The Nauru Files

How bad are Australia's refugee concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Island? The Guardian has been leaked over 2,000 incident reports from Nauru, and they paint a horrifying picture of self-harm, despair, and sexual assault:

More than 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s detention camp for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – totalling more than 8,000 pages – are published by the Guardian today. The Nauru files set out as never before the assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers held by the Australian government, painting a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty.

The Guardian’s analysis of the files reveal that children are vastly over-represented in the reports. More than half of the 2,116 reports – a total of 1,086 incidents, or 51.3% – involve children, although children made up only about 18% of those in detention on Nauru during the time covered by the reports, May 2013 to October 2015. The findings come just weeks after the brutal treatment of young people in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory was exposed, leading to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announcing a wide-ranging public inquiry.

The reports range from a guard allegedly grabbing a boy and threatening to kill him once he is living in the community to guards allegedly slapping children in the face. In September 2014 a teacher reported that a classroom helper had requested a four-minute shower instead of a two-minute shower. “Her request has been accepted on condition of sexual favours. It is a male security person. She did not state if this has or hasn’t occurred. The security officer wants to view a boy or girl having a shower.”

[...]

In the files there are seven reports of sexual assault of children, 59 reports of assault on children, 30 of self-harm involving children and 159 of threatened self-harm involving children.

This is simply obscene. And creating, imposing and then tolerating these conditions is a crime against humanity for which the Australian government and its hired camp-guards need to be held to account.

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Member's Day

Today is a member's day, and one which may finally see some first readings. There's a private bill to deal with first, then the second reading of David Parker's Minimum Wage (Contractor Remuneration) Amendment Bill, after which its on to the first reding of Marama Fox's Oaths and Declarations (Endorsing the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi) Amendment Bill (which will apparently fail, National and NZ First being uncomfortable with New Zealand being New Zealand rather than some little piece of England). If the House moves quickly, they'll make a start on Mark Mitchell's Social Security (Stopping Benefit Payments for Offenders who Repeatedly Fail to Comply with Community Sentences) Amendment Bill.

There should be a ballot for at least one bill tomorrow. I wonder what new member's bills we'll see?

Open Government: Round-filed

Back in May, the government quietly "announced" (in their usual beware-of-the-leopard way) that it was delaying submission of its Open Government Partnership second national action plan in order to "allow time for wider engagement with New Zealanders and civil society organisations". As part of this process, it invited submissions fro the public on how to engage:

We would welcome any ideas that you have for how the Government can enhance its engagement with civil society and reach a wider group of New Zealanders to get their views on open government.

We welcome your contributions. Please email us at NZOGP_ActionPlan@ssc.govt.nz by 31 May 2016.

We will consider the contributions we receive in developing the engagement method and plan. All contributions will be considered and a summary will be produced and published on this website.

So how many submissions did they receive, and what happened to them? I was curious, so I submitted an urgent OIA request asking for copies of the submissions and all advice and communications that had resulted from them. The response was depressing:

• SSC received four submissions on the engagement process, all from private individuals. Civil society organisations, a core part of the OGP and the other party to the partnership, did not submit on the engagement process.
  
• SSC released only one submission - mine - while withholding the others on privacy grounds. This is unusual; its normal practice for submissions of this nature to be made public as a matter of course. But they did release a summary, which showed that submitters were critical of SSC's progress so far.
  
• No advice or communications resulted from these submissions - so, no formal summary of submissions or key themes, and no summary for the website as promised, not even a single email commenting on low interest or the absence of input from NGOs. Its as if they just threw them in the rubbish-bin the moment they were received. However, SSC claims that "input from the public has informed aspects of the revised engagement and consultation process that is now underway" - without a shred of documentary evidence to support that claim.
  

None of which bodes well for the current engagement process. At the moment people are submitting on the national action plan background and themes, and soon we'll hopefully have a chance to actually suggest commitments. People are submitting in good faith - but from this, we have no reason to believe that SSC will consider the submissions, or even look at them before burying them in a hole.

It begins...

A couple of months ago, National announced that it was trying to re-introduce bulk funding of New Zealand schools. And now they're getting the natural response: industrial action from teachers:

Meetings for 60,000 teachers will be held across the country during school hours next month in opposition to the Government's proposed funding review.

The paid union meetings are the first time the New Zealand Education Institute (NZEI) and Post-Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) have undertaken joint meetings of such a scale.

The unions say the Government's latest funding proposal, part of an attempt to fix the stigma attached to the current decile model, would be a "return to the failed bulk-funding experiment of the 1990s".

"It could result in fewer teachers and larger class sizes.

This is only the beginning. Last time the government tried this, they faced years of strikes and stoppages across the education system, and schools which accepted bulk funding were blacklisted. And all of that will happen again if National tries to re-impose this policy. If they want the education system to function, they need to work with teachers, not against them, and give up on the stealth cuts of bulk funding.

Why does the UK Labour Party hate democracy?

When the UK Labour party announced its leadership challenge, the first thing it did was disenfranchise more than a hundred thousand of its own members least they vote for the "wrong" candidate. The good news is that the High Court yesterday overturned that decision, restoring the voting rights of 130,000 members and requiring that £25 "supporter fees" paid to gain the right to vote be repaid. The bad news? Labour is of course appealing:

Labour has decided to appeal a High Court ruling, passed down on Monday which suggested the party’s governing body had illegally barred 130,000 people from voting in the leadership election.

Judges had ruled in favour of five supporters who accused the party's governing body – the National Executive Committee (NEC) – of unlawfully "freezing" them out, even though they had "paid their dues", when it decided that full members would not be able to vote unless they had six months' continuous membership up to July 12.

A spokesperson for the party said: “The Procedures Committee of the NEC has decided that the Labour Party will appeal this ruling in order to defend the NEC’s right, as Labour’s governing body, to uphold the rule book, including the use of freeze dates.”

Because apparently the last thing a democratic socialist party wants is for its members to be able to vote on its leadership. It's absurd, its undemocratic, and it really makes you ask: why does UK Labour hate democracy?

Calling bullshit on "P-contamination"

For the past year, Housing New Zealand has been using bogus tests for methamphetamine residue to evict people from state houses. They know the tests are bogus, with a huge false-positive rate, and yet they keep using them. But now, the Tenancy Tribunal is calling bullshit:

Two recent Tenancy Tribunal decisions related to meth testing have gone against the agency.

In one case, a tiny level of meth, just above the guideline, was detected on an extractor fan in a house.

Housing New Zealand evicted the tenant and tried to charge them $10,000 for the clean-up in which doors were removed as well as an oven, extractor fan, and light fittings.

In July this year the tribunal ruled the decontamination work bore no resemblance to the contamination.

[...]

In another case, ruled on in May, Housing New Zealand tried to evict a tenant for meth contamination and fine them large sums - again after low levels of meth were detected.

In this case the tenant disputed the allegation and accused Housing New Zealand of breaching health and safety legislation by renting them an uninhabitable house.

Housing New Zealand had to refund several months rent to the man it had accused.

Unfortunately most of Housing New Zealand's victims never challenge their evictions, so its unclear how much of a restraint this will be on their abusive policies. And with political pressure to increase churn in state housing tenants as a way of masking under-provision of state houses, I suspect Housing New Zealand will just keep on chucking people out on the street on the basis of this voodoo.

(Really, someone should P-test Premier House, a few Ministerial offices, and Parliament's debating chamber just to demonstrate the false-positive rate)

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Open Government: Learning everything second-hand

Transparency International's latest newsletter has some information on the Open Government Partnership consultation process and the new Experts Advisory Panel:

• Commissioner, Al Morrison and Principal Advisor, Amy White have been appointed to lead a newly constituted Experts Advisory Panel (EAP)
  
• TINZ Chair, Suzanne Snively, and TINZ Director, Fuimaono Tuiasau, were invited on the EAP panel

They've also got dates for the workshops: Auckland on August 17, Christchurch on August 23, and Wellington on August 26. Which is good to know, but shouldn't we be hearing it directly from SSC or Engage2? There have been no announcements about either (though the EAP appointments were released under the OIA, just less interesting to me than SSC's plans for a strapped-chicken consultation).

A proper engagement process should be telling us this stuff, rather than leaving interested people to learn everything second-hand.

The cost of Big Brother

The New Zealand government has built Big Brother: an "Integrated Data Infrastructure" which combines all the information the government collects on you into one big pile for data mining, supposedly in order to produce better policies. But what are the costs of this sort of system? Over the Tasman, they're learning the hard way that one of them is a massive decrease in trust their statistics agency:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has so badly mishandled the question of retaining names that its senior leadership need to consider their futures.

The ABS is – sorry, was – probably one of Australia's most trusted bureaucracies, alongside the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Electoral Commission, and Geosciences Australia.

But since deciding that this year's Australian census will retain participants' names and use them for ill-defined data-matching purposes, the Bureau has so alienated people there are serious calls for name-boycotts and a persistent discussion about the scale of fines (AU$180 a day up to a maximum $1,800, if you're interested). Those calls can undermine the census and its mission of providing policy-makers with useful data.

Like New Zealand, the ABS wants to link census and other data in order to conduct data mining on health, social security, and social outcomes. But they never bothered to ask anyone first, and the result is that people are now openly advocating evading next week's census.

Statistics New Zealand might want to consider that before pushing on with their Big Brother idea.

Open government: My answers

Yesterday the SSC and Engage2 began their first real engagement on the Open Government Partnership second national action plan, with a series of questions about themes for the action plan. Here's the answers I gave:

How could we improve on New Zealand’s last National Action Plan?

• Having commitments which are actually additional rather than simply pre-existing programs shoved under the banner of the OGP.
  
• Having commitments which are actually ambitious and contribute to the OGP's "race to the top" rather than unambitious tinkering.
  
• Having commitments strongly tied to the OGP's core themes and values, rather than ones which are only weakly connected.
  
• Having commitments which reflect the demands of civil society rather than SSC bureaucrats.
  

What does open government mean to you in practice?

Transparency. There are related values, but transparency is supreme. That's why they call it "open" government.

What do you think should be the themes of the second National Action Plan for Open Government should be? e.g. Open data, engagement, open budgets?

• Transparency. There is obvious scope to build on the Ombudsman and Law Commission's work reviewing the OIA, as well as some easy to implement but highly ambitious options which could be pursued (e.g. Cabinet transparency, with automatic release of Cabinet papers and minutes)
  
• Anti-corruption: this ties into the reaction to the Panama papers. Other countries (e.g. the UK) have led on this, establishing public beneficial ownership and lobbying registers, and New Zealand should follow.
  
• I am not interested in Open Data. The government choosing what to make open and what to keep secret is not true openness.
  
• I oppose use of the OGP Action Plan to legitimise the Data Futures Forum / IDI / Social Investment Agenda. The mass data mining of the New Zealand public is not about open government, and has huge privacy implications. That's not what the OGP is about, and SSC should not use the OGP as a trojan horse for it.
  

If you're planning to contribute to the engagement process, you might want to think about your answers. What themes do you want to see?

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A $650 million subsidy to the rich

Negative gearing is a tax subsidy paid to landlords and property speculators. It cost us $650 million last year, and is a direct subsidy to the rich. Now, Labour is planning to get rid of it:

Labour has confirmed it will introduce a policy to remove tax breaks on investment properties but aims to target speculators rather than small-time landlords.

Labour's housing spokesman Phil Twyford has released Inland Revenue figures which showed property investors claimed $650 million in tax write-offs on residential rental properties in the year to March 2015.

His party now plans to crack down on negative gearing, which allows landlords to claim tax deductions on their rental properties.

And yet, despite that seemingly bold policy, they're also trying to hedge it, in an effort not to upset Boomer landlords. Which really makes you wonder if their heart is really in this. Negative gearing serves no good purpose at all. Instead, it encourages poor investment. We are better off eliminating it entirely. And if that upsets landed Boomers, fuck ' em.

The Olympic Spirit

What does the Olympic Games mean today? Oppression, tear gas, and rubber bullets:

Police used stun grenades and tear gas to clear protesters in the path of the Olympic torch in a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday, two days before South America's first Olympic Games open under tight security.

[...]

Police said anti-government protesters in Duque de Caixas, on Rio's north side, threw rocks and blocked the torch's path.

Police dispersed them with pepper spray and rubber bullets. A video of the incident spurred social media criticism of the police and amplified complaints that the Games ignored the poor.

[...]

Three people were injured by rubber bullets, including a 10-year-old girl, local media reported.

The Olympics: they're about shooting the poor. Sounds like a good reason not to have anything to do with them.

Open government: Engage!

For the past ten days, the State services Commission and Engage2 have been running a public engagement process on the development of New Zealand's second Open Government partnership National Action Plan. And now, finally, we have something to engage on, with a chance to provide input on the draft background for the action plan.

The draft background is on the govt.nz engagement platform here. Its basicly the introduction: where we are now, what was in our first action plan (spun to present it as something other than the complete disaster it was independently assessed as by the IRM), and (supposedly) what they learned (supposedly because its pretty clear from this process that they didn't learn anything). At the end of it, it asks three questions:

• How could we improve on New Zealand’s last National Action Plan?
  
• What does open government mean to you in practice?
  
• What do you think should be the themes of the second National Action Plan for Open Government should be? e.g. Open data, engagement, open budgets?
  

As usual for SSC's "engagement", there's no provision for telling them anything else (but you cna always email ogp@engage2.co.nz I suppose). Still, these are useful questions at this stage, though given the expected timeframe there's not going to be a lot of time to adapt proposed commitments to preferred themes (assuming SSC has any intention to). It is important that you answer this. SSC clearly has some ideas about what it wants to see in the action plan - in particular, using it as a tool to legitimise their "big brother" Integrated Data Infrastructure - basicly, combining all the information the government collects on you into one big pile for data mining - and their social investment agenda. Neither of which have anything to do with open government. Its important to go on record if you oppose this, both in the hope of changing it, and because that opposition will be noted by the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism and potentially result in adverse consequences for the government.

Submissions apparently close on August 20.

Climate change: Welcome to dystopia

In the Guardian, George Monbiot summarises the state of the world:

This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous record was set in 2015; the one before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years have occurred in the 21st century. Each of the past 14 months has beaten the global monthly temperature record. But you can still hear people repeating the old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel lobbyists, that global warming stopped in 1998.

Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area last winter than in any winter since records began. In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed. India has been hammered by cycles of drought and flood, as withering heat parches the soil and torches glaciers in the Himalayas. Southern and eastern Africa have been pitched into humanitarian emergencies by drought. Wildfires storm across America; coral reefs around the world are bleaching and dying.

Reading this, its like the opening chapter of a dystopian novel, the one that tells you that everything is different and broken. And we're now living in it. The government still acts as if climate change is a distant threat, the impacts of which will start to be felt thirty years from now - but it is happening today (see here for a local example). And with such severe effects on New Zealand's export farming - basicly what's happening in Canterbury is the new normal for the entire East coast - you'd expect them to show some urgency about it.

(What does that dystopia look like? I've recently been reading Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, which scrolls it forward 30 - 50 years to paint a picture of an American southwest which has become a classic cyberpunk dystopia, with cities collapsing and mass waves of refugees living in squalor as present-day water-wars go hot. New Zealand shouldn't end up that bad - we're not Americans, and we don't have an instability-exporting narco-state as a next-door neighbour - but as Australia burns down and dries up we might see Australian boat people. Which would be kindof ironic, given the horror with which Australia has reacted to far smaller influxes of refugees).

Climate change: Australia realises its mistake

Back in February, the Australian government announced that it was sacking all its climate scientists because it had already learned everythign it needed to know. Now, with record temperatures, perpetual bushfires, and the Great barrier Reef dying, they want to hire them back:

New Science Minister Greg Hunt has ordered a major U-turn in the direction of the CSIRO, reviving climate research as a bedrock function just months after the national science agency slashed climate staff and programs.

Mr Hunt, the former environment minister, told Fairfax Media he has instructed CSIRO's executives and board to "put the focus back on climate science", adding: "This is not an optional component, it's critical".

The new strategy, to be devised over the next three months, includes 15 new climate science jobs and research investment worth $37 million over 10 years.

"I've issued a ministerial directive … that we will make climate science a core activity, that we will strengthen and build capacity," Mr Hunt said.

Fifteen scientists hardly seems like a "core activity", especially compared to the 140 they wanted to sack (and the 35 they actually did). But at least they've changed direction. And they need to - because if climate change continues, Australia is going to dry up and blow away, and the people there are going to start running out of water.

Thieves

Radio New Zealand reports a spike in employers failing to pass on Kiwisaver payments to IRD:

The number of employers failing to pay KiwiSaver contributions to their workers has jumped dramatically in the last year.

Figures obtained by RNZ showed that at the end of June, Inland Revenue was chasing 12,182 employers for $28 million in unpaid contributions and penalties.

A year ago around 2000 employers were being pursued for unpaid payments, a six-fold jump.

The debt included $12.32m in employee contributions that are taken from workers' salaries but never passed on to Inland Revenue which administered the KiwiSaver scheme.

These employers are stealing from their employees. There is no other way to describe it. Its their employees' money, and the employers are not doing what they are supposed to with it. And that makes it an open-and-shut case of theft by a person in a special relationship, which carries a penalty of up to seven years imprisonment.

If these thieving employers don't want to pay the money they owe, then IRD should pass their information on to police and have them prosecuted. Or do thieves get a pass if they wear suits?

Australia deliberately ignores the abuse of refugees

That's the conclusion of a new report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Australia's refugee concentration camps:

Australia is intentionally ignoring appalling human rights abuses against men, women and children being held in detention on Nauru, a new report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International says.

The report said Australia's offshore detention policy had resulted in the abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, which had been hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

[...]

The researchers' report, based on interviews with 84 refugees and asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Kuwait and Afghanistan, as well as service providers at the Australian-funded facility, said that Canberra could not conceivably be unaware of the detention centre's shortcomings.

"The Australian government's failure to address serious abuses appears to be a deliberate policy to deter further asylum seekers from arriving in the country by boat," Human Rights Watch said in a statement accompanying the report.

Which means that it might not just be Australia's hired camp guards on the hook for crimes against humanity charges in The Hague.

The full report is here.

Britain's institutional cruelty to refugees

As part of its policy of institutional cruelty to refugees, Britain detains people who claim asylum in immigration detention centres. Tens of thousands of people a year are detained in this fashion, not for any crime, but purely for the administrative convenience of the state (and, lets be honest, to demonstrate viciousness in an effort to deter people from fleeing torture). As if this wasn't enough, the British government now plans to let those people be thrown into solitary confinement for prolonged periods for arbitrary reasons:

People held at Britain’s immigration removal centres can be thrown into solitary confinement against medical advice and held for hours without any explanation, according to new guidance set to be issued to guards by the Home Office.

A draft “detention services order”, spelling out guidance to staff at the immigration prisons on the use of solitary confinement, says the sanction can be applied even if medical advice explicitly warns that it would be “life threatening”.

The practice, described by campaigners as “cruel”, can also be handed out by guards to anyone who is judged to be “stubborn” or “disobedient” – despite concerns by official watchdogs that vulnerable people with mental health problems are being being seriously affected.

Remember, these people haven't been sentenced for any crime. They're (supposedly) not in these detention centres to be punished. And yet they'll be subjected to a solitary confinement regime far worse than anything suffered by sentenced prisoners (who require a formal hearing to be detained for longer than an evening, and the authorisation of a cabinet Minister in order to be confined for more than 72 hours).

But I guess that's just another example of Britain's new, post-Brexit cruelty and racism.