Fucking absurd

Since time immemorial - or at least the 1990's - the National party's Big Economic Idea was cuts. Slash the state! Sack people! Give away billions in tax cuts to cronies so future governments couldn't fund anything! And to justify this peculiar fixation, they talk constantly about debt. There's too much of it! We can't afford the interest! We're about to go bankrupt! And sadly, this ideological framework has been swallowed wholesale by Labour, who sternly promise to keep debt low and not increase spending

But as Bernard Hickey points out this morning, none of this is true. Sure, the NZ government has $426 billion of debt - but it has $611 billion of assets, a positive net worth of $185 billion. And interest payments - which are now fixed and in NZ dollars, unlike the 1980's - are just 2% of government revenue. Which is perfectly sustainable.

And yet, National still keeps demanding cuts. Meanwhile, we have failing infrastructure, collapsing public services, and 33,000 homeless children. Hickey asks the obvious questions: would you leave kids homeless when you were worth $207 billion? Would you leave your kids homeless with interest costs of 2% of income? Answering "yes" to those isn't just fucking absurd, it's absolutely sociopathic. But I guess that's the sort of person right-wing politics attracts: the sort of person who wants to deliberately starve and freeze children, while running the country into the ground, all so they and their rich mates can steal more from us.

We need to vote this NeoLiberal plague out. Both sides of it. Because as long as Labour remains committed to NeoLiberalism and the "too much debt" myth, they will continue doing exactly what National does. The only difference is they'll lie to us about how they're helping us while they fuck us over.

Deeply unethical

Yesterday, the Labour party announced its party list, parachuting senior police officer Superintendent Rakesh Naidoo in at 13th place to show how much they care about "law and order". Which immediately caused problems, because Naidoo apparently hadn't told his bosses until the last minute.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins claims this is all OK, because while they had been talking to Naidoo "over a couple of months", his selection "was done at the last minute deliberately" to enable him to stand. But that's not OK. We have a politically neutral public service, and to protect this, section 52 of the Electoral Act 1993 requires public servants seeking office to take leave. This is normally from nomination day, but where candidacy undermines the perception of political neutrality, it may be for longer. While the police are not public servants, these provisions explicitly apply to them. And Naidoo is a senior police manager, working on policy issues, and that's simply not something you can do while seeking political office.

On top of that, the Police Manual chapter on elections and political matters specifically requires police employees seeking public office to

advise their District Commander or Director at the earliest opportunity so that the potential impact on their role as a Police employee and any necessary plan of action can be discussed early.

An ethical person following the rules would have advised their managers when they were considering seeking office, to ensure that risks were managed and they had obviously obeyed the rules. Naidoo didn't do that. Instead, he and Labour seem to have contrived a process, with the latter deliberately manipulating its normal candidate selection procedures so he could pretend not to be running, so he could keep on collecting his salary (and, potentially, accessing police information) right up until the last minute.

This is deeply unethical behaviour which reflects badly on everyone involved. It doesn't meet the standard of ethics we expect from police or political parties. And given how low our expectations are of either, that's pretty damning.

Time to end MPs' property rorts

Last week we had the unseemly sight of Social Development Minister Louise Upston cutting housing for the needy, while being paid $1,000 a month to live in an apartment she already owns. It was "all within the rules", of course - because politicians write the rules to suit themselves - but it was all a bit Marie Antoinette. And its not just her. Politicians have claimed over $2.5 million so far this term to live in their own houses - a practice which makes it clear how low the ethical standards of our rulers are.

As Thomas Coughlan points out, it is entirely right and proper that MPs are paid, and paid expenses, for doing their jobs. But this is taking the piss. And if you made expenses claims like this in a normal employment situation - demanding to be compensated for living in your own fucking house, in some cases the house where you had always lived - you would be fired, if not prosecuted.

The practice of rorting expenses delegitimises parliament, and it delegitimises the political class as a whole. They're nothing but thieves and fraudsters, unfit to rule over us. Once again, they are earning their reputation...

So what can be done? Coughlan has a good suggestion:

The obvious fix is a simple one: ban related party leases for electorate offices and Wellington accommodation, and tidy up Parliament superannuation scheme rules to ensure MPs aren’t using private super schemes to build property portfolios.

It’s this particular issue that’s at the nub of most expenses scandals in the past decade or so: an MP claiming an awful lot of money to rent accommodation that they or a related entity own.

It’s within the rules now. But it shouldn’t be.

It is blatantly obvious that we need to do this, and blatantly obvious why: because it is a naked conflict of interest. It is dishonest, and it is corrupt. I'd throw in preventing MPs from effectively moving their place of residence after election in order to access a higher allowance. If you live in or near Wellington already, then that's where you live for the term, and we're not going to pay for you to pretend to live elsewhere so you can campaign and/or get a holiday home (this means you, Andy Foster).

MPs complain constantly about how the public perceives them. I suggest that if they don't want to be viewed as corrupt and dishonest, they should stop behaving that way, and amend the rules so that they can't. Its that simple. And if they don't, the public will continue to hold them in the contempt they deserve.

Parliament fails to defend transparency

The Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee has reported back on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The bill makes various changes to competition law, which the National-dominated committee has naturally gutted. It also includes an odious secrecy clause, effectively granting the Commerce Commission a ten year exemption from the OIA, which is renewable, meaning it is really an indefinite exemption. The case for this was exceedingly weak, it was denounced as "unnecessary and excessive" by the Ombudsman, and it seems to have been driven by misunderstanding of and hostility to transparency from senior Commission staff (here are the receipts; if you keep scrolling you'll also see they also admitted that it was completely unnecessary). So what did the committee thing? Rather than standing up for transparency or conducting a first-principles analysis, they simply split the difference, reducing the exemption to five years. But its still renewable, meaning its still effectively indefinite, unless the commission fails to do the paperwork).

In talking about the Fisheries Amendment Bill, which also included a secrecy clause, the Ombudsman noted that:

In circumstances where the OIA already protects the relevant interests, only an extraordinary harm to those interests would justify a permanent exclusion of information from the scope of the OIA.

In this case, the OIA also protects the relevant interests, and the Commission (in advice it attempted to keep secret) admits that. There is no extraordinary harm to justify exclusion. Secrecy cannot be justified.

Using austerity to attack democracy II

Back in March, Newsroom's Sam Sachdeva reported that the regime was planning to use high costs as an excuse to limit access to the Official Information Act, and had commissioned consultants to build them a case. Obviously, I was quite curious about this, so I fired off a series of OIA requests to government agencies. Some were about costs, and revealed (unsurprisingly) that no-one (at least, no-one in the sample of core government agencies I checked) had any idea how much the OIA cost them, and that no-one was counting. Some, aimed at understanding recent large increases, were about the types of requests received, and when they had started being counted in statistics, and they were quite illuminating. And of course there was a request for the policy advice underlying the regime's plans. A request for Te Kawa Mataaho's advice got bounced to Ministry of Justice - saving me the effort of asking them directly - where it was delayed, and then delayed, and then delayed again. They finally responded yesterday, having illegally delayed the response until a related proactive release was signed off.

The response letter, with links to the released documents, is here. There's a lot of emails (some of which are significant), a couple of contracts, and notes from a meeting with the Ombudsman which suggests the regime's intent is to use this as an excuse to declare requesters "vexatious" - something both the Law Commission and the Ombudsman have opposed in the past. The Ombudsman is clear, both there and elsewhere, that one of the drivers of costs is increasingly convoluted agency review and sign-off procedures, where every response is scrutinised by multiple layers of management for arse-covering and "no surprises" reasons. This frequently results in delays, and it has been a frequent topic of the Ombudsman's practice reviews.

As for the costs themselves, they're in the proactively released Tregaskis Brown report and accompanying briefing. You hire consultants to deliver the answers you want, and TBL has delivered in spades, with a headline cost estimate of

$183.6 million for the 2024/25 financial year, within a possible range of $175 million – $250 million depending on estimated complexity of OIA requests.

They've calculated this by (roughly) taking the number of requests, estimating the proportion per agency which are complex (expensive) vs routine (cheap), and multiplied by the relevant cost per request, based on Australian data. They correctly highlight that 77% of requests come from 6 agencies (Police, Natural Hazards Commission (EQC), Department of Corrections, NZ Defence Force, Fire and Emergency NZ, and NZ Customs Service), and (sensibly) recommend further work to understand both actual costs, and what is driving them, as well as strengthening proactive release. Those bits are fine, but the cost estimate is absolutely absurd. How? The accompanying A3 (p10 of the proactive release) estimates the police's annual OIA costs at $50 million. But the police are actually one of the few agencies we have good OIA cost data for! A November 2025 request made on FYI, the public OIA request site, included both the numbers of requests processed, and the staff numbers and costs for both the police Ministerial Services OIA group, and the Information Requests Service Group (IRSG), for exactly the time period TBL is looking at. Ministerial services processed 1014 requests in the second half of 2024, and 832 in the first half of 2025, for a total of 1846 in 2024-25. IRSG processed 28921 and 25280 respectively, for a total of 54201. (Yes, there's a discrepancy between these numbers and those published by TKM. The reason for that is speed cameras and media requests, which are handled by other groups).

As for costs,

Police advises that there are 13 people in Ministerial Services who process OIA requests. As at 1 November 2025, the annual total for their salaries is $1,547,991.

There are 53 people who work in the Information Request Service Group and the annual total for their salaries is $4,489,296.

This gives a cost-per-request for police ministerial services (which handles the most complex requests) of $838.57, and for IRSG as $82.83. While there's no cost-estimate for speed cameras and media requests, both are likely to be at the lower end (the former because they are routine, the latter because anything non-routine gets kicked into the formal OIA process and handled by Ministerial Services). These are obviously far lower than TBL's estimates of $3530 for complex requests and $353 for routine ones. Even allowing for overheads (which TBL estimates at 66%), TBL's costs are inflated by a factor of 2.5.

You would hope that TBL's followup work will reveal that. In the interim, though, Goldsmith has got what he paid for: a big, scary number for costs, which he can decry as "waste", plus the inevitable line-go-up graph, showing those costs will increase into the future. Which he will probably consider to be a case for action.

The proactively-released briefing notes that the OIA is of constitutional significance, and that any change will attract significant interest. It recommends 10-12 weeks of public consultation on any proposal. That's clearly not happening on the original proposed timeline of "before July", so it may have been kicked back until after the election. Alternatively, Goldsmith being Goldsmith, he may just not bother with proper process. This regime has established a terrible reputation for ignoring advice and enacting radical, anti-democratic, even constitutional vibe-based policy under urgency. Sadly, we can't rule out them acting as they have in the past, and wrecking the OIA in the same manner. The only way to stop them is to throw them out of office as quickly as possible.

A crime

Last week, we learned that climate polluters had been writing our climate laws, and trying to hide the evidence by handing over their demands in hardcopy (which was then conveniently "lost" and so unavailable to an OIA request). That was highly suspicious, suggesting a deliberate attempt to thwart the Public Records Act and its requirement to create and maintain full and accurate records of official business. And now it gets worse, with news that prime ministerial staffer and former far-right lobbyist Matt Burgess was getting official documents sent to his private email account.

Once is suspicious. This however suggests a pattern of behaviour to hide public records, a deliberate non-compliance with the Public Records Act. And that is a crime. While the penalty is pathetic, he needs to be prosecuted, pour encourager les autres. Failing to do makes a mockery of the law.

But that's not enough. We clearly need law reform here to protect transparency. This must include explicit penalties in the OIA, stronger (and matching) penalties in the Public Records Act, and a tweak to the Electoral Act declaring violation of either to be a corrupt practice - meaning anyone convicted will be automatically removed from parliament. Add a legal principle of absolute ministerial responsibility for the actions of their subordinates, and we would finally have proper incentives for open government.

If Ministers refuse to do this, it is effectively an admission that they are guilty. The question is, how shameless is how political class?