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.

We don't need the fast track to kill fossil fuels

RNZ has a story this morning about the expansion of solar farms in Aotearoa, driven by today's ground-breaking ceremony at the Tauhei solar farm in Te Aroha:

From starting out as a tiny player in the electricity system, solar power generated more electricity than coal and gas combined for the first time over summer, albeit only for a few days, according to the Electricity Authority.

Overall, solar farms generate just 2 per cent of the country's power now, but by 2030 Meridian Energy thinks it will be 7 to 8 per cent.

Which is roughly what we generate with wind ATM. Or gas. In fact, solar will overtake gas in terms of generation capacity within two years. Here's MBIE's breakdown of generation capacity to 2023 (excludes hydro):

Source: MBIE, Energy in New Zealand 2024, p24.

Look at that beautiful exponential curve for solar! And it gets better: total solar capacity in December 2024 was 573MW. There's another 463MW currently under construction, and 130MW which will start building in August, all of which will be built by the end of 2027. Throw in a couple of hundred MW of distributed generation, and there will be more solar than gas. The same is also true of wind, which has 262MW under construction and scheduled for completion by the end of 2027, and there's 300MW of batteries under construction to remove the need for peaking power. All of which means that we're going to be burning a lot less gas in a couple of years.

And the kicker: this has all been done without National's fast-track bill. The government has claimed that its corrupt, Muldoonist, anti-environment law is necessary to boost renewable energy, but clearly it is not. So when big generators claim that the world will end because their latest big stupid project has been rightly refused resource consent, they are lying. We don't need to allow corruption or compromise the rule of law in Aotearoa to get a green future; the market is pushing that perfectly well. Instead, Contact is fighting over who gets the money from that revolution: them or someone else. And none of us should really give a single wet shit about that. There's plenty of other wind projects waiting to be built, and we'll just build them instead.

How to deal with a kangaroo court

In November last year, Te Pāti Māori's Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke spoke for all of us when she led a haka against National's racist Treaty Principles Bill. National and its parliamentary patsies did not like that, so after kicking her out of the house for a day, they sought to drag her to Parliament's "Privileges Committee", the kangaroo court the government uses to persecute those who upset it in Parliament, in order to punish her a second time for the same offence. But Maipi-Clarke and the rest of Te Pāti Māori have told National's kangaroo court to go fuck itself:

Three Te Pāti Māori MPs who performed a tense haka in Parliament during the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill last year say they are refusing to attend a hearing with Parliament's Privileges Committee over concerns their "fundamental" legal rights are being ignored.

[...]

In a media release, the party claimed that despite requests for a fair hearing, the Committee has denied key legal rights including the denial of a joint hearing, having their legal representation restricted, an expert testimony from Tā Pou Temara denied, hearing schedule conflicts being ignored and concerns Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke will face similar sanctions she got when the haka was performed.

Ngarewa-Packer said the decision to undermine basic legal practice perpetuates the "ongoing tyranny of the majority against Māori representation".

Te Pāti Māori are right. Denying those appearing before the committee legal representation and the right to call witnesses is a breach of fundamental rights. Section 27 BORA affirms the right of natural justice to everyone facing a tribunal or public authority with the power to make a determination about their rights or interests. That means fairness, impartiality, hearing both parties, and the right to legal representation when required. The Committee's actions fail to uphold those rights. But then, so does the Committee itself. Because the idea that a committee of MPs, on which the government has an automatic majority, which decides cases on partisan lines and which can impose arbitrary punishments is fair and impartial does not even pass the laugh test. Instead, it is a politicised pretence of "justice", specifically intended to persecute and punish anyone the government chooses. And anyone who pretends otherwise is trying to sell you something.

(And again, this government thinks they can be trusted with four-year terms when we have such a sore at the heart of our democracy. Again, they can get fucked).

So what's next? I guess the committee will reschedule, and hopefully in doing so they'll be reasonable. But even then, given their nature, there's simply no point in cooperating in any way with such a body. If they're going to disregard evidence to make a nakedly political decision, they should be forced to do so openly, rather than cloaking their persecution in a pretence of justice. And if they don't like being made to do so, well, maybe they shouldn't?