Equality comes to Argentina

Argentina's Senate has voted to legalise same-sex marriage, making Argentina the first country in South America to affirm full equality for gays. And hopefully the rest won't be too far behind. Meanwhile, New Zealand still lags behind with "separate but equal" civil unions. Isn't it time we reclaimed our mantle as the most progressive country in the world?

Deep collusion

As seen in the recent case of Pete Bethune, one of the basic expectations of government is that they will help us out if we get into legal trouble overseas. This isn't just a kiwi thing - its universal across the western world. However, a host of classified documents released as part of a court case today showed that the UK did not meet that obligation with respect to UK citizens arrested in Afghanistan and elsewhere by the US as part of its war on terror. Instead, ministers and officials of the Blair government actively colluded in the rendition and torture of their own citizens:

Other disclosed documents show how:

• The Foreign Office decided in January 2002 that the transfer of British citizens from Afghanistan to Guantánamo was its "preferred option".
• Jack Straw asked for that rendition to be delayed until MI5 had been able to interrogate those citizens.
• Downing Street was said to have overruled FO attempts to provide a British citizen detained in Zambia with consular support in an attempt to prevent his return to the UK, with the result that he too was "rendered" to Guantánamo.

The papers have been disclosed as a result of civil proceedings brought by six former Guantánamo inmates against MI5 and MI6, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and the Attorney General's Office, which they allege were complicit in their illegal detention and torture.

There's more details here and here, showing the callous disregard of MI5 agents to the fact that a UK citizen had clearly been tortured, and the machinations of the Blair government in ensuring that its citizens were denied consular assistance and shipped off to Guantanamo to avoid the PR problem of having to try them in the UK. The overall picture is of a government and establishment engaged in a criminal conspiracy to commit torture, kidnapping, and war crimes.

The people responsible for this have to be held to account. Unfortunately, the latest whitewash "inquiry" is designed precisely to stop that from happening.

Apparently there's more to come, but the government is dragging its feet on releasing the documents. In the process, they're in contempt of a clear order from the courts to release. That order must be enforced - the government must be made to obey its own laws. And if it means sticking the Foreign Secretary and the head of MI5 in jail for contempt, then so be it.

Big tobacco is evil

OK, so we all know that Big Tobacco is evil; their long denial that they were effectively selling a slow death by cancer shows that. But they're also responsible for another kind of evil: child slavery:

Tobacco giant Philip Morris has been forced to admit that child workers as young as 10 have been subjected to long hours working on tobacco farms with which it has contracts in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, migrant workers at the farms, mostly from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, were subjected to conditions that often amounted to forced labour, as employers contracted by tobacco farms that sold their produce to Philip Morris International had their passports confiscated and were often made to do additional work for no pay. The company, which sources tobacco from Kazakhstan for cigarette brands sold in Russia and other former Soviet states, said it was taking "immediate action" to stop the abuses.

In many cases families were expected to pay back unrealistic debts to intermediaries who had arranged for their journeys to Kazakhstan, in schemes that bear all the hallmarks of people trafficking. The report also documented 72 cases of children working on the farms.

Child slavery, debt slavery, forced labour. Light up, breathe deep - you're getting slavery in every cigarette.

The full report from Human Rights Watch is here.

Tried and failed

In the wake of Tuesday's incident in which two police officers were shot and a police dog killed, police have been pushing for greater access to firearms, with a demand for guns in every car. This, apparently, would have ensured that Tuesday's shooting had never happened (or would have resulted in a death of a person rather than just a dog). But there's a small problem:

A police dog handler had a firearm in his truck but chose not to pick it up before going into a house where he and another officer were shot.

So, these police were already effectively under the policy the police want to impose nationwide. It didn't help. So much for more guns being the solution.

But then, its clear that the policy change isn't just aimed at increasing access to firearms - its aimed at increasing their use, making the police comfortable with using them whenever they feel like it, and making us comfortable with that. And we shouldn't accept that. The police work for us. We should be dictating the boundaries to them, not the other way around.

Police and guns II

Last night's Campbell Live [video] saw one of the most disingenuous performances from a Minister I have seen in a long time, with Police Minister Judith Collins proclaiming that she did not want to see police regularly carrying guns as an unarmed police force was a key part of our kiwi identity, while pushing for a policy - carrying guns in every police vehicle, with police given carte blanche to carry them whenever they feel it is appropriate - that would result in exactly that. Collins' big line was that she trusted the police's judgement on when it was appropriate to carry guns. I don't. Listening to Howard Broad and Greg O'Connor, it is clear the police have an agenda here of moving towards a more militarised force. And its time we put our foot down and said "no". Contrary to Collins, the broad outlines of police firearms policy are not an operational decision - they are a political one. The police work for us, and they should do so on our terms. Instead, on this issue and others, they seem to want to act as a law unto themselves.

Meanwhile, the Herald introduces some numbers into the debate, by pointing out how many police cars have already been modified to carry firearms. Unfortunately, the police don't know (or rather, won't tell us) how many times they actually do carry guns, but the numbers from the Auckland district are fairly reassuring: only two sergeants' cars permanently carry firearms. Also reassuring is how often those guns are issued: 194 times in two years, or about twice a week. The number is low because frontline officers need to seek permission, and meet with the appropriate vehicle. Remove those constraints and we'll see the number explode.

(As for the number of cars with gun safes, charitably its to provide operational flexibility and ensure that senior officers are not tied to any particular vehicle. Less charitably, the police are preparing for an armed force, and are spending our money to do so. The Herald's Dickison and Chang might want to dig into that if they can...)

And OTOH, there's clear evidence that police are already using their guns too often. Watch the news: every time you see a serious crime, there's a police officer "guarding the crime scene" carrying a machine gun. That's intimidating and completely unnecessary, but clearly police policy. its time we laid down the law and told them it has to stop. The police work for us, and they should not be standing over us with machine guns. Ever.

The end of flogging in Tonga?

Earlier in the year, a British judge serving on the Tongan Supreme Court caused outrage by imposing a sentence of flogging - the first time the sentence had been imposed in over thirty years. Like the death penalty, corporal punishment is still on the books in Tonga, but has fallen into disuse, and has not been applied since the 1980's.

Today, the Tongan Court of Appeal overturned the sentence on the grounds that it was a cruel and unusual punishment. The court went on to note that:

interpreted in the light of international conventions and decisions of this Court it might be argued that the whipping provision is now unconstitutional.

And that, hopefully, is the end of flogging in Tonga. But it won't be finally dead until the law is repealed - something which will hopefully follow the democratic elections in November.

"Not viable"

Interest seems to be growing in Rahui Katene's bill to remove GST from healthy food. There's a strong empirical case for the move, and it looks like it would work far better than the current government programme of education. But the government hates the idea. The latest excuse, from Peter Dunne, is that scrapping GST on food is "not viable" as it would cost too much money - about $330 million a year.

But cost doesn't make something unviable - it just means its a question of priorities. The government could afford to do it if it wanted, and (in these tight times) if they chose to forgo other policy decisions. But for National, other things - such as tax cuts for their rich mates and ETS subsidies for farmers and polluters - come first. And that's what politics is about. But trying to hide that fact, and pretend that something is not an option because of cost rather than choice, that's just chickenshit.

Patronising islamophobia

The French National Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to ban the burqa. There are all sorts of reasons to criticise the bill - I'd start by calling it a grossly illiberal move which violates the fundamental right in a free society to dress however the hell we like, motivated by a desire to whip up islamophobia for political gain - but Larvatus Prodeo put it best: a bunch of men (the National Assembly is 85% male) are telling women what to wear in order to stop men telling women what to wear. For their own good, of course.

And put like that, its clear what a patronising crock of shit this bill is. Women must be forced to be free, whether they like it or not. And that includes forcing them to be free from their own religious beliefs.

Islam, like Christianity, is a deeply misogynistic religion. But unlike the French National Assembly, I understand that some women buy into that bullshit. And that is their right. People are allowed to oppress themselves - they are allowed to make mistakes. We might disagree with what they do, but once we start telling people how to behave in their private lives by e.g. telling them how to dress, we're no better than the Mullahs and the Pope.

The bill isn't law yet - it still has to pass the scrutiny of the Senate and the Constitutional Court. But its one step closer to taking France in a very illiberal direction. Hopefully they'll recover from this madness before it is too late.

Another shift for Labour

The Fifth Labour Government saw a gradual erosion of NeoLiberalism, with an end to privatisation, improvements in worker's rights and social services, and a slightly more progressive tax system. But two of the core pillars of the NeoLiberal consensus - an inflation-focused monetary policy, and free trade, remained unchanged (and if anything Labour continued to push the free trade agenda vigorously). Now Labour is out of power and reassessing where it stands, these pillars are also under attack. First there was Phil Goff's announcement that Labour would abandon the Reserve Bank's myopic focus on price stability in favour of broader objectives. And now free trade seems to be coming under attack with Clare Curran's "Kiwi Jobs Bill".

The bill [PDF] is quite mild, establishing a commission of inquiry to investigate ways in which government procurement can be tilted in favour of kiwi businesses. Several overseas countries, including Australia, already do this, and so seeing if we can do what they do while meeting our obligations under the FTAs we have signed is a major focus. While this is the sort of thing governments can do simply by announcing it, being in opposition means even the simple things require legislation.

(As an aside: wouldn't our democracy be better if Parliament had a budget to allow opposition parties or the public by petition to establish a limited number of such inquiries each term? It would allow policy alternatives to be explored independently, boosting the choice available to the New Zealand public and deepening our democratic conversation. Governments would hate the idea because it would reduce their monopoly on policy discussion. Which is another reason to do it).

While not officially Labour policy, Labour MPs don't put member's bills forward unless they have been approved by caucus. So this signals a shift away from free trade (in services, at least) from the Labour Party, or at least a willingness to consider alternatives.

As for the merits, I'm cautiously supportive of free trade, with significant misgivings about environmental and social effects (not to mention giving corporations even greater freedom to behave like sociopaths). While in theory the absence of national preferment in procurement - a basic of FTAs - means the government can choose the best bidder from a wider pool, in practice it is not always clear that spurning competitive bids from locals in favour of slightly cheaper ones from foreigners is in fact "better" when all costs and benefits are taken into account. And on the gripping hand, past governments have signed these things, and so for better or worse we have to abide by them. The question is whether we can, as other countries do, have some sort of national preferment (or requirement for work to be done in NZ employing kiwis) while keeping our word. And on that front, I think it is worth at least taking a look.

Police and guns

So, police have responded to yesterday's incident, in which two police officers were shot and a police dog killed, with an immediate move to increase police access to firearms. Nothing like smearing yourself in other people's blood to get what you want - and this is something that police have wanted for a very, very long time. But its not something which is going to make them - or us - any safer.

On the first point, attacks on police with guns have fluctuated over the years. While the current police Annual Report [PDF] shows a dramatic rise in the past few years, looking further back shows that it has been this high before. In 2004/5 there were 37 assaults with firearms, in 1996/97 there were 36. In between its gone up and down, sometimes dropping to as low as 13, more usually hovering around 30. Its a basic occupational hazard of police work that people will shoot at you. The way to reduce that risk is not to arm police (which doesn't act as a deterrent, and instead gives a strong incentive to shoot first), but to reduce public access to firearms. There are changes to our firearms licensing system which would do that, which would reduce the number of guns disappearing out of the hands of licensed users and into the hands of criminals. Those changes would be costly, but I'd far prefer that to the prospect of our police routinely swaggering around with pistols on their hips.

As for the second point, we've already seen that the police can't use their guns safely. Outside the Armed Offenders Squad, training is woeful, and we've had a number of incidents where police have used firearms in highly questionable circumstances. Giving them greater access to guns will increase the number of those incidents. But the big fear is that it will lead to a shift to US-style "compliance policing", with police routinely threatening to use lethal force against the public they are supposed to be protecting in order to coerce consent. And that's not something we should tolerate in New Zealand.

Unfortunately, it looks like we have a power-grabbing Police Commissioner and an authoritarian Minister who is perfectly happy to give them whatever they want. The result will be more police shootings, and possibly more shot police. And that's not good for anybody.

Climate change: Utter madness

The Afforestation Grant Scheme is one of the few success stories of New Zealand's climate change policy. It basically pays people to plant forest on marginal land, with the crown retaining all carbon credits. And its successful - the latest tender round was oversubscribed, and paid out $4 million for 2688 hectares of new forest - an average of just under $1,500 per hectare, or (in the long run) about $3 per ton of carbon. Compare this to the current NZ carbon price of ~NZ$18 (a figure which is only going to rise), and its a very good deal for us.

So naturally, the government is killing it off, cutting the funding by $2 million a year for three years before cancelling it entirely.

This is just utter madness. if we want to deal with our long-term emissions problem, we should be boosting this scheme, not cutting it. But to a government of the right, it seems everything looks like "waste"...

Fiji: Holding democracy to ransom

Not content with expelling the Australian ambassador, Fijian dictator Voreqe Bainimarama is now threatening to cancel elections:

Bainimarama, who seized power in a coup in 2006, has reneged on earlier promises to restore democracy and last year, when he abrogated the constitution, said there would be no elections before 2014.

Now he is thinking of changing his mind again.

"In fact, I am all of a sudden thinking we might not be ready for 2014 for election if we don't get any assistance from Australia and New Zealand for instance," he told [Radio] Tarana.

"If we reach 2014 and we are not ready because of constant interfering, we are not going to give up our government to political parties...

Of course, New Zealand is already assisting with elections; according to MFAT we've provided $286,000 since the 2006 coup to do the groundwork for elections which have been repeatedly cancelled. And I'm sure that our chequebook is open if Bainimarama ever names an actual date. Its not the lack of New Zealand assistance which is stopping Fiji from having elections - its Bainimarama's refusal to yield power, to surrender control to a democratically elected and therefore legitimate government which might do things he doesn't like (like, say, cutting the military budget, or putting him and his cronies on trial for their treason).

Fiji: Another tantrum

Yesterday the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional trade and political forum parallel, cancelled its planned leadership summit in Fiji over concerns about Fiji's military regime. According to the MSG's current chair, Vanuatu Prime Minister Edward Natapei, allowing Fiji to host the meeting and chair the organisation would be inconsistent with the organisation's democratic values.

Today, Fiji responded by expelling the Australian ambassador. It's a classic example of the regime's paranoia. Everything bad that happens to Fiji is not the result of the regime's own incompetence, but of Australian and New Zealand plotting. And this extends to being snubbed by their neighbours, who could not possibly have any commitment to democracy of their own, but must have been put up to it by others.

This sort of temper tantrum is not the way to rejoin the international community. But I don't think that's really the point. Instead, the regime is reinforcing the military's external enemy narrative in order to both justify their own existence and retain power. The same trick is used by tinpot dictators across the world to gain the acquiescence of their people; the questions is whether the people of Fiji will fall for it.

National's plan for growth: Build more prisons!

Or at least that seems to be the subtext of Corrections Minister Judith Collins' proud announcement that a new prison will bring $1.2 billion over 30 years to South Auckland. New prisons are the last thing a sane society wants to build - they are in every sense of the word a waste of money, a pure drag on the economy. At best, they should be regarded as a necessary evil. But pretending that that waste somehow contributes to our society and economy is simply madness. And tarting it up to make it sound impressive (the timespan is carefully chosen to give a figure over a billion; the actual "benefit" is ~$40 million a year) suggests again that spin is being put before sanity.

Its also worth remembering that every cent of that $1.2 billion over 30 years "benefit" is taxpayer's money. Its what the government is paying to build and run the place. For every other part of the public service, including schools and hospitals, that would be something the current government disapproved of. You don't see them talking about how a new hospital will bring millions to the local community; instead its "greedy doctors" and public sector "waste". But with prisons, they pretend its real economic activity - a complete reversal of National's value system. But I guess when the only answer they have to crime is to lock more people up for longer, then they have to find a "bright side" somewhere.

There is no "bright side" in building prisons. They are a symbol of failure, not success. But unfortunately, the government's "policy" in this area consists of locking more people up for longer, the same old policy that has failed in the past. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the classic popular definition of madness. But that's exactly what our government is doing with corrections policy. And its long past time we sent in the men in white coats.

Timor doesn't want Australia's refugees II

Last week, in a wretched backdown to the racists, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard pushed the idea of restarting John Howard's "Pacific Solution" by building a refugee processing centre in Timor. The Timorese government made it clear pretty quickly that they didn't want any part in it, and now their rejection has been underlined by a unanimous vote in the Timorese Parliament. But despite this, the Australians are pressing on with the plan:

But sources said Canberra would persist with the idea, because the East Timorese Prime Minister and ministers do not sit in the parliament, the resolution was non-binding, and only about 34 of the 65 members turned up to vote.

Of course, those Ministers have already rejected the idea, and those 34 members are a majority. But Australia doesn't seem to regard either fact as an obstacle. It really makes you wonder what the Timorese have to do to get the message across.

The quest for a GPI

There was an interesting article (offline) in The Press on Saturday on the development of a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for New Zealand. For those who don't know, the GPI combines the traditional measure of national advancement - GDP - with measures of environmental and social progress to give us a better measure of whether we are in fact better off. There are at least two groups working on this in NZ - one at Landcare Research, and an independent group led by sustainability consultant Dave Breur. In addition, Green MP Kennedy Graham has a member's bill in the ballot to require the government to report and forecast environmental and social indicators alongside GDP in budget documents. All three versions disagree on exactly which measures should be used, and how they should be combined, but they're all clear that you need to measure things other than just straight economic growth.

As for why, other countries which have measured GPI have found something disturbing:

From World War II until the late 1970s, GDP and GPI roughly kept track. Any expansion in economic activity registered directly as a general increase in reasons to feel good about life.

But from the 1970s, raw economic output has continued to soar (and no wonder with every family working two jobs and all hours, says Peet) while GPI has stagnated. Spinning the wheels faster has not necessarily been paying off.

As the article points out, this is politically explosive. Both major parties have been pushing growth uber alles. But if economic growth does not make us better off (because it is effectively mining our society and our environment), then what is the point of such policies? All they do is transfer wealth from the many to the few. Measuring GPI will let us see the full effects of our policies, and make better judgements about what we want. And that can only be good for our society.

A good OIA story

I've had a lot of bad OIA experiences with the police. Quite apart from the vaguely sinister phone call I got from them once in response, there's the litany of requests "lost", late, or answered with glib bullshit. The police regularly top the list for OIA complaints, attracting over a hundred in 2008 - 2009. Institutionally, they seem to have an attitude problem, an entrenched culture of secrecy which holds that they should not be accountable in any way to the public and that we have no right to know what they are doing.

So its good to see that some of them are doing it right. Over the weekend, I acquired the 2010 OIA tracking data for the Auckland Police District. In the six months to June 31 2010 this district had handled 2279 requests. Six of these had poor data (e.g. typos in dates) so I don't want to guess at them. Of the remaining 2273, only three were late. The median response time was one working day. Its certainly a contrast with Police National headquarters, who in my experience are always late and can't find their arse with both hands.

The real story here is really that most OIA requests to police are routine. While I asked for the information on the subject of requests to be excluded to protect privacy, I understand that these requests are mostly people getting their file for their court date or insurance companies finding out if that burglary happened so they can pay out. While these have always been part of police business, they're technically OIA requests (every time you ask the government anything its technically an OIA request, and they have to help you with it; you don't have to say the magic words "Official Information Act"). And for this sort of stuff, the OIA seems to be working very well indeed.

New Fisk

CNN was wrong about Ayatollah Fadlallah

Another beat-up from the Herald

The Herald reports this morning that some list MPs are not maintaining electorate offices:

Seven list MPs are receiving almost $41,000 each a year to run offices in their local communities but choose not to, prompting a warning from Parliament's financial watchdog the funding may be reviewed if others follow suit.

From this, you'd think that our MPs were on to another rort, misappropriating money intended for their electorate offices for porn and champagne. But you'd be wrong. The Herald, whether deliberately or simply due to poor research and lazy reporting, is conflating MP's support entitlements with their electorate office entitlements.

Those entitlements are laid out in the Directions and Specifications for Services and Funding Entitlements for the House of Representatives, its Members, Former Members, and Certain Electoral Candidates 2008 [PDF], and it is clear from that that they are quite separate. MPs are entitled to:

• $40,932 (for list MPs) in "individual member's support funding" for "discharging their responsibilities as legislators and elected representatives" i.e. things like policy development, communications and advertising (s4.7, 4.12). It may not be spent for "anything that is not for a parliamentary purpose". This is the budget which all those electorate newsletters, posted surveys, mail drops, newspaper ads, etc come from, and its basically there so MPs can tell us what they're doing and ask us what they should do. It is not dependent in any way on having an office.
• the services of 1 (for a list MP) full-time equivalent staff member as out-of-Parliament support staff (s4.15), plus temp-coverage for sick leave and annual leave for same. This is to allow MPs to have an electorate office and serve their local communities by acting as an interface with central government (something our MPs do particularly well). Staff are employees of the parliamentary Service, and MPs who don't hire staff don't get to pocket the money.
• a full-time executive assistant in their parliamentary office, to answer the phones and do the paperwork. Again, these are employees of the Parliamentary Service, and MPs who answer their own phones don't get to pocket the money.
• Rent for an electorate office, plus fixtures and fittings (s5.18). Again, MPs who don't retain offices don't get to pocket the money.

Its pretty clear from this that the Herald's opening statement, that MPs receive $41,000 each year "to run offices in their local communities" is just flat out wrong. MPs who aren't setting up electorate offices may be stupid - but they're not rorting us. If anything, they're saving us money, though at the cost of shortchanging us on the democratic services we expect them to provide. And that's the real story here - not that these seven list MPs are rorting us, but that they're not doing their job. The Herald should name and shame them, so we can vote accordingly.

No justice in America

On New Years Day 2009, Oakland transit officer Johannes Mehserle executed Oscar Grant. Grant had been removed from a train, arrested, and was lying face down. Mehserle shot him in the back. The killing was videoed by at least five people in the surrounding crowd.

Today a jury (with no black members, of course) convicted Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter, the lowest charge available. It carries a penalty of between two and four years in prison. That's all the life of a black man murdered by a white law enforcement officer is worth.

Once again, we have been reminded that there is no justice in America. White police can kill with impunity, and the law ignores it.