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.

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?

National's ghost ships

Back in 2020, the then-Labour government signed contracted for the construction and purchase of two new rail-enabled Cook Strait ferries, to be operational from 2026. But when National took power in 2023, they cancelled them in a desperate effort to make the books look good for a year. And now today, after first announcing that the market would sort it out, then that they would build two smaller, non-rail ferries, they've finally announced their new plan: to build two new ferries, slightly smaller than the ones they cancelled, including rail tracks. Who's building them? They haven't decided. How much will they cost? They haven't decided that either. About all we do know is that they will be delivered in 2029 - three years later than the original ones. Assuming everything goes to plan and ACT doesn't veto the whole thing, of course. And assuming the Aratere lasts until then, when Kiwirail is saying it won't.

So, we've spent $300 million (and potentially much, much more) to make the government's books look good for a year or two, and get less, later. Great economic management! Excellent use of public funds!

I think its fair to say at the moment that the government doesn't so much have a plan, as the concept of a plan, and that these are basically ghost ships. And we all know what they say about those...

This is not democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change: More subsidies for Tiwai

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

Is this what government is for?

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

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

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

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

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

Will Labour take on the oligarchs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving OIA enforcement

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

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

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

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

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

Parliament says "no" to transparency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law, culture, and the OIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe there's a connection?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm. Maybe there's a connection there?

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

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

Climate Change: Failed again

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

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

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

"Capital poor"

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

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

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

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

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

Arbitrary or worse

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

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

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

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

Drawn

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

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

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

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

How to fight back against Trump's tariffs

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

Fixing school lunches

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

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

Member's Day

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

This is why we have juries

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

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

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

Aotearoa should sign the Disappearance Convention

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

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

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

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

Judging their own case

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

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

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

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

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

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

Submit!

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

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

Want change? Don't vote Labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A recipe for waste

With the Trump regime in the US causing growing global instability, the government is banging the drum about increasing defence spending. And this morning we have a bunch of defence lobbyists pushing to double the size of the navy to four frigates, at a cost of $8 billion.

Which sounds like a great way of wasting billions of dollars. Lest anyone forget, the navy doesn't have enough staff to crew the ships it has got, let alone new ones. Half the navy's fleet of inshore patrol vessels were effectively mothballed just a few years after purchase, due to lack of crew (they were eventually sold to Ireland). The same then happened to the navy's offshore patrol vessels. And as the article itself pointed out, three of the navy's eight helicopters were grounded last year due to insufficient staff.

All of which suggests that unless the navy solves its staffing problem, exactly the same will happen to any new frigates: they'll be tied up and left to rot, hugely expensive white elephants. But that's what you get from performative defence spending. It would be an even bigger waste than the government's Cook Strait ferry fiasco, and if National is willing to throw billions down the drain on new war toys but baulked at iRex, then it shows there is something seriously wrong with their priorities. At least ferries are useful. War toys are pure waste.

(I do not know how to fix NZDF's staffing problem, and I honestly don't care. If people don't want to work as trained killers or support staff for trained killers, that seems great to me. But the people pushing for increased spending need to recognise it as a problem, and explain how they're going to solve it, because there's no point buying toys when there are no people to play with them).

But if the goal is to increase nominal spending to appease the Trump regime, then there are better things to spend it on than war toys. Defence housing is unfit for human habitation, and could be upgraded. That at least would be useful. But I guess that just doesn't benefit international arms companies...

A complete fiasco

When National cancelled the iRex ferry contract out of the blue in a desperate effort to make short-term savings to pay for their landlord tax cuts, we knew there would be a cost. Not just one to society, in terms of shitter ferries later, but one to the government, which would eventually show up on its books. And now we know: $300 million:

New documents reveal the coalition has set aside $300 million to cover broken infrastructure contracts and a break-fee with Hyundai, after the government ended a contract with the Korean company to build two new Interislander ferries.

The Cabinet paper was released by Treasury just half an hour after Finance Minister Nicola Willis had repeatedly refused to confirm that figure to reporters.

The broken contracts for associated infrastructure costs - for example, port upgrades - have been resolved, but the exact amount to be paid to Hyundai is still being negotiated.

And note that that's just what they've set aside, not necessarily what the actual cost will be. And on that front, there's this:

The inside word from KiwiRail is that the original contract break cost was the entire $551m and the $300m now budgeted for is Hyundai offering a discount on the break fee *if* they win the new contract to build the reduced capacity/capability ships.

Note that we'd be able to verify this, and hold both the government and KiwiRail to account for fucking this up so badly / agreeing to that contract, if KiwiRail had released the contract. But they refused. And you can see exactly why both parties have a very strong incentive to keep the details completely secret.

This is a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to pay a fucking fortune to get less than what we were going to, and later, just so National could make the books look marginally better in 2024/2025 and pretend to be "better economic managers". But this isn't "better economic management" - it's pure stupidity and waste. And we need to hold the government to account for it.

United States of betrayal II

Like everyone else outside Russia, I watched Saturday morning's shitshow between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in horror. Sure, the US had already thrown Ukraine under the bus, demanding that it accept Russia's theft of land - but there's a difference between that, and berating someone in front of the world for refusing to surrender to a genocidal invader. With this, the Trump regime - and the US Republican Party - has made it crystal clear which side it is on. And it is not the side of democracy and human rights.

Fortunately, Europe seems to be stepping up. And they've also got the message - also sent last month, but not really believed because it was a reversal of 80 years of policy - that the US will not defend them either. And that even if there is regime change in the US, no future US regime can be trusted ever again on anything. And now they've got that message, they can move forward on building a European defence alliance serving European priorities, rather than just being an adjunct of the US. Which almost certainly means less European involvement in American imperial wars in future (great for Europe, bad for the USA, which will have to do all its own dying. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind).

It should also be focusing minds here. Because if the US won't defend Europe, it sure as shit won't lift a finger for Aotearoa (assuming they can even find us on a map). The AUKUS partnership they are trying to tempt us into is worthless. In fact, given their explicit support for tyrannical regimes and of global corruption, we should be regarding them as an enemy, not a friend. And we should be withdrawing from the Five Eyes, rather than continuing to feed intelligence to a corrupt and hostile threat to global peace.

Meanwhile, the US is now openly threatening to withdraw from the UN. Which is terrible: the withdrawl of fascist states from the League of Nations was one of the reasons for its failure to prevent the Second World War. OTOH, if they're going to do it, we can't do anything about it, and at least there's a silver lining. Because the UN has a veto problem, and one of the major impediments to fixing it is... the US veto. If they leave, then it is at least an opportunity to fix that, and the world should refuse to let the US back in unless they accept it.

An inappropriate candidate

Last month I dug into the appointment of fossil-fuel lobbyist John Carnegie to the board of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. Carnegie was rejected as a candidate in two appointment rounds, being specifically not recommended because he was "likely to relitigate board decisions, or undermine decisions that have been made" and "likely to create tension or conflict with fellow board members". Despite this, then-Energy Minister Simeon Brown appointed him anyway. So how bad a candidate was he? RNZ's Eloise Gibson has done some digging of her own, and turned up a rather disturbing interview (on a cooker platform, to boot) where he rails against EECA's work:

"[Oil and gas companies] are asking what will happen in six or nine years if we get someone who basically a) wants to reintroduce Onslow [a massive pumped hydro electricity scheme], who basically wants to go back to the old policies so, b) wants to make fossil fuel technology harder to consent, reintroduces a 100 percent renewable electricity target, reintroduces GIDI... that was the state subsidised demand destruction... that's the question investors are going to be asking," he said.

GIDI was the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry fund, under which EECA gave grants to heavy industrial companies to subsidise the costs of converting coal and gas boilers to electric or biomass.

GIDI has been scrapped. But EECA's core functions still reduce demand for oil and gas.

Whether he will effectively do that work, or whether he will try and sabotage it from within is left as an exercise for the media. But MBIE had pretty clearly reached their own conclusion on that question, which is why they recommended not appointing him.

Meanwhile, that rant - reintroducing Onslow (killing winter demand for fossil fuel peaking), making fossil fuels harder to consent, a 100% renewables target (now looking entirely achievable in an average year thanks to solar), reintroducing GIDI, and state-sponsored demand destruction to drive the fossil industry out of business - looks like a solid policy agenda which would give us both energy security and cheaper power. And hopefully we'll see exactly that when we throw this corrupt, climate change denying government out on its arse.

Still against a four-year term

It must be bad idea week at the Beehive. Yesterday, they were promoting vigilantism - a policy hated by everybody except the very worst people in the world. And today, they've announced that they're going to proceed with ACT's weird four-year-term bill, which would make the length of the parliamentary term indeterminate, and subject to an easily renegable or bypassable promise by politicians.

I've long been an opponent of a four year term. At best, its driven by technocrats who view democracy as a cost to be dispensed with. But underneath that is a never-quite-stated belief that politicians would make better decisions if they didn't have to worry about what voters want. That they shouldn't have to "waste time" persuading us that fucking us over is really for the better. This is both elitist and nakedly anti-democratic. Because the point of democracy isn't to make good decisions, but to make our decisions. And the point of regular elections is to keep politicians constantly thinking about whether they are serving us, rather than their donors - and to throw them out on their arses if we are unhappy with their performance.

And looking at the current government, it is clear that we need more accountability, not less. This government, with its abuse of urgency, naked corruption, and radical anti-Māori revanchism, is a poster-boy for bad government and for why we need to be able to throw politicians out quickly. The thought of another 18 months of them is bad enough; giving them a whole extra year is fucking unthinkable. But that's the sort of thing their bullshit bill will enable: next time we get a government this shit, it will last longer. Next time we get a Rimmer or a Roger Douglas or a Ruth Richardson or a Robert Muldoon, they will have more time to shit on our faces.

Pretty obviously, I don't like this idea. I hope you don't like it either. And I hope you tell the political class that, forcefully, when the bill gets to select committee, and even more forcefully if it ever gets to referendum. Aotearoa has a long history of telling politicians to go fuck themselves by huge margins on this question. Let's uphold that tradition, and make it 70% opposed. And maybe then the fuckers will finally get the fucking message.

But let's go one better. As noted above, this government is a poster-boy for bad government, a perfect argument for more accountability, not less. So lets do that. Instead of giving them more time to fuck up our lives, let's give them less. Let's cut the parliamentary term to two years.