a compelled vote. They should.

Jason Brennan makes a pretty convincing argument that while none of us have a positive duty to vote, those choosing to vote have a duty to vote well: to weigh seriously whether the policies offered up by the different parties would achieve the ends that the voter wishes and that the trade-offs are worthwhile, in the voter's estimation. While few voters meet that duty, things are even worse among current non-voters: non-voters, on average, aren't made up of rational calculators and conscientious objectors like me; most non-voters instead have little political knowledge and little intention of acquiring any. And forcing them to vote does not encourage them to acquire more information.

I'll offer instead a compromise position: make voting compulsory, but also implement a simple quiz at the ballot box. Voters would need to be able to match parties with their main supported policies. They'd also be quizzed on a few basics, like which parties formed the prior government, whether crime rates increased or decreased over the prior administration, whether income inequality has been increasing or decreasing, whether most climate scientists agree that the planet has been warming, and order-of-magnitude level quizzes on the composition of the budget. The quiz questions would vary election to election but would hit on the baseline matters necessary for understanding the policy issues at stake in that year's election. Everyone's vote counts for at least 1, but we could award bonus votes for voting well. Everyone would have the opportunity to vote well: Elections NZ would put up the 50-or-so quiz questions and their answers; each voter might get a random draw of 10 at the ballot box. Those compelled to vote but unable to vote well would have less opportunity to do harm to their own interests with their vote. I won't go all the way to nudge-based voting, but we could at least avoid some harm with this version.

Think of the incentive effects. GOTV campaigns would be focused on informing supporters about basic facts so that the party's supporters' votes might count for more.

I could support compulsory voting if it came with this kind of mechanism. Or we could keep things voluntary.


* And see his prior similar argument here.

An end-run around film parallel imports?

I've been annoyed about New Zealand's film classification regime for a while. I hadn't considered the copyright and licensing angle on it.

Recall that New Zealand generally runs a free parallel importation regime. If some brand wishes to enter into restrictive licensing arrangements for retail distribution, the New Zealand government generally sees no reason that it should go about enforcing those deals where they restrict Kiwis' access to imports. So if some retailer is the only officially licensed supplier of a brand of shoes, The Warehouse can still import a container load of them for sale in their stores. The producer can punish the wholesaler who sold the the shoes to The Warehouse, but there's no recourse in the New Zealand courts. Parallel importation is legal. There is a carve-out in which you cannot parallel import films for nine months after the films' first release anywhere in the world, to give some time for the theatres to have a go, but otherwise things are open. Here's MED's FAQ.

Now recall further that the folks with local distribution rights are mightily annoyed with parallel importation. And the film distribution companies that sell rights to Netflix prefer being able to engage in pretty serious geographical market segmentation. Where Kiwis can pretend to be American through use of ISP global modes, or Hola!, or any of the various other VPN arrangements, geographic market segmentation breaks down.

New Zealand's censorship regime then gives an end-run around parallel importation: you can't legally import a film that hasn't been classified here and you can't distribute one that doesn't have the New Zealand film classification. Having the US one isn't good enough. Where some NZ ISPs advertise a global mode that facilitates subscribing to Netflix, the Censor's Office reckons they're complicit in helping the importation of films that haven't been rated. I would have thought that 122 (3)(b) and 122 (4)(b) meant that ISPs couldn't be liable, but I'm not a lawyer.

And so it's all rather interesting that The Film and Video Labelling Body has weighed in on the Censor's Office's legal run against Slingshot and Orcon.

The Film and Video Labelling Body, an incorporated society whose members include the likes of Sony, Universal, Paramount, Spark and The Warehouse, does most of the legwork involved in issuing labels to non-R-rated films.

Operations manager Sharon Rhodes said it expressed concern to the Office of Film and Literature Classification about online services bypassing the New Zealand labelling system early this year, but had not specifically mentioned Slingshot or GlobalMode.

Spark, which launched online television service Lightbox in September, had raised concerns with the labelling body last year, she said. "I brought it up at our annual meeting in May and members were pleased to see it was something we were looking into."

Rhodes said she agreed with the chief censor's view that Slingshot had breached the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act by offering GlobalMode as a means for New Zealanders to access services such as Netflix.

The cleanest solution? Fix the law so that a New Zealand classification is no longer required. Require instead that films carry the rating of any country's classification office from some list of countries whose classification decisions generally seem to make sense, or that tend to correlate strongly with New Zealand's prior decisions. It makes no kind of sense that a small country should re-classify every movie for the New Zealand market; we should be relying on others' work here.

Big numbers: domestic violence edition

Simon Collins at The Herald reports on some problems in Suzanne Snively's estimates of the social costs of domestic violence.

Sir Owen Glenn's family violence inquiry has stumbled again, producing a $7 billion estimated cost of family violence based on the mis-reading of a key research paper.

A report by economist Suzanne Snively and Wellington theatre student Sherilee Kahui, published by the inquiry yesterday, said family violence cost New Zealand between $4.1 billion and $7 billion a year - up from Ms Snively's last estimate in 1994 of just $1 billion.

It looks like they attributed the full high-end costs to the greater number of people experiencing more moderate forms of abuse. This isn't to diminish that experience, but there are gradations of experience and gradations of cost.

Inquiry spokeswoman Marie McNicholas declined to comment on the latest mistake and referred questions to Ms Snively. Ms Snively said the data was prepared by Ms Kahui.

Ms Kahui said the $7 billion "high-end" figure was not in an early version of the study, which initially included only the "low-end" estimate of $4.1 billion and what is now described as a "moderate scenario" of $4.5 billion.

The high-end estimate was added after experts in Auckland and Wellington said they believed the true domestic violence victimisation rates were higher than the "moderate scenario" rates of 18.2 per cent for women and 1.9 per cent for men.

"We were struggling to find empirical evidence of an estimate that would be higher than 18.2 per cent," Ms Kahui said. "So it was about finding something higher."

Jeepers. Kudos to Ms. Kahui for pointing out that there was a quest to find a big number.

I note that Suzanne Snively also authored the PWC report on Adult and Continuing Education that estimated very large benefits from Adult and Continuing Education by assuming that anybody taking a night cooking course would be 50% less likely to commit any crime.

Congrats too to Simon Collins for catching this. I didn't have time to look through the report yesterday when I saw the big number floating around; nice to see that others have started sniffing out this stuff.

Informed choices?

New Zealand's chief censor has a bizarre view of "informed choices". 

He complains that video game manufacturers have been reluctant to pay his office $1400 per game to let his expert video game players play all the way through the games and assess their content:

“As chief censor I have previously expressed the view that games, in the legislation, should be treated the same as films.
“This would see all games distributed in New Zealand carry New Zealand classification labels, and allow New Zealanders to make informed choices about what they and their children watch and play.”

Informed choices. That sounds wonderful and nice. I wish that I could, when my children turn 12, make an informed choice to play games rated R13 with them, if they're ready.

But the Chief Censor, by choosing R13 instead of RP13, makes it illegal for me to make that informed choice.

Can anyone give a person under 13 years old permission to watch a R13?
No. Parents, caregivers or teachers cannot give permission for under 13s to watch or play R13 films or games. If a teacher or community group wants to show an R13 film to people under 13, they will need to apply to the Chief Censor for an exemption from the R13 classification under section 44 of the Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993.

This isn't about informed choice. It's about the Chief Censor taking away parents' choices.

Currently, game manufacturers need only submit games restricted in Australia or the UK; the Censor worries that too many of these are sold online by Steam, and others, without NZ classification. I worry rather that the Censor takes away far too many of our freedoms already by banning us from playing games with our kids instead of just warning us that we might want to pay particular attention to some of these games before launching into a gaming session.

Drinking Derp

Anna Pearson reports on teenagers' drinking, with lots of anecdotes from kids who like getting drunk.

Unfortunately, the story's a bit weak on data. The Ministry of Health showed reduced youth drinking participation, slight reductions in overall hazardous drinking among past-year drinkers but more substantial reductions in hazardous drinking among youths who were past-year drinkers. The MoH data is here; I'd summarised here. The main figures are copied below.



The Auckland Youth '12 Survey also showed decreases in binge drinking, for both genders, from 2001 through 2012.

Pearson footnotes in her story: 

Another study found the proportion of 16- to 17-year-old females consuming eight or more standard drinks in a session in New Zealand tripled between 1995 and 2011. 

I'm curious to know which study she's referring to. It's possibly the SHORE data that showed an increase from '95 to 2000, then flatlining since then, but it would be pretty misleading to put up the two dates and invite readers to infer a continuously increasing trend through the two data points. Maybe some new data is out that I don't know about. If there is, wouldn't it have been nice to put up the official MoH data that kinda shows the opposite?

Update: Anna reports the Women and Alcohol in Aotearoa Report as source on that stat. I'd hit that one here; it cites the Casswell 2012 unpublished presentation to the From Harm to Harmony conference as source.

Quotes of the Day: Capital Gains Taxes Edition

The Fraser Institute has just released a paper, looking at lessons from around the world for capital gains taxation in Canada. The section on New Zealand's non-adoption of a CGT, was written by Australia's Stephen Kirchner. The following are some excellent quotes

The incentive to convert income into capital gains does not necessarily translate into the ability to do so, and the opportunity for avoidance via this mechanism is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated. 

While it is true that capital gains tend to be concentrated at the upper end of the income distribution, so are capital losses. Net capital gains are thus more correctly viewed as compensation for bearing risk than can be left untaxed without compromising efficiency or equity. 

Rather than expanding the scope of the capital taxation to include housing assets, a better approach would be to reduce the tax burden on other assets to alleviate the double taxation of saving that occurs through the existing tax system. The introduction of a CGT that exempted owner-occupied housing would only increase the bias in favour of saving via owner-occupied housing.

As Tyler Cowen would say, read the whole thing. The overall paper is aimed at a Canadian policy makers, so it is unlikely to get much exposure here in New Zealand, but that is a shame.