Climate Change: The end of coal in the UK

It's official: coal has been eliminated from the UK's electricity system:

Britain’s only remaining coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire will generate electricity for the last time on Monday after powering the UK for 57 years.

The power plant will come to the end of its life in line with the government’s world-leading policy to phase out coal power which was first signalled almost a decade ago.

The closure marks the end of Britain’s 142-year history of coal power use which began when the world’s first coal-fired power station, the Holborn Viaduct power station, began generating electricity in 1882.

Good. Coal has been a significant source of greenhouse gases, and its elimination from global energy systems is vital if we are to get climate change under control. So its a huge positive step from a historical polluter.

Sadly, here in Aotearoa, Shane Jones is trying to push us back onto coal, taking us in entirely the wrong direction in service to his fossil fuel masters. So much for trying to do our bit. Tim Winton is right: our leaders are collaborators with the fossil fuel industry. And if they don't like that word, or the public anger that comes with it, then maybe they should stop collaborating in our destruction.

A tipping point?

The National Party has been promising Dunedin - and the lower South Island - a new hospital since 2008. Despite those promises, the Key government did nothing during its nine years in office, and it was left to Labour to actually start the process in 2017. National promptly criticised them as moving too slow, and continued to promise Dunedin a new hospital. They repeated the promise during the 2023 election campaign. So it was a bit of a shock when on Thursday, they suddenly declared it was "unaffordable" and announced they weren't going to build it after all. And Dunedinites were Not Impressed: 35,000 of them - a quarter of the city - turned out to show their disagreement:

Dunedin's Octagon packed with people on Saturday calling for the government to keep its promise to build the new Dunedin Hospital with no cuts.

[...]

Dunedin Mayor Jules Radich called it the biggest protest in the city of about 134,000 in years.

"Today up to 35,000 people from across the South have come together on Dunedin's streets to express their outrage at proposed cuts to our new regional hospital," he said in a statement.

Its easy to see why: this is vital infrastructure, which serves half the South Island. Downgrading it will mean a permanent reduction in the quality of health care for people in the South. And since everyone needs hospitals at some stage in their life, this is going to hit very close to home for a huge number of people (including people in "safe" National seats in Otago and Southland). Calling it "unaffordable" while dishing out billions for landlord tax cuts, truck motorways in Auckland, or a mega-tunnel in Wellington solely so Luxon doesn't have to see people giving him the finger when he is driven from the airport is a fundamental misunderstanding of the public's priorities, a failure to read the room.

And its not just about Dunedin. With its mantra of "unaffordable" for everything outside Remuera, what National does to Dunedin could be coming to your city. If you live in Hastings, New Plymouth, or Palmerston North - or their catchment areas - you can just see National sharpening the knives for your local health system. And it will hurt you or someone you love.

This should be a tipping point for the government. When 40,000 people marched down Queen Street to oppose the Key government's plans to mine our national parks, the government got the message and backed down. But the first-term Key government wanted to be re-elected. And I'm not sure that that's actually true of the current government. Quite apart from ACT and NZ First, who do not care about anything other than their corrupt donors, Luxon's National Party is not the Key National Party. Key still had a fair whack of pragmatic conservatives (hence also their desire to seek coalition with Te Pāti Māori and work with them on the foreshore and seabed). But those have now been replaced with crazed ideological glue-sniffers and religious weirdos, who seem to want to wreck our society and burn shit to the ground as quickly as possible. I'm not sure that they will listen, even to mass protest. But if they don't, then they should be a one-term government. The only question is how much damage they will do before being defenestrated by the voters.

Another abuse of democracy

This week National introduced its long-threatened bill to repeal the offshore drilling ban and promote the fossil fuel industry, and rammed it through to select committee. Today the select committee opened for submissions. If you have an opinion on this corrupt, ecocidal legislation, you will need to speak up quick - because the committee has decided that submissions are due by Tuesday, 1 October, just four days away.

Submissions can be made using the form above. On the one hand, it is clear that the committee is not interested in listening to the public; the donors and lobbyists have already spoken. But it is still worth submitting. Not to change or improve the bill - that is a waste of everyone's time, and the more uncorrected mistakes in it, the better - but to influence the opposition members of the committee, and encourage them to publicly commit to a policy of immediate repeal.

As for how to do this, I would suggest focusing on the projected emissions impact of the bill (as laid out in MBIE's Climate Implications of Policy Assessment statement) and their utter inconsistency with both our emissions budgets and our domestic and international emissions reduction targets. If these projections are remotely accurate, then a future government which wants to meet those budgets and targets will need to repeal this bill as quickly as possible. Insofar as permits represent a commitment to emit, they will need to be revoked as well (and basic political hygiene - ensuring that there are no profits from corrupt lobbying - means such revocation will have to be without compensation).

Submitters could also mention the impact of the short submission period, the effect of these continued abuses on the public legitimacy of Parliament as an institution, and the terrible message it sends about the effectiveness of pursuing change by parliamentary methods rather than by other means.

I expect the major environmental groups will set up web forms and submissions guides; I'll update with links as I see them.

Update: Environmental NGOs have a submission guide here. Ngaa Haumi has one here.

Climate Change: We can't afford the gas industry

Yesterday, National finally introduced its long-threatened bill to repeal the offshore drilling ban and promote the fossil fuel industry to the House. They'll be ramming it through its first reading under urgency this afternoon, and while it will go to select committee, they will almost certainly try their usual stunt of an undemocratically short submissions period in an effort to limit opposition.

The Greens have made it quite clear that they will be reinstating the ban and revoking any permits granted in the interim, but Labour are being their usual chickenshit selves, and refusing to commit to that. Which makes them fools as well as cowards. Because permits represent extra emissions, which we simply cannot afford. The government's own modelling shows that their policy will increase emissions by 14.2 million tons to 2035, and 51.6 millions tons to 2050. Which is a cast-iron commitment to breach not just our first two emissions budgets, but all future targets as well.

No party which pretends to be committed to climate action can accept this. So Labour has to choose: do they want to maintain credibility with the public, or suck up to ecocidal big business polluters? Because they can't do both.

Meanwhile, what this bill and this climate assessment shows us is that we cannot as a society afford the gas industry. It has to be destroyed. And currently, that's on-track to happen: high prices and shortages are driving industrial users to electrify, the electricity sector is going to be hit by a flood of solar and batteries which will drive gas out of the system, and Methanex - the customer which fundamentally drives demand and effectively underwrites all future development - is shutting down two of its three plants. This is exactly the managed decline we need to see. The gas industry and their corrupt stooges in National hate it, and so we have this desperate rearguard action in an effort to pretend that gas still has a future. But it doesn't and it can't. All we need to put the final nail in the coffin is for Labour to publicly commit to that. But I guess the question here is: when has the NZ Labour party ever done the right thing voluntarily?

How to complain about a delayed OIA release

A few years back, Te Kawa Mataaho / Public Service Commission started releasing OIA statistics, on the theory that this would allow failure to be identified and managed, and so improve performance. It may have done so initially, but then the iron laws of bureaucracy (and specifically, Goodhart's and Campbell's) took over, and underresourced agencies began to game them in order to improve their "performance". So we had a flood of bullshit extensions, as agencies tried to scam extra time while claiming responses were "timely". When the Ombudsman stomped on that, they started responding that the information would "soon" be "publicly available" (when "soon" meant "when we feel like it" and "available" meant "with whatever we want redacted"). The Ombudsman has stomped on that too, and so the latest tactic to pretend a response is timely for statistical purposes while scamming extra time is "delayed release": a response claiming that a decision has been made, but information will be released later (sometimes with a date, sometimes without, sometimes after a long delay). Et voila! A timely "decision" which can be used to make the stats look good, while giving as much extra time as an agency wants to actually do the work.

The problem of course is that - absent highly unusual circumstances - this is simply illegal. The OIA requires that decision and release both be made "as soon as reasonably practicable" (ASARP). When a decision has actually been made, then release should be immediate unless it is not "reasonably practicable" to do so. Unless an agency gives a specific reason why that is the case, a delay is illegal (and, under s28(5) of the Act, an effective refusal).

What should you do if you receive an OIA response like this? The first step is to look for the reason justifying the delay. If there isn't one, reply immediately asking exactly what circumstances make it impractical to release the information immediately. There may be a reasonable explanation! But if there is not, or they say "we need more time", or "it is still at the Minister's office", or "it is still under review", or they don't respond at all within 48 hours, then its on to step two: complain. You can use the online form here, or just email it to complaint@ombudsmen.parliament.nz.

What should you say in your complaint? After laying out the circumstances of the request ("on $RequestDate I filed a request with $agency. A response was due by $DueDate. On $ResponseDate the agency responded, saying that it had made a decision on my request, but that release of the information would be delayed..."), ask that the response be investigated, and say something like:

the response has been unduly delayed, and therefore (following s28(5) of the Act), effectively refused. While the Act permits a delay between decision and release, this requires unusual circumstances...

At this stage either give the agency's explanation (if one has been provided), and say that it does not seem to make immediate release impractical, or say that no explanation has been provided. Either way, go on and say:

This seems to be a failure to meet the "as soon as reasonably practical" standard demanded by the Act.

Additionally, if the response does not provide an actual release date, or indicate what specifically will be released, or if it does not include any withholding grounds, note this, and question whether it is actually a "decision" under the Act. In a past ruling on this sort of response (587412), the Ombudsman said:

To constitute a valid decision under the OIA, a response must be very clear as to whether a request is granted, in full or in part, as well as confirm if information is intended to be withheld, and provide the reasons for the same. I would expect an agency to have identified the specific information within the scope of the request, collated and reviewed this information, and set specific criteria for determining which information (if any) is to be withheld.

Many "delayed response" "decisions" fail to meet these conditions, and are thus not "decisions" at all.

A complaint will take a while - possibly six months to a year. You will likely receive your information long before then. But it is still important to complain. Complaints have stopped routine forms of OIA abuse in the past. With enough complaints, we can stop this one.

Priorities

Back in 2018 the then-Labour government legislated formal targets to reduce child poverty with the Child Poverty Reduction Act - and took actual steps to achieve them, with a $5.5 billion families package to boost incomes and a school lunches scheme to ensure kids didn't go hungry. While a lot of work needed to be done, it made a good start. And then National came along and gutted the targets, replacing them with more "achievable" ones. Why? Because they didn't want to spend the money required to met them:

Documents showed year-on-year progress was not on track and meeting the targets "would require investment in the region of $3 billion per year".

Officials presented Upston with two alternative targets for 2028 that they believed could be achieved.

However, Upston told RNZ the government "disagreed with the advice and this approach, as it would further entrench long-term welfare dependency and the number of children growing up in benefit-dependent homes".

Instead, the government spent $3 billion on landlord tax cuts, effectively deciding to give to the greedy, not to the needy (they also scrapped the survey tracking child poverty, to prevent any evidence of failure). Its a stark illustration of National's priorities, and who they favour in society.

As for child poverty, Upston thinks it will be solved by "growing the economy, improving health and education outcomes, and getting more households into work... rather than welfare payments and tax credit changes". In other words, the usual capitalist magical thinking that if you make rich people richer while shitting harder on the poor and gutting health and education, everything will magically get better. National applied such cruel "solutions" in both of their previous times in government, in 1991 and 2012, and their efforts are why we have a child poverty problem in the first place. Do they seriously expect us to believe it'll be third time lucky? Or are they just spewing bullshit to cover for the fact that they do not give a shit about anyone other than the ultra-rich?

And round we go again...

One of Labour's few achievements last term was to finally move on RMA reform. Following an independent review and a select committee review of an exposure draft, both aimed at ironing out bugs and producing a compromise most people could live with, Labour passed the Natural and Built Environments Act just before the 2023 election. And then National immediately repealed it. Since then they've been picking holes in the legacy RMA regime to advantage their donors and cronies. And now they've announced grand plans to replace the entire Act again:

The Government has revealed its plans for a permanent replacement for the Resource Management Act, the 1991 law that has, for more than a decade, been a piñata of blame from politicians who accuse it of failing to adequately protect the environment while stifling development.

[...]

The coalition Government resurrected the RMA last year and today announced plans to kill it once again and replace it with two new pieces of legislation, which will be focused on allowing people to enjoy property rights. RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Under-Secretary to the Minister Responsible for RMA Reform Simon Court said the replacement would be passed before the next election.

Which probably sounds great to them and their donors and cronies. The problem is that the next government, can, will, and should immediately repeal it and revert to the old regime, just as National did. The development focus and the obvious role of corruption in the process makes its survival untenable, and its repeal by the next government a basic act of political hygiene.

(...and the same goes for practically every other significant policy of this government. Given its naked corruption, repealing everything they have done on day one and replacing it with SFO investigations into every donor and lobbyist who benefited is vital. Anything less sends a message that corruption pays).

If National wanted lasting policy change in this area, they'd be doing what Labour did, and setting up a multi-year programme of review and inquiry and compromise to build consensus. Instead, they're just pulling some rabid propertarian weirdo shit from a bunch of foreign billionaire-funded thinktanks and trying to impose it by fiat. Anyone who thinks such policy can or should last is either a fool, or trying to sell you something.

The Supreme Court stands up for fairness

National is planning to breach te Tiriti o Waitangi by amending the Marine and Coastal Area Act to effectively make it impossible for the courts to recognise Māori rights over the foreshore and seabed. But its also been playing dirty in other ways. Earlier in the year it announced changes to the funding regime for Marine and Coastal Area Act cases, cutting their funding in an obvious attempt to limit both claims and their success. A side-effect of this change - a total coincidence, I'm sure - was to cut funding for the claimants in the Edwards case (which had made it easier to recognise rights over the foreshore), who were attempting to defend their victory against the government in the Supreme Court. This is obviously an unjust abuse of power to strap the legal chicken - and now the Supreme Court has recognised it as such, issuing a rare prospective costs order against the government:

In a rare decision, heavy with judicial and political implications, the country’s top court has told the Crown it must give advance financial support to a group of hapū challenging it over the Marine and Coastal Areas Act.

[...]

The five-judge panel of the Supreme Court observed the Crown had previously been an interested party in the case.

Now it had become a direct party by appealing the Court of Appeal’s findings on customary marine title, raising the prospect of one party to the argument taking funding away from the other.

“This alteration represents a substantial disadvantage in effect now imposed by one litigant upon another, at the final stage of proceedings,” the Supreme Court found, “despite that litigant having previously recognised the responsibility to ensure all sides of the argument before the courts could be advanced with full and adequate funding.”

Effectively this restores the status quo ante of government funding for the case, undoing the harm of the government's cuts and allowing the case to be decided on its merits, rather than who has the biggest wallet. And despite the Court's disclaimers, its difficult to see this as anything other than a strong criticism of unfair behaviour and abuse of power by the government.

National has of course already pledged to overturn the judgement no matter what the court decides. Which shows what they really think of Māori rights and the rule of law. They may very well pass such legislation. But if they do, the next government will simply undo it. Which raise the obvious question: wouldn't it be better to avoid all that civil disorder and damage to both the Crown-Māori relationship and the legitimacy of the state, and simply let the court decide the case on its merits? Or would they rather destroy our society in order to cling to an outdated colonial mindset for a few more years?

Tax the rich!

We already know that the rich people aren't paying their fair share. But it turns out its worse than that: we're a tax-haven! Our rich people pay lower taxes here than in any comparable country:

Well-off New Zealanders are paying less tax than their peers in nine similar OECD nations, new research shows.

New Zealand had the lowest income tax rate, did not systematically tax capital gains, and did not have any other types of wealth taxes, the Victoria University study commissioned by Tax Justice Aotearoa found.

[...]

Using 2023 OECD data it found someone on a $330,000 income that was wholly taxed as a conventional salary, would pay income tax of $108,000, or 33 percent. This was the lowest income tax rate of all the comparable nations, which had rates ranging from 37 percent to 55 percent, said Victoria University senior research associate Max Rashbrooke, who carried out the analysis.

New Zealand and Belgium were the only two nations that did not have a capital gains tax, though Belgium had other wealth taxes, which New Zealand did not.

Which should put paid to the constant threats from the rich and their collaborators to leave if we raise taxes. Go ahead! Fuck off, if you want to pay higher taxes elsewhere. We'll be glad to see the back of these social scabs.

As for why this matters: our schools and hospitals are falling apart, our infrastructure is rotting, and we have homeless people living on the streets. Our government can't do the things we need it to, because it refuses to raise the revenue it needs to do them. Which makes sense from National - they work for rich people, and they want government to be broken and useless. As for Labour, they just are broken and useless - if not working for the same people National is. But if they want to regain power, they need to address this problem. Because if they don't, we can and will vote for a party which will.

Worse and worse

Cancer Minister Casey Costello is in trouble again over her secret, magically appearing tobacco policy document. The Ombudsman has already found that she acted contrary to law in refusing requests for it; now she has been referred to the Chief Archivist over a possible breach of the Public Records Act over her claim that it magically appeared on her desk and that she has no idea who wrote it:

Casey Costello has again been reprimanded by the Chief Ombudsman for her handling of a mystery document containing tobacco-industry friendly ideas, which she passed to health officials to develop policy.

[...]

Now Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier has released a new investigation into Costello's handling of the document.

He says he is "concerned the associate minister was unable to produce any records about the provenance of the notes" and has "taken the rare step of notifying the chief archivist about the record keeping issues in this case".

The chief archivist has a range of powers to examine matters relating to record keeping, under the Public Records Act.

The Ombudsman refers a handful of complaints to the Chief Archivist each year, though referring a Minister is unusual. The penalties for contravening the Act are derisory, but reminding Costello and her staff of their legal obligations might be helpful.

...assuming its allowed to get that far. Because thanks to National's restructuring last time they were in power, the Chief Archivist is now part of the Department of Internal Affairs, and works for a Minister. While they have statutory independence in some areas, this does not seem to cover their investigative functions. Which seems deeply unsatisfactory when they're called upon to investigate Ministers. We will need to watch carefully to ensure there is no Ministerial fuckery from National over this.

A constitutional shitshow

Last month, we learned that the government was half-arsing its anti-gang legislation, adding a significant, pre-planned, BORA-abusing amendment at the committee stage, avoiding all the usual scrutiny processes. But it gets worse. Because having done it once, they're now planning to recall the bill in order to add another such amendment:

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith's office confirmed on Tuesday night the government would be sending the bill back to Parliament to ensure it includes gang patches and symbols being displayed in cars, as whether the bill as it stood would in fact cover them was in dispute.

"There was some debate around whether gang insignia being displayed from inside a car would be covered by the ban. We decided to clarify, and make sure it was covered completely. We make no apologies for getting tough on gangs."

The bill had only been waiting for the final, third-reading, stage before getting the Governor-General's signoff - but now will be sent for a second Committee of the Whole House stage. The amendment will ensure the ban does affect insignia displayed from vehicles.

Regardless of what you think of the merits of the amendment, this is a fucking shitshow. It is not how laws should be made. It is a constitutional abuse. And the blame for it can be laid squarely at the feet of the National government, and their preference for rushing legislation through to meet arbitrary deadlines, leaving no time for the required policy advice and drafting (and their "back office" cuts, which mean there's no-one left to formulate that advice and draft the law anyway). So we get messes like this, where law is being written literally on the floor of the House, so National can tick the box on its latest quarterly plan.

This is not a style of government we have seen in a long time - not really since the Douglas / Richardson Revolution of the 1980's and 1990's. Back then the executive treated the legislature as a rubberstamp, to be mushroomed and bullshat and jerked about to ram through its agenda as quickly as possible, before the public could catch on and oppose it. MMP was supposed to put an end to that. But we have a coalition apparently composed entirely of crazies high on their own power, and lacking a single party or Cabinet Minister with a commitment to good policy or proper lawmaking to keep the radical weirdos in check. And the result is half-arsed law, rammed through without proper scrutiny. The sooner it blows up in their faces with an embarrassing hole or a messy court-case, the better.

A dysfunctional watchdog

The reality of any right depends on how well it is enforced. But as The Post points out this morning, our right to official information isn't being enforced very well at all:

More than a quarter of complaints about access to official information languish for more than a year, as the OIA watchdog fails to keep up with high complaint numbers.

[...]

In 2023/24, the Office of the Ombudsman completed just 37% of OIA complaints within three months. Four out of 10 complaints took longer than six months ‒ similar to when Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier took over in 2015, promising to fix the “bugbear“ of long waits for resolution.

On average, OIA complaints took 244 days to complete, while Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA) complaints took 261 days.

And as the article points out, its actually worse than that because the Ombudsman is juking its stats, trying to get people to abandon their complaints (I can confirm that strategy), then counting them as "completed". And this accounts for a quarter of all "completed" complaints.

This matters. Many OIA requests are time-sensitive - seeking information while an issue is still in the news (rather than merely being a historical curiosity), or in order to participate in government consultations and select committee processes. The denial of information thwarts that. And the failure of the Ombudsman to enforce the Act and investigate and make decisions on complaints in a timely fashion thwarts it still further. Their juking the stats to make the situation appear better than it is is simply icing on the cake.

How do we fix this problem? Better resourcing and better triaging of complaints to focus on the right to participation is part of the solution. But ultimately, the Ombudsman is a mediator, not an enforcer, predicated on an utterly outdated and colonial model of government where everyone is a good chap who will be reasonable if another chap tells them to. Our government structure hasn't worked like that for decades, if it ever did; nowdays that model seems positively prehistoric, and completely unsuitable.

We know how to properly enforce rights; through the courts. And that means replacing the Ombudsman with a UK-style Information Commissioner, with appeal rights through the judiciary, and decisions enforceable by court order. The problem is, why would Ministers, who currently get to laugh while their pathetic "watchdog" dithers and "recommends", vote for that?

Climate Change: The threat of a good example

Since taking office, the climate-denier National government has gutted agricultural emissions pricing, ended the clean car discount, repealed water quality standards which would have reduced agricultural emissions, gutted the clean car standard, killed the GIDI scheme, and reversed efforts to reduce pollution subsidies in the ETS - basically every significant policy to reduce emissions. And now they're plotting to end the carbon-neutral public service policy:

New documents show the government is considering removing its goal of carbon neutrality across the public sector by 2025.

Released to the Green Party under the Official Information Act (OIA), the advice to Climate Change minister Simon Watts was redacted, but the file name was left on the PDF: "[REDACTED] BRF-3950 Briefing Note - Removing the 2025 neutrality goal of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme and reviewing programme setting". <

[...]

Watts confirmed in a statement he had requested advice on how the programme aligned with his government's climate strategy, but no decisions had yet been made, with advice from a number of agencies due back in October.

The public service is not a huge source of emissions, and this is small potatoes compared to the other policies National has ended. At the same time, the article makes clear that the policy had been effective at reducing emissions by removing dirty coal boilers, upgrading government vehicles to EVs, improving energy efficiency, and reducing flights. More importantly, doing all of this shows that it can be done, giving the lie to the climate deniers who constantly carp that it's all too hard and emissions can't be reduced. National clearly can't tolerate the government being a good example, so they’re going to stop it. Just another example of the sheer pettiness of National's climate denial policies...

Dangerous ground

The Waitangi Tribunal has reported back on National's proposed changes to gut the Marine and Coastal Area Act and steal the foreshore and seabed for its greedy fishing-industry donors, and declared it to be another huge violation of ti Tiriti:

The Waitangi Tribunal has found government changes to the Marine and Coastal Area Act are characterised by a blind adherence to pre-existing political commitments at the expense of whānau, hapū, and iwi.

[...]

The tribunal found the government dismissed official advice, failed to consult with Māori and breached the principle of active protection and good government by failing to properly demonstrate "Parliament's original intent" and seeking to amend the act before the Supreme Court could hear the matter.

The report said the Crown's consultation with commercial fishing interests, while failing to consult with Māori, was a breach of the principle of good government

The Crown exercised kāwanatanga over Māori rights and interests without providing any evidence for one of its key justifications - namely that the public's rights and interests require more protection beyond what is already in the act - the report said.

They recommend killing the bill and engaging with Māori in an effort to identify and address an actual policy problem, rather than unilaterally attempting to eradicate their rights.

Combined with similar reports on Oranga Tamariki, Māori wards, and the Treaty Principles, and you're left wondering if there's any significant national policy regarding Māori which isn't a flagrant breach of te Tiriti. And looking back at those reports, they all identify the same underlying problems: National putting its obligations under its coalition agreements above the state's obligations under te Tiriti; a refusal to consult; and the systematic abandonment of good government practice and ignoring of evidence in order to ram through its policy. it seems that the government no longer recognises its Tiriti obligations, particularly the principles of active protection and partnership, and is actively reneging on our founding agreement, with all that that entails.

...And the Tribunal recognises this. It ends its letter of transmittal with a clear warning:

At present, the Crown’s actions are such a gross breach of the Treaty that, if it proceeds, these amendments would be an illegitimate exercise of kāwanatanga. We caution the Crown that, on the strength of the evidence we have received, to proceed now on its current course will significantly endanger the Māori–Crown relationship.

[Emphasis added]

Which is as clear a warning as you can get that the government is on very dangerous ground here. Te Tiriti is the foundation of our constitution. It effectively gives the government its right to exist. The government messes with that at its peril.

Climate Change: National wants to cheat on Paris

In 2016, the then-National government signed the Paris Agreement, committing Aotearoa to a 30 (later 50) percent reduction in emissions by 2030. When questioned about how they intended to meet that target with their complete absence of effective climate policy, they made a lot of noise about how it was a "responsibility target", and that we would pay other countries to do it for us. But now they're back in power, they're openly talking about refusing to meet that commitment:

Since 2015, Aotearoa has pledged to purchase additional overseas mitigation to meet the target, most likely from developing nations, as domestic reductions were considered too expensive.

But [Climate Change Minister Simon] Watts told the Climate Change and Business Conference on Tuesday that purchasing mitigation offshore would be unpopular with the public.

“When I stand up and say, ‘Guess what, I'm going to write a cheque for $4 billion in your taxpayer money to some country overseas,’ you know people go: 'I sort of want my hospital and I want my health care over that. You know, I love it, but I sort of want other stuff.'”

The problem for Watts and National is that while climate denial and abandoning Paris is a shibboleth of the international right (see Peter Dutton in Australia, Poilievre in Canada, and of course former president Trump in the US), abandoning your international commitments has consequences. And not just diplomatic ones. Notably, the NZ-EU FTA commits us to meeting our Paris obligations and not doing anything which undermines the agreement. So if National refuses to meet them, their farmer base may find themselves locked out of European markets. And since they're both the biggest polluters and the biggest deniers in the country, that will be a little bit of justice for these environmental criminals.

Of course, if Watts doesn't want to pay other countries to reduce emissions for us, he has another option: he could reduce them here, and build a better, cleaner, healthier society in the process. Labour had a plan to (sortof) do that; it wasn't enough, but it was a solid foundation to build from, and was actually working - and overachieving. Of course, National repealed all that the moment they got into power, leaving them with a de facto policy of "economic collapse" as an emissions reduction strategy. And the less they do, the harder it will be for the next government to make up the ground, and the larger that 2030 bill will be. But clearly, National doesn't think it'll be their problem. And rather than doing anything to meet our obligations long-term, they're going to wreck everything, openly talk about cheating the world, so they can snipe from the sidelines when the adults have to clean up their fucking mess. They're saboteurs and criminals - not a responsible government.

A government-funded hate campaign

Cabinet discussed National's constitutionally and historically illiterate "Treaty Principles Bill" this week, and decided to push on with it. The bill will apparently receive a full six month select committee process - unlike practically every other policy this government has pushed, and despite the fact that if the government is being honest in its intentions, it will then be immediately voted down. Its clearly intended to be a six month-long anti-Māori hatefest. And it will cost us millions:

A conservative estimate suggests it will cost about $4 million to progress the controversial, and doomed, Treaty Principles Bill to a second reading at Parliament.

The estimate, calculated by Council of Trade Unions (CTU) economist Craig Renney, suggests just 12 people would have been working to create the bill since the government was formed in November last year, and includes the legislation passing through a six-month select committee process.

It does not include costs such as contractors, consultants and lawyers, or any involvement from Crown Law, the Waitangi Tribunal, or the Human Rights Commission.

Rimmer of course calls this the cost of "democracy". What it actually is is a government-funded racial hate campaign. It is disgusting and illegitimate, just like the racists pushing it. And by proceeding with it, National will bring both Parliament, and the New Zealand state, into disrepute.

National's automated lie machine

The government has a problem: lots of people want information from it all the time. Information about benefits, about superannuation, ACC coverage and healthcare, taxes, jury service, immigration - and that's just the routine stuff. Responding to all of those queries takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. But now National has a solution: it will simply get a computer to lie to them:

The Government is venturing into the world of artificial intelligence, launching a virtual assistant dubbed Gov-GPT, modelled on Chat-GPT.

Technology Minister Judith Collins announced the new tool at the Aotearoa AI Summit in Auckland on Wednesday morning.

Callaghan Innovation will run a pilot of the chatbot, designed to help Kiwis easily find information about the government and its agencies.

"GovGPT is an exciting first step towards a vision of a 'digital front-door', where individuals can find answers to their questions about government in a convenient and timely way," Collins said.

The problem, of course, is that "AI" doesn't help people easily find information, or answer people's questions. Instead, it produces plausible information or answer-shaped objects, based on its input data. And whether those answer-shaped objects are actually correct is entirely a matter of accident. Which can have catastrophic consequences. In this case, it is likely to lead to people not getting benefits or entitlements they are entitled to, not doing things they are supposed to do, and (in the latter case) potentially going to jail. It is likely to have catastrophic consequences for people's trust in government. But Judith Collins clearly doesn't see that as her problem, and may view it as an advantage, another way of saving money.

The problem for the government is that once it has built an automated lie machine, people may wonder why we are paying our political class enormous amounts of money to lie to us on a daily basis, when such lies can so easily be generated by a machine. But Judith Collins has an enormous parliamentary pension package, so she probably doesn't see that as her problem either.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. First up is the third reading of Dan Bidois' Fair Trading (Gift Card Expiry) Amendment Bill, which will be followed by the committee stage of Deborah Russell's Family Proceedings (Dissolution for Family Violence) Amendment Bill. This will be followed by the second readings of Katie Nimon's Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) (Improving Mental Health Outcomes) Amendment Bill (which will whizz through) and Camilla Belich's Crimes (Theft by Employer) Amendment Bill (which National will vote down because they love wage thieves). If the House moves quickly it will make a start on Tracey McLellan's Evidence (Giving Evidence of Family Violence) Amendment Bill, and if it gets that far, there will finally be a ballot tomorrow.

Motorway madness

How mad is National's obsession with roads? One of their pet projects - a truck highway to Whangārei - is going to eat 10% of our total infrastructure budget for the next 25 years:

Official advice from the Infrastructure Commission shows the government could be set to spend 10 percent of its total budget for new infrastructure for the next 25 years on one roading project.

The project "Accelerating Northland Expressway" is a four-lane expressway between Auckland and Whangārei, which the government has agreed in principle to speed up as part of its Roads of National Significance programme.

[...]

Sent in early July, the advice document reads: "Based on historic annual investment by central government and Treasury's projections of future GDP, we estimate this project alone could consume 10 percent of the total non-maintenance/renewal investment for the next 25 years across all types of central government infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, defence, justice, public admin, etc)."

[Emphasis added]

And of course, there's a high risk of cost overruns, meaning it could cost twice as much.

The opportunity cost of this is appalling. Every kilometre of this road we build is schools, hospitals, and new government buildings we don't. Not to mention the train tracks and other public transport infrastructure needed to decarbonise our cities. If it actually gets built, people should be thinking "there are our hospitals" every time a truck goes by on it.

This project is simply madness. There are many, many, far better things to build - including, no doubt, other roads in Northland (or maybe some bridges). We should build them instead. National's truck-highway obsession is simply wasteful madness.

The cost of flying blind

Just over two years ago, when worries about immediate mass-death from covid had waned, and people started to talk about covid becoming "endemic", I asked various government agencies what work they'd done on the costs of that - and particularly, on the cost of Long Covid. The answer was that they just hadn't done any and were basically asleep at the wheel. And today, we get to learn that it could be costing us $2 billion a year:

Researchers estimate long covid is costing the economy $2 billion a year in lost productivity.

[...]

"The research suggests that long covid is likely costing the Australian economy approximately A$9.6 billion, equivalent to 0.5 percent of Australia's GDP. And that's a conservative estimate."

The economic impact in New Zealand was likely comparable, equating to $2b per year she said.

"While this is an estimate, it's plausible that long covid significantly impacts productivity here."

They're having to use Australian figures because there hasn't been any primary research in NZ, because no-one profits from it. Private industry won't fund it, because there's no money; and the government certainly won't, because all it does is show them that they did a shit job. But all the same, it needs to be said: this is a staggering amount of money. And the lost taxation on it alone would go a long way towards paying for those extra hospitals we need. And we're paying it - or rather, not getting it - because governments put no effort into working out what it would cost, and therefore could not make a "business case" for not paying it. Kindof as if they'd just ignored the ongoing costs of climate change (oh, wait...)

(OTOH, even if they'd done the work, we'd still be up against the bipartisan status quo party consensus opposing either spending money or regulation. Which again, sounds a lot like climate change policy...)

As Marc Daalder said when he took a deeper look at the government's inaction on this:

Long Covid is poised to place significant demand on the welfare and healthcare system through increased demand, on the economy through lost wages and labour shortages and on society through the sudden spike of disability. Responsible agencies would be preparing to manage these impacts, not plunging their heads in the sand and pretending they don't exist.

Sadly, it appears that multiple key government agencies were and are irresponsible. Faced with a significant threat of ongoing costs, they ignored it, ensuring we would pay them for decades. Heckuva job. Really earning those salaries there.

Councils reject racism

Last month, National passed a racist law requiring local councils to remove their Māori wards, or hold a referendum on them at the 2025 local body election. The final councils voted today, and the verdict is in: an overwhelming rejection. Only two councils out of 45 supported National's racist agenda of immediate disestablishment. The rest basically told central government to go fuck itself. Some of them even wanted to say so explicitly. And many have directed their council bureaucracies to explore the option of just not having the required referendum - effectively threatening outright rebellion.

And the reason for this is simple: Māori wards work. In meeting after meeting, councillors stood up to say so, that the permanent presence of Māori representatives was a vital part of democracy which ensured the whole community was represented, gave them a useful perspective and valuable input and stopped them making mistakes. And in meeting after meeting, it was local National Party representatives saying this. Which tells you how off-side National's racist policy has put it with its own base.

So, in October next year, people in 43 council areas covering most of Te Ika-a-Māui will effectively be having a referendum on the National government. Which ought to make them decidedly uncomfortable. National can of course avoid this by repealing its racist legislation. If they don't, then here's hoping for a bloody defeat at the polls next year.

Government of deceit

When National cut health spending and imposed a commissioner on Te Whatu Ora, they claimed that it was necessary because the organisation was bloated and inefficient, with "14 layers of management between the CEO and the patient". But it turns out they were simply lying:

Health Minister Shane Reti’s office has admitted an organisational chart of Health NZ - Te Whatu Ora, which allegedly proved the organisation had become bloated and inefficient “does not exist”.

Reti used the chart to justify painful spending restraint at Health NZ. He now claims that there was not one organisational chart as initially claimed, but that he was referring to an amalgam of the many Health NZ organisational charts he had seen.

As Ayesha Verrall points out, this matters. We expect the government to justify their policies, ideally with some reference to actual reality. Instead, like a pack of second-rate corporate managers, they're just lying to our faces, spewing bullshit to provide cover for their cruelty. And then, when confronted with this fact, they basically say "what are you going to do about it?"

This sort of public lying shows a fundamental disrespect for voters, and a fundamental contempt for the norms of democracy. We should not tolerate it. These liars need to be democratically eradicated.

As for what we're going to do about it, I think the answer to that is obvious. There's an election due in two years, and sooner if Rimmer shits the bed. We should take that opportunity to vote this pack of lying arseholes out on their arses.

A missed opportunity

The government introduced a pretty big piece of constitutional legislation today: the Parliament Bill. But rather than the contentious constitutional change (four year terms) pushed by Labour, this merely consolidates the existing legislation covering Parliament - currently scattered across four different Acts - into one piece of legislation. While I haven't gone over it in detail to check for fuckery, it looks like quiet, boring legislation. There seem to be two significant changes:

• Giving parliamentary Security - those nice people who x-ray your bags on the way on to make sure you're not bringing in anything dangerous or planning to go on a stabbing spree on the tiles - formal statutory powers to do what they do. This is modelled on the existing framework for court security - who are in a similar role, but for courtrooms - and seems perfectly reasonable. Codifying their powers will help avoid mistakes and over-reach, which is a good thing in a democracy.
• Shifting funding for Parliamentary agencies to the model currently used for Officers of Parliament, preventing the executive from just cutting off funding to the legislature. Not that that was likely, but the possibility was not acceptable.

There's also some boring stuff about extending public service immunity for good faith actions in the course of their duties to the Parliamentary Service, and shifting functions under the Citizens Initiated Referenda Act from the Clerk to the Electoral Commission.

The worst thing you can say about this bill is that it is a huge missed opportunity for transparency. There have been repeated recommendations from multiple agencies to extend the Official Information Act to cover Parliament's administrative functions, ensuring we have a right to transparency from the legislature, rather than the current grace-and-favour arrangement. It would also help ensure the accountability of the Parliamentary Service for public money, and for its actions as an employer and a custodian of public property. Sadly, that seems to have been ignored. Which makes it an excellent amendment to raise when this bill gets to select committee...

Climate Change: Failed again

National's tax cut policies relied on stealing revenue from the ETS (previously used to fund emissions reduction) to fund tax cuts to landlords. So how's that going?

Badly. Today's auction failed again, with zero units (of a possible 7.6 million) sold. Which means they have a $456 million hole in their budget. Better, its now looking even likelier that the next auction will fail as well - meaning the entire pile (which will have grown to 11.1 million tons, plus the 7.7 million ton cost containment reserve) will be cancelled at the end of the year. Meaning nearly 19 million tons which won't be able to be emitted.

Polluters will still pollute this year, thanks to government pollution subsidies and stockpiled and forest credit bought on the spot market. But the ETS settings have been changed to aggressively reduce the stockpile, and eventually it should run out. If National cut subsidies - which are a cost to government - rather than continuing to support dirty, outdated and inefficient polluters, then maybe, eventually, they'd be forced to clean up their act. If they don't, then we know whose side they're on.

Open Government: National reneges on beneficial ownership

One of the achievements of the New Zealand’s Open Government Partnership Fourth National Action Plan was a formal commitment from the government to establish a public beneficial ownership register. Such a register would allow the ultimate owners of companies to be identified - a vital measure in preventing corruption, money laundering, and tax-evasion by the rich.

So of course, National has decided to renege on this commitment. A recent Cabinet paper on Modernising the Companies Act 1993 and Making Other Improvements for Business effectively abandoned the idea:

The register would also add a compliance burden to companies (albeit a small one). As such, it does not fit well with the overall scheme of the package. In addition, its complexity would delay the finalisation and introduction of the other reforms. I will work with my Ministerial colleagues in the Justice sector to determine the best way forward for this work.

Which is Minister for "we are throwing this in a deep hole and you should never expect to see it again". Exactly why a government which was funded by the rich to deliver tax cuts and beset by corruption scandals would do that is left as an exercise for the reader.

The problem for National is that this isn't just a previous government's policy - its an international commitment under the Open Government Partnership. The refusal to abide by it will be formally reported on by the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism. It will also likely cause problems with the Financial Action Task Force, who can actually stick us on a blacklist for failing to meet accepted standard for preventing money laundering and terrorist financing. And that is something which would actually hurt, and stop rich National MPs from moving their money overseas.

Climate Change: "Least cost" to who?

On Friday the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released their submission on National's second Emissions Reduction Plan, ripping the shit out of it as a massive gamble based on wishful thinking. One of the specific issues he focused on was National's idea of "least cost" emissions reduction, pointing out that it ignored some costs in favour of others, and only considered short-term rather than long-term costs - and in particular, ignored the costs of future environmental devastation.

...which makes perfect sense. Because the one-sided framing of emissions reduction as a "cost", rather than a way of avoiding future costs, is climate denier framing. The original "least cost" policy was "do nothing". But that's politically unviable now that the world is burning down around us, so it has become "do as little as possible". So measures which require any polluter to do anything differently are out, in favour of an "ETS only" approach, with a carbon price set too low to force change, and wishful thinking about cheap future technology which will allow the status quo to continue unchanged. And if it doesn't arrive, or doesn't work, or costs too much? National doesn't care. Somebody else's problem. Except it's our problem, now, if we want to have a liveable planet in twenty or fifty years.

But it's also worth asking the question: "least cost" to who? And for National, the answer is "to current polluters". It is all about protecting current incumbents from the true costs of their activities. Wider society and the future just don't get a look in. But "least cost" (to polluters now) now means higher costs for others and later: more air pollution deaths, more fires, more floods, more droughts, more cyclones, and so much, much more money spent cleaning up those avoidable disasters. Current polluters won't be paying for that directly. But the rest of us will be, and the bill will go up the more Fonterra and BP and Todd Energy and Methanex and the rest are allowed to pollute.

"Least cost" is just another iteration of National's meta-policy of denial, delay, and kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. The Deputy Prime Minister is nearly 80, so he doesn't expect to have to deal with the consequences of any of his actions. And while other government Ministers and MPs are younger, they don't expect to be in government when the bills they're racking up come due. So like so much else done by this government, they're just strip-mining the present and leaving the bill for the next government. Which they'll then no doubt use as a stick to beat that government with, because they're spending so much money paying National's environmental debts.

This isn't rational. It isn't moral. it is short-sighted, and greedy, and stupid. But isn't that National in a nutshell?