Well, thank you very much Dean Stockley and thank you very much everybody for coming along. It's a great privilege and as I've said it various times to the Woodhouse family and it's great to see so many friends from that family here tonight. While it's a great privilege it's also a rather daunting one when I think of that person whom I got to know really well. I've learned a great deal from various mentors over my life and times and for more than 50 years Owen Woodhouse was a major mentor and indeed he continues to be. I still think about his talents whenever I'm trying to think something through or trying to put words on a page. He emphasised the importance of getting the question right. He emphasised the importance of getting the facts right of seeking out the relevant values, policies and principles and balancing them when necessary. And of the ongoing assessment. He was also very insistent that we have ongoing assessment of changes in the law to see just what impact it has had. Also characteristics were clear thinking, clear writing, getting the first sentence right. They were critical as well. And so too was the international and comparative material. What could we learn from elsewhere? What lessons were there to be learned from elsewhere? I think I was having a discussion with Geoffrey Palmer about the timing of this last night in terms of who first came across Sir Owen. Geoffrey at that time was a graduate student in Chicago and when Sir Owen came partly because one of his co-commissioners had children at the University of Chicago but also because they wanted to meet up with Kelvin who was doing work on no-fault motor vehicle recovery. And so it's not exactly clear who of the two of us first met Owen. I met him in the library which some of you may recall, the law library at the back of Pembridge. And I see Pembridge today as surrounded. Must be getting rebuilt. And Jack Norther introduced me to the judge who was just starting out on his Royal Commission. And it was the first time I'd ever had a substantive discussion with a judge. He was really interested in what this young man, well I must have been getting near to 30 I think, had to say. And I think he also said it would be a good idea if people within the faculty took an interest in his Royal Commission. Now I'm sure that he did say the same thing to Colin Aikman who was then the Dean at Victoria and as I'll mention later, that led to a number of us appearing. Now you've got a number of names if you can see them on the screen behind me and I'll move through a number of different topics. But I'm talking about various places of peril and danger. They present themselves all the time and to mention some that I'm not going to discuss, consider the Korean Peninsula right at the moment. The 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Fukushima earthquakes and tsunami. The war of famine and cholera epidemic threatening 2 million Yemenis. The storm and flooding in Texas and the much more extensive flooding in Bangladesh in there in Nepal in which it is reported that 1200 have died. Now as I say tonight, I won't get into those matters but it is those are matters in which law has some part to play but inadequately at the moment. Not enough has been done in respect of those matters but I will be considering dangers and perils at work, dangers and perils at sea and on the battlefield and then after going through those three I'll come back to the ACC scheme and its extent and its extension and raise some issues at that point. Now I begin in terms of timing back in 1897 if I may. It's a time when labour law was getting established in serious ways in New Zealand. It's six years after Tragea whose name is on the wall behind me. Edward Tragea was appointed as the first secretary for labour in New Zealand and the chief inspector of factories. Another name that I picked from that time is Franz Kafka. This may be a bit of a surprise. But he was a brilliant young lawyer and he was appointed in that year to the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. In that year 1897 there's a very good lengthy article in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation by Walter Gaust Clay, barrister of the Inner Temple and it's about the law of employers' liability and insurance against accidents. Sadly that journal no longer exists. We need more comparative study of legislation. Although I notice that the Chief Justice recently cited to it but from the 1930s I think. Now in his very first sentence and that again goes back to a point I made about Sir Owen. Mr. Gaust Clay sees the existing law of employers' liability as being based on two essentially distinct principles. The first was compensation for a wrong and indemnity against apparel. Compensation for a wrong. The first had been developed by the courts. The second by legislatures. He was able to state the issue succinctly in that way because he had studied the law and particularly the legislation of 51 different jurisdictions. He also looked at some of the practice. He looked at the United Kingdom and many of its colonies. Many of the states of the United States, 15 European states. And he gave particular attention to the German law of insurance against accidents which had been adopted in 1884 during Chancellor Otto van Bismarck's long reign. That law he considered was probably the most successful part of social legislation undertaken in Germany at that time. In the light of that review, which just predated the First Workers' Compensation Act in the UK and predated the New Zealand one by three years, 1900 was the date of ours, Gors Clay recorded, and he's still on the first of his 111 pages, that the conviction appeared to be growing, to be gaining ground, that the idea of employers' liability, the court made law, should be abandoned altogether. And the problem of where accidents should be seen as essentially one of putting on a sound economic basis a portion of the necessary taxation of the state, that is by legislation. He elaborated the reason for that preference in these terms. For as the care of the injured workmen and the support of those whom were he uninjured, he would have to maintain fall in the last resort upon the state. It is the duty of the state to provide that the funds required for the discharge of the liability shall be raised in an equitable manner from among its subjects. So he was looking to sharing of the risk and doing it in an equitable manner, and he was looking to taxation, as was happening in many parts of continental Europe. A similar appeal to community responsibility, to think of the first principle in the Woodhouse report, appeared in the following year in New Zealand in the preamble to the Old Age Pensions Act of 1898. Parliament declared that it was equitable, that word again, that deserving persons who during their prime of life have helped to bear the public burden of the colony by the payment of taxes and to open up its resources by their labour and skill should receive a pension in their old age. Mr Gors Clay's paper in its second page focuses on a matter which he saw as essentially separate from compensation for work injury. That matter was the precautions to be taken against accidents through state regulation, supported by the enforcement of penal provisions requiring the taking of care. The legislation he reviews shows that that distinction between looking after the injured on the one side or the family of the dead worker on the other was quite...that was distinct from the business of proper safety and regulation and enforcement. Even although the proposition that taught liability for negligence would help promote safe systems of work was to be heard over much of the following century, the rejection of that proposition, or at least its very limited role, had long been reflected in the imposition of distinct obligations on the operators of factories, mines, ships, shops and offices, many obligations to protect their workers. Consider the great efforts of Shaftesbury and Macaulay in the middle of the 19th century. That law, supported by an inspectorate and criminal liability, is to be found in New Zealand legislation dating back to at least 1846. A publication of 1896 by Edward Tragea brings together that legislation and shows that lengthy period for the new colony. A publication a decade or two later to introduce an international element would have included legislation designed to give effect to the first international labour conventions adopted in 1906. They prohibited the use of white phosphorus in the match industry and night work for women employed in industry. An early sign that employers were willing to take on such obligations who were willing to do that, wished to be protected by treaty from foreign employers who would otherwise be free of such obligations. That argument of foreign cheating was one which Samuel Plimpsall had already had to deal with in getting his essential safety measure protecting seafarers established. The preambles to those early treaties referred accordingly to the desire of the parties to facilitate the protection of work people by the adoption of common provisions. Now, I've so far mentioned several notable individuals including lawyers and legislation and treaties, but not the courts except very incidentally. The Tragea publication, like that of Gorse Clay, does both include the employer's liability acts from 1882 through to the 1890s. Those acts chipped away at the extraordinary 1837 decision of Lord Abinger and his fellow barons and priestly enfowler. Now, it's interesting for me for a number of reasons and I trust it's of some interest to you to go back to that case. By the time in 1837, by that time, the common law judges had established that an individual was responsible for his own fault and there could be as well vicarious liability to a third person for their servant's negligent conduct in the course of that employment. But what of the case presented by Baron Abinger and his colleagues of physical harm caused by the negligent conduct of one servant to another? Could the master be held liable to the injured servant? The case said the barons was unprecedented. We are therefore to decide the question upon general principles and in doing so we are at liberty to look at the consequences of a decision the one way or the other. The judgment continues with these hypotheticals, all concerned with transportation but transportation of a particular kind. I'll do the glass. If the master be liable to the servant in this action, they said, the principle of that liability will be found to carry us to an alarming extent. It's the kind of sentence that I don't think judges should be in the habit of writing. He who is responsible by this general duty or by the terms of his contract for all the consequences of negligence in a matter in which he is the principal is responsible, and here's the particular type of transportation, is responsible for the negligence of his coachmaker, of his harness maker or his coachman. The footman therefore who rides behind the carriage may have an action against his master for a defect in the carriage owing to the negligence of the harvest maker or for drunkenness, neglect or want of skill in the coachman, nor is there any reason why the principal should not, if applicable in this class of cases, extend to many others and the court continues with suggested liabilities in respect of other classes of domestic servants. The chambermaid, the upholsterer, the cook, the butcher and the builder and throughout the word used as servant, not employee or worker. The court essentially concluded the case against the injured servant in this case with this assessment. The inconvenience, not to say the absurdity of these consequences afford a sufficient argument against the application of this principal to the present case. In that largely unreasoned and unprincipled way the common servant doctrine or fellow employment rule was established with serious consequences getting in the way of injured workers in many parts of the common law world. It's striking that in 1939 or fully 100 years later the House of Lords, while finding that the doctrine was based on personal apprehension rather than on principle and that, they quote, there were none to praise and very few to love it held that the doctrine could not be overthrown by judicial decision. It was too long established, they said and Lord Atkin was one of those judges and it's interesting to compare what he had said just a few years earlier right in the middle of the Depression in respect of the snail and the bottle in the case of Donahue and Stevenson. Now, it's important as Sir Owen would have insisted to look at some of the real facts at that time. This is 1837. At that time they thought about the railways. They might have taken account of the fact that railway construction and operations in the UK were developing rapidly. There were already about 500 miles of track and up to 900 workers who can hardly be thought of as servants serving along with other servants in the household thinking back to the various categories of servants mentioned. Further as an effect and cause of railways development came big increases in mining and metallurgy and the use of the blast furnace. The rapidly developing industrial revolution with its manifold dangers to the increasing numbers of industrial workers and the resulting serious injury appear to have passed the barrens by. You will I hope agree with my assessment that that ruling was extraordinary both as a matter of principle and fact. Now I now move to a second place apparel of danger dangers at sea. As I said at the beginning I'll come back to work accidents, the work place, the ACC scheme and its scope. Edward Traguia included among his collection of labour legislation that which gave particular protections to seafarers. For at least six centuries national legislation or national practice had required masters of ships to go to the aid of those in distress at sea. That obligation took general treaty form only in 1910 and it was included in New Zealand shipping legislation a few years later. The legislation said a master or person in charge of a ship shall so far as he can do so without serious danger to his own ship, her crew and passengers render assistance to every person even subjects of foreign states at war with his majesty who was found at sea in danger of being lost. And if he fails to do that he commits a crime. Now that obligation has been accompanied by a quid pro quo for at least 1566 and that year Pope Pius the fifth and calling on fishing vessels to come to the aid of those in peril provided the balance. Payment should be made to those who took that action. Now some law and economics scholars in addressing this area of law failed to mention the legislation and the treaties. It seems they're not interested in the written law. They put the matter essentially in economic terms in terms of economic incentives. But surely as a great French law of the sea expert has put it, the ideas of humanity at the base of the 1910 convention are above all discussion. The obligation of assistance is demanded by humanity a word that will occur quite often in this address. It's a word that Owen often used in thinking and writing about injury prevention, rehabilitation and compensation. That humanitarian demand appears to be often ignored, who think solely in terms of the market and zero some games. Think of all the actions of good citizenship being displayed right at the moment in Houston and no doubt in Bangladesh and so on. Where so many are in peril, if not at sea certainly in very deep water and who I imagine are not contemplating that there will be a quid pro quo. They are doing just their humanitarian duty. Now I come to my third area an obligation of assistance is to address on the battlefield. In 1859 at Sulphurino, Honoury do not a Swiss citizen who was hoping to get Napoleon to assist him in financing development in Algeria, Honoury do not finding this massive casualty rate after that awful battle arranged instead of a loan from the Emperor but he arranged succor to the casualties in their many thousands. He proceeded on the basis of tutti frittali we are all brothers, no line was to be drawn between friend and foe. His efforts led along with efforts of others of his compatriots to the formation in 1863 of what became the International Committee of the Red Cross and the adoption in 1864 of the First Geneva Convention for the amelioration of the sick and wounded in the field. It provided for the protection as neutral of hospitals and ambulances and of those who work there. It also protected houses of the wounded. Further the generals were to issue an appeal to the inhabitants to their humanity to bring help to the wounded. Those who did so were to remain free. It will not surprise you that the very first of the fundamental principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is humanity and that the law of arms or the law of war or the law of armed conflict is now commonly referred to as international humanitarian law. Now another name that I have from the 1860s is Florence Nightingale. She was flatly opposed to do nonce ideas of having National Red Cross societies. She saw their responsibilities or the responsibilities suggested for them as belonging to governments alone. Governments should not be able to get rid of those obligations by having these voluntary organizations. She failed in that opposition as is demonstrated by the fact that there are now nearly 190 National Red Cross societies around the world, National Red Crescent societies. But she was much more successful and this is a much more important part of her contribution. She is much more successful in insisting on accurate statistics. She collected the facts about military deaths and she was able to show by looking at them that it was more dangerous to be in the barracks in the British Army than it was to be in the battlefield in the Crimea. She demonstrated this very effectively and visually by using pie charts. One of the first people to use pie charts. And those charts were not just descriptive, they were also prescriptive. She was in the business of persuading the government to improve military hygiene. She took on the army top brass and was successful in that endeavor. Just a week ago the Australian Chief Government Scientist declared that she should be known as the lady with the lamp. I have it on good authority that she was not a very good nurse. But she should be known as the lady with the logarithm or the patron saint of mathematicians. That government, Chief Government Scientist, drew several lessons from her life. The first was that mathematics was critical to our lives and societies and the last was that evidence was to be used to make a difference in distancing healthcare policy. Florence Nightingale corresponded with a great number of people including Sir George Gray and part of the correspondence is about lessons to be drawn from the first New Zealand census. Again she suggested how in New Zealand hygiene among Maori populations might be improved. And one of her letters to Gray she said you will do a noble work in New Zealand. It was about the time he was coming back from Cape Colony to New Zealand. You will do a noble work in New Zealand but pray, think of your statistics and the word statistics began with a capital S. Now in again in 1863 came the first detailed statement of the Laws of War. It has at its core humanity competing with military necessity. It is general orders 100 issued by President Lincoln for the armies of the North in that very destructive civil war. Francis Lieber prepared that text. He was a real polymath. He also had sons on both sides of the battle and he spelled out a very detailed text including a ban on waterboarding. It's not something that's new but it's that ban. At the same time well the following year 1864 there were principles stated in much shorter form for the battle at Gate Pa. They were stated on the Maori side by Henry Taratoua and in which in that battle there were 250 Ngaturangi warriors and they defeated a British force of almost 2,000. Those laws provided that unarmed soldiers were to be saved as were the wounded or captured and soldiers who flee to the house of a priest. Unarmed Pakiha women and children were also to be spared. Now that body of law has been greatly elaborated over the following 150 years and it's been extended beyond the field to the shipwreck and people at sea in difficulty to prisoners of war in 1929 and in 1949 a date which is significant to civilians in occupied territory. Further changes were made in the 1970s to develop the law in respect of internal armed conflict, methods and means of warfare which had not been addressed since 1907 and improved methods of implementation. Now one of the principles that has been carried forward all the way since 1899 and it's included in one of those 1977 texts is what is known as the Demartens formula. A formula drafted by Frederick Demartens who was a leading Russian or some would say Estonian international lawyer and one of the principle negotiators in the Hague in 1899 and 1907. The latest version says in cases not covered by this protocol or other international agreements civilians and competence remain under the protection and authority of the principles of international law derived from established custom from the principles of humanity and from the dictates of the public conscience. In 1996 the International Court of Justice spoke very strongly in support of that clause. They said that court said the continuing existence and applicability of that clause was not to be doubted and it was an affirmation that the principles and rules of humanitarian law apply to nuclear weapons and saying that the court rejected the arguments made by the Russian Federation and the United States among others. Now there are obviously terrible breaches of this body of law and a good deal of cases of successful application which don't get the same press. I just want to touch on one matter which has been prominent recently and I'll do this quickly. It's a matter about which there's been a good deal of controversy. It relates to the resolution adopted late last year by the Security Council relating to the Middle East. It was adopted on 23 December last year in the last days of New Zealand's membership of the Security Council. The New Zealand action and co-sponsoring it and voting for it has been criticised. And has been the subject of much ill-informed comment including by the recently appointed Foreign Minister in his first few days back in May. Now New Zealand voted in favour along with 13 other members including France, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom and the United States as is well known and now I make four points about it very briefly. The resolution first reaffirmed that the occupied Palestinian territories were subject to the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 concerning the protection of civilians in armed conflict. And that convention includes a prohibition on civilian settlements in occupied territory. And that position of prohibition on civilian settlements had been taken by the legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry as long ago as November 1967 just a few months after the June war. And it was taken unanimously by the International Court of Justice in 2004. Third to counter the argument that the resolution was unbalanced and the resolution condemned all acts of violence against civilians called for immediate steps to end them and called upon the parties to act on the basis of international law. My final point about that event about that resolution is that the 4th Convention was actually in draft before World War II. We had a conference in 1940 not very good timing. The ICRC commentary to that convention says this about the delay and it's very cautious ICRC writing as they're renowned for that caution. The events of World War II they say show the disastrous consequences of the absence of a convention for the protection of victims in warfare. So a strong statement, disastrous consequences of which we're all pretty well aware. Now let me come back to the business of work injuries and beyond. I go back again to the late 19th century partly as a link to the reference on the overhead behind me to the international labour organisation. The bodies that were set up in continental Europe, the one that France Kafka was involved with for instance, had very interesting functions and composition. The German associations and those in Austria were formed by groups of employers within a particular industry. Their boards had equal numbers of employer and worker delegates. They had large powers of self-management and they had two different functions as you might have guessed. They first of all were involved in setting and gathering the premiums from the employers and making decisions on compensation for injuries and deaths on a no-fault basis. And second, they had the role of proposing regulations to promote safety in the particular industry. They had the function of appointing inspectors and the function of enforcing the regulations against employers and workers in the event of breach. The exercise of these important powers was subject to supervision and appellate control by government insurance officers. Kafka, to come back to him, was a very senior member of such an office in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which was then known as the Manchester of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There's a great recent book about Kafka in which his office writings have been translated with some really interesting commentary. And you find him dealing with businesses which were trying to get into a less expensive risk category. You find him resolving particular compensation claims on appeal. You find him trying to improve safety standards, for instance, in quarries. Some of you may remember how Joseph Kay came to his deaths by being stabbed in a quarry in the trial. And after 1914, he was becoming increasingly concerned as well with the rehabilitation of the many servicemen wounded in the Great War and the establishment of psychiatric hospitals for them. Slightly macabre, to notice that one of the psychiatric hospitals was proposed for the town of Frankenstein. Now, the composition of these associations can be linked, I think, to what happened when the International Labor Organization was established in 1919 at Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles doesn't have a very good name, but the International Labor Organization was one of its major products. That constitution provides for a tripartite representation. Each of the now 187 members of the International Labor Organization is represented at the conference which adopts International Labor Conventions, now almost 200 of them. Those delegations have two government delegates, one employer delegate and one worker delegate. And the governing body, the executive body is similarly composed. Those responsible for the preparation of the chapter of the Treaty of Versailles and for the setting up of the organization justified it in this way. Universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice and conditions of labor at that stage exist involving such injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people as to produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperiled and an improvement of these conditions is urgently required. No doubt. They had very clearly in mind what had happened in Russia just less than two years earlier and what was happening in terms of social and economic turmoil across the whole of Europe. The drafters and the resource of list of areas in which improvements were required they also so set out general principles and one of these principles, it's really striking to read when you think it's nearly 100 years ago, one of these principles was that men and women should receive equal immuneration for work of equal value. So there you have that proposition stated and we're still even in New Zealand a long way from achieving that. They also as with the two earlier Labour conventions I mentioned made the point that they had to be international regulation of Labour conditions because the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of Labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries. If the Dutch were to prohibit the use of children and minds they might be worried that the Belgians would get ahead of them but if they were all bound by the same treaty obligation that wouldn't happen. Now those principles developed and that mechanism developed was reassessed in 1944 it's interesting to see these things happening in the middle of warfare. In Philadelphia when the International Labour Conference met with President Roosevelt in attendance and the conference was under the chairmanship of Walter Nash the only other New Zealand minister who has chaired the International Labour Conference is Jim Bolger. So two significant contributions and they set out the fundamental principles which include the proposition that Labour is not a commodity an idea that was challenged really by the very use of the word contracts in the Employment Contracts Act that Labour is not a commodity and there are various other important principles stated there and you can relate them back to Roosevelt's Four Freedoms the Atlantic Charter and Declaration of 1942 and also if you want more detail go to William Beverage's report in 1942 leading to major social reform in the United Kingdom. Beverage had as part of his first principle the proposition that a revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions not for patching a revolutionary moment in the world's history of revolutions not for patching. Now the International Labour Organization under the enthusiastic leadership of Albert Thomas its first director adopted a great number of conventions New Zealand had no interest at all in the ILO just as it had almost no interest in the League of Nations until 1935 in the election of the first Labour government in 1938 New Zealand became 21 international Labour conventions including three relating to workers' compensation. Now in terms of workers' compensation I should go back to 1900 or slightly earlier, 1900 the year when Workers' Compensation Act was passed for the first time and just before that was the disaster in the Brunner mine in 1896. That killed all 65 miners working there they left 39 widows and 192 children as well as elderly dependents. I'm grateful to Hazel Armstrong for some of this material I should say. The funds available from a government of post-Levy on coal production and from the friendly societies formed through the miners unions were not adequate to cover the costs of such tragedies and the 1900 Act was passed in substantial part as a consequence. Now a great deal has been written about the periods from 1900 on to New Zealand and I'm not going to add to it tonight and indeed time is passing but there have been all these debates up to the 1960s and 1970s they're written up very well by a great number of people including Hazel's as I just writing as I just said. Also a very good book by Ian Campbell who was a long time senior member of the Workers' Compensation Board staff and by Geoffrey Palmer and I would expect that in future lectures in the series and in the associated symposiums some of that experience will be reviewed in a wider context as Sir Owen would have wished but if I could just go back again to the reference I made earlier to Owen talking to Colin Aikman and this does go to the point about close relationships within our society between the universities and many others. Colin reported to us at morning tea one day that he'd had this conversation with the judge and wouldn't it be a good idea for us to make submissions and four of us did. Colin Ivor Richardson, Peter Mackenzie and I and it was great last night to have Peter in the audience and for him to correct one or two other things I'd said. Now apart from the social welfare department that group of four was the only group the only set of submissions arguing for a universal scheme Colin made a good argument that the final phrase routinely put into Royal Commission in terms of reference was wide enough for the commission to go widely as of course it did. Now in terms of my own thinking and we talked about this a number of us at a 2003 conference by the teaching and legal system which began with Priestley and Fowler I was aware of the inadequate and chancey law common law and legislative remedies a matter which had been emphasised by Terence Eisen's recent book The Forensic Lottery influenced by the preamble to the Social Security Act of 1938 and so on also influenced by the ILO conventions in respect of which New Zealand was in breach because of the six year time limit for compensation in New Zealand also the beverage report was important in my thinking. Now I'd just take three lessons from the last 50 years of debate since the report was published the first concerns the questions to be asked and answered the 1967 report like the 1897 article distinguished prevention of injury from rehabilitation and compensation next incapacity in terms of widening the question incapacity should not be limited to injuries at work nor indeed to workers the position that was taken by parliament after the change of government in 1972 in principle the scheme should include incapacity should include incapacity caused by illness a subject which was the subject of study including careful costings submissions and proposals made by the law commission in the late 1980s and 1980s but unfortunately that step has yet to be taken principle just cannot justify the distinction that is drawn between the entitlements of those who lose their leg in a car accident and those who lose their leg to cancer and it's encouraging that that matter is still back on the agenda and being pursued. So one issue is trying to work out the right questions and just seeing how principle applies once you take in that case a wider view the second lesson yet again is about taking the facts seriously. That's the subtitle of an excellent 1996 book by three Canadian scholars one of whom is also a New Zealander they reviewed the evidence largely from North America of the efficiency of the tort system and it's alternatives relating to automobile accidents, medical accidents product related accidents, environmental injury and workplace injuries they said they wished to move away from the theoretical debates about the appropriate normative goals of the tort system and the doctrinal implications that each entails the tort system they conclude cannot successfully achieve all three of the goals they identified, deterrence compensation and corrective justice the empirical evidence leads them to a bleak judgement, that's their words, about the tort system as a compensatory mechanism. Now that conclusion had of course already been reached by the Royal Commission in 1967 and by the Law Commission in 1988 we were greatly helped to take the 1988 exercise by many submissions 1698 and by the work of expert consultant showing the great value of interdisciplinary work we had Ian Campbell whom I mentioned earlier who completed an excellent PhD and published a book on the whole matter in his late 70s, a lesson to many of us so we had Ian, we had Professor Les Castle on underlying economic and public policy principles, he took me off not knowing about Adam Smith's writing on jurisprudence, thought I was a not very lettered lawyer and very good help too from two Australians who came to Sir Owen's funeral Richard Cumston and Richard Madden for good advice on actuarial and policy matters and rehabilitation. I just mention two other facts which are comparative or two other questions. The first one is about the proportion of GDP that the scheme absorbs, it's still under 2%, a proportion which over the years has been a good deal less than the proportion of Australia's GDP absorbed workers compensation and road traffic injury premiums which of course have a much narrower coverage and second, how do the administrative costs of operating the scheme compared with those of other schemes, usually under 10% of the premium and related income in any particular year compared with 30% or so in other systems. A third matter concerns the need for bipartisan support and for the fostering of that support. Over the years there's been far too much political bickering so far as I can observe with insufficient attention being given to the facts and to the underlying policies and principles. I trust that I'm not being too optimistic in drawing positive lessons from the very brief life of the privatisation of injury insurance in the early 1990s and the failure of the incoming government in 2008 to give effect to the policy that had announced the previous year in opposition of re-establishing a competitive market to provide accident insurance. PricewaterhouseCoopers had undertaken an independent review in 2008 and that concluded that the current highly regarded ACC scheme is consistent with the Woodhouse Principles, adds considerable value to the New Zealand society and compares very well in comparison to alternative schemes and operation internationally. So there you have an independent report calling attention to the facts and to the principles and maybe that helped introduce reason and appreciation of the facts for the incoming government. Now I come finally to a conclusion in some senses. I trust and I should try to get this right. I trust that I've given you a sense of some evidence that Sir Owen and his person and in his work has taught to this country's great advantage. He drew on the wisdom of the ages. He drew on strong values, on wide experience, on facts and was a great New Zealander. I end with, not with the quote from Shakespeare that you have on your invitation that challenged me too much to try to work out quite how I could use it. But you might go and look at it. It's Hotspur, the young Percy and Henry IV Part 1 trying to persuade a reluctant lord of the importance of getting involved in the rebellion against Richard II which led to his downfall and the installation of Henry IV. But I end with one great friend of Owen's, one of his naval colleagues left in and commander Dennis Glover, DSC and there are words that at one point I tried but I didn't expect any great success to have included in the judgment of the New Zealand Court of Appeal. This is what Dennis Glover said, I do not dream of Sussex Downs or quaint old Englands, quaint old towns. I think of what will yet be seen in Johnsonville and Geraldine. Thank you.


Hey everybody and welcome back to Happily Dressed, a fashion blog dedicated to self-acceptance, self-confidence and self-sufficiency and welcome back to the channel. Today I'm doing something very exciting that I haven't done in a while and that is a thrift flip. I really wanted to take the opportunity and use my pdf pattern the Haley top that I have for sale online right now to flip this skirt into something really cool. So basically I have this skirt that I thrifted a long time ago but there's so much fabric I wanted to keep it just in case I wanted to create something cool and special and I guess today is that day. It's just really nice like I think it's so cool so today I thought I do. I thought I'd try to make it into the Haley top and the crazy thing is though this fabric is so light which is really nice but I'm just scared that with stiffer fabrics it's easier to manipulate them to do what you want but with stiffer fabrics you're able to manipulate it a lot more and a lot easier and this I won't be able to do that but I think with ironing it down and stuff like that it'll still be fine. If you want to get your hands on the Haley top you can by following the link down in the description below it's available on my website it looks something like this once you print it out it's just paper and you get to tape it all together which is great. If the bleed on your printer is a little weird don't worry just put page to page take that down cut it out and it'll work for you. I'm kind of just crossing my fingers I'm hoping that I have enough to make this work if I don't I'll just choose something else. I'm kind of just starting this video with high hopes and so let's keep it up.  To get started I cut up the middle of the skirt trying to find a good point to fold it and be able to place the pattern down but cannot get it so I had to end up undoing the darts to make it a square and less of a circle. Once I did that I had to lay down the pattern on a front seam which you'll see later on definitely turned out to be a problem.  So I'm thinking of switching the material I was going to try and do it with a pair of old dickies pants but I think I'm going to run to the same issue that there's going to have to be a seam on the front but it would be a little bit more structured so I could try that but I think what I'm leaning towards is using this curtain my friend Andy thrifted it for me I don't even know what to call this but it has structure and texture and it's a really nice like chocolate brown which is really cool. I might try this but I'll just keep you guys updated because this unfortunately is not working. So I ended up using the dickies pant to make this which is really nice and I only use one pant leg because I also cut out a lining instead of doing two of the same fabric just to save some fabric for the dickies pants so I could do this with other ones and the other leg. So now what I'm about to do is go ahead and just work on my loops so I'll just fold them in half and sew down at one fourth of an inch seam allowance and then once I finish doing that to all seven I'm going to fold them outward or like right side out and then top stitch them and that's the loops done and then we'll move on to our bodice piece. So now after your loops are done what you want to do is take your front and use your pattern to mark out your darts. I used an awl to poke a hole in the middle so I know where my middle point is and then mark my two side points and marked in the dart. I did that on the front piece and the lining piece and once I was done I went ahead and sewed that down and ironed it flat. After that I went ahead and put the sides onto the front right sides facing pin them down and sewed them at a half an inch seam allowance. I did that for the front and for the lining. Once that was nice and pressed as well this part you're going to want to stay stitch your loops. Basically place your first loop an inch down from your point. Place your last loop or the third loop an inch up from the bottom point and then place your middle loop at an equal distance between those two. It should look something like this after you finish and then what we're going to do is take our lining piece and face it right sides facing to our front and go ahead and pin that down. The cool thing about this method is that you don't need a serger because all your seams will be hidden and you want to make sure you leave a little space open so that way you can flip it over. Once it's done it should look something like this and then what you're going to do is cut your seam allowance down to a fourth of an inch so that way your seams can lay down easier and then go ahead and flip it right side out. I use a point turner to go ahead and get those corners nice and crisp and once you're done turning it out you're going to take it to your ironing board and go ahead and press it flat around the seam so that way you can top stitch and you're going to top stitch around the whole piece. So now once you have your piece all sewn together now is the fun part I'm going to pin it to my mannequin really quick and then tell you guys what I'm thinking. All right so now when you're done you can put it on your body but I have mine on the mannequin. Basically now you can test and see how high you want to sit it on yourself because now we're about to work on the strap so the cool thing about this top is that it's completely customizable with what kind of straps you want and how you want it to lace up in the back so basically you could use ribbon you can use the same material that you used to make it out of. I could actually cut the strip out in the Dickies pant fabric that I used to make this in the first place but I think what would be really cool is if you use some kind of really long ribbon whether it be like pink something very light shiny delicate lacy even I think that'd be really awesome I don't have enough pant fabric to make the straps out of it so I think what I'm going to use is some elastic string that I have which I think will be really nice and whatever method you choose with the straps that is your Hailey top done you can't see it in the camera because it's overexposed but I love the white straps on this if I had time I'd go out and get some kind of white ribbon and go ahead and tie that in the back a length that I'd recommend is around 50 to 83 inches I believe I've had this string about 80 to 90 inches and it's a little too long but I mean having a longer string makes it more adjustable to different body types which is really nice you can use this pattern upcycle in a spare fabric you have if you go thrifting and find an item that you really like and want to turn it into something different like I tried to do with the skirt today but it just didn't work out and yeah I definitely recommend for something like this you use a stiffer fabric like like a linen duck canvas even some cottons like a heavier weight cotton I think would be really beneficial for you and then the lining you can put in almost anything it could be a satin another cotton yeah I actually really like this top and I would wear it if I could but it's just not my style but thank you guys so much for watching if you did enjoy this video make sure you give it a big little thumbs up for me and if you didn't know I actually have a patreon that you can find in the description below so if you want to show your support for the channel you can do it by going over there I host live streams q&a's and even do some fun motivation stuff about self-acceptance of confidence and self-sufficiency as well as tarot readings so go ahead and check that out if you're interested if you want to stay up to date with what I get into on an everyday basis you can go and follow me on instagram and happily dressed and until next time I'll see you guys in my next video see you guys later


many people want to try to bring frameworks and lenses of analysis of high theory like Marxism, like structuralism, and so forth to understand how these movements work in various ways. And I think that in the same way that Cesar Chavez was able to talk about moving away from existing structures of organizing to create alternatives, that he also never relied upon high theory to motivate people is when he was ever asked where did you learn about non-violence. He said of course I've read Gandhi, I've read Thoreau, but it was really about learning about non-violence from my mother. I witnessed her reaching out to people in our community and that the importance of reaching out to the least of the community is an important part of what social justice meant. Serve the homeless and transient folk in the community she would make food and then hand it out freely to people. If an organization or a theory wasn't envisioning how these people could become actors or be taken care of then he said he wasn't very interested in those kinds of bodies or those kinds of theories. Cesar Chavez said look social justice and peace activism really doesn't mean anything if it can't extend a hand to those kinds of folks to them. If a theory can envision how those people can become agents in social change then this is really a theory that is vanguardist and Cesar Chavez was not particularly interested in vanguardism as part of social justice. In fact the emphasis that he always gave in the the farm workers movement in their organizing institute his position was always we're not here to create leaders we're here to create organizers and the job of an organizer is to help a community develop its own leadership its own set of skills amongst the people so that organizers essentially make themselves obsolete and work themselves out of a job and so the idea is how do you take people who perhaps are feeling frustrated and want social change but don't necessarily know how to do it how can we help them to develop their own skills to be able to address structural problems in their own community but not in a sense of charity in the ways that the church would work with it but trying to figure out how we change those people into agents that can make change for themselves.


Good afternoon, everybody, from the loud to the very quiet chamber music. Yes, pleasure to be talking to you today. I'm going to just start with a little introduction to myself and how I got into this topic. Basically, I've been gradually working my way there through the late 18th century into the early 19th century. It may seem like a rather short journey to you from Haydn, which was my topic of my PhD thesis. Through to a book on Beethoven's middle period string quartets dealing with a canonic composer and canonic genres, and in the first part of that book I had an introductory chapter and that chapter basically became the subject of the present research, which is looking at everything else other than Beethoven, but during his same time period and in his same location Vienna, which was a hotbed of musical production and publishing and performance in the late 18th and early 19th century. It's an incredibly exciting time in music history because for the first time music started to be more publicly performed. It was publicly performed in the church and in court settings where semi-publicly performed, where quite large gatherings could obviously amass, but for the first time concert life starts and music gets spread on a wider screen, if you like. Now during this time in Vienna there were a variety of other composers busy working away, but today we know virtually nothing about them and that was to my mind a great pity. Why do we know virtually nothing about them? Well it has to do obviously with the quality of their work and with the aesthetics of the time, but when I went back and started editing some of this music I found that that wasn't necessarily the most important factor that was preventing their music from being known today. One of the factors was that it wasn't so common in those days to publish because publication of music in Vienna was quite slow to get going as opposed to the Protestant North. And so it's a time when chamber music becomes the first music to be most widely unpublished and distributed, but certain composers hadn't cottoned on to that idea and so some of this music remained unpublished even though it was very good. So I started to edit some of this music myself and realised that it was a great pity that it wasn't more widely known today. The other reason why this music isn't so well known, this is a letter by Beethoven by the way and as you can see, even if you're German even if you have some background in reading this kind of handwriting you will still find it difficult. I've been with some colleagues at the Beethoven House still trying to figure out some of the words on this page a rather famous testament by Beethoven and so we get handwritten documents, we have diaries, we have so-called ephemera that are main lines of evidence for what went on in private sphere music making during the time. So it's sometimes quite difficult to get at the evidence, it sometimes involves a bit of sleuthing and detective work and some of the evidence is rather hard to uncover and even once you have quite difficult to decipher. On the other hand there are a wide variety of different lines of evidence that we can use to uncover what happened in the private sphere and one of my favourite is to look at iconography. I just talked very briefly about this picture by way of a case study of how I operate when I'm looking at chamber music in Beethoven's Vienna and trying not to focus on Beethoven. This particular picture has to do with Schubert.  So he's labelled. There's a variety of pictures that one looks at for evidence about the string quartet and other chamber music making at the time and typically I find that a lot of the emphasis in these pictures is in fact on the listeners. As you can see here some of them are actually labelled with their names and not the performer. We also notice a variety of visual tropes trotting through these pictures. Very often there are busts and other artefacts that suggest high art in connection with the string quartet in particular. So those tropes start to establish the privileged nature of chamber music making. And as I said, a focus on the listeners, often they're deeply, they've either got their eyes closed or as in the case, we don't really know about this man on your left, whether he's asleep, whether he's studying a score on his, people have suggested different things that maybe he's studying a score on his lap or maybe that's the fold of his trouser. But there always seems to be some sort of an emphasis on the listener and on the act of listening, so that's one of my avenues of research. Part of what's new about this research is that I do focus on audience reception quite a lot and on performance. I'm not so concerned with looking at the notes, partly because it's quite difficult to get those notes in the first place. I have to do lots of editing and fosicking around and transcribing, but gradually I am building up a repertoire of this music. But I'm trying to carve out a broadly cultural approach to the music, and that involves looking at various other different kinds of evidence than the notes on the page. So, for example, I have a section on publishing. These are... Oh, I'll come back to that one in a minute. We could talk about that. These are the chapters of my book, this one here. So, defining chamber music in the 19th century, celebrating Haydn, who was actually, as opposed to Beethoven, one of the main cultural gods in Vienna in the early 19th century, was also getting his name made for him and partly himself making his name. But he was not so well known and by those who did write about him, well, they thought that he was quite an avant-garde composer. So, we're looking at venues between chamber and theatre, the new venues that were carved out for this music. Chamber music in the Biedermeyer site, so how it factors into the coffee and culture of the salon. Coffee... sort of table culture. I'm interested in criticism and how social ideals were written into that criticism. And then I'm interested in what happened next, what happened after Beethoven disappeared from the scene and the impact that his music had in part then covering up all of that other music that's then become lost to today. Thank you very much.


Professor Tom W. Bell is a legal expert on special jurisdictions and decentralized communities. He earned his JD from the University of Chicago, practiced law in Silicon Valley and Washington DC, and served as a policy director at the Cato Institute before joining the faculty of Chapman University, Fowler School of Law. His many publications discuss copyright, Internet Law, Prediction Markets and the Third Amendment and include the book Your Next Government from the Nation-State to Stateless Nations. Bell's clients have included the Prospera Zeti and the Free Society Project. Tom, you're not gonna be able to see us, but we will have time for questions after you speak and feel free to share your screen if you would like to and you can also see a countdown timer of roughly how much time you have left. Take it away, Tom. Thank you. Thank you, Carl. Glad to join you all, wish I could be there in person. I was last with the MTA in 2016, spoke then about theology. It's great fun. I'm expecting the birth of my next son imminently so I couldn't travel, but let's talk. I want to tell you about some of my work in the field, which is basically practicing decentralized law. I'm going to tell you about three projects on which I've worked, Prospera, the Zetae in Honduras, the Kataba Indian Nations Green Earth Zone and Free Society Project. And the theme that ties these all together is the use of ULEX, the open source legal system. So let's jump in. I'm gonna share my screen now and make sure that we can all see the same things. I'm looking for what I want now. I probably should have closed out a lot of these browser windows. I'm still looking for the one I want. Sorry, friends. I want to show you first this one. There we go. So if you are, I hope that's sharing, I don't see it on my own screen. But I hope you're seeing the webpage for my book, Your Next Governments, so you'll know where to find it. And I will post in the chat when I can, links to all of the, oh good, you see it, all of the pages I'm sharing today. In fact, there they are in the chat now. And by the way, if you're curious what I spoke about in 2016, I'm just gonna show you this. You can look up re-create.org. Basically, the premise of re-creational theology, which I spoke about in 2016, is all presented here. But we're not gonna talk about that today. We're gonna talk about bringing peace among people. That's the goal here, bringing peace among people. So in this book, Your Next Government, I discuss some of my work in the field for clients and I've updated it since then with the audio book version. There's an updated audio book version, which is free, as far as I can tell. I see $0.00, so check it out to get even more up-to-date news about my work in the field and today you're gonna get even more up-to-date news. Let's start talking about Prospera. This is Google Maps, I'm going to zoom in here so you can see where it is. Now notice, we're gonna be going into Honduras here in the middle of the screen. We're gonna zoom in and notice we're in the same time zone as Chicago and that's terribly handy when you're engaged in all kinds of virtual transactions. We're zooming in on the island of Rotan off the coast of Honduras and we get in close enough, you'll see there is Prospera. Now it's mostly undeveloped. The architects at Hadid Architects are developing some wonderful buildings there and what do I wanna say about Prospera? I'll say it's the most advanced special economic zone in the world today. Essentially, the ZA there that is from the Spanish acronym for Zones Employo y Deseroyo Ekinomica, Special Employment and Economic Development Regents. The ZA there is one of three that has launched and like the other ZAs, it is accorded under Honduran law including their constitution, a great deal of latitude to basically self-legislate. They can pass indeed half to pass legislation for everything in that private zone except criminal law. Now they get to enforce their own criminal law which is essential in Honduras but they can't have their own criminal rules unless they're approved by the National Assembly. And it turns out the Honduran criminal code on paper isn't that bad. It's not scary at all, no worse than any other countries at least. It's the administration of the Honduran criminal justice system that can give you pause but you don't need to worry about that in Prospera. More importantly for present purposes is that it is independent economically for the most part from Honduras. They do have to levy some rather small income taxes. They do have to pay minimum wage that's in the Honduran constitution. There's other limits. It's not go do your own thing. You don't get to fly your own flag. You don't get to have your own diplomatic relations. It's not a sovereign nation but it has a great deal of leeway and especially in those areas that foreign investors and people who want to bring economic development to Honduras, all those areas they care about. I was very pleased to work on this. I've been working in Honduran projects since 2011 and this was the third of the three projects I worked on the one that finally got some traction and launched and in it is the Roatan common law code. The Roatan common law code. I'm gonna come back so I can look at you. And the Roatan common law code uses Ulex the open source legal operating system. It uses the substantive rules from Ulex. And to get those substantive rules I went like someone going shopping with a basket to the library and I pulled off the shelf all of the world's best most uniform recognized rule sets for things like contract law for things like secured transactions for tort. I use sources such as those from the American law institute, uniform commercial code. They're all flag free sources. It's very important. You heard Curtis Lockhart from CCI speak earlier about Romer's approach to charter cities. And I think Romer misunderstood something brilliant man did not understand how patriotic people can be even in places like Honduras where they definitely have problems with their government but nonetheless, these people have felt the sharp end of colonialism. There is no way as a prize where we miss this no way they're gonna let a Canadian flag over their soil and let the Canadians even Canadians bless their hearts they seem pretty peaceful compared to Americans. Even Canadians are not gonna be allowed to parade around on Honduran soil waving their flags saying oh look, we know how to govern better than you. That's an insult. So what we did with Prospera was we used flag free sources. Now they mostly come from American sources not entirely, some of them international but this is important for diplomatic political reasons. I also happen to think they're better rules due respect to the Canadians. I think that using flag free sources gets you away from all kinds of public choice lobbying problems that poison the legal systems of nation states. Let me go back to screen sharing though I got more to tell you about this one I'm very excited about. This is the Kataba Green Earth zone and this just launched. Now here's a website for Prospera, check it out. Oh, I gotta say one more thing about Prospera. They have announced the issuance of a cryptocurrency backed by the real estate in their zone. I think they're the only place on earth doing that. It is a cryptocurrency backed with not just a hard asset but the most permanent assets, real estate, absolutely wonderful. But let's talk about the Kataba. The Kataba are a relatively small Native American tribe in a trust relationship with the US federal government based in South Carolina. And here you can see where they are in South Carolina. Here we are. And they recently announced the launch of their Green Earth zone. And here is the press release. Again, you'll find the link in the chat and in the Green Earth zone, they basically have attempted and I think succeeded in creating a set of rules which are optimized for digital assets, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and other forms of digital development. They are bringing this to their reservation on what they call server pods.  The whole zone is going to take up less than two acres, 1.89 acres. They're gonna hook it up to power. It's going to be a virtual special economic zone. The first special economic zone in the United States, I would argue, and I had studied about this. You can read about it in my book. Very excited about the Green Earth zone. Interestingly for the present audience, I want to observe the Kataba are almost two A1 members of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Most interesting, apparently sometime back in the 1800s, someone did some stall missionary work among the Kataba, persuaded them and now you have friends running the GEZ. I'm very excited about the connections that they can make between those of you in Utah and Mormons all over the world and their zone. Very excited about it. I hope some of you will follow up and find a fellowship with the Kataba on that front and others and surprise, surprise. It won't be a surprise. The Kataba are basically running Ulex as part of like the Prosper Zedian Roatan. They're running that as part of their legal system. I was privileged to work on that legal system. They just launched it. They're going to be accepting. Really what you want to do is enter into a treaty with host nation under which two things happen. They secede or basically it's called cessation. They back away from their claims of sovereignty on not much land. We're not asking for much.  We basically want to create a private Monaco. Monaco is very small, bigger than the Kataba zone, which is 1.8 acres, but still very small. So we have a treaty of cessation and mutual recognition. So the host country will say, we're backing off of this zone, this area, this delimited geographic area. You're welcome to go in there and we will recognize you. We're going to have a treaty of mutual recognition. It'll be the first of what we hope will be many recognitions by sovereign countries. You need to be recognized by sovereign so that you can do things like sail your vessels into the ports and fly your planes to their airports. That's going to take a long time, but we're going to start out with friendly relations with our host, kind of our parent country really. We're going to be their own little private Monaco. And it turns out there's lots of countries in the world that would love to have a little Monaco. Right, she can jowl with them, bringing in foreign investment, perhaps showing them how to govern better, you know, maybe just being a tourist attraction. It certainly works well for the south of France and northern Italy. They're close to Monaco. Lichtenstein's neighbors are very happy with it. We hope to do the same for other countries that have been kind of left out of this new developing area. So what else can I tell you about a free society project? I'll scroll down a little bit here and there's not much to show. Really, we're kind of there as a team and you might recognize some of you who do crypto stuff. You might recognize these two gentlemen. They're big in crypto. And this zone, like the Kataba greeners zone is going to be optimized for crypto. And I saw that because I'm one of the people that's working on the coding for that. And of course it uses Ulex. And let's take a look at Ulex while we're here. This is the GitHub page. You coders will recognize what's going on here. It's basically open source code, but it's legal code. Legal code. I'm up to version 1.2 now. This is a public source image of a plant called Ulex. And that's kind of our mascot is the plant Ulex. It's beautiful and thorny. And here are the rules. If you want to see the rules of Ulex, there they are. So the thing about Prosper that's interesting, sorry, not Prosper, Free Society Project that's interesting is we're going to be using the procedural rules as well as the substantive rules. So here's the substantive rules. And those are used in Prosper and the green earth zone.  Here's some great tort law by the American Law Institute. This is the gold standard for tort law. Great, but those two jurisdictions have their own procedural rules. The idea with Free Society Project is to have a completely decentralized sovereign decentralized as we can make it. And so you'll notice if you spend some time with these rules, look how the judges are formed here. There is no standing court. There's no marble-pullered hall. There are no employees of the government deciding claims against the government, which by the way is I think a salient injustice of most current legal systems. We have employees of the people we're suing deciding the cases against their employee, their employer when we sue the government, outrageous. That won't happen in Free Society. Shouldn't happen anywhere. And I even have here a pretty carefully articulated appellate system, which is can be open sourced. My long-term goal is to upload Ulex and make a platform where people all over the world in all kinds of communities can bring their disputes, find judges, have neutral resolution of their claims against each other. I want to bring peace online. I want to bring the rule of law online. Without the rule of law, there can be no prosperity. In fact, the World Bank says the rule of law is the single largest source of wealth in the world today and they are correct. And we don't have that online. I want to help make that happen. I'll say one more thing and take questions. I want to flag for your attention a slightly different topic. So I've gotten interested in what I call protocol communities, things like Bitcoin, Tezos, Aragon. And you can see here, here's all the communities I look at in this paper. And this paper basically studies the governance of these, you could call them crypto communities basically decentralized communities, assesses them on a number of criteria. For example, are they susceptible to a 51% attack? Do they invite open proposals? Do they put people in privity? So these are things I think we should care about. And if you want to find out more about it, that you can read this paper, that this is about totally online communities. I mostly wanted today to focus on real world communities that are starting to run Ulex. And basically I want to bring Ulex to these communities as well, but that's a longer term project. Okay, I think I'm still under 20 minutes. So I'm gonna stop here and see if you have questions. I noticed I have trouble hearing people on the mic. So if you ask me a question, please get up tight with the mic so I can hear you, okay? Hi, can you hear me? I can, thank you. Okay, so I have been exposed to a lot of new information and I'm trying to digest it. So if I'm not understanding you, just please forgive me. When you were talking about Prospera, I thought I heard you say something about enforcement would be by the society, but determining policy would not be. So as a libertarian candidate for governor in Arizona, please help me understand who determines what constitutes a crime and who will determine that. Great, I have another paper on this. Look for common law. It's the Illustrated Guide to Common Law Zones in the Journal of Special Jurisdictions. And it talks in great detail about the Prospera legal system. It compares it to the legal systems of other common law special economic zones like they do by International Financial Center. The short of it with Prospera is they do not get to write their own criminal laws. The Honduran National Assembly has defined murder, for example, Prospera cannot change that on their own. What Prospera can do, in fact, what it has to do is enforce that law on its own. So there will be Prospera security guards who catch murders and Prospera courts that try murders and Prospera prisons that imprison guilty murderers. The Honduran government itself will not be administering their criminal code, but they have written the criminal rules that will apply in Prospera. So I'll stop there. Does that answer that part of your question? It does. And for me personally, it's safe to say that most people would define murder the same. However, I guess one of my concerns is because as a libertarian, I'm interacting with Cato Institute on more than one subject. Recently, someone in Cato was vehemently defending mandated vaccines, for example. And so, you know, we have body sovereignty. At least I think libertarians would agree on that. So again, I'm concerned about that definition or other definitions such as that, but that's the end of my question. Thank you. You can look up the Honduran criminal code as I have. I didn't see anything that was glaringly outrageous. So, but I suggest you do your shopping if you want to move to Prospera. I'm thinking of moving there. Well, in lieu of moving to Prospera, what efforts or would you say trains of thought are you aware of that are going to take what we, the lessons learned from Prospera, from Catawba, to say, hey, you know, here's the digest. Here's what we, here's what happened. And I know it's an ongoing effort. Because this seems very directly applicable to me, even in Utah where we have, we want to have a trustable voting system, right? And it'd be really cool if we could take essentially the model of Prospera or whatever else and create a repeatable Ulex style thing for our precincts and have them federate to create this conglomeration of zones, right? So that's why I'm very interested in what you're doing and the lessons learned because how do you get one legal system operating inside of another? That seems a way to fix our voting system. Well, I'm glad to hear you're thinking about that. I agree. It's very interesting. Right now I can say is, you know, you might want to check out my book. I have some resources here. And I would say connect with the people at CCI. I'm really impressed with their work. I really love their podcasts. And we'll CCI, will you bring out some new podcasts? I'd love to hear some more. There's some other people I could hook you up with, but I think that's a good start. Check out my book CCI and, you know, good luck friend. I think we're all heading in the same direction and nobody really knows how to get there, but we're going to explore lots of paths. I think we'll get somewhere good. Cool. Well, you're doing great work. Good luck. Thank you, sir. Hey, Tom, it's Curtis Lockhart from CCI. Thanks for the plug. Appreciate it. Sure. But I got to say your comments about Canada. You know, I've kept those in the back of my mind, too. On the Prospera theme, I guess, the other two questions have been about it as well.  It looks like we may have lost him for a bit. I'm not sure if he heard that. Did you hear that, Tom? Oh, I'm sure he would have had a profound answer. So sorry. Oh, well. Oh, there you are. Tom. I'm back. Did you hear? Did you hear that? I got it. I got it. Okay. I'll give you really quick. I see I'm over. I'm not happy. I think Castro is going to be fine for Prospera Y because Prospera is already set. I don't think Castro realized how hard it is to get rid of the Zed A's once they're up and running. She can change the composition of camp, the sort of board of trustees that oversees the Zed A's. But that means there won't be any approval of new Zed A's under Castro's watch. Prospera's already been approved and we set it up. And by the way, I'm no longer active in managing Prospera. I'm just, I have a small equity stake and I want to see it Prospera. But anyhow, they are already in the door. Camp cannot stop them. And last thing, outside property owners can put their property into Prospera by mutual agreement of Prospera and those outside property owners. So basically what Castro is going to do is cut off all future competition to Prospera and it will be able to expand by bringing in new real property. And I don't think she's going to be able to get rid of it. She can slow down the processing by camp. But Prospera's already approved. So she just did a big favor to Prospera. It's not so great for the Zed A system generally, but for Prospera, I think it's actually could work to their benefit. Let's have another round of applause for Tom. Thank you so much, Tom, signing off now.


Hi everyone. This talk will be recorded for crypto in 2020. Here we revisit the question of constructing lattice-based blind signatures. This is joint work with Ike Kiels, Julian Loss and Kahn Ian. A blind signature scheme is an interactive protocol between two parties, a signer and a user. The signer takes his input as a secret key, the user a public key as well as a message M. The key pair, PKSK, is output by some Keegan function and message M is an arbitrary bit string. In this work we consider the special case where the interaction consists of three moves. At the end of the interaction, the user learns a signature sigma on a message of its own choice and the signer is supposed to learn nothing. Further, a public verify algorithm V is defined which on input and message signature pair as well as a public key will either output, accept or reject. Blind signatures come with two security properties, one more unfortunately and blindness. In the blindness experiment, the adversary takes the role of a malicious signer. Intuitively, the adversary should be blind to which message was used in a specific interaction as well as the produced signature. In the one more inforgerability security experiment, also called OMUF, the adversary takes the role of a malicious user. The intuitive goal of the adversary is to forge a new signature on its own. In contrast to plain digital signatures, the existential inforgerability against chosen message attack security experiment is not applicable here. Since during the simulation of signatures to the adversary, the experiment does not learn the signed messages. Therefore, the experiment has to keep track of the number of interactions and thus the number of signatures the adversary may learn. In the end, the adversary has to produce a one more forgery. Blind signatures have various applications in privacy-related protocols such as e-voting, e-cash and anonymous credentials. Since our scheme can be instantiated by latest assumptions, it is post-quantumly secure. One can subdivide post-quantumly secure schemes into two distinct sets. On the one hand side, we have schemes from generic complexity assumptions and on the other hand side, efficient schemes with a concrete security treatment. The works listed here are representatives for a whole body of work. In the concrete, non-post-quantum setting, we have the seminal work of Ponchal and Stern, Journal of Cryptology 2000. They give the first proof of the Okamoto-Schnauer Blind Signature Scheme which is based on the discrete logarithm assumption. This assumption can be broken by a quantum computer. In the generic non-post-quantum setting, we have Jules, Luby and Ostrowski, Crypto 97. In their construction, they use one-way trapdoor permutations. It is not clear how to instantiate them from a post-quantumly secure assumption. In the intersection of generic and post-quantum, we have Fischlin, Crypto 2006. He gives the construction for blind signatures, which uses a pubtikine encryption scheme, a commitment scheme and a non-intensive serial knowledge proof, of which all three are instantiable from lattice assumptions. In the intersection of concrete and post-quantum, we have Rückert, Asia Crypt 2010. Rückert's work is the first concrete lattice-based construction for blind signatures. His construction is based on the hash function by Lubaszewski and with Ciancio. In this intersection, lots of related work builds upon the proof ideas of Rückert. Unfortunately, as we show in our first contribution, this initial work is flawed and thus all subsequent work also suffers from the same flaw. This clears the field for our second contribution, a construction for lattice-based blind signatures. Three move-blind signature schemes are susceptible to the so-called ROS attack against the OMUF security, whereas ROS stands a random in homogeneities in an over-determined solvable system of linear equations. The ROS attack can be seen as a specific attack against the OMUF security of three move-blind signature schemes. It works roughly as follows. The attacker takes the role of the user in the OMUF experiment. The first thing the attacker does is to request L-first messages, R1 to RL, thus opening L parallel sessions with the designer. Next, the attacker uses these L-values R1 to RL to compute a solution consisting of two parts. The first part is a vector of L-challenge values C1 to CL, which the attacker will send over to design individually. The attacker will now receive L-responses S1 to SL. From these L-responses S1 to SL, the ROS attacker finally computes L plus 1 signatures. The bigger the value L, the more information the attacker receives hence the easier the task of the adversary to break the scheme using the ROS attack. If L is too small, then the task of the ROS attacker becomes information theoretically hard. If the blind signature scheme is the one by Okamoto Schnorr, whose hardness is based on the discrete logarithm problem, then the ROS attack is actually feasible. In the work which recently appeared on E-print by Ben Hamuda, LePo, Hoare and Reikova, they show that if L gets large enough, then the ROS attack finds the solution in polynomial time. In the latter setting, the concrete hardness of the ROS problem for large L is not known. In Poinschall & Stearn's original proof for the Okamoto Schnorr blind signature scheme, the parameters are chosen such that the ROS attack is information theoretically hard. In the latter space blind signature scheme by Rückert, some parts of the proof techniques introduced by Poinschall & Stearn were reused. However, the proof does not take the possibility of the ROS attack into account and in particular does not set the parameters such that the ROS attack gets information theoretically hard. This roughly shows the problem in the security proof of Rückert's led to space blind signature scheme. The main technical ingredient in Poinschall & Stearn's proof to show that for small L the ROS attack is information theoretically infeasible is the forking lemma. It gives a lower bound on the success probability of executing an algorithm twice on partially dependent uniform randomness in the shared state. In 2000, Poinschall & Stearn introduced forking proofs for signatures and blind signatures. In 2006, Belach and Neven give a generalization. Their version only estimates the probability of both runs being successful. In the context of blind signatures, this is on its own not sufficient. For three move blind signatures, an additional argument on the distributions of the outputs is needed. In 2019, HAWK kills and loss give a further generalization which also allows to argue on the distributions of the outputs. Our first contribution is to point out flaws in the work of Rückert, in the case of Belach & Neven forking lemma leads to a flaw in the om of proof. Specifically, an argument on the output of the forked algorithm is missing. Thus, the security statement becomes uncertain. Yet, we do not give a concrete attack. Our second contribution is to point out flaws in the work of Rückert and we do not give a concrete attack. Our second contribution is a generalization of the modular framework presented in HKL19. They show how to construct blind signatures from a special type of hash function. We extend that framework to the case of correctness errors. Whereas HKL19 considered the error-free setting. In the letter setting, blind signature schemes come along with some kind of correctness error. We say, the scheme has correctness error delta. If for all messages M, the probability that the verify algorithm and output reject is bounded by delta. The random choices are drawn over an honest execution of the scheme. The framework of HKL19 defines the two following transformations. From a linear hash function, they construct a linear identification scheme. From that, they construct a linear blind signature scheme. In this work, we start with a linear hash function with noticeable enclossance error. An enclossance error is a notion closely related to correctness error. From that, we construct a linear identification scheme with negligible correctness error. Finally, from that, we construct a linear blind signature scheme also with negligible correctness error. A linear hash function is defined by three sets. A set of scalars S, a domain D and a range R. Where D and R are S modules. Let F be a map from the domain to the range. We require F to be a module homomorphism. Meaning that F preserves addition and scalar multiplication. Further, we require the kernel of F to be non-trivial, implying that F is compressing. Finally, F is required to be collision resistant. In the homomorph proof, we reduce the hardness of breaking the homomorph security to the hardness of finding collisions in F. For every variable defined in the scheme, we define a filter set. Which is a subset of either the set of scalars S or the domain D. From the filter sets, we require the enclossedness property. We say, a linear hash function is delta enclosed if the addition and scalar multiplication of certain variables lies in a specific filter set. This relates to the correctness error of the blind signature scheme. The better this probability, the smaller the correctness error. Further, we require smoothness from the filter sets. We say, a linear hash function is smooth if computations of certain variables are identically distributed to certain other variables drawn uniformly at random from some other set. This property is crucial for the blindness proof. The first transformation of our framework turns linear hash functions into linear identification schemes of correctness error. The Keegan algorithm samples a secret key uniformly at random from its respective filter set and sets the public key to be F of sk. The signer starts by sampling r uniformly at random from its respective filter set. Here, the index i denotes that the assignment is repeated for all values where i is defined.  Then, the signer sends this vector to the user. The user now samples the challenge uniformly at random from its respective filter set and sends it over to the signer. The signer then calculates S as C scalar multiplied with sk plus r. Here, the circular arrow denotes that this operation is repeated until S is in its respective filter set. Without this check, value S may leak information about the secret key. With high probability, this check will be true for at least one value r. Thus, by choosing an appropriate dimension of vector r, we achieve negligible correctness error. The signer ends its execution by sending S over the channel. At the end, the user checks whether there exists some i such that F of S equals to C scalar multiplied by pk plus F of r. If this is true, the execution of the identification scheme is correct. The simplified idea in constructing the signature scheme is to set the signature to be the transcript. The verify algorithm of the blind signature scheme will then test whether the transcript is a result of a valid interaction. However, this contradicts blindness, since it's trivial to deduce from the signature which interaction it was produced in. So, we need to blind the transcript. Since the first component of the signature is an undiminential vector, this leaves us a huge signatures. To mitigate this, we will use hash trees. Hash trees, also called Merkel trees, were first used in the context of lattice-based plant signatures in the work Place Plus. A hash tree is a binary tree data structure where a list of values, here r prime 1 to r prime 4, are hashed together to get a single hash value, the root of the tree. The leaves of the binary tree are the hashed values. To get the hash value of the parent, both children note the hash together. This step is repeated until the root of the tree is reached. Anticipating the usage of hashed trees in the final blind signature scheme, we continue as follows. The first part of the signature consists of values such that a single value r prime and thus a leaf of the tree can be recomputed. The second part of the signature consists of the minimal number of nodes needed to be able to reconstruct the root. To generate the subset of the tree, an additional algorithm built off is introduced. For the sake of an example, let r prime 3 be the value recoverable from the first part of the signature. Thus, the authentication path consists of h4 and h5. Now, for the second part of our framework. Here, we turn linear identification schemes of correctness error into linear blind signature schemes of correctness error. The Keegan algorithm stays the same. The signer side stays also the same, so we can safely ignore that for now. But the user side changes significantly. Instead of drawing a challenge uniformly at random, the user proceeds as follows. First, the user draws two vectors of blinding parameters alpha and beta. Alpha will be used to blind the third part of the transcript, beta to blind the second. Vector r prime is calculated, such that exactly one value r prime can be reconstructed from the blinded second and third part of the transcript. Then, the hash tree is constructed. Next, the first part of the signature, c prime, is calculated as the hash of the root of the tree and message m. Value c prime now gets unblinded to get the second part of the transcript. The circular arrow denotes that this calculation is repeated until a j is found, such that c is in its respective filter set. This guarantees that no information about c prime is leaked by the second component of the transcript. After the signer returns s, the user performs the same test which already can be found at the end of the identification scheme. The value of variable i is necessary to identify the index of value r prime, which can be reconstructed from the signature. Next, the user calculates the second part of the signature s prime by blinding the third part of the transcript. The circular arrow denotes that the calculation is repeated until the value k is found, such that s prime is in its respective filter set. This check guarantees that no information about s prime is leaked by the third part of the transcript. Finally, the user computes the last part of the signature, an authentication path for exactly that value r prime, which can be reconstructed from c prime and s prime. The simplified verify algorithm will check whether c prime equals the hash of root and m. We formulate the following security statements. If a linear hash function is collision resistant, then the first transformation yields one more man in the middle secure identification scheme, where the latter security notion is an intermediate notion natural to linear identification schemes. Further, if a linear identification scheme fulfills this notion, then the second transformation yields an ohm of secure blind signature scheme. Additional, if a linear hash function is smooth, then a resulting blind signature scheme is blind. For our framework, we provide a sample instantiation based upon the hash functions of Lubaszewski and Michi Ancho. The underlying assumption is the hardness of the arses problem. Here, the size of the prime is approximately 2 to the power of 1890. Our signatures are roughly 36 megabyte, and the signing speed is probably quite slow due to the size of the prime. Further, the maximum number of signatures per issued key pair is polylogarithmic in a security parameter. This is due to the security exponentially degrading in the number of issued signatures. Only in this range, the arse problem is information theoretically hard. So, all in all, the practicability is quite low. To conclude, we give a modular framework for lattice-based blind signatures with negligible correctness error, some blindness and ohm of proofs. However, the instantiation is quite improbable. So, as open problems we see, a more efficient instantiation and also crypt analysis of the generalized arse problem. If there's something I want you to take away from this talk, it's the following. Take care with forking proofs for blind signatures. They turn out to be quite tricky, especially in the lattice setting. Thanks for your attention.


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