The role of think tanks

Che Tibby is considering the role of think tanks, and struggling with how a left-wing think tank should or could respond to a fear campaign such as the Australian federal election (or, I suppose, National's constant playing of the race card over here). But I think this is misconstruing the role of think tanks. Their role is to fight the long-term battle in the marketplace of ideas, by producing and critiquing policy, conducting studies, providing media comment, and generally propagating the memes and providing "intellectual ammunition". They are a strategic weapon, not a tactical one. While they could use their research ability and expertise to counter misinformation, as Che points out, that requires that people listen. Getting people to do that is the sort of thing best done by politicians, not by researchers.

And OTOH, the above is pretty much academic, given that the New Zealand left is pretty much unarmed on the think-tank front.

Ahmed Zaoui: what you can do...

If you watched "Enemy of the State" last night and are wondering what you can do to help Ahmed Zaoui, the Human Rights Foundation (who are representing him in court) have posted a handy list on Scoop. I recommend emailing Paul Swain or any Labour MP myself. A short note supporting the fundamental right to a fair trial and mentioning that you will be judging the government on its human rights record at the next election is probably sufficient.

The Human Rights Foundation release ends with the following quote from Winston Churchill:

"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

Perhaps the government needs reminding of that as well.

Update: (15/10/04) corrected Paul Swain's email address. Ooops.

Another must-read

The Holden Republic has a detailed and highly informative post on the Te Arawa settlement, which dispels a great deal of the racially divisive bullshit propagated by Don Brash.

Conflicts of interest

Former US Secretary of State James Baker is touring the world trying to get countries to forgive Iraq's US$200 billion debt. At the same time, he's in a consortium working for the Kuwaitis, trying to extract the US$57 billion in debt and war reparations Iraq owes them - for US$1 billion up front plus five percent of any monies they recover. That's some conflict of interest, neh?

But then, did we really expect any different from the same corrupt kleptocracy which gave us Enron and Halliburton?

Enemy of the State

I watched this documentary tonight, in which a TVNZ reporter travelled to Algeria, France, Belgium and Switzerland in an effort to find out whether Ahmed Zaoui is a terrorist. He seems to have decided "no", but it would have been nice if he'd done it a year ago (or maybe even almost two?), rather than waiting until this late in the piece.

And at the same time, the whole question is also fairly irrelevant. People are not objecting to Zaoui's treatment because they think he is innocent (though that fact makes it worse); they are objecting because not even a terrorist should be treated like that. No-one should be imprisoned without trial. No-one should be denied access to the evidence against them. And no-one should be subjected to a process which so grossly violates the principles of natural justice. The banner at the top of the page says "free Ahmed Zaoui, or give him a fair trial", and that is what people have demanded since the beginning: that Zaoui either be charged and the evidence against him tested in a court of law before an impartial judge, or that he be set free - just like any other criminal suspect. But the current process - arbitrary imprisonment based on laughably thin secret "evidence" - is simply an affront to our fundamental values. As Tom Scott said, we are a better country than this. It's long past time we started acting like it.

Score one for transparency

ACT Leader Rodney Hide has stood up for transparency and declared which way ACT MPs voted on the HART Bill. ACT split its vote on four motions, one to amend and three to accept parts of the bill, and always 6:2. According to Hide, the two MPs who voted together were Heather Roy and Ken Shirley; the identities of the larger faction ought to be obvious.

United Future, meanwhile, says that "the matter of how individual MPs voted is for them to reveal" (though they also note that Peter Dunne voted for it). I guess that says everything that needs to be said about their commitment to transparency.

Destroying America

Over the last few years, we've seen disturbing glimpses of how the US treats top-level Al-Qaeda members, and how the war on terror has undermined its commitment to fundamental human rights. Inadvertant admissions by admininstration officials and leaks by insiders have painted a picture of rendition, children being held hostage as "leverage" to get their parents to talk, and outright torture. Now Human Rights Watch has assembled those hints in one place, and it's not a pretty picture:

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration has violated the most basic legal norms in its treatment of security detainees. Many have been held in offshore prisons, the most well known of which is at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As we now know, prisoners suspected of terrorism, and many against whom no evidence exists, have been mistreated, humiliated, and tortured. But perhaps no practice so fundamentally challenges the foundations of U.S. and international law as the long-term secret incommunicado detention of al-Qaeda suspects in "undisclosed locations."

"Disappearances" were a trademark abuse of Latin American military dictatorships in their "dirty war" on alleged subversion. Now they have become a United States tactic in its conflict with al-Qaeda.

[...]

the use of forced disappearances and secret incommunicado detention violates the most basic principles of a free society. When Argentina tortured and "disappeared" suspected dissidents in the name of fighting what it characterized as "terrorists," it was wrong. When the United States tortures and "disappears" alleged terrorists, even those suspected of plotting the most terrible attacks, it is also wrong. That the terror being fought by the United States is of a different character does not change the illicit nature of the methods employed to combat it.

This represents a betrayal of America's fundamental values - "liberty and justice for all" - and ultimately a loss in the war on terror. Even during World War II or the Cold War - conflicts which posed a definate threat to the survival of the US as a nation - successive US governments refused to sell out those values because they recognised that it would in a real sense be losing. Now the Bush administration has sold them out in an eyeblink when faced with a small number of terrorists who, while they pose a threat to US interests and the lives of US citizens, pose no threat whatsoever to the US's survival. Despite the horrors of September 11th, Al Qaeda couldn't destroy America. But they didn't need to, when they had George W. Bush to do it for them...

Democratic transparency V

And finally, a thoughtful response from Rodney Hide:

Peter Brown must have agreed to the split vote procedure. It requires leave of the House to have a split vote. Any one member can veto the leave.

Standing order 144 (1) (b) requires that a party vote either noe or aye. There is no provision for a split vote in the rules.

If the rules were applied then a party would vote, say, aye, and then the individuals who opposed would have to stand and have their vote recorded (they could have someone vote on their behalf, but their name and vote would be required).

Occasionally, parliament agrees to a split vote. This is done by agreement of all the parties.

It’s frustrating not knowing how people vote. I had this on my shop trading bill. However, I agreed to a split vote cos I thought my congeniality might pay off. The result was I actually don’t know how people voted ... and nor to the public.

You raise a good point though. The solution is not in changing the rules - it’s just in MPs not agreeing unanimously to suspend them!

Hide has a point in that this isn't just about the rules - Parliament can suspend them with leave, and so a change of political culture is required. We must have MPs who take transparency and accountability seriously. At the same time, changing the standing orders would help bring about that change, and make it clear that openness rather than secrecy is the norm.

Also, having reviewed Hansard, I see that ACT split its vote four times during the debate over the early stages of the HART Bill: once for an amendment to clause 3(a), and then three times as each part was confirmed. On all occassions it was a 6:2 split. I've asked Rodney to publicise which way his MPs voted, and I'm awaiting his response.

DPF on secret split voting

DPF agrees with me on the public's absolute right to know how our representatives are voting. And he suggests the amendment to the standing orders:

144(1)(f) "If a party, by leave, splits its vote, the party shall table by the conclusion of the next house sitting day, a statement listing which members were represented by the ayes, and which members represented by the noes, as cast by the party's representative.

This ensures that Parliament won't be unnecessarily bogged down with roll-calling on procedural matters, while guaranteeing transparency and accountability.

The trick now is to get the bastards to pass it...

Local body clusterfuck

I was shocked by last night's news about inconsistencies and problems counting the local body vote, which have called into question some of the results. But I think people are being too eager to lay the blame at the feet of STV. This is not a problem with the STV system; it is a problem with the incompetance of the companies who were hired to count the ballots. They had more votes than expected, their software had the inevitable bug, and they seem to have had no plan to count the ballots by hand in the event of a problem. In short, it is what happens when you outsource to a company which has never done elections before.

Fortunately, there's a simple solution, backed by politicians across the political spectrum: give the whole thing to the Electoral Commission. They know how to run elections, they have an institutional memory longer than that of a goldfish, and they're far less likely to fuck it up. But I guess the private sector wouldn't be making any money off it then.

And as a final point, what do you think the odds are that any of the contracts with Datamail included a massive penalty clause in the event of this sort of screwup? Fortunately, we have a Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 for just this purpose (DHBs are of course covered by the Official Information Act) - though they'll almost certainly try and hide behind "commercial sensitivity".

Ahmed Zaoui update

So, what does our supposedly "pro-human rights" government do when faced with a court decision which upholds human rights and affirms a wide-ranging right of judicial review? Appeal, of course.

The government's actions in the Zaoui case are getting more disgusting by the day. They've invested so much in keeping him in prison and trying to throw him out that they now face serious damage if he is released or allowed to stay. And so they find themselves selling out their basic values in order to avoid admitting they were wrong...

As for the Supreme Court, other than Donna Awatere-Huata, it looks like it may be Zaoui all the way...

Democratic transparency IV

National party Whip Lindsay Tisch has responded to my request that he reveal which way National MPs voted on the HART Bill:

In regards to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, "Leave of the House" was sought under Standing Order 144 for a Split Vote on the report back of the Health Select Committee 25 August 2004. NO PARTY OBJECTED. In the subsequent Committee stages the process continued. If a Party doesn't grant leave for a split vote then it doesn't happen. Under Standing Order 144 it is not a requirement to name which way a Member voted and that was the process that was followed.

I've also received a similar response from United Future:

Thank you for your message. All United Future MPs voted absolutely in accordance with Parliamentary Standing Orders.

Both responses miss the point. There's no question that secret split voting is legal under Parliament's standing orders; the problem is that this lack of transparency undermines democratic accountability. Our system of democracy rests on the electorate being able to hold politicians accountable. In order for this to happen, we need to know which way they have voted.

The standing orders need to be amended to ensure that names are recorded when a party vote is split in this fashion. Those parties who believe in a transparent and accountable Parliament should deny leave for any split votes until they are.

As for Tisch, while the standing orders currently don't require parties to reveal voting records, they don't forbid it either, and his unwillingness to do so speaks volumes about his - and National's - commitment to accountability.

Smart-arses and complexity

A throwaway comment in Che Tibby's latest caught my eye:

All I have to say is this, the truly great theories are really, really, hard to understand. Once upon a time there were only two people in the world who understood the theory of relativity. Einstein, and some smart-arse. These days everybody knows that if you send a clock into space at the speed of light when it gets back to Earth it's only advanced five minutes while society has advanced a billion years. Or something.

Just by way of establishing my smart-arse credentials, the above-mentioned smart-arse was the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who translated some of Einstein's work from German into English. And the time-dilation example Che uses is an example of Special Relativity; it was General Relativity that was "only understood by two people". The former deals with observers moving at constant speed with respect to one another, and results in time varying along with velocity depending on the frame of reference used. The latter throws in observers who are speeding up and slowing down as well, and reconceptualises gravity as the curvature of space (resulting in all those irritating examples where people roll marbles across rubber sheets). It also utilises the Lovecraftian horror of tensor calculus, which drives people insane and ruins their hair.

As for complexity, being difficult to understand is often simply a sign that someone is a bad writer, or that they are applying the old strategy of "if you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". In fact, where science is concerned, it's simplicity and elegence which are appreaciated, not complexity. All the "greatest" scientific theories - natural selection, Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Equations, even special relativity - are all at their heart extremely simple ideas which will frequently fit on a T-shirt.

Must read

Welcome to the Green Zone by William Langewiesche. It's a potted history of the Green Zone, its disconnection from Iraq, and the growth of a seige mentality within it, which manages to simultaneously be utterly scathing about the CPA's flaws (right-wing ideology, power-tripping officials, and a near-total ignorance of Iraqi society) while praising its successes.

New Fisk

Future generations will struggle to escape the legacy of the disaster in Iraq

Not about race

In his press conference in Rotorua yesterday, Don Brash once again played the race card and accused the government of giving things to Maori solely on the basis of race:

"The compensation payment should be recognised because the annuity Te Arawa got in the 1922 agreement was never indexed to inflation, but giving them the lakes is wrong and so too is setting up a board that gives them representation purely because of their race."

Except of course that Te Arawa are not being represented on that board "purely because of their race". They are being represented on the basis of their significant historical and present ownership interest in the lake, and because government mismanagement adversely affected rights that were specifically protected by the 1922 settlement. It's a way of ensuring that it doesn't happen again - or rather, that Te Arawa is actively involved and can protect their rights. And given that they will actually own the lakebed (but not apparantly the water above it), co-management seems a fairly good solution - certainly better than the alternative of managing by court action and suing the regional council, DOC etc whenever they make a decision that impacts on those rights.

Of course, all of that is far too long and complex for a shallow soundbite by the lakeside, and wouldn't play very well with the rednecks Brash is targetting in any case.

Democratic transparency III

Don Brash has responded to my query regarding National party whips refusal to disclose who had voted which way on the recent Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill:

Your comment surprised me, and I have been investigating the matter. Individual votes should be recorded, and I will be endeavouring to find our why this is not happening. Thanks for drawing this to my attention.

Not much of a response, but it at least acknowledges the requirement for transparency. Hopefully he'll publish a list in a few days.

There has been no word yet from either Peter Dunne or Rodney Hide.

Wednesday's Hansard is now on the web, and it does not record who voted which way. Peter Brown's complaint about secret voting is near the end, directly above the debate on part 4 of the bill (click here and scroll upwards). From the look of it, the Business Select Committee recently agreed to abrogate democratic oversight and allow MPs to vote secretly without recording names. It's also interesting to note that Simon Power was very very careful to ensure that things were being done in secret before any voting actually took place. I guess he felt he had something to hide.

This is simply unacceptable - it is a deliberate attempt by our representatives to hide their votes from us so that they cannot be punished for them. It is simply untenable in an open democracy for an MP to say, as National Whip Lindsay Tisch said on Wednesday night, that:

We have written proxies from our members, which I hold here. I am not prepared to divulge who voted which way. I have cast the votes with the leave of the House for a split vote, and it is certainly not my intention to divulge the information about our members’ preferences.

Tisch's email is lindsay.tisch@parliament.govt.nz. Why not email him and ask him what he's trying to hide?

Dangerous minds

Last night I watched the documentary "Singer: A dangerous mind", about the controversial Australian ethicist Peter Singer. For those who aren't familiar with his work, Singer is most famous for his views on animal rights and euthanasia, both of which revolve around his theory of personhood. According to Singer, it is not enough to say "human life is valuable"; we must ask why. Investigating this question leads us to the idea that what makes human life valuable is that we are "persons" - we have the capacity to experience pain and suffering, but more importantly, we can conceive of ourselves existing over time, plan for the future, and experience pain when those plans are frustrated. It's a very compelling viewpoint, but it has the consequence that not all persons are human beings, and not all human beings are persons. To the extent that higher animals can also conceive of themselves as existing over time (and there is some evidence that at least some - such as our close primate relatives - do), then they too are worthy of moral consideration - which bars eating them or using them for medical experimentation. And to the extent that some human beings are unable to do this - if they are severely intellectually disabled, in a vegetative state, or simply very young - it allows them to be treated in the same way that we would treat an animal.

This is obviously a controversial viewpoint - it uses our desire for consistency to on the one hand challenge our treatment of animals, and on the other hand undermine our traditional assumptions about the value of human life. And it has attracted a great deal of opposition, not all of it intellectual. Singer has had trouble with the German government for advocating active euthanasia of the severely mentally retarded, and his lectures in the United States have met with protests and disruption. So I wasn't sure what to expect from a documentary on him - whether it would be a fair assessment of his views, or a hatchet-job from religious-fanatic Americans. Fortunately, it was the former.

"A dangerous mind" followed Singer to various parts of the world: to America, where he lectured his students and had them visit a hospital ward full of premature babies; to Britain, where he met with the family of a disabled boy whose doctors had tried to euthanise him without their consent; to Austria, where he researched the fate of his Jewish grandparents in the Holocuust and speculated on the merits of thinking with the head rather than "with the blood" or the gut; and to Australia, where he talked to medical ethicists and the family of an elderly woman who had committed suicide rather than suffer further cancer treatment. It also had comments from other ethicists, both supporting and opposed to Singer's viewpoint. It was a good, thoughtful piece of television, which is obviously why it was on at 11:30 at night.

One of the things that came across very clearly was that while Singer's critics abuse him for "playing god" and making decisions about the value of human life, these decisions are made all the time. Doctors faced with marginal cases - premature babies with little chance of a normal life, elderly patients with Alzheimers who are just a walking, breathing shell - disguise these decisions under the label of "medical futility". The perniciousness of making these decisions in this way was illustrated in his visit to Britain, where doctors had decided that a disabled boy did not deserve basic medical treatment, and in fact tried to kill him (and won a court case saying that they could override the wishes of parents and relatives when making this decision). What Singer does is bring this debate into the open, and provide us with clear criteria against which such decisions can be assessed. Those who don't like those criteria and their consequences really only have one option: to develop better ones. So far though they have been unable to present a credible alternative.

Desperation

Following his defeat in Auckland, John Banks is apparantly considering returning to national-level politics. Russell Brown is mystified at why Don Brash would be interested in such a move - Banks will bring the taint of a loser, and possibly be a potential challenger to Brash's leadership. However, it's much easier to see why ACT would be interested: desperation. ACT desperately needs an electorate, and however tainted, Banks is still far more likely than most of their existing MPs to bring them one.

Progress

The Campaign For Civil Unions now has a nifty progress-counter so you can see how well they're doing.