Leave Sir Ed's watches alone

Compulsion off the agenda
It’s looking less likely that the government is going to start forcing people to hand over their money to fund managers.

The government’s Savings Working Group said today it is not going to recommend compulsory savings.

It looks as if the group has done what politicians habitually fail to do and actually looked at the evidence as to whether compulsion does what its touters claim it does.

Compulsion would need a lot of justifying because there are plenty of arguments against it.

“We’ve had a real discussion about compulsion. Its not finished, but on what we’ve seen so far it doesn’t look as though there is any justification of compulsion for savings,” the working group’s head Kerry McDonald said today.

However, he said the group is looking at high effective marginal tax rates and the warped incentives they create, as well as poor returns on investment for a lot of government spending.

Both these areas are worthy of inquiry and if they are addressed New Zealand’s economy might finally get out of second gear.

Bring back Goldstein
Over the past couple of years Ira Goldstein has become somewhat of an icon and the agency that followed in TBWA Whybin’s footsteps at ASB had big shoes to fill (excuse the mixed foot metaphor).

Unfortunately the new ASB marketing campaign by agency Droga5 has proved somewhat underwhelming.

It includes an ad offering IVF assistance, another ad telling us ASB likes hiking and table tennis (who cares?), a message on the door saying “Hi, you look nice today” (are you perving at us through the CCTV camera?), and a creepy cell phone message saying “I’m ASB mobile. I like to be touched.”

The campaign has been given a resounding thumbs-down by NBR readers, including one commenter who pointed out the messages resounded with double entendres.

“Reading these posters, remind me of a decrepit old man dressed in a grubby gabardine coat, sitting on a park bench, eyeing up the pretty young girls.”

Another asked, “Why would you waste so much of your enormous profit with this sort of mindless egotistical banal about doing something for your long suffering customers?”

To be fair, Mr Goldstein was getting rather stale before he was retired, but it’s hard to imagine people flocking to ASB after viewing these new ads.

At least the ads are better than Air New Zealand’s new ads featuring a furry pervert.

None of your business
The ugly family feud developing over the plan by Sir Edmund Hillary’s widow to sell his collection of Rolex watches at Swiss auction has uncovered a little-known government power.

As the dispute heads to court, with other family members seeking an injunction from the High Court to stop the sale, it turns out the Ministry of Culture and Heritage (an expendable ministry if ever there were one) may intervene in the spat.

The ministry is seeking a legal opinion on whether the watches fall under the Protected Objects Act, which allows the government to ban people from selling their privately-owned property overseas.

The saying “possession is nine tenths of the law” means nothing to the government, which can unilaterally decide your possessions are “important” and therefore no longer yours.

While there is undoubtedly huge public interest in the affair, there is no role for the government interfering in a private dispute.

If other New Zealanders want the watches to be kept in New Zealand they are free to bid for them at auction like everyone else.

NBR commenters agree: “This is just the kids being offside with the evil stepmother, just like in the fairy tales,” one said.

“It's none of the governments business.”

The moral of the story is: never underestimate the number of creative ways the government can interfere with your private property rights and freedom.