Hard News by Russell Brown

The picture below is a screenshot of my last nine followers on Twitter, as of about 10 minutes ago. You'll note that they are all "eggs" – that is, accounts that lack a personal avatar and instead carry the default Twitter icon, an egg.

But if you were to look more closely at those accounts, you'd see that's not the only thing they have in common. Apart from the mercifully-real Dexshirts, they each follow exactly 21 other accounts. And those accounts are largely the same ones –  Richard Branson, Elon Musk, The Spinoff, Jacinda Ardern, David Farrier, Ateed, the Herald, Auckland Council, Metro and others, with the odd change-up, like YouTube star Yousef Saleh Erakat. The follows have been added in a different order for each account, but they stop at 21.

I have 53,000 Twitter followers and I tend to appear in Twitter's "you might want to follow these people" box – there's a feedback loop there – and I'm thus at the level where, especially in the context of the local Twittersphere, I tend to attract fake follower accounts. It's not really a great use of my time to do anything about it – it's hard to curate your followers on Twitter (unlike Facebook, relationships are not reciprocal) and many of them are culled by Twitter within a week anyway, in response to spam complaints.

But what's happening right now seems different. Since I started writing this, another account that follows exactly 21 other accounts has followed me. It's much more than the usual level of activity. I only paid attention to all this because one of my recent followers replied to a retweet of mine:

I've seen this before, of course. It's exactly the pattern of pro-Trump bots and shitposters. In a recent post, I quoted this paragraph from Carole Cadwalladr's Observer story about the hard right's use of data science and social media automation to shape opinion:

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.

I can't say if these are Russian bots. And, indeed, it would be a mistake to assume they are. They could simply be chasing and provoking controversy, as a means to currency for some other purpose. But Sam Wolley's piece for The Atlantic from November, with his research partner Douglas Guilbeault, is worth a look. They say:

Our team monitors political-bot activity around the world. We have data on politicians, government agencies, hacking collectives, and militaries using bots to disseminate lies, attack people, and cloud conversation. The widespread use of political bots solidifies polarization among citizens. Research has revealed social-media users’ tendency to engage with people like them, a concept known as homophily by social scientists. In the book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler suggest that social media invites the emergence of homophily. Social media networks concretize what is seen in offline social networks, as well—birds of a feather flock together. This segregation often leads to citizens only consuming news that strengthens the ideology of them and their peers.

In this year’s presidential election, the size, strategy, and potential effects of social automation are unprecedented—never have we seen such an all-out bot war. In the final debate, Trump and Clinton readily condemned Russia for attempting to influence the election via cyber attacks, but neither candidate has mentioned the millions of bots that work to manipulate public opinion on their behalf. Our team has found bots in support of both Trump and Clinton that harness and augment echo chambers online. One pro-Trump bot, @amrightnow, has more than 33,000 followers and spams Twitter with anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. It generated 1,200 posts during the final debate. Its competitor, the recently spawned @loserDonldTrump, retweets all mentions of @realDonaldTrump that include the word loser—producing more than 2,000 tweets a day. These bots represent a tiny fraction of the millions of politicized software programs working to manipulate the democratic process behind the scenes.

Bots also silence people and groups who might otherwise have a stake in a conversation. At the same time they make some users seem more popular, they make others less likely to speak. This spiral of silence results in less discussion and diversity in politics. Moreover, bots used to attack journalists might cause them to stop reporting on important issues because they fear retribution and harassment.

So anti-Trump (or at least pro-Clinton) bots aren't new, but they're not what I've typically seen in the past six months. The bots or paid human trolls who have interacted with me have been almost exclusively pro-Trump. Some of them are definitely human: one responded with telling (and amusing) indignation to my customary greeting, "How's the weather in St Petersburg?", demanding to know whether I was racist against Russians. You blew your cover there, dude.

But whatever it is, it feels like something is going on. And the fact that that something includes a ramping-up of anti-Trump provocations makes it even more intriguing. Is this a new entrant to the mass-manipulation game? Or is the same old network of automated emotional dividers recalibrating for a new zeitgeist?

The National government's bold move to bind a future government, nearly 20 years hence, to phase in a rise in the age of elibility for National Superannuation, from 65 to 67, invites a yawn on its face. But it's significant in a couple of senses.

Firstly, it is Bill English's big break from the entirely political promise of his predecessor that the age would not change on his watch. (Ironically, the leader of the Labour Party has bound himself to the same entirely political promise.) And, significantly, it has fired up superannuation as an election-year issue. Inevitably, the argument has quickly become one of competing generational interests.

It's actually worth stepping back a little and looking at the history here. It's summed up nicely enough in the Wikipedia article for Welfare in New Zealand:

A means-tested old age pension for those 65 years and older was introduced in 1898.^[12] This established some key features of public pensions in New Zealand, such as the use of general government spending rather than individual contributions, and a "pay as you go" rather than actuarial approach to funding.^[13]

The 1938 Social Security Act lowered the age for the means-tested pension to 60, and introduced a universal (not means-tested) superannuation from age 65.^[12] The universal pension catered to a strong demand for universal payments, while the lowered age for the means-tested pension provided for the likes of manual workers who were worn out and still poor at the age of 60.^[13]

The third Labour government introduced a compulsory superannuation scheme in 1975 where employees and employers each contributed at least 4 per cent of gross earnings.^[12] Rob Muldoon's third National government abolished the Labour scheme the following year, and in 1977 created a universal (not means-tested) scheme called National Superannuation that paid 80% of the average wage to married people over 60.^[1][12] The age of eligibility was lifted to 61 in 1992, then gradually raised to 65 between 1993 and 2001.^[12][14]

The design of a compulsory retirement savings scheme was drawn up as part of the coalition agreement between the National Party and New Zealand First following the 1996 general election. The proposed scheme was put to a referendum in 1997 and rejected by 92 per cent of votes, with only 8 per cent in favour.^[13] A move to a partially pre-funded or "smoothed pay-as-you-go" system was made with the creation of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund under the leadership of Labour Minister of Finance Michael Cullen in 2001.

KiwiSaver was introduced by the Fifth Labour Government in July 2007 as a voluntary retirement savings scheme on top of New Zealand Superannuation. Employees choose to contribute 3%, 4% or 8% of their gross earnings, with employers contributing 3%, and the government contributing a $1000 "kick-start" upon joining KiwiSaver as well as 50c per dollar on the first $1043 contributed by the employee each year. The savings are privately managed in a scheme of the person's choosing (if they don't choose a scheme, the government assigns them one), with the government's role limited to regulation, and the collecting and passing on of contributions via the PAYE tax system. An added incentive for younger people is the ability to make a one-off withdrawal from their KiwiSaver fund to help buy their first home.^[15] While completely voluntary, 2.15 million New Zealanders are active KiwiSaver members as of June 2013, equal to 56 percent of the country's population under 65.^[16][17]

At 1 December 2011, a person may be able to get New Zealand Superannuation if they:

• are aged 65 or over
• are a New Zealand citizen or permanent resident
• normally live in New Zealand at the time they applied.

They must also have lived in New Zealand for at least 10 years since they turned 20 with five of those years being since they turned 50. Time spent overseas in certain countries and for certain reasons may be counted for New Zealand Superannuation.^[18]

New Zealand Superannuation is taxed, the rate of which depends on their other income.^[19] The amount of Superannuation paid depends on the person's household situation. For a married couple the net of tax amount is set by legislation to be no less than 65% of the net average wage, although the Fifth Labour Government increased payments to ensure it is no less than 66% of net average wage. Rates are also payable for people living alone and for single people in shared accommodation.

New Zealand is one of only four countries that have flat-rate universal superannuation, the others being Canada, Denmark and Russia. One quarter of the state's core operating expenditure goes on superannuation.^[19]

This summary, based in part on this Brian Gaynor column from 2011, omits a few things, most notably the superannutation surtax/surcharge introduced by the Labour government in 1985 – a form of income-testing that was understandably unpopular with superannuitants. The National government that followed in 1990 campaigned on abolishing the surcharge but it wasn't pared back until 1996  and only finally surrendered in 1998 as part of National's coalition agreement with New Zealand First.

The trade-off for the restoration of a universal benefit was a lower rate for everyone – a floor of 60% of net wages after tax, with adjustments to be made on the basis of CPI movements. Tax rates and policy add a lot of complexity here, but the full historical drama is available in this excellent Good Returns post, excerpted from a paper by David Preston for the Office of the Retirement Commissioner, which also traverses the two super task-forces and the multi-party accord on the issue broken by National's deal with New Zealand First.

The Labour-Alliance government restored the floor vs wages to 65%, which is still a lot lower than the 89% it reached in 1978 (but, again, tax had a significant impact on how that actually worked out).

But another part of that Wiki summary bears noting. The age of eligibility for superannuation increased by five years between 1992 and 2001. That does make Bill English's promise that a future government will make a two-year adjustment up in two decades' time look fairly timid. It also tends to make Andrew Little's adoption of John Key's "no age increase while I'm leader" stance look arbitrary.

There are, of course, obvious problems with increasing the age of eligibility. We are all living longer and there's a very large generational cohort entering retirement now which will soldier on for many years. Maintaining superannuation in its current form is going to be very expensive. On the other and, there are demographics – most notably Māori – who will not live as long. Middle-class white people will be paid a lot more super as a group than working-class Māori – and an increase in age elibility only makes that disparity worse. Could we look again at means-testing from 60-65 or at Peter Dunne's idea of offering the option of a lower rate, taken earlier?

Okay, then. If we value the current system, we could all accept that we need to pay more tax to keep it as it is. But who should pay that tax? Current taxpayers (who do include supperanuitants) who will derive the benefit in future – or the group of working taxpayers in 20 years' time, who will be faced with supporting a large group of superannuitants from a relatively smaller tax pool?

An actuarial approach would suggest that we should be paying those extra taxes now on a scale that reflects the greater demand in future and not the demand now. But that's not how our pay-as-you-go system works.

This also touches on Michael Cullen's New Zealand Superannuation Fund. The fund won't cover anywhere near the whole of the future superannuation bill, but it wasn't meant to: it was always meant to be a smoothing system for pay-as-you-go.

National stopped paying into the Super fund when it started running GFC-related deficits, and any number of right-wingers this week have publicly disdained the idea of "borrowing money to invest". Leaving aside recent actual history (returns from the fund have considerably outstripped the cost of borrowing), that really depends on how you look at it.

If you take an actuarial view, then providing for the future retirement of workers now is a core government duty. Now. So you're not actually borrowing for that, you're borrowing for the least-prioritised stuff at the other end of the budget.

At any rate, we can be grateful that Cullen took his steps to improve our terrible national savings performance. Our house, with two income-earners born just outside the boomer window in 1962, has a Kiwisaver account and a longer-running unit trust that isn't subject to the same restrictions on withdrawal as Kiwisaver (which is fortunate, given that we had to dip into it three years ago when we got in a bad tax mess).

We're doing okay with our saving, I guess, but I'm well past my earnings peak in a declining trade and I can't see us significantly ramping up our rate of savings for the next decade. So we'll quite probably do what a lot a lot of people will do – sell up, take the gain and move out of Auckland. I don't actually want to leave Auckland, I'm in love with the way it's changing, but it may just be the only prudent course. The more so given that we have two disabled adult children whose future independence remains unclear.

So, yeah, it's our house. We're lucky. As Keith Ng noted this week on Twitter, New Zealand Super's assumptions include that the majority of its recipients will own their own houses. And maybe that's the really big problem here. And if it is, our governments need to do a lot better than they've been doing.

In late 2011 an Auckland 16 year-old began going to to a tiny commercial studio in Morningside most days after school and, with exactly one other person, made first an EP and then an album that turned out to be a game-changing global hit.

While she committed the odd misstep, she generally established herself as intelligent, creative and preternaturally mature –all the while growing up in public. Then, towards the end of that album's cycle, she sacked her manager, got off the treadmill and took a long break from performing. Long enough to become a 20 year-old.

I gather there were some crises of confidence for Lorde in recording the difficult second album. How could there not be? The idea of replaying the magical duo with Joel Little came and went and explored collaborations with various other people. This was significant in the sense that the great distinction of Pure Heroine was that it was made with such a limited cast in an era where any given pop single might have been sweated over by six writers and five producers.

And now now, she's back. Beautifully. Interestingly.

Wednesday night after 9pm was a great night. While Martin Guptill was playing out one of his country's great one-day cricket innings, Lorde was sprinkling breadcrumbs. A week's worth of teasers peaked in a treasure hunt where clues to the title of her new record – at the time we didn't know whether it was a single or the whole album – were placed around central Auckland.

The whole Lorde world was watching from its time zones and it felt kind of special that Aucklanders got to select themselves as global reporters. I looked at the pics and watched the funny-ass Periscope stream of three young gay men on a Herne Bay beach bathed in green light. ("Are we crusing?" "Yeah, we're cruising" "Where's the daddy-dick at?")

We got the title – 'Green Light' – and a slightly longer teaser of the tune itself. I went to bed with an earworm of a song I hadn't really heard.

And now, this morning, it's with us ...

Well, firstly, it's the breakup song. And imwaitingforit was not only the name of the teaser website, but the refrain from the chorus. And the other part of the tease, M******A, now translates to the title of the second album, Melodrama.

Inevitably, this, although the opening is sparse and wordy, this isn't the minimalism of the first album – the chorus is that of a kitchen-sink banger.   But I like love the house-style floating piano riff and turning it up reveals some thumping drums..

Some people claim to be hearing Taylor Swift in there. I wouldn't know, but the co-writer and producer (for not just this, but the whole album apparently, so there's some continuity with Pure Heroine) is sometime Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff.

And a word for the video. It's cool. The images are thought-through. The pampered popstar dancing wildly on the roof of her luxury while the driver waits bored.

So, yeah. Welcome back Lorde. Thanks for making it interesting.

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Let us also note that there is another follow-up release by a highly talented young woman from New Zealand today.

Nadia Reid's second album, Preservation, is out now and you can buy it for $15 on Bandcamp. It's like this:

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More records released on Lorde Day:

Grayson Gilmour's rather delightful new song 'Hundred Waters'. Video here in 360° video and audio:

And Pitch Black's single of 'It's the Future Knocking', with remixes by International Observer, Alpha Steppa and Deep Fried Dub.

Seriously looking forward to that Pitch Black show tonight ...

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Oro Festival has announced its lineup around headliners Underworld for April 8:

I've heard one other (exciting) act mentioned in gossip, so perhaps there's more to come. At any rate, this is an unusual and ambitious show. It's in Auckland: not in town but at a location in Woodhill state forest owned by the local iwi, Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara. As a matter of respect for the site, only a few VIP ticket-holders will be allowed to park onsite and everyone else will be buying either park-and-ride bus tickets or the ride all the way from town along with their tickets.

The promoter is the respected club doyen Dave Roper, who has been quiet lately but is clearly roaring back with the one.

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Over at The Spinoff, there's Gareth Shute's oral history of perhaps the most memorable event in New Zealand hip hop history – the Boost Mobile tour, where Telecom threw a whole lot of money at an ascendant local rap scene and sent a bunch of excitable kids around the country, twice, to market is new budget mobile brand.

It's a great read. I had not, for example, ever heard of what Savage describes here:

In Gisborne, we had two different opposition gangs in the crowd. And right on ‘Not Many’, the encore song, apparently some gunshots went off. All the security could hear was a pinging noise off the poles, and popping coming from the crowd. So it sounded like they were shooting at the stage. And you know you have the truck that takes all the equipment, the security rushed us from stage to that truck and we had to drive out into the wop wops, but at the same time, we had people trying to follow us. So we had to meet our bus in the wop wops before we went back to the hotel. It was crazy like that.

Perhaps the only thing missing is credit for the woman who made it happen from the Telecom end – former 95bFM general manager Suzanne Wilson.

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There's a rightful shitstorm blowing up over this part of the new South By Southwest festival contract, which aims to deter SXSW artists from playing side-shows, doing informal marketing or anything else the organisers feel affects them by, among other things, threatening to hand them over to US immigration authorities. New Zealand artists have been trekking to Austin for years. This would seem to add a huge degree of of peril for them. Don't do any busking, right?

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Bandcamp celebrates the arrival of the On-U Sound catalogue (well, some of it) by interviewing label founder Adrian Sherwood along with his sometime collaborator, UK dubstep pioneer Pinch. They have a new album together, Man vs Sofa.

The offerings from the catalogue are fairly rich. For instance, The Discoplates Collection features digital versions of the 10" EPs that have been a feature of the label since 1982, including the recent archive comp 
An On-U Journey Through Time & Space, which gathers four sci-fi themed tracks, including this absolute classic:

And a deep dig in the archives with Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics from 2015. Which isn't strictly as the title suggests, but features some of the label's more far-out sounds, including a previously unreleased Neneh Cherry track.

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Staying on the dub tip, the legendary British DJ David Rodigan has a new book, My Life In Reggae. There's an excerpt here about meeting King Tubby and buying some dubplates. And an enjoyable interview in The Guardian.

And Soul Jazz has reissued its classic Hustle! Reggae Disco compilation, with five new tracks. It includes this stone-cold Loft classic:

Sounds more like disco than reggae? Well, yeah – but it's the sound system vibe, innit?

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Four black artists from New York have clubbed together and bought the house in North Carolina where Nina Simone was born, to ensure its preservation. This makes me happy.

Andrew Schmidt has an epic article on The Terminals up on Audioculture.

And there's this Gilles Peterson audio documentary on the musical heritage of Capetown, which looks great:

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The Friday Music Post is sponsored by:

Representing New Zealand music

My story for Matters of Substance last year about the rollout of newly Pharmac-funded antiviral drugs that cure Hepatitis C contained both good and bad news. The good news lay in the fact of funding and in the compassionate, innovative work being done by Professor Ed Gane and his team in Auckland. The bad news was the weird intransigence of the Southern District Health Board.

To recap: the big problem with new direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) has been the pricing strategy of the drug companies, who are attempting to rapidly recoup development costs before new and even better drugs become available (an aim one company, Gilead, achieved almost immediately – everything since has been gravy). DAAs from Gilead cost $1000 a tablet – meaning that 12-week course of treatment came in north of $80,000. Even given the remarkable efficacy of these drugs, that was a big call on Pharmac resources.

Even after a budget had been made available, Pharmac was unable to negotiate an acceptable price with Gilead. So it did something appropriate but unusual: funded treatment not on the basis of severity of condition, but on the genotype of the Hepatitis C virus the patient had.

It would fund treatment with a DAA from another company, AbbVie. But AbbVie's drug combo only cures patients with genotypes 1 and 1a – about 55% of the infected population (which is thought to number about 50,000 in New Zealand). Those people could access treatment as of right. Patients with genotypes 2-6 are only eligible for funded treatment (with Gilead's product) at the point where they're basically in line for a liver transplant.

But there is another way. Genotype 2-6 patients can, via the Fix Hep C Buyer's Club, obtain "generic" versions of Gilead's drug combo for around $1500 and be treated with those. I use quotation marks around "generic" for a reason. The word suggests an inferior knock-off – but Fix Hep C's supply is made under licence from Gilead in India.

“These are the same medicines that Gilead is making in the States," Professor Gane told me. "They’re good medicines.”

And yet, the SDHB confirmed to me, not only was its policy was to refuse to prescribe to or monitor patients who wanted to take the Fix Hep C option, it would not even tell patients the option was available.

Professor Gane was, to put it mildly, surprised when I told him of the SDHB's stance. From the MoS story:

“I can’t understand that,” says Ed Gane of the Southern DHB’s stance.

“We certainly prescribe plenty here. If you have genotypes other than genotype 1, you should at least have the option of paying for your own treatment, which includes generic. And I think the only ethical thing to do if you are testing for hep C is to have that discussion.

“If we see someone diagnosed with genotype 3, we’ll say, ‘Sorry, but Viekira Pak will not work for you, we expect that Pharmac will have a treatment funded for you within the next one to two years. But in the interim, if you really want to be treated, you can import your own generics.’ And I would refer them to the Fix Hep C Buyers Club.”

I honestly thought that the story, with its affirmation from the country's leading liver specialist, would change things down south. It hasn't. The DHB remains unmoved. And now Hazel Heal, the Hep C advocate who first alerted me to the issue, has taken the step she didn't want to have to take: a formal complaint to the Health and Disability Commssioner.

"I don't want a fight, I just want them to change," Heal says.

"I'm now on my fourth person who has genotype 3 who has been given a blood test, been checked for genotype, found out they're genotype 3 – one of them at least is cirrhotic – and been told there's no treatment for them. I know you can't complain to the Health and Disability Commissioner about rudeness, but people shouldn't come away from their doctor crying and hurt.

"We just want them to be good clinicians and not necessarily good people or good communicators, I understand that. But they're standing in front of this patient, knowing that the generic option is there, with this level of research behind it, professional guidelines for goodness sake."

There is another treatment option: it's just really bad one. Patients are being directed to as much as 12 months' treatment interferon and ribavirin. Interferon is a really awful drug to take: it depletes serotonin to the extent that it creates the symptoms of clinical depression and patients with any history of mental health problems are warned against taking it. I've had it described to me as a form of torture. And its efficacy – in stark contrast to the DAAs – is not much better than 50%.

Patients in Auckland were advised for at least two years before Pharmac funding not to go on interferon and to hold tight for the new drugs. In Dunedin, people are still being told it's their only choice.

In her formal complaint, Heal notes she has been told that in 2017 this is "akin to recommending amputation rather than antibiotics for gangrene."

The New Zealand Hepatitis Foundation fully supports the Fix Hep C path and has a guide on its website to the process. In one of his responses to Heal, Dr Jason Hill, clinical leader at Dunedin Hospital's Department of Gastroenterology, wrote that if such a guide existed on the Hepatitis Foundation's website, "I can't find it". (From the home page it took me literally 10 seconds and two clicks.)

The Fix Hep C process is also endorsed in the formal treatment guidelines published by the the New Zealand Society of Gastroenterologists.

The SDHB's objections seem to centre on a reading of MedSafe's boilerplate advice about personal importation that other specialists simply do not share. It's hard to know what's going on here. Is there an element of professional rivalry? (Professor Gane had a hand in both the guidelines noted above.) Is it an excess of risk aversion? Is there research money somehow involved? Or is it just the thing that has always complicated and frustrated attempts to deal with Hepatitis C as a major public health problem – stigma?

Most Hep C patients were infected through injecting drug use. And many of them have learned from experience that going to doctors and hospitals can be a humiliating experience in it itself.

"It's like we're not real to them," says Heal."I honestly think stigma is the basis of it. There is that within the profession, within medicine, that says we need to suffer a bit with interferon. That it's not something they need to concern themselves with. A treatment is a treatment and we should feel lucky to get it because they see really sick patients who haven't inflicted it on themselves. It's like racism where people don't realise they're racist. That stigma amongst clinicians against people with Hep C. 

"My own doctor just about fell off his chair when he saw how much my cirrhosis had gone [after treatment with generics from Fix Hep C]. It was like the highlight of his career. And yet he's looking people in the eye now and telling them they've got no option. I just don't understand."

The SDHB's intransigence has, surprisingly, not even been on the radar of the Southern Alliance, the clinician group tasked with guiding the DAA rollout. Or perhaps it's not so surprising: the Pharmac-funded side of this project has plenty of its own challenges – notably in educating GPs and reaching into prisons – and I'll look at those in future posts.

But the SDHB clinicians aren't suburban GPs. They should be aware of their own professional guidelines. They shouldn't be risibly claiming not to be able to find those guidelines on the internet. This is about people's lives, for goodness sake.

Last week, Professor Gane was honored with the Innovators Award at the New Zealander of the Year Awards, for his work on curing Hep C, which goes all the way back to his original research in 1992, which demonstrated for the first time that the virus was the most common cause of liver failure.

He told NZ Doctor that he hoped any publicity around his award could be harnessed to challenge the continuing stigma around the disease. It would appear that there is plenty of work to be done yet on that score.

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If you'd like to know more about Hepatitis C, you can visit the Hepatitis Foundation website and read the Matters of Substance feature I wrote in 2015 about the story of the virus, and its human impact, in New Zealand.

Late last year, New Zealand Rugby announced that it was to begin random, out-of-competition drug-testing of players, coaches and administrators – not for drugs that might be used to gain any performance advantage, but for illicit recreational drugs.

The messaging around the announcement was careful. In the words of NZR contracts manager Chris Lendrum, the move was "essentially about the health and wellbeing of our people" and support, rather than punishment.

The reality behind the messaging is more complex. NZR did consider a broader culture-change strategy, like that underway at the Defence Force, which commissioned the New Zealand Drug Foundation to advise on its policies and practices around drug use. (The Defence Force has taken a similar longer-term approach to its sexual violence problem and in 2015 commissioned a review of its own culture from the specialist consultancy Tikai.)

But in the end, rugby went for something quicker and simpler, contracting The Drug Detection Agency, a franchising business whose shareholders include Julie Christie, to conduct its drug testing. The Drug Detection Agency's advisory board includes a franchising lawyer, an accountant, a professional director, a toxicologist and Christie, but no one with direct experience of drug and alcohol counselling.

It is tempting to conclude that NZR is less concerned about pastoral care than with avoiding what happened to Racing 92, the French club now scrambling to manage the PR fallout from its contracted player, New Zealander Ali Williams, getting busted buying cocaine outside a nightclub over the weekend. Williams' arrest compounds the club's problem with another of its New Zealand players, Dan Carter, being arrested for drink-driving two weeks ago. It's notable that almost all the news coverage has noted the club's PR issues and none of it on player welfare.

The irony, of course, is that had Williams bought his coke discreetly and not been a drunk asshole trying to score on the street at 3am, he would have been fairly unlucky to have been picked up in testing, had there been any. Cocaine metabolites are typically detectable in urine for around 48 hours after use. In case of heavy use, or use with alcohol (as per Williams) that could extend to four days, or perhaps a week if use is chronic, but that would be unusual.

Methamphetamine clears detection limits a little more quickly. But, depending on the cutoff value used in testing, cannabis metabolites may be detectable up to a month after use – while impairment is generally back to baseline after three hours . This is, of course, one of the key problems with workplace drug testing: it tends to privilege more harmful drugs which clear the body more quickly. 

Which brings us to Prime Minister Bill English's anecdata yesterday about employers who tell him they have trouble finding prospective employees who can pass a drug test. He said:

"One of the hurdles these days is just passing a drug test. Under workplace safety you can't have people on your premises under the influence of drugs and a lot of our younger people can't pass that test."

The problem, of course, is that – with the exception of alcohol – workplace drug tests really don't measure with someone is "under the influence" of drugs. They are more useful in screening for people who are occasional drug users, if that's what an employer wants to do. By the same token, there is no workplace drug test which can tell you whether a potential hire has a long-term problem with alcohol.

I can't find any reliable figures for how many jobs in the economy are subject to either pre-employment or random drug testing (which is to say, almost every news story on the subject originates in a press release from The Drug Detection Agency, which has clear interests in the matter and reports its internal data accordingly). But it seems around 5% of the 90,000 or so tests conducted annually (which corresponds to a lower-than-90,000 number of employees actually tested) return non-negative results, around three quarters of them related to cannabis.

The rate amongst those seeking jobs seems to be much, much lower. After the introduction of sanctions for beneficiaries who failed pre-employment drug tests, the failure rate amongst 8000 beneficiaries tested was 0.27%. Later news reports that the rate of sanctions was growing were statistical bollocks.

Let's be clear: there are sectors in which it is vital that employees not be impaired by drugs. Anything that can be done to improve the terrible workplace safety record of forestry, for example, seems worthwhile. (Although, as Chris Fowlie notes, forestry's enthusiastic embrace of testing does not appear to have improved that safety record.) But we can get an idea of the real-world efficacy of drug-testing in the evidence that the influx of construction workers to post-quake Christchurch created a methamphetamine boom.

Other industries, of course, have no interest in drug-testing their employees. The US tech industry, to take the most notable example, learned many years ago that drug-testing was a good way to lose the race for talent – and while Amazon tests its blue-collar workers, it wouldn't dream of having its coders pee in a cup. There's also the fact that the evidence that drug-testing actually curbs drug use is pretty thin. Further, drug-testing can have unintended consequences – one of the reasons synthetic cannabinoids took off in New Zealand was that for years they didn't show up in drug tests.

But let's come back to those rugby players. Two friends of mine have been in the presence of All Blacks who were on party drugs – one was saucer-eyed and somewhat confused down at the Viaduct two days before a test for which he wasn't in the squad and the other, a legend of the game, had a post-season night out dancing with some friends. Young people do that. But neither was causing the danger or distress to others (or putting themselves at risk) in the way that any number of players have through their alcohol consumption.

New Zealand Rugby and other employers might be better served by treating drug use the way they do (or should) alcohol use: be aware of problematic use, test for actual impairment, counsel. News media should stop treating the press releases of directly-interested companies as news. And politicians should stop reaching for the drug boogeyman every time they're in a tight spot over employment.