Blue sky thinking?
There are a raft of issues facing our country and occasionally someone will go out on a limb and suggest a solution that sees them either dismissed or vilified that they would have all our cats murdered. However, without someone to stick their neck out, how do we make progress on the pressing issues of the day? I would like to tentatively do this, but I am mindful that I don't want to attract a Prosser-backlash. Consequently, this discussion is based firmly in humour as no right thinking person would possibly embrace my solutions to these problems. Today, I pick on fat people and criminals.

Hey fatty boom boom, sweet sugar dumpling.
A belly to you, but a source of renewable energy
to me. Soon we won't be measuring a waist in
inches, we'll be measuring them in kw/h.

KFC will save the world
Apparently we are the third most obese nation on earth behind Australia and the United States. We suffer from a first world problem (yay for us!) in that our population is carrying around its collective forms a belt of surplus stored energy that can lead to a myriad of health issues that will cause the early demise of our people and drain the country's coffers as we struggle in vain to fix the heart disease, diabetes and cancers that obesity contributes to. Oddly enough, while we lead the world in renewable energy we still haven't got enough to power ourselves. Hang on. Fat is stored energy is it not? Why don't we harvest our nation's reserve of fat? Is it possible that we take our obese citizens, use liposuction to harvest their fat, render it, clean it and burn it? We have three outcomes:
1. Fatty loses some weight.
2. Our national grid gains some electricity.
3. Okay, so we produce some more greenhouse emissions, but we've opted out of our Kyoto obligations. Isn't it about time we got our very clever industrial scientists working on a way of making the generation process clean burning?
If we were to adopt this process we would be reducing the health related risks of obesity and guarding against the energy crisis. Moreover, this scheme has the potential to make us net exporters of energy. But is this truly renewable? Evidently it is with plenty of information to suggest that in cases of massive weight loss, there is a tendency for the individual to put it all straight back on. This might seem like a bad thing, but it doing the country a favour will remove the stigma behind weight gain.

Auckatraz
New Zealand has the second highest incarceration rate in the world behind the United States. It is a costly exercise with the country heaving a collective sigh every time there is an announcement that a new prison will be built. There is outrage amongst talkback contributors (see one of the other pages for my take on these Rocket Surgeons) that prisoners lead a charmed life with better food and accommodation than many of our country's elderly. Also, there is the matter of recidivism. Graeme Burton holds the sad distinction of being one of three people who committed a murder while on parole from serving a prison sentence for committing a murder. He is beyond rehabilitation, as are a long and tragic list of our worst criminal offenders. So what to do when there is no hope and the cost of detention exceeds $300,000 per offender per annum? 

I hear the weather is vile and there
 is nothing to eat but seals and ropey
seabirds. Perfect.

Welcome to the Auckland Islands, enjoy your stay. Somehow, New Zealand acquired title to a number of sub-Antarctic islands. They're cold, they're inhospitable and they are impossible to escape from. I argued in a first year law essay that exile to these islands represents a cost effective and safe removal from society for a nation that is squeamish about imposing the death penalty. I propose a sentence of transportation whereby our offender is taken from mainland New Zealand by ship and dropped off on an island surrounded by sea-mines by helicopter with a package containing a square of tarpaulin, a blunt knife and a piece of flint. Sir, if you've elected not to exist within the rules of our society, you may go and create your own with the barest of essentials.

Having revisited this essay, I would take my recommendation one step further: in the case of murderers they have earned their sentence by taking a life and so no sentence will adequately compensate the victim or their family. Society may be adequately compensated if the offender has a few spare organs, a bit of bone marrow and blood plasma harvested prior to transportation. Lives may be saved. One of my colleagues argued that the recipient may not want blood or a kidney from Clayton Weatherstone. My response is that beggars can't be choosers and that a blood transfusion will no more make the recipient a murderer than the effect of the blood transfusion coming from someone of a different race, sex or religion. In one swoop we reduce the shortage of donor organs, save ourselves a quarter of a million dollars per prisoner and eliminate the problem of recidivism. This solution also provides a more appreciable deterrent to first-time offenders, and further we won't have to care what happens to them after they're dropped off and can get on with the very important task of determining how we're going to spend that money. My vote is on better treatment of our elderly.