Separating church and state in New Zealand

On Saturday I went down to Wellington to attend Victoria University Centre for Public law's mini-conference on Constitutional Conversations on the Separation of Church and State in NZ. A summary:

Gay Morgan (University of Waikato) spoke on the US experience. After some background about how early US colonists fleeing religious persecution became persecutors in turn by establishing theocracies, she got to the meat of the US First Amendment's Establishment Clause, and the difficulties it has had in both defining "religion" and separating it from culture and traditional practice (which may have been religious originally, but have become secularised). She felt that there was a real problem with the broad-brush, constitutional language approach, which has begun to trivialise the real concerns people have in this area. What people object to isn't secularised yoga in school PE classes (irrevocably promoting Hinduism, according to some fundamentalist christian lawsuit), but being forced to go to church, and being forced to support religious groups with their tax dollars. Rather than the top-down approach, she advocated being specific e.g. legislating so that education funding could only be spent on education according to the curriculum, rather than on religious indoctrination.

Dr Caroline Sawyer (VUW) talked about the "UK" (actually English) experience. This was somewhat meandering, starting with the establishment of the Church of England and legal persecution of Catholics and other religious minorities, and went on to talk about marriage law as a specific example of the state recognition of religion in the UK. She tried to use the New Zealand Marriage Act as an example of this, but IMHO missed the key point that here it is a matter of convenience, rather than a recognition of any inherant "authority" to marry people. One of the key points was that establishment was tied to the monarchy, but that because that probably isn't going anywhere any time soon, neither is the church.

Dr Meg Wallace was supposed to talk about the Australian experience. Instead she gave a dull rant about the need for secularism in New Zealand, and invoked article 6 of the (dumped) draft Fijian Constitution [PDF] as a model to be adopted here.

Dave Armstrong talked about the effects of New Zealand culture. Our desire to view religion as a private matter and our dislike of abstract causes meant that we generally got along, but also has led to complacency which is being exploited by a fanatical religious minority. On this front, he expressed thanks to overseas fundamentalists for waking us up to the dangers a little, but thought we still wouldn't care until things had gone to far. The most likely crisis point would be Charter Schools, where the rules are so lax that Al Qaeda could set one up. And when that happens - or more likely some Christian fundamentalist group uses government money to deny evolution and push bigotry at small children - there is likely to be a backlash. He also had concerns about the Treaty of Waitangi as a barrier to seperation, due to the (well justified) consultation requirements.

Ngaire McCarthy rebutted Armstrong's last point, talking about how her language had been hijacked and perverted by Christians and mapped onto their concepts. She explained how wairua was about connection, not spirits, and karakia were not prayers.

Dr Bryce Edwards (Otago University) talked about the way forward, and suggested a sweeping secularisation bill to remove religious references from legislation. He had a long list of these, starting with the obvious - Marriage Act, blasphemous libel, Education Act, Charities Act - to the not so obvious - Broadcasting Act, Sale of Liquor Act, the RMA, the national anthem. And then the bastard made me talk briefly about the practicalities of that, in which I said that no MP would buy that big fight for no political payoff, and that it was probably better to salami the issue, with one or more specific bills on high-profile issues. The best candidates were the Charities Act (where the definition of charitable work is over 400 years old and written in an era when they thought religion mattered) and the Education Act (where secular education is only mandated for primary schools and often abused). Many of the other issues will pass in due course, likely the next time the government revised the law.

One thing which wasn't obvious from the advertising, but which became obvious at the event, was that that was basically the NZ association of rationalists and humanists talking to itself. No-one else was interested in the "conversation"; its just not seen as a priority by New Zealanders. Until, of course, something goes horribly wrong...

The case for MMP

Last night I went to a public meeting at the Palmerston North Central Library to hear Dr Sandra Grey of Keep MMP make the case for MMP. She started off by debunking a series of common myths around MMP:

• A perfect voting system: No voting system is perfect. They all require various democratic goods to be traded off against one another. MMP trades off single-party government to gain fairness, legitimacy, equal voting power, a more diverse Parliament, and a stronger Parliament. Whether you think these tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how much you value the latter over the former.
• Confused voters: Apparently, people don't know about the referendum, and therefore won't be making an informed choice (Peter Dunne is one of the latest to propagate this myth). But from talking to people while campaigning, Dr Grey has found that people are talking about the referendum, and about what they like and dislike about MMP and how to fix it (IMHO this is just a comforting myth put about by the anti-MMP faction so they can take solace in denouncing the ignorance of the peasants when they lose).
• More MPs: While MMP gave us more MPs, it doesn't have to be that way; there's no magic number that it requires. Wales makes MMP work (kindof) with only 60 MPs. But the issue has been wisely separated out from this referendum into the constitutional review.
• Instability: One of the biggies, but history has shown it to be untrue. The system has not led to sudden mid-term collapses of confidence and changes of government; five out of six MMP governments have gone full term (and the one that didn't - Labour in 1999 - 2002 - went early voluntarily in a failed effort to seize an absolute majority).
• "The tail wags the dog": Again, another biggie, and equally untrue if you look at the historical record. The major party in government has clearly set the agenda. While they have had to compromise in order to gain the support of coalition partners, these compromises have been modest. When minor parties have been seen as being too greedy - e.g. Winston Peters in 1996 - 1999 - they have been punished by the electorate.

She talked a lot about the statutory review if MP wins, and the parallel constitutional review, and encouraged people to submit on both if they wanted to tweak the system. As for the second question, she pointed to polls showing FPP well in the lead, with STV a distant second (and SM even further behind that). And as a result, she thinks a second referendum would be fairly pointless - a straight rematch of 1993, pitting MMP against FPP, the result of which would be a foregone conclusion.

Her overall conclusion: MMP is on all objective measures a fairer, more accountable and more deliberative system than the alternatives on offer. And we should vote to keep it.

There was a brief Q&A session afterwards, including the inevitable question on which voting system to support on the second part of the ballot paper. She would support STV as a distant second, but noted that many people she had talked to said they would leave that part blank (IMHO these people are fools, voluntarily surrendering that battle to the anti-MMP brigade). In response to a question about Supplementary member, she pointed out that contrary to National's spin, it is not "FPP-lite"; rather it is FPP on steroids, giving major parties all the FPP electorates, plus a big bonus from the party vote. The system undervalues some votes, overvalues others, and will lead to single party majority governments (which is one of the problems we were trying to avoid).

As a final note, 70% of OECD nations use proportional representation (those that don't are predictably the Anglosphere - the US, UK, Canada and Australia). Its pretty obvious which way democracy lies.

Hansen in Palmerston North

For those who don't know, James Hansen, one of the world's most famous climate change scientists, is currently touring New Zealand (FaceSpy here). Yesterday I went to see him in Palmerston North. The lecture theatre was packed, with people sitting in the aisles; I'd estimate three hundred people, mostly Massey staff and scientists from the local CRIs.

The topic was "Human-made climate change: A scientific, moral and legal issue". After running us through the evidence for climate change - that it is happening, that its our fault, and that its going to get worse if we don't stop doing what we're doing, Hansen pointed out some of the problems in dealing with it. The key one IMHO is inertia in the climate system, which both hides the fact that there is a crisis, and commits us to more climate change even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today. Because of this inertia, there's every chance that we could push the climate system beyond its tipping points before we realise it.

This is a huge problem. Human civilisation is dependent on a particular climate (which, for example, allows us to grow enough food to feed 6.8 billion people). If we want to protect that climate, then we need to keep atmospheric CO₂ levels below 350 parts per million. We're already at 393 ppm (and going up by ~2 ppm a year), so that means we not only need to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to a greener energy system, but we also need to soak up that excess carbon in the atmosphere as well. Hansen thinks this can be done if we plant enough trees, but its a big ask.

As for why, Hansen's reason was simple: he showed us pictures of his grandchildren. He doesn't want to leave them a radically worse world than the one he inherited, one where his generation has burned all the fossil fuels and fucked the climate, and left their generation to suffer the consequences. Its a powerful moral argument. The question is whether coal company executives love their granschildren too.

Naturally, the lecture attracted the obligatory grumpy old denier, whose sole purpose there seemed to be to witness to the environmentalists (seriously, he didn't even ask a question, just made a statement about recognising people's "sincere beliefs", as if this was a fact-free zone where everything was simply a matter of opinion. Religious people are so amusing). Hansen's answer was simple: real sceptics change their minds in response to the evidence. Climate change deniers don't. They are neither good sceptics or good scientists.

Hansen's next talk is in Wellington on Monday evening. After that, he's hitting Dunedin, Gore, Christchurch, and Auckland (again). I recommend going.

MMP symposium: the morning

Over the past two days I attended the New Zealand Centre for Public Law / Institute for Policy Studies / Birkbeck, University of London's Centre for New Zealand Studies' symposium on MMP and the Constitution: 15 years past; 15 years forward. I have covered the evening session here. Here's a rundown of the morning session. As usual, any errors are due to my poor memory and worse handwriting.

The morning session had the theme of "the future".

First up, at the horrifying hour of 7:30 am, Professor Philip Joseph (University of Canterbury) spoke on MMP and the Constitution: Future Constitutional Challenges. He argued that MMP has not changed the basic ground rules of the Westminster system. Instead, it has made them more visible. The key rule - summarised in the Cabinet Manual as "The Queen reigns, but the government rules, so long as it has the support of the House of Representatives" - is now out in the open, and governments must continuously demonstrate (rather than simply assume) that they hold the confidence of the House. And that is a Good Thing for our democracy. It has also revealed that the old "convention" of Cabinet collective responsibility was nothing of the sort; rather, it was simply a pragmatic arrangement, which could be changed to suit the times. Finally, it has weakened the fundamental dichotomy between "government" and "opposition", with non-government parties able to wield real influence over policy if they play their cards right.

Joseph highlighted several challenges. He thinks the Maori seats are likely to produce an inbuilt overhang, undermining proportionality (I think he's focusing on those electorates, rather than, say, the Auckland electorates, or South Island electorates, simply because they are brown). Population growth (or rather, unequal growth in the North and South Islands) will erode the number of list seats, eventually eroding proportionality and requiring either an increase in the size of the House, or a growth in the size of electorates (which will mean a reduction in the number in the South Island) (he also continued his earlier theme by suggesting the abolition of the Maori seats as a quick fix for this). Finally, the National Party is attempting to change the system - something Joseph thinks will be vetoed by the minor parties in future Parliaments. Overall, he thinks a return to FPP politics is now inconceivable. Quite apart from the political challenges any such reaction would face, MMP has generally met people's expectations around dispersing power. This is sometimes uncomfortable - the continual shenanigans of Winston Peters provide evidence enough of that - but it is better than the alternative.

Professors Stephen Levine and Nigel Roberts (VUW) spoke on "Future political challenges" [online next week sometime]. They looked at current proposals for another referendum as a repeat of the 1992 / 1993 process, and considered the options we had then. John Key has already said he does not want to return to FPP, and many of its supporters in 1992 (e.g. Jonathan Hunt) have subsequently admitted they were wrong. STV is ruled out by the unfortunate experiences with using it in DHB elections. PV is a minor cruft, nothing more. Which leaves SM ("sado-masochism"), the system which came last. They looked at the results of the 1996 - 2005 elections if they had been held under SM, assuming that parties would only get list seats if they gained 5% of the list vote (DPF has a similar exercise with slightly different assumptions here); their conclusion was that coalition would be rarer, but still necessary. 1999 and 2002 would have seen Labour majority governments, but 2005 would have been as tight as it was under MMP, with the Maori Party as kingmaker.

Instead of looking at such drastic solutions, they thought it might be worthwhile to consider what problems there might be with MMP. They identified five: the one-seat threshold (which produced the unfairness of NZ First being returned to Parliament with 5 MPs with fewer votes than the (unsuccessful) Christian Coalition gained in 1996), the different treatment of independents and minor parties, overhangs, closed lists, and dual candidacy (or rather, the dislike of the disparagingly-named "backdoor" or "zombie" MPs - those defeated in their electorates, but elected on the list) (I am surprised the threshold level was not on this list). They pointed out that these are all minor changes, and none really require a referendum to fix (though switching to open lists would require a 75% majority to comply with the Electoral Act's entrenchment clause, since it would change the method of voting). Referenda should be reserved for changing the system as a whole; for these sorts of minor changes, the government should use the normal legislative process, preferably with the widest cross-party support possible. Finally, they pointed out that in assessing changes, we should look back to the 1986 Royal Commission's criteria for judging voting systems. These are a clear statement of the issues, still relevant today, and give us strong reasons for preferring the current system.

Professor Jonathan Bradbury (Swansea University) spoke on MMP, Party Politics and Constitutional Change in the UK: the Experience of Scotland and Wales and Implications for UK Electoral Reform. While we think of the UK as still struggling with the unfairness of FPP, in fact they have embraced proportional representation at a regional level and in EU elections. Both Scotland and Wales use MMP (though with different numbers of list seats and regional lists), while Northern Ireland uses STV. A major driving force in this shift has been "Westminster as a negative template" - a desire to escape the problems of traditional FPP. But party political reasons have also played a role, and a far stronger one than in New Zealand. Scotland, for example, got MMP in an effort to prevent a future Scots Nationalist majority government capable of declaring independence; Wales' system is much less proportional in an effort to advantage the incumbent Welsh Labour Party. MMP has produced clear multi-party systems in all the areas it is used, with a shift to (generally) majority coalition government (though the current Scottish government is a minority coalition). And it has led to much greater diversity among representatives, and far more women in power. Finally, it has led to real competition among representatives to represent their constituencies (particularly in the area of constituency work). This has led to both Scotland and Wales cracking down on the ability of list representatives to do constituency work, with Wales even going so far as to ban dual candidacy in an effort to protect Labour MPs from competition in this area from their electoral competitors (something we in NZ would regard as undemocratic madness).

While these MMP governments are providing a good alternative model for how politics might work under PR, Westminster is still in the grip of the two-party duopoly, and there is no real appetite for reform from those in power. In 1999 the Jenkins Commission recommended that the UK adopt an MMP system with regional lists; despite the majority labour government having promised real electoral reform, it was ignored. But there is real disillusionment among the electorate with FPP, and it is now a straitjacket on an electorate which wants a much more diverse range of candidates (only 60% of voters support the 2 major parties now). Eventually, this pressure will force one party to act to avoid being seen to be standing in the way of change - but as in Scotland and Wales, their solution is likely to be driven more by selfish party political reasons than democratic principle.

Following Bradbury's paper, we had a short unscheduled presentation from Margaret Wilson, Speaker of the House and former Labour Party President. She supports MMP, and agreed with much of what had been said earlier. There is a big conceptual battle in electoral systems between majoritarianism and proportionality, but the majoritiarian solution - FPP - "certainly isn't participatory democracy". She saw some need for reform, and particularly supported the removal of the one-seat threshold, calling it a distortion on the electorate vote. As a former party president, she saw MMP as a gift - it allowed the internal debate within parties to be formalised and made public - "everyone gets their own party now". The party system can't always cope with the legitimate differences of members, but MMP put them up for election, making the result far more legitimate. I'm wishing I'd bugged her for an interview now and picked her brain, but at the time I couldn't think of much to ask...

After a short break, there was a panel discussion, with some of New Zealand's leading constitutional and legal experts (Sir Kenneth Keith; Mai Chen), Dr Thomas Lundberg from the University of Glasgow, and... DPF filling in for Chris Finlayson as he was attending a select committee meeting. It was a very interesting discussion, covering possible reforms (ditching the one-seat threshold was again popular), codification of government formation ("unnecessary"), corporate lobbying (Mai Chen: minority government equals leverage), and of course the Maori seats. Unfortunately its a bit much to summarise here.

MMP symposium: the evening

This evening I attended the New Zealand Centre for Public Law / Institute for Policy Studies / Birkbeck, University of London's Centre for New Zealand Studies' symposium on MMP and the Constitution: 15 years past; 15 years forward. Here's a rundown of the evening session. As usual, any errors are due to my poor memory and worse handwriting.

The evening session had the theme of "evaluating the New Zealand experience".

Dr Ryan Malone (Law Commission) spoke on the effect of MMP on the Parliamentary process [PDF]. Under FPP, Parliament was effectively in the grip of an executive dictatorship, with majority government and Cabinet collective responsibility combining to allow small cliques to utterly control the policy and legislative process by leveraging dominance of Cabinet to control caucus, and then the House. MMP has decisively undermined this. Proportional allocation of select committee memberships has meant that most committees are now far more independent than they used to be, while the need to build legislative majorities around each issue has meant that the government has much less control of its own legislation. On some occasions, legislation has been delayed while a committee subjects it to further scrutiny; on others, opposition parties have effectively built majorities of their own to force amendments to government bills at the committee stage. Hostility to urgency has meant the government can no longer rush things through. The upshot is fewer bills, passed with much more care and negotiation than before.

Associate Professor Andrew Geddis (University of Otago) gave a short talk on the effect of MMP on political parties [PDF]. He focused on changes to the legal framework governing parties, and concluded that while those changes had been significant, they were not tied to MMP, but rather a recognition of the growing importance of parties in our democracy.

Professor Jonathan Boston (VUW) spoke on the effect of MMP on the executive [PDF], focusing on the progressive shift towards looser forms of government as a response to the small parties' "unity-distinctiveness dilemma" (how to form an effective government while retaining your identity as a party). A key part of this has been the erosion of the doctrine of Cabinet collective responsibility in favour of the current "selective collective responsibility" seen in recent confidence and supply agreements. Our current arrangements, where parties have Ministers outside Cabinet who are bound by collective responsibility only within their portfolios, are apparently unique in the world; other countries have been able to manage governments under MMP without needing such loose arrangements (but then, they haven't had to contend with Winston Peters). But while unusual, these arrangements haven't undermined the effectiveness of the government, and have broad cross-party acceptance. It is likely they will continue well into the future.

After supper, there was a very interesting talk by Professor Andre Kaiser (University of Cologne) on MMP, Minority Governments and Parliamentary Opposition [PDF]. This sought to answer two questions: why has New Zealand tended towards minority government over the past decade, and what implications does it have for the Parliamentary opposition. New Zealand is an outlier again here, with most MMP systems producing majority coalitions due to vote-splitting and pre-election deals. But rather than being a feature of our electoral system, instead it seems to be a feature of our parties. Kaiser analysed the parties' positions (from their election manifestos) on economic and non-economic issues, finding on the former that most small parties were solidly on the left, while on the latter Labour was solidly in the middle, with potential partners to either side of it. This puts them in a superior bargaining position in coalition negotiations, while National seems constrained to working with ACT. More importantly, the large divisions among non-government parties limits coordination among "the opposition", resulting in a split between a powerless real opposition (National and ACT) and other parties who can wield real influence over policy and legislation and thus achieve some of their goals without ever being part of the government. This creates incentives for both sides to pursue such loose arrangements, and Kaiser thinks they will continue (though its worth noting that his dataset only goes up to 2002 and does not include United Future; his conclusion certainly reflects the 2002 arrangements where Labour could get its agenda through by finding a partner on the left or right as necessary, but I'm not sure that it looks so good with the current setup where majorities are hard to come by).

It's a fascinating paper, and well worth reading.

Finally, Associate professor Raymond Miller (from the "exotic location" of Auckland) dug into the New Zealand Election Study to examine the public's reaction to MMP and coalition government [PDF]. Lots of crunchy data in here about how attitudes vary with party affiliation, age, gender and ethnicity. Two key points I noticed: firstly, support for MMP is strongly correlated with age, with younger voters strongly favouring MMP and coalition government (though also with a high proportion of don't knows reflecting their lack of experience with any other system). By 2011, 36% of the electorate will have grown up under MMP and will be reluctant to change. Meanwhile, the elderly supporters of FPP will be dying off. So this really is National's last chance to turn back the clock on democracy and go back to the "good old days" of the elective dictatorship. Which in turn makes it vitally important to saddle them with a coalition partner who will veto any attempt. Secondly, divisions over MMP and coalition government reflect deeper divisions on the purpose of an electoral system and of government itself - whether it is supposed to elect a stable government which can "make tough decisions" (a traditional authoritarian position), or give us a government that keeps its promises and does what people want (a modern, democratic one). On that front, you'd hope that FPP proponents would be persuaded by the stability of our MMP governments - only one (1996) has had a messy coalition breakup, and only one (1999) has failed to go full term (though that was by choice rather than necessity). OTOH, given that its really all about the older generations refusal to accept change coupled with a naked play for electoral advantage, I'm not sure how much empirical evidence actually matters to them...

More to come tomorrow, assuming I can wake up for it.

Journalism Matters: Elsewhere

Finally, if anyone is interested, here's some links to other discussion of the Journalism Matters summit:

• Scoop has photos and audio from both Saturday and Sunday.
• David Robie of the Pacific Media Centrehas some thoughts here.
• Public Address's Keith Ng has his original piece about contextual advertising and editorial direction, and some followup thoughts on issues raised at the conference (which he didn't attend, being out of the country). The latter has sparked a good discussion on Public Address System, which has distracted me for much of the day.
• The Herald's Audrey Young blogs about it here. The Herald also has a piece on the summit's outcomes.
• Finally, Mediawatch said they'd be talking about it next week.

We now return to your regularly scheduled bloggage.

Journalism Matters: Outcomes

Over the weekend I attended the Journalism Matters conference in Wellington. The conference brought together journalists, academics, journalism educators and corporate representatives, and was organised by the EPMU to debate the state of New Zealand's news media and what can be done to improve it". Here's a rundown of the Sunday session.

Disclosure: I was invited to cover the conference by the EPMU.

Sunday morning had run over time, so the summit closed with a very rushed session on "possible solutions". This included some resolutions being passed, which I'll reproduce in full:

1. The EPMU will lead a review of journalism in NZ over the next 6 months, inviting public submissions on the effects of growing commercial pressures on journalism, journalists' pay rates and the resulting loss of talent to PR, freelance pay rates, union membership, public interest broadcasting and the growing pressure on journalists to serve multiple media at once.
2. The EPMU will also review the Journalists' Code of Ethics, available as Rule 42 of the EPMU rules at: http://www.epmu.org.nz/SITE_Default/about/rules/default.asp. Public submissions will be sought for this review too. The code needs to be updated to take account of new technology.
3. We want taxpayer funding of TVNZ to be increased to a level that allows it to be a true public service broadcaster.
4. We urge everyone concerned about democratic media to take every opportunity to create new media outlets committed to providing people with information about public issues in a coherent form, facilitating an exchange of ideas about those issues and building a sense of social cohesion as a foundation for social action.
5. We support the work of the Bruce Jesson Foundation and urge other funders to fund independent investigative journalism on important public issues.
6. We will establish a Movement for Democratic Media, with membership open to all NZers as well as the union, to create, support and link local websites and other media outlets reporting on public issues, and to campaign for publicly funded broadcasting.

The first of these is quite broad, and there was a lot of concern about whether it could do a proper job in only six months. But it might be useful in finding ways to avoid Alastair Thompson's doomsday scenario for print media. The fourth seems to be encouraging people to start blogs and generally just make some noise. The last was first suggested in Simon Collins' contribution to the commercial pressures forum as a means of

giv[ing] some coherence to all those bloggers and citizen journalists out there by encouraging a network of local news websites dedicated to public issue journalism... Any individual local news site, say in Wellington, would be lost in the vastness of the web, but if we could link it up with sites around the rest of the country, which share their best stories on a national news site, the combination could rival the commercial websites like Stuff and nzherald.co.nz.

But this seems to have morphed into a sort of advocacy group instead. Still, advocating for public broadcasting is important, and hopefully we'll see someone emerge to do it.

Journalism Matters: Sunday

Over the weekend I attended the Journalism Matters conference in Wellington. The conference brought together journalists, academics, journalism educators and corporate representatives, and was organised by the EPMU to debate the state of New Zealand's news media and what can be done to improve it". Here's a rundown of the Sunday session.

Disclosure: I was invited to cover the conference by the EPMU.

Sunday opened with a panel and open forum on public broadcasting. Peter Cavanagh (CEO of Radio NZ) began with a robust defence of the role of public broadcasting. Globalisation and changes in media ownership had undermined traditional media values, to the extent that the media no longer served the public good - rather, it was just another business with the primary aim of maximising short-term profit (a telling example of this was the unusual honesty in APN's Australian employment contracts, which stated that "the core business of the company is the soliciting and publishing of advertising"). Against this backdrop, Radio New Zealand is now the only major news organisation in New Zealand where output is not driven by commercial imperatives and with an obligation to serve the public good. Cavanagh saw RNZ's job as "nation building" and returning cultural, rather than financial, dividends. He also expressed some concern about increasing content-sharing among media organisations, which had resulted in shrinking diversity and too much news and information being traced back to too few sources.

TVNZ reporter Sharon Fergusson was next, but she began by saying that TVNZ forbade her from commenting to the media without permission from PR, and therefore her comments were off the record. They might be in the Scoop audio feed, though.

Margie Comrie talked about the unusual treatment of public broadcasting in New Zealand. Elsewhere in the world, public broadcasting is valued, and well funded. In New Zealand, it is not, and has historically been treated as a cash-cow by the government. TVNZ - the only public broadcaster in the western world which is expected to return a dividend - has been boxed into a corner by conflicting demands and looted for "special dividends" whenever the government needs cash. But Radio New Zealand shows that the non-commercial model works well; despite being run on a shoestring, it does serious news, and never resembles TV voyeurism. As a final comment, she noted the absence of New Zealand's newest public broadcaster, Maori TV, which has likewise done wonders on a small budget.

Finally, Nine To Noon host Kathryn Ryan started by admitting to being a heretic - she likes commercial media. But she thought that public sector broadcasting was essential to raise standards and provide the stuff the market wouldn't provide. Without it, and the competition of "real news" it provides, we'd see news values declining as commercial imperatives took over. Like her boss, she was also concerned about the decline in diversity in the face of syndication and sharing, and was also worried about the possible creation of a "digital ghetto" is content was moved online before there was an audience for it. Finally, she pointed out that the absence of commercial pressure at Radio New Zealand meant they were free to report on stories regardless of popularity, and could spend half an hour on an interview with someone if they thought it was important and/or interesting enough. As someone who pulls down content through their website, its a model I quite like.

Discussion focused on how public advocacy could support public broadcasting in New Zealand. Australia has the Friends of the ABC, but we have no equivalent organisation in New Zealand, and this has seen a constant erosion (particularly by National) of TVNZ's mandate. If we want it, we have to speak up for it. There was also an interesting point raised about the size of the NZ media market: some people argued that the media pie in NZ was really too small for public broadcasting, with the result that journalists often bought in to attacks on TVNZ because it was competition for their own livelihood. But Chris Warren turned this around, asking whether with such a small amount of advertising revenue we could really afford 3 fully commercial channels, let alone the 6 expected to happen under digital TV. If the market is that tight, then the case for a non-commercial TVNZ becomes stronger.

Next was a panel on what can be done? Freelancer Kim Griggs opened this by making a strong case for the restoration of journalists' reprographic rights, removed by Parliament in 1994 for no reason other than business asked them (typical New Zealand business move, trying to increase profits not by working harder, but by lobbying Parliament to screw their workers or customers). in Australia, these rights (the equivalent of authors getting 10 cents every time their book is taken out of the library) are worth thousands of dollars a year to journalists and are a valuable source of revenue. In New Zealand, it apparently all goes to NZPA. So, there's a challenge to NZ MPs: to bring a bill to restore those rights (Unfortunately, the VDIG Hansard has disappeared, so I can't look back and read the speeches, but I understand Labour opposed it, and Rick Barker spoke out against it).

Former City Voice editor Jeremy Rose talked about alternative ownership models and whether we can fight the McDonaldsisation of media by putting out quality boutique media. On the former, he argued that it was less a matter of foreign vs local ownership as ownership structures and the need to repay debt; this created pressure to cut costs, which in turn prevented media organisations from investing the time and resources required for serious investigative reporting. He floated some alternatives - a trust model, for example the Scott Trust which "owns" The Guardian for the sole purpose of ensuring that it remains a liberal voice; or the idea of "reader takeovers". The latter is an attractive model, and in NZ we already have some reader-owned media, in the form of Consumer and AA Directions. He also suggested that it might be worth unions and NGOs clubbing together and combining their PR budgets to support an independent newspaper to give them a voice.

Otago Daily Times editor Murray Kirkness gave a very interesting talk on the quirks of the ODT (headline today: ‘Regular bloke’ rewarded for being teetotally honest) and his experience in managing community newspapers for Allied Media (who own the ODT). many of these newspapers are simply not commercial propositions - he described his immense pride at seeing one paper which had never made a profit return a whole $800 to its owners - but were being run for social reasons (and in some cases anticompetitive ones). As editor of one of the few papers in NZ with a stable (rather thank shrinking) circulation (against a shrinking population, no less), he said outright that he wanted to reinvest in his journalists. So, maybe those underpaid APN reporters can go and live in Dunedin - it'll pay more and cost less.

Finally, Alastair Thompson of Scoop gave an excellent presentation on the future. And his prognosis for print journalism was basically "you're all doomed". Every major newspaper in NZ bar the ODT is conglomerate owned. Those conglomerates treat us the provinces (or the provinces of the provinces). They are not interested in resourcing NZ newspapers to do Good Journalism (any more than Fairfax NZ is interested in resourcing the Marlborough Express or APN the Christchurch Star); rather they will treat us as a cash-cow. And in a world where advertising revenue is shifting online, an area newspaper management is neither comfortable with nor competent in, that spells bad news. Newspapers are going to need to transition themselves to the new online world, but if they fail to transform, they are going to fail as companies. That aforementioned debt-burden makes this more likely, and Thompson thought that we may see anti-competitive behaviour, conglomerates buying up papers simply to close them down, as part of their death-spasm during the shakeout. This led to his most memorable line - that

we're dealing with deadly, dangerous and wounded corporations who are avaricious, venal and stupid

However, the net was also an opportunity, at least for some. He pointed out that in some areas, print media was still better than the net for classified advertising (small, geographic areas e.g. a suburb or small town), and that this provided a niche for profitable "micro-newspapers", with copy from Scoop, wire feeds, and a few journalists supported by local ads. It's an interesting vision, and it will be interesting to see whether it comes to pass.

Journalism Matters: Saturday Afternoon

Over the weekend I attended the Journalism Matters conference in Wellington. The conference brought together journalists, academics, journalism educators and corporate representatives, and was organised by the EPMU to debate the state of New Zealand's news media and what can be done to improve it". Here's a rundown of the Saturday afternoon session.

Disclosure: I was invited to cover the conference by the EPMU.

The first hour after lunch was occupied with a workshop on the morning sessions, with the conference splitting into three groups to discuss the issues raised. The group I ended up in focused on wages and conditions and the decline of journalism as a profession, which pretty much put me off any thoughts I may have had about pursuing journalism as a career. Here's some of the nasty facts:

• 20 years ago, a journalist could be hired out of high school on a salary of $32,000 plus overtime (or ~$40 K all up). Today, you generally need a degree or journalism qualification, and the starting salary at APN and the Herald is $28,000. Overtime disappeared with the Employment Contracts Act in 1991.
• Freelancers are even more poorly paid, with a maximum rate of around 40 cents a word. Some publications offer as little as 10 cents a word. It is estimated that they need to pay 85 cents a word for professional freelancers to earn a salary of $60,000.
• Salaries are tightly capped. After 10 years as a professional journalist, you might be making $40,000 a year. $60,000 seems to be the absolute upper limit.
• Wages at the Herald have failed to keep pace with inflation over the past 25 years.
• Because they are poorly unionised, journalists have no real way of fixing this.

As a result, the profession haemorrhages experienced staff, and has an enormous churn amongst the young journalists hired to replace them. As a profession, it's just not economically sustainable - just like nursing or teaching were until a few years ago.

(Apparently other workshops discussed the rise of citizen journalists and the expected future of the New Zealand media. They sounded a lot less depressing).

The workshop / bitch session was followed by a speech from Chris Warren, former president of the International Federation of Journalists, on the international perspective and consolidation of media ownership. Warren talked about a crisis in press freedom caused by the "war on terror", a crisis in safety as journalists struggle to cover it, and a crisis in the way journalists work as large media companies seek to increase profits by cutting costs and screwing their workers. He also discussed the changes in media ownership laws in Australia, which have seen ownership concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with a consequent loss of diversity of opinion. He also talked a little about how the internet was challenging newspapers, shrinking ad revenues while at the same time demanding more and more frequently updated content.

There were some interesting points made in the discussion about the different audiences for print and internet news. Apparently there's only a 20% overlap in readership between the two in Australia - so only 20% of people who read the Sydney Morning Herald will read it both in print and online. The online audience is quite different ("more downmarket"), and so you see quite different story selection and placement between the print and online editions. There was also some discussion of the role of strong unions in preserving journalists' pay and conditions in Australia - collective bargaining has delivered real wage increases of more than 25% since 1992. However, this is now under threat due to the Howard government's ECA-style "WorkChoices". Finally, it was pointed out that our new Evidence Act actually includes a presumption about the confidentiality of journalists' sources, which again runs counter to international trends.

Next was a panel discussion and forum on Journalistic Ethics. This was wide-ranging, with a fairly large number of speakers. Firstly, Tony Wilton (former secretary of the New Zealand Journalists Union) talked about how the EPMU actually has a journalist's code of ethics in its bylaws, and the struggle to get it recognised by employers (they were initially keen, apart from of course the clause about not allowing advertising of commercial considerations to influence things, but it all went out the window with the ECA in 1991). This was followed by the University of Canterbury’s Jim Tully asking "who is the journalist in the 21st century"? Journalism differs from other professions such as law or medicine in that it has been unable to close itself to outsiders. "Journalist" covers a broad range of people from employee-journalists to contractual journalists (freelancers) to citizen journalists (bloggers) to co-opted experts such as political or sports commentators. And all of these roles can overlap. The upshot is that it is impossible to "close" the profession, which in turn makes it impossible to enforce any professional code of ethics.

Freelance journalist Amanda Cropp was next, discussing the ethical problems posed by the PR industry. She cited a story on MediaWatch [audio] last week talking about the massive increase in government PR flacks, and how many freelance journalists do PR work as an extra way of making a living. She had some horror stories about freelancers who mixed their work and who seemed utterly blind to the ethical problems in, e.g. charging PR clients a "placement fee" for being mentioned in a story done under contract for a magazine, or writing press releases for the same people you report on. Not that some of the magazine editors were much better. This breakdown of barriers between PR and journalism poses a threat to journalists' credibility.

Finally, Dominion-Post reporter and Parliamentary press gallery chairperson Vernon Small gave an entertaining talk on "mapping the crossroads between new media and ethics" and where the profession was headed. Like Judy Macgregor before him, he was pretty scathing of the blogosphere, calling bloggers "biased and unfair" and saying that they were way out on the fringes of the media solar system. He pointed out that the convergence of text, audio and video content on the web posed new problems for regulators - traditional newspapers were now putting audio and video on their websites, and had in a sense "leaped the fence" while leaving their regulators behind. He questioned whether we should expect the same rules to apply to new media like the web or cable TV (characterised by being "pull" or "on demand") as older, "push" or broadcast mediums, but also claimed that if we had different rules, it would undermine the entire system. As for a solution, he took his pointers from the web and argued for "more speech, not less" - letting people decide for themselves, perhaps aided by some voluntary labelling scheme which would mark news stories as having been produced by "ethical journalism". Journalistic standards of fairness, accuracy and balance are journalists' point of difference.

There was some quite interesting discussion on this, including a strong debate on the merits of in-house vs. external codes of ethics, and some points about the isolation of freelancers from journalistic norms (50% of them have no journalism training; 50% have been working in the industry for less than 5 years). There was a very interesting question raised by a journalist from Auckland's Chinese Herald, who pointed out that there was a lot of misleading coverage of Asian New Zealanders in the media and that this led directly to racist attacks. He wanted to know why this was tolerated, and what he could say to his readers (and listeners, since he also ran a radio show) about what New Zealand journalists were going to do about it. He didn't get an answer, with the (almost entirely Pakeha) gathering distracting themselves into the safer topic of Debbie Gerbich instead.

The discussion also saw an explanation from Audrey Young on her John Key post (apparently, the title was added by her sub-editor). Young argued that "one of the best ways we can ensure journalistic standards in blogging is for more of us to do it". Vernon Small argued that the blogosphere's "rush to instant opinion" invited trouble in the form of errors born of swift judgement (something I'll ruefully admit to); he thought journalism had a requirement for considered opinion. Chris Warren chipped in with some very interesting points about blogging culture: the problem he thought isn't that bloggers are acting unethically as journalists - the problem is that blogging is fundamentally contemptuous of journalism. We've seen the development of a key communications technology which is fundamentally contemptuous of journalism, with that contempt being driven in part by a belief that journalists are not living up to their own standards. However, he also argued that journalists have "terrible glass jaws" and were perhaps excessively sensitive to criticisms from bloggers.

I was actually hoping to interview Vernon Small about his views on blogging (I think he's right, but I'm also interested in how he thinks we can improve what we're doing), but once I'd introduced myself he ignored me like I was shit on the bottom of his shoe. When I did manage to corner him, I was given the impression that I'd be able to interview him on the Sunday. Unfortunately he didn't show, so I didn't get the chance. Maybe I'll just have to politely bother him by email instead...

I'll have more on the Sunday sessions later.

Journalism Matters: Saturday Morning

This weekend I'm attending the Journalism Matters conference in Wellington. The conference brings together journalists, academics, journalism educators and corporate representatives, and was organised by the EPMU to debate the state of New Zealand's news media and what can be done to improve it". Here's a rundown of the first session. As usual, any errors are due to my poor memory and worse handwriting.

Disclosure: I was invited to cover the conference by the EPMU. I have no idea how much, if anything, it cost to attend.

Dr Judy Macgregor (former journalist and academic, now EEO Commissioner) was the first real speaker. She stole a slogan from Amnesty International and argued that journalists needed to Make Some Noise in defence of their profession and its role in the democratic system. She thought that journalism faced challenges from technology, demography, and the market. On the technology front, the internet now means that "every woman and her dog can say whatever they want without fear of repercussion" and had led to the rise of a "me-media", some of which "are not profitable, or even sensible". She saw this as a threat to the quality of published news. At the same time, there was also an ethical challenge from journalists with their own blogs. However, she thought that whatever the technology, the journalist's central skill of filtering and judging information was still needed.

Demographically, everyone talks about "disinterested youth" who don't read newspapers, but she pointed out that there is a mismatch between what a young audience wants and what is actually published. She asked whether an editorial board of young people would really reserve 2 pages of each paper for stock market news, 2 for racing, and publish only 10 letters to the editor (while telling another 50 that their points had been noted). The obvious answer is "no". Obviously, if the media want young people to pay attention, they need to do more to appeal to that audience, by publishing relevant information. She also felt that there was a problem with most journalists (and journalism students) being Pakeha, and that this unrepresentative composition had resulted in Maori news being bad news (in the sense that Maori seem to only be mentioned in the context of crime). The same also seems to be happening to Asian New Zealanders (who have even less journalistic representation than Maori), and Deborah Coddington's "Asian Angst" story got a particular mention here.

On the economic front, globalisation has seen an increase in cross-media ownership, foreign ownership, and homogenisation, but there are still plenty of outlets, and (in New Zealand) a broad diversity of political comment. She asked whether great journalism was compatible with good business in the context of the current media marketplace - and pointed to a study by the Aspen Institute which argued that it was, if it is supported by management. Finally, she capped it off with some sharp and pointy observations on our local political commentators.

This attracted a wide range of questions and comment (I have two pages of notes). The most interesting bits (to me) where her comments on the Audrey Young's blog post on John Key, and on blogs in general. On the former, she thought that journalists should not attack sources, and that such attacks endangered the continuing relationship between journalist and source necessary for newsgathering. Whereas I'd have thought that it was a good way of keeping sources honest (OTOH, Young's personalisation of the issue was a bit misleading; the problem wasn't so much that Key lied to her, but that he had tried to lie to the New Zealand public and expected a journalist to be complicit in this). On blogs in general, MacGregor was highly critical, saying that "much of common blogging isn't terribly thoughtful" and that there was a need for a debate on citizens as journalists before the next election (more on this later).

The other event of the morning was a panel discussion and open forum on "commercial pressures on journalism". This was conducted under Chatham House rules, meaning that while I'm free to use the information received, I can't attribute it. There were some interesting points to come out of this. Firstly, commercial pressures were a worldwide problem, caused by the pressure on media companies (from shareholders, and increasingly the need to make the interest payments on highly leveraged buyouts). This led to pressure to cut costs, and the easiest way of doing this was to use fewer journalists, resulting in poorer news quality. It also led to pressure to outsource functions like subediting, and to shifts to fluffier "lifestyle" content in an effort to increase advertising revenue. Declining revenues as classified advertising shifted to internet sites like TradeMe was likely to increase this pressure; it would also make large advertisers more powerful and give them greater ability to dictate content. against this, it was pointed out that there have always been commercial pressures driven by media companies' need to return a profit (but, I think, not such a threat to their revenue base).

A second theme (which was repeated often during the day) was journalists' wages and conditions. These seem to be poor (more on this later as well), with one journalist commenting that they earned more as a waitress than from their profession. Others noted that there was no shortage of journalists; instead there was a shortage of jobs that paid well enough. As a result, the industry had problems retaining experienced people (many are forced into PR work by financial considerations), and so on one major media website inexperienced journalists were doing everything themselves, with no review and no checks and balances. This was seen as affecting news quality.

Finally, someone asked a question similar to that asked by Keith Ng: are website hit rates influencing story selection? One editor answered "not really", while a major Sunday newspaper admitted being "quite driven by that stuff" and that they closely watch what gets page views on their web-site all week and that this did influence stories. It also emerged that talkback radio closely monitored their topics, and had concluded that while their nighttime crowd are mad, daytime callers are actually fairly sane.

Lunch was fairly boring, and I have to admit to not being very impressed by the Parliamentary caterers. I'd have thought our MPs demanded bette

I'll do the afternoon session later in another post.

More on the election funding symposium

DPF has his thoughts on last week's election funding symposium here. One thing he points out (which I didn't really touch on) is that there are some areas where is strong cross-party agreement:

• Banning anonymous and trust donations (over the disclosable level)
• Higher penalties for breaches of the Electoral Act
• Having parties as well as individuals liable under the law
• Increasing the cap for electorate candidates
• Having the broadcasting limit incorporated into the overall spending limit
• Simplifying the number of agencies involved with elections and complaints
• Better transparency on third party campaigns

From discussions here and at the symposium, even I think there's a strong case for raising the candidate limit and introducing some fairness into the broadcasting regime (which currently seems designed to hobble smaller parties). And hopefully we'll see some action from Parliament in those areas.

There are also areas of disagreement as well, but I disagree with DPF about some of them. From my reading, there seem to be strong Parliamentary majorities (meaning everyone bar National and ACT) for significantly lower donation limits, extending the spending cap, and limits to prevent circumvention by third parties. There's some quibbling over the details - should third parties be allowed $60,000 or $150,000? - but the basic agreement is there and I have no doubt that something will be able to be worked out. The only stuff there seems to be real disagreement on (as in disagreement over ends rather than means) is public funding and consultation.

Electoral funding symposium: the party hacks

On Friday I attended the Transparency International / VUW Institute of Policy Studies symposium on The Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns. I've already blogged about the morning session, from political scientists, here.

The afternoon session was turned over to representatives of political parties. Unlike the morning, which was informative and interesting, it was mostly a disappointing exercise in partisan political hackery, in which politicians and party officials spouted their talking points for the (absent) media with little effort to engage in the debate. The effect was more akin to intellectual spam than a two-way conversation - something made quite obvious by National Party president Judy Kirk spamming herself across the room during the lunch break - and IMHO they contributed little to the overall event.

Steven Joyce (former National party General Manager) basically defended the status quo. While claiming that he wanted to see anonymous donations curbed, he then defended the current $10,000 disclosure threshold as perfectly reasonable, and opposed any attempt to lower it. He called the Coalition for Open Government's suggested $500 threshold a "ridiculously low" level of support - which I think says more about his utter disconnection from the vast majority of voters (to whom $500 is a substantial amount of money) than anything else. On state funding he was simply self-contradictory - he first said that funding should mirror public support and pooh-poohed the idea of equal funding as implying that all parties were of equal merit, then complained about the current broadcasting allocation rules because they mirrored public support (in particular, National's lack of public support at the 2002 election). When later called on this during the questions, he suggested that the problem was that the broadcasting allocation looked at historical levels of support rather than current polling - but its hard to imagine him not screaming bloody murder if National had been given funding consistent with its dismal polling in 2002. Amidst all the hackery, he did make one interesting point: that he thought the next election would be fought in cyberspace, via YouTube and email campaigns. This style of campaigning is more or less free, meaning that it would be uncontrolled under current laws (and that's without even getting into the jurisdictional issues).

Richard Northey (former Labour MP) gave a presentation so boring it almost put me (and much of the audience) to sleep. This may have been intentional, as somewhere in there he advocated getting NZPost to run elections, on the basis of the excellent work done by the Electoral Enrolment Centre (somehow, outsourcing a vital democratic function to corporate control, even if the corporation is state-owned, doesn't seem like a good idea to me). He also dropped the bombshell that an "anonymous" donation was one where a businessman handed you a large check and said "I'm anonymous" (the Electoral Act disagrees). But he also made some interesting points about the duration of spending caps. Back in 1984, when he was running for Parliament, the then $5,000 limit paid for everything a candidate might need - hoardings, newspaper ads, flyers, direct mail, a voter tracking system, and the drinks to celebrate / drown your sorrows afterwards. Now, the $20,000 candidate limit may not, particularly in large rural electorates with five seperate nespapers. If you had raised more money, then you would spend it before the three month limit, on preparing the ground - something we are seeing more and more of in recent elections. His conclusion was that a three-month limit was more suited to an era when there were "short, sharp" election campaigns, rather than the modern age of the "permanent campaign".

Doug Woolerton (NZ First MP) laid out his party's position - support for greater disclosure, opposition to state funding - and noted particularly that the candidate spending rules needed to be clarified as soon as possible in the wake of the High Court ruling in the Peters-Clarkson electoral petition. He also whined that the Auditor-General's report into parliamentary spending meant that Parliamentary Services was "paralysed" and was refusing to sign cheques for advertising any more - a comment which generated the only media coverage of the symposium.

Dr Russel Norman (Green co-leader) presented his party's position, which is generally similar to that of the Coalition for Open Government. He was also enthusiastic about the idea of getting a Citizen's Jury to resolve the long-term shape of our electoral funding regime.

Dr Whatarangi Winiata (Maori Party President) gave a long-winded and tangled speech which lost the audience even more thoroughly than Richard Northey. He displayed a basic ignorance of the legal framework which wasn't exactly encouraging. If it was supposed to illuminate where the Maori Party stood, it failed utterly.

Murray Smith (United Future VP) gave a broad speech, focusing more on his party's view of the general principles which should underpin the law, rather than specific policies. However, he did reveal a few: he supported imposing a spending cap of $100,000 on third-party campaigns, and opposed distortions in the funding regime which favoured larger parties over smaller ones (for example, the broadcasting funding regime, which not only gives larger parties more, but also handicaps small parties by forbidding them from spending as much as the larger ones). He also suggested allowing greater discretion in the use of broadcasting funds - for example, allowing parties to spend them on newspaper advertising rather than solely on TV or radio.

Gary Mallett (ACT) expressed his disappointment that we were even having a debate on the topic, and gave an absolutist rant about freedom of speech. This was neatly countered by Therese Arseneau in the questions, where she pointed out that freedom of speech around elections must be tempered by the principles of political equality and popular control - values ACT does not give a rat's arse about.

Judy Kirk (National Party President) echoed the National party's talking points, declared that we needed a "permissive regime" around donations, and opposed extending the spending limits to cover the whole of election year (translation: she has a pot of money and she wants to use it). She also argued that the penalties for breaching the law were too low, and supported smaller parties getting a larger share of broadcasting funding.

Mike Williams (Labour Party president) reeled off the Labour talking points, which were pretty much what has been leaked so far. Nothing new there either.

One interesting point emerged from the subsequent floor discussion. Right-wing parties expressed strong concerns about the politicisation of the funding rules, and clearly feared that the new regime would explicitly set out to disadvantage them. However, they were also united in their rejection of a citizen's jury - a democratic mechanism which would remove the potential for politicisation by putting the decision where it belongs: in the hands of the people. You could see this as ignorant - some of those parties were utterly clueless about what a citizen's jury would involve - or as merely stupid. Or you could see it as very revealing: the right may hate and fear the left, but at the end of the day they're still politicians and can be bargained with and bought off. Whereas real democratic control might actually result in some real change...

Climate change symposium: the afternoon I

Last Friday I attended the one-day Climate Change: the Policy Challenges Symposium in Wellington. Where the morning session focused mainly on the international context, the afternoon dealt specifically with domestic policy:

Dr Bert Metz (IPCC / Netherlands Environmental Agency) spoke on "How to avoid more than two degrees of warming?" The EU has adopted a target (based on the UNFCCC's objective of avoiding "dangerous" anthropogenic climate change) of limiting climate change to a 2 degree increase in average global temperature. Unfortunately its difficult to tell how much CO₂ this allows us to emit; the best guess is that to have an even chance of staying within the target, the global concentration of greenhouse gases needs to be limited to around 450 ppm CO₂-equivalent (or 400 ppm of CO₂). But the CO₂ concentration is at 380 ppm now, so this will be a very challenging target. Achieving it will require around a 50% reduction in emissions by 2050, and 70% or more by 2100 (figures relative to today; the cuts are deeper compared with the "business as usual" baseline). That looks insurmountable, but there are plenty of reduction options available, and a fair amount of choice in how we achieve it. However, the core of any lower-emissions pathway is likely to involve massive changes in the global energy system, with vastly reduced use of oil and coal and corresponding increases in biofuels and nuclear or renewable energy (note that all of these options exist now, so its not as if we can't do anything about it). There's also the interesting possibility of linking carbon capture and sequestration technology (if developed and commercialised) to biofuel generation to effectively suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere and start reversing the damage we have caused; this has the potential to significantly lower both the cost of abatement and the risk of dangerous temperature rise.

The next section, on "Policy Issues and Options", consisted of four short talks by people involved in one way or another with the policy community.

Phil Gurnsey (Ministry for the Environment) is the man currently responsible for climate change policy. His talk on "The Policy Landscape" covered the enormous shift we have seen in international opinion in the last few year, the growing global consensus that we actually have to do something about the problem, and the driving forces behind New Zealand policy. As a public servant, he couldn't really say much, but he did highlight some of the upcoming policy announcements and suggested in a roundabout way that the government was looking at a gradual introduction of emissions trading.

Murray Ward, Gurnsey's predecessor between 1996 and 2002 (and thus the man responsible for both the 1999 emissions trading scheme and the now-discarded carbon tax) talked about "An Integrated Approach". He pointed out that from the 1st of January 2008 - a little over a year away - New Zealand would be fully exposed to the international cost of carbon, and that every ton of CO₂-equivalent emitted that could otherwise have been avoided will cost the taxpayer between $20 - 40. He argued strongly that this cost needs to be reflected in the domestic cost of energy, and that an effective response to climate change was impossible unless this occurred (mostly because we would repeat the same mistake we made between 1997 and today: allowing major new capital investments to occur in the energy sector which will burden us with costs for years to come - e.g. Marsden B). However, he also noted that this raised some equity considerations, which suggested a need for both a separate track for "competitiveness at risk" firms which could not pass on their costs, and "smart revenue recycling" to compensate and assist groups that are disproportionately affected. Having established the general bases, he proposed... a quick and dirty energy-sector emissions trading system, using Kyoto Assigned Amount Units so that it was fully interfaced with the international market. The government would auction an appropriate amount of AAU, while requiring the energy sector to provide it with AAU to cover their emissions, and the market would handle the rest. The revenue from the auction - estimated at $1.5 billion over 5 years - would be recycled into research, further emissions reduction (planting trees), providing information, training and capital to assist with energy efficiency, and helping those significantly disadvantaged (primarily by aiming to lower their energy bills through e.g. installing insulation), as well as a "carbon fund" to help pay for future impacts of climate change (floods and droughts). The emissions trading regime would be supplemented by a projects mechanism similar to the existing one, in order to spread the opportunity cost of emissions across the economy.

This is a good policy, particularly with the emphasis on revenue recycling. One of the failures of the carbon tax was that it was able to be presented as a tax grab by the opposition - with some justification as the money went into the consolidated fund rather than being tagged for any purpose (Treasury hates tagged revenue). And while the government proposed some recycling, it was never made explicit and in any case was not into the right areas (better depreciation rates to encourage capital upgrades rather than explicitly seeking environmental double dividends). Making it clear that any revenue will go straight back into helping solve the problem - and into helping those specifically disadvantaged by it - would do a lot to build public support and reduce opposition.

Peter Neilson (Business Council for Sustainable Development) spoke on "Price-Based Mechanisms". He made the by-now standard argument that we need a price on emissions to shift investment patterns away from carbon-intensive technologies and towards lower-carbon ones. The carbon tax was one attempt at this, but it failed because "the case for doing something about climate change was not widely appreciated" (whereas it is now), it exempted agriculture (our biggest emitter), and was seen as a revenue grab (see above). Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be revived, as too many parties are now on record as opposing it. Instead, we are now likely to see an emissions trading scheme. Neilson's contribution to this was to suggest grandparenting for "competitiveness at risk" firms, and using that promise to demand firms start monitoring their emissions now in the hope that it might get them to notice their activities. He was also strongly in favour of linking any system directly to the international market, on the basis that Kyoto (and whatever succeeds it) isn't just about lowering New Zealand's emissions, but also about New Zealand doing its share to lower global emissions.

Dr Charlotte Severne (NIWA) spoke on "The M?ori Economy". This is based heavily on primary production - farming, fishing, and forestry - and so will be heavily affected by climate change. At the same time, Maori organisations have a lower ability to plan for and respond to climate change, both because of less access to capital, and lack of capacity. But despite facing a higher burden, Maori have not generally been included in the process of formulating climate change policy. As she pointed out, those attending the symposium were overwhelmingly Pakeha.

That's the crunchy bit; I'll do the rest of the afternoon in another post. In the meantime, the presentations from the symposium are now online here, and they're well worth checking out.

United Future and climate change

I've been playing phone tag for the last day with United Future, trying to get some comment out of them on National's abrubt about-face on climate change and their support for a limited emissions trading regime. Unfortunately, United Future doesn't have anything to say yet. However, they are putting together "a comprehensive response" which will be out in a couple of days. Watch this space, I guess.

Meanwhile, the government's reaction to National's new desire to reduce emissions may become clearer in Question Time today:

NANDOR TANCZOS to the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues: Does he stand by his statement that “There is a growing sense of urgency among governments … that action needs to be taken now” on climate change; if so, why won’t the Government consider putting in place price-based measures across the economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before 2012?

It will be interesting to see what their answer will be.

Climate change symposium: the morning

On Friday I attended the Climate Change: the Policy Challenges Symposium in Wellington. The symposium was organised by VUW's Institute of Policy Studies as a followup to the Climate Change and Governance Conference earlier in the year, and brought together by New Zealand and international speakers to discuss specifically policy rather than the broader questions discussed at the earlier event. I've already covered the keynote speeches of David Parker and Nick Smith, but here's a rundown of the rest of the morning session:

Professor Jonathan Boston (VUW) opened the symposium, highlighting some of the recent evidence of climate change and lamenting the fact that most of it went unreported in the New Zealand media. As a result, the debate in New Zealand is still stuck on whether climate change is happening, where most of the rest of the world has moved on to what we are going to do about it. He also noted the scale of the problem we face: to avoid a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels (now widely accepted as the threshold for "dangerous" levels of anthropogenic climate change under the UNFCCC), we need to stabilize equivalent CO₂ concentrations at no more than 450 parts per million (which means about 400 ppm of CO₂). But we're already at 385 ppm CO₂, and around 420ppm CO₂-equivalent. If we are to avoid breaching that cap, developed countries will need to reduce emissions by between 70% and 90% by 2050 - and more the longer we delay.

Professor Michael Grubb (Chief Economist, The Carbon Trust) gave a good, chunky presentation on "climate change solutions in theory and practice: national and international dimensions". The first part of the talk looked at the general analytic framework of climate change policy, which recommends some combination of energy efficiency, economic instruments, and technology as a solution. Unsurprisingly he concluded that each has its own strengths for targeting particular sources of emissions, and that all three were needed for comprehensive policy.

The Carbon Trust has done a lot of work on mapping sources of emissions by sector in an effort to work out the coverage of current policy and where future policy should best be targeted. One of their interesting results (from this report [PDF] is presented below:

This tracks UK business emissions by sector, their source, and the number of entities in that group; total emissions are represented by area. It is immediately apparent that the orange parts of the graph - representing emissions from buildings (either direct heating from coal and gas, or electrical load for heating, lighting, computers etc) make up a large portion of emissions. But policy is primarily targeted at the blue bits, and primarily in the large energy-intensive industries sector via the European Emissions Trading Scheme. The large proportion of emissions from buildings is only weakly targeted, and so potential for reduction is unrealised, despite the fact that huge gains (at least 15%) are cost-effective. One of the Carbon Trust's jobs is to find ways of realising this potential, and to break down the barriers to uptake (which mostly seem to be systematic and behavioural rather than economic).

He then moved on to discuss the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) - an emissions market covering 46% of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions. He noted that there have been major problems with overallocation, which have affected pricing, and that "grandparenting" of permits in the electricity sector had resulted in their making windfall profits which had undermined confidence in the scheme (the price of electricity went up to reflect the added cost of carbon, but generators had been given the permits for free, so they collected the increased price and laughed all the way to the bank). Effectively the ETS had turned into a massive rent-grab as governments and industries fought over who would capture the revenue from carbon prices. Grubb was fairly sanguine about this - its what politics is all about, after all - but at the same time clearly hoped that some of that rent-stream could be put to use by governments to push the technological innovation needed to move towards a lower-carbon future.

Grubb will be speaking again on the same topic on the 18th at the School of Government in Wellington, if anyone is interested. Details here.

Dr Steve Hatfield-Dodds (CSIRO) spoke on "building climate policy momentum through improving incentive alignment". His key idea was that "economic culture" (of which he is highly critical) impedes a public policy response, and encourages three misconceptions about dealing with climate change: that it will require lower living standards; that it will result in increased energy prices, and less affordable electricity, and therefore "hurt the poor"; and that delaying action can reduce costs. On the first misconception, he expanded on the talk he gave last time, arguing that economic growth and living standards will continue to increase even with extremely harsh climate change policy, and that the difference it makes is that it will take 52 years rather than 50 for incomes to double. He also rehashed previous material about the asymmetry between willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept, and added some empirical data (reported (badly) here) showing that framing policy in terms of costs rather than "you'll simply benefit less" results in a 15% reduction in support.

On the second misconception, he presented modelling results from ABARE (the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics) showing that while energy prices will rise, they will still rise much slower than incomes, meaning that affordability does not decline. He also pointed out that there is significant potential for revenue recycling - and conversely, that insulating sectors of the economy against the full cost of their emissions costs us all.

On the merits of delayed action, there is a strong and reasonable presumption that technology costs will decline over time. But Hatfield-Dodds points out that the argument for delayed action rests on a hidden assumption that timing doesn't matter, and that differences in emissions pathways doesn't materially affect the outcome. This is something climate scientists are not at all sure about, and its not something we can afford to be wrong about. Risk management suggests therefore that we should act early rather than later, on the grounds that this will both ensure that that technology does arrive (something economists just blithely ignore), and that we don't commit to shooting ourselves in the foot.

Finally, he talked a little about the international situation and the problems it presents. Under the "Kyoto model" of constrained and unconstrained emissions zones (i.e. "Annex I" and "non-Annex I" countries), "leakage" is a problem, in that emitters can escape the cost of policy by moving to the unconstrained zone. But a commitment by key players such as China and India that they will move to constrain emissions at some stage in the future (even if they don't say exactly when) will effectively plug that leak. Getting such a commitment (or ideally a timeframe or criteria for key non-Annex I parties such as China, India and Brazil to move towards Annex I) should be a key goal of current negotiations on a post-Kyoto regime.

Dr Tim Denne (Covec Consultency) spoke on "achieving emission reductions at least cost: international lessons for the New Zealand context". He began by pointing out the bleak facts about our continued growth in emissions, and looking at some overseas success stories of emissions reduction. Germany had reduced their emissions by reducing the use of lignite and by the post-unification collapse of the East German economy. Luxembourg had shifted its industries from using coal to using imported electricity, effectively exporting its emissions to other countries in the EU. The UK had been highly successful switching from coal to gas, while France had increased its reliance on nuclear power and reduced agricultural emissions by reducing cattle numbers (though this seems to be primarily due to reduced subsidies rather than any effect of climate change policy). Transport emissions had increased in every country, primarily due to increased demand. The lesson here is that the most significant reductions seem to come from fuel switching, while agricultural and transport emissions seem very difficult to reduce unless you are willing to shoot cows and throw them in a ditch (or, less wastefully, eat them). Unfortunately, there is only limited scope for fuel switching in New Zealand (and due to limited gas supplies, we seem to be going the other way at the moment), while our geography and the fact that we are an agricultural nation compounds the problems for transport and agriculture. This means that we are going to have to rely on emissions trading (buying reductions elsewhere) rather than being able to reduce emissions domestically.

A key question posed was "should transport and agriculture pay?" Denne thought they should, as even a modest charge encourages emitters to look around for solutions. It also avoids any question of subsidising output (an issue we may face over the government's decision to cover agricultural emissions - an enormous environmental subsidy and wealth transfer to farmers). So fundamentally a "fart tax" or agricultural emissions levy is a good instrument. He echoed Steve Hatfield-Dodds in arguing that insulating some sectors costs us all, and presented some figures comparing the cost of agricultural emissions with the cost of a 1% shift in various tax brackets. By my BOTE calculations, the cost of covering the emissions from farmer's sacred cows would handily pay for a 3% cut in the business and middle personal tax rates. Maybe we should all remember that next time they drive a tractor up Parliament's steps demanding that we subsidise their pollution...

More controversially, Denne raised the possibility of economic collapse (a term deliberately chosen to be provocative). Why not kill Huntly, or shut down polluting industries? Leakage is clearly an issue, as are social impacts such as unemployment - but the risk posed by the former seems to be overstated when you consider that the places emissions might leak to will be part of the system eventually, meaning that leakers probably won't be escaping the cost of emissions after all. Social impacts are an issue, but he didn't think the concept should be dismissed so readily (and as an obvious point, the savings from reduced emissions could be used to compensate the losers).

Finally, Denne stressed the need for all emitters to face the international cost of carbon in the long run, and that we need to get a price signal working before 2012 if we are to avoid regrets with long-lived infrastructure (such as power stations and housing). Unfortunately I'm not sure that the government is heading in the right direction on this...

I'll do the afternoon session in another post.

Climate change symposium: stealing a march

Today I attended the Climate Change: the Policy Challenges Symposium in Wellington. I'll post on the wonkery later, but in this one I'll do the highlights: David Parker and Nick Smith.

Climate Change Minister David Parker was the first speaker, having had his talk on The way forward on climate change moved forward by six hours to pre-empt National's policy announcement later in the day. Unfortunately, the timing didn't hide the fact that it was absolutely underwhelming. I'd been expecting Parker to make use of the excellent platform provided by the policy symposium to announce some policy of his own. Instead, in keeping with the government's (too) cautious post-carbon tax approach, he "announced" a list of "strategic principles" so obvious as to be practically banal:

1. Recognising that while action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have moderate costs, the predicted costs and risks of inaction are unacceptably high
2. Recognising that effective international action is needed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, New Zealand should help by reducing its own emissions, and by encouraging other countries to act.
3. Recognising that New Zealand's response should maximise the economic advantages of using energy and resources more efficiently.
4. Agreeing that our response should start with the most easily-achieved and least-cost solutions.
5. Agreeing that a combination of sectoral and economy-wide measures, including voluntary, price-based and regulatory measures, is likely to be needed, and
6. Agreeing that all sectors of the economy should play an equitable part in the nation's response to climate change, reflecting the fact that some sectors are able to achieve emissions reductions more easily than others. It's important to consider there are sectors in which there are few low-emissions technologies available at reasonable cost.

Or, in English, "we should do something, and it should be cheap and practical". This is the sort of thing Cabinet agrees at the earliest stages of the policy development process, before it starts looking at actual policy (or even options for actual policy). And if this is where the government is at the moment, then we're pretty much back where we were in early 2000 (and early 1998, and early 1992). In other words, nowhere.

Actually, that's not quite fair on Parker. The government does have policies(the biofuels obligation, for example), and they are clearly headed in the right direction (albeit slowly). But what they mostly have at the moment is a lot of fiddling around the edges, with little in the way of core policy to produce emissions reduction or sink absorption. It is a sign of the emptiness at the heart of government policy that a) they're forced to refer to a "12-page list of government initiatives already underway" (attached here) in the hope that the public will accept "quantity over quality"; and b) the most important announcement Parker could make today was the establishment of a "Climate Change Advisory Panel".

Which brings me to National's Nick Smith. Where Parker was tepid and underwhelming, Smith was the opposite. The National Party has had its conversion on the road to Kyoto, and they want everyone to know it. Quite apart from their credibility problem, the chutzpah is astounding. Having spent the last six years trying to deny the reality of climate change, they now admit that the case is strong, "[the] uncertainties are not an excuse for doing nothing", and that the risks must be managed. Having railed against Labour's decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, they now support participation because it is the only way to get larger countries to act. And having done everything possible to undermine the carbon tax and "fart" tax (including driving a tractor up the steps of Parliament), they are now criticising the government for abandoning those policies. About the only thing missing was the statement that Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

As for their policy, its a marvellous piece of political ju-jitsu. The ultimate destination of government policy has been fairly clear for the last six months or so: some form of limited carbon tax or pilot emissions trading scheme applying to the energy sector and possibly large industrial emitters as a precursor to full emissions trading post 2012; vehicle fuel efficiency standards or a "feebate" scheme, a biofuels obligation, a backdown on the disastrous deforestation cap, and more agricultural R&D. So, National has basically stolen those policies - and a march on the government - announcing support for energy-sector emissions trading "immediately", a feebate scheme to boost vehicle efficiency, biofuels, an end to the deforestation cap, and more agricultural R&D. About the only point of difference is that National favours gutting the RMA "to promote renewable energy". And now they're "hop[ing] the government will steal their ideas".

So now it seems that we have a convergence of climate change policy between the two main parties. Unfortunately, this means that action is probably even further away than ever. Quite apart from the fact that Labour will probably shift its policies to try and create a point of difference with National (throwing their careful process of policy development into disarray), there's also the fact that real action on climate change seems to be a line in the sand for Peter Dunne, while Winston opposes any policy which might raise electricity prices for pensioners. So even if Labour wanted to call National's bluff and use their announcement to put a limited cap and trade regime in place before the start of CP1, they probably couldn't. Which is, I suspect, National's point.