High Court Judge Paul Davidson has declared that the police practise of issuing formal warnings (20,000 over the last decade) are illegal. He is wrong.

The fact that no law covers this doesn’t make it illegal. It’s a practise driven by pragmaticism.

In 1905 H.G. Wells’s “The Club of Queer Trades” novel was published. It described a London club in which membership was confined to individuals who has invented an entirely new and profitable commercial activity.

I had a wager last week with a cynic, a medical professional with an outdated view on life, that within 20 years Massey, or one of the Polytechnics, will offer a diploma course in stop-go sign holding.

Thirty odd years back I attended an address in Auckland by a bank economist. He waved about lots of newspaper clippings from the 1980s, all with similar headings along the lines of “Homeowners Punished by rising interest rates”. That was a decade it will be recalled in which inflation soared and house mortgages hit a high of 24%.

The enclosed letter from a respected newspaper analyst is self-explanatory.