This is not democracy

When National introduced its bullshit "Treaty Principles Bill", the public reacted with outrage. Over 300,000 of us - more than 5% of the entire population of Aotearoa - submitted on the bill, crashing parliamentary servers. But now, National's stooge committee has decided to dump two-thirds of those submissions in the trash unread:

Labour's Justice spokesperson Duncan Webb says thousands of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill are set to be excluded from the Parliamentary record.

He said it was not a matter of submissions arriving after deadline, but that the committee staff do not have enough time to process the unprecedented number of written submissions - including more than 200,000 online and 12,000 hand-written.

"The committee's working but they've made it very clear that there's no way that they can process all of the submissions by the time the committee is due to report back, and if they're not processed ... they kind of fall off the end and don't become part of the record," he told RNZ.

National has consistently used short submission periods in an effort to stifle public opposition to its bills, but simply throwing out submissions unread is a new low. Previously we've seen it on security legislation, steamrolled through under quasi-urgency to meet "urgent" deadlines set by spy agencies. Here its being used on a normal bill, one which was promised a full parliamentary process. Except oh no, that's too much work, so National has decided to dispense with it.

To echo my words from a previous abuse: this process is a sham and a fraud. It is not democracy. It shames our parliament and brings it into disrepute. And as someone who spends a lot of time encouraging people to submit on parliamentary processes (and who submitted themselves and whose submission is apparently among those dumped), I feel once again that my good faith has been abused and that I have been made a party to National's democratic fraud. Rather than encouraging people to participate peacefully within the system, maybe I should have been encouraging them to burn the whole rotten shitpile and the clique of arrogant-self-serving arseholes in it to the ground.

...because that's the clear message this sends. If a government makes peaceful change impossible, it makes violent change inevitable. Maybe our politicians should think about that, before telling people so loudly that peaceful, democratic participation is a waste of time.

Climate Change: More subsidies for Tiwai

In December 2021, then-Climate Change Minister James Shaw finally ended Tiwai Point's excessive pollution subsidies, cutting their "Electricity Allocation Factor" (basically compensation for the cost of carbon in their electricity price) to zero on the basis that their sweetheart deal meant they weren't paying it. In the process, he effectively cut emissions by a million tons a year. But now of course National is reversing it and restoring Tiwai's subsidy:

The Tiwai Point aluminium smelter will receive carbon credits worth an extra $37 million a year to help it pay its power bills, after Cabinet ignored official advice to boost the subsidy by a lower amount.

[...]

When the smelter signed new electricity contracts with higher prices last year, it triggered a process to reevaluate how much the carbon price affects the smelter’s power costs. Officials recommended raising the free allocation by around 340,000 credits a year – worth $22 million on a $64 carbon price – based on independent modelling commissioned by the environment ministry. The smelter asked for a much more significant uplift worth $56 million, based on its own commissioned modelling.

In the end, ministers split the difference, plugging the assumptions from the smelter’s modelling into the officials’ preferred modelling approach and arriving at 581,000 extra credits worth $37 million a year.

So, we get a huge amount of public money being used to subsidise a profitable, foreign owned company to raise power prices for the rest of the country, and a huge increase in pollution to go with it. And its even worse because He Pou a Rangi has repeatedly advised the government that it needs to cut industrial allocations to avoid overallocation and long-term costs - most recently in their advice to a select committee. Unfortunately, the government seems to be completely ignoring it, preferring to undermine the ETS by subsidising twilight industries to continue polluting. Which means this is just going to be another problem the next government is going to have to fix. And the longer National continues to subsidise pollution, the more drastic that fix is going to have to be.

Is this what government is for?

Aotearoa has an infrastructure shortage. We need schools, hospitals, public housing. But National is dead set against borrowing to fund any of it, even though doing so is much cheaper than the "public-private partnership" model they prefer. So what will National borrow for? Subsidising property developers:

The new scheme, called the Greenfield Model, would see the Government’s National Infrastructure and Financing Agency (NIFFco) lend to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) at a “very competitive” interest rate during the early stage of development.

The debt would then be re-financed to private markets, such as a bank, once the development is complete. It would ultimately be re-paid by the new homeowners via a levy.

This would be a good idea if it was for state houses, a public asset. But essentially what National is planning is low-cost loans to private developers - just a direct subsidy to their profits. And the people who buy those houses will then have to pay a special tax to pay for National's financial shenanigans.

Wouldn't it be much simpler for the government just to borrow and build themselves?

Will Labour take on the oligarchs?

David Parker gave a big foreign policy speech this morning, reiterating the party's support for an independent (rather than boot-licking) foreign policy. Most of which was pretty orthodox - international law good, war bad, trade good, not interested in AUKUS, and wanting a demilitarised South Pacific (an area which presumably excludes Australia). But at the end, Parker strayed off foreign policy to talk about the world's big problems. And he identified two: gross inequality, and techbro oligarchs spreading misinformation:

The scourge of irresponsible social media, megalomaniacal tax avoiding tech barons, and irresponsible internet service providers is on my list of the important.

I have a view that we in the west have made a fundamental error in providing what is in effect an exclusion of liability for third party content.

He's not just talking about classic "misinformation" (whether state driven or not), but also defamation, threats, scams, and every other online evil. The current exclusion of liability means internet platforms face little incentive to police this (and every incentive to push them using their algorithms where it boosts "engagement"). Parker's solution is to remove that exclusion, make platforms liable, and "[l]eave it to the Courts to work out the balance between freedom of expression and the duty not to sell a harmful product."

Parker points out that we can use liability limits and safe harbours to encourage platforms to take active steps to remove harmful content. We already do this under the Films, Videos, and Publications Act to encourage platforms to remove objectionable content, and under the Harmful Digital Communications Act to encourage them to deal with complaints about harmful content. We could use similar means for scams.

All of this seems perfectly reasonable. Newspapers are liable, through the courts, Media Council, and Advertising Standards Authority, for what they choose to publish or allow to be published. There seems to be no reason why Facebook, YouTube, or XChan should be immune. Especially when they are making what are effectively editorial choices through their algorithms and moderation policies to highlight or bury, allow or deny certain content. Unlike the postal service or the phone company (which is where the exclusion originated), they're not just a dumb pipe. Treating them as one is causing definite harm, and its time the government put a stop to it.

...and while they're at it, they should put a stop to their systematic tax-cheating and lawlessness as well.

Improving OIA enforcement

Yesterday The Post had a long exit interview with outgoing Ombudsman Peter Boshier, in which he complains about delinquent agencies which "haven't changed and haven't taken our moral authority on board". He talks about the limits of the Ombudsman's power of persuasion - its only power - and the need for more coercive tools, such as holding chief executives personally liable for failures as they are under health and safety legislation.

That's certainly one option. Here's another: introduce a compliance notice regime for the OIA.

We already have this tool in the Privacy Act, and it allows the Privacy Commissioner to issue a notice to an agency which has broken the law, requiring them to remedy the breach and/or prevent any repeat. And if they don't, the Commissioner can go to court and get a court order forcing them to obey, which then in turn opens up the usual penalties for civil contempt.

Unlike CEO liability, this is directly focused on specific breaches, and forces agencies to actually fix them and obey the law. It would mean that shit like this wouldn't happen. Which is the outcome we want, right?

Again, this would make a useful member's bill, and the relevant provisions can be cribbed from existing law.

Parliament says "no" to transparency

The Parliament Bill Committee has reported back on the Parliament Bill. As usual, they recommend no substantive changes, all decisions having been made in advance and in secret before the bill was introduced - but there are some minor tweaks around oversight of the new parliamentary security powers, which will likely be shown to be inadequate within a year or two. As for my major theme - extending the OIA to Parliament - the committee basically said "fuck off":

We note that previous reviews, including by the Law Commission, have considered a possible extension of the OIA to cover Parliament. We also acknowledge the calls from submitters to extend the OIA to cover more parliamentary information, a view that some members of the committee generally support and would like to see progressed.

However, the bill as introduced does not amend the OIA, and for reasons of scope we cannot recommend substantive amendments to that Act. A full policy process would be required to ensure any proposal would not adversely affect the political, policy, or constituency work of members and political parties, nor the ability of the House to maintain control over its own proceedings. Moreover, a reliance on the definition of “proceedings in Parliament” from section 10 of the Parliamentary Privilege Act may not be suitable in the context of the OIA.

Firstly, hiding behind scope is bullshit - it is entirely normal for select committees to amend the schedules of the Ombudsmen's Act or OIA to add agencies which have been excluded. As for the need for a full policy process, this is basically an admission that they haven't done one - that despite recommendations stretching back to the Danks Committee in 1980, they didn't bother to consider the issue when developing the bill. Which is a hell of a failure in the policy development process - but I guess what you get when you develop major legislation in secret and without any public consultation.

There is more about this failure in the bill's departmental report (p22), where after reiterating all the whining about how they couldn't do it in the past, and doing a bit of scaremongering about what they've been asked about and therefore what they might have to release, they basically say "we do not administer the OIA, and any such policy project should be undertaken in conjunction with the Ministry of Justice". Well, they don't administer the Privacy Act either, but they were perfectly capable of consulting when they planned to extend it to cover information held by Parliamentary Security. So it does basically seem to be a prolonged case of "don't wanna" from an institution which has always felt itself to be above the laws which apply to others.

The committee does talk about the Protocol for the release of information from the parliamentary information, communication and security systems as a substitute for the OIA regime. Except when you read it, most of it is about secrecy and MP's veto power over the release of any information relating to themselves, and the bits covering general requests and information about parliamentary administration are either very vague, or entirely at the discretion of the Speaker. Still, there are obvious things to ask about, and we can see if the transparency they are claiming actually exists, or whether it just exists in theory as a way of defending against real, enforceable transparency.

I should note that one are where there might be more transparency is MP's expenses, where the Speaker will effectively get a regulation-making power to decide what will be reported publicly. But against that, the Speaker is an MP, with huge conflicts of interest around the making of such regulations (both because they have expenses themselves, and they need to maintain relationships with their caucus and other parties). Again, we can wait and see if that actually amounts to anything more than empty promises.

Meanwhile, as for those members of the committee who support bringing parliament under the OIA, I suggest speaking up about it, and putting a member's bill in the ballot enacting the Law Commission's proposed changes to start the process. I'm more than happy to draft it if they need help.

Law, culture, and the OIA

Yesterday outgoing Ombudsman Peter Boshier published a report, Reflections on the Official Information Act, on his way out the door. The report repeated his favoured mantra that the Act was "fundamentally sound", all problems were issues of culture, and that no legislative change was needed (and especially no changes to his office). Open government advocate Andrew Ecclestone has already done a deep dive into the legislative changes Boshier has advocated in the past, so I'll restrict myself to two points. Firstly, it is quite worrying that the only legislative changes he highlights in his report are those that strengthen the state by giving it impunity to dox its critics and restrict requesters by creating further - and entirely arbitrary - reasons for refusal. And secondly, the primary way we can change the culture of government to be more open is to legislate for it.

The latter ought to be obvious. After all, that's what the Official Information Act was all about: legislating to change the culture from one of secrecy, where telling people what government was doing was literally a crime, to one where "information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it". That principle has been eroded in various ways, or not worked out as well as it should have. But we can absolutely push things back in the other direction by legislating for it. If we don't want public servants to destroy data to hide it from requests, or Ministers or their advisors ordering public servants to lie, we can legislate to make those things crime. If we want proper proactive release, rather than the current half-arsed grace-and-favour system which hides everything and releases nothing, we can legislate for that too. And if we want it to be harder for agencies to refuse or delay requests, we can legislate for that as well. Because while agencies have a clear interest in hiding information, fundamentally public servants will obey the law rather than risk jail, and that is a way of changing the culture.

But its not just the culture of the public service which needs to change - its also the culture of the Ombudsman's office. In the report, Boshier rejects the idea that the idea that his office is toothless (and needs to be replaced by an independent Information Commissioner) as

While it is true that my role is recommendatory only, the OIA imposes on agencies and Ministers a public duty to observe my recommendations. This public duty may be enforced by the Solicitor-General by issuing court proceedings. My predecessors and I have on rare occasions had cause to refer unheeded recommendations to the Solicitor-General for enforcement and this has prompted compliance without the need for court proceedings.

Which sounds tough. But how many times has he actually done this? Once. And its worse when you realise that the Ombudsman bends over backwards to avoid issuing formal recommendations which would create such an enforceable duty - instead preferring to resolve almost all complaints informally and by mediation. And the perfect example of this is Health NZ, which the Ombudsman singled out for a litany of unlawful behaviour in his accompanying "timeliness reviews".

The core problem with Health NZ is that they are deliberately delaying OIA responses by a blanket 5-8 working days for Ministerial "review". This is a widespread problem - its also mentioned in DIA's timeliness review, and mentioned in Kāinga ora's. And its a long-standing one. For example, the Ombudsman upheld a complaint against police over this back in 2022, but made no recommendations, "as Police informed him it had amended its ministerial notifications practice during the investigation". Public duty avoided, they then changed them right back, showing the Ombudsman to be useless and toothless. If the Ombudsman had issued a formal recommendation, that wouldn't have happened. But they're too conflict-averse, too focused on mediation, too unwilling to clean out bad behaviour with fire and sword - and so bad behaviour continues and grows.

(To pick another example: seven years ago, I request some information from MFAT. After two investigations by the Ombudsman, they promised they'd talk to a foreign government about ensuring its release. And they just... haven't. They don't respect the watchdog, and they think the promises they make to it can be ignored).

In the case of HealthNZ, the Ombudsman did make a recommendation. But its under the Ombudsmen Act, so no enforceable public duty applies. And of course it applies only to Health NZ, so other agencies are free to ignore it. Which is another example of why we need to replace the mediation-focused Ombudsman system with a judicial one with an Information Commissioner: because while agencies and public servants routinely ignore the Ombudsman, a judicial model will produce actual court orders, which are both far less ignorable, and provide clear legal precedent for other agencies. Which seems far more robust than the current system of urging agencies to "be a good chap".

Maybe there's a connection?

What is going on with the price of butter?, RNZ, 19 march 2025:

If you have bought butter recently you might have noticed something - it is a lot more expensive.

Stats NZ said last week that the price of butter was up 60 percent in February compared to the same time last year.

It recorded an average of $7.32 per 500g block, up from just under $4.50 at the start of last year and just under $5.20 four years ago.

At supermarkets this week, Woolworths' cheapest butter was $7.19, in New World's North Island stores it was also $7.19, while in its South Island stores it was $7.79 and Pak n Save's was $6.89.

Fonterra lifts first-half profit, raises dividend, New Zealand Herald, 20 March 2025:

Fonterra has reported an 8% lift in first-half net profit to $729 million, increased its interim dividend and narrowed its milk price forecast for this season.

The co-op’s operating profit rose by 16% to $1.1 billion.

Fonterra announced a 22 cents per share dividend, compared with 15c in the previous comparable period.

Hmmm. Maybe there's a connection there?

And this once again shows what a shit deal Aotearoa is getting from farmers. They're allowed to steal our water, shit in our rivers, destroy our climate, and poison our drinking water, and we don't even get cheap food out of it. Which should make you wonder why we let any of that happen.

The good news is that we can regulate all of those things. And its really looking like we should. Because there seems to be no reason to let this parasitic, anti-social industry get away with its crimes and give nothing back to society.

Climate Change: Failed again

In what has become regular news, the quarterly ETS auction has failed, with nobody even bothering to bid. The immediate reason is that the carbon price has fallen to around $60, below the auction minimum of $68. And the cause of that is a government which has basically given up on climate change, repealing all useful policy, setting laughably low targets, while making louder and louder noises about refusing to meet our Paris commitments - or even withdrawing entirely. Not to mention refusing to address the fundamental oversupply issues which have undermined the ETS.

Basically, with this government, ETS participants have no confidence that the system will work properly in the future, or even that it will exist in the future. Which naturally affects how much they're willing to pay. The good news is that they're burning some of the stockpile of excess units. But long-term, this lack of confidence in the system is going to be a killer.

As for the auction. 1.5 million tons of unsold units now go into the pile for future auctions. And if they continue to be unsold by the end of the year, they'll simply be cancelled, removing them from the system forever. Which isn't a terrible outcome. But the long-term collapse of the system probably is.

"Capital poor"

One of the eternal truths about Aotearoa's economy is that we are "capital poor": there's not enough money sloshing around here to fund the expansion of local businesses, or to build the things we want to. Which gets used as an excuse for all sorts of things, like setting up kiwisaver (good!), not taxing rich people properly, or selling the country to foreigners. For example, here's Chris Luxon doing the latter at his "investment summit" last week:

Low capital intensity has been identified as one of the major causes of that low productivity.

In order to increase our productivity, we need more capital investment. And David Seymour has been changing the rules to ensure we can.

Meanwhile, here's another story from last week: NZ bank profits hit $7.2 billion: KPMG. By way of comparison, that's more than the amount kiwi employees pay into kiwisaver each year. But unlike kiwisaver, it goes straight overseas into the pockets of those banks foreign owners.

Maybe we wouldn't be so "capital poor" if we hadn't allowed our wealth to be siphoned overseas for decades by a rapacious foreign oligopolies?

Arbitrary or worse

Back in December, Lands Minister Chris Penk rejected proposals to recognise the proper names of Manawatū and Pito One. Both proposals were strongly supported by their communities and so recommended by Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa / New Zealand Geographic Board. Despite this, Penk rejected them. I was curious about his reasons for this, so I asked for the advice. The response [part 1 part 2] was unfortunately incomplete (to the Ombudsman!), but showed no offical advice recommending rejection. So I asked directly for his reasons. I got the response to this today, and after some obfuscatory waffle, he tehn says this:

I have no specific reasonings for Manawatu or Petone in particular.

Whether that is because there are in fact no reasons - making the decisions arbitrary - or just none that Penk is willing to publicly admit to - making them biased and improper - is left as an exercise for the reader. But there seems to be a definite pattern in the overall decisions he announced, and it doesn't look appealing.

So what can be done about this? Likely nothing. The law says "The Minister’s determination on a proposal is final", would would probably present a high barrier to any judicial review. But we could fix it for the future. Because the current law, allowing essentially arbitrary decision-making, is no longer a good fit for the Way We Do Things In Aotearoa. It is, in an Aristotelian sense, unconstitutional. As for how to fix it, section 30GC(7) of the Climate Change Response Act provides a good guide to how we do things now: when a Minister disagrees with an expert-body following a public submissions process, they need to give detailed reasons for doing so both to parliament and the public. Its an essentially shame-based mechanism, but tends to deter poor and arbitrary decision-making, while ensuring that any departure from expert recommendation is properly supported. Amending section 20 of the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008 to include such a mechanism would make a nice little member's bill for some MP.

Drawn

A ballot for a single Member's Bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Resource Management (Prohibition on Extraction of Freshwater for On-selling) Amendment Bill (Debbie Ngarewa-Packer)

The bill does exactly what it says on the label, and would effectively end the rapacious water-bottling industry which is sucking us dry and robbing us blind.

It was another full ballot, with 75 bills this week.

How to fight back against Trump's tariffs

In the US, the Trump regime is busy imposing tariffs on its neighbours and allies, then revoking them, then reimposing them, permanently poisoning relations with Canada and Mexico. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on agricultural goods, which will affect Aotearoa's exports. National's response? To grovel for an exemption, on the basis of our past good relations. As for how successful that will be, Australia has adopted a similar approach to Trump's threats to impose universal tariffs on imported aluminium and steel. And the Trump regime has told them to fuck off. Being a long-standing US ally counts for nothing. So if they're going to impose tariffs on Australia, they are absolutely going to impose them on Aotearoa.

So the question is what National is going to do about it. Beg some more? But Trump responds to weakness by doubling down on oppression. Canada and Ukraine show that the way to get policy change from the US regime is to stand up to them and force it. As for how we could do that, counter-tariffs would just disrupt supply chains and raise the cost of living here. As a small country without a lot of leverage, we need to be smart.

Fortunately, there are some smart ideas lying around. America's economic power is currently built on fascist oligarchic techbros, who are also directly backing Trump's regime. And tech (and SF) writer Cory Doctorow has suggested that countries target them directly, by repealing the US imposed IP laws which underpin their wealth and power and allow them to fuck over their customers:

Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity"

[...]

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Doctorow was talking about Canada, but Aotearoa also has such laws. Section 226C of the Copyright Act criminalises circumventing "technological protection measures", or publishing information which shows people how to do it themselves. In other words, it makes jailbreaking your devices, or blocking techbro surveilance or advertising, or telling people how to do it, a crime. There's an exception to enable lawful use - which is why we all have region-free blueray players - but that doesn't cover protecting your privacy, or using your hardware in an unapproved way, or letting you fix your own stuff. Repealing those sections would let us do all those things, and create a new export industry for jailbreaking Big Tech.

Unfortunately, due to US influence, we have similar obligations in FTAs with other countries. So any tariff-response repeal would need to target the US directly. The best way of doing this would be a simple amendment to the Copyright Act, inserting a section saying that sections 226 to 226E do not apply to technological protection measures applied by US-controlled companies. The definition of "US controlled" would need to cover the various money laundering schemes used by the tech monopolies to dodge taxes, but I think its within the wit of our drafters to do so. And that should give us open season on US techbro bullshit, while complying with our obligations to everyone else.

The question is whether the government will have the courage to do this, or whether they will accept bullying by America and let Trump's techbros continue to pillage us and invade our privacy.

Fixing school lunches

The free school lunch program was one of Labour's few actual achievements in government. Decent food, made locally, providing local employment. So naturally, National had to get rid of it. Their replacement - run by Compass, a multinational which had already been thrown out of our hospitals for producing inedible slop - has been a disaster. Inedible food, which does not meet dietry requirements, and which is sometimes contaminated with plastic or causes severe injury. The only thing we haven't seen yet is a mass-poisoning, but that's probably only a matter of time. And now the primary subcontractor has gone bankrupt as a result of lowballing the bid, putting the whole scheme in doubt.

The good news is that the former providers are ready to step up and fix things. It would be a popular move: a Talbot Mills poll released today shows that 60% of people want the old system restored. A sensible government responsive to voters would recognise this, and do it. But for National, it would mean admitting that they made a mistake. And rather than do that, they'll likely just cancel the entire system out of spite, having set it up for failure in the first place. Because when faced with a choice between feeding kids, and admitting they fucked up, they’d rather let kids starve. It’s just the sort of monsters they are.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. First up is the Auckland Harbour Board and Takapuna Borough Council Empowering Act Amendment Bill, a local bill to alter the purposes for which some land in Auckland can be used. Following that is the third reading of Camilla Belich's Crimes (Theft by Employer) Amendment Bill, which should pass into law today. After that, the House should continue with the first reading of Hūhana Lyndon's Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill. If it has moved quickly on earlier business, it should make a start on Laura McClure's Employment Relations (Termination of Employment by Agreement) Amendment Bill, another nasty ACT bill to undermine workers rights. And if it gets that far, there should be a ballot for a bill tomorrow.

This is why we have juries

Back in October 2022, Restore Passenger Rail hung banners across roads in Wellington to protest against the then-Labour government's weak climate change policy. The police responded by charging them not with the usual public order offences, but with "endangering transport", a crime with a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail. Effectively they were being treated like people who had blown up a bridge or sabotaged a plane, simply for dangling a banner.

It was obvious police over-reach, and today a jury in Wellington told the police to go fuck themselves, acquitting one defendant, and refusing to convict the other three. A retrial has been ordered on the latter, but the question now is whether the police will actually go ahead with it, or give up rather than run the risk of another jury sending a stronger message.

And this is ultimately why we have juries: so we can tell the state where to get off when they go overboard. Because no matter what the law says, we can always simply say "no".

Aotearoa should sign the Disappearance Convention

There's horrible news from the US today, with the Trump regime disappearing Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student, for protesting against genocide in Gaza. Its another significant decline in US human rights, and puts them in the same class as the authoritarian dictatorships they used to sponsor in South America.

How can Aotearoa signal its disapproval of this abuse? Back in 2006, the UN agreed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). The Convention requires its parties to take various steps to prevent forced disappearance, as well as criminalising it in international law. When it was established, Aotearoa refused to sign, officially because of a slight technical difference in wording with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but really because our "ally" the US was disappearing and torturing people as part of its extraordinary rendition program. And we wouldn't want to disagree with that, would we?

But times - and the international situation - have changed, and its time to revisit that decision. When Aotearoa refused, the ICPPED had fewer than 20 parties. Now it has almost a hundred - including almost all of Europe and South America. Basically, everyone we consider to be "like-minded" in supporting that "rules-based international order" we talk about so much. These states are all also members of the International Criminal Court, so its pretty clear that the inconsistency we were supposedly so worried about can be managed to the satisfaction of the majority of the international community.

Signing and ratifying the Convention would establish safeguards against disappearance here and improve human rights in Aotearoa. It would also signal our disapproval of disappearance internationally, and allow us to punish those responsible if any of them ever set foot in Aotearoa. That seems like a Good Thing. The question is, will the government do it, or are they still chickenshits about human rights?

Judging their own case

Yesterday National announced plans to amend the Public Works Act to "speed up" land acquisition for public works. Which sounds boring and bureaucratic - except its not. Because what "land acquisition" means is people's homes being compulsorily acquired by the state - which is inherently controversial, and fairly high up the ladder on coercive uses of state power. Currently the law recognises this with objection and review processes, to ensure that such acquisitions are necessary, reasonable, and not exercised in a discriminatory manner (for example, by targeting Māori land - one of the government's go-to tactics for stealing Aotearoa from its original owners). But National plans to get rid of all that, and instead replace it with Ministerial fiat:

Landowners would no longer submit their objections to the Environment Court, but through the Minister for Land Information (Penk) or the local authority for faster resolution.

"Over the past 10 years, 49 objections have been received for compulsory land acquisitions just for NZ Transport Agency projects," Bishop said.

"The new accelerated objections process will mean we can work through any objections far more quickly. Then we can get on with delivering important infrastructure projects that will help grow our economy, so New Zealanders can get ahead."

So, the same Minister or local authority who decides they need your land for a public work will get to decide whether their decision is "reasonable". Which doesn't even pass the laugh test. It certainly doesn't seem to meet the natural justice requirements for public decision-making in the BORA, and for obvious reasons: it violates the fundamental rule that no-one should be judge in their own case.

But clearly National thinks that adhering to fundamental norms of justice means they might not get what they want. And that, right there, is why they shouldn't be allowed to do this.

Submit!

The Justice Committee has called for submissions on the Term of Parliament (Enabling 4-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill. Submissions are due by 1:00pm Thursday, 17 April 2025 (note unusual time!), so in practice you need to get it done by 16 April. You can submit at the link above.

If you're looking for reasons to oppose the bill, there's some here. Alternatively, you can just look at this government, and imagine how much worse it would be with an extra year. And possibly, you could imagine how much better it would be if we could get rid of them after two years rather than having to wait for three.

Want change? Don't vote Labour

The current National government is one of the worst in Aotearoa's history. And because of this, its also one of the most unpopular. A war on Māori, corrupt fast-track legislation, undermining the fight against climate change, the ferry fiasco, the school lunch disaster... none of these policies are making friends. People want them gone, and want the next government to make repealing them its first item of business. So naturally, Chris Hipkins has said he'll keep them all:

He also used his speech to advocate for a more collaborative approach to governing, referencing the coalition’s decisions to reverse many of Labour’s policies.

“I am not going to stand here and ask you to give your support to the Labour Party just so we can put everything back in place - and start the merry-go-round again,” he said.

“And I can assure you we aren’t going to spend our first year back in government pausing, cancelling, and reviewing everything.

“No more throwing the baby out with the bathwater just to make a political point.”

Or, to put it another way, "don't vote for us, because we won't change anything".

And Labour wonders why people have such contempt for them...

But this isn't just about Labour's spinelessness - its also a problem for our democracy. Because if elections don't change anything, if we just get the same shit policies delivered by the same apparatchiks, if major party collusion means the only real difference between them is the colour of their tie, then our democracy is simply a fraud and a scam. And if enough people get that idea, then we might actually try and change things for real, by means other than elections. And that's not the sort of outcome anyone should want.