Justice for Afghanistan?

Ben Roberts-Smith is a war criminal. While serving in the Australian SAS in Afghanistan, he murdered four unarmed Afghan civilians and committed other war crimes. He kicked an elderly handcuffed man over a cliff. He machine-gunned a prisoner with a prosthetic leg, then stole the leg as a trophy and used it in drinking games. He ordered soldiers under his command to murder unarmed civilians. He assaulted prisoners in his care, and ordered other assaults. These are not allegations; they are findings of fact by an Australian judge (though under a civil burden of proof, and sadly not in a criminal trial).

That judge said that Roberts-Smith had "disgraced his country" by his conduct. The Australian government gave him a Victoria Cross for it. But now, he is finally being prosecuted for it:

Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested in relation to multiple counts of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians and prisoners in what looms as the most significant war crimes prosecution in Australian history.

Roberts-Smith is expected to be charged on Tuesday with five counts of war crime - murder following a joint investigation between the Office of Special Investigator and the Australian Federal Police. The maximum penalty for the offence of war crime - murder is life imprisonment.

Good. And hopefully the same will happen to the rest of Australia's war criminals. Because the Brereton Report found 39 murders, not just four, with 25 war criminals responsible. And they all need to be held to account.

Parliament is now a hate-platform

A ballot for two member's bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Public Finance (Prohibition on Providing Public Funds to Gangs) Amendment Bill (Rima Nakhle)
• Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill (Jenny Marcroft)

The first bill is just more tiresome racism. The second is a hate crime. Its drawing from the ballot (and indeed, its acceptance into the ballot at all) makes it clear that "our" parliament is now simply a hate-platform, Stormfront-in-Thorndon, spewing divisiveness and hate into the public sphere for the benefit of a tiny fringe of fundy bigots and weirdos. Just this week the House supported rules against exactly that, extending a sessional order which deplatforms hateful petitions from parliament's website. But apparently hateful member's bills which seek to erase the identity of some kiwis and reduce their rights are OK. That has obvious implications for the already tottering legitimacy of Parliament as an institution, and for the legitimacy of the laws it makes.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. First up is the committee stage of the Carter Trust Amendment Bill, which is the usual cleaning up the mess after some rich person got a private law once. After that is the third reading of Kieran McAnulty's Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Sales on Anzac Day Morning, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas Day) Amendment Bill, which repeals some archaic religious trading restrictions, while weirdly leaving others in place. It will be a conscience vote, but there was a significant majority for it at second reading. If it passes and is signed today or tomorrow will come into force just in time for the easter holiday. After that is the first reading of Kahurangi Carter's Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill, which fixes a significant problem with our copyright law, and then the House should make a start on Tim van de Molen's Military Decorations and Distinctive Badges (Modernisation) Amendment Bill, which is just army wank with a pronoun fix (the latter of which could have been done at any time by the Chief Parliamentary Counsel). And if that happens, there should be a ballot for one bill tomorrow.

Good riddance?

It sounds like the regime is having second thoughts about its stupid plan for an LNG terminal:

The Government’s plan to build a liquefied natural gas import terminal in Taranaki to reduce electricity prices is in doubt.

A decision on the type of terminal and who will build it is due mid-year, but ministers are considering using that decision to rethink the project, potentially delaying it – or axing it.

Multiple Beehive sources say skyrocketing liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices, driven by the war in the Middle East, have changed the economics behind the idea.

[...]

However, the final decision, multiple ministers privately admit, may be to walk away from the project entirely, given the high prices.

Good riddance. It was always a stupid plan, more expensive than simply reducing gas demand, while leaving us dependant on imported fuel which could simply disappear in a crisis. And that's exactly what happened! There is a crisis, the LNG has disappeared, and its likely to stay gone for a long time (and longer the more National's "ally" Donald Trump fucks around). Those risks were always there of course, but they've happened quickly enough for the government to actually change its mind at least.

So what's the alternative? A mix of demand reduction - investing in electrifying industry to get it off gas - and building renewables to increase supply. That's perfectly do-able, and for only a fraction of the cost of National's $2.7 billion boondoggle. Of course, its not what the gas industry wants, so the question is whether the regime will be sensible, or continue to listen to its donors, even when everyone can see that what they want is total stupidity.

Using austerity to attack democracy

A couple of weeks ago, when the Financial Times reported that the UK regime was planning to attack their Freedom of Information Act because too many people were using it, I wondered how long it would be before National tried the same. Not long, as it turns out

The Government has asked officials to examine the costs associated with responding to Official Information Act requests, in a move some fear could lead to reduced transparency.

Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has confirmed any changes could lead to less information being released to the public in some cases, arguing the system has become unsustainable as “every different little element of communication has been included”.

[...]

In a statement to Newsroom, Goldsmith confirmed he had asked the ministry to gather more information on the effects of a sharp increase in OIA requests, which had risen 394 percent since 2016.

“We are interested to know what revisions could be made to make the Act more efficient and practical.”

...which he then confirms means more secrecy. Because that's what "efficient" and "practical" means to these arseholes.

OIA numbers have absolutely risen over the last decade, for a lot of reasons. There have been changes in who and what gets counted, reflecting both government restructuring and evolving OIA practice, and there have been changes in awareness and accessibility and in democratic engagement. But that's really just the background increase. Because when you dig into the numbers, you see huge increases in service delivery agencies, agencies like Corrections and ACC and MSD, who make decisions over people's lives. And it seems that part of the story is that government has become more adversarial - denying people their rights in prison, cutting ACC and benefits to save money - and people are using the tools they have to push back and enforce their rights.

(There are other things going on as well. Over 85% of Custom's OIA workload in 2024 seems to be "travel movement requests" by insurance and finance companies wanting to check if someone has left the country. There are likely other similar stories for other agencies when we start digging...)

Goldsmith has apparently tasked some consultants to dig into this. If they do their job properly, that will help us understand where the increased load has come from, and how badly successive governments have under-resourced agencies to handle this basic democratic requirement. But consultants say what they are paid to say, and they may simply have been paid to do a hatchet job to make a case for removing our rights. The regime could avoid such suspicions by proactively publishing the brief and all their advice on the issue so far. But until they do, we should assume the worst. This regime surrendered any claim to a presumption of good faith long ago.

The OIA is a key constitutional measure, a pillar of our democracy. We can't participate in democratic decision-making or hold the government to account for its decisions without the transparency it enables. Yes, it costs money - but so do elections, and like elections, we should gladly pay that price as the cost of living in a democratic society. A regime which sees it merely as a cost to be cut and controlled is both missing the point, and fundamentally opposed to democracy. We need to vote that regime out while we still can.

Maybe the regime isn't united on tyranny?

When the regime introduced four tyrannical bills last week, I joked that the reason for the theme was that it was one of the few things the coalition could agree on. But it turns out that maybe they don't? RNZ's Phil Pennington has a piece on the Policing Amendment Bill today, focusing on the surveillance aspect rather than the protest-suppression clauses. Which it turns out were opposed by both the Ministry of Justice and the Privacy Commissioner as overly broad and lacking safeguards. Opposition parties are jumping on that and wanting changes, which is good. But the problem for the regime is that ACT also agrees:

ACT's Todd Stephenson gave qualified backing to [the bill].

"This bill does clarify and expands the police's power to collect, record and use information, including images, sounds, for lawful policing purposes," he said in the debate.

But with a kicker.

"Our support is conditional on ensuring that there is strong privacy protections and safeguards against mass surveillance powers."

So maybe the regime isn't as united on tyranny as they appear...?

My own thoughts on the bill are here. Unless safeguards are added, it will give the police power to shut down any protest, and to engage in mass or targetted surveillance without any need for a warrant - overturning both fundamental constitutional principles and long-settled law. These are not things we should accept.

If you'd like to have your say on the bill, you can submit on it here. Submissions are due by 1.59pm, Wednesday, 22 April 2026.

The alternative to pay equity legislation

Last year, the regime rammed through the Equal Pay Amendment Act under urgency, gutting pay equity laws, dumping all claims, and stealing $13 billion from new Zealand women.

Today, they got a taste of the alternative. Because before that law was passed, the College of Midwives started a class action on behalf of its members, alleging breach of a prior settlement, breach of good faith, and unlawful discrimination on the basis of gender. Today, the High Court issued its decision, finding for the midwives on those points, awarded (token) BORA damages, and required that they be restored to the position they would have been in had the breaches not occurred. Which means:

Held, fair and reasonable take home pay, as at 1 July 2020, for a notional LMC midwife working 1.0 FTE was $170,340. Figure to be adjusted for successive years based on Labour Cost Index.

Held, LMC midwives must be paid the fair and reasonable service price, backdated from 1 July 2020.

And "adjusted using the LCI, fair and reasonable take home pay was $200,275.59 in July 2023, and $206,946.03 in July 2024."

In June 2025 the take-home pay for an LMC midwife was $132,000. And that's after a substantial pay equity bump in 2023. In 2020, it was about $99,000. In other words, the court has ruled they've been underpaid by $70K a year for the last five years. Multiply that by 1500 claimants, and its half a billion dollars in midwives pockets.

The question is whether the regime will accept the ruling of the court, whether they'll appeal in a desperate effort to delay payment until its someone else's problem, or pass "fuck you" legislation to overturn the ruling. And with this coalition, the latter can't be ruled out. The sooner we have a new government, the better.

Naked corruption

Its election year, so the big parties are already collecting big donations from rich people wanting corrupt favours. But the disclosure threshold for those donations is set at an appallingly high $20,000. Meanwhile, National is nakedly selling access to Ministers for $8,000, and to the prime Minister for $10,000:

The National Party is offering the public a chance to sit next to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon over dinner at a cost of $10,000.

It’s led to criticism from one academic, labelling the event “cash for access”, but the party says it’s a form of fundraising used by many parties.

The “Mainland Dinner” will be hosted by party president Sylvia Wood at Christchurch’s Town Hall next month.

Tables for the dinner start at $5000, which the party calls the “silver” tier.

The “gold” tier will get you a table with either a Cabinet minister or Wood at a cost of $8000.

The most expensive table, the “platinum” tier and where Prime Minister Christopher Luxon will be seated, is priced at $10,000.

This is simply naked corruption. But its all below the disclosure threshold, so there's no requirement to declare it, or for the purchasers of policy to be identified to the public.

The media would be doing Aotearoa a favour by infiltrating someone into this dinner, photographing everyone sitting next to a Minister, and then doorstopping them and asking them what they wanted for their money. And if that deters future corrupt donations, good.

Not a government in waiting

The fundamental job of the opposition in a Westminster system is to show us the alternative, both in people and in policies. When the government makes some policy announcement, the opposition is meant to tell us what they would do instead, and how it serves our needs better. But when the government said it would be responding to the American fossil fuel crisis, Labour's Chris Hipkins literally couldn't be bothered:

Labour leader Chris Hipkins isn’t providing an alternative plan of action to help struggling New Zealanders facing pain at the pump and the threat of rising prices elsewhere.

Asked repeatedly what alternatives Labour could suggest, Hipkins said the onus to present ideas was on the current Government.

And it is. But there's also an onus on him to show us what he would do if he was in charge. And not just because its a democratic obligation - its also a way to win votes, to convince people you would do the job better! The Greens understand this: they were ready with a pile of Green policy and an offer of votes to pass it over the objections of National's coalition partners in the unlikely event that national wanted to (they did not). And hopefully they'll reap the reward from that. But Labour just can't be bothered trying to convince us. Its unclear if this is due to arrogance, a belief that they're just entitled to govern and so don't need to convince us plebs, or just because there is genuinely nothing they would do differently from National. But either stinks, and shows that they're not a government in waiting.

As for Hipkins, we're paying him $298,000 a year plus slush, and he's not doing the job! So why are we paying him then?

The right solution for the wrong problem

The regime has been taking a bit of stick about its "policy" of 10,000 new EV chargers, which seemed to have no tracking and no actual means of achieving it. So they've finally been forced to announce something: $50 million in loans to Meridian and ChargeNet to build a quarter of the chargers they'd promised. As a policy it doesn't stink, and has the virtue (to National) of being cheap (a loan from the government is just creating a pair of matching asset and debt entries in the government books, and costs nothing). It might even see some chargers built, which would be good. But its also a solution to the wrong problem.

National's "10,000 new chargers" policy is from 2023, which was a different era as far as EVs are concerned. And its rooted in thinking which is even older, when EVs were short-range luxury vehicles for urban elites. That wasn't really true in 2023, and its certainly not true now; when new EVs have comparable range to fossil vehicles, "range anxiety", the problem the new EVs policy was supposed to solve, simple ceases to be an issue. Sure, we want a comprehensive nationwide network so that vehicles can always get to a charger if they need one. But with most people charging at home, its not the big problem it once was.

So what is the problem? The same as it was before: price (though this is less of an issue now than it was in 2023, because EVs are cheaper as well as better). We had a perfectly good policy targetted at that problem, in the form of the clean car discount, which was self-funding (or meant to be) by charging dirty vehicles to fund clean ones. And that was a good idea, reflecting the significant positive externalities for EVs (and negative ones for fossil vehicles) in the form of emissions, air pollution, public health, and energy security.

But National scrapped that policy. And "10,000 new chargers" was meant to be just rhetorical cover for doing so. "Sure, we're refusing to act on the biggest barrier, but we'll totally act on the imaginary one our outdated preconceptions have invented, and we'll pretend that's the same". But it wasn't the same, and then they didn't do shit about it for two years anyway. Now they've finally been forced to do something, but all it does is expose the massive inadequacy of their policy and the paucity of their thinking. And looking down the barrel of an American fossil fuel crisis, that is something we should absolutely hold them to account for.

Corrupt, criminal secrecy

Fishing is a criminal industry. Fishers routinely lie about catch sizes, illegally dump bycatch, and cover up the murder of protected species. After a long campaign by NGOs in the 2010s, the Ardern government was finally dragged (kicking and screaming, against the wishes of two corrupt fisheries ministers) into putting cameras on boats to ensure criminal behaviour could be monitored and deterred. The fishing industry felt that this was unjust, and immediately began lobbying and bribing to have the footage declared a state secret, so it could never be used by NGOs to hold them to account. And they've got what they wanted. The new Fisheries Amendment Bill, introduced today, includes one of the most draconian secrecy clauses I have ever seen, with protections exceeding those given to classified security information.

First up, all fisheries camera recordings are declared exempt from the Official Information Act. But that's not enough for the fishing industry. There is also a clause that they cannot be disclosed outside the ministry, except to certain agencies or for certain purposes. Any other disclosure, or disclosure by anyone it has been lawfully passed on to, is a criminal offence, with a penalty of a $50,000 fine. And naturally, there's no whistleblower exemption (so if a recording exposes serious wrongdoing, and the ministry refuses to act on it, reporting it to appropriate whistleblower authorities is a crime. Which is one way of the criminal industry preventing anyone bypassing its captive regulator...)

This information isn't a threat to national security. It doesn't endanger the maintenance of the law, or any any person's safety. Its not even commercially sensitive. If it was any of these things, the law wouldn't be necessary. Instead, its potential exposure - and the potential for the exposure of their crimes, and for oversight of MPI to ensure they enforce the law properly - hurts the poor widdle fee-fees of the fishing industry. And that, to this regime, is "an important public purpose", proportionate to the consequent destruction of our BORA-affirmed right to free expression (which includes the right to receive information), and the least infringement on that right, and so a measure which can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

That is simply bullshit. Protecting a corrupt criminal industry and its captive regulator from public scrutiny is not an important public purpose. It is the very opposite of a public purpose. But its what happens when you put a man who has taken tens of thousands of dollars from that industry in the position of regulator.

This bill is simply an affront to democracy. It is an abuse of our human rights, an insult to transparency, and the product of corruption. It should not be allowed to pass.

More tyranny

The regime introduced a bunch of bills today: an Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill to introduce a "papers, please" regime for anyone MBIE (which also means the police) suspects they may be liable for deportation or in breach of their visa conditions; a Corrections (Management of Prisoners, and Prisoners’ Property) Amendment Bill to enable them to torture prisoners with solitary confinement more easily and stop them from writing books about it; a Fisheries Amendment Bill to make the Quota Management System a matter of ministerial fiat and introduce a secrecy regime for boat camera footage; and a Policing Amendment Bill, to allow the police to arbitrarily close public places and spy on people without warrants. There's a couple of themes across these bills. The first is overturning court decisions, including some that have affirmed quite significant protections for human rights. The second is replacing statutory protections with executive discretion, which means executive arbitrariness and corruption. And the third, linking the two, is tyranny. Because that's what we call an arbitrary executive which does not respect human rights: tyrants.

The Fisheries Bill secrecy clause deserves its own post, so I'm going to talk about the policing bill here. And it is awful.

One part of this is the creation of a new regime allowing any police officer to close access to any "accessible area" - meaning "an area of land that is accessible to the public, or a section of the public, by motor vehicle", and apparently including private property. So anywhere that is a road, or connected to a road. They're probably thinking of car-parks, but of course the definition also applies to your backyard, and even your house if you have an indoor garage. These closures can be done for a variety of reasons, some of which are good (for example, if there is a danger to the public, like a gas leak or incipient landslide, or a serious offence has been committed and there is a need to secure the crime scene). But most of it is of course aimed at one of the regime's perennial targets: boy-racers. So they can close roads to everyone if an "antisocial road use offence" is being committed or might be committed; if people are operating (or are expected to be) motor vehicles in an antisocial way; or if people are creating (or are expected to create) excessive noise with a motor vehicle, or if there is (or is imminent) "public disorder". If they close an area, its an infringement offence not to leave immediately.

The regime will be looking at this and thinking "anti boy-racer law". But the public disorder and noise clauses also make it an anti-protest law, because the police have a history of regarding public protest as inherently disorderly, and noise (say, from a vehicle-mounted PA system leading a protest march) which upsets those in power as "excessive". Naturally, there's no protection against this - no Terrorism Suppression Act-style clause saying "for the avoidance of doubt, protests, strikes, lockouts, and industrial action are not 'disorderly', and their noise is not 'excessive'". The drafting is so shoddy they haven't even excluded dwelling-places or marae from the definition of "accessible area". And given the regime's anti-protest noises, this should be regarded as deliberate until proven otherwise.

That all stinks, but its not the worst of it. The other part of the bill "reaffirms" the rules about the police collecting intelligence and recording people in public places. I put "reaffirms" in quotes because it does nothing of the sort. The courts and the Privacy Commissioner, in a long series of judgements (Tamiefuna v R, but also Hamed v R), have said what the law is, and that the police have been systematically breaking it. The regime's response is to dramatically broaden the law, and legalise the police's unlawful behaviour.

The new amendments start with a list of "purposes for which Police may collect information", which is a good start. It then says that the police can record anything they can see or hear in or from a public place, or anything they can see or hear on private property if they are lawfully there. No warrants required. To see how much of an intrusion this is, we have only to look at the police's illegal photographing and databasing of young Māori, or the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamed v R, which found that the police could not just covertly film and record people on private (but generally publicly accessible) property under "implied licence" without a warrant. That ruling led to a temporary law change, which was later incorporated into the Search and Surveillance Act 2012, which set limits on the police's ability to spy from public places without a warrant. The amendment bill would void that long established law.

If this passes, the police will be able to park outside your house with a camera and spy on you in your yard or through your windows, and record anything visible (to what wavelength?) or audible (with how much amplification?), without needing any type of warrant. They won't even need to be physically present, because the "by any means" allows remote cameras and microphones. Or they can use a drone, with thermal cameras and high-gain directional microphones and just spy on you 24/7, without any warrant, oversight, or reporting. Those are unquestionably "searches" in terms of the BORA (clearly being interference with a reasonable expectation of privacy) - but they'll be lawful. And of course they can hassle people on the street, photograph them, database them, and record their conversations without any suspicion of a crime.

This is obviously very convenient for police. But it is not the sort of thing done in a free and democratic society. We need to stop it. We need to topple the tyrants at the election.

A government without a plan

Today the regime held an emergency, covid-style one o'clock press conference to announce its response to the US-caused global fuel crisis, at which they announced... nothing. Oh, they're monitoring the situation, and might consider cost of living assistance at some unspecified time in the future, if Rimmer lets them, but for now its strictly do nothing. Which is what you get in a crisis when you elect a bunch of anti-government weirdos who believe that government can only be a problem, and never a solution.

Meanwhile, there's a rising tide of commentary calling the regime's 2023 decision to shitcan the clean car discount, and subsequent decisions to weaken the clean-car standard, shortsighted. This would indeed be the week to be driving an EV, but thanks to this regime's fossil ideology, there are less of them on the roads than we would have had if they'd left it alone. And as we're all learning, electrified transport (and electrified everything else) isn't just about the climate - its also about the cost of living, energy security, and social resilience. National's shit decision-making has locked our country into a high-cost dependency on unstable foreign regimes.

So what should we be doing? Greater Auckland has a list of both short-term and longer-term measures. And while the focus is understandably going to be on getting us through the immediate shortages, now would be a great time for Labour to rise to the occasion, and stand up and tell us how they're going to crash-electrify all the things so that we don't have to deal with this issue again (the Greens of course already have, years ago). But I guess that would require them to have an actual position on something, and that seems beyond them at the moment.

Good Riddance

Methanex is one of Aotearoa's largest polluters. It burns 45% of our total natural gas supply to produce low value methanol and millions of tons of carbon dioxide. In the process, it also receives millions of dollars in pollution subsidies - roughly $40 million worth last year. But now, finally, its going bust:

Methanex has written down the value of its New Zealand operations to zero reflecting the challenge it’s facing to keep its Taranaki methanol plant operating.

In its recently released 2025 annual report, the Canadian-owned company said future earnings from the Motunui plant were not enough to justify its value on the books, leading to a non‑cash write‑down of about US$71 million (NZ$120 million).

The company’s annual report said the “recoverable amount of nil” was due to declining natural gas supply in New Zealand and uncertainty over whether contracted gas volumes would be delivered or future gas exploration would be successful.

Methanex still had agreements with gas suppliers, some extending until 2029, but the company said it could not be sure these contracts would deliver the volumes needed.

Meanwhile, a report from the Gas Industry Co says that Methanex is expected to close early next year due to the inability to source gas. Good riddance. Its not like these foreign parasites pay taxes. Instead they just gouge us for subsidies and export them as dividends. So the sooner they shut down and fuck off, the better. We'll all be better off when they do.

There is a name for this

The Auditor-General has tabled their report on former MP Paul Eagle's spending while chief executive of the Chatham islands Council, and its not good, exposing serious management and integrity issues at the Council. Including this:

Auditor-General Grant Taylor and Assistant Auditor-General Melanie Webb said a project to refurbish the home which housed the council's chief executive was not well managed, and changes Eagle requested "increased the costs beyond what was necessary".

Quotes and contracts for the work on the property were found to have been created or edited by Eagle, as well as procurement memorandums created by him in 2025 had been backdated to the previous year.

[...]

"The information that the chief executive provided was misleading. Specifically, it created an incorrect picture about when certain events occurred (for example, when a contract was signed) or whether they had happened at all.

They decline to give a position on the legality of Eagle's actions, but there are a number of names for it: corruption. Fraud. More specifically, forgery, altering documents with intent to deceive, and using altered documents with intent to deceive. These are serious crimes, and Eagle needs to be prosecuted for them. When a person in power abuses their position to enrich or advantage themselves, then that is corruption, and they need to be held to account.

An ever-worsening fiasco

Back in 2021, the then-Labour government signed contracts for two new Cook Strait ferries. Costing $551 million for the ferries, it would have come with improved, future-proofed port facilities, making it a generational investment in core infrastructure. The first of them was meant to arrive last month. But it didn't, because National cancelled them out of spite the moment they got elected, at a cost of $671 million.

So now instead of two new, improved ferries operating from improved ports, we have no rail link across Cook Strait, two old rust buckets which are breaking down all the time, and National's planned replacements aren't scheduled to arrive until 2029. And they're already over-budget:

The Cook Strait Ferry Replacement Programme is already $167 million over budget, newly released documents reveal.

The current cost estimate has hit $1.867 billion, already exceeding the $1.7b Crown-tagged contingency approved by Cabinet in March 2025.

The Government is relying on council-owned ports to plug the gap, but the amounts are unknown or not yet approved by ratepayers.

However, as The Post revealed last month binding commercial deals with the port companies are yet to be finalised.

So, they might not have the required port infrastructure, because National is too busy complaining about woke to do the job properly. Assuming they don't just cancel the whole thing again so they can give even more money to landlords.

This fiasco just gets worse and worse. The regime has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, and destroyed a critical transport link. If you or I did that, it'd be terrorism. But smashing shit and leaving others to pick up the pieces is just how National "governs" now. The sooner we're rid of these muppets, the better.

Payment for services rendered

Back in 2021, in the wake of the Tamarind disaster, the then-Labour government passed the Crown Minerals (Decommissioning and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021, ensuring that the oil and gas industry was responsible for its own cleanup costs. The industry of course hated that, so when the new regime was elected in 2023, they started lobbying hard for its repeal. The regime obediently brought a bill to Parliament to reduce the liability, and got it to the verge of enactment, but it didn't go far enough for the gas industry. After further lobbying, they forced the regime to recall the bill to committee and amend it to lower liability even further, allowing the gas industry to walk away from its mess and leave us with the costs again. And that law eventually passed in July last year.

The gas industry was pleased. So pleased that Greymouth Petroleum, one of the chief lobbyists for the change, has just given $100,000 to each coalition party though one of its subsidiaries, GMP Environmental. Why did they launder the donation in this way? I guess because seeing a gas company giving huge amounts of money to politicians would make it just a little too obvious what was going on. But its no great effort to use the companies register and follow ownership up the chain to see who is really paying - or to consider the legislative history to see what they're paying for.

And that's what this regime means: naked corruption. Bribery. Law for sale.

Its not enough to throw them out of office. We need to ban large donations, get money out of politics forever, and break the power of the rich over our political parties. Otherwise, no matter who we vote for, we'll get the laws the billionaires want. And that's not democracy, but plutocracy.

National's energy security plan looks even stupider

A month ago, the regime announced its big plan for keeping New Zealand addicted to fossil fuels "energy security": a giant LNG terminal, importing expensive foreign high-emissions fuel, to be paid for by people who don't use it, and bulldozed through with a special law. It was always a stupid plan, more expensive than simply reducing gas demand, while leaving us dependant on imported fuel which could simply disappear in a crisis. And the events of the last week, which have seen the strait of Hormuz closed to shipping and international supplies of LNG cut off (causing a bidding war and price increases) show just how stupid it is. If National had their way, then in future crises we would face having LNG supplies - and therefore electricity prices - massively increase in price overnight. They would effectively link our domestic electricity prices to the stability of the Persian Gulf. And that is not anyone's definition of "security".

What would real energy security look like? reducing exposure to dirty foreign fossil fuels. Which in this case means a massive increase in renewable electricity generation, combined with a crash program to electrify gas-dependent industry. Obviously, that would be terrible for the gas industry, who wrote National's plan. And it would be terrible for the government's finances, because power cartel dividends mean they profit from our artificially high prices. But it would be good for the environment, and good for us. We would have significantly lower power bills as a result. And that is exactly why national, the party of gouging cartels, won't do it.

IN other words, if we want this, we need to kick them out. The sooner we do it, the better.

"Papers, please" for the internet

Yesterday the Education and Workforce Committee released its report into online harm to young people, recommending (among other things) a ban on social media for young people. Which, in practice, means "age-verification", mandatory identification and registration of social media users, and banning VPNs to prevent evasion. Basically "papers, please" tp use the internet. There are all sorts of reasons why this is a terrible idea - not least because the companies doing it are poor custodians of our personal information, if not trojan horses doing shady shit for fascists - but I'll focus on the simple one: there are already countries where people are forced to register and be identifiable to the state to use social media, and which ban VPNs to prevent evasion. They're tyrannies like Russia and Iran. And while "making sure the state can tell who says what" is not the ostensible purpose of the policy, its a very obvious side-effect, one which needs to be seriously considered. And when you look back at its history - press licensing, government observation of public meetings - its tyranny all the way down. But apparently tyranny is the bipartiasn position of our two status quo political parties now...

Meanwhile, we have an example from right next door in Australia that none of this works, and that it drives kids to use even more dangerous technologies (ChatGPT, FFS, which sycophantically reinforces user delusions, driving them to psychosis and suicide, or Roblox, which is so notorious as a site for predators that child safety on it has its own wikipedia article). And we also have examples from the UK, where the regulatory burden of complying with moderation requirements of their Online Safety Act has forced the shutdown of small internet forums. This has a very real impact on the freedom of expression of adults, but apparently, none of that matters: any amount of collateral damage is acceptable to our parliament of tyrants.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Aotearoa when it was still free. When the state couldn't say "papers, please" to you on the street, or on the internet. Our two major political parties now seem to be colluding to eliminate that freedom. Neither of them deserve your vote. And if they pass this law, like other tyrannies, their state deserves neither your support or your loyalty.

(There are other suggestions in the report which are worth pursuing, such as adopting the EU Digital Services Act model of making platforms responsible for online harm, regulating algorithims so they can't shovel shit onto our feeds, banning non-consensual deepfake pornography, and aligning online and offline advertising restrictions. Sadly, those are the bits parliament is likely to chuck out, in favour of the stupid, simple and intrusive age ban / identification requirement, because our MPs prefer easy headlines to doing the actual work of designing good regulation...)

Pushing on an open door

RNZ has polling today on taxing billionaires, and its not good for the plutocrats:

The second poll commissioned in February 2026 revealed that 66 percent agreed that New Zealand's economic system was not set up to effectively to address issues like housing, healthcare and climate change.

Half of New Zealanders also agreed that billionaires shouldn't exist while people still struggled with basic necessities like food.

Sixty-eight percent supported billionaires being taxed more to fund public goods like healthcare, housing and climate action.

And another 37 percent were in favour of introducing a billion-dollar wealth cap to minimise the amount of wealth any person could legally hold.

This level of economic dissatisfaction and support for taxing billionaires means that taxing wealth fairly is pushing on an open door. The public is waiting for the government to do it, but so far only the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have committed. Meanwhile, Labour is still flailing around with its weak and pathetic "let's not actually tax anybody" capital gains tax. Will they rise to the occasion and lead people where they want to be led? Or put their own property portfolios before the public and continue to be toadies for the wealthy?

"Unnecessary and excessive" secrecy

Back in December the regime introduced the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. While doing various other things - including introducing whistleblower protection for those providing evidence tot he Commerce Commission - the bill also massively expands the Commission's statutory secrecy powers, effectively giving it a ten-year exemption from the OIA. The bill is currently before select committee, and some of the submissions on it have been released, including that of the Ombudsman. Who is... not impressed.

The Ombudsman essentially argues that the secrecy clause is not justified as the information it seeks to protect is already strongly protected under the OIA:

Successive Ombudsmen have held that, in the OIA context, information provided by informants to regulatory bodies such as the Commission attracts protection on grounds of confidentiality on the basis that its disclosure under the OIA would have a chilling effect on the willingness of future would-be informants to come forward. In circumstances where the OIA already protects the relevant considerations, the creation of multiple mechanisms which, in essence, create a 10-year blanket carve-out from the OIA appeared unnecessary and excessive.

They suggest a number of ways of highlighting this to give reassurance to informants which would be less restrictive and infringe the BORA right to receive information less.

They also note that the "because we want to" clause - which allows the Commission to ignore its own secrecy clause for anyone it thinks has a "proper interest" in receiving the information - will apply to parties under investigation, as the fundamental right to natural justice means they must be able to know the nature and origins of allegations against them in order to properly respond. Which in turn completely guts the Commission's primary argument for secrecy (protecting the identity of informants to prevent retaliation). So, as I noted earlier, the bill won't do what its meant to, and the only people it will hide information from is the public.

There's also submissions from the New Zealand Law Society Te Kāhui Ture o Aotearoa and law firm Chapman Tripp which make similar points. The latter in particular highlights the public interest in transparency, so that the Commission's investigations are procedurally fair, its evidence properly tested, and its decisions seen to be robust.

The question now is whether the committee will listen, or whether they'll continue mindlessly following the trend for increasing secrecy and reduced accountability.

Our outdated anti-corruption laws

Last year a group of VTNZ staff were fired after being caught taking bribes to falsify driving test results. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it suggests there's a systematic problem (and there's a big government report on that). But one of the issues is that our anti-corruption laws no longer match the shape of our public service.

In the 2019 case, corrupt VTNZ staff were prosecuted for obtaining by deception, essentially for misleading NZTA about whether people had passed the test. Which got the job done - they went to jail - but the actual offence here is bribery, corruptly using an official position to extort a personal benefit. The two offences have a similar penalty (at least if the amount of money involved is large enough), but very different elements. And one actually recognises what happened and goes on corruption statistics, and one does not.

So why weren't previous offenders prosecuted for bribery? Because they couldn't be. Aotearoa's anti-bribery law applies only to "officials", defined as:

any person in the service of the Sovereign in right of New Zealand [sic](whether that service is honorary or not, and whether it is within or outside New Zealand), or any member or employee of any local authority or public body, or any person employed in the education service within the meaning of section 10(7) of the Education and Training Act 2020.

And despite the name, VTNZ is not a public body, and its employees are not public or state servants. They used to be, but Jenny Shipley privatised them in 1999. They're just an ordinary company, providing a service to the government under contract. "Management by contract" was meant to give greater accountability and transparency. But it turns out that when push comes to shove, it means less of both.

Such relations have become pervasive throughout the New Zealand state. Contractors perform all sorts of private functions. But our anti-bribery law was written in 1961, and is still framed in terms of a monolithic state with a clear distinction between public servants and others. It desperately needs to be changed, to cover anyone performing a public function on behalf of the state. That way, when they take bribes, we can at least call the crime by its name, and recognise that we have a corruption problem, rather than pretending that that's something which only happens elsewhere.

Papers, please

At the moment the Trump regime in America is running a pogrom against non-white Americans, with ICE invading cities, disappearing people off the streets and dragging them from their homes to be dumped in concentration camps. And our local Trump-wannabes clearly want in on the action, with a proposed law to allow immigration officers to demand proof of identity from suspected overstayers:

Immigration officers will soon have the power to ask people suspected of overstaying their visa for proof of identification at their homes and/or workplaces.

The powers are part of a legislative proposal introduced by the Government in September last year.

The Immigration (Enhanced Risk Management) Amendment Bill was announced to strengthen the tools available for immigration officers to respond to serious immigration breaches.

This includes “expanding the ability for immigration officers to request identity-based information from an individual when there is good cause to suspect they may be in breach of their visa conditions or potentially liable for deportation.”

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford told RNZ the Bill would be introduced by the end of the month, with the intention of passing it into law by the end of the term.

Who's a "suspected overstayer"? I guess that's up to the racism of the immigration officer and whatever quotas for detention that might have been set. Meanwhile, it also means they can demand identification from anyone else in those locations as well. And if like many kiwis you don't bother carrying it - because this is a free and democratic society - then I guess its off to the gulag.

This bill is yet another piece of tyranny from our nasty, authoritarian regime. We should not accept it. As for immigration, remember, if they ask you anything, you don't know. You don't know where, you don't know how, and you don't know who. The state depends on cooperation to enforce its will. Refuse to collaborate, and make it hard for them.

A flagrant abuse of power

When the regime rammed through its law gutting pay equity and stealing $13 billion from the women of Aotearoa, it didn't bother with a select committee process. That might have let people have their say - and worse, seen the media report on what they were saying, which would have been bad for the regime. But a group of former MPs organised their own select committee process to do what parliament had refused to. Now, it has reported back, calling the process an abuse of power, a breach of human rights, and a violation of the rule of law:

The committee described the processes of planning for and enacting the legislation as a "flagrant and significant abuse of power".

It also found the law breached the Bill of Rights, the Human Rights Act, and the Regulatory Standard Act principles, as well as a number of international conventions that New Zealand was party to, including International Covenants on Civil and Political, and Economic and Social Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

[...]

Committee members also said it could find no evidence in available Cabinet documents or parliamentary debates to support scrapping the scheme.

There are a lot of recommendations, chief of which (of course) is limiting the use of urgency for laws restricting fundamental rights, as well as statutory consultation requirements and constitutional recognition of pay equity as a human right. All of which would be a good start. Both Labour and the Greens have pledged to repeal the Act and restore pay equity if elected; it would be good to see them also commit to constitutional reform to prevent such an abuse from ever happening again.

You can read the full report here.

An attack on democracy as well as the homeless?

Over the weekend the regime announced its long-expected policy of "move on" orders for homeless people. Having massively increased homelessness while slashing emergency housing, National's "solution" is get get the police to kick its victims round our cities, threatening them with fines or jail if they don't "move on". Which is pointless and cruel and far more expensive than actually housing them - but the regime clearly thinks there are more votes in performative cruelty than in actually solving problems.

Its a terrible policy, of course, which is going to further ruin lives and waste a lot of time and money doing so. But its not just the homeless under threat. The regime's proposed amendments to the Summary Offences Act allow orders for "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating behaviour" and "[o]bstructing or impeding someone entering a business". Which, given both common protest tactics and the prevailing interpretation of police that public protest is inherently "disorderly, disruptive, threatening or intimidating", seems like a clear threat to the public's right to protest. While the bill hasn't been published yet - the regime doesn't like to do that in advance, preferring to spring its legislation on people by surprise - unless it includes significant safeguards, we should regard it as an attack on our democratic rights as well as an attack on the homeless.

Submit!

The Environment Committee has called for submissions on the Environment (Disestablishment of Ministry for the Environment) Amendment Bill. Submissions should be made tot he link above, by 4.30pm on Wednesday, 11 March 2026.

(Yes, they're going with a middle-of-the-day deadline rather than the usual midnight one, in an effort to make it just that much harder for people to submit. Because that's the sort of "democracy" we are now).

There will no doubt be proper submission guides from various NGOs in due course, but the TL;DR is that the bill does exactly what it says on the label: destroys the Ministry for the Environment. While the regime is pitching this as a minor, technical change, part of folding it in to a new mega-ministry, the effect will be to silence the voice for the environment, reduce it to a budget line and an internal debate within an overwhelmingly development-focused agency, avoiding embarrassing notes in Cabinet papers with formal warnings of environmental impacts and consequences. And of course it will enable the shreds of that voice to then be quietly cut.

This is how the regime sees the environment: something which should be kept out of sight and out of mind, while the big boys pay to play with their bulldozers. I don't think kiwis feel this way. And if you don't, submit, and tell them so! Sure, the regime will ignore you and pass the bill anyway, because autocrats gonna stomp on your face. But speaking up still matters. National hates headlines like "100,000 oppose bill; government passes it anyway", they hate everyone seeing that everyone hates them, and that's why they try so hard to stop people submitting. And that's why we have to. Every voice raised against this bill imposes a political cost on the regime. It encourages the present-opposition to commit to restoring an independent MfE, and it encourages other voters to vote out the regime and get one which respects the environment.

An avalanche is made up of pebbles. Be a pebble, and help crush this government. Submit on the bill.

A victory for the environment

Trans-Tasman Resources has withdrawn its fast-track application to pillage the Taranaki seabed. Good riddance. As the fast-track panel pointed out, there was a credible risk of harm to protected species and uncertain environmental impacts, and TTR had done no work to clarify them, even when sent a clear message by the courts that they needed to. This was just a bunch of lazy foreigners wanting to pillage our natural resources, and relying on corruption to get their way. But it turns out that the panels the regime appointed were committed to doing their job.

Sadly, its unlikely to be the end of it:

Eggers says the company is now considering its options, but isn’t ruling out lodging a new application – especially if Shane Jones gets his way to amend the fast-track process to make ministers the ultimate decisionmakers.

So, if you fail under one decision-maker, withdraw, then reapply, and get another one (and ideally, one who has publicly indicated both their bias and that they can be bought). That's not a proper process by any measure, but its what this corrupt, dogshit vandal regime has given us. The next government needs to not only end it, but legislatively revoke any "consent" obtained by such a corrupt abuse of process.

(And meanwhile, we've had a reminder today of the hazards of such ministerial decision-making, with the Waimea Dam - rammed through by Labour with a Muldoonist special law to overturn a court decision - turning into a complete financial disaster, and the farmers who pushed it are now wanting a handout to bail them out. Because of course they are. Because it turns out Ministers aren't great decision-makers, and make decisions based on lobbying rather than evidence or business-cases. Which is what scammers like TTR rely on. And meanwhile, the public inevitably gets left to pick up the tab, either direct (in the case of the dam), or indirect (in the case of TTR's proposed environmental destruction)).

Brownlee is a partisan, misogynistic hypocrite

Yesterday parliament saw one of its worst incidents of racism, as Winston Peters questioned the right of Teanau Tuiono to ask questions because he is "someone who comes from Rarotonga". Tuiono is from Northland, like Peters, but even were he from Kent, like Winston's colleague Andy Foster, it doesn't matter: he's a New Zealand citizen and an elected MP, and that's the end of it.

This rightly caused outrage, but Brownlee claimed not to have heard it and promised to review the Hansard and get back to the House on it. Today he did, and made the obvious ruling that this sort of racism is unacceptable and will be treated as highly disorderly (which you'd hope would mean apology or ejection). But he refused to require Winston to apologise because "the moment has passed". People with a political memory longer than a goldfish may recall that he made a completely different ruling back in August, when he required Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick to apologise for something he had already punished her for the day before, and named her and banned her for a week when she refused. But there are obvious differences between the two cases: specifically, Winston is a member of the regime, and he is a cis-man.

In other words, Brownlee has one rule for the government, and one for the opposition; one for men, and one for women. He's nothing but a partisan, misogynistic hypocrite, and his continued presence in the chair brings the House into disrepute.

Good riddance

The regime has finally decided not to push for a referendum on a four-year term this election. Good. But the bill isn't dead, and apparently won't be withdrawn - it's still on the Order Paper, hanging around to be picked up and advanced in future, by whoever wins the election. And they're not stalling it because they've decided its a bad idea; rather, the three components of the regime simply don't quite agree, so it got set aside because it's not really anyone's priority.

...except apparently Chris Hipkins. Faced with a regime which is a poster boy for why we need more accountability, not less, and which is making people hate the entire political class in a way we haven't seen since the 1990's, he's willing to put himself out there and go on record as being in favour of a proposition which has repeatedly been defeated by two-thirds margins. Because he's just that keen on being less accountable to us plebs. And then you think about what he did with an absolutely majority when he had one - nothing - and how he talks about that time now as the government "trying to do too many things". So he wants an extra year so he can do even less? (But I guess its an extra year to collect his fat salary, putting him even further into the millionaire-class while pretending to represent ordinary people...)

This regime has been a potent reminder of why we need to keep our politicians on a short leash, whatever the colour of their tie. With a unitary state, a highly-centralised government structure, and no real institutional checks and balances, the only safeguard against an executive run amok is the chance to throw them out on their arses as often as possible. I'm glad we'll get to keep that right, for the moment. But it is disturbing that so many of the political class subscribe to the elitist, anti-democratic idea that they shouldn't have to face our judgement, that they should be less accountable to us. That's not good enough. They're not good enough. They've shown by their enthusiasm for dictatorship that they cannot be trusted, so we need to shorten the leash. It is time to cut the parliamentary term to two years, and bring them back under democratic control.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day - the first of the year. First up is a the Ōtautahi Community Housing Trust (Trust Variation) Bill, a private bill to expand the area where a community housing trust can operate. Worthy, but the fact that this requires an actual law in the first place is a bit broken. Next is the third reading of Carl Bates' Juries (Age of Excusal) Amendment Bill, followed by the second reading on Kieran McAnulty's Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Sales on Anzac Day Morning, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas Day) Amendment Bill. If the House moves quickly, it should make a start on Kahurangi Carter's Copyright (Parody and Satire) Amendment Bill, which would insert fundamental fair use protections for taking the piss into copyright law. There are nine first readings on the Order paper at the moment, so there won't be a ballot unless things move a lot faster than expected.

100% pure vandalism

Aotearoa is in the middle of a giant environmental disaster, caused by climate change. So naturally, the regime thinks this is the perfect day to introduce a bill to disestablish the Ministry for the Environment. Because nothing says "we care about this problem" like shutting down the agency which warns us about such things and devises policy to avoid them.

While some staff will be merged with other agencies to form the regime's new development and infrastructure ministry, they will very much be sidelined, taking a back seat to the new agency's core functions of housing, transport, and local government. The rest will simply be sacked. Which means all that policy expertise will be lost to Aotearoa forever, and will take decades to rebuild. Which is the point. National wants to silence the institutional voice for the environment, so they don't have to admit in their cabinet papers that MfE told them it was a terrible idea with terrible consequences. So they're going to just rev up the bulldozer and crush it all, so nothing can stand in the way of them bulldozing everything else.

Again, this dogshit vandal regime has to go. The question is how much of Aotearoa they'll outright destroy before we can get rid of them.

An empty suit

Another weekend, another climate change disaster in Aotearoa. Flooding, people without power, roads blocked, people dead. And the Prime Minister is announcing a fucking foreign football game. And when asked about the disaster he says shit like "it's raining here too".

We used to have prime ministers who understood that their job, in times of national disaster, was to show up. Express the country's shock and anguish, provide reassurance that the government was going to help. But this regime is doing less than nothing to help, and is in fact doing everything it can to make things worse. And instead of reassurance, its just "make sure you have your personal survival kit ready" - in other words, you're on your own. He's not a leader; he's an empty suit. And rather than empathy, he just projects contempt for everyone else, us "bottom-feeders" who can't run away to Waiheke when disaster strikes.

This isn't the first time that Luxon has done this. His repeated absenteeism in times of national disaster makes it clear that he is fundamentally unfit for office. The sooner we vote this prick out, the better.

Rot at the top

"Our" Parliament is full of rich people, with inherent conflicts of interest around wealth, gifts, and property ownership. In an effort to mitigate this, Parliament established a register of pecuniary interests, requiring politicians to tell us what they owned and who had been bribing them. But despite clear rules, MPs keep "forgetting" to declare everything, and the house keeps refusing to sanction them for doing so - effectively permitting corruption to exist in our highest elected body. And now, it turns out that the person who is meant to enforce these rules, Speaker Gerry Brownlee, has been failing to declare his full interests for 20 years:

Speaker of the House Gerry Brownlee has been incorrectly and incompletely declaring his property ownership to Parliament for 20 years.

This includes new amendments that also contain errors and omissions. The details are outlined in the table below.

As Speaker, Brownlee is the person responsible for enforcing Parliament’s rules, including the requirement for all MPs to correctly declare their business, property and other legal interests for trust and transparency reasons.

Late last year, after questions and a story from the Herald, Brownlee amended 16 of the 20 annual declarations he has made since Parliament’s Pecuniary Register was introduced in 2005.

Brownlee says there was no intent to deceive - he just owns so many houses that he forgot some of them. Similarly, he "forgot" property he had an interest in through a trust. And if you believe that, I have an electorate office in Ilam to sell you.

This is unacceptable - not just for a Speaker (who must have absolutely clean hands), but for an MP. If we are to accept that mere declaration - rather than divestment - is enough, then MPs can not under any circumstances be allowed to lie on them. Brownlee needs to go - not just from the Speaker's chair, but from Parliament. Until he does, we should regard it as a rotten, corrupt house, full of rotten, corrupt thieves.

Pure Muldoonism

Back in the early 1980's, Robert Muldoon was thinking big. He wanted a giant dam on the Clutha River, which would flood half a town. But the courts applied the law, and wouldn't grant water rights for it. So Muldoon passed special legislation to overturn the court's decision and grant the water rights directly for his pet project. It was an unpleasant example of the naked authoritarianism and contempt for the rule of law that pervades our executive, and the National Party in particular.

Fast-forward 40 years, and the regime is again thinking big, and again has a pet project: an LNG terminal in Taranaki to keep gas prices high! But not even their corrupt fast-track law is fast enough for them, because it will actually have to look at evidence (and might even find it wanting if the applicants do the usual half-arsed job). So of course, they're simply going to legislate "consents" into existence, bypassing any pretence of due process:

A proposed liquefied natural gas terminal will bypass even the fast-track process in order to be built in time for winter next year, documents show.

[...]

The Cabinet paper, released after the announcement, noted that "timing is very tight" to get the facility up and running in time for winter 2027.

"An LNG terminal will require regulatory consents and approvals if it is to be operational ahead of winter 2027, and the existing Fast-track Approvals Act 2024 processes are unlikely to be sufficient," Watts wrote.

"I propose developing an Enabling Liquefied Natural Gas Bill to provide the necessary consents, approvals, levy power and any modifications to existing legislation to enable the preferred LNG facility to be built and operational ahead of winter 2027."

Winter 2027 is an entirely arbitrary deadline, aimed more at getting things done before the election, in the hope that this will prevent the next government from cancelling their bullshit. But what ones Parliament legislates, another Parliament can change, so any legislated consents can simply be cancelled and the contractor told to go fuck themselves. Alternatively, a future government could change the target of the levy from electricity to gas users, thus ensuring that the gas industry pays for its own insurance policy. And if they don't want to, well, why the hell should we?

Meanwhile, Christina Hood highlights MBIE modelling, (p 24 here) which shows that the regime's policy is really not the best one:

Sure, LNG will reduce electricity prices by $11/MWh a year in 2028 (and $58/MWh in a dry year). But bringing supply and demand back into balance will reduce them by $59/MWH ($123/ MWh in a dry year), and even more if we develop additional gas storage. The savings from that are about $1.4 billion a year (vs $265 million for LNG). And it would be cheap: about $200 million, or about one year of National's bullshit electricity levy. So why didn't they look at that?

The answer is obvious: because reducing gas demand is not what the gas industry wants. Avoiding that, and keeping its addicts supplied with their dirty fuel, is the entire point of an LNG terminal! Likewise, the electricity industry does not want lower electricity prices, because that means lower profits. So, we get a stupid policy, designed purely to protect the status quo and keep prices high. This is what National calls a "laser focus on bringing down the cost of living".

We deserve better than this. The next government should cancel this bullshit, fund a massive switch of industrial energy from gas to renewables (and a massive boost in renewable electricity to fuel it), and let the gas industry die in the bed it made. And we'll all be better off that way.

The cost of National

Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index yesterday, showing that Aotearoa had dropped two places to fourth (behind Denmark, Finland, and Singapore). And as Matt Nippert points out, it would have been worse, were it not for rising corruption elsewhere. TINZ's Anne Tolley (a former national Minister) expresses all our disquiet when she says:

"We used to be first in the world and we've just seen a continual drop down the ladder - about 10 percent in four years," Transparency International New Zealand chairperson Anne Tolley said.

"It sort of feels like the wheels are coming off a bit and that's really dangerous for our democracy."

Hmmm. I wonder what has happened in the last four years? Could it have anything to do with a regime which has made policy decisions nakedly driven by industry lobbying, handed over billions of dollars to cronies, unlawfully appointed political cronies to public office, and is currently planning to campaign on being able to make even more corrupt decisions after the next election? (And that's not even getting into the whole LNG boondoggle).

This is the most corrupt government Aotearoa has had in over a century. And it is openly viewed as such. The miracle is that we haven't fallen further.

We need to change this. We need to regulate lobbyists, take public sector appointments out of the hands of ministers so they can't be used to reward cronies, tighten political donation laws, and restore and extend transparency over our government. And the first step to doing that is to kick this corrupt dogshit regime out of office in November.

Utter madness

That's the only way to describe the regime's announcement yesterday that it plans to go all-in on climate destruction and build an LNG import terminal for "energy security". How will it pay for this new source of emissions? By taxing our (overwhelmingly clean and renewable) electricity supply! So kiwis who use clean and green electricity will be paying to subsidise dirty gas imports. Madness!

The "justification" for this is (of course) "security of supply" and "eliminating price spikes". But the government didn't even consider spending the full $2.7 billion cost of the terminal on renewable electricity generation (endless cheap power apparently being "woke" or something), let alone on a GIDI-style scheme to get high-value industrial users off gas entirely (which would be cheap: $200 million to wipe out 10 - 20 PJ of demand). As for "price spikes", they're an issue only for major industrial users to stupid and shortsighted to hedge. But then, that's the underlying problem, isn't it? Major industrial users - of both gas and electricity - being stupid and shortsighted. And so we all pay to subsidise their poor business practices.

(And its a hell of a subsidy - taxing electricity to pay for gas halves the price of imported LNG, making it only twice as expensive as the current wholesale price. What we're effectively looking at here is a huge wealth transfer, from ordinary kiwis to a handful of mostly foreign-owned, highly-polluting companies. But I guess they pay bribes to Ministers and we merely have votes...)

We're also paying to pretend that gas has a future, to keep people hooked. But with solar and batteries looking to rapidly decarbonise the electricity system, and higher prices driving users off gas, that's pushing shit uphill. This is an industry with no future. And the sooner we accept that and plan for its orderly demise, the better off we'll all be.

But perhaps the biggest condemnation of the plan is from the gas industry itself. After all, if LNG was such a shit-hot idea, you'd expect them to be paying for it, right? So the fact that they refuse to risk any of their own money, and are instead demanding that we all pony up to build their dream, tells us that they don't really believe in it. They're just another loss-making industry sticking their hand out. But if they won't pay for it, there's no reason why we should. If the present regime signs a contract for this bullshit plan, the next government should simply repudiate it, just as the regime did for the IREX ferries. And we'll all be better off when they do.

Two defeats for the regime

There's been good news over the weekend, with two significant defeats for the regime's programme of environmental destruction. First, there's the draft decision of the Fast Track Panel to reject Trans-Tasman Resources' plans to mine the Taranaki seabed, on the grounds that there was a credible risk of harm to protected species and uncertain environmental impacts. The panel found that these significantly outweighed any economic benefit. It's only a draft decision, and TTR gets to comment on it, but it seems unlikely they will be able to overturn these findings unless they present significant and credible new evidence. Which means that one of the flagship projects of fast-track - a dirty mining project which has already been rejected by the Supreme Court - is dead. Good riddance.

Secondly, there's the news today that despite the regime bending over for the oil industry and repealing the offshore drilling ban, they're just not coming back, and will instead leave Aotearoa to small, bottom-feeder companies - which in turn may lack the resources to properly explore any permits they are granted, or to meet remaining cleanup obligations. Which means that National's desired levels of drilling seem unlikely to happen. Good riddance to that too.

Both the corrupt, Muldoonist fast-track program and the equally corrupt courting of the oil industry were absolutely central to National's policy programme. And neither seems to be working out the way they want. Which hopefully means they cause only limited damage before the election allows them to be repealed and the "consents" granted under them overturned.

Climate Change: The sin of cheapness

Tairāwhiti has a problem. Thanks to decades of forestry strip-mining the land, every major storm washes down sediment and slash from the hills, covering fields and smashing bridges. And as we saw last month, major storms are happening more often and getting worse...

Tairāwhiti also has a solution: a transition programme agreed with farmers, foresters, environmental groups and the wider community, which would see the hills replanted with native trees to prevent erosion. But to do it, they need government funding: $359 million over a decade - $36 million a year - which will be matched by $241 million from the community. And it should be a no-brainer, because the damage it averts is estimated at at least four times that much. In 2023 the damage from flooding was a billion dollars alone...

But of course, the government said "no". It turns out they have infinite money for landlords, for tax cuts to the rich, for -ve BCR roads in Auckland, or for war-toys - but nothing for actually protecting people from real risks, even when it is profitable to do so.

Its stupid. It's short-sighted. And its simple cheapness. The government just... doesn't want to pay. But if they won't, then its worth asking the question: if the government won't pay to protect people from real risks, why do we even fucking have it? What is it for? And if the answer to that is just "giving more money to rich people and Shame Jones' corrupt mates", then maybe its time we did away with this bunch and got a new one?

43,000 unemployed under National

The December labour market statistics are out, showing unemployment has risen again to 5.4%. There are now 165,000 unemployed - 43,000 more than when National took office.

...which is what happens when you strangle public spending and crash the economy. Meanwhile National's Ministers enjoy their fat salaries of $304,300 a year (plus slush, plus housing, plus kiwisaver) while telling people to "economise on... the volume you eat". Maybe its time we ate the rich instead?

The same old problem

Another day, another IPCA report finding unlawful use of force by the police. This time, its a police officer who saw a woman give him a thumbs-down signal while driving, chased her nearly a kilometre to her home, violently assaulted her and tore her clothing under the pretext of "arresting" her, tried to break in, and pepper-sprayed her in the face when she surrendered. The IPCA found that none of that was legal - none of it. The purported "traffic stop" in response to the gesture was completely unjustified:

In our assessment, Officer A stopped her because he was annoyed by her gesturing to him in what was no doubt a rude and disparaging way. Therefore, in our view, the stop was unlawful.

...which means there was no basis for an arrest, and so no basis for use of force, so all if that was unlawful too.

This happened three years ago. In the interim, the victim pleaded guilty to failing to stop when signalled to do so, refusing to give an officer her details, and resisting arrest. The IPCA concludes that as the stop and arrest was unlawful, the conviction is unsafe, and recommends that the police use an available legal mechanism to ask for a rehearing of the sentence, then offer no evidence. Which is a way of letting them back away gracefully, without a formal judicial finding of wrongdoing on their part. But naturally, the police are having none of it. The Blue Gang always stands by their man - whether they're a child pornographer, a rapist, an evidence-planter, or just a petty bully in uniform.

And then the police wonder why the public don't trust them. This is why. Naked abuse of power shielded by official corruption. No accountability. A commitment to being unreformable. Its enough to make you think that abolition is the way forward. Certainly, we should be stripping powers and functions from them, and giving them to other agencies, without inherently abusive coercive powers, to reduce the harm police cause. To point out the obvious, the police can't do abusive bullying traffic stops under a pretence of legality if its absolutely not their job.

Meanwhile, the police simply saying "no" to the IPCA's recommendations makes it clear that we have a problem with accountability. The most obvious solution is to let the IPCA do directly what the police refuse to do, whether it is making applications for convictions to be set aside, or bringing employment proceedings or even prosecutions against police officers. The police won't hold themselves accountable, so someone else will have to do it for them.

How do we change OIA culture?

Former district court judge David Harvey has a column in the Herald today lamenting the state of the Official Information Act. Like others before him, he agrees that the law is fundamentally sound - its the public service that is the problem. Despite clear statutory language in favour of transparency, they are incentivised by ministers, chief executives, PR departments and deliberate underresourcing to delay, deny, and defend against OIA requests. And the Ombudsman is no help, because they are also structurally underresourced, and culturally focused on turning over complaints as quickly as possible to make their numbers look good, rather than actually investigating.

This isn't an abstract problem. As Harvey points out,

secrecy and obfuscation are not neutral administrative choices; they actively corrode democratic legitimacy.

And that is exactly what is happening. And you only have to look overseas to see where that leads.

What can be done? People have talked about training, but no-one is doing it - at least, not the sort of training that rams home to public servants that their duty is to the people, not the minister, and that they need to release information ASARP. And while criminal penalties for egregious abuses would help (and are entirely normal overseas), Ministers seem unlikely to pass laws which punish those protecting them, and the police seem unlikely to enforce them if they are passed.

The core problem here is that the fish rots from the head. Ministers want to be protected, and chief executives obey because they want to keep their jobs. So breaking the employment nexus by making chief executive contracts non-renewable while imposing clear positive transparency duties would be a start. We already do this for the Auditor-General precisely to prevent cosy relationships and strategic employment-seeking behaviour from corrupting their duties; doing it to the rest of the public service isn't so great a step.

Fundamentally, though, it comes down to ministerial leadership. Everything is downstream of that. When the OIA was passed, ministers decided they wanted it to work, made their expectations clear to the public service, and resourced them to do it. We clearly need a similar drive from ministers to clean out the culture of secrecy they have imposed, and restore transparency. As for how to get that, that seems to be our job, through the electoral process. Those running for office need to be asked about their attitude to the OIA, and what they will do to restore transparency. Those who support secrecy, or who do not keep their promises need to be electorally punished. Until that happens, ministers will keep fucking us over, and we will keep responding to them with the disdain that deserves, and public trust in them and their institutions will continue to decline.