Yesterday, John Roughan’s column in the Herald was about the people of Christchurch and their need to know “the worst they might face”. He draws his story from the reluctance of the GNS to make comments about the possibility of further strong earthquakes even though they knew there was good scientific evidence that there would [...]

It’s like magic. Every time the road statistics throw up something favorable, the police immediately take credit. A record low January road toll has been lauded by police as a sign their road safety messages are getting through to New Zealanders. No – it is not a sign of anything other than random fluctuations. Don’t [...]

The Myth of Equality A few years ago the socialists found a new bible to replace their old one. Their old one, Das Kapital, written by Groucho Marx’s brother, Karl, had been tainted by the collapse of the soviet socialist “utopia”. While the hard-line communists adopted the new world of environmentalism, the socialists wandered around in [...]

The UN committee on the rights of the child are concerned that we have insufficient rights for children in New Zealand. They imply that this is the cause of our “staggeringly high” infant mortality statistics. This would be impressive if we actually had high infant mortality stats, but we don’t. New Zealand’s infant mortality rate [...]

I suppose I will be getting visits from dozens of worried patients who have just read the Herald’s latest attempt to scare the willies out of you. Popular painkillers ‘lift stroke, heart risk’ Any headline like this, involving common drugs, causes plenty of panic. Many of my patients will simply stop taking these medicines and [...]

Every now and again we see stories of doomsayers talking about population “bombs” and “storms”. The Sunday Star Times runs one today which suggests that there is “a gaping hole in New Zealand’s workforce where all the 20 – 35-year-olds should be”. There is only one problem with this analysis from Professor Natalie Jackson, who [...]

The Herald has kicked off it’s “Two Drinks Max” campaign today. Just what we need – more emotional heat and less rationality. I don’t have any problem with the somewhat simplistic “Two Drinks Max”. If people want to pledge themselves to this; more power to them. However, I do object to the dishonest way the [...]

Yesterday Steven Joyce finally announced he was raising the driving age. Unfortunately, he is only raising it to a timid 16 years. Still, at least we won’t have the lowest driving age in the developed world and one of the highest youth fatality rates. I find it hard to believe that there is so much [...]

Freakonomics cites a recent paper on road fatalities: According to a recent paper by Lee S. Friedman, Donald Hedeker, and Elihu D. Richter, the lifting of the federal 55 mph speed limit in 1995 was responsible for 12,545 deaths between 1995 and 2005. That’s about 45 percent more American fatalities than we have suffered in 9/11, Iraq [...]

The only thing that saves the stupid headline below from joining my Spam Journalism collection is the fact that the article it heads is not trivial: Govt’s tough line on violence isn’t working – police Police say the Government’s policies to reduce violent crime have had little effect, as such offending is still on the [...]