Afternoon roundup

It's been a busy week of lockdown. On Monday, we released my report looking at cap-and-trade solutions for freshwater quality. Yesterday, Matt and I sent in our submission on the Commerce Commission's inquiry into supermarket competition. 

Don't think the computer's shut down this week. The browser tabs....

• It's a shame that rapid antigen tests are illegal in NZ. They aren't nearly as accurate as PCR. But when people are waiting six days for a test result and, in some cases, trying to run at-home isolation from the rest of the family during that period, having rapid antigen testing as a complement would be really good. RNZ reported on nurses living with close contacts being told to turn up for work even where those contacts' results hadn't come in yet. We could have had rapid antigen tests rolled out for staff starting shifts in hospitals and care homes. MedSafe banned them in April 2020 and re-upped the ban in April 2021. 
• I love this. North Canterbury's MainPower is telling staff to "Take Two for the Team". If 90% of their workforce is fully vaccinated by 1 December, every vaccinated staffer gets an extra day of special leave. Vaccination isn't just for you, it's for the team. Perfect. 
• I had a bit of fun in our Insights newsletter comparing the stringency of SmokeFree rules with the stringency of rules for MIQ exercise facilities. I'm pretty sure the Crowne Plaza's exercise area would not have been approved as an outdoor smoking patio for the bar.
• Meridian is putting in battery storage. Presumably they'll use it during times of peaking demand when power prices are through the roof. And of course, screwing around with the electricity market with price caps would discourage these kinds of investments. 
• Scientific American makes the case for the combination of carbon prices and carbon dividends. The Climate Commission pretends this option doesn't exist. It's depressing. I suppose the advice from NZ for Americans looking at this option: make damned sure that they're actually going to distribute the money back as a dividend, because the political establishment very much prefers to turn that money into its own discretionary slush fund to target to their voters. New Zealand's Green Party understands the case for carbon dividends. But they'd rather give their own voters a subsidy for a Tesla. It's depressing. Standard logic-of-collective-action stuff: concentrated benefits to Tesla-buying people, distributed cost to everyone who doesn't get a carbon dividend. And it'll make it easier to claim that reg measures on carbon are needed because of political pressure on ETS if prices rise - the sign on which would reverse if we had a carbon dividend. 
• The Atlantic continues to be great on Covid coverage. Best case, stupid endemic Covid becomes more like colds and flus because everyone will have some protection through vaccination and our immune systems will be able to handle it. But the virus could mutate to evade vaccines and immunity from prior infections. 
• My Dom column on the freshwater management report.

Lockdown accountability

Newsroom provides an excellent we-told-you-so this morning. 

Here's Jo Moir:

While the source of the Delta outbreak that plummeted New Zealand into a Level 4 lockdown is all but confirmed, how it got into the community is a work in progress.

Investigations are now homing in on a public walkway that shares the same airspace as the exercise area at the Crowne Plaza managed isolation facility.

In July Newsroom raised the issue of the public thoroughfare, which is the only access to a busy office block in downtown Auckland and requires passing directly beside the exercise yard via an un-roofed walkway.

The photo shows the obvious problem. The 'outdoor' area is anything but. It's enclosed on so many sides that you'd probably not be able to run it as an outdoor smoking area if you were a pub: there's a roof and walls on two sides, and the open side at the end is awfully small.  

The Ministry of Health recently consulted on its definition of an 'open area' for outdoor smoking areas for bars and pubs. Smoking is banned indoors but not outdoors. What counts as outdoors though? Does an awning make something indoors? How about an awning and a wall? This caused a lot of problems when different liquor enforcement officers would come to different views. 

The Ministry of Health's preferred option, in that consultation, was Option B. Any outdoor seating area that met this description would be prohibited from allowing smoking, because of the risks to passers by. 

Option b: Define it as an area that is completely or partially enclosed with a roof or overhead structure of any kind, whether permanent or temporary. This means that if an area has any roof or overhead structure, regardless of how much the roof or overhead structure encloses the area, it will meet the definition of an internal area.

I bolded the relevant bit. If you had a roof over the smokers, and then a minor bit of unroofed area, Option B would prohibit its use as an outdoor smoking area. 

The photograph obviously shows that the MIQ 'outdoor' recreation area has at least some kind of roof or overhead structure. Passers-by had to be right next to them, though there was a minor barrier. 

It looks like the Ministry of Health's preferred protection measures to guard against outdoor second hand smoke at pubs are stricter than the Ministry of Health's preferred protection measures to guard against Covid. 

And this is absolutely par for both courses for this player.

And we have wound up in a spot where a couple of guys out on jetboats on the weekend will wind up charged for breaking Level 4 restrictions, when the only harm they imposed was a potential one to rescue crews if they wound up in trouble, but none of the officials who decided it was a great idea to put this recreation area up next to a walkway will be up on charges, despite this now being the most likely candidate for how we wound up in lockdown and despite its having been an obviously recklessly stupid idea and despite their having been warned about it back in July. 

Police safety

The police union regularly asks to be armed. A few years ago, I included a chapter on our unarmed constabulary in a piece arguing that New Zealand really is the Outside of the Asylum. 

Policing in New Zealand is, all things considered, safe – even without firearms. Auckland University of Technology criminologist John Buttle tallied the figures for 2008–09, a high point in assaults against police. He found police reported being assaulted 2,481 times that year – out of 1,221,823 incidents attended by police. In the 123 years from 1886 to 2009, 29 officers were killed by a criminal act in the line of duty.

If loss of life at work is a measure of how dangerous an occupation is, then policing comes quite far down the list of hazardous jobs. This raises the distinct possibility that it is more dangerous being a farmer than it is a police officer.

Farmers do not carry sidearms to guard against enraged livestock.

Peter Kelley points me to an excellent OIA request he made for police injuries over the past several years. 

Injuries include not categorised; exposure to biological factors; chemical substances; contact with cold objects; sharp objects; noise; radiation; falls from height; being hit, struck or bitten by an animal, insect or spider; rubbing and chafing... there are a lot of categories. 

The one that is most obviously something that might be avoided by being armed would be "Hit, struck or bitten by person (Assault)". But they helpfully list the proportion of assaults among the other categories as well. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't count being spat at until 2017. And I'm not sure that that's something where an armed response makes the most sense anyway. 

It's hard to see any obvious case in here for arming police. Or at least there is no surge in injuries from assaults. Thomas Lumley put together some charts on it:

Ok trying that one again with the right cutoff date for 2021. It has 2013 and 2021 scaled pro rata to full years, and with uncertainty intervals (95% Poisson confidence intervals) pic.twitter.com/1DzlF8qbCl

— Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) August 19, 2021

Vaccines for children

Good news! Cabinet has decided to end its prohibition on vaccinating children aged twelve and up. From 1 September, parents will no longer be banned from protecting their children against Covid. 

At least if their children are at least 12 years old. 

The Prime Minister framed it at the press conference as a difficult decision, because they're talking about other people's children.

But they've shown absolutely no similar concern about banning parents from vaccinating their children. 

I could understand her framing it as she did if she were talking about mandating vaccination for children. And I can see a very good case for mandating vaccination. But that isn't what she was talking about. She was talking about removing a prohibition that currently prevents parents from getting their kids vaccinated. 

Medsafe approved the vaccine for those aged 12 and up back in June. The FDA approved it on 10 May. We've known it's safe for over three months. Cabinet has just not seen fit to allow it to be used. There is no medical reason for it. 

I expect that the main problem has been a lack of vaccine supply. 

Because of the lack of vaccine supply, it has been convenient to consider those aged 12-16 as ineligible. All the comms on New Zealand's terrible vaccine roll-out have been around vaccination as proportion of the eligible population. One easy way of juking that stat is by artificially restricting the number of people considered eligible. If you don't have enough vaccines to go round anyway, then you can make a terrible figure look marginally less terrible at low cost. 

The ban continues for children younger than 12. 

The trials on the younger cohort are still continuing. If the FDA doesn't give a ruling on it until October, then we might not have a MedSafe determination before November, and then Cabinet extending to younger kids in December?

Given that we continue to tapdance on landmines in MIQ, and there is Covid in the community, might we consider allowing emergency authorisation for vaccinating kids younger than 12 if there is strong medical reason for it?

While risks for children on average are lower than for others, pediatric wards in the US are filled with kids with Covid. If might not make sense to make an 11 year old with co-morbidities wait the extra few months for her birthday, where the vaccine risks for 11 year olds are going to be awfully similar to the risks for 12 year olds, and delta's risks for kids seem kinda high. 

MIQ's Aristocracy of Pull

This week's column at Newsroom went through the problems in allocating MIQ spaces by political pull. Unfortunately, Newsroom's version strips out the links; the version on our site has them. 

A snippet:

The surest way to a space in MIQ, for the past sixteen months, has been political influence. Those with political influence get spaces. Those without it are forced into a broken room booking system. Getting a room through that broken system seems to be a full-time job all on its own: some would-be travellers have even hired people to sit at a computer and hit the refresh button, all day long, on their behalf.

But for those with political pull, things are a bit easier.

Last August, in the leadup to an election, the Provincial Growth Fund considered horse racing tracks to be vitally important pieces of infrastructure. An all-weather track in Cambridge needed specialist workers from overseas.

Entry into MIQ was then relatively simple.

Minister Faafoi’s spokesperson assured everyone that officials made the decision without input or advocacy from politicians.

And he was surely right.

No such advocacy was needed.

Criteria for entry always prioritised workers essential to the continued operation or construction of critical infrastructure. As soon as a horse racing track was considered critical infrastructure, the system’s gears turned and spaces for those workers were available as priority.

Horse racing, before last year’s election, had political pull. So horse track workers could use the MIQ express lane.

The America’s Cup was also a government priority. The government had already provided a substantial subsidy for the boat race and did not want it to fail for want of spaces in MIQ.

Because the government made a boat race a priority, all officials then needed to do was follow the rules. Over seven hundred entry visas followed for the racing crews, technical support, family of the syndicates, and even a nutritionist for one of the teams.

International film projects have political pull. So even Kirsten Dunst’s nanny was deemed an essential worker.

The Wiggles’ fan base gave them political pull. When the normal channels did not lead to a space, the Prime Minister’s suggestion that a space should be found seemed to do the trick.

The rules make it harder to get into MIQ if you are not a New Zealand resident. Political pull can turn a stalled immigration process into a fast-track so you can travel abroad and be eligible for MIQ for your return.

And political pull meant some four hundred MIQ spots are being saved for bureaucrats, businesspeople, and performers heading to a trade expo in Dubai in October. In 2017, the National-led government had committed over fifty million dollars for a pavilion for that expo. The government has considered it a priority. Once it is a priority, there will be spaces. That is how the system works.

Families split by the border and a lack of MIQ spaces cannot compete with any of that. The rules ensure that those with political pull can find a way through. Longstanding insiders have political pull. More recent migrants who have not seen their families for a year and a half do not.

The system seems corrupt – but not in any bribe-taking sense. Instead, it is corrupt in what seems a particularly Kiwi sense of the term. No money changes hands. No officials or Ministers are bribed. None need to be. The corruption instead is baked into the rules of the system providing a fast-track for those with political pull.

Officials follow the rules of a game that was rigged from the outset.

Dunedin lessons for the Christchurch Stadium

Newsroom put up a superb piece last week on all of the messes that Dunedin got itself into by spending stupid amounts of money on a stadium. 

I knew it was bad but hadn't known it was this bad. It was "Let's divert money from the CCO that runs the local lines company, deferring maintenance and leading to outages" bad. 

The judgment reads: “Aurora accepts it failed to exercise the skill, diligence, prudence and foresight to be reasonably expected.”

Between 2010 and 2016, Aurora failed, “without adequate justication”, to spend $37 million of forecast expenditure replacing and renewing assets. This led to a significant proportion of network assets “being at or near the end of their lives”, the judgment said.

The timing of this scandalous neglect was no coincidence, says whistleblower Richard Healey, of Dunedin, who exposed Aurora’s potentially harmful problems in 2016.

While a backlog of dangerous power poles weren’t being replaced across Otago, Aurora and sister company Delta paid $30 million in “subvention payments” – shifts within a corporate group, between profit-making to loss-making companies, for tax reasons – to Dunedin’s stadium.

“There were other factors and decisions related to maintenance that made sure we were always going to end up in this mess,” Healey says. “The key to the whole proposition is the fact that that money, which should have been used for the rebuild of the network, was portrayed by various people within council as some magic pot of gold that could be shifted across to fund the stadium – and it wasn’t.

Go read the whole thing. 

Yay, Sportsball and blackouts. 

Lunches

Well, we're very likely to be heading into another lockdown on the basis of a community case in Auckland.

Back in July, we found that the government had blown a pile of the emergency Covid money on the free school lunch programme. 

The free school lunches programme draws on special Covid recovery funds for another two and a half years, despite Treasury's misgivings about depleting the emergency money reserved against a resurgence of the virus.

The Covid-19 Relief and Recovery fund (CRRF) is a $50 billion pot of money that was established in the early days of the pandemic to respond to the health emergency and its economic fallout.

It's been tapped for a wide range of Covid-19 related expenses, but the Government has also used it for a range of increasingly tangential "Covid recovery" spending, and just $5.1b remained in the kitty at last tally.

Shame that the cupboard's a bit bare.

What did it the school lunch programme buy us? Last week Wednesday, Ministry of Ed dropped the evaluation of the school lunch programme. That evaluation has a cover dated May 2021, so draft findings would have been around before the budget was set.  

What did it find?

The programme had large effects on the proportion of lunches with at least one vegetable, and also reduced the proportion of lunches with sweet snacks. 

It provided a tiny and statistically insignificant decrease in the proportion of kids hungry after lunch. 

But kids who were often hungry after lunch, before the pilot, had larger increases in "being full", and in reported mental wellbeing.

And none of it cashed out into higher attendance rates at school. And improvements in school functioning (paying attention and such) were not statistically significant.

It's not immediately obvious that this pilot warranted expanding for broader rollout. There were existing food-in-school programmes before the government's programme, targeted at hungry kids. So effects weren't ever going to be huge: they'd have to come from kids that those programmes missed, or from improvements in what might have been on offer. 

And regardless of your views of the merits of scaling the thing up, I don't know what the word misappropriation even means when they're able to use emergency Covid spending on school lunch programmes. Might as well fund them out of the Defence vote if you're going to stretch things that far. I mean, some of those kids could be soldiers some day maybe. Is it more of a stretch than doing it out of the Covid budget? And what's the point of doing a pilot if you're just going to ramp the thing up to 11 regardless of whether the pilot shows it to be a good idea? Does anything mean anything anymore?