Principles versus parliament

Yesterday the regime announced that it wouldn't consider recognising Palestine as a state until next month - so basically, waiting until Israel has murdered or deported every last Palestinian and stolen all their land. Parliament had an urgent debate on this today, with a banger of a speech by Chloe Swarbrick:

At the end of it, she challenged government MPs to support the Greens' Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill, saying that "[i]f we find six of 68 government MPs with a spine, we can stand on the right side of history".

The Speaker threw her out.

I guess he didn't want a politician with actual principles making the rest of the cowards look bad.

Meanwhile, there's an obvious comparison here with John Key's famous "get some guts" over backing America's re-invasion of Iraq. On any normal analysis, its a similar allegation of cowardice. So why was it OK, when Swarbrick gets ejected?

I think the answer is obvious: It's OK When You're A Man.

"Our" Parliament is an archaic, deeply racist, deeply misogynist institution, whose "rules" are applied arbitrarily and nakedly for the political advantage of the regime and to lynch its opponents. Its no wonder MPs don't respect it. And its no wonder the people don't either. If it wants to retain its social licence to legislate, to rule by anything other than naked force, it needs to be better, to reflect modern Aotearoa, to drag itself into the present, to not do shit like this.

But good luck getting the fossils in there to understand that.

Drawn

A ballot for one member's bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill (Chlöe Swarbrick)

Swarbrick's bill implements a number of past recommendations from government agencies and advisory bodies which for some reason (cough big booze money cough) have remained unimplemented. One of these is to remove a special-purpose appeal chain over territorial alcohol policies, which is something I am wary of. OTOH, the way that appeal process works is by preventing the policies from ever coming into effect, which seems to frustrate the law, and general appeal rights such as judicial review remain. So this would mean that territorial authorities actually get to make a policy (which can then be judicially reviewed), rather than stopping them from doing so.

There were only 61 bills in the ballot today.

One way of fixing it

How can we stop the Ministry of Health censoring and sanitising vital mental health statistics to make themselves (and Ministers) look good? Legislate for annual reporting:

Green Party mental health spokeswoman Chlöe Swarbrick says the Ministry of Health should be legally required to produce a wide range of mental health statistics, after concerns were raised about a routine mental health report released years late and with significantly less data than it once had.

[...]

“It’s evident that right now there is a big problem,” Swarbrick said.

“Right there is not a legislative requirement for them to report that high quality and transparent data. Which shows us that we need to establish that legislative requirement.”

And she has the backing of former Statistics Minister James Shaw, which should help.

The government does exactly this over environmental statistics, and after National shitcanned The Social Report, Labour put up a member's bill to require statutory reporting of social statistics as well (I wonder what happened to that...?) But will Labour pass it? Or will they insist on retaining the power to lie and fudge to hide their own failures?

Correction: Shaw is the former Minister of Statistics. The current Minister is David Clark.