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Lebanon and Hizbollah ready to welcome Ahmadinejad

The Greens support feudalism

Last night, Parliament saw the first reading of the Lawyers and Conveyancers Amendment Bill. The primary purpose of the bill is to restore the feudal title of "Queen's Counsel" to the New Zealand legal community (New Zealand lawyers apparently feeling inadequate with merely being labelled "senior", like the Australians).

The Greens supported it.

This is an appalling move. The Greens have always strongly supported moves away from feudalism and towards greater independence. Which is why they supported the original change. Nandor Tanczos was pretty clear in his first reading speech:

We believe that the title of Queen’s Counsel is a colonial vestige, and that it is high time it went.

And he was even clearer at the committee stage, when he proposed an amendment removing the title of "senior counsel" from the realm of the royal prerogative altogether and instead having it bestowed by someone qualified to judge whether a lawyer was actually highly experienced: the Law Society. This was a feudal title, and both it and the patronage by which it was bestowed had no place in modern Aotearoa.

So, what's changed? Why do the Greens suddenly support feudal titles and corrupt royal patronage? Do they have a reason? or is it simply that Nandor, Jeanette, and Sue have gone, and taken those core beliefs with them?

National to let IHC burn

Last week, the government put two IHC companies into statutory management after they indicated that they would not be able to pay staff wages owed as a result of a court case. Today in Parliament, health minister Tony Ryall was asked repeatedly whether the government would stump up the money to rescue those companies and ensure their staff could be paid. His response - repeated several times - was that "the liability lies with the provider". In other words, the government is going to refuse to pay up, let these companies go bankrupt, and throw their clients out on the street.

The government is pretending it doesn't have the money to do otherwise. Bullshit. As with their cuts to ECE, this is simply a question of priorities. And as there, National has decided that tax cuts to the elite few and ETS subsidies to their farmer mates come before essential health services for the disabled. And that's National in a nutshell: screwing the many to give more to the few.

Enjoining against bigotry

A US judge has followed up her ruling last month that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy was unconstitutional with an injunction preventing them from enforcing it. The net result is that gays are now free to serve openly in the US military. Unless, of course, the government appeals. But having supported overturning the ban, Obama can hardly do that, can he?

Anyone but Prendergast

Stuff is reporting that Celia Wade-Brown has won the Wellington mayoralty by 176 votes. So much for Kerry Prendergast. And so much for her arrogant claim that people didn't understand STV. Instead, it seems they understood it very well indeed.

And now the capital has a Green mayor. I'm looking forward to that change in transport priorities already...

Blaming the electoral system

So, with less than two hours to go until we find out who has won the Wellington mayoralty, incumbent Kerry Prendergast is pre-emptively blaming STV for any loss. According to Prendergast, it is "unfair and undemocratic" to require mayors to have majority support, and to use a voting system which takes second and lower preferences into account to determine that. And then there's this bit:

"At this stage, Celia [Wade-Brown] can't beat me, but STV can. I don't think members of the public have really understood the system. Some do, but the majority don't understand."

Or, to put it another way, "stupid ignorant voters not voting for me". But contra Prendergast, I think Wellington voters understood STV very well. They understood that they could rank candidates in order of preference, and they understood that they could rank her last, or not rank her at all, effectively casting an "anyone but Prendergast" vote. And it seems that many of them did exactly that.

Women go backwards under National

The World Economic Forum has released their annual Global Gender Gap Report, showing New Zealand ranks fifth in the world for gender equality for the fourth year in a row. But while a high ranking should be a cause for some celebration, looking at the country profile [PDF] should give us cause for concern, because our actual score has dropped slightly since last year [PDF]. The reason? A decrease in economic equality, caused by drops in both the overall ratio of women's to men's incomes and in wage equality for similar work. After four years of upwards progress, women are now going backwards under National.

And sadly, this trend is likely to continue. Quite apart from the dismantling of the pay equity unit and the government's refusal to act on pay equity audits which showed significant discrimination in the education sector [PDF], its ECE cuts are likely to force women into more precarious work, or out of the workforce entirely. None of this is going to be good for women. But since when has National ever cared about them?

Barbaric

Something barbaric is happening in Queensland: they're trying a woman for having an abortion:

It is alleged that Tegan Leach, 20, and her partner, Sergie Brennan, 22, imported the abortion drug misoprostol from the Ukraine and used it to terminate Leach's eight-week pregnancy. They face jail terms of seven and three years respectively.

Abortion is legal in Queensland only by a judge's ruling - and that ruling applies only to women who have gone begging to a doctor and effectively declared themselves insane. It does not cover modern pharmaceutical abortions, and it certainly doesn't let women control their own bodies. The upshot: two young people are now facing serious jail time because Queensland's abortion law has failed to keep pace with the times.

(I should point out that the law is similar in New Zealand. Abortion is still a crime (though we're civilised enough not to charge the woman), as is supplying or procuring the means (however it is done). So the same could happen here, and IIRC it has, quite recently).

Meanwhile Queensland's "pro-choice" Premier Anna Bligh refuses to act, and says that any reform has to come via a member's bill. But she blocked such a bill just two years ago. Like most politicians, she doesn't want to take a position if she can avoid it. The consequences of her cowardice will be seen in the Cairns District Court this week.

They lie reflexively

On Friday, US special forces attempted to rescue Linda Norgrove, a UK aid worker held hostage in Afghanistan. They failed, and she died. Initially the military claimed that she had been killed by her captors during the rescue. Now it has emerged that she was likely killed accidentally by her rescuers. Faced with a dead hostage, the US and UK lied reflexively in an effort to protect their reputation and paint her captors as (greater) monsters.

As the Independent editorial linked above points out, this isn't just wrong - its also stupid. Lies get discovered, trivial ones trivially so. And every time the government lies and is found out, trust in it decreases. If the UK and US governments want to get their citizens to believe in and support their war in Afghanistan, then consistently lying to them about it is exactly the wrong way to do it. But despite this, they just can't break the habit of deceit. Tomorrow or next week or next month they'll bomb another wedding party, lie and claim it was a group of militants, and have their deceit revealed when a journalist interviews witnesses and survivors. And they'll wonder why no-one supports their war anymore.

Unfortunately, their solution to that is likely to be more lies rather than less.

No place for women in "our place"

Te Papa - "our place" - is asking pregnant or menstruating women not to attend one of its tours:

An invitation for regional museum staff to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of Te Papa's collections included the condition that "wahine who are either hapu [pregnant] or mate wahine [menstruating]" were unable to attend.

Te Papa spokeswoman Jane Keig said the policy was in place because of Maori beliefs surrounding the taonga Maori collection included in the tour.

It may very well be - but that doesn't mean it is acceptable - or legal. Te Papa is a public institution. It is therefore bound by section 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act not to discriminate. It is also providing public access to its exhibits. This means it is bound by the Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender ("which includes pregnancy and childbirth"). While Te Papa may have made agreements with the donors of its exhibits, it cannot contract out of that obligation not to discriminate. Their behaviour is simply unlawful. Neither does phrasing it as a "request" get them off the hook - if a shop "respectfully" requested Maori not to enter, "for their own spiritual protection", we'd call it exactly what it was: racism. This is no different.

(As for the underlying spiritual belief - essentially that pregnant or menstruating women have cooties - I think that deserves all the contempt it gets, both on scientific and moral grounds. And no, its no excuse. The Catholics don't get exempted from human rights legislation for their homophobia and misogyny, and neither should Maori).

Key dog-whistles on MMP

Last month, we learned that John Key had been conspiring with Peter Shirtcliffe to overturn MMP and replace it with a less democratic electoral system. And we saw him doing it, with an attempt to blame MMP for ACT's internal problems. Today, he's at it again:

The public will get a chance at next year's election to vote for a change in the electoral system, and recent issues such as internal ructions in the ACT Party and the at times rogue element within the Maori Party regarding support from MP Hone Harawira means MMP will be under the microscope.

"My instincts have been that when you see issues around smaller parties it tends to undermine the confidence in MMP as a system," Mr Key said today.

Key's subtext is clear: a vote for MMP is a vote for Hone Harawira! Of course, there's a little problem there: Harawira is an electorate MP, so he'd be there regardless. But why let facts get in the way of a racist dog-whistle?

Our spineless Prime Minister

Last week, John Key demonstrated his utter lack of backbone by refusing to stand up to Paul Henry's racism, either at the time or after the fact. Yesterday he did it again. Challenged in his weekly press conference about his government's failure to congratulate Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo, he procrastinated and wibbled and then said:

“I’m not aware of why he’s in jail and it’s not for me to comment about what’s appropriate in terms of a country’s putting people in those facilities.”

Character is revealed under stress, and what's revealed here is appalling: an ignorant and insular man, who hasn't bothered to read a newspaper (or, presumably, his MFAT briefing) over the weekend, but also one who, when confronted with the story of someone who has been jailed for standing up for democracy and human rights, doesn't think it is appropriate to comment. Does Key have any principles at all? Or just a default setting of kow-towing to China?

But all is saved - overnight Key has stuck his finger in the wind, ran a focus group, and now feels it is politically safe to congratulate a Nobel prize winner and victim of Chinese oppression - albeit perfunctorily and with bad grace:

"Yes the Government offers him our congratulations," Mr Key said this morning as he headed into the National party's weekly caucus meeting.

If that's all he's going to say, you have to wonder why he didn't say it yesterday. But that would have involved standing for something - something our Prime Minister never does. The contrast with Helen Clark couldn't be clearer - we knew what she stood for. But Key stands for nothing. He is a man without principles, spineless, hollow.

UK police want to be above the law

The London Metropolitan Police has a problem: they keep abusing their powers and wrongfully arresting or even killing protestors. They keep discriminating against non-white members of their own force. And people keep finding out about these things using the UK's Freedom of Information Act. So they've hit upon a solution: put themselves above the law:

Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, has privately lobbied the home secretary to make it harder for people to take legal action against his force, the Guardian has learned.

[...]

The proposals are contained in appendices to a letter marked "confidential" and sent to Theresa May by Stephenson, who is Britain's most senior police officer, on 22 June. In the documents, released after inquiries by the Guardian, he suggests:

• Making it harder for people to sue the police for damages in civil actions. These usually involve allegations of brutality or wrongful arrest.
• Loading higher costs on to officers and other staff suing police forces at employment tribunals. These cases include claims of discrimination and unfair treatment.
• Charging the public a fee for freedom of information requests. The Freedom of Information Act is supposed to help citizens hold public bodies to account.

The result of these changes will be impunity for police: impunity to abuse, impunity to discriminate, impunity to behave unlawfully. That is completely unacceptable in a democratic country under the rule of law.

Homophobia and hate crimes

Its election season in America, which means we get the dreary sight of candidates appealing to bigotry to get elected. Today its New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, who declared that children shouldn't be "brainwashed" into thinking being gay is acceptable, and condemned his opponent for marching in a gay pride march earlier in the year. He then tried to deny he is homophobic.

Meanwhile, there was a perfect example of where this climate of hate and bigotry leads in the pages of the same paper on Friday. A pack of young men decided they didn't like gay people - so they kidnapped and tortured three of them:

The spree began last Sunday about 3:30 a.m., when the crew members snatched a 17-year-old off the street, took him to the apartment at 1910 Osbourne Place in Morris Heights and essentially sought to force him to confess to having performed sex acts with a 30-year-old man, one official said.

The boy, who had been trying to join the street crew, was, “thrown into a wall, made to strip naked, hit in the head with a beer can, cut with a box cutter and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger,” said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, who outlined the arrests at a news conference at 1 Police Plaza with Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito and other officials.

About 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the street crew members grabbed a second 17-year-old, took him to the same apartment and grilled him about his contact with the same 30-year-old man, the police said. Then they lured the 30-year-old man to the apartment by telling him a party was being held there and forced the teenager to hit him and burn him with a cigarette, the police said.

The assailants also brutalized the 30-year-old, hitting hit him with a chain, sodomizing him with a small baseball bat and forcing him to drink 10 cans of the alcohol-spiked energy drink they asked him to bring to the party — a brand called Four Loko, Mr. Kelly said. While holding the man hostage, the attackers took his keys, went to his apartment and robbed his brother of $1,000 and two debit cards, Mr. Kelly said.

Hate crimes like this are enabled by politicians like Paladino - politicians who constantly denigrate gay people and cast them as less worthy of respect, less than human. The results of that denigration can be seen in the scars and bruises on those men.

This is why we need to speak out against such hate speech when it occurs: to prevent it from going unchallenged, to prevent a climate of hate and bigotry from growing, to prevent crimes like this.

Against elected DHBs

The Herald reports that the Auckland District Health Board has had a clean sweep by candidates with names at the top of the alphabet. Over on Kiwiblog, DPF takes this as an argument that we shouldn't elect DHBs. And I agree with him. But its not just a question of farcical elections, where no media coverage combined with an election method which produces large fields results in an unmanageably large decision space and a virtual lottery between candidates. There are deeper philosophical reasons as well.

Fundamentally, elections are about representation and accountability. We elect people to make decisions on our behalf, and to make them accountable to us for those decisions. A corollary of this is that those people need to be able to make decisions that they can be accountable to us for - where there is no power or discretion, there is no point in election. Unfortunately, neither of these criteria is satisfied when it comes to DHBs. Legally, they are accountable to the Minister, not to us. If they advocate on behalf of their electors, they can be sacked. And their decision-making power is mostly an illusion. Both their strategic and annual plans must be signed off by the Minister. More importantly, their funding, and what it is spent on, is dictated by the Minister. A DHB has very little discretion on how their money is spent. Instead, they are effectively elected managers, all accountability with no responsibility.

The result of this is to insulate the real decision-makers - Ministers - from accountability. They can underfund health, then say that cuts are the DHB changing priorities. They can refuse to provide enough money for doctors and nurses, then blame the DHBs for the resulting strikes. They can fail to fund enough operations, then point the finger at the DHBs for waiting lists. DHBs get to carry the can for every Ministerial decision. Except the good ones, of course - when the Minister announces tagged funding for another thousand hip-ops, they take the credit. But when that funding is never increased, demand exceeds supply, and people hang around in pain for months or years, its the DHB's fault.

Ending this charade and replacing DHBs with appointed management bodies would allow us to place the blame for health decisions squarely where it belongs: on the Minister. It would allow us to hold them accountable, and prevent them from hiding behind a bunch of poor saps who get to helplessly implement whatever deranged scheme the Minister has come up with. But since Ministers write the law, the chances of such a change are about zero.

Interesting

Parliament resumes tomorrow, and first on the Order Paper [PDF] is something interesting: Member's Notice of Motion No. 1, a motion to disallow the New Zealand (Mandatory Fortification of Bread with Folic Acid) Amendment Food Standard 2009 [PDF]. This has been brought by Moana Mackey, a member of the Regulations Review Committee, in response to a complaint against the food standard. The majority of the RRC rejected the complaint [PDF], but the Labour minority on the committee supported it. So they lodged a motion, which under the Regulations (Disallowance) Act 1989 would result in the standard being disallowed if not voted on within 21 sitting days. The fact that the government is debating it probably signifies they want to vote the motion down and defend the regulations.

This has all been done very quietly, and Mackey hasn't issued any press statement on it; given the lack of attention paid to Member's Notices of Motion (which are usually used to formally congratulate people MPs want to suck up to in their electorates), I'm wondering whether she was hoping to have the regulations disallowed by stealth. While this would show up the Minister, its democratically dubious. Debating the motion forces both government and opposition to make their case, and lets the public judge which is the stronger. Unlike politicians, I happen to think that is a Good Thing.

Good riddance to racist rubbish

So, Paul Henry has resigned. Good riddance. The man was a vile little racist who pandered to the worst elements of our society for ratings. Fortunately, his advertisers seem to have realised (and impressed upon TVNZ) that that contaminates their brand. Hopefully this will be a lesson to them.

Sadly, it hasn't been a lesson to Henry. His resignation statement is full of self-pity and victimhood, a complete failure to acknowledge the severity of the hurt he has caused, another exercise in insincerity. Still, he's gone. And now maybe we can have breakfast television hosted by an actual journalist, rather than a clown, and which reports the news rather than denigrating anyone who doesn’t fit into the host's North Shore worldview.

10/10: World Day Against the Death Penalty

Today, October 10, is the world day against the death penalty. New Zealand finally abolished the death penalty over 20 years ago, but 58 countries still retain it. Today is the day we work to change that.

This year the focus is on the United States. Not only is the USA alone in the western world in practicing capital punishment - it also executes the mentally ill and mentally disabled in clear contravention of international law. Until recently, they also executed children.

Worse, they execute the innocent. In 2004, the state of Texas executed Cameron Willingham for setting a fire which killed his three children. The fire was later proven to be accidental. And he's not the only one. A depressing number of US death penalty convictions turn out to be dubious. All up, over a hundred US death row inmates have been subsequently exonerated. And racism is a common factor in these wrongful convictions. Clarence Brandley's story is typical [PDF, p. 4]:

Brandley was working as a high school custodian in Conroe, Texas, in 1980, when police arrested him for the murder of Cheryl Fergeson, a 16-year-old student.

While the police interviewed Brandley and one of his white co-workers, an interrogator proclaimed that, “One of you two is going to hang for this,” and told Clarence, “Since you’re the nigger, you’re elected.” In his first trial he faced an all-white jury. One juror refused to convict, causing a hung jury, and was met with a constant barrage of harassment and threats after the trial ended, ridiculed for being a “nigger-lover.” Clarence’s second all-white jury convicted him, and in 1981 he was sentenced to death. A year later it was revealed that the majority of the murder investigation’s physical evidence had mysteriously disappeared while under police control. In 1986 a new witness stepped forward claiming to know the real murderer. Yet Clarence’s defense was repeatedly denied a new trial. With an execution date set for March 27, 1987, a vocal protest movement around his case began to grow.

In October of 1987, after extensive hearings detailing prosecutorial misconduct, the judge declared, “In the thirty years that this court has presided over matters in the judicial system, no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice…And public officials who lost sight of what is right and just.”

Texas "justice": may differ from actual justice, particularly if the defendant is black. Anyone who entrusts the power of life and death to a system capable of such errors needs their head examined.

But in addition to being racist and error-prone, the US system of capital punishment is simply wrong. Killing people is wrong. It's wrong when its done by murderers, its wrong when its done by lynchmobs, and its wrong when its done by the state. And sticking a gown and a wig on someone doesn't change that one iota.

New Fisk

Injustice in three dimensions

Rodney loses

While everyone is congratulating Len Brown for his landslide victory in the Auckland mayoral race, and thanking whatever entities they do or don't believe in for sparing them another term of John Banks, I think we should take some time to remember the real loser in Auckland today: Rodney Hide. Having restructured Auckland's local government in an effort to gerrymander the right a permanent lock on power, his (and John Key's) anointed candidate has just been shown the door by the voters. His chosen party, the CitRats, have likewise been shown the door, winning only half the seats they predicted. The result: instead of handing Auckland to the right, he has instead gifted it to the left. Thanks, Rodney!