Monthly Archives: December 2002

High Spirits: Can We Spend and Tax Our Way to Healthier Drinking?

This entry was posted in Health, Listener, Regulation & Taxation on 28th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Listener 28 December, 2002.

Keywords: Health; Regulation & Taxation;

The etching ‘Gin Lane’ by William Hogarth (1697-1764) shows an inebriated woman, ulcers on her legs from under-nourishment, her baby falling from her arms. On the steps below is the skeleton of a man – her fate too. Behind is commerce: the gin shop, the pawn shop and a funeral parlour. Above the arch beside her is written ‘drunk a penny, dead drunk tuppence, straw for free’: there was a kind of host responsibility even in 1750.

Taxing Harm: Modernising Alcohol Excise Duties

This entry was posted in Health, Regulation & Taxation on 17th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Alcohol ‘is an article of human consumption which has a legitimate use accompanied by dangerous possibilities’ The Report of the Royal Commission on Licensing 1946

This is the executive summary of a report commissioned by the Alcohol Advisory Council: The views in this report are the author’s and may not be those of ALAC. The full report is available on The ALAC website

Different Kinds Of Countries and Cities: The Distances Between Them.

This entry was posted in Globalisation & Trade, Literature and Culture on 15th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Cultures of the Commonwealth The Urban and the Rural No 9, spring 2003, p.25-35.(1)

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade; Literature and Culture;

Geoffrey Blainey titled his seminal history of Australia The Tyranny of Distance, arguing that

In understanding Australia’s history, the idea of distance may be as revealing as say Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘frontier theory’ is in probing the history of the United States. Distance – or its enemy, efficient transport – is not simply an explanation for much that happened in Australia’s history. Once the problem of distance is understood it also becomes difficult to accept many of the prevailing interpretations of other events in Australia’s history. Distance itself may not explain why they happened, but it forces a search for new applications.(2)

He could have said the same for New Zealand. For if external distance tyrannised Australia, New Zealand was more distant – even from Australia. (The physical distance from Canberra to Wellington is roughly the same as from London to Moscow.)

Working Smarter: Is Our Workforce Skilled Enough to Compete Globally?

This entry was posted in Education, Labour Studies, Listener on 14th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Listener 14 December, 2002.

Keywords: Education: Labour Studies;

Instead of the five percent downtime the manufacturer specified, the expensive German machinery was malfunctioning at four times that rate. The increasingly frustrated management called in its workers, who explained they had never had any training on the use of the machine. The German manufacturer would have been astonished. Their view is that each worker was a skilled technician who had a positive role in managing the machinery, not someone to do the jobs that the machine designers had not yet automated. Training for a new technology would have been routine.

The Air New Zealand-Qantas Merger: an Application in the Public Interest?

This entry was posted in Business & Finance on 11th December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Paper prepared for Debate Air New Zealand.

Keywords:Business & Finance;

Major factors in the background to the proposed merger between Air New Zealand and QANTAS are the Australian reneging on its open skies agreement with New Zealand, so that Air New Zealand does not have simple access to the Australian domestic air travel market, and the subsequent hurried – and with hindsight, foolish – purchase of Ansette Australia by Air New Zealand to obtain that access. I draw two immediate and relevant conclusions:

From Is This As Good As It Gets?

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation on 1st December 2002 by Brian Easton.

Metro December 2002, p.84-93, by Gilbert Wong.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

An even greater challenge to the orthodoxy that the reforms were good for growth come’s from economist Brian Easton. The problem he identifies is the way the nature of the decline is perceived. While New Zealand is in 20th place 30 years after it was in sixth place, the OECD data does not show a slow and steady decline. Instead, says Easton, it shows stable growth marred by two massive drops that spike down like two steps on the graph of economic growth.