The Right to Repair Bill and parliamentary cooperation

Marama Davidson's Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill was due for its second reading today, but was instead discharged without a vote. Why? Because when the time came, Davidson was not in the House, so the chair dumped it and moved to the next item of business (conveniently, a National member's bill).

Watching the video, this all happens very quickly. Pugh announces the end of the previous item of business, the clerk fluffs reading the bill's name, Pugh looks around, and immediately calls Nationals' Tom Rutherford. Who gets as far as saying "she's not here", and the camera pans across - and Davidson is in her seat (she wasn't ten seconds ago). So there's definitely some eagerness from the chair to move on there. At the conclusion of that piece of business, Davidson politely rises and asks for leave for the bill to be reinstated, which National denies.

Interestingly, in between those two events, the Speaker had taken the chair at the end of the dinner break and asked the House for leave to alter proxy limits to enable MPs to flee back to their electorates and avoid the bad weather. This was of course granted. And maybe the Greens were assuming that having cooperated in the management of the House, the House would cooperate with them. If so, they were played for suckers.

It was clear long ago, but this is another reminder: there is no benefit to cooperating with this regime. And therefore opposition parties should not do it. If the regime asks for leave, even over something like letting their MPs go back to their rural electorates in an emergency, the response should either be "concessions in advance" or "go fuck yourselves" (or, in this case: "you'll get your leave when we get ours"). And if the regime doesn't like that, they can either waste parliamentary time on a pointless vote, or they can restore the cooperation required for parliament to function easily. Because at this stage, with the way they are doing things, there is no point in anyone cooperating. And for those of us outside parliament, there's no point pretending that the House is anything other than a dictatorship for the regime, and no point respecting an obviously rotten institution.

But the thing the regime has forgotten is that they will not be in power forever. The zombie house has less than a year to run, and then there will be an election, and hopefully the boot will be on the other foot. And when it is, I hope National is given a fucking good kicking with it, to remind them of why they should play nice.

National says "fuck you" on the right to repair

The Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee has reported back on Marama Davidson's Consumer Guarantees (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill, recommending by majority that it not be passed. The bill would be the first real advance in consumer rights in decades, creating enforceable rights to have goods repaired rather than replaced, and to parts and repair information to enable people to do it themselves (or get a qualified expert to do it for them). It would help undermine monopolies and their strategy of planned obsolescence, letting us actually use the stuff we buy. The bill is backed by ConsumerNZ and overwhelmingly popular with the public: 95% of 1250 submissions supported it, with only 2% opposed.

But the government sided with the 2%, as usual. No, they didn't say why. But the Labour-Green minority report says that the government majority strung them along, working on amendments in apparent good faith, before bloc voting to reject everything at the last minute. And they note how this undermines the collaborative nature of select committee work. I wonder if there will be consequences for that?

Presumably the National, ACT, and NZ First stooges on the committee got their marching orders from higher up to oppose the bill. And presumably they'll vote it down in the face of that overwhelming public support, tarring themselves as the regime for the 2%, a government of causes with no supporters. And yet, they're not even united on it themselves - a National MP has their own member's bill in the ballot on a right to repair for motor vehicles.

Either way, I don't see this issue going away. And if National votes it down, Davidson should take what has been learned from the committee process, strengthen it (including by adding provisions to prevent companies using intellectual property and technological protection measures to prevent repairs), and then get the next government to introduce it as government legislation.