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?

Under-resourcing transparency

The Ministry of Health is in my experience one of the worst performing government agencies when it comes to handling OIA requests. They unlawfully extend any non-trivial request, hyper-parse everything and adopt the most unhelpful and self-serving interpretation without consultation (and in violation of the principle of availability and the duty of assistance), and in the end are late anyway. Their Minister reportedly blames resourcing pressures for this. But as the PSA points out, resourcing is decided by the Minister:

However, the PSA's national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons told RNZ the minister should be taking responsibility instead.

"It shouldn't take the Ombudsman stepping in for Health NZ to provide information to the public, but really this does come back to the minister. He can't keep demanding savings and then blame officials when the impacts of cuts are felt," she said.

"Health NZ has lost over 2000 roles either through early exits, voluntary redundancies, or vacancies not being filled. This includes teams that support official information requests. They've lost critical expertise."

She said it was no wonder the public wanted information when the government was making such cuts, and the minister, his office, and health agencies should have seen it coming.

"This government is undermining the Official Information Act. It plays an absolutely critical role in enabling the participation of the people of New Zealand in public administration, but also in holding ministers and officials to account."

Its also worth noting that the courts have ruled (in relation to Corrections) that resource limitations do not justify failure to comply with statutory duties; if there are resource issues, then it is the chief executive's duty to reallocate resources so there are not. In the case of Corrections, the High Court ordered the chief executive personally to obey - raising the prospect of fine or jail if they do not. If government agencies keep making similar pleas when it comes to the OIA, then its time we took them to court and subjected them to similar orders.

Meanwhile, RNZ also quotes Labour's Carmel Sepuloni as blaming under-resourcing and cuts for OIA delays. So obviously, if she becomes Minister, she'll be ensuring that transparency is fully resourced, and that information is released expeditiously, and she'll resign if its not, right? I look forward to a public commitment from her, and all Labour's potential Ministers, on this.

Strike day

Today is strike day. Teachers, nurses, doctors, and assorted other medical professionals and public servants are all on strike today. Its the largest strike since the 1970's, and in numbers it exceeds the Great Strike of 1913 (though that went on for months, not just a single day. Still, early days yet...).

The regime says they don't understand what the strikers want. This is bullshit. The teachers, nurses, doctors etc have all been crystal clear: a decent, above-inflation pay rise, rather than effective pay cuts. Safe staffing, so they're not being overworked and those in their care are not at risk. No erosion of conditions. If the regime can't or won't understand that, that's on them. Likewise if they claim to "have no money" because they gave it all away to landlords, rich people, and the cancer industry.

Unsurprisingly, the public overwhelmingly supports the strikes. The regime needs to listen to that, and start making offers public servants can accept. If not, we'll just have to de-elect the selfish pricks, and get a government which will.

Feathering their cronies' nests

The central refrain of this regime has been "we can't afford it". They're constantly pleading poverty over public services, and using "tight" finances as an excuse to drive down public service wages. Meanwhile, they're nearly doubling the pay of their cronies who serve on government boards:

A Cabinet document, quietly uploaded online on Monday, shows ministers agreed to lift the maximum annual fee for chairs of governance boards from $90,000 to about $162,000.

The "Cabinet Fees Framework" is not binding but provides guidance to ministers when deciding compensation for those on a range of bodies, such as royal commissions and ministerial inquiries.

Speaking on Tuesday, Luxon said public sector fees had become completely "out of whack" with private sector rates and needed a reset.

So, just to get this clear: workers are paid too much and need a pay cut, but managers and board directors are paid too little, and need a whopping increase (probably so they can afford butter). As usual, austerity applies only to normal people, not the rich. Alternatively, the regime is just looting the public purse and engaging in upwards redistribution - as usual.

And next, of course, those higher pay rates for government boards will be used to "justify" higher pay for Ministers. Just wait...

"Protecting frontline services"

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

Little's pitch

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

A complete fiasco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restore birthright citizenship

In 2005, Labour repealed the long-standing principle of birthright citizenship in Aotearoa. Why? As with everything else Labour does, it all came down to austerity: "foreign mothers" were supposedly "coming to this country to give birth", and this was "put[ting] pressure on hospitals". Then-Immigration Minister George Hawkins explicitly gave this as the reason during the law's first reading debate, saying:

Some people may come to New Zealand on temporary permits solely to give birth, so that their New Zealand - born children are citizens. Under current law those children are entitled to access publicly funded services such as health care and education. Restricting citizenship by birth will ensure that citizenship and its benefits are limited to people who have a genuine and ongoing link to New Zealand.

Twenty years later, and we're seeing the cost of this change: kiwi kids being threatened with deportation to foreign countries. And while public outrage seems to have caused the Minister to rethink, this should never have happened. People who were born here, have grown up here, have never known anywhere else should not be exiled from their country, or victimised due to the legal mistakes of their parents.

We should learn this lesson, and fix the underlying law which threatened to result in this injustice. And that means restoring birthright citizenship, not just to those born here in future, but also to those immorally deprived of it by the Clark government's cruel penny-pinching. And if the current government wants to quibble over this, we should ask them: are they really that small?

(And while we're at it: we should restore relationship rights too, so kiwis can be with the people they love).

Fixing science?

Aotearoa's science sector is broken. For 35 years it has been run on a commercial, competitive model, while being systematically underfunded. Which means we have seven different crown research institutes and eight different universities - all publicly owned and nominally working for the public good - fighting over the same fixed pool of funding, leading in turn to a huge amount of competition, duplication, and wasted effort. We also have 15 different CEOs, all trying to empire-build and make their balance-sheets look big so they can move on to the next, bigger job. Which leads to a certain amount of institution dysfunction.

Today, the government announced its "solution" to this: a partial re-merger of the CRIs, into four new "public research organisations". Which means years of restructuring, layoffs, and chaos, all of which will affect the ability of these organisations to actually do science. Not mentioned in the announcement: any change to funding, either the amount or the model. Which means it only (partially) fixes part of the problem. Because if funding remains fixed and on a commercial model, then the new PROs will simply engage in the same inefficient, pathological behaviours as the old CRIs, because that's what the funding system incentivises.

Interestingly, the Science System Advisory Group report which underlies all of this recommended going much further, with a complete re-merger of all CRIs into effectively a new DSIR, plus a lot of changes further up the chain to reduce duplication and ensure coordination across government and with universities. Its unclear how much of that is happening, though the government has seized on the recommendation for a new agency to try and attract venture capital and multinational research efforts.

Whether this ends up as yet another expensive, failed, pointless restructuring done just to give the impression of Doing Something remains to be seen. Funding decisions are the key, and there's meant to be another SSAG report on them due out sometime. But if they do this restructuring without changing funding, then I think its really just a wasted effort.

"Better economic management"

At the 2023 election, National basically ran on a platform of being better economic managers. So how'd that turn out for us? In just one year, they've fucked us for two full political terms:

The government's books are set to remain deeply in the red for the near term as a big dent in the tax take and higher expenses deliver continued budget deficits.

But the government has adopted a new measure of its finances, excluding the impact of ACC, which it said has distorted previous forecasts and had the potential to affect spending decisions.

[...]

Using the established measure the deficits would rise more than expected in the budget and a surplus was not expected in the forecast period to 2028/29.

The reason for this of course is austerity, which has seen core government services cut and 11.6% of all the workers in wellington sacked in a single year. Meanwhile, they're grinding down ordinary people with sub-inflation increases to the minimum wage and 0% pay offers to public servants (so: pay cuts in real terms). And all of this flows through to the rest of the economy. The only people doing well are landleeches, who are gouging us for an extra 6.9% this year. But then, that's who National works for, isn't it?

If this is "better economic management", I'd hate to see what worse looks like.

National finds out

Since coming to power last year, National has viciously cut the public service, sacking nearly 10,000 public servants (to date). Those people weren't just doing nothing, and it was obviously going to have an impact on something other than the government's books. But while National's over-paid, privately-insured, and DPS-guarded Ministers may have been able to ignore growing hospital wait times and the police withdrawing from enforcing laws against domestic violence, there's finally been an impact they may have to pay attention to: it may affect their ability to deliver their agenda:

Funding cuts have been so deep at the Ministry for the Environment that it may not have enough resource to enact the Government’s resource management reforms, including the Fast Track resource consenting plans.

The current work plan is only able to be delivered because some of those losing their jobs accepted delayed redundancy, MPs have heard.

[...]

Palmer said the ministry had hit all its deadlines on the work programme set by the Government, but indicated that it may now need more funding next year as the Government embeds its reforms, including the Fast Track resource consenting regime.

“It may well be further resources are required,” he said.

This was a problem for Labour last term as well, when their ongoing austerity meant the Ministry of justice could not deliver on their promise to rewrite the OIA, and instead had to ask the Minister to prioritise (the Minister ultimately chose to prioritise reducing accountability for politicians via a four-year term instead). But this is rather more serious. RMA reform and the fast track law are National's key priorities for the portfolio, and the Ministry is basically saying that they can no longer provide the necessary advice and analysis to do it. They've been gutted so badly by National's arbitrary cuts that they're basically useless.

Given the scale of the cuts, this is unlikely to be an isolated story. Other Ministries will likely be in the same situation, even if they have not yet publicly said so. So National may have cut itself into ineffectiveness, and its agenda may now be going nowhere fast.

Jurors are being ripped off

I had to do a morning of jury service this week, and was fortunate to not get selected for what sounded like an unpleasant and psychologically damaging case. I still have to check whether I have to go back tomorrow (hopefully not), but in the meantime I've begun thinking about the related administrivia.

Jurors and potential jurors are paid. Its not a wage - jurors are not employees - but it is meant to be some compensation for the trouble. The rates are specified in the Jury Rules 1990, and were last updated in 2004 - twenty years ago. Back then the hourly rate for a half day was $10.33 / hour - a bit over the minimum wage of $9/hour. Twenty years later its still the same, while the minimum wage is $22.70 / hour. Even merely adjusting for inflation would raise it to $17/hour.

Jurors are getting ripped off, nickelled and dimed by a government which uses any excuse to "save" money. Until compensation is restored, they should refuse to serve.

Cheating their victims

Last month, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care delivered its report, detailing a horrific litany of abuse for which the government was ultimately responsible. One of its key recommendations was for redress, for the government to compensate its 250,000 victims, with a priority on those tortured at Lake Alice who the government has been deliberately waiting to die. Yesterday, the government produced its response to that recommendation: a measly $20,000 each:

The Government will make a “rapid payment” of $20,000 to terminally ill Lake Alice abuse survivors.

The payments would be available to persons who were 17 years old or under and placed in the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit between 1972 and 1977.

In a statement this evening, the minister responsible for co-ordinating the Crown Response to the Abuse in Care Inquiry, Erica Stanford, said Lake Alice survivors had “informed us there are a small number of their group who are expected to only have a short time left to live”.

$20,000 for torture which destroyed people's lives, and which the commission costed at an average $857,000. So the government is going to give these people 2% of the damage it caused. Well, its not like they're landlords, is it?

This miserliness does not come remotely close to meeting the government's moral obligations to its victims. It just doesn't. Instead, it just seems like a continuation of the government's ongoing policy of denial and minimisation of liability. And that's just not good enough.

Labour's austerity victimises teachers

Primary, secondary and kindergarten teachers are all on strike today, demanding higher pay and an end to systematic understaffing. While the former is important - wages should at least keep up with inflation - its the latter which is the real issue. As with the health system, teachers have been asked to do more and more with less and less, with the government exploiting their professionalism and sense of duty to their students to keep them in line. And as with the health system, it appears to have reached a breaking point. It takes a lot to get teachers to go on strike; simultaneous strikes across the whole sector is a terrible "achievement" for a Labour government.

Education Minister Jan Tinetti apparently acknowledged that the system was broken. Which is nice performative handwringing, but its not going to solve the problem. To do that, the government actually has to offer more. So far they've simply refused, and Labour's commitment to austerity, to keeping taxes on rich MPs low, doesn't give much cause for hope.

Let's be clear about this: this is not a case of the government being unable to afford to properly resource the education (or health) sector. The government is a government and can have as much money as it wants. The problem is that the government chooses not to resource those sectors. It is running down and starving core functions, gutting our state, because it would rather do that than tax the rich fairly (and again, we need to remember here that all MPs and Ministers are rich). You expect that sort of shit from national and ACT, the traditional parties of rich arseholes. Labour doing it just makes them traitors to their own voters.

Grant says "no" again

Yesterday the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists released a report on dental care in Aotearoa, highlighting its unaffordability and recommending free, universal dental care. This is something the left has been campaigning for for a long time - Jim Anderton pushed for it before the 2011 election, and Helen Clark has advocated for it. It would massively improve people's lives, reduce pain and suffering, and save money in the long-term. But it would involve spending money, so naturally Grant Robertson has vetoed it:

The Tooth be told report, commissioned by the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, said free or subsidised access to dental care in Aotearoa would save millions of dollars in healthcare over time.

But Acting Prime Minister Grant Robertson told Morning Report moving directly to universal dental care would require over a billion dollars a year in extra funding and any additional investment needed to be weighed against other priorities in the health sector.

Instead of free and universal provision, he wants people to go crawling to WINZ, with all the added pain and suffering that entails. Weirdly, he thinks that this isn't a deterrent - which I guess tells us either that he has never dealt with them, or that nine years on an MP's salary and six on a deputy prime minister's has destroyed all memory of it (and WINZ has got massively worse since Grant was a student).

Its a stupid and short-sighted decision - every dollar spent today on dental care saves $1.60, which is a far better benefit / cost ratio than you get from an Auckland motorway. But the money has to be spent up front, and how does that help Grant's next budget? Also, apparently voters hate long-term investment - or at least the donors he talks to in the Koru Club do, and they're the people who matter to him now.

It's a perfect example of Labour's metapolicy of austerity - can't do anything, gotta keep taxes on the rich low! It's also a perfect example of why they deserve to lose the next election. Labour is giving us nothing to vote for. So why should people lift a finger to keep paying Grant $334,734 a year?

Coming home to roost

Labour is a status quo party. Like National, they're committed to low debt, low taxes, and absolutely no wealth taxes on rich people like them. And yesterday, we saw the result of that: a major hospital emergency department which kills people:

The emergency department of one of New Zealand's biggest hospitals has been slammed as unsafe for patients and staff in a damning new report.

An independent inquiry into the death of a patient in June - after she left Middlemore's emergency department (ED) upon being told it would take hours for her to be seen - has delivered a brutal assessment of the hospital's ED.

In a scathing, five-page document, Middlemore has been described as dysfunctional, overcrowded and unsafe.

Written by an unidentified fellow from the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, the report stated that only the exceptional hard work and dedication of Middlemore's staff was keeping it from more serious incidents.

And its not just Middlemore. Two weeks ago there was a similar report about Palmerston North hospital, which saw a similar completely avoidable death due to lack of ICU capacity.

This is what the status quo parties' low debt, low taxes policy means in practice: chronic underinvestment in infrastructure (and the health system is infrastructure), meaning that things only work by gouging ever increasing amounts of free labour out of workers. That can't go on forever, and eventually things fall through the cracks. In local government, Keeping Rates Low just means shit on the streets and crumbling footpaths. When central government does it, people die. By their funding decisions, our government are murderers. But I guess they were being "kind" to people on $296,007 a year, rather than people who needed a hospital.

This is why we need change. Urgent change. And that means sweeping away the rotten, status quo parties who would rather see people die than pay a cent more. There's an election next year, and we should treat political parties promising underinvestment the same way we treat local government candidates promising it: throw the bums out and elect someone better.

Austerity is murder

Over in the UK, the radical Tory government is planning more benefit cuts to screw the poor. Meanwhile, there's also a timely reminder of exactly what that means: mass-murder:

More than 330,000 excess deaths in Great Britain in recent years can be attributed to spending cuts to public services and benefits introduced by a UK government pursuing austerity policies, according to an academic study.

The authors of the study suggest additional deaths between 2012 and 2019 – prior to the Covid pandemic – reflect an increase in people dying prematurely after experiencing reduced income, ill-health, poor nutrition and housing, and social isolation.

Previously improving mortality trends started to change for the worse after austerity policies introduced in 2010 when tens of billions of pounds began to be cut from public spending by the Tory-led coalition government, the study said.

The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found there were 334,327 excess deaths beyond the expected number in England, Wales and Scotland over the eight-year period.

The study talks about "excess deaths", but lets be clear: these people were killed by government negligence. They were murdered by depraved indifference. The only reason we're not talking about genocide - the definition of which includes "[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" is because the politicians who instigated this slow-motion massacre likely lacked the intent, as they didn't think about their victims at all. Why would they? Its not as if they were important. Its not as if they were people. Its not as if they went to Oxford or Cambridge or Eton or somewhere else that mattered. And yet, given their depraved indifference, its clear that both David Cameron and Theresa May, the Prime Ministers who presided over this, are murderers. And they need to be held to account for every single one of these deaths.

And to bring this home: this is the social policy Christopher Luxon wants to inflict on New Zealand by advocating for tax cuts and austerity. Every time he opens his mouth about that, he needs to be confronted with these numbers, and asked how many people he is willing to kill to benefit the ultra-rich.

Climate Change: Treasury's sabotage

(Cartoon by Jon Kudelka)

There's a (paywalled) story on BusinessDesk about today's budget document drop - and in particular the climate change documents - about how Treasury resisted Ministerial demands for more spending on climate change, forcing cuts to a level deemed insufficient to meet the requirements of the Emissions Reduction Plan:

Ministers wanted spending that would bridge the gap in reductions needed to meet the first emissions budget. Ministers wanted quick action while Treasury asked them to “focus on the need to create the strong foundations for emissions reductions and removals over the medium and longer term, in addition to the short-term first emissions budget”.

Possible emissions reduction estimates were hard to be precise about, Treasury warned. There was also conflicting advice from the chief executives of the agencies with responsibility for climate change policy.

“The key differences between our draft package and the advice provided by Climate reflect our focus on the rationale for government spending, delivery risk and implementation readiness of initiatives, while Climate CEs’ advice focuses more on a package that is necessary and sufficient to deliver the ERP (emissions reduction plan), meet emissions budgets, and enable an equitable transition.”

Just to repeat that last bit: the climate chief executives recommended what was necessary to meet our emissions reduction targets, and Treasury cut it below that level essentially because they're ideologically committed to austerity. The implication is that the government will not achieve its promised level of reductions thanks to this Treasury sabotage. The comparison to the dinosaur accountant in the above cartoon should be obvious. Effectively, we have a key government agency acting as a quisling for the fossil fuel industry and betting on human extinction (or at the least, widespread immiseration). But hey, they kept taxes on the rich low...

Another starving watchdog

WorkSafe is supposed to make sure that every Kiwi is safe at work. Except they can't any more, because they're not funded to do the job properly:

A lack of funding is forcing WorkSafe to reduce its focus on adventure activities, and it is unable to hold some companies that break health and safety laws to account.

The health and safety regulator has warned its minister it had made a "pragmatic decision" to focus more on the "high harm" forestry, transport, manufacturing and construction industries over "comparatively lower risk" adventure activities.

This was despite WorkSafe identifying "regulatory risks" in having other agencies doing safety compliance checks on its behalf - known as third-party accreditation regimes - including for adventure activity operators, WorkSafe Chair Ross Wilson warned Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood in October.

"These are the decisions that the Board must continue to take while there is a gap between expectations and resourcing," he wrote.

This is where Labour's commitment to austerity and keeping taxes on the rich low gets us: agencies unable to perform their core functions properly due to underfunding. And as for the consequences of that, it can be summed up in two words: Pike River. I don't think any single adventure tourism accident has hit that bodycount (the biggest single incident from a casual glance is the Carterton balloon crash, which killed eleven people), but there's a regular ongoing death and injury toll of skydivers, jetboaters, scenic flights, and river-boarders. The death toll is such that safety standards were tightened over a decade ago. And now they're no longer being effectively enforced, its only a matter of time and luck before we have another completely preventable mass-casualty incident. And I'm sure that thought will be highly attractive to foreign tourists considering coming here.

Another starving watchdog

The Independent Police Conduct Authority is meant to investigate complaints against police and uncover illegal behaviour. But it is collapsing under the weight of complaints, with 50% staff turnover:

Police’s independent watchdog is facing “material risk” in its ability to deliver its core functions amid a 64 per cent rise in complaints over three years, meaning a new plan to promote its services to vulnerable communities remains on hold.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority expects the number of complaints will continue to increase, after recording 4257 complaints for the 2020/2021 year, up from 2592 in 2017/2018.

[...]

In a meeting with the Ministry of Justice last October, the authority reported the increasing demand was causing capacity restraints and impacting its ability to deliver its core functions in a timely manner.

The most obvious reason for this is underfunding. While the IPCA has received a small budget increase over the last few years (from $4.1 million in 2017/18 to $5.7 million in 2021), that's clearly nowhere near the increase in workload, or enough to retain staff. And the result is that they're in the same position the Ombudsman was in a few years ago: constantly trying to do more with less, and failing as a result. And pretty obviously, this has an effect on public confidence in both the IPCA and the police. If the government wants to stop that erosion of confidence, it needs to increase the IPCA's funding so it can actually do its job properly, rather than just starving it. And if its wondering how to fund that, actually sacking police officers found by the IPCA to have broken the law would free up some money...