More privilege problems for Labour

This afternoon Parliament will debate the report of the (powerful) Privileges Committee on Education Minister Jan Tinetti's misleading the House. But it looks like another (former) Minister is in trouble as well: Parliament's Registrar of Pecuniary Interests has reported back on their inquiry into Michael Wood, finding that Wood had not complied with his responsibilities. Along the way, the Registrar also found that Wood had lied to the public about his compliance:

Noting that his pecuniary interests had been the focus of intense media scrutiny and comment, I then showed Mr Wood a video clip of an interview he gave on 8 June 2023, the day the inquiry was announced. Apart from expressing the hope that “clarity and transparency” would emerge from the inquiry, Mr Wood had stated that “I have also followed up and corrected the Register of Pecuniary Interests going back to 2017”. I put it to Mr Wood that that statement was not correct, as there had been no amendments made at all to his previous returns, for the entire period since February 2017. What did he mean by that comment to the media? He replied that he “must have misspoken in the heat of the press scrum”. He thought he might have mixed up the Standing Orders and Cabinet Office requirements.

Wood does not look at all good from this. Its one thing to make a careless mistake, front up, and fix it. Its quite another to refuse to fix it, despite constant reminders, for two years, then lie to the public about what you're doing. Voters in his electorate can draw their own conclusions about his honesty and fitness for office.

Wood's case will now be considered by the (powerful) Privileges Committee. Of course, given that Labour has four of the eight places on the committee, and will effectively be judging one of its own, I don't think the public can expect any justice from them. The problem of course is that if Labour gives Wood the proverbial (powerful) slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket, it makes the entire pecuniary interests declaration system pointless, with a consequent impact on Parliament's credibility.

Good riddance to feckless rubbish

Three weeks ago Transport Minister Michael Wood was stood down after failing to properly declare a conflict of interest. Today, he's finally resigned:

Suspended transport minister Michael Wood has resigned as a Cabinet minister, after it was revealed his family trust held shares in Chorus, Spark, and the National Australia Bank that he did not declare.

Wood had made or been involved in decisions relevant to the sectors in which he held these undeclared shareholdings. The minister had already been under scrutiny for not declaring a conflict of interest related to his shareholding in Auckland Airport while working as transport minister.

"I have not managed this effectively, I take responsibility for it, and as such have submitted my resignation to the prime minister. I apologise to him and the public for this situation,” Wood said.

And good riddance to him. Wood's "explanation" for his failure to divest his Auckland airport shares despite years of reminders was always unconvincing, and "discovering" further undeclared conflicts makes it even less so. At best, he's simply too feckless to hold any position of public trust. And it certainly makes him seem completely out-of-touch with normal people, who know what they own and don't use secret trusts to try and hide their assets. But then, normal people would also check for further problems the first or second time they were told to divest, not the thirteenth. By failing to do so, he's not only ended his political career, but also invited judicial review of every decision he's made affecting the relevant companies or their competitors.

Apparently there will be much more intense scrutiny of cabinet conflicts of interest as a result of this, and the Prime Minister is considering a full ban on shareholdings by Ministers. Good. But note what's missing from the new regime: transparency. At present conflict of interest information is guarded closely by DPMC, with only an infrequently released public summary which carefully removes any actual details. Which isn't good enough. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If we want to be able to be sure Ministers are not behaving corruptly, and are managing their conflicts appropriately, then the secrecy over what they have declared and when steps are taken to remove them from decisions must end.

Deliberate non-compliance

Yesterday Transport Minister Michael Wood was stood down after failing to properly declare a conflict of interest - namely his continued ownership of Auckland Airport shares while transport minister. Chris Hipkins and his Labour cronies tried to pass this off as Wood simply being forgetful, but this was somewhat undercut by the admission that the Cabinet Office had told him to sell the shares "around half a dozen" times, and each time received an assurance that he was doing it. That's enough to cast serious doubts on Wood's honesty, but it turns out that its actually worse than that: in question time today Hipkins admitted that Cabinet Office had told Wood to sell a full dozen times since the 2020 election, receiving an assurance each time.

Having to be reminded once, or maybe even twice, could be regarded as just a mistake, a matter of things getting away on a busy person. Being reminded a dozen times makes it look less like forgetfulness and more like deliberate non-compliance. And those assurances look less like the hurried "yeah, yeah, I'll get round to it", and more like outright lies.

The rules in the Cabinet Manual are clear: Ministers must behave in a way that upholds, and is seen to uphold, the highest ethical and behavioural standards. They must declare their conflicts and have them managed. Wood hasn't just fallen below that standard - he appears to be deliberately flouting it. Its not enough anymore to stand him down from his transport portfolio - he has shown that he simply cannot be trusted. He must be removed as a Minister, and never allowed to sit in Cabinet again.

Another trust problem

Today transport Minister Michael Wood was stood down after failing to properly declare a conflict of interest. He'd bought shares in Auckland airport "as a teenager", hidden them in a trust when he became an MP, and failed to declare them for seven years, for three of which he was Transport Minister. While the amount of money involved - $13,000 - is small compared to his $296,007 plus slush annual salary - it is far below the standard of conduct we expect from MPs, let alone Ministers. As I noted back in 2011, when Hekia Parata was caught with an undeclared shareholding in Contact Energy while Minister of Energy, for obvious reasons Ministers should not be financially involved in industries they are supposed to regulate. If they are, then it creates a perception that decisions may be made for personal financial gain.

Standing Wood down is the right decision. Forcing him to sell his shareholding and going over anything else he owns with a fine-toothed comb for other undeclared conflicts of interest also seems justified. Because if he's hidden one thing, the presumption should be that he's also hiding other things, and he should not re-enter public life until he's proved himself clean.

This mess also once again shows the ongoing problem of trusts in undermining public confidence in politicians. Normal people don't have trusts. They're used exclusively by rich people to dodge taxes, criminals to launder money, and politicians to hide their interests and enable corruption. Our political institutions simply should not tolerate them. We should bust the trusts, end secrecy, and force full disclosure so we can all see whether our politicians are clean. As for us voters, we can and should judge the honesty of politicians with trusts at the ballot box.

Michael Wood: Climate saboteur

The clean car discount has been hugely successful at pushing kiwis into low-carbon vehicles. So naturally, Labour is sabotaging it:

The Government is changing the Clean Car programme to increase fees slapped on higher emitting vehicles, changing the rebates for zero emissions imports and lowering the threshold for eligible vehicles.

[...]

Wood said the changes to the scheme included narrowing the focus to more fuel efficient vehicles “earlier than planned”.

That means the threshold for a rebate would be lowered for new and used cars that emit from 146 grams of CO2 per kilometre down to 100 grams of CO2/km.

The announcement has crashed the carbon price - which was beginning to recover - by $5 / ton. Which is not a sign of confidence in Labour's climate direction.

The reason for this is austerity - locking in quick and early reductions costs money. But as the Climate Commission has pointed out, delaying action also costs money. And we're seeing some of the cost this week, with Coromandel in line for another metre of rain. But hey, lets not actually do anything to stop it from being two metres in future.

While Labour talked up climate change as its "nuclear free moment", when push comes to shove, none of them want to actually act. Apparently, they don't want to risk "overachieving" on emissions reduction. They don't want to cut emissions "too fast". They don't want to risk actually changing the status quo, which is murdering us. They don't want to do anything other than smile and talk and tinker round the edges, while towns flood and people die. And when something unexpectedly succeeds, they can't just take the win, but they have to actually deliberately fuck it up.

We need to accept it: Labour are climate saboteurs. If we want real action, we need to gt rid of them.

Wood pulls a Dutton

After almost two decades of racism, Australia is finally getting off its "stop the boats" bullshit. But don't worry, racists - Michael Wood has your back!

The Government wants to increase the time it can detain without a warrant people seeking asylum en masse from four days to 28 days.

It also plans to introduce a “community management approach” - including electronic monitoring - rather than putting people in prisons, however, that will likely not be in place before the legislation is passed.

The Government says the bill, to be introduced to Parliament this week, is to ensure those arriving here would have enough time to get legal representation.

...which is pretty tortured logic, because one of the primary roles of those lawyers will be to free their clients from detention. "We have to lock you up so you can get help to not get locked up", seems utterly perverse "logic". Instead, its just the desperate attempt to rationalise punitive racism of the sort seen in Australia. And it shows the utter moral void at the heart of this dying Labour government.

But then, should we really have expected anything better? After all, this is the party that locked up Ahmed Zaoui, of "lie in unison", of leaked smears against teenagers, which removed the right to reasons in immigration decisions and which introduced mandatory detention for the illusory "threat" of "mass arrivals" in the first place. Their record on refugee issues is simply shameful. This is just more of the same.

What is wrong with Labour?

On April 1, the government raised the minimum wage to $21.20. At the time, I thought it was an example of the progress you get under Labour. But there's a nasty twist:

Workplace Relations Minister Michael Wood wanted the Government to increase the minimum wage from $20 to $21.40, before Cabinet eventually worked him down to $21.20.

A Cabinet paper shows officials from MBIE recommended an increase to $21- a real-terms pay cut for roughly 160,600 minimum wage workers, as the increase would have been lower than the rate of inflation. Wood overruled this in his advice to Cabinet, and pushed for a larger increase.

Officials also presented Cabinet with a compromise option, which was to increase the minimum wage in line with the four-year average of annual increases under the current Government.

This would have seen the minimum wage increase to $21.25. Instead, Cabinet opted to undershoot that and landed on an increase of $21.20.

As the article makes clear, Wood stood up for Labour's professed values, pushing for a larger increase to drag wages up across the board, while encouraging employers to invest in increasing productivity (which in theory increases wages even further). The fact that the rest of his party rejected this in favour of something less than even MBIE's "Goldilocks option" casts real doubt on whether Labour subscribes to those values. Instead, they just seem to be pushing NeoLiberalism and protecting the rotten status quo, rather than supporting the people who vote for them.

Climate Change: Not keeping their promises

One of the big steps forward in climate change policy was when cabinet started demanding climate change assessments of policy, so when they built that road or changed energy or farm policy, they'd know what they were doing and be able to make an informed decision (and if not, one that could be legally challenged). So are they keeping to this promise? Of course not:

Cabinet granted $390 million to support more than 8,800 international flights, without getting an assessment of how much the policy would heat the climate.

[...]

A Cabinet circular says a CIPA disclosure is required for proposals likely to create at least 0.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (or equivalent) within the first ten years – a threshold one expert on aviation’s climate impact said was likely to have been crossed in this case.

Asked why a CIPA wasn’t done, Woods responded with an emailed statement saying Covid-19 had pushed the number of weekly flights down by three-quarters from pre-pandemic levels, that air freight was being carried more efficiently now than it was pre-Covid (because with few passengers, airlines can carry the same amount of products on fewer flights), and that over the last 18 months, airlines had largely retired their older, less efficient aircraft.

When Stuff suggested to a spokesperson for Wood that the intention of a CIPA was to compare the climate impact of a policy with the real-world situation if the policy isn’t adopted (not to compare the impact of a policy with the pre-pandemic situation), the spokesperson re-iterated that a CIPA was not needed because aviation emissions were down on pre-pandemic conditions.

The decision to keep planes flying to Aotearoa during the pandemic is probably a good one. Those planes carry kiwis home and help deliver vaccines and other vital supplies after all. But the excuse for not carrying out a climate change assessment is particularly weak, and smacks of either an agency which just doesn't get it, or a Minister wanting to avoid the inevitable bad headline over how many millions of tons of pollution he has enabled. And the delivery of that excuse is just the usual dishonest spin. This falls well below the standard of governance we should expect on this issue.