Aotearoa should not have places named after slavers

What do Picton, Ashburtn, Stokes Valley, and Ellice St in wellington have in common?

They're all named after slave-owners.

This is abhorrent. Naming stuff after foreign imperialists is bad enough, but slave-owners were participants in one of the greatest crimes against humanity in human history. We should not be naming our towns and suburbs and streets after them. Renaming these places seems like the least we can do.

Unfortunately, given the attitude of land information minister Chris Penk, who today refused to return Russell to its original name of Kororāreka, that seems unlikely to happen under this racist dogshit regime.

National's "investment boost"

I've been thinking a bit about National's "investment boost", the centrepiece of its dogshit budget. Its pitched by the government as encouraging big capital investments which will create jobs for the future. But I don't think there's much chance of that. The problem is that the policy just won't last long enough for that sort of investment.

The first reason for this is politics. We're due an election in the next 18 months - maybe sooner if the increasingly irritable Winston throws a tanty when Rimmer takes his job - and at best its a crap-shoot for National (and those odds will only have gotten worse after they stole $13 billion from women). A future Labour-Green government may toss the whole policy simply to make fiscal space for their own policy choices. At the least, they'll limit it to promote better investment, and rip out the bits promoting mining, fossil fuels, and farming, because they don't want to subsidise them. The second is that poor policy design means there is no cap to government exposure for this depreciation, meaning it runs the risks of a huge cost blowout and turning into another film subsidy disaster. So even if National somehow clings to power, they'll need to change it to stop the financial bleeding. They'll be slow about it, because they won't want to admit they made a mistake, but eventually it'll have to be limited, probably after three or four years.

What does that mean for the policy? Most obviously, it is not going to result in the sorts of big new capital investment National is talking up, because there's simply no time to get something conceived, designed, consented, and built (and so paid for) before the tax break gets changed. Planning a big, multi-year project around this tax break is a great way to lose money (though people may plan in hope, then shelve projects and whine for a handout when the inevitable happens. NZ businesses apparently love whining, and its almost as if that is their real business model).

So what will we get? Small, quick, cheap stuff. Utes and computers, obviously, which don't really do shit to boost productivity, and are effectively consumer spending for businesses. National is probably hoping that that might give them a quick economic juice before the next election so they can say "things are getting better". For bigger projects, it'll be either short planning cycle stuff - again, small and quick - or stuff which is already consented and planned for, which can be brought forward. And on that front, there's an obvious type of project which has plenty of pre-consented stuff sitting around, and which can be built in two years from saying "go": solar farms. Yes, National may just have strengthened our solar boom. Their farmer-cronies (who want rural land "protected" from more productive uses so they can instead use it to pollute) will be spitting.

(It may also help with wind farms - which again have a lot of projects pre-consented and waiting - but they take longer to build).

Which also brings me to how a future government could use this policy: use it solely to push decarbonisation. Building a renewable energy project, electrifying a factory and getting it off gas, switching your fleet of delivery trucks to EVs? Have a depreciation break. Want to keep buying old, fossil infrastructure? Fuck you. We need to decarbonise quickly, and this seems like an excellent way to bring that investment forward and make it happen.

Drawn

A ballot for three member's bills was held this morning, and the following bills were drawn:

• Local Government (Port Companies Accountability) Amendment Bill (Lemauga Lydia Sosene)
• Financial Markets (International Money Transfers) Amendment Bill (Arena Williams)
• Military Decorations and Distinctive Badges (Modernisation) Amendment Bill (Tim van de Molen)

The first would extend some (but not all) of the provisions covering council controlled organisations to port companies and their subsidiaries (which are excluded from the definition of CCO by s6(4)(c) and (ca) of the Local Government Act 2002). This would include the principal objective statement - setting up a legal clash with the principal objective clause of the Port Companies Act 1988 - and (most importantly) the LGOIMA and Ombudsmen Acts. If passed, it would be the biggest statutory expansion of transparency since the OIA was extended to cover Parliamentary Undersecretaries in 2016, but why its being done in this convoluted way rather than simply repeal the exemption isn't clear. Rachel Brooking, the original sponsor of the bill, told me there were "other consequences involving more moving parts" when she first put it in the ballot in 2021. Possibly there are worries about guarantees and lending, but it does also create direct conflicts of law, and set up problems for future (or past?) privatisations, in that all port companies would be subject to LGOIMA, regardless of whether they would be CCOs if not for the exemption. But that's what happens if you try and unravel a nearly 40 year old failed privatisation campaign, I guess.

The other bills are just basic consumer protection, and weirdo flagshagging (increasing the penalty for wearing medals you're not entitled to to $10,000, which seems wildly disproportionate - the penalty for equivalent offences under the Flags, Emblems, and Names Protection Act 1981 is $5000. But flagshaggers gonna shag flags, I guess). Given what else was in the ballot, it could have been much, much worse.

$13 billion

That's how much Nicola Willis thinks she stole from New Zealand women by repealing pay equity:

A tax incentive for businesses, boosts to health and education spending, and Crown funding for new gas fields are among new Budget initiatives made viable by nearly $13 billion in cuts to the pay equity regime.

[...]

The Government initially refused to disclose how much money it had saved as a result of the pay equity changes. However, the Budget says there is now $12.8b in “fiscal headroom” over the next four years as a result of the new, tighter system.

And she's using the money "saved" to pay for... more business tax cuts! Not health, housing, welfare, or any of the other countless things we desperately need as a result of National's cuts-driven recession, but to shovel more money to her donors and cronies. It's pure class warfare, based on outright theft. But that's so very very National, isn't it?

Meanwhile, there'll also be $200 million set aside for "co-investment" in the gas industry. This is an industry with literally no future - no future in electricity, no future in industry, and which faces a death spiral for its network. Only a complete sucker would invest in a pre-stranded asset. But then, its not about investment; its about creating a conflict of interest for the next government between its role as an investor and its role as a regulator and policy-maker, which will reliably generate advice and headlines about how much money the government will be burning by doing either. Essentially an ideological poison pill. The good news is that its a contingency, so there are no concrete plans yet for such investments (because there's no new gas fields to invest in), and this government has only 18 months left to run. And the quicker we kick it out, the less we'll lose on this bullshit.

National grovels to Trump

Its budget day, and the government has been whining about how it has no money and so can't afford anything. Meanwhile, they've just given away half a billion dollars a year to foreign fascist techbros:

New Zealand financial statements filed by tech firms including Google, Facebook and Amazon show how they're moving their local profits to tax havens like Ireland, allowing them to declare little or no taxable revenue here.

Treasury estimates a proposed Digital Services Tax would have pulled in $479 million from these firms over the next four years – but this week, under the shadow of Donald Trump's tariff threats, the Government announced it was dropping the bill from its legislative agenda.

The Herald has a closer look at Google's tax-cheating. They shipped over a billion dollars offshore by paying dodgy "service fees" to themselves, ensuring that there was nothing here to tax. If those profits had been taxed here instead of laundered through overseas tax havens, it would have been an extra quarter of a billion dollars we could have used to pay for the things we need. Instead, it will pay for political corruption and promoting fascism in the US.

A tax on tech revenue would have been one way of disincentivising techbro money-laundering. But National has cancelled it in order to grovel to Trump. But in the process, they've shown us a truth they'd rather deny: when they claim "there is no money", it is a choice, and a lie.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. Unusually, its not starting with bills; instead there will be two debates, the first on ACT MP Joseph Mooney's disallowance motion for the tikanga provisions in the Professional Examinations in Law Regulations 2008, and the second to authorise a select committee inquiry into online harm. After that there is the committee stage of the Auckland Harbour Board and Takapuna Borough Council Empowering Amendment Bill, followed by the first reading of Shanan Halbert's Enabling Crown Entities to Adopt Māori Names Bill and Andy Foster's Financial Markets (Conduct of Institutions) Amendment (Duty to Provide Financial Services) Amendment Bill. If the House moves very quickly, it might get to Debbie Ngarewa-Packer's Resource Management (Prohibition on Extraction of Freshwater for On-selling) Amendment Bill, but that seems unlikely. There should be a ballot for two bills tomorrow.

Parliamentary privilege is a threat to all of us

People are rightly outraged about psycho fascist Parmjeet Parmar "inquiring" about using the privileges committee to arbitrarily imprison her political opponents. As Chris Hipkins said yesterday, that is the sort of thing which happens in tinpot dictatorships, undemocratic and wrong, and a permanent stain on our Parliament. But its worse than that. Because parliamentary privilege doesn't only affect MPs, but all of us. Among the examples of contempts listed in the standing orders is:

reflecting on the character or conduct of the House or of a member in the member’s capacity as a member of the House.

Taken literally, this means that saying that Shane Jones is a corrupt mining industry stooge, or Winston is a senile old racist, or Casey Costello is a tobacco lobbyist, or David Seymour is a racist little incel are all contempts, punishable by parliament's private star chamber, the privileges committee. And its not just a theoretical problem: its not that many years since Matt Robson - then a private citizen, not an MP - was dragged before the privileges committee and forced to apologise for saying that Peter Dunne was in the pocket of the liquor and tobacco industries and had always faithfully delivered his vote for their interests.

That was outrageous enough when it was a mere apology. But now government MPs are discarding years of parliamentary precedent and openly speculating about throwing people in prison on the basis of pure political animus. That is beyond "outrageous"; it is a threat. A threat to every single one of us. Because "reflecting on the character and conduct of MPs in their capacity of MPs" is something we all do, and something we all should do. Our democracy is predicated on it. So when the government is "inquiring" about the ability of their kangaroo court to throw people in jail for breaching their bullshit "privileges", it sounds a lot like they are trying to outlaw democracy.

There is something we can do about this. Currently there is a bill before the House - the Parliament Bill - which would codify and re-enact the existing law around parliament, including parliamentary privilege. During its select committee hearings, several submitters raised the House's purported power to imprison for contempt, and recommended that they be explicitly repealed (just as its power to fine was limited in 2014). They were ignored. As a result, the House continues to claim the power to imprison people for up to two years (or maybe longer), for pretended offences like "making an MP feel bad", on the say-so of a kangaroo court which convicts on a partisan vote.

This cannot be allowed to stand. Parmjeet Parmar's "inquiry" turns this power from a theoretical historical anachronism to an active threat to each and every one of us. It is an active threat to our democracy and our liberty. It must be repealed.

(And while we're at it: in 2014 we also explicitly said that the House cannot expel a member, because of the impact of such a decision on democracy. Suspensions have a similar impact, so its time we legislatively limited them as well, to a maximum term of three days. Parliament clearly needs its wings clipped, and its time we did some clipping).

Update: Graeme Edgeler has already drafted the required amendment paper. So, which MP wants to stand up and move it?

A desperate delay

So, that was a bit of a damp squib. Everyone having geared up for an epic filibuster battle which would upset the government's legislative program for at least the day, National has now abused its parliamentary majority to adjourn the debate on its outrageous and anti-democratic punishment of Te Pāti Māori MPs until June. Officially this is to allow those MPs to participate in the budget debate, but Chris Bishop said the quiet part out loud: it's to "allow this week to focus on the Budget", rather than on a tyrannical government abusing parliamentary processes to effectively lynch its primary opposition. In other words, to ensure the government gets to control the headlines, rather than having to deal with the "distraction" of its own abuses.

The government is clearly hoping that public anger over this will dissipate. I am hoping it won't. And hopefully that anger will be shown to government MPs where-ever they go. This is a government which seriously suggested arbitrarily imprisoning its political opponents, merely for the opposing them. As Chris Hipkins noted in his speech, this regime is departing significantly from the democratic norms of Aotearoa. It is acting like a tinpot dictatorship. It is directly attacking our democracy. And that is not something the people of Aotearoa should tolerate or forgive.

(And yes, I'm glad to have been wrong about Hipkins on this; he moved that the penalty be reduced to a 24 hour suspension, in line with past practice, and seemed to be willing to fight for that).

National's move to ram through an adjournment caught everyone by surprise, including Brownlee. It was yet another abuse of parliamentary procedure to prevent debate and stifle opposition. Which is the central feature of this government: urgency and abuse of process all round. They are the worst, most abusive government we have had since Muldoon. And we should kick their arses out at the first opportunity.

Reported back

The Justice Committee has reported back on the Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill. The bill as introduced was a tyrannical law which threatened to outlaw protest and ordinary democratic activity in Aotearoa on the basis of government conspiracy theories and fantasies about its motivations. The good news is that its been made less bad, with the addition of "avoidance of doubt" clauses protecting protest, advocacy, dissent, and strikes, as used in the Terrorism Suppression Act. The bad news is that their attempts at a similar clause, clarifying that "protect[ing] information for a lawful purpose in the ordinary course of business, a profession, or an occupation, whether paid or unpaid" is not "improper", is too narrow, capturing only "jobs" (for want of a better term), rather than ordinary democratic activity. So if you organise a protest using invitation-only meetings and encrypted online messaging for the high-level planning, and you're not doing it as a job (if your "occupation" isn't "protest organiser"), then you're still at risk of the government having some fantasy about your motives and using it to imprison you. Likewise if you merely blog occasionally, rather than being able to say "actually, this is what I do". As for protecting journalism, the government (in its departmental report)is quite clear that it sees journalists as de facto enemy agents:

Journalism cannot be exempted from the definition of improper conduct because some journalistic endeavours are deliberately false or misleading and could be conducted for a foreign power intended to compromise a protected New Zealand interest(s).

...which confirms my suspicion that the government views even well-justified exemptions as undercutting its core purpose of all-encompassing criminalisation, so there are no "loopholes" for their "foreign agents" to wiggle through. The problem is that such "loopholes" are our democratic space, and blocking them blocks us. But I guess a government which will happily disenfranchise 210,000 Māori voters for 21 days by abusing its majority to kick their representatives out of parliament doesn't really give a shit about democracy.

Which side are you on, Labour?

Today will see an unprecedented moment in Parliament. A racist government whose leader opposes the "Maorification" of New Zealand is using its parliamentary majority to suspend opposition MPs from the House for being Māori, silencing them and the people they represent for up to 21 days. It is outrageous and anti-democratic; their own Speaker knows it is wrong, and they clearly do too. They're so ashamed of what they are doing - and scared of the public's reaction to it - that they have closed the public gallery, preventing anyone from watching their abuse of power.

This is a golden opportunity for the opposition Labour Party to stand up for our democracy and against this racist abuse of power. To show their voters which side they're on. To actually stand for something. So of course spineless jellyfish Chris Hipkins doesn't want to. Oh, he agrees the punishment is "too extreme", but he says Labour is "pretty unlikely" to filibuster the debate. So, he's going to take the leverage the Speaker handed him to force the government to compromise and adopt a more appropriate penalty, and he's going to do... nothing. Which is perhaps why the racist prime minister is now declaring there will be "no compromise" - because he knows Hipkins is weak and won't do anything other than whine and wring his hands.

But the Labour caucus isn't just Hipkins, and its MPs can speak even if its leader won't. And they should, if they want to continue in their gold-plated careers. Because their voters will be watching. And they will be judging. And silence, cowardice, and collaboration is unlikely to impress anyone.

Chipping away at National's gang-patch ban

National's racist gang-patch was clearly intended to humiliate gangs and allow them to be punished for being seen in public, and police have taken on that mission with enthusiasm, attacking funerals and kicking in doors to seize banned clothing (meanwhile, they've also abandoned domestic violence and mental health callouts, in a clear preference for violent, aggressive policing over core work). But while the government loves this, the courts might not. A local story in the Manawatu Standard last week about two gang members seeking the return of their seized patches shows the judiciary is showing some reluctance, especially where police have been unnecessarily aggressive in their seizure:

Nepia Wall, a member of the Black Power, had a sweatshirt seized by armed police at his family home, one that was given to him by his brother who had died.

Mongrel Mob member Raneira Tamaki was also asking the court to return his “side patches” that had been passed down generations, including from his own deceased brother.

Judge Lance Rowe said the Gangs Act 2024 made it an offence to wear gang insignia in public, but it was unclear whether the item could be returned to an offender or their whānau if it was proven to be of sentimental value.

[..]

[Wall] was not involved in any gang activity at the time, but it prompted armed police to go to his family home to seize the item, something which the judge said was concerning.

The judge is asking the police to explain why they thought guns were necessary for a seizure from someone not involved in gang activity, and signalling that excessive force will be relevant (because searches and seizures must be reasonable, and this seems... not to be). But the real red rag to National's racists is that the judge has said they will need to consider tikanga, mana, and whanaungatanga in their decision. To which we could also add te Tiriti, since an heirloom passed down for generations is a taonga, continued ownership of which is guaranteed by article two, and which should not be seized without a significant public policy reason. These are all part of the law of Aotearoa, and are clearly relevant here.

National will be spitting over this. But while they clearly intended that all patches would be seized and destroyed in order to humiliate their victims, the actual law gives courts discretion over their ultimate disposition. And return doesn't seem contrary to the purpose of the Act, which is explicitly about prohibiting public display, not about prohibiting private ownership. Where offending is low-level, the item in question is a taonga, and police have clearly been abusive in their seizure, then return does not seem at all unwarranted - if only to encourage the police to behave better in future.

We won't see a decision until June or July, but it looks like it will be interesting, and potentially litigated further up the chain. And while a positive ruling won't unravel the gang-patch ban, it will poke a few holes in it, and absolutely infuriate the government and the police.

Climate Change: Now what?

When National came to power in 2023, one of its first acts was to repeal all useful climate change policy. When they finally released their amended emissions reduction plan, it relied on a single project using a fantasy technology for the bulk of its reductions. And now, that project has fallen over:

Fully a third of the carbon savings needed to meet the government's legal obligations to cut emissions from 2025-2030 was supposed to come from carbon dioxide being stashed permanently under the ground of Taranaki, at the Kapuni gas field.

Kapuni's owner Todd Energy says the project's future is uncertain unless it gets some kind of extra incentive or subsidy from the government - something the government currently shows no signs of offering.

This was entirely predictable. As I pointed out when National first floated its CCS fantasy, carbon capture requires very high carbon prices. The perfect use-case - switching geothermal stations to closed- rather than open-cycle - did not happen when Aotearoa's carbon price was at $85 a ton with a credible pathway to keep rising. And since then, we've elected a climate-denier government, whose market-fuckery and lack of credibility on future emissions reduction policy has destroyed credibility in the ETS and crashed the carbon price to below $50 a ton (it has since recovered marginally to $55). So its entirely unsurprising that Todd Energy doesn't want to take the risk of investing in carbon capture when they won't get any financial return from it, and when National's ETS/forestry policy seems guaranteed to ensure they lose money.

Of course, Todd Energy is sticking their hand out for a subsidy. There are cases where that is justified - for example, when it would be offset by reduced pollution subsidies, or cause structural changes which would reduce emissions elsewhere (for example, by helping to destroy the future financial viability of the gas industry), or just when the cost of buying those reductions is substantially cheaper than the government would expect to pay. Glenbrook, the poster-child for the GIDI policy, did all three. But none of that is the case here. Instead, this particular CCS project would increase emissions, because Todd Energy would be using the "stored" CO₂ to push out more gas, both creating additional direct emissions and extending the lifetime of an industry we need to eliminate. And according to MBIE's highly optimistic Climate Implications of Policy Assessment, that would offset a huge chunk of any savings. But for National, subsidies aren't about economics, but about corruption and cronyism, and I expect they'll be more than willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars rather than publicly admit failure.

Even so, we are going to have a huge hole in our carbon budget. National won't want to do anything about it, because they clearly don't plan to be in government then to be held accountable for their failure. But the opposition needs to be planning now for how they're going to plug that hole, and drawing up policies to quickly reduce emissions by the required amount. And the ideal one, with some excellent knock-on effects for both reduced subsidies and destroying the gas industry, is to shut down Methanex permanently...

Maybe Little should actually win the election first?

So, Andrew Little thinks the Wellington City Council should cancel its plans for the Golden Mile, because there's an election in five months:

Andrew Little told Nine to Noon he'd be disappointed to see the council march ahead with the plan, given local body elections are to be held in October.

[...]

He said he'd repeat his message to the council - asking them to pause on signing more work contracts for the Golden Mile.

"Given that there is going to be a change of mayor after 11 October - and there'll be a new line-up in council - I don't think it's ethically correct for this council to be signing off significant new contracts that will bind the next council at a time when things are so sensitive for the Wellington economy."

...which is assuming a whole lot, not the least that Little will be elected as mayor, and that the future council will be as anti-redevelopment as he is. Meanwhile, the actually existing council were elected to serve a three-year term, which won't end for five months, have consulted repeatedly on this project, and many of them were elected on a platform of doing it. But apparently all of that counts for nothing against the whims of an unelected dude who feels entitled to power.

There's an obvious comparison here with US Republicans who refused to allow Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court, on the basis that their dude - Trump - would win the next election. And its as ugly and entitled and undemocratic from Little as it was from them

But then, ugly and entitled is Little's campaign to a t, starting from the moment he shoved Tory Whanau aside. The problem is that he needs Whanau's progressive urbanist pro-Golden Mile project voters to win. And if they correctly conclude that he is offering them nothing, and don't turn out for or second-preference him, and he loses, he will have no-one but himself to blame.

Brownlee stands up for democracy

Yesterday, parliament's white privilege committee recommended that three Te Pāti Māori MPs be suspended for up to three weeks for opposing the racist Treaty Principles Bill with a haka. The penalty is outrageous and antidemocratic - and surprisingly, even National's Speaker agrees. At the beginning of question time today, he denounced the recommendation as unprecedented and unfair, made the point that it could be amended, and effectively invited the opposition to filibuster and hold the Budget hostage to force the government to do so:

[T]he committee's recommendation was adopted by a narrow majority. That is an important point when the effect of the recommendation would be to deprive members of a minority party of their ability to sit and vote in this House for several days.

As the committee's report states, the Speaker has a duty to protect the rights of members of all sides of the House. In particular, there's a longstanding convention for Speakers to safeguard the fair treatment of the minority. I intend to honour that convention by ensuring the House does not take a decision next week without due consideration. In my view, these severe recommended penalties placed before the House for consideration mean it would be unreasonable to accept a closure motion until all perspectives and views had been very fully expressed.

[...]

As with many other situations when proposals are made to this House, it is not an all-or-nothing decision. I also note Standing Order 129, which provides that when an amendment has been moved, a member who spoke before the amendment was moved may speak again.

Just to spell that out: privileges committee reports trump all other business, and if everyone gets a 10-minute speaking slot, that's up to 1240 minutes - 20.6 hours - if everyone speaks once for their full time (550 minutes / 9 hours if only the opposition speaks, and 210 minutes / 3.5 hours if just the Greens and Te Pāti Māori do). And if an amendment is moved, everyone gets to speak again. There are 6.5 hours in a normal sitting day (less an hour for question time), and there are only two of them before the government wants to present its budget (and it wants to do some legislating before then, and hold a member's day). So if the government doesn't agree to vote for a more appropriate penalty (say, one day), this debate will drag on, eat their carefully-planned legislative calendar, eat Member's Day, and ultimately prevent their budget from being presented on schedule, disrupting their big PR setpiece.

So, I guess National gets to choose: do they want vicious racist vengeance and to undermine the legitimacy of their parliament? Or do they want to have the budget as normal?

Outrageous and antidemocratic

That is the only way to describe the Privileges Committee's recommendation to suspend the leadership of Te Pāti Māori for 21 sitting days for their haka protest against the racist Treaty Principles Bill (the haka's leader, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, gets only 7 days). Outrageous because this is the harshest penalty ever handed out by parliament; a clear case of the government abusing its majority to silence and exile the opposition - exactly like a corrupt tinpot dictatorship. And anti-democratic because in the process, they're depriving 210,000 Māori voters of their democratic representation, at the precise time the government will be introducing racist legislation to further undermine their rights, in the form of Rimmer's radical racist libertarian Regulatory Standards Bill.

I was expecting Te Pāti Māori to be convicted by National's kangaroo court, and I was expecting it to be both a badge of honour for its victims, and a source of shame for Parliament. But I was not expecting this level of punishment. It not only brings the entire house into disrepute; it undermines Parliament's very legitimacy. Because, very obviously, if Parliament ejects and suspends and gags its Māori members for vigorously defending, in a culturally appropriate way, the interests of their constituents, then it loses any claim to either represent or be owed allegiance by those constituents. And equally obviously, if a government can use its majority to do this to Māori, it can do it to everyone.

While a New Zealand government using the privileges committee and its House majority to suspend and silence all opposition was previously only a theoretical possibility, now it is real. And we must therefore defend ourselves, and our democracy, from that threat. And that means not just evicting this repulsive, racist, anti-democratic regime; it also means nobbling Parliament and ensuring it can never do this again. Parliament needs to actually be forced to follow the fundamental human rights it has promised to obey. As for how, repealing the 350 year old law which gives them their impunity and making them subject to the courts would be a good start. Politicians have shown they cannot be trusted, and will abuse whatever power they are given. Time to put some neutral adults in charge of them instead.

An alternative vision for Aotearoa

Its the budget next week, where National will inflict another round of cuts on kiwis in order to keep funding handouts to landlords and rich people. And while Labour is doing nothing (sorry, "keeping its powder dry"), the Greens are acting as the main opposition, releasing an alternative budget to show what we could be doing. The core idea? Tax the rich properly, with a wealth tax, higher company taxes, and reversing the landlord tax breaks, and using the money to pay for things people need: a better health system, more state housing, free dental care, free ECE, better public transport, and better support for students and people out of work. Oh, and there's a "fuck you" tax on private jet passengers, because fuck those people and their polluting luxury lifestyle.

Its a compelling vision, which shows us that we can have a better society; all we have to do is vote for it.

Naked corruption

When National passed its corrupt, Muldoonist fast-track law, they were criticised for accepting donations from fast-track applicants. You'd think that after such criticism, and the consequent effect on the reputation of our state, they might have ceased the practice - but of course not. Instead, they're still taking money from people whose cases they will later be deciding on:

Ministers Shane Jones and Chris Bishop continued to make decisions about several fast-track projects despite their respective parties receiving donations linked to the applicants.

One political scientist says such donations could be perceived as a conflict of interest and erode public trust in government.

However, both ministers said that donations to parties were not considered to be a conflict.

"The long-standing approach of the Cabinet Office to donations to political parties is that they are not generally treated as resulting in a pecuniary conflict of interest for individual Ministers belonging to the party," a statement said.

Which is a transparently self-serving approach. The stooges in DPMC, eager to please their political masters, may say it, and the politicians, out of self-interest, may (pretend to) believe it - but no member of the public does. No ordinary person outside the Thorndon Bubble believes that company managers, with legal obligations to their shareholders, give free money to politicians and expect nothing in return. And no-one belives for a moment that the politicians take tens of thousands of dollars and then says "fuck you" to the people who gave it to them. They reserve that attitude for us plebs, the people who vote for them without giving them enormous gifts.

NZ First has taken $121,680, and National $58,897.25 from fast-track companies. We should call these "donations" what they really are: bribes. And we should call the practice what it is: naked corruption. That is actually a crime in Aotearoa, and its time these ministers went to jail for it.

More constitutional vandalism

Since the national government embarked on its racist campaign against Māori, the Waitangi Tribunal has emerged as one of its chief adversaries, putting the impacts of its racist policies formally on the record so they can not be denied. National has responded by sabotaging it, replacing almost the entire membership with unqualified crony appointments. But apparently that's not enough, so they've decided to "review" the Tribunal to undermine it further:

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka has announced a review will take place into Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and the Waitangi Tribunal, in a move the ACT Party says will “rein in [the] activist tribunal”.

The review comes as part of a coalition agreement between National and NZ First, and aims to refocus the scope, purpose and nature of the Tribunal’s inquiries back to its original intent, Potaka said.

As ACT's response shows, this is simply more constitutional vandalism, intended to eliminate one of the few checks and balances on our overpowered executive. And its moving in completely the wrong direction. The lesson of this regime is that the Tribunal needs to be strengthened, not weakened, with stronger protections against government fuckery.

Hopefully Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori will make it clear that they will reverse whatever the racist dogshit regime does, and restore and strengthen the mana of the Tribunal. As for the government, it needs to think about it this way: it can either resolve claimed Treaty breaches calmly and quietly through a Tribunal, or it can resolve them through protest, occupation, and confrontation, with all the consequent impacts on the legitimacy of the state. Lawyers and historians, or Ihumātao everywhere. Their choice.

A calculated policy of deceit

This week the government rammed through legislation under urgency to cancel all outstanding pay equity deals and make them impossible to get in future, balancing their books by stealing $17 billion from New Zealand women. It was an outrageous abuse of the democratic process, and since it passed, we've learned just how abusive it was. According to an analysis by Stuff, the government first started plotting this move in December 2023, right after they gained power. The real work began in December last year, and was deliberately kept outside the normal policy process to prevent us from learning about it:

Even many officials who would normally work on a proposal like this were kept in the dark. For instance, no regulatory impact statement was made to assess the lawmaking.

Similarly, the BORA vet was - unusually - issued by the deputy Attorney-General himself, rather than the usual Ministry of Justice team (of course, he said stealing from women was OK, and absolutely did not impact their rights - a case of mansplaining away human rights?)

The government "justifies" this by talking about "legal risk". But what risk is that? The risk that the Employment Relations Authority would rule on and approve deals before they could legislate them away. Which is really a financial risk, that they wouldn't be able to steal as much money. But the real risk they were worried about was democracy: that we would object, that we would protest, that we would submit on the bill, that we would make it clear to their backbench that pursuing this misogynistic policy would result in a bunch of them losing their jobs. And to avoid that, the government pursued a policy of total secrecy, unseen before in modern policy-making.

In short, they followed a calculated policy of deceit, pissing all over our constitutional norms in order to steal from women and attack our democracy. And we should hold them to account for it. There are protests tomorrow in most major centers outside government MPs' electorate offices. Be there, and speak out against this dogshit misogynist regime.

Government of the 0.3%

A couple of months ago, the government held a public "consultation" on their proposed Regulatory Standards Bill. People responded en masse, and made it crystal clear what they thought of it:

The Ministry received approximately 23,000 submissions and worked with a specialist consultancy to quantitatively assess support and opposition to the proposed Bill. This analysis showed that 20,108 submissions (around 88 per cent) opposed the proposed Bill, 76 submissions (0.33 per cent) supported or partially supported it, and the remaining 2,637 submissions (almost 12 per cent) did not have a clear position.

76 supporters out of 23,000. That's not even lizardman's constant (the 4% of senile-dementia victims who habitually support the most cooked option). Its not even the ACT voter percentage they got for their racist Treaty Principles Bill. And meanwhile, it is crystal clear that the public overwhelmingly opposes this extremist libertarian bullshit.

So guess who the government listened to? Yes, the 0.3% of weirdos who want to drown them in the bathtub: they're advancing the bill. Meanwhile, they ignored the rest of us; our voices apparently don't matter. And of course neither does our time, which they wasted with their bullshit "consultation" (again).

But while the government can ignored our submissions, there are other things they can't ignore. Such as our votes. So, if they've wasted your time and ignored you. tell them to go fuck themselves at the ballot box, and vote the whole lot of them out on their filthy arses.

Still 34,000 unemployed under National

The March labour market statistics are out, showing unemployment unchanged at 5.1%. There are now 156,000 unemployed - 34,000 more than when National took office.

While better than expected, there's been a shift from full-time to part-time work, and total weekly paid hours has dropped - meaning people are working less, while nominally remaining in jobs. Underutilisation - people who would like to work more hours - is also up. So this isn't exactly good news. The questions is whether it will get worse, and how many people will throw in the towel and cross the Tasman for fairer work in response to National's misogynist attack on women.

Dropped

All charges against the Restore Passenger Rail protestors have finally been dropped. Good. But they should never have been laid in the first place, and it shouldn't have taken a jury telling the police to go fuck themselves (or the threat of them doing so again) for the state to see that.

The obvious question is whether the state will be properly held accountable for this abuse of process. Sadly, I think we all know what the answer to that will be.

National supports sexism

That's the only possible conclusion we can draw from their decision to legislatively terminate all pay equity claims, and make future claims much harder to win:

Workplace Minister Brooke van Velden announced the moves to raise the threshold for proving work has been historically undervalued to support a claim, on Tuesday saying changes back in 2020 had created problems.

"Claims have been able to progress without strong evidence of undervaluation and there have been very broad claims where it is difficult to tell whether differences in pay are due to sex-based discrimination or other factors."

Claims were concentrated in the public sector, with costs to the Crown of all settlements so far totalling $1.78 billion a year, she said.

"The changes I am proposing will significantly reduce costs to the Crown," she said.

So, they're explicitly going to balance the government's books and pay for landlord tax cuts and new war toys by paying women less. Sexist fuckers.

But there's a reason we have a legislated process for this: because the alternative is that workers go to court, and win a settlement that way - as they did in 2015. And if National cuts off that route, then it gets "negotiated" through industrial action - which, given that nurses are significant claimants, means hospital shutdowns and their healthcare metrics being shat out the window. But I guess their thinking is that that will all happen later, in another budget cycle, so it all gets ignored in favour of the short-term goal of making the books balance this year.

And that's what you get for putting the white male businessman parties in charge. I hope we all remember this at the next election, and kick them out on their arses.

Another unfair Australian election

Australians went to the polls on Saturday in an election originally expected to be a tight contest between an uninspiring ALP government, and a full-on monstrous radical Coalition opposition. But then Trump happened, and Dutton doubled down on culture war bullshit, and so instead its been a Labour landslide. Which is welcome, I guess - shit-lite is still "lite", and everyone loves to see Trump get kicked in the balls - but it again shows the rank unfairness of Australia's electoral system.

The ALP won 56% of the seats on (at current count) just under 35% of the primary vote. The coalition - which got a slightly lower primary vote of 32% - won 26% of the seats. The Greens, who won 12% of the vote, and One nation, which got 6%, received no seats at all, while independents got 10% of seats for 7.5% of the vote. 10% of seats are still in doubt, so these numbers may change a little, but its also very obvious that this is a wildly disproportionate result, practically British levels of unfairness. And I'm not sure why Australians continue to put up with it, especially when it turns their politics into a cosy oligopoly where both shit and shit-lite push racism while pandering to the fossil-fuel industry, in pursuit of some horrific conception of a racist, coal-addicted median-voter.

Australian politics could be better. And the way to make it better is by moving to a fairer electoral system. It worked here, after all. But why would shit and shit-lite support that?

A "secret" that wasn't

Back in 2018, Aotearoa was in the midst of the Operation Burnham inquiry. During this, it emerged that key evidence was subject to a US veto under an obscure and secret treaty. Part of the Five Eyes arrangement, this treaty was referred to by a number of different names in different documents, but seemed to be the "Security of Information Agreement between the New Zealand Minister of Defence and the United States Secretary of Defense of September 2 1952", with amending exchanges of notes in November 1961 and in 1982.

I was curious about this treaty and especially about its impact on the handling of OIA requests, so I asked MFAT for a copy. They refused, claiming it was a) secret; and b) American, and therefore couldn't be released. So I went to the Ombudsman, pointing out that the equivalent treaties for all other Five Eyes had been released and were likely to be substantially similar (so it wasn't really secret after all), and that if MFAT wanted to hide behind the Americans, it should at least have to actually ask them if they objected to release. The Ombudsman agreed on the latter point at least, and so MFAT agreed to reconsider its decision and ask the US. And then they just... didn't. back to the Ombudsman, and MFAT agreed that it would make its own assessment of the treaty and consult the US about that, and released a summary. back to the Ombudsman for a full-on challenge to the idea that this is secret or foreign in any way, and MFAT agreed to formally talk to the US to gain US declassification. And then they just... didn't (again). And its currently before the Ombudsman again, with more MFAT promises to talk to the US.

So you can imagine how pissed off I am to find out that a key part of the information I requested - the 1961 exchange of notes - was declassified and released by the US State Department in January 2018, before I even made my request, and that MFAT has simply been dicking me around for seven years. You can read the full thing here, thanks to the Unredacted Five Eyes archive.

As for what it says, it echoes the other, similar (and public) agreements that we already knew about. Which invites the question: why the secrecy? What is the supposed harm in release here? What was the point of MFAT's "consultation" if it didn't result in them learning that this had already been declassified? And why is the New Zealand government still resisting transparency after all these years?

National says "fuck the BORA"

That's the only way to describe their plans to reinstate the prisoner voting ban. In case anyone has forgotten, this is a law that was explicitly found to be inconsistent with the BORA by the Supreme Court, in Aotearoa's first ever declaration of inconsistency. The solution that was eventually hashed out to this constitutional impasse was that if the courts made such a declaration, parliament would fix it. National is now rejecting that - along with the very idea that parliament has responsibilities under the BORA.

That being the case, it is clear that the half-measures of the New Zealand Bill of Rights (Declarations of Inconsistency) Amendment Act 2022 are not enough. Parliament has again demonstrated that it is unwilling to be a responsible branch of government and uphold its explicit, legislated duties under the BORA. That being the case, the solution is clear: take the job off them and give it to someone with a demonstrated track record of acting responsibly. In this case, that means repealing s4 BORA, and allowing the courts to directly overturn legislation themselves.

Gas is dead

The Herald had another announcement today about a new solar farm being officially opened - this time the 63MW Lauriston solar farm in Canterbury. It is of course briefly "NZ’s biggest solar farm", but it will soon be overtaken by Kōwhai park at Christchurch airport (168MW) and Tauhei (202MW), both of which are currently under construction and should be complete next year. And looking further ahead, the 400MW Te Rāhui farm near Tāupo should be building soon, along with a number of other big projects.

None of this has any form of government assistance. Instead, the government is still blathering about gas as a "transition fuel". Which is the thinking of twenty years ago. The last major gas-fired power station in Aotearoa was commissioned in 2007. While there have been a couple of "peaker" plants added since, they're much smaller and not intended for baseload generation. And there are no plans for any in the future: the last "live" gas project - Todd Energy's proposed peaker plant at Ōtorohanga - was cancelled years ago (though the consents for it have not yet expired). The market has spoken: the future is solar, and wind, and batteries. The gas industry is dead; it just hasn't realised it yet.

Shoving the future aside

I woke this morning to the shock news that Tory Whanau was no longer contesting the Wellington mayoralty, having stepped aside to leave the field clear for Andrew Little. Its like a perverse reversal of Little's 2017 decision to step aside for Jacinda - the stale, pale past rudely shoving the voice of the future aside.

This isn't any criticism of Whanau - she has to do what's right for her, and she's been very gracious about it (even effectively endorsing Little). But there's a real question of whether her progressive urbanist voters will stomach supporting another Labour failure, especially when his immediate response is to double down on the Keep Rates Low bullshit which has ruined Wellington in the first place:

The former Labour leader said one of the main reasons he stepped up to be a candidate was so he could restore the faith in the council.

“There, there’s not, it is simply not acceptable for rates to increase, by my calculation, about 30% in the last two years,” Little said.

“A lot of that is, I think, council not getting a grip on their own finances.”

Nope. Its because politicians like Little Kept Rates Low and didn't pay to maintain the infrastructure which literally underlies their city, instead choosing to kick the can - or rather, the giant puddle of shit - down the road. Now that bill has come due, the council is actually facing up to it, and the wealthy wankers in their drafty "heritage" villas want to just keep on not paying, because they'll be dead soon. Last election Wellington voters told those people to go fuck themselves, by electing Whanau and a progressive council. The question is, when the only mayoral choice on offer is "Keep Rates Low" wearing different-coloured ties, whether they'll even bother to turn up this time.

"Protecting frontline services"

When National embarked on slash and burn cuts to the public service, Prime Minister Chris Luxon was clear that he expected frontline services to be protected. He lied:

The government has scrapped part of a work programme designed to prevent people ending up in emergency housing because the social development ministry cannot cope with the workload, official documents show.

A December MSD report to Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka said that was partly because it was too busy with work related to changes to the Jobseeker benefit.

[...]

"We do not recommend progressing further with phase one work at this time due to insufficient frontline capacity and wider organisational pressures," the report said.

"MSD's frontline capacity is currently oversubscribed, and there are wider organisational pressures because of the focus on implementing initiatives to support other government targets, including the Jobseeker target."

Another way of saying "oversubscribed" is "understaffed". And its worth noting that MSD cut 700 roles last May to meet National's arbitrary bodycount targets. And now they can't do the basic stuff the government asks them to do.

This is what cuts give us: a dysfunctional public sector which can no longer perform basic functions. And that's fine with National, because its not like a Minister paid $304,300 a year or any of their rich wanker Koru Club friends think they will ever need those functions. Instead, they're happy to make everything suck for the rest of us, so they can posture as "fiscally responsible" and hand over billions in cash to landlords.

Wouldn't it be nice to have politicians who actually represented New Zealanders, rather than rich people?

Climate Change: National supports pollution subsidies

When the Emissions Trading Scheme was originally introduced, way back in 2008, it included a generous transitional subsidy scheme, which saw "trade exposed" polluters given free carbon credits while they supposedly stopped polluting. That scheme was made more generous and effectively permanent under the Key National government, and while Labour talked about removing the subsidies, they somehow never got round to it (it would have upset someone, you see). Both the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and He Pou a Rangi have recommended reducing the scheme, and now Treasury and IRD have joined them. But National says "no":

Ministers rejected advice to take a hard look at hundreds of millions of dollars in climate grants to the likes of NZ Steel, Methanex, Rio Tinto, and Fletcher Building.

Inland Revenue and Treasury told the government there was no proper evidence that yearly subsidies to some of the country's biggest carbon polluters were needed.

Their recommendation for a thorough review was met with a no thanks from Minister Simon Watts.

So, a government which endlessly claims that we don't have enough money for schools or hospitals or public transport (or anything other than landlord tax cuts and pointless guns) is happy to continually fork out quarter of a billion dollars a year to encourage some of our worst polluters to keep polluting. You'd almost get the impression that they weren't really serious about either climate action or fiscal management...

He Pou a Rangi has been crystal clear that the current level of subsidies is a long-term threat to the effectiveness of the ETS, and they need to be reduced ASAP. So this is going on the - already long - list of immediate problems the next government will have to sort out. And hopefully, they'll have no time for industry special pleading while doing so. Because these polluters have already had nearly twenty years to clean up their act. If they haven't done it by now, then its time they faced the financial consequences for their stupidity.

Climate Change: Fucking the ETS again

For a while, it looked like the government had unfucked the ETS, at least insofar as unit settings were concerned. They had to be forced into it by a court case, but at least it got done, and when National came to power, it learned the lesson (and then fucked the ETS in other ways). But now, it looks like He Pou a Rangi is going to fuck it up all over again, proposing a huge increase in auction volumes:

The commission found that the government could increase NZU auction volumes by 13.6m units for the 2026-2030 period, compared with last year’s estimates.

That was largely because surplus units were coming down faster than expected. In addition, industrial allocation of units was forecast to be lower than expected due to plant closures, lower production and updated baselines.

The full advice is available here, and while their reasoning on surplus reduction does not seem unreasonable, it is also risky, because the government won't be able to reduce 2028 volumes if later data shows they're wrong. As for industrial allocations being lower than budgeted, we should be banking this as emissions reductions, rather than immediately giving them away to allow further pollution. But because the government doesn't count the cost of its Paris NDC liability, there's no financial argument for that (and instead a clear financial argument for more auctions to raise revenue to waste on landlord tax cuts and higher salaries for politicians).

In short, this is a mistake. We should be taking every excuse to grind emissions down, and to grind down the total liquidity in the ETS. And it almost makes you wonder whether National's recent crony appointments to the commission are affecting its advice.

The rotten, unaccountable crown

Between 1950 and 1993 the New Zealand government tortured and abused up to 250,000 children in residential care facilities. They then proceeded to cover it up in order to minimise their liability, dragging out cases, slandering their victims and ultimately denying redress. In its final report, the Inquiry into Abuse in Care declared that this policy was wrong, and named specific public servants who were responsible. Some of those public servants - including Solicitor-General Una Jagose - are still employed in positions of responsibility. But now, the government has decided none of them will ever be held accountable:

After examining its own conduct, the state has decided it will not take any action against public servants named or implicated in the landmark Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

[...]

Public Service commission deputy chief executive in charge of policy and integrity Hugo Vitalis told Newsroom he did not believe the behaviour of those identified amounted to ‘misconduct’ or ‘historical misconduct’.

“Nevertheless, in all cases the commission considered the commentary, discussed the matter with the relevant employer and was satisfied that no further action was required.”

I guess they've decided to accept Jagose's "befehl ist befehl" argument.

So, we have a huge crime by the state and its agents, and the state just washes its hands of it, holds no-one accountable, and refuses to compensate its victims properly. Apparently people are just meant to be happy with a bullshit, two-faced "apology". And then they wonder why public trust in them is declining. This is why. Because a state which outright refuses to hold itself accountable for torturing children is basically a criminal regime, and unworthy of trust or respect.

Climate Change: Kicking the can down the road again

Last week, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment recommended that forestry be removed from the Emissions Trading Scheme. Its an unfortunate but necessary move, required to prevent the ETS's total collapse in a decade or so. So naturally, National has told him to fuck off, and that they won't be changing anything:

But Climate Change Minister Simon Watts, said the government's approach to forestry had already been set in its Emissions Reduction Plan and it did not plan any other changes.

The government had already announced plans to restrict whole farm conversions to forestry on certain classes of productive land.

"The forestry sector will play a key role in driving economic growth by creating more jobs in our regions and boosting the value of exports. It also provides a nature-based solution to climate change, which is a key pillar of the government's climate strategy," said Watts.

So its the usual "policy" from national: do nothing. Kick the can down the road. Leave it for the next government to fix. Because they are going to have to fix it, one way or another, if we want to have a functioning carbon price to reduce emissions. But maybe National - a party still full of climate change deniers and weirdo apocalyptic cultists - doesn't want that either. They may no longer feel that they can openly espouse climate change denial, but they can trash all the policies, do nothing about the threat, and leave us all to burn and drown – which amounts to exactly the same thing.

Little's pitch

So, having teased it last week, Andrew Little has announced he will run for mayor of Wellington. On RNZ, he's saying its all about services - "fixing the pipes, making public transport cheaper, investing in parks, swimming pools and libraries, and developing more housing". Meanwhile, to the readers of the reactionary Post, he's making a rather different pitch:

Little, who is working as a lawyer after serving as an MP for 12 years, said his priorities in office would be fiscal responsibility, affordable housing and better project management, such as reconsidering the controversial Golden Mile project.

[...]

As mayor, he would pursue a regional deal to build new infrastructure, put an end to front-loading costs on ratepayers, and run a ruler over-spending.

"Fiscal responsibility", "an end to front-loading costs on ratepayers", "run a ruler over-spending" - yes, it's the same "Keep Rates Low" platform which is responsible for the underinvestment in infrastructure which has seen perpetually leaky pipes and shit on the streets. With a side order of empty promises of "better management" and some wishful thinking about getting someone else to pay for it all. Oh, and some "questions" about cycleways and urbanism, just to ensure wealthy urban-villa-owners and ute-drivers are on-side. And that's apparently what Labour stands for now: the classic stale, pale, male agenda which has wrecked local government in Aotearoa. The last gasp of the greedy generation which looted everything while stealing from the future.

The good news is that Wellington has STV, so Little running won't split the vote and allow some right-wing, Keep Rates Low candidate to win. But we may get one under Labour colours instead. Vote accordingly.

Winston is inciting terrorism

That's the conclusion of a report into security risks against Green MP Benjamin Doyle, in the wake of Winston Peters' waging a homophobic hate-campaign against them:

GRC’s report said a “hostility network” of politicians, commentators, conspiracy theorists, alternative media outlets and those opposed to the rainbow community had produced dehumanising and violent commentary capable of encouraging or inspiring action from a lone-wolf attacker.

“Much of the threat is socially motivated, rooted in deep-seated transphobia, moral panic, and conspiratorial thinking - often under the guise of ‘child protection’” it stated.

[...]

“This is essentially the manufacturing of moral panic to reaffirm us-versus-them dynamics. This also could be indicative of stochastic terrorism becoming an enduring part of NZ political discourse.”

The report found a 75% to 85% chance of Doyle being subjected to stalking and harassment, and a 15% to 25% chance of a physical attack. That's what Winston and his hate network are inciting. And the mainstream media outlets who have spread it for clickbait need to take a good, hard look at themselves and what they are complicit in. The Prime Minister also needs to take a good, hard look at his current Deputy Prime Minister and coalition partners, and consider whether inciting a terrorist attack against an opposition MP is really appropriate behaviour for a Cabinet Minister, or a member of his coalition.

Good fucking riddance

National's racist and divisive Treaty Principles Bill was just voted down by the House, 112 to 11. Good fucking riddance. The bill was not a good-faith effort at legislating, or at starting a "constitutional conversation". Instead it was a bad faith attempt to stoke division and incite racial hatred - the legislative equivalent of a bucket of shit dumped on the table. And you can't have any sort of conversation over that.

The politicians who inflicted this on Aotearoa, who conspired to divide communities and whip up hatred, are scum, and should be reviled forever. They should have no role in the future of our country. We should vote them out on their arses and never let them back into politics.

Drawn

A ballot for three Member's Bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill (Cameron Brewer)
• Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Restrictions on Issue of Off-Licences and Low and No Alcohol Products) Amendment Bill (Mike Butterick)
• Crown Minerals (Prohibition on Coal Mining) Amendment Bill (Julie Anne Genter)

The latter is key climate change legislation, basically ending any new permits for coal mining or prospecting, while leaving existing permits unaffected. I expect National to vote it down, but it will become a stake in the ground for the next government, and may cause Shane Jones to have an aneurysm on the floor of the House.

I was expecting a bigger ballot, but they'd already held another ballot yesterday, resulting in the introduction of Ingrid Leary's Property Law (Sunset Clauses) Amendment Bill.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, and its all first readings. First up is Laura McClure's Employment Relations (Termination of Employment by Agreement) Amendment Bill, followed by Carl Bates' Juries (Age of Excusal) Amendment Bill, Adrian Rurawhe's Employment Relations (Collective Agreements in Triangular Relationships) Amendment Bill and then Kieran McAnulty's Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Sales on Anzac Day Morning, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas Day) Amendment Bill. If it moves quickly, the House might make a start on Shanan Halbert's Enabling Crown Entities to Adopt Māori Names Bill, but is unlikely to get much further. Given postponements, there should be a ballot for four or five bills tomorrow.

The dishonest crown

The High Court has just ruled that the government has been violating one of the oldest Treaty settlements, the Sealord deal:

The High Court has found the Crown has breached one of New Zealand's oldest Treaty Settlements by appropriating Māori fishing quota without compensation.

It relates to the 1992 Fisheries Settlement, commonly known as the Sealord Deal, which funded the purchase of a 50 percent stake in Sealord and protected Māori fishing rights and interests in perpetuity.

The court found the Crown had breached the 1992 settlement and by extension the Treaty of Waitangi.

The full ruling is here. The breach is due to the technical details of the government's quota management system, but it basically meant that Māori quota was stolen by the crown and reallocated to other fishing companies to pay off its debts. Its been going on for decades, so the amount of quota - and therefore money - involved is substantial.

But while the court has found a breach, it hasn't ordered any relief, so the obvious question is what the government will do next: enter good-faith negotiations to make good its breach and compensate for the wrong? Or pass "fuck you" legislation because they don't really think Treaty settlements are binding on them? And if the latter, what do they think it will do to all the other settlements - and their claims of being "full and final" - that they have passed?

Grooming us for identity theft

Local body elections are in October, and so like a lot of people, I received the usual pre-election enrolment confirmation from the Orange Man in the post. And I was horrified to see that it included the following:

Why horrified? After all, surely using email, rather than the failing postal system, makes elections more accessible?

Sure. But it also exposes us to scams and fraud. Think about the emails you usually receive. How many of them are real? Now think about important emails - things from your bank, or NZTA, the IRD. How many times have you seen warnings from the government or these bodies about scam emails?

Now imagine the following: you receive an email from "votе.nz", with a link (also to votе.nz) where you can confirm your details. You click it, and it presents you with a RealMe login page, asking you to enter your username and password to proceed.

This is exactly what the government would do (because DIA is desperately pushing RealMe into everything whether they want it or not). And its also how you get scammed (with or without the lookalike Cryillic letter). And in this case, the consequences of being scammed includes identity theft, someone being able to use your RealMe to get a passport in your name, and possibly having your voter details changed to deny you your right to vote.

The government should be protecting us from these risks. Instead, we have a government agency basically grooming us to be scammed, because its more administratively convenient for it to do so. Its stupid and wrong, and it would be nice if they stopped.

The return of dirty politics

At the 2005 election campaign, the National Party colluded with a weirdo cult, the Exclusive Brethren, to run a secret hate campaign against the Greens. It was the first really big example of the rich using dark money to interfere in our democracy. And unfortunately, it seems that they're trying again, with the Sensible Sentencing Trust running deceptive billboards purporting to be Green party ads advocating for the defunding of the police.

[Photos by Johnny Cans]

While the ads carry an authorization statement, the use of Green Party branding in this way is clearly deceptive and intended to mislead people into thinking it is a real Green Party ad. It is likely a violation of rule 2(b) of the advertising standards code. More importantly, insofar as it might reasonably be regarded as encouraging or persuading voters to actually vote for the party - and there are people for whom it will - then running it without the permission of the party is an actual crime. Which is kindof ironic, given what the SST supposedly stands for.

(Of course, given its support of Bruce Emery for stabbing and killing Pihema Cameron, we know that the SST really only opposes some crimes: crimes committed by poor or brown people. Crimes by richwhites, especially against poor brown people, are OK.)

There are deep links between the SST and government parties. Winston Peter's current chief of staff, Darroch Ball, led the SST when he was kicked out of parliament. And former ACT politician and stealer of a dead baby's identity David Garrett was a lawyer for the SST before entering parliament. So you have to wonder about the level of coordination here (especially with the government also running a hate campaign against the Greens in question time), and whether we are once again seeing astroturf groups being used by the parties of the right to wage dirty politics campaigns and circumvent political spending limits.

Parliament's secret "transparency" regime

When the Parliament Bill Committee rejected calls for Parliamentary agencies to be subject to the Official Information Act last month, their excuse was interesting: Parliament didn't need the transparency of the OIA because it already had its own transparency regime! Which came as rather a surprise to everyone working in this area. But they had the Protocol for the release of information from the parliamentary information, communication and security systems to point to, and while being mostly about secrecy and MP's veto power over the release of any information relating to themselves, it did require parliamentary agencies to develop and submit to the Speaker:

detailed guidelines for dealing with requests for information about parliamentary administration that balance openness and transparency, privacy principles, and parliamentary independence

I was curious about these guidelines, so I asked for a copy and for information on how they had been publicised. And it turns out they simply hadn't been. While approved by the Speaker at the same time as the protocol, they had never been placed on the parliamentary website - meaning that Parliament's bespoke "transparency" regime had effectively been kept entirely secret, at least from the public. Which is... somewhat odd. If you want to be open and transparent, surely you'd advertise the fact, rather than hiding it? But clearly, I'm just not sufficiently steeped in Westminster parliamentary traditions...

[I should note that the non-publication of these guidelines for nine years is currently being reviewed, in light of the Parliament Bill Committee's report, so maybe they'll finally be posted...]

As for the guidelines themselves, you can read them here: Guidelines for the release of Parliamentary administration information. They basically replicate the OIA regime, with some twists:

• all withholding grounds are absolute; there is no public interest test;
• all advice to or from the Speaker is confidential and may not be released;
• there is no right of appeal, even when Parliament blatantly ignores its own rules (privilege literally means being above the law).

This clearly does not meet the transparency expectations of modern Aotearoa, and pretending that it does is simply a bad joke. Instead, its just grace and favour and arbitrary secrecy unless someone in power decides otherwise. And that is not the level of transparency we expect in a free and democratic society.

Parliament claims that it accepts transparency and the principles of the OIA. If it is serious about that, it should accept the full OIA regime and be fully subject to the law, just like any other agency. And if they refuse, or drag their feet, we can draw our own conclusions about how open and transparent they really are.

The ideology of grovelling to Trump

Yesterday the Trump regime in America began a global trade war, imposing punitive tariffs in an effort to extort political and economic concessions from other countries and US companies and constituencies. Trump's tariffs will make kiwis nearly a billion dollars poorer every year, but Luxon has decided to do nothing in response.

Part of this is NeoLiberal ideology, which holds that tariffs are always bad and always make people worse off. In the case of Aotearoa, this simply isn't true - modelling published by the University of Auckland's Niven Winchester shows that Aotearoa would be $400 a year per household better off (plus the non-monetary benefit of sticking it to America) by joining global retaliation than by grovelling to US bullying and doing nothing. And of course, there are other, non-tariff ways to retaliate: finally imposing revenue taxes on US dotcoms operating here; personal sanctions against members of the US regime and their oligarch supporters similar to those we impose on Russia; repealing US-imposed IP laws.

But there's another ideological basis for the government's refusal to respond, and that is that National, ACT, and NZ First are all conservative parties. And conservatives are ultimately about all traditional hierarchies: men over women, whites over non-whites, straights over queers, parents over children, rich over poor, the strong over the weak. But there's another traditional hierarchy they're also in favour of: big countries over small ones. The US (originally the UK) over us. Which is why they get involved in so many US wars, and why they're too chicken to stand up to Trump: because they see Aotearoa's natural role as one of subservience to a foreign overlord.

(There are ugly words used to describe political leaders who promote the interests of foreign powers over those of their own country, and they all seem completely applicable here.)

These are not kiwi values. And on foreign policy, they're also not aligned in any way with our interests as kiwis. Luxon's refusal to stand up for kiwis against the Trump regime is a real betrayal. And we should hold him accountable for it at the next election.

The people have spoken

The Justice Committee has reported back on National's racist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, and recommended by majority that it not proceed. So hopefully it will now rapidly go to second reading and be voted down.

As for submissions, it turns out that around 380,000 people submitted on the bill - 75,000 of them as part of a "collated" (template) submission which were counted as one per group. This included 31,200 for racist political party ACT and 24,706 for white supremacist group Hobson's Choice. While the committee officially accepted only ~37K submissions (the others will be accepted and entered into the parliamentary record at a later date), they took the unusual step of getting the Ministry of Justice to analyse the rest before they were accepted. The result found overwhelming opposition to the bill, with 90% of all submissions opposed, and only 8% in favour. The people have spoken very loudly on this, and you'd expect Parliament to listen. If they refuse, or try and subvert it, then you can expect the sort of discontent we had with the political system in the early 90's, and a similar movement to further constrain and humiliate politicians.

With so many people submitting, this could have been a signal moment for democratic engagement. Instead, National turned it to shit, by trying to throw our submissions in the bin to meet their arbitrary, self-set timeline. That should have consequences too. Most obviously, by voting them out at the next election. But also, the political elite are currently pushing for a four-year term, to make themselves less accountable to us. Absurdly, they are predicating this on giving greater power to select committees. Given what we've just seen about how a government majority can abuse that process and nullify any real scrutiny of a bill, we should be telling them to get absolutely fucked. And if you'd like to do that, you can do it here.

Again, this government needs to be voted out. The National Party needs a good electoral decimation to teach them a lesson. They agreed to this hateful, racist bill in order to gain power. Not a single one of them crossed the floor to vote against it, showing them all to be a pack of racist arseholes. Then they abused the select committee process to try and shut down opposition and silence submitters. They agreed to it, they own it. And we should hold them responsible for this entire shitshow, and never let them - or anyone else - forget what they did. They are a racist, white supremacist, anti-democratic party, and they should bear that label forever.

The fix is in

So, having broken its promise to the nation, and dumped 85% of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill in the trash, National's stooges on the Justice Committee have decided to end their "consideration" of the bill, and report back a full month early:

Labour says the Justice Select Committee is expected to report back on the Treaty Principles Bill on Friday - more than a month ahead of time.

Parliament set down a deadline of the 14 May, and a Cabinet minute shows the committee was set to consider it until 16 May.

But Labour's Justice spokesperson Duncan Webb - who had previously sought an extension to avoid thousands of public submissions being excluded - now says the timeline has been moved up.

"The committee finished more than a month ahead of the 14 May deadline set by Parliament with the report expected to be presented and available tomorrow (Friday)," he said.

Webb said the Committee had "rammed it through with outrageous haste" and the early report would exclude those thousands of submissions.

There is absolutely no reason for this haste. The original May deadline was set by the government, and could easily have been moved to allow for full analysis and consideration of the submissions. Especially as National has repeatedly said publicly that they will be voting the bill down at second reading. So I guess we can conclude from this that the fix is in, and Rimmer is going to get the racist referendum (and associated hate-crimes) he is thirsting for. And National is going to collude with him on this.

As I said earlier, this is not democracy. National's abuse here makes it clear that the entire parliamentary process is a sham and a fraud. It undermines the legitimacy of parliament, and of our democracy. And that is something no government should do. We need to vote these tyrants out at the first opportunity.