Apparantly, there are people who think that Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials is blasphemous and "fit for the bonfire". The Archbishop of Canterbury begs to differ. In fact, he quite liked it...

New Fisk

Iraq constitution sealed at last, and immediately come the warnings of an upsurge in violence

Inquiries, part II

United Future has published its proposed terms of reference for an inquiry into the Treaty and constitutional issues. Read them here.

First thoughts: this is rather broad, and covers a mix of high-level meta issues and low-level minutiae - everything from a written constitution, republicanism and the Treaty to what our national day should be. Because these questions are so interdependent, and because there are multiple consistent sets of answers, it is probably best to deal with them in two seperate, sequential inquiries - the first into the Treaty, its role and its principles, and the second into republicanism, a written constitution, and justiciability. Seperate, because these really are two completely different areas of inquiry; sequential, because the Treaty is the foundation of our current constitution - our answers to other constitutional questions are going to be strongly influenced by our views on its role and principles. Waitangi day and the Maori seats are very much subsidiary questions rather than fundamental ones, and probably shouldn't be mixed in with the main process (too much of a distraction, for a start).

Anyway, there's some good blog fodder there. Maybe I'll do some posts about the individual questions... that is, if someone else doesn't beat me to it...

Hope for United Future?

Normally I don't have much time for United Future - but at the moment they actually seem to be operating as a proper center party, rather than a bunch of wacko Christian fundamentalists.

Guess that country

It's election time. The ruling party warns media outlets that they will be complicit in illegal activity if they run ads criticising the government, and hints darkly at licensing problems or legal action. A scene from Singapore, Hong Kong, or Malaysia? Nope - it's the good old USA...

Inquiries

The idea of a royal commission to investigate the Treaty and define exactly what those "Treaty principles" are seems to have caught on, with most parties coming out in support (to be fair, everyone has suggested it at some time in the past, but now they all seem to be agreeing all at once). The only holdout is National, who have labelled it a "smokescreen" and a "diversionary tactic" which would "resolve nothing".

To the contrary - the whole idea of a royal commission is to resolve these fundamental constitutional issues. And while it may not reach a conclusion, even the act of investigation is likely to shed some light on the subject. At a minimum, by allowing people to have a say and vent a bit of steam a formal inquiry would likely significantly reduce the tension surrounding the Treaty and race relations. And that is precisely why National doesn't like the idea. Despite all their talk of "debate", they're not actually interested in informing the public or building consensus - their plan has always been to stoke racial tension to get votes.

Update: David Slack has emailed me to point out another perspective: that of Tariana Turia, who points out that we already have such a commission of inquiry in the Waitangi Tribunal:

"The Waitangi Tribunal is charged by legislation with determining the meaning and effect of the Treaty as embodied in the two texts, and deciding issues raised by the differences between them.

"In considering claims, it must decide if the Crown breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

"Over almost 30 years, the Waitangi Tribunal has made extensive findings on the intent of the original signatories, and how their aspirations in 1840 can be realised in today's circumstances... It has made extensive comments on the principles of the Treaty.

Which is pretty much what we're after. Unfortunately, as Turia points out, pakeha generally don't pay much attention to the Tribunal (except, perhaps, to complain about it), and as a result these findings have been ignored.

New Fisk

Insurers pay out 90 years after the 20th century's first genocide

Milford Gondola

The Gondola from Queenstown to Milford Sound has already caused a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Forest & Bird and the Federated Mountain Clubs are outraged, scandalised, shocked, stunned... and I think you get the picture.

Meanwhile ACT's Gerry Eckhoff is obviously lining up for a photo op on the Gondola's opening day although he must have written this press release before he saw ACT's latest poll rating. At the rate they're going he'll be too much of a has been to warrant an invite

Southland District Mayor Frana Cardo has been sounding increasingly shrill and has suggested that Milford will degenerate into Las Vegas or Disney... that is perhaps going a little bit far. But given that her community will be largely cut out of the goldmine that is Milford and probably stands to lose pot loads of dosh on her watch, the self interest is understandable.

Even more laughably, Skyline Gondola's Director grant Hensman attempted to brownwash the issue by declaring that

"We want everyone to have a totally good experience. It's about Mauri, (Maori for life force), we want people to feel the life force of this area, to really experience it."

I mean really, what a load of horse shit.

So people on both sides of the debate have tried to peddle some pretty amazing crap on the public already and there will be more to come as the gondola has to pass the obstacle course of DOC's concessions process, the Resource Management Act and no doubt the environment court. On top of that, a government that is behind in the polls and not too far from the next election might not be able to resist the temptation to get involved and shore up its support.

There are some serious misconceptions out there too. Perhaps its time to introduce some facts to the debate. Its been suggested that very few people would actually see the gondola. DOC hasn't been generous enough to give statistics on the Greenstone-Caples track, however according to DOC's figures The track up to Key Summit (a popular short walk near the proposed Milford Road terminus) gets 15,500 - 17500 walkers a year, and 10,000-11000 of them go on to do the Routeburn Track. A significant proportion of these people will use the Greenstone-Caples track and would possibly end up getting up close and personal with a pylon or a gondola full of waving tourists. It may be a "wind swept tussocky shithole" (to quote NZPundit ) but it's a popular wind swept tussocky shithole.

Similarly its been suggested (to paraphrase Kiwi Blog) that the project would significantly reduce the amount of large bus traffic along Milford Road and the environmental damage this causes and would allow far more people to see Milford without the normal increase in traffic congestion.

Well, yes and no. The congestion at Milford is not just about the sheer numbers of people it's the fact that they are all trying to catch boats at the same time at Milford Sound.

Congestion will be removed from Te Anau to the gondola terminus but it will remain congested from there to Milford including the Homer Tunnel, which they would surely have to upgrade if numbers continued to increase. It would do nothing to solve any congestion in Milford itself. No one is really worried about environmental effects from the buses, as far as I know its all about numbers.

So what about the environmental effects of the gondola? Well firstly its worth pointing out that we aren't exactly short of tussock and beech forest especially in that area. The damage will be pretty localised. The land that is cleared during construction will regrow in time, and the tourists will even be able to wave at deer or see genuine introduced weeds as they glide over the cleared areas.

The most important environmental issue is sewage. They'll need to come up with some method of dealing with the sewage from all these visitors unless of course they're going to make them hang on until they get to Milford.

The other big problem is that at the moment the area is pristine and when Skyline and Ngai Tahu have finished, it won't be. That is a simple fact. The gondola and more likely the road they'll need to service it will spoil people's views. Sure they've said they'll paint the towers and gondola cars green. Unfortunately a green painted metal tower just looks like a green painted metal tower and not at all like a tree! Besides the things that will really draw someone's gaze are the movement and the sun reflecting off the gondola windows.

Even more intangible than the gondola spoiling the view is the effect it will have on people's recreation experience. People go to that area to get away from it all and to experience nature. If they come face to face with a Gondola or two full of waving Japanese tourists or even some wires and a pretty green metal tower, then that recreational experience is changed. Plain and simple. Maybe people can go somewhere else...maybe not...the important question is, should they have to?

I'm going to put a few other questions to our readers, and I don't pretend to have the answers to all of them.

1. Why should New Zealanders sacrifice their enjoyment of the outdoors and be displaced from their favourite areas for the benefit of wealthy foreign tourists?
2. How much development is acceptable in a national park?
3. How much is too much development?
4. When Milford Sound gets too congested should other areas of Fiordland be developed to remove the pressure?

I look forward to your comments.

This is familiar...

The British have been operating their own version of Guantanamo in Belmarsh prison for the past two years. Foreign nationals accused of links to terrorist organisations are held there, kept in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, completely isolated from the outside world. The legal mechanism for doing so is strikingly familiar - they are not criminal suspects, but immigration detainees. They are outside the jurisdiction of ordinary courts, have no right to trial by jury, or even any right to hear the charges or evidence against them. Standards of evidence are lower, and allow evidence extracted under torture.

Despite having stacked the deck in their favour, however, the British government still has one fundamental problem: their "Special Immigration Appeals Commission" isn't tame enough. Yesterday it ordered the immediate release of one of the detainees on the grounds that the evidence against him was "wholly unreliable and should not have been used to justify detention". It found that the charges against him had been consistently exaggerated and that security service witnesses had been deliberately misleading.

It's a mark of how destructive this form of detention is of the rule of law that the British government ignored the ruling, instead continuing to hold the man until they had found a tame judge to grant an injunction preventing his release (needless to say, detainess do not get to appeal to a higher court - but that's how a stacked deck works, isn't it?) Having argued all along that their stacked deck can deliver justice, they move immediately to overturn it when it does.

There are obvious parallels here with the Zaoui case - but I'd like to think that our government will at least play by the rules and obey the rulings of its own courts, rather than shifting the goal posts if they lose.

New Fisk

'It's the same old Iraq, just a tiny bit worse than it was last month'

Enduring freedom

Human Rights Watch has issued a report on abuses by US forces in Afghanistan. The report accuses US forces of operating outside the rule of law, looting, using indiscriminate and excessive force, reckless disregard for civillian lives, arbitrary and indefinate detention, and mistreatment of detainees verging on torture.

Long-time readers will also remember that two suspicious deaths in US custody have been ruled homicides; since then, nothing has been done, no investigation seems to have been conducted, and no charges have been filed. The US army, it seems, does not care how its soldiers behave.

This simply is not good enough. The US claim to be the good guys; it is well past time they started acting like it.

This is a bit rich

According to this Stuff article, Gerry Brownlee is criticising the government for opening the way to new Treaty claims.

It ought to be obvious to all that every criticism the Waitangi Tribunal makes of the government's plans, applies with bells on to National's policy. The National party's plan is simply to legislate crown ownership - and I can't think of any clearer example of a flagrant Treaty-breach than a racially-based expropriation and denial of due process.

Parliamentary sovereignty

Michael Cullen is rejecting the Waitangi Tribunal's report on the basis that it implictly ignores Parliamentary sovereignty, which is guaranteed by article one of the Treaty.

Well, yes... and no. Parliament is sovereign; it can pass whatever laws it wants. That does not mean that every law is a good idea, or (more importantly, from the Tribunal's perspective) in accordance with the Treaty.

To point out the obvious, Parliament was sovereign when it passed land confiscation laws in the 1860's. It had every legal right to pass those laws. But they were clearly in violation of articles two and three, and there is now widespread acceptance that they were wrong.

And to point out the equally obvious, the Waitangi Tribunal is not a court, and its judgements are not binding. That does not mean they should be ignored. The Tribunal's report should make the government pause and reconsider whether it is doing the right thing. If it gets this wrong, it will haunt us for the next twenty years.

Thanks, Don

Now that Don Brash has made racism respectable, the National Front is crawling out from under its rock and hoping to cash in. Thanks, Don!

Though if its any consolation, it'll be National's votes they'll be stealing.

Do you want to reduce inequality or not?

Shock! Horror! Racial privilege! WINZ gives its caseworkers greater incentives for placing Maori than pakeha! How can this possibly be equal?

Look at the respective unemployment rates. 10% for Maori, 8.8% for pacific peoples, and 3.2% for pakeha. How can that possibly be equal?

The government has a policy goal of reducing this inequality and targetting Maori and Polynesian unemployment. It translates this goal into action on the frontline by writing it directly into the KPIs of relevant staff. Interestingly, it also targets youth and disabled unemployment, and directs its staff in exactly the same way - but people don't seem to have any problem with that.

I can't help but feel that those crying "privilege" here want to pretend the whole problem doesn't exist. Perhaps the question we should be asking them is "do you think that higher Maori unemployment is a bad thing, and what, if anything, do you think the government should do about it?"

The ICC has made a difference

The British army refused to go to war against Iraq until they were assured of the war's legality and that they wouldn't face trial for war crimes.

Of course, the British government redrafted their legal advice to remove any troubling questions, but it still marks a sea change in military thinking. Once upon a time, the military's obediance to the state was unquestioned, and the idea that law applied in wartime merely academic.

I guess the ICC has made a difference.

Salem Pax is OK.

Raising the stakes

A couple of weeks ago I argued that there was nothing for pakeha to be be afraid of in the government's foreshore and seabed proposals. I was planning to do a followup on the flip side of this - that there are good reasons for Maori to be afraid - chiefly, that the proposals abrogate due process and makes any rights recognised subject to the arbitrary whim of Parliament in a way that they weren't before. But I never got round to it, and now the Waitangi Tribunal has beaten me to it, panning the government for inconsistency, eliminating due process, and failing to properly consult. The Tribunal won't release its report until Monday (which will ensure that I have blog-fodder for next week), but it apparently reccommends that the government step back and allow matters to progress through the courts.

Whether that is possible at this stage remains to be seen, but it certainly raises the stakes. The Waitangi Tribunal is not a court, and its judgements are not binding - but that does not mean that they can simply be ignored (as National would like to pretend). Ignoring the judgement will foster the impression among Maori that the Treaty is a one-way street - cited by the government as legitimising sovereignty, but ignored whenever adhering to it would be inconvenient or politically costly. And they'd be right. Meanwhile, National will no doubt be doing their best to whip up fear and hysteria over Maori owning the entire coastline and preventing us from giving ourselves skin cancer - which isn't going to help matters.

I've said it before: any real solution to the foreshore has to be acceptable to the vast majority of New Zealanders, including the vast majority of Maori - otherwise it will simply fester and be relitigated whenever there is a change of government. This is too important to fuck up. It's to National's discredit that they continue to play politics with the issue, rather than trying to work together to find a solution acceptable to all.

As for what that solution will be: I'm not sure. The government's proposals aren't bad, and are perfectly acceptable if Maori sign up to them. But if the government cannot get a consensus on that, it is probably best to let it proceed through the courts. That would be consistent, and it would be treating Maori as equal under the law (something Don Brash is keen on - except, it seems, when it might be to their advantage). The Court of Appeal decision suggested the barriers to fee simple title would be high and that exclusive title would be granted only rarely. If that turns out to be true, then following due process is unlikely to significantly interfere with the customary right of all New Zealanders to go to the beach - or at least, not any more than existing millionaire owners already do.

"Justice cannot be upheld through recourse to methods which abandon its principles"

The only person convicted of involvement in the 911 attacks has won a retrial. Why? Because the US had refused to allow the German intelligence services to share possibly exculpatory evidence.

The September 11th attacks were terrible, but that does not mean that we should throw justice out the window when punishing those responsible. Suspected terrorists deserve the same legal protections as everyone else. Fundamental to this is the right to a fair trial, to review the evidence against them, and question their accusers. Compromising on these rights results not in justice, but in judicial lynching - it is literally destroying western civilisation in order to save it.

A fundamentally stupid idea

Sticking a 13km carnival ride through a national park.

The reason we have national parks is to set aside unspoilt areas of wilderness for the enjoyment of all. And I can't think of much more destructive of people's wilderness experience than being able to see a line of tour buses and a gondola no matter where they go.