I know for a fact that Key, Harper and Cameron are close and definitely share ideas. Privitisation is being pursued for ideological reasons, so while they’ve suffered a setback here, you can bet there will be no general change in course.

It’s only two so far, and one of them is almost brand new. All the others are still publicly run. It seems that the problem might be that Serco aren’t employing enough prison officers in an attempt to save money – that will turn out to be a false economy because there are pretty big financial penalties for not meeting their contract, and that includes prisoner safety. Also, if they’d done a better job, they would have got the contracts to manage more prisons, but they’ll struggle now. It wouldn’t be politically expedient for the National-led coalition to give Serco more contracts, especially as they’re a third-term government. They’ve actually got a reasonable chance of winning a very rare fourth term, but they’ll have to watch themselves. If our next government is a Labour-Greens coalition, there’s no way any more prisons will be privatized. Serco might have shot themselves in the foot here – they’ve already badly damaged their own reputation in Great Britain and Australia, so perhaps Canada is the next logical choice!

I’ve just seen that Obama used his speech in Kenya to stick up for gay rights, so if I’d been watching TV instead of writing, I’d have written about that for my bouquet.