A "secret" that wasn't

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

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

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

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

National says "fuck the BORA"

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

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

Gas is dead

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

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

Shoving the future aside

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Protecting frontline services"

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change: National supports pollution subsidies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change: Fucking the ETS again

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

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

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

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

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

The rotten, unaccountable crown

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

Climate Change: Kicking the can down the road again

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

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

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

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

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

Little's pitch

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

Winston is inciting terrorism

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

Good fucking riddance

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

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

Drawn

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

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

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

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

Member's Day

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

The dishonest crown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grooming us for identity theft

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

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

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

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

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

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

The return of dirty politics

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

[Photos by Johnny Cans]

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

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

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

Parliament's secret "transparency" regime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ideology of grovelling to Trump

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

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

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

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

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

The people have spoken

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

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

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

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

The fix is in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.