MacDoctor

Oil on Troubled Waters

MacDoctor — Sun, 19 May 2013 07:05:52 +0000

Mrs MacDoctor and I have just had a relaxing week in Vanuatu, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. Internet access was painfully slow, so there has been no blogging for more than a week and not much news about New Zealand. I see that I have not missed much, just another unexciting budget from Bill English. Still, he and John Key can rightly pat themselves on the back for not being stampeded into orgies of “stimulus” spending and endless printing of increasingly worthless banknotes à la Messers Obama and Bernanke. They deserve the thumbs up they received from the IMF and from Standard and Poor’s, despite the lack-luster nature of the budget.

Of more interest is the latest petition from the Greens on deep-sea drilling. When are the media going to wise up to the fact that the Greens use petitions not as a way of influencing government but as a way of generating free adverstising for themselves? Or if they are wise to it, when are they going to do their job and actually get the story, rather than the spin? While the media continue to give the greens uncritical support, they devalue the impact of all petitions as New Zealanders and the government both become increasingly weary of them.

Todays report is on the latest Green advertising stunt known as “Kiwi Bid” (are they going to offer the government and the people of New Zealand compensation for the loss of earnings and jobs from not exploring the sea bed? Nah). Much is made of the fact that two sports stars are lending their support, and there are quotes from Olympic Rower and ex-green candidate, Rob Hamill – whose sole marine expertise consists of large shoulder muscles – and Metiria Turei – whose marine expertise is considerably less.

Where is the quote from a Marine geologist? Where is the reassurance from the Government that proper measures will be taken to regulate this? Was the CEO of BP New Zealand not available for a quote on the lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster? While I realise that journalists have deadlines and often drip feed shorter articles to spin out the story into a series rather than a single item, there is no excuse for such a blatantly unbalanced article. It just gives unnecessary oxygen to a small flame of artificial outrage being generated by the Greens. Currently the attached poll would indicate that 75% of New Zealanders are quite comfortable with deep sea drilling as long as it is properly overseen.

The Green, of course, have not even a modicum of understanding of the nature of drilling as this quote from Turei shows:

There is no guarantee of safety with deep-sea drilling so we shouldn’t be doing it.

Of course there is no guarantee of safety – that would be impossible. The real question is – does the level of reward reflect the risk? To answer that, one requires some marine expertise and careful reasoned consideration, not fact-free bluster from the ignorant and blatantly partisan scare-mongering from the press.

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Charity

MacDoctor — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:17:53 +0000

The word charity was derived from the Latin word caritas (precious, costly), an attempt to translate the Greek word agape in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 13:13), a word that is hard to translate, but the phrase “extravagant selfless love” gets the flavour of it. It is a far cry from the simple alms-giving that we normally associate with the word charity.

It strikes me that the polarisation of the reactions to Family First (and Greenpeace earlier this year) losing their charitable status, is due to this slow degradation of meaning of charity. If we still saw charity as a giving of ourselves to others in need, we would not be confused about the status of organisations such as Family First and Greenpeace who provide strong advocacy, but little in the way of support of personal need.

To be charitable in any meaningful way, an organisation (or person for that matter) must be involved directly in supplying personal needs. It is not sufficient to claim that you are bettering mankind by lobbying for government action – you have to be bettering mankind directly yourself to be charitable. Anything less than this is merely a monetary donation to a “cause” – possibly worthy, but a far cry from truly loving your fellow man.

Any government, of course, likes to foster charity by providing tax incentives to the donors. So long as the organisation involved is truly charitable (i.e. provides a service) then that is one less service that the government does not have to provide. Allowing advocacy groups charitable status, provides no benefit to the government financially and leads to lobbying groups being partially funded with taxpayer dollars taken from people who vehemently disagree with the lobby in question. This is manifestly unfair.

A cause should only be backed by those who believe in it. If I like Greenpeace’s advocacy for the environment, I am at perfect liberty to sponsor them. If I agree with Family First and their take on the world, I can support them. Those who say that removing charitable status from advocacy groups deters free speech are drawing a very long bow. If a cause has support in the community, it will find backers.

It comes as no surprise that the Greens are producing a bill to change the definition of charity to include advocacy. These are, after all, the same people who want to force me to fund their election campaign (with tax dollars) despite the fact that I disagree with almost all the policy they have ever produced. Including advocacy in the definition of charitable status will soon have political organisations, unions and political parties trying to take advantage of tax deductibility.

Not all advocacy should be denied charitable status. Many organisations who are clearly charities provide a great deal of advocacy. Barnardos and The Salvation Army spring to mind immediately. These are organisation whose purpose is charitable works but who find themselves, from time to time, forced into advocacy for their charges. This is perfectly acceptable. But groups whose charitable works form a minor part of their activities should be viewed with suspicion.

Family First are an advocacy group, not a charity. There is nothing wrong with this but people donating to it should not be having their donations subsidised by the taxpayer.

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Random Thought #2

MacDoctor — Tue, 07 May 2013 09:34:43 +0000

Apropos of the state supplying food to poor children in schools. Everyone seems to assume that the reduction in learning ability seen in children who come to school without food is due to their being hungry. Thus, feeding them will improve their long-term ability to achieve academically. However, the MacDoctor has seen little or no decent research to back up this assertion. It seems to him that the drop-off in learning ability is just as easily explained by the simple fact that these children have, in general, lousy parents. It is a well-established fact that poor parenting skills and disengaged parents are powerfully correlated with poor academic achievement in children. One suspects that this is due to far more than the simple absence of breakfast.

It would be interesting to see any long-term research on supplying meals in schools, if there is any. Especially if we plan annually to drop $100 million of borrowed money on the problem …

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Neologic #2

MacDoctor — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:07:01 +0000

Preserving Aaron Gilmore’s finest moments for posterity

Gilmore [gil-mawr] verb.

1. To bluster or bully someone from an imaginary power-base: When he was caught lying, Aaron tried to gilmore his way out, but nobody was intimidated.

2. To deposit bowel motions in an inappropriate place: The dog gilmored on the doorstep.

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Why Don’t We Bubble Wrap Them?

MacDoctor — Sun, 05 May 2013 11:07:53 +0000

The MacDoctor is all for using protective devices, if they have been shown to be effective, but too often he sees over-reaction like this:

Schools urged to insist on helmets for push-scooter riders after claims to ACC rocket 500 per cent.

The number of children seriously hurt while riding push scooters has skyrocketed with their popularity. More than 6000 under-14s were injured last year.

Nowhere are we told what the increase is in the number of children riding scooters. For all we know from this article, the rate of injury might be falling (if the increase in scooter use is up more than 500% over the 5 years). After all we are talking of an increase from around 150 accidents to about 750 accidents – not a huge increase considering there are over a million kids under 16 in New Zealand. Already you know that the article is going to be long on drama and short on fact.

A single glance at the impressive laceration pictured in the article confirms this. We are told that the 9-year-old Brent came by his accident by hitting a rock and flipping over. The MacDoctor suspects he was going down a hill at a considerable speed when he did it. We are given the impression that a helmet would have prevented this injury. Child safety group Safekids is campaigning for schools to introduce a “no helmet, no scooter” policy for children.

Yet when you look at the breakdown of accidents that ACC report only 2% of them record a diagnosis of concussion. While a small percentage of the lacerations may be head-related, all serious head injuries like Brent’s would also have the diagnosis of concussion in addition to the laceration. Given that the vast majority of “concussion” diagnoses are for very minor head injuries, the MacDoctor concludes that the number of serious head injuries we are talking about is very, very small. Possibly Brent is our only unfortunate.

More to the point, there is no evidence at all that wearing a helmet on a scooter is a worthwhile safety precaution. It is possible that any extra protection provided to the head is overtaken by an increased rate of serious neck injuries. It is not possible to simply extrapolate this data from bicycle riding. For one thing, the mechanisms of injury are quite different and, for another, the age groups are considerably more variable. Also the data on bicycle helmet safety is nowhere near as conclusive as we are normally lead to believe.

The MacDoctor sees mostly minor scrapes and the occasional arm fracture from scooters. He sees far more serious injuries from almost every other activity of children – monkey bars, slides, team sports of all kinds, horse riding and – the big daddy of them all – the dreaded trampoline. Even furniture causes more injuries than the lowly scooter – and don’t let’s start on kitchens…

Children damage themselves at play, sometimes seriously. Responsible parents will try to minimise this risk – as they should. But let us not bubble wrap our children like a crate of fragile eggs. Let us be realistic about risk, least we create risk-averse adults or, worse, discourage our children from physical activity completely. If you have a nine-year-old like Brent, you might want to insist he wears a helmet. But six-year-old Sally, riding to school, is likely to be fine and will not be helped by schools with restrictive policies or heavy-handed legislation.

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