Hard News by Russell Brown

The most staggering thing about Donald Trump's speech announcing US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is that it demonstrated he has no idea at all what the accord actually is.  When he blathered that after withdrawing “we’ll see if we can try and make a deal that’s fair”, it meant exactly nothing.

Because as David Roberts explained on Vox days before the announcement, signatory countries set their own goals under Paris. And they can change or ignore those goals at no greater cost than periodically having to explain themselves to the rest of the world. To be fair, that's arguably a maximalist take on the flexibility of the accord's ratchet mechanism. This legal analysis on CarbonBrief takes a more nuanced view, but essentially comes to the same conclusion.

Basically, if Trump wants to kill off Obama's clean air inititive – as stupid and self-harming as that would be – he can. So leaving the accord has been almost entirely a matter of ideology – which is, apparently, the way it has played out in the White House, with a group including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who, let's recall, was CEO of Exxon freakin' Mobil five minutes ago) losing to the Year Zero cult led by Steve Bannon.

Clearly, the fact of US withdrawal is bad, although it's probably worse for the US than it is for the world. But in a way, Trump's feeble account of the decision is worse. He has done the same thing, swinging wildly against phantoms, on the matters of NATO and trade agreements, but this seems on a new level.

Unfortunately, it may be catching. In tomorrow's UK Daily Telegrah, this editorial will appear, arguing preposterously that Britain abandoning the "naive" Paris Agreement would allow it to embrace the "fracking revolution", a "technology cheaper and greener than, say, coal". This is simple bullshit. If Britain wants to argue that embracing fracking was, in the words of the accord, "enhancing its level of ambition” – as dubious a claim as that might be –  it could do so today. The Telegraph's pompous offering that "ideology must not be allowed to drive the energy debate" has precisely fucking nothing to do with Paris.

While on the one hand there is genuinely an economic and industrial wave building behind the production and use of more sustainable energy technologies – not least in the US itself – on another there is a countervailing trend: the emergence of an era in which stupidity and ignorance have been raised to virtues.

New Zealand sports writing has often suffered in comparison with with the more elevated work of American journalists, although that's not quite fair. Rugby scribes in particular used to write regularly at length, in tour journals and books. Some of those books – such as Trek out of Trouble, Noel Holmes' unflinching account of the All Blacks' 1960 tour of South Africa – were very good indeed.

But, biographies aside, people don't buy rugby books like they used to. And  like all news coverage, sport has fallen prey to the accelerating news cycle. I'm as guilty as anyone of grazing on online rugby "stories" with little in the way of craft or substance.

On the other hand, there's Dylan Cleaver, who not only scooped the sports pool at the Canon Media Awards this month, but won the health reporting category and the nib senior health journalism scholarship with his vital series about rugby's problem with the long-term consequences of concussion. He shows the game can be written about with purpose.

In the lead-up to the Lions tour, Cleaver has embarked on a series called The Book of Rugby, which is largely not about the playing of the game but its place in modern New Zealand society. How many of the myths hold true? Still some, he concludes. But things are changing.

Every Christmas for years as a kid, I would get the DB Rugby Annual and I would read it cover-to-cover, then pore over it again.

But in 2017, there is no DB Rugby Annual and, as Cleaver notes in his introductory essay:

Put bluntly: the younger the generation, the less passion there is about sport. There is nothing subtle about the decline either. In 2011, 8.7 per cent of New Zealanders described themselves as "passionate" about sport. That number had dropped to 7 per cent by 2014 (with a slight boost in 2015 no doubt off the back of the cricket and rugby world cups).

Although attendance remained steady, consumption (6 to 4.1 per cent) and participation (6.3 to 4.9 per cent) also suffered significant drop-offs between 2011-14.

At the same time, the passion for entertainment has increased. Whereas the ratio of passion for entertainment to passion for sport is 2:1 for those 45 and older, it jumps to 3:1 for the younger generations and is increasing.

And yet, rugby is still doing far better than any other sport. Nearly half the respondents in the survey Cleaver quotes describe themselves as rugby "fans" or "fanatics". Rugby league and cricket are some way back on 36%.  It can still rightly be called our national game.

Like all sports, rugby must now pit itself against an ever-wider range of entertainment options. It helps that at its best New Zealand rugby is spectacular entertainment. Super Rugby has been a hard watch at times in its history, but this season all of the New Zealand teams have delivered spells of creative, athletic brilliance. The main problem facing the competition is that our teams are now a bit too good. The credibility of the competition relies on it being a competition.

Another consequence of the move to entertainment has been the creation of rugby celebrities. Yes, top players have always been celebrities – legends, even – but they are now modern celebrities. They get invited to events that get them in the gossip pages, they have their dick-picks leaked and their social media followings win them the same commercial freebies as other "influencers". On top of that, the best of them get paid a hell of a lot of money. (The not-so-good can head overseas and possibly make even more.)

It's customary to lament the associated corporatisation of the game, but former Black Fern (and current Labour MP) Louisa Wall, whose voice appears throughout Cleaver's series, makes a fascinating contention: that the game's halting movement to a more progressive culture has largely been driven by the needs of sponsors.

"Global corporate brands have to be inclusive and embrace diversity so if the Rugby Union is going to be part of that family of sponsors, they are going to have to change," she says. "The sponsors can't align themselves with brands that are fundamentally against what they stand for. Discrimination is not cool. Inequality is not cool."

Wall and (it seems) Cleaver credit the speech of a sponsor – ASB CEO Barbara Chapman – at last year's rugby awards for putting the game on notice that bullshit like the Chiefs' scandals cannot continue. If that's true, it's also true that ASB and other sponsors have also heard the chorus in the media, social and otherwise, to that effect. Even if you hate rugby, you may have helped improve its culture.

The big change in the infrastructure of the game, noted through the series, is the radical increase in the importance of schools rugby. That has come at the cost of the game's traditional community bedrock in the clubs. It has also changed schools. The second part of The Book of Rugby looks at the way professionalism has made its way through the school gates, for good and ill.

It's now a genuine career path for some kids, but that has meant its concentration in relatively few schools, who recruit for ability. In other schools, competitive sport itself is dying out. I was only ever an occasional First XV player, but back then there was no gym work. We were fit as fiddles, but there was no bulking up. I find it hard to imagine me going out every weekend now to face proto-professional gaints.

Schools, Cleaver contends, are also becoming something like the clubs of Europe: outside the control of the national union, focused on their own, sometimes narrow, interests. For various reasons, this may become a problem.

The other way we participate in rugby, of course, is by watching it. I pay quite handsomely to watch rugby on Sky, but I haven't been to a game in three years. I don't live far from Eden Park, but after a couple of miserable years with the Blues (for one of which I forked out a season pass) I gave up. I was offended as much by the feeling that the administrators were hopeless as the players, the feeling that going to a game wasn't a great experience.  I don't really have anyone to go with now anyway. I attended two matches on the last Lions tour (including the Wellington test, which is the finest All Black performance I have witnessed) but this time I'll probably go to none. Cost is a factor there too. The tickets are expensive.

I do wonder whether we'll keep on being able to write our childhood test match memories the way RNZ's sports editor Stephen Hewson has today in A hot dog on a stick, a can of fizzy and my first All Blacks game. Those childhood memories are often how we rationalise a contining belief in the game. Will that still be the case 20 years hence?

Like much rugby writing at the moment, this post serves as a way of marking the fact that the British and Irish Lions have arrived and begin their New Zealand quest on Saturday. A Lions tour, independent, of modern, branded rugby competitions, still carries a weight of tradition. It still invites comparison with the teams of yore. Even though it's not the epic journey it used to be (Whangarei and Rotorua host the only games outside the main centres this time), it will bring a crowd of visiting fans, and they were good sorts last time. It'll be fun.

I'm unlikely to get around to regular rugby posts, so feel free to treat the comments here as a place for thoughts on the games as they unfold, as well as the game itself. It's still worth talking about.

The episode of Media Take that screened last night is our last for a while. We'll be back on August 22 to cover the general election campaign and its aftermath. And I'm happy to say we went out with a good one.

For various reasons, the show has done less media commentary and been more of a place for korero about issues this year, and this week's episode looks at the debate about New Zealand's prison system, whose population recently exceeded 10,000 – a new record. Growth in the number of New Zealanders imprisoned has continued even as  the number of convictions has fallen. New inmates are more likely to be Māori than ever before.

The cost of the system is spiralling: last week, Finance minister Steven Joyce described growth in the prison population as "unprecedented" and "unanticipated" in discussing a Budget that allotted nearly a billion dollars in operational funding to the Department of Corrections – and an additional $763 million in new capital funding to expand prison capacity.

In truth, it shouldn't have been a surprise: the growth in prison numbers is in part a consequence of a 2013 tightening of bail and remand laws championed by, among others, the Sensible Sentencing Trust. But what's going on here in a broader sense? Is this really working? And what are the social costs?

That's subject of the show. Toi and I are joined by Julia Whaipooti of JustSpeak, Sensible Sentencing Trust legal advisor David Garrett, AUT law lecturer Kylee Quince and two people with direct experience of the prison system: the manager of Hoani Waititi Marae Shane White, who also oversees reintegration initiatives and writes tikanga programmes for the Department of Corrections, and Tricia Walsh, whose quiet bearing of witness is the most powerful element of a sometimes fractious programme.

I should note that we recorded well over time and the half-hour version of the show screening tonight will be a tough edit. But you can catch the extra "open floor" discussion online at the Media Take on-demand page shortly after the programme airs and it'll all be in the extended version of the show that screens on Sunday at 11.30am.

You can watch this week's episode and the extra "open floor" korero here on demand.

Media Take extended screens at 11.30am Sunday, Māori Television

PS: Yes, I am available to consider other work for the next 10 weeks :-)

There should not really have been such surprise at news reports about associate Health minister Peter Dunne last week proposing the legal, regulated sale of cannabis and the Portugal-style decriminalisation of other drugs. He has been advancing essentially the same ideas for a couple of years. He announced those ideas as United Future policy the week before and at the beginning of this month he expanded on them in a speech to a police strategy conference.

But his timing in making these relatively explicit proposals is notable. Dunne knows better than anyone that it is likely that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 will get a comprehensive rewrite in the next Parliamentary term. He's putting a stake in the ground.

His proposals warrant some debate. His policy when the Misuse of Drugs Act is rewritten, would be to "transfer the current Schedule of Class C Drugs from that Act to the Psychoactive Substances Act." This doesn't quite work, as phrased. Raw cannabis is a Class C drug in the MoDA schedules – but any cannabis preparation is scheduled in Class B, alongside amphetamine and morphine. And yet cannabis preparations are more likely to be approved as medicines and even to meet the "low risk of harm" standard in the Psychoactive Substances.

It may be safe to assume that the minister knows this and is simply choosing to say "Class C" because it's a clearer proposition for a press release. But it does shed useful light on the unholy mess that is the MoDA schedules. Because you might be surprised to know what is actually in Class C. You'll find codeine in its various forms, barbiturates – and also oxycodone (aka "hillybilly heroin") and fentanyl, which has been associated with a wave of overdose deaths in the US. Clearly, we're not going to be seeing those for sale in corner shops.

There is strangeness further up the schedules too. Relatively less harmful drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms are Class A drugs alongside heroin. It's reasonable to wonder what the schedules actually signify, if not potential for harm. The answer, to some extent, is that they signify whatever panic was abroad at the time.

For Dunne, the regulated supply of cannabis should follow an overall shift to Portugal-style decriminalisation of all drug use and possession:

First, we should move to an overall approach similar to the full Portuguese model, where the cultivation and possession of all drugs remains illegal, and all drug users are referred for assessment and treatment, but where there is a tolerance exercised for the possession of what are essentially Class C drugs under the current Misuse of Drugs Act. In that event, persons caught with – say – no more than the equivalent of one week’s personal supply would be referred directly to treatment rather the Courts, in an extension of our current diversion scheme. This would require significant additional investment in the provision of assessment and treatment services, but that makes far more sense than investing similar amounts more in the Courts and prison services for the same purpose. At the same time, it would free up more Police resources to concentrate on catching the criminals behind the New Zealand drugs scene.

Let's be quite clear here. Portugal's reforms were an attempt to curb alarming rates of harm from IV drug use in particular. They have been an unqualified success by that measure. Between 2001, when the reforms took effect, and 2012, annual new HIV infections plummeted from 1,016 to only 56. Overdose deaths fell from 80 to 16. The number of heroin users has halved. Lifetime prevalance rates suggest that drug use overall is on a long-term decline.

Portugal's system is not the libertarian paradise it's sometimes characterised as. In fact, it's quite nanny-state: the system can, and does, limit the freedom of people it decides are a danger to themselves.

But people picked up with personal quantities of drugs are not all "referred directly to treatment" as the minister suggests. They must appear before a panel ordained as part of the Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, which typically includes a psychologist, a social worker and a legal advisor. The panel may direct a user to treatment: but in as many as 85% of cases, it doesn't. The user's name is simply kept on file and action is suspended for six months. Coming before the panel again within that six months may be seen as evidence of a more serious problem.

This is actually a good thing. Forcing treatment on people who don't need treatment isn't a good use of resources.

New Zealand's most significant source of illicit drug harm is not opioids, but methamphetamine. The harms are different: less likely to involve blood-borne disease and fatal overdose, more likely to encompass mental illness, socal dysfunction and violence. A New Zealand solution thus may not look exactly like a Portugal solution. But Dunne is absolutely right to believe that directing resources from policing and prosecution of individual users to treatment and assessment is the right thing to do.

Portugal's system, however, entrenches another set of problems: those entailed by illicit drug production and supply. It still offers organised crime a monopoly in those areas. More radical solutions would extend regulated supply beyond just the cannabis market. But those solutions can't presently be observed in action anywhere and perhaps it's unrealistic to expect a Parliament to embark on that adventure just now.

What this all adds up to, however, is that drug law reform is absolutely an issue in this election year. The next Parliamentary term represents a once-in-a-generation chance to rewrite a 42 year-old law groaning with anomalies and contradictions – and to bring that law into line with our quite enightened National Drug Policy. We haven't done that well at all so far: the government's dismissal of the Law Commission's thoughtful, cautious review of the Act in 2010 was a disgrace.

It's also perhaps a more fruitful question to ask of those seeking election for the next term. Even the Greens have had qualms about going into an election with a law reform policy and Labour continues to bleat about it "not being a priority". It's not going to be in most manifestos. But asking for a commitment of good faith for when the law must be overhauled seems entirely reasonable.

I was otherwise occupied on Budget day and thus missed most of the scoring and shouting of odds. But I did catch Checkpoint opening its coverage with a look at Budget's 2017's headline story: the combination of tax threshold adjustments, increases in the scope and size of the accommodation supplement and a boost in Working for Families tax credits that is widely reckoned to have benefited lower-income families.

The report noted Finance minister Steven Joyce's expressed desire to "give middle-income families a hand" and quoted a mother of two school-aged children, who agreed that the extra $25-30 a week it meant to her family – described as being "at the upper end of the middle income bracket" – would make a difference.

"Some weeks we struggle to buy petrol, or we struggle to buy fruit or even a loaf of bread. So that would at least give us a chance to either get to work or  to feed the kids for lunches."

She said her family and many of her friends' families still relied on their parents when things like car repair bills came in.

"It's very hard to be able to sort of run a family easily without any added help from our parents."

I sat there listening in the car and thought: in what sort of high-performing economy are upper-middle-income families relying on benefits and help from their parents just to get by? How did we get here?

It seems that an economy whose claim to fame has been getting rid of subsidies is now more reliant than ever on a subsidy to landlords which became the centrepiece of National's housing reforms of the 1990s (and was embraced again when the party regained office) and a subsidy to employers that was a flagship policy of the Clark Labour governments (I'm told it was politically verboten in Treasury at the time to characterise WFF as a benefit, which it really is).

Both of these subsidies are expensive. Last Thursday's announcements run to an additional $2 billion a year. That's a hell of a lot of money not going to more conventional goverment spending on services.

It clearly isn't just me thinking these things. David Slack, who is on quite roll in his Sunday Star Times column lately, contemplated the nation and wished for "a Budget that goes further than simply patching things". And Fran O'Sullivan also delivered a sceptical review of the Joyce's first Budget:

The lack of substantial growth in real wage rates is another failure. It is really quite disturbing that the Government is having to fund a massive increase in Working for Families tax credits and the level of the accommodation supplement simply because for many families their take-home pay packets are not sufficient to live on.

Andrew Dickens, a more capable prose writer than most of his radio colleagues and a centrist at heart, chimed in on a similar note, asking whether the ballyhooed boost for families was a sign of success or failure.

Analyses from all points of the compass, it seems, arrive at the same, uncomfortable conclusion. We can bask all we like in our pretty-good-in-global-terms recent economic growth, but we have made a country many of us can't actually afford to live in; one in which it is also proving difficult to maintain the services expected of a modern social democracy. Were it not for the stimulus of a high net migration rate, the numbers would look worse.

There's a conversation I've been having in the past few years, which is, essentially, with all this good economic news, exactly who is doing well? The answer, in general terms, is people who don't rely on wages. Labour as a share of income in the economy has fallen in the long term, but it did recover between 2002 and 2008. Since then, well, there's a reason people might feel that another $25 a week – be it a tax cut or one of those subsidies – would help them manage. And that feeling in turn guides an affinity for economic policies that might not be to the eventual good of the majority of wage earners.

In a 2015 paper noting these trends, the Productivity Commission asked: