Schools belong in the OIA

For the past decade, successive governments have been chipping away at the Official Information Act, exempting agencies and passing secrecy clauses, reducing transparency and the accountability of officials. One of the results of this tide of secrecy has been increased demands for it, as agencies see other bodies protected from accountability and demand it for themselves. And now even school principals are demanding to be above the law:

A major education union is seeking legal advice in a bid to exempt state schools from the Official Information Act after an Auckland law student sent an onerous “system-wide” records request to nearly 2500 schools.

The Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand (Spanz) says a growing number of OIA requests are burdening stretched principals and tying up time and resources preparing responses that would otherwise go towards educating children.

This of course mischaracterises the Act as an onerous additional burden, rather than a core democratic requirement. Because that it is what it is. Its purposes include enabling people to participate in the administration of laws and policies, and promoting the accountability of public officials. And those purposes apply absolutely to schools. Looking at the criteria for OIA inclusion used by the Law Commission in their 2012 Review of the Official Information Act (p337), they are funded by central government, they are subject to Ministerial direction in various ways, the government controls and oversees their finances, and they serve a public purpose. The decisions they make are fundamentally public in nature, effectively being an exercise of state power. They clearly belong in the OIA regime.

Looking at the sorts of requests they get on FYI, there's broad surveys of policy (for example: do schools support queer kids at their school ball?), basic financial accountability, focused questions about policy and culture (there's a series at the moment asking how various toff schools appoint their prefects). Not seen so much on FYI, but ever-present: requests for the exact rules children are supposed to have broken, or the reasons why they have been punished.

The first sort of request is about participation: collect information, summarise the results, draw conclusions, and say "maybe this needs to change". The second sort is absolutely about accountability, about ensuring that decisions are lawful, reasonable, and justified, and being able to challenge them if they are not. You can understand why school principals would find this irritating. So do Ministers. But we don't let them declare themselves to be above the law, and neither should we allow school principals to.

Finally, as for the supposedly inappropriate request sent to all schools, SPANZ has this to say:

She wrote that Cunliffe’s request was not a simple exercise to establish how a particular school managed its records.

“It is a carefully designed, system-wide exercise intended to map legislative non-compliance across the school sector.

That seems like a clear public purpose, well-aligned with the purposes of the OIA. Exposing wrong-doing is what it is for! And if SPANZ sees that as a threat, the public is entitled to take that as an admission of guilt.

Climate Change: Madness

Over the last few days Wellington has been hammered by torrential rain and floods, and one person is still missing dead. So naturally its the perfect time for a bunch of Aussie grifters to announce a huge, high-emissions project, a Southland lignite-to-urea factory:

Australian company Victorian Hydrogen has applied to explore for lignite on 3141 hectares of Southland farmland in the hopes of eventually setting up a 1.5 million tonne per year urea fertiliser production plant.

The executive director of Victorian Hydrogen, Allan Blood, said the proposed $3 billion lignite-to-urea project would give New Zealand’s agricultural sector self-sufficiency.

The project is expected to apply for approvals under the fast-track regulatory process. Blood said key milestones would include applying for regulatory consents and engaging with landowners, completing initial geological and hydrological studies by spring 2026 and progressing to detailed engineering design, and a targeted three-year pathway from the conclusion of studies currently underway, to full production.

Unmentioned: the emissions from the project. But the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment looked at this when Solid Energy was proposing similar insanity back in 2010; they found that making urea from lignite produced 1.3 tons of carbon for every ton or product (compared to 1.1 tons for making it from natural gas at Kapuni, or 0.8 tons for making it from natural gas in the Middle East). So 1.5 million tons of urea a year from lignite is 2 million tons of carbon dioxide - a figure completely inconsistent with our future carbon budgets.

Why are they looking at Southland? Because their plans to do it in Australia have fallen through: the state government won't give them consents, and no-one will sell them coal anyway. Whereas Aotearoa has corrupt politicians willing to grant consents for "donations", and a policy of explicit pollution subsidies, so the grifters will be paid to destroy the climate. Interestingly, those subsidies are justified on the basis of preventing "emissions flight", but as Middle East production is in fact cleaner than domestic, it seems that it is in fact a perverse incentive for dirty production.

While America's latest Middle east war and the resulting disruptions in international fertiliser flows are being used as a justification here, if consented this factory won't be producing before 2030. By which time you would expect those disruptions to have been resolved. So its an opportunistic grift, presenting a dirty "solution" to a problem which won't exist when it is complete, aimed at collecting huge subsidies. It should not be permitted to progress. And if the present regime corruptly grants it fast track approval, it should be legislatively revoked by the next government. We simply cannot afford this madness.

Climate Change: The new normal

I'm sitting here in Palmerston North (where it is raining), watching the reports of the rain and flooding from Wellington. Water flooding down the hillsides. Main streets turned into rivers. Looking at the Wellington City Council's flood map, every place I've ever lived in in that city would currently have a river running through it.

This is not normal. Or rather, it didn't used to be. But now, thanks to polluting capitalism, it is. Its happening somewhere every month or so, and it will keep happening, year after year, and get worse and worse, until we zero our emissions, then draw down the excess carbon we have spewed into the atmosphere. Our government should be doing its bit to do that, and until 2023 it was at least making a start. But the the current pack of arsonists in the Beehive stopped all that, because not drowning is woke or something, and is now pushing fossil fuels as hard as it can, with policies for more oil and gas, an LNG terminal for more expensive power, and an associate energy minister who calls out "coal! coal!" in Parliament at random, like he's suffering from some form of carbon Tourette's syndrome.

These morons will kill us all if they get their way. They will destroy our homes and turn us all into climate refugees, rather than upset the economic incumbents and do the hard work of healing the climate. So, we need to get rid of them before they get rid of us. And that means voting them out in November, and never letting them back into power until they have dragged themselves into the modern world from whatever historical backwater they think they're living in.

More racism from National

When National voted down its own Treaty Principles Bill last year, they claimed it was because they understood that "seek[ing] to impose a particular interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi by simple majority and referendum" was not an appropriate way to handle the foundation of our constitution. But the racist party never sleeps, and a year later, they're back, seeking to impose a particular interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi by simple majority, without the referendum this time:

The Government has quietly agreed to repeal a number of references to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi within laws, while amending others to be more specific.

Cabinet has also decided that, going forward, these provisions in legislation will reference both the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

[...]

The Herald learned of Cabinet’s decisions after discovering a memorandum filed by the Crown at the Waitangi Tribunal on March 12.

"Amending others to be more specific" of course means imposing a particular interpretation of the state's obligations under Te Tiriti, naturally without any consultation with the other party (or, for that matter, the public). Which is exactly what they were trying to do with the Treaty Principles Bill they denounced as illegitimate. But if the Treaty Principles Bill was illegitimate, then so is this - and so, if this passes, is the state. Because Te Tiriti is the fundamental bargain which legitimises the state in Aotearoa, and it is not one which can be unilaterally altered. A regime which reneges on that bargain cannot be regarded as having any legitimate authority over the country.

That's the sort of shit the regime is meddling with here, and why a sensible government wouldn't touch it. Meddling with the fundamentals of the state ought to be anathema to conservatives. But national is now dominated by radical white supremacist fundie weirdos, half of whom seem to have a hard-on for Armageddon. And if they're allowed to remain in power, then all of us are going to pay the price for their stupidity.

Climate Change: The latest inventory

Ministry for the Environment has released New Zealand's Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990–2024, which has updated emissions figures. The bad news is that gross emissions fell by just 87,000 tons last year, or 0.1%. The regime blames a dry year for this, but those emissions are more or less balanced by the resulting demand destruction from high electricity prices and no gas. The real problem is that in sector after sector - transport, agriculture, waste - emissions just didn't fall at all. The government removed all policy pretty much instantly after being elected, crashing the carbon price in the process - and this is the result: nothing.

But there's also some good news, because net emissions - gross emissions minus trees - did fall, by 1.1 million tons, or 2%. And if we can keep that up for the next 25 years, we're in the ballpark for the government's "net-zero for everything but cows" target. But that's an awful lot of trees, and the regime's chief backers - farmers - hate them because they're economically and environmentally better than their filthy cows. So its difficult to see that sort of progress being allowed to continue, at least if the current regime does.

Fundamentally, if we want to solve this problem, planting trees is not enough. We need to cut gross emissions as well. Which means driving fossil fuels out of the electricity market, sticking solar panels and wind turbines everywhere, electrifying all the things, and reducing the number of cows to a more sustainable level. It means doing things differently, and destroying a bunch of current market incumbents. But we have to do it. We're seeing the alternative already: once-in-a-lifetime disasters are now once-a-year events, and it will only get worse. If we want any hope of mitigating that damage, we need to bring our emissions under control. Alternatively, we can just let the weather and the fires do it for us.

Strengthening proactive release

Newsroom has an opinion piece by Marcus Ganley, on the problems of proactive release of official information. The government releases vast quantities of stuff - annual reports, cabinet papers, briefings, research, investigations, datasets, OIA responses, and so on - but its often very hard to find. It's not deliberate "beware of the leopard" territory so much as no-one really cares about making it easy, and even if an agency is doing a good job this week, they'll inevitably "update" their website, break all existing links, and wreck it all. And of course there's no indexing or metadata telling you what these documents are or what is in them - just a soup of cabinet papers and "proactive release material" you have to trawl through.

There's not even a central index of where to find each agency's data. Te Kawa Mataaho has a spreadsheet listing the various places cabinet papers are found, but it was last updated in 2023 - which I guess shows how much of a priority it is for them.

We can obviously do better than this. Ganley has a few suggestions:

Since 2010, the Australian Freedom of Information Act has required agencies to publish information released to a requester on a website. In New Zealand this is a discretionary matter. Some agencies publish all requests, others only those they deem to be “of public interest”. Making publication of all releases compulsory would be a simple change.

Another step would be to require agencies to publish a much wider range of information on a regular basis. In the same way that we don’t have to wait for someone to request a Cabinet paper, there are whole categories of government information that, after a limited period of confidentiality, could be routinely released.

The UK Freedom of Information Act is the model here. It establishes a system of "publication schemes", basically requiring every government agency to say what it is going to publish, and to actually do it (meaning its legally enforceable; agencies can be forced to publish information they have "forgotten" to). Looking at the model publication scheme shows that it contains a lot of stuff that's routinely published here. But its a legally enforceable duty, not the current system of grace-and-favour, which can be revoked or forgotten on an official or Ministerial whim.

Adopting a publication scheme system would give us enforceable rights to proactively published information. It would also resolve Ganley's other issue, about legal protection for OIA releases not extending to proactive releases, and this perversely deterring release. There are very good reasons why that is the case - they can be summed up with the words "Paula Bennett" - but extending protection to release under a publication scheme would I think avoid that problem, and make it even clearer that any such release is prima facie bad faith (so not protected anyway).

But that still leaves us with the problem of things being difficult to find. There's a solution to that too: open government advocates have long advocated for a central government proactive release portal, with proper metadata, indexing, tagging, and searching. Chris Hipkins even suggested the first step towards one, with a proposal for a central repository for released cabinet papers. But he shot himself in the foot by not even bothering to consult the agency he thought should do it, allowing them to sink it. Such a portal would be a huge leap forward for open government in Aotearoa, the sort of project worthy of the Open Government Partnership. And we need to push for it (and then for things to be added to it). But I just can't see it happening under the current bunch of tyrannical control-freaks.

A victory for democracy in Hungary

Hungarians went to the polls yesterday in parliamentary elections, and responded with a resounding "Ruszkik Haza!", telling Putin (and Trump) proxy Victor Orbán to fuck off. The opposition even gained a two-third majority, enabling it to amend the constitution and undo all of Orbán's fuckery (including the stacked electoral system which translates bare majorities into supermajorities).

The opposition front may be led by a right-winger, but I (and more importantly, Hungarians) will take a normal, democratic, conservative over a fascist any day. And he's promising the right things: normalising relations with the EU, joining the European Public Prosecutor's Office, and prosecutions for the corrupt beneficiaries of Orbán's regime. Hopefully that will include Orbán himself, for his role in channelling public money to his friends and family. Which means Orbán will either need to flee back to his master in Moscow, or face a prison cell.

Crown solicitors deserve scrutiny

Graeme Edgeler had an interesting piece the other day advocating for crown solicitors to be subject to the Official Information Act. Uniquely in the western world, Aotearoa has privatised its most important prosecution decisions to private law firms. These make public decisions in the name of the state, decisions that if they were made by any other government functionary would be able to be scrutinised using the OIA. But because they are appointed by royal fiat, rather than simply a contract, they are not subject to the OIA:

This isn’t true of all prosecutions. The serious fraud office conducts prosecutions – including jury trials – of serious fraud. You can request information about these prosecutions under the Official Information Act. And when Police prosecute more minor offending, and Police prosecutors are making the same sorts of decisions around plea bargaining that Crown Solicitors make, Police are covered by the Official Information Act, and their decisions can be subjected to public and media scrutiny.

And the same goes for importation prosecutions by Customs, and fisheries prosecutions undertaken by the Ministry of Primary Industries, and District, City and Regional Council prosecutions, and even the exercise of prosecution powers by local Fish and Game Councils when people fish or hunt without a licence.

[...]

But, if that charge wasn’t fishing without a licence but was instead murder, the Official Information Act will not help you understand the decisions made by those prosecuting on behalf of the State, because the law says that there is no public interest in allowing OIA oversight of murder prosecutions.

This is, quite obviously, fundamentally wrong. And even the solicitors themselves recognise that! A 2021 investigation of crown solicitors by RNZ quotes one of them as being uncomfortable with the lack of scrutiny of their decisions not to prosecute (it also highlights other issues deserving of scrutiny: the lack of diversity, the level of expenditure, the way that these warrants have been held by the same clique of law firms for a century. Which just... smells. But the state protects itself from investigation by denying basic transparency...)

Not mentioned in Graeme's article: crown solicitors are subject to the Public Records Act. And the terms of their appointment state that all their information belongs to the state, and they must make it available to the Solicitor-General on request. Which simply reinforces his point: these are public officials, making public decisions in our name. As he says, "given the power Crown Solicitors possess, conducting the most serious prosecutions on behalf of the Government, there is no good reason not to subject them to the same scrutiny as Fish and Game wardens."

Graeme has set up a petition to parliament asking for the OIA to be extended to cover them. I've signed it. You should too. Because the people who make decisions about whether to prosecute rapes deserve at least the same level of scrutiny as fish and game wardens.

A hegemony-ending war?

Well, that was a day, wasn't it? After threatening that "a whole civilisation will die tonight" if he didn't get what he wanted, the orange shitgibbon has decided that actually its time for a ceasefire. The terms of which - a continuation of Iranian nuclear enrichment, and Iran and Oman getting to toll the Strait of Hormuz in lieu of reparations - are effectively an admission of US defeat. The US says it will be "negotiating" over the next two weeks to try and change that, with the threat of restarting bombing, but its clear to everyone else that that won't get them what they want, and that it would be much better to simply walk away, and let the uneasy ceasefire eventually become effectively permanent.

And hopefully the rest of the world will spend the next two weeks persuading America to do that. Because America has made it clear that they are the enemy of the world, and we simply cannot take their shit any more. The way they export instability with their perpetual interference in other countries, the way they start wars and fuck up the entire world on the whim of their demented mad king. And while its tempting to see this as a problem of their current leadership, he is just the symptom of a society which believes itself exceptional and so entitled to do this to us.

Our global system is now too interconnected and too brittle to withstand such constant sabotage. And that means that America needs to be constrained, diplomatically and economically.

The good news is that this disaster of a war looks to be the beginning of the end for American hegemony. They've alienated the allies they depend on for their power, and shown that hosting their bases creates insecurity, not stability. If America is allowed to station forces in your country, they will use those forces to start a war with your neighbours, without asking or warning you, then leave you to burn when the inevitable retaliation comes. If they are allowed to use your airspace for military purposes, they will do so to commit or enable war crimes. All while sitting safe in their fascist "homeland", which of course is sacrosanct and is never allowed to be attacked. That's not a recipe for good relationships. Countries hosting US bases should be seriously reconsidering whether they want to keep doing so, and hopefully kicking America out. Meanwhile, they've also demonstrated the limits of their military power. Like their friend Russia, they are in fact incapable of defeating a middle power. While they can bomb for a month, smash stuff up, kill people, destroy infrastructure, and commit war crimes from the air, all that does is piss people off (Who knew?) And even that power is now constrained, because they've burned most of their arsenal on murdering Iranian schoolchildren and enabling Israel to do the same.

So, while this probably isn't the last American imperialist war, I think its all downhill for them from here. The world is already looking to China, simply because they manage to appear normal, and aren't constantly bombing people. If they can keep that up, and resist the urge to exploit America's weakness to steal from their neighbours, then the hegemonic position occupied by America will simply fall into their lap as the status quo coalition aligns behind them. I'd rather have no hegemon (because fuck hegemons and fuck empires), but a peaceful, non-predatory one is better than the American monster.

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.