MP's "travel perks"

Managers can do anything they wanted, provided they would be happy to see the decision reported in the next day’s newspaper, and would be comfortable explaining their decision to their mothers.
NZ businessman as quoted in Human Resources Management in New Zealand (Rudman, R)

Dr Lockwood Smith

Speaker of the House Dr Lockwood Smith seemed to be quite comfortable with his decision to keep “travel perks” for MPs secret, although many people won’t necessarily agree with it.  We may feel uncomfortable with it on a gut level, but does the decision not just fail the smell test but also a more thorough analysis as well?

MPs' pay rates and benefits are set by the Remuneration Authority, which tries to determine the appropriate level of remuneration for senior civil servants, the Judiciary and MP's.  Most private companies use similar services to find the “market rate” when negotiating pay rates for their senior executives.  Usually this involves finding a total dollar value for the position - the total remuneration - and allowing the employee to choose the cash and benefit mix, up to that value; this commonly includes private use motor vehicles, superannuation and medical insurance.  These salary options often have a direct benefit to the employees family as well as the employee. 

For MP's $9600 per year of their total remuneration package goes towards reimbursement for international travel.  Although this commences from their start, the benefit isn't available until they have served 3 years.  Adding to the complexity, the proportion of international travel that is reimbursed is determined by the length of service, starting at 25% after three years and rising to 90% after 12, and there is no 'total pool' of all the contributions over the years – essential it is a pay as you go scheme with new members subsidising longer serving MP's.

Dr Smith argues that taxpayers actually gain from this scheme; because less money is reimbursed from the scheme that would have be paid directly to them as salary  (in 2009/10 it was $432,989 paid from $1,176,812 salary sacrificed), and as the balance isn't carried over each year, there is a direct saving in salary costs.

Other than it's complexity, the benefit isn't that different from those available from private companies; there's swings and roundabouts with some people benefiting more than they put in a particular year and some less (you see this often with private use vehicles – some people thrash the privilege, and you wonder based on their usage why some bother with the benefit), there is some private benefit to members families, and it forms part of the total remuneration.

MPs' have a very high rate of marriage failure - although whether this entirely due to the stress, long hours and public exposure of the job or partly a correlation due to the personality of someone who chooses to enter Parliament; so allowing their families to use this benefit may be a good thing.  Dr Smith suggesting that it's good for Parliament seems rather a generalisation and much harder to demonstrate.

So if it saves money, is good for MP's, and doesn't differ from common private practice, what's the issue?

Part of the blame must lie with the news media who insist on reporting it as a “travel perk”, when in fact it isn't free, but has been paid for.  This description is both emotive and untrue.

One of Dr Smiths arguments is based on the principle that if it was paid as cash we wouldn't know (or care) how it was spent, so MP's have the right to keep it private, but that somewhat misses the point.  The scheme does have the potential for abuse and based on the occasional previous misuse of public money, MPs' are difficult to trust - and for Dr Smith to suggest he will police it on our behalf is a who watches the Watchman argument, especially as he also benefits from the scheme.  The argument that since it is taken from total remuneration it not therefore paid by the taxpayer is also misleading – all MP's salaries are paid by the taxpayer however they are made up, making us not just stakeholders but shareholders in the system – and with a feeling that we have a right to know how our money is spent, whether that belief is correct or not.

MP's also sometimes bring it upon themselves by their representation of themselves as being just like us when seeking election – an everyman for everybody.  In many respects New Zealand is a very egalitarian country; our power distance - the amount we accept an unequal distribution of power - is very low.  Our inbuilt sense of distributive justice means we feel they should receive similar benefits as ourselves based on that similarity – and this isn't a similar benefit to what most of us receive.  In reality the burden, the workload, and the consequences of their actions are hugely dissimilar to our jobs, and their compensation should reflect that.

We are a very ethical country – in fact we top the world rankings for being corruption free.  This is the crux of the matter, our gut feeling that the secrecy is an ethical issue.  It can be hard to judge MP's job performance, but we can judge whether they do the right thing.  For all the benefits of the scheme and the logic of Dr Smith's arguments, ethics isn't just about doing the right thing, it’s also about being seen to do the right thing.

Te Papa Taonga Collection health hazard

Te Papa (image from www.cato.co.nz)

Te Papa caused controversy recently by suggesting that pregnant and menstruating women avoid the tour of their Maori Taonga.  Interesting was the suggestion that there was a risk of miscarriage due to the power they contain.  So is there a genuine health hazard?

Diaconis and Mostellers’ Law of Truly Large Numbers say that for a large enough sample, any unlikely thing is likely to happen, and further suggested that we notice unlikely events more than we notice likely events.  Without going into details with the maths, as an example, in a situation where something has a .1% chance of happening, if the situation is repeated a thousand times, the chances of it happening at least once rises to 63.2%, and if the situation is repeated 10,000 times, it will happen at least once with a chance of over 99.9%, i.e. it’s more likely to happen than not.  In recent months we’ve seen news reports both of someone winning the lottery twice, and a repeat of the same winning lottery numbers in relatively quick succession – good examples of both parts of this law in action.

If two things happen together does this mean that one causes the other?  Hobbes has suggested that for much of human history, life has been “brutish, short and nasty”, and in that sort of environment it certainly makes good survival sense for us to overestimate the connection between events – with less significant consequence, than failing to notice a real connection.  Particularly in emotionally heightened situations, where we search for meaning, we are programmed to overestimate the chances of a correlation or simple coincidence being due to causation.

Also in emotional situations, and where there are established beliefs, we are more likely to display a conformational bias; we look for evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way.

So there’s been a good historical chance of miscarriage coincidentally after expose to taonga; we are predisposed to interpret this as causation; and we are more likely to remember the event than all the times it didn’t happen.  This would explain the establishment of the belief, but doesn’t answer our original question – can expose to taonga be a health hazard?

To answer that question we can look to the placebo effects evil twin – the nocebo effect.  We’re all familiar with the placebo effect, where an inert substance such as a sugar pill can produce a positive health outcome at greater than statistically average chance.  However, researchers have also found the opposite effect – for example in one study, women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die from it than women with similar risk factors who didn't hold the same belief.  There are cultural practices – the best know would be voodoo, that exploit the nocebo effect.

So a miscarriage occurring after exposure to taonga may simply be coincidence, or it could be correlative, where the root cause is the belief rather than the exposure itself.  So yes, exposure can be a health hazard: but not from any intrinsic power they contain, but rather from our belief that they do.

The Hobbit dispute

Sir Peter Jackson on the set of the Lord of the Rings

There’s a lot we don’t know about the nature of the dispute between the actors, the movie studio and the Hobbit’s Director. We can however look at the logic of some of the statements made to help us determine the veracity of their claims.

The problems first seemed to surface as an attempt to negotiate a collective agreement covering actors for this film. Notable was the claim that New Zealand actors are independent contractors not employees and therefore were covered by the Commerce Act, not the Employment Relations Act, making a collective negotiation “illegal”.

Not discussed is what makes them independent contractors instead of employees. This is an area that has regularly been before the courts, who have developed a number of tests to help determine the difference – which ask questions such as “who has control of how, where and when the work is done”, “are they required to do the work themselves or can they hire other people to do the work for them” and “who supplies the tools and equipment”. Some jobs have aspects which are consistent with employment for some tests and being a contractor for others. The Appeals Court in the case of Cunningham v TNT Express Worldwide (New Zealand) Ltd, operating under the previous Employment Contracts Act, looked at the “real nature of the relationship” primarily through looking at the intention of the parties as indicated by the nature of the contract they agreed to. Since the Employment Relations Act has come into force, the courts now consider the real nature of the relationship in wider terms with the intention only being one factor, and may decide against the agreement that was signed.

This happened in the Supreme Court decision on Three Foot Six Ltd v Bryson, where the court decided despite the contract and some aspects of the job being like a contractor, Bryson was an employee, although the court noted that the decision was “not to be regarded as affecting the as yet untested status of any other employee in the film industry”. Being stung once, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Sir Peter is keen to establish that actors are independent contractors from the outset. Particularly misleading was the statement that a collective employment agreement couldn’t be negotiated because the work was temporary. The Union, however, appear to have conceded on this point and now have concentrated talking about improving conditions in the “pink book”.

Withdrawal of labour is a well established tactic when negotiating, enshrined (at least for employees) in law – it could be considered one of our “rights”. The main argument against the Union proceeding with this path is the damage it does to the film industry as a whole, loosing future income that benefits other parts of the economy i.e. other people. This was a surprisingly collectivist argument from a right of centre government. Lets look at an analogous situation of rights v economic benefit – could I operate a clothing factory “sweat shop” paying a lower than minimum wage to people in exchange for the economic benefit they bring to me, clothing retailers, and ultimately consumers through lower prices? Surely the concept of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work shouldn’t be negotiable?

Photo: Reuters

So what's a fair day's pay?  We can do a comparison with minimum wages, but in this case we have a better point of comparison.  If you are doing the same job, to the same level of skill as the person next to you, then you shouldn’t be discriminated against because of your race, gender, nationality etc.  Yet that’s exactly what is happening here, between New Zealand and actors of other nationalities.  Unless you want to argue that our actors aren't as good, or as productive, or something  ....

There has been a further development. The suggestion is now that the work will go to England, not Eastern Europe. Since the conditions for actors work in England are greater than were being asked for here, and I can’t imagine other costs are any less, the economic argument against negotiating appear weak.

It has also been argued by the film studio that the action by the Union has cost them economically due to the time delay. This is a movie that has been on hold for some years (mostly due to financing issues with the studio), but it is possible that conditions have changed and this is now true. However, the action has only been for a few days. To organise another location, when work has already begun in this country, could take at least as long as the delay so far. It would appear then, that where the delay is due to the actors the cost is unacceptable, but when the studio makes an equally costly decision that’s OK. The argument, once again, isn’t about economics but seems to be about a principle.

The whole concept of workers accepting less than minimum conditions than they would have as employees; the tax breaks; and the other incentives to bring film work here - in exchange for less well defined economic benefits, looks a lot like the theory of trickle down economics, or as it was called in the US in the 1900’s “horse and sparrow economics”, based on the idea that if you feed a horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Secondary school teacher negotiations

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. Lane Kirkland

Teaching has surely become more difficult, with assaults by students increasing, more ready access to alcohol at a younger age, and a greater emphasis on student rights over student responsibility.

You can understand teachers being frustrated then when their working conditions, including limiting classroom size, is under threat. If classroom size is a determinant of educational achievement why should teachers need to negotiate it at all – shouldn’t it be a given that the Government would want to get the best possible results for students? When I go to negotiate my pay deal, I look for personal benefits – more holidays, better pay. It looks like teachers are negotiating, and striking over, conditions (such as preparation time, class size) that improve the educational outcomes of students. Surely they should be offered these as tools to help them with their job?

The teachers claims seem to be a mixture of personal benefit (pay increase) and conditions, that, while they make the job easier, are also of benefit to students. The dual outcomes of these claims have been largely lost in government statements, analysis, and comment on the negotiations.

Why I dislike TV1's Breakfast programme

TVNZ Breakfast programme logo

I don’t watch “Breakfast” on TV1, and haven’t done for some time.  Why I dislike the programme can be described using Aristotle’s three pillars of rhetoric;

The first is ethos.  Ethos is about the character of the presenter, how they behave, what they say and how they treat other people.  Making fun of people who are different to you is classic bullying behaviour; suggesting someone who is eminently qualified to hold a job shouldn’t have it because of their skin colour and name is simply racism; and having a middle aged man making salacious comments about younger females they find attractive is just offensive and disturbing.  Once upon a time our presenters were epitomes of gravitas, they represented how we are at our best, not our most base.

The second is logos.  I’ve probably misquoted, and I’m afraid I can’t name the source, but someone recently referred to forming an opinion based on the facts, instead of passing off opinion as fact.  The stories presented in which I had some background knowledge confirmed my belief that research and analysis – gathering the facts, forming an opinion based on fact -were not high priorities for this programme.  Research seemed to be obtaining comment from a couple of people and then editing to present a predetermined point of view (the bias being deduced from the nature of the questions).  Contrast and conflict were valued over the development of argument or analysis.  The best of our news media has created worthwhile, constructive debate; promulgated ideas, and given a voice to people who couldn’t otherwise speak for themselves.  Creating controversy shouldn’t be the end goal for the news media, it should only be a by-product of making us better informed.

The last is pathos, the appeal to our emotions.  In the absence of the above two, Breakfast relied heavily on this method of persuasion.  It aimed to bypass the forebrain and imprint itself directly on the amygdala.  Pathos is the main delivery method used in advertising, and in a sense Breakfast became an extended advertisement, where the product being sold was the programme and its presenters.  It is hardly surprising that it has high ratings: adverts are designed to appeal to us and “sell”.

That the foremost exponent of this presentation style has come to an ignominious end is in some ways quite sad.  Although his nature helped shape the end product, he existed in an environment which allowed it to happen, encouraged and amplified it, rather than controlled and moderated it.  He paid the price of many peoples failings, at TVNZ, and of the higher value we place on entertainment over information.  We used to refer to “bread and circuses” as a superficial means of appeasing the masses.  But bread has some substance and with Breakfast there was none.  In the end, all we were left with was the circus.

On arming the Police

Armed NZ Police make an arrest - photo from www.stuff.co.nz

Watching Detective Inspector Mark Benefield show a strong emotional response -twice- while making press statements regarding the Carmen Thomas murder enquiry I was struck with how far we are from our stereotyped model of detection; from the cold calculation machine that was Sherlock Holmes, through the “just the facts ma’am” of Joe Friday, and the cool science discipline of CSI.  Justice is supposed to be blind, with decisions made only on the facts: not the beliefs, prejudices, and emotions of the participants.  We have expected our police to conduct their enquiries in the same manner - to ensure that there is no bias.

This may seem to be an insignificant detail, but it came at the same time as the Police Minister announced that police would have more routine access to firearms while on duty – assuring us that “law abiding citizens will have nothing to fear”.  Unless of course they find themselves at the wrong time and in the wrong place, confronted by an Officer responding with heightened emotions instead of analytically.  The Ministers argument only holds water if Police Officers never make mistakes, but to be human is to be fallible, and to be emotionally engaged only increases that potential.

I am neither arguing for or against the arming of police.  I do however have an issue with how the argument and policy have developed.  Only in July last year there was an announcement  that training in firearms would be reduced within certain groups of Officers, largely because of costs.  It looks like these Officers will now be armed – and are less well prepared for it than they were a year ago.  Unstated was whether the training will be returned, and if so where the previously unaffordable concomitant costs will be met from.

The Police Association at the time referred to the fact that criminals were already armed to protect their property and against other criminals, and that police were often “collateral damage” , i.e. outside of the engagements such as warrant execution where there is already discretion about whether to carry firearms, the assaults on police which would require the use of weapons is unpredictable and opportunistic.  In that case would having the weapons stored in the car help?  We haven’t seen any analysis of how many of the Police Officers killed on duty would have been saved by a weapon in their car, and outside of foot pursuits or traffic stops where the officer proceeds with weapon drawn what they hope can be achieved.  It looks very much like the plan is to “baby step” our way towards fully armed police, using single incidents where each current policy fails as a catalyst to move public opinion and political will further down the path.

There is a danger that once a tool is introduced the carefully worded purpose will fall by the operational wayside.  Only in May 2009 The Minister said;

"I would much rather have the police able to be armed with Tasers than firearms."

It would seem they now have their cake having eaten it as well.