Who will fund the dream of rebuilding Syria back to its former glory?
The untold story of the deaths at Hajj
Monday, June 13, 2016
New Fisk
The problem, not the solution
Housing New Zealand was established to end homelessness in New Zealand by the provision of affordable state homes for all who need them. Instead, its creating homelessness:
Housing New Zealand is being accused of causing homelessness by evicting people who can't get rehoused anywhere else.
The Tenancy Tribunal made 1430 orders involving Housing NZ last year, an average of 27 a week, and 717, or an average of 36 a week, so far this year up to May 16.
Auckland Action Against Poverty advocacy co-ordinator Alastair Russell said the state-owned agency, which exists to house people who can't get housed elsewhere, was "pursuing an aggressive policy of eviction based on non-payment of rent".
And frequently, that "non-payment of rent" is due to the usual muppetry by WINZ, rather than any failure of the tenant.
The driver for this is simple: thanks to National's policy of state house sales they don't have enough state houses. And rather than building more, they create vacancies by rapidly churning their tenants and looking for any reason they can to evict people. Or, to put it another way, they provide homes for people living on the street by throwing people out on the street...
Pretty obviously, this isn't a solution to housing need. But National isn't interested in a solution. If they were, they'd be investing a billion a year in a mass state-house building programme to rebuild the state housing stock, rather than trying to sell it down and dump the job on community agencies.
Friday, June 10, 2016
Ruataniwha dam supported by corruption
This is awkward. One of the councillors who consistently votes for the Ruataniwha dam has had a serious and undeclared conflict of interest over it for at least six months:
It’s been revealed that a Hawke’s Bay Regional councillor could stand to make money if the Council approves a controversial and polluting dam that’s set to cost close to $1 billion.
The councillor, Deborah Hewitt, owns a property that falls within the proposed area to be supplied with water from the planned Ruataniwha Dam. The land value of those within this irrigation zone is expected to increase if construction of the dam goes ahead.
It’s understood Hewitt began the process of declaring the conflict of interest yesterday, a day after Greenpeace New Zealand and more than a dozen others requested an official inquiry into the issue following information obtained under the Official Information Act.
[...]
“It’s uncanny timing that the council has only acknowledged this conflict of interest after people started making noise about it. It begs the question, if it wasn’t for public pressure, would it have been declared?”
I think the answer to that is pretty obvious.
This is simply corrupt. There is no other word for it. It is also illegal. Section 6 of the Local Authorities (Members' Interests) Act 1968 bars locla authority members from voting on or participating in discussion of matters in which they have a pecuniary interest, on pain of being unseated. Councillor Hewitt appears to have done this consistently. She needs to be prosecuted for it.
No justice for rendition
In 2004, Britain kidnapped Sami al-Saadi in Hong Kong and illegally rendered him to Libya. The same year, they helped the CIA do the same to Abdul Hakim Belhaj and his family in Thailand. Both men were tortured by the Libyan regime, and it is clear that MI6 knew and wanted this to happen. In fact, they questioned both victims after their torture. But despite this, the British government is refusing to bring charges against its spies:
Prosecutors are set to announce that they are bringing no charges following a police investigation into MI6’s involvement in the kidnapping of two families who were “rendered” to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s prisons, despite protests by the victims and their lawyers that the evidence against the agency is overwhelming.
Documents that described the UK’s involvement in the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife, and fellow Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi along with his wife and four young children, were uncovered during the 2011 revolution that led to the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi.
[...]
Scotland Yard officers who have spent four years building a case against the MI6 officers allegedly involved will be deeply dismayed by the decision.
So too will be Belhaj, Saadi and their families, who have said that they will regard any failure to bring charges as a damning indictment of British standards of justice.
This is as clear a case as you can get. There is a paper trail a mile wide linking this straight to MI6. Given that, its hard to escape the conclusion that this is just another example of the British establishment protecting its own from justice. But by doing so, they prove both that the UK is absolutely unreformable, and that people will have to seek justice for its crimes by other means. And when you are trying to fight terrorism, that is a very dangerous message to send.
As for Mark Allen and jack Straw, the apparent architects of this crime, there are a multitude of legal jurisdictions which claim universal jurisdiction for torture and are well connected to other countries via extradition treaties. Like America's Iraq criminals, they should be thinking twice about any foreign trips for the rest of their lives.
Thursday, June 09, 2016
Why have we built Big Brother?
A Treasury newsletter pointed me at Deloitte's State of the State report on "social investment for our future". It attempts to make the case for the government's social investment agenda, which has driven the creation of big brother.
Their case for this massive invasion of privacy? To keep taxes low, of course!
Which is very obviously the usual trap of "we must do something! This is something! So we must do this!" That level of thinking is obviously why Treasury pays external consultants the big bucks.
But it gets worse. Because Statistics New Zealand's "big brother" Integrated Data Infrastructure isn't enough for them. There are gaps from people who haven't been forced to interact with the government yet, and the data isn't integrated enough. So they're pushing for a national identity register and national citizen numbers to "capture the entire population" and ensure they can keep track of us all properly. At this stage, there is the only mention of privacy in the entire report, where (after highlighting that New Zealanders value privacy and are likely to react to their idea with "disdain and distrust") they ominously note that "a culture shift is required" away from valuing personal privacy.
So there you have it: the privacy of the poor must be sacrificed to ensure freedom from taxation for the rich. And that's why StatsNZ can tell whether you've had an abortion and the current balance of your student loan.
Good news and bad news on local government
The Government introduced a new Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill (No 2) today which makes various tweaks to the rules around local government mergers. The good news: all such merges will once again have to be approved by a referendum in the affected area. The referendum will still be decided by a simple majority, rather than having to have majority support in every affected area (so big councils can outvote and eat small ones if they have the support of their voters to do so), but its far better than the current situation, where a poll doesn't need to be held at all.
The bad news: the bill will allow for
the same local authority to act as a unitary authority (as both territorial authority and regional council) in one district and as regional council only in another district that has its own territorial authority
...and whose voters have no say in the composition of the new supercouncil. So its a way to remove decisions about air and water quality and make them the preserve of trusted voters, while cutting evrybody else out.
I'm wondering if this is National's endgame for ECan: Christchurch voters keep wanting clean water, so make Ashburton (or other dipshit rural) council the "regional" council and deprive those troublesome urban voters of any say over the issue. But because its a general provision, Christchurch voters could submit their own reorganisation proposal and get in first, then outvote the rest of the region to control all the water themselves! Either alternative would obviously be deeply undemocratic, but its what National is setting us up for.
The other bad news: National will be able to strap the chicken on reorganisations by being able to "specify expectations" to the Local Government Commission. Not on any particular proposal, of course - that would be too overt - but they could e.g. specify that it should approve all mergers, or refuse to allow urban areas control of water. The Local Government Commission also ultimately decides local body representation schemes, including electoral boundaries and the system used. So National could also require the Commission to push for at-large election and oppose shifts to STV, for example, or to grant greater electoral weight to rural areas, or to cap council sizes to reduce representation.
Overall, this bill is another attack on local body democracy, and the core of it needs to be opposed.
We built big brother
You are being watched. The government has a secret system which contains records of everything you have ever done. Where you went to school. Where you worked. How much you earned. Who you lived with. Your sexual orientation. Whether you have ever been a victim - or a suspect - of crime. Whether you have ever had a mental illness or addiction problem. Where you went on holiday. Whether you have been on a benefit. What drugs you have been prescribed, and for what conditions. Your census records. Whether you have had a sexually transmitted disease. Everything you have ever told a government agency, or anything they have learned or inferred or suspected about you, all in one big database for them to look through.It sounds like the introduction to a dystopian SF TV show. But it has happened here, in New Zealand, completely without notice.
The system is the Department of Statistics' Integrated Data Infrastructure. It integrates a multitude of government data sources, everything from benefit and employer data to IRD records and census returns. A host of intrusive, highly personal data, all in one place.
The data is supposed to be anonymised, and I have no doubt that Statistics New Zealand has done a though job of removing names, dates of birth, IRD numbers and addresses. But you only need three or four data points to identify someone from anonymised data, and this database has hundreds. If you know that someone lived in Central Auckland in 2013, was burgled in July 2015, and broke their leg in 2010, that's enough to individually identify them and expose their entire life-history for perusal.
The data is only supposed to be used for statistical purposes under Statistics New Zealand's (extremely rigorous) research protocols. At the same time, the mere fact of its concentration creates threats to privacy. There's the obvious security risk - hackers could download it all, and basically pwn everyone's privacy. There's the insider risk - Stats New Zealand staff taking the opportunity to perve through people's data for LOVEINT (or whatever) on them. Again, I have no doubt that Statistics New Zealand has robust protections in place to counter both of these risks.
But the under-the-radar risk is access by other government agencies. To point out the obvious: the data is a "document", so the police can demand your entire life history with a simple production order and no judicial oversight (they get it easy: they can demand the key as well). And of course the SIS or GCSB could demand it (or just covertly access it) and share it with all their foreign friends (assuming those foreign "friends" haven't hacked it already, because its exactly the sort of data they keep track of).
More importantly, there's the abuse of trust inherent in this. We give our information to the government for specific purposes, and under the assurance that it will only be used for those purposes. While we accept a certain level of cross-matching to serve those purposes - travel records and court warrants, for example - We don't expect our health records to be cross-correlated with our income taxes, or our travel history to be cross-correlated with childcare. This secret concentration and integration of data by the government is an abuse of the trust we have placed in it, and an abuse of our privacy.
And we are defenceless against it. With companies, you can just lie (and you should: you should lie about everything that it is not strictly necessary for a company to know to complete a particular transaction. Its a basic C21st defence mechanism). Or you can refuse to deal with them. But the government can compel both interaction and truth, and jail us if we refuse either. Which means we go into their database, whether we want to or not.
In the UK, GCHQ and MI5 are currently in shit because they've been collecting "bulk personal datasets" of travel and financial data (which naturally they fuse with communications metadata and spied-on emails). What we're doing here goes well beyond that. And while the intention isn't to spy - its all about using "Big Data" to mine for policy proposals - it creates a hell of a capability. And a capability that is simply too dangerous to exist in a free and democratic society.
This system must be destroyed, and its data deleted. And I will vote for any politician who promises that.
Wednesday, June 08, 2016
End the torture of "seclusion"
Yesterday we learned that Capital Coast DHB was torturing an autistic man, keeping him locked in a "seclusion unit" for five years. The scary thing is that its not an isolated case:
An unknown number of patients are held in long-term seclusion in New Zealand institutions.The Ombudsman doesn't have the resources to monitor all the facilities which could be doign this, and oddly, they don't keep records so the number of people they're torturing in this way can't be counted. The scary thing is that they expect cases even worse than the one we know about.
Inspectors from the Ombudsman's Office, who monitor the issue, say they do not know the exact number, but there are more.
[...]
Documents show at least one other case exists at the same site - in a different mental health unit, Haumiatiketike - where an intellectually disabled man has been under a seclusion order for at least two years. The health board refused to elaborate on his case due to "privacy issues".
Over the past five years, inspectors have noted about five long-term seclusion cases in mental health facilities. But they say a "substantial number" of areas are not monitored, including community-based homes for the disabled, aged-care units and other compulsory care facilities.
Again, this is simply wrong, and it must end. People should not be tortured for any reason, and especially not because its the cheapest way of "managing" them. Those currently in seclusion need care and support, not torture.
As for those who are torturing them, I think the solution is clear: torture is illegal, and those fuckers should go to jail for their crimes.
Toys for the boys
The government released a defence white paper today, basicly a long-term plan for the NZDF. Or, in English, their shopping list. So what does NZDF want? Big, fancy ASW planes, for hunting down Soviet (not an error) submarines. Big fancy cargo planes for hauling tanks to the Middle East, the same ones Australia has. Some of that sweet "cyber" woo-money GCSB, SIS and all the other cool kids are getting, so they can be all hip and cool and William Gibson like SF fans were in the 80's. And they want us to spend $20 billion over 15 years to buy them all this.
Bluntly, we should tell them to fuck off. Because what's apparent from this wish-list is that NZDF are wanting toys for the boys, not anything related to our actual defence needs. Meanwhile, the cost will be at the expense of higher-value investments, such as schools and hospitals.
NZDF wants the same kit everybody else has, both for status reasons, so they can keep up with the Americans and Australians, and for "interoperability" - so they can fight other people's wars, the wars the New Zealand public opposes. Their case for better armoured vehicles is all because the Middle East is an "increasingly challenging and higher threat environment for defence force deployments". Or, we could not fucking go there. Its not like we want to be there anyway, after all. Buying NZDF this gear, giving them these capabilities, puts them on the table as an option when the US wants to form another coalition for its next stupid imperialist adventure. Denying them that capability keeps us out of the US's stupid wars, keeps us safe.
Especially when the capability they want comes at the expense of things we actually want the NZDF to do. The big fancy cargo plane NZDF wants as a replacement for the current Hercules? It will need a long runway to take off, won't be able to land on rough airstrips, and there will be only one of them rather than four. So, the basic role of delivering aid to the Pacific after disasters, the one the planes actually get used for and that the public overwhelmingly supports, will be sacrificed for a gold-plated status-symbol useful only for providing logistical support for other people's wars. Those ASW planes? What we actually need is something to monitor illegal fishing, do post-disaster damage assessments, and look for lost ships - not fucking imaginary submarines from thirty years ago. As for "cyber", it's woo and always has been, a buzzword used to scam funding from gullible politicians. And insofar as its not, don't we already have an agency, the GCSB, supposedly dedicated to that already?
And then there's the opportunity cost. Because that $20 billion over 15 years, more than a billion dollars a year, is a shitload of money and will come at the cost of other programmes. That billion dollars a year? That's not just the pathetic paid parental leave extension the government is currently threatening to veto, but a full year (and probably more). Its two thousand new state houses every year. Its a 50 percent increase in police numbers, or the elimination of tertiary fees, or a doubling of science funding. Or its the annual increase required in our health budget - which to be blunt, saves more lives than NZDF ever has and ever will. All of these investments are worth far more to us as a society than a bunch of useless planes and guns so defence ministers and generals can play at their fantasies of war (really, can't they just fuck off and start a larp?)
Eisenhower was right:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Time to stop stealing. Time to stop paying for NZDF's toys.
National's New Zealand
National's latest "success story"? Homelessness in Auckland has more than doubled in the past three years:
The homeless population of central Auckland is two-and-a-half times higher than it was three years ago, a new report says.
The Auckland City Street Count of Central Auckland has found 177 people were sleeping rough within 3km of the Sky Tower on a single night this year.
That's the most recorded since the count began in 2004, and is significantly higher than the 68 people counted in the same area in 2013.
At least 51 people weren't included in the count, because they had found temporary accommodation or were in hospital that night.
The previous high was 91, in 2008; National has almost doubled that. Looking at the graph, something definitely seems to have happened between 2013 and 2014 which caused a step change in homelessness. "Reviewable tenancies" and the practice of churning state housing tenants to create the illusion of spaces, perhaps?
But no matter what the cause, this is a horrific failing on the part of the government, and one they need to be held responsible for.
Member's Day
Today is a member's day, and its likely to be a slog. Sue Moroney's Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave and Work Contact Hours) Amendment Bill is due for its committee stage, and with National still threatening an unconstitutional financial veto its likely to be contentious. There's a small possibility that they'll wrap it up tonight, and be able to make a start on the committee stage of Adrian Rurawhe's (far less contentious) Official Information (Parliamentary Under-Secretaries) Amendment Bill - but if National filibusters, it'll be paid parental leave all night.
Because today will be all committee stages, there won't be a ballot tomorrow.
Time to end the subsidy of migrant labour
Stuff this morning has an article containing the usual whining from business about how they need migrants because they "can't get kiwis to do the work". You know, like working late at night with drunks for fuck-all pay, or 18 days in a row in the middle of nowhere for less than minimum wage.
The common thread in this is that the jobs they want filled are shit jobs that people are reluctant to take if they have any better option. And in a market economy, the proper solution is for employers with such jobs to offer higher wages until they fill. Can't get people to work your crazy hospitality hours with your unpleasant hospitality customers? Offer more money. Can't get people to pick fruit in holiday season? Pay them more. Can't get people to effectively give up any chance of a normal life because you can't be fucked taking care of your own cows? Fork over the cash (or hire another person so they can live like normal people, rather than crazed Stakhanovite cow-cultists). If you can't find someone to fill a job, then the market is sending you a message, and the message is "better pay and conditions".
So the problem here isn't that kiwis are not willing to take those jobs - its that employers are not willing to pay what it takes to fill them. And when you frame it like that, access to easy migrant labour really is just a subsidy to shit employers. And that doesn't just suppress the wages and living conditions of the rest of us and allow bad employers to unjustly profit from exploitation - the subsidy of low migrant wages also stops them from innovating and competing properly with one another. It allows them to retain outdated labour practices that no longer match the modern world, because our government lets them avoid the market consequences. And that's not good for any of us.
The thing is that this is already illegal. New Zealand law requires employers to offer a job to New Zealanders and have genuinely failed to fill it before seeking foreign workers. But that law is not enforced, and skills are deemed "essential" and in "shortage" not because of any genuine shortage, but because of a "shortage" at the price employers are willing to pay. The entire dairy industry runs off such practices (and are squealing because they might have to up their game and start paying real wages).
But no matter what form it takes - cash, environmental, regulatory or migrant - if a business is only "profitable" because it receives a subsidy and is able to dump its costs on the rest of us, its really not profitable at all. We are socially better off by ending those subsidies and letting those businesses die rather than letting them continue to leech off us. Bad employers should stand on their own two feet and offer real pay and conditions rather than being subsidised by migrant labour. And if they won't, we should let them go bankrupt and make space for someone who will.
(And just to make this perfectly clear: I like immigration, and I'm perfectly comfortable with people coming her to share and change the New Zealand way of life. What I don't like is the law being ignored to effectively subsidise bad businesses unwilling to accept that they will have to pay more for workers)
Tuesday, June 07, 2016
Open Government: Utter denial
Back in March, I OIA'd State Service Minister Paula Bennett about the Open Government Partnership, which exposed that she simply wasn't interested and had not been briefed on the (then) upcoming national action plan consultation. Large amounts of the documents released had been withheld as "free and frank advice", so I complained to the Ombudsman. Over the weekend, some of the redacted documents were released.
Bennett's response is here. In it she claims that the material was withheld because
At the time we were responding to your request, the independent review of New Zealand's National Action Plan was published, and public comment was being sought. Due to the active public consultation period, officials wished to avoid any potential for free and frank expressions of opinion to have an impact on the consultation, so that interested stakeholders could form their own view. Accordingly some sections of the documents that dealt with the independent review mechanism or aspects that were covered in the independent reviewer's report were withheld.
Which is interesting, given that the IRM report was released on 18 February, public comment closed on 3 March, and the material was not released until 17 March. I'd call Bennett a liar, except that she's just saying what her officials have told her to say. And its the officials who have something to hide here, because those "free and frank expressions of opinion" are pretty bloody embarrassing for them and demonstrate the government's continued bad faith around the OGP.
So what did they withhold? Firstly, in a February 2015 background briefing they state the obvious about our unambitious action plan commitments:
The risks are mostly reputational. Our OGP actions could be perceived as not reflecting our high reputation in this area. For example, action plans consisting of commitments that are existing programmes of work risk criticism for lacking ambition, and limited engagement with the public and stakeholders in their development, implementation and evaluation will lead to OGP and domestic criticism. As an existing high performing country, demonstrating stretch in action plans will always challenge New Zealand. Our view is that these risks will be managed by the proposed programme.
In September 2015, after they had received initial feedback on the mid-term self-assessment report, they realised they had a problem, complaining about a "vocal minority" (three quarters of their submissions) who took a "narrow view" that New Zealand should actually adhere to the spirit and rules of the Open Government Partnership and make ambitious commitments and consult properly over them, rather than have an action plan of existing programmes with no extra ambition. They noted that they "do not agree with this view", but that it could result in "negative comment" when the self-assessment was released.
By December, that had turned into full-throated denial. Their advice then predicted that IRM reviewer Steven Price would be critical of their action plan and accused him of "reflect[ing] particular civil society and community voices and their concerns". However, they thought there was "a very positive story of progress to be told about New Zealand's achievements", and they presented a communications plan which would attempt to discount the IRM report. In the end, they didn't do any of it - in fact, SSC did not issue any public comment on the IRM report at all, and refused to acknowledge it or its criticisms in any way.
Later in the submissions analysis in that document, they go into further detail on why their critics are wrong and how it is "legitimate" to use existing programmes as core OGP commitments. The IRM report should have disabused them of that notion. Unfortunately, their response has been to retreat further into denial, delaying our next action plan, while promising that public input will be ignored. But that isn't going to solve the core problem: the OGP demands real commitments, and real reform; trying to pretend it doesn't will eventually damage the very reputation SSC is predicating their inaction on.
Another amazing coincidence!
Hager Book: Brash assisted to power by business lobby, New Zealand Herald, 24 November 2006:
Hager also details attendees at National Party corporate fundraisers and lists "high value" donors.
These include Alan Gibbs, Craig Heatley, David Richwhite, Diane Foreman, Doug Myers, Michael Friedlander, Peter Shirtcliffe and Rod Deane.
Queen's Birthday Honours: Michael Friedlander receives knighthood, Stuff, 7 June 2016:
Long-time philanthropist and property investor Sir Michael Friedlander says he has "come to terms with" receiving a knighthood this Queen's Birthday.
Friedlander, who is also one of the country's wealthiest people, was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philanthropy.
In fact, its just amazing how many of the people on that list have been given honours by National. Heatley and Foreman got CNZMs, Myers and Deane were given knighthoods (Shirtcliffe had already been given one by Roger Douglas). But I'm sure its just a terrible, awful-looking coincidence.
This is just wrong
The Herald this morning has an appalling story about Capital Coast DHB's treatment of an autistic man. They're torturing him, keeping him locked in a "seclusion unit" for five years. The Ombudsman has ordered him freed, and they're still torturing him. Why? To put it bluntly, cuts are to blame:
After the Ombudsman's report, Ashley seemed very close to release. A provider, Community Connections, was found. Plans were made to find him a home, to design an individual funding package, and to train specialist staff.
But it never happened. Reports mention a "tightening" of funding. Psychiatrists also wanted Ashley to be less "disturbed" before he was allowed out of the seclusion ward, and to try living in another part of Tawhirimatea with more patients for a while.
Funding for effective therapy gets discontinued. When they come up with a new transition plan, it doesn't get funded. And so they keep torturing him, because the DHB has no money to treat him effectively, no money to treat him like a human being. And in the process, they are exacerbating his condition, making it worse.
This is simply wrong. Capital Coast DHB are torturing this man because it is not a budget priority not to, because it is not financially convenient to stop. But it needs to stop. And those responsible for this prolonged torture need to be prosecuted for their crimes.
Friday, June 03, 2016
Places to go, people to be
Nothing from me today, as I'm off to Wellington for general geekiness. Normal bloggage will resume on Tuesday.
Thursday, June 02, 2016
Contracts and incentives
Yesterday we learned that some of National's charter schools were not all they're cracked up to be, with two violating contractual limits on expulsions and others failing to meet academic targets. So are they being punished for failing to meet the terms of their contract? Yeah, right:
Mr Seymour said the government was in discussion with Vanguard about its suspension and expulsion figures.
"The reason that we're in discussion rather than punishing them at this stage is simply the fact that first of all they have an ethos that is working extremely well. They have a very high discipline mantra and that has led to higher levels of exclusion and expulsion then you'd otherwise get."
Mr Seymour said it was also important to take into account that many of the school's students had struggled at other schools.
The whole idea behind the NeoLiberal policy of privatisation and contracting out is that management by contract provides clear incentives to providers to perform. Except that that fails to consider the other incentive in the system: the incentive on politicians who sold this snake oil to declare them a success. So as with Serco's private prisons, when the schools fail, they are not punished - because to actually enforce the contract would mean Seymour admitting that he had made a mistake. And so the contractors get to rip us off, and laugh all the way to the bank. And their victims - kids - receive a substandard education while they do it.
