Ending a sham collaboration II

Last month Nick Smith announced with great fanfare a target for 90% of New Zealand's rivers to be swimmable by 2040. Except it turned out that most rivers were in fact excluded, and his idea of "swimmable" was literally bullshit. Now it seems that his bullshit standard ignored advice from the Land and Water Forum - and Forest & Bird has pulled out of it in response:

Forest & Bird have pulled out of the Land and Water Forum in protest against the government's new "timid" freshwater standards.

[...]

The forum gives more than 50 stakeholders, including industry groups, non-governmental organisatins (NGOs), iwi, scientists and others a chance agree on recommendations to be made to government.

However, Forest & Bird said those recommendations had been largely ignored in the government's plan to make 90 percent of rivers swimmable by 2040.

Forest & Bird said the recommendations had buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders and incorporated the best scientific advice, but what the government had come up with was very different.

I'm surprised its taken them so long - because it is clear that the government regards "collaborative processes" such as the Land and Water Forum simply as a way of suborning and silencing critics while increasing "social licence" to pollute. Fish and Game bailed years ago because of this, and with Forest & Bird's departure, the Environmental Defence Society is now the only environmental voice among a sea of polluters on the Forum. The quicker they quit, the sooner the sham ends, and the sooner we can stop pretending that there is anything to be gained by collaborating with polluters.

Eliminating land-bankers

One of the problems of New Zealand's property boom is that wealthy property owners often find it easier to leave houses vacant rather than providing a home for anyone. The Australian state of Victoria has a good solution for this: tax it!

Owners who leave properties vacant will be slugged with a new tax under a Victorian government push to free up more housing for sale and reduce rents.

The new vacant residential property tax is expected to raise about $80 million over four years, coming into force on January 1.

The tax is among a suite of changes the government has announced to make housing more affordable, including scrapping stamp duty for first home buyers on properties worth up to $600,000.

This seems like a good idea. Auckland has a ghost home problem, and its even worse in Queenstown. Taxing vacant properties would help eliminate it.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of land-bankers who deliberately leave land under-developed to wait for capital gains. But that's what land taxes are for.

Intergenerational warfare

Bill English has come clean about his plans for superannuation, and announced that he wants to fight the election on making you worse off:

The Government will progressively lift the age of eligibility for NZ Superannuation from 65 to 67, starting in 20 years’ time, Prime Minister Bill English announced today.

“New Zealanders are healthier and living longer so adjusting the long-term settings of NZ Super while there is time for people to adapt is the right thing to do,” Mr English says.

The changes will be phased in from 1 July 2037 and will not affect anyone born on or before 30 June 1972.

In other words, it will target the same people who have got tertiary fees, student loans, mass unemployment, benefit cuts, health cuts, climate change, and a housing bubble. Meanwhile, the people who received free education and healthcare and tax cuts for Africa while destroying the global climate will laugh all the way to the bank in their bubble-inflated houses. Its pure intergenerational warfare by the Boomer Prime Minister against anyone younger than him.

The good news:

The change will be legislated for next year.

In other words, it will only happen if National is re-elected with an easy majority of Boomer or crazed 1%er parties (so, basicly ACT). If we change the government, Bill English can't fuck us over.

I'd call that an incentive.

The banality of evil

Last week the Ombudsman formally warned that people were being subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in our prisons. Corrections tried to pretend that it was a matter of medical care (as if that would justify unnecessary use of restraints), but the truth is far worse. Corrections was abusing these people because it was cheaper to do so:

In one case, a prisoner was tied to a bed for 16 hours a day, for 37 consecutive days - a total of nearly 600 hours.

Yesterday Corrections chief executive Ray Smith defended the actions, saying staff were trying to save the patient's life.

But Judge Boshier said that was disingenuous, and it was an economic decision, rather than a welfare one.

"Prisoner A was able to be managed when there was sufficient resourcing. The tie-down coincided with the need for the prison to manage its own resourcing. In other words, it was expedient. So I think it is disingenuous to say there was no choice other than to do this."

This is where National's cuts and austerity have taken us: to a place where Corrections tortures and abuses people because it is the "cheapest" way of managing them.

And that's the case even if you factor in the cost of lawsuits - because the Prisoners and Victim's Claims Act, which Labour introduced and National made permanent, effectively denies compensation to the people Corrections has tortured. They're prisoners, so in the eyes of our major political parties, they simply don't count, and their lives and dignity have no value.

Again, people need to be prosecuted over this. Unfortunately, while the law can assign blame to those who tightened the straps night after night, and maybe even to those who purported to "authorise" the unlawful use of force, it appears helpless against the budget cutters and bean counters who seem to have driven this abuse.

Opportunity knocks again

Six months out from the election, and Bill English is openly threatening people's retirement security:

Prime Minister Bill English has hinted at changes to the age of retirement.

Speaking on TV3's The Nation on Saturday, English said he would not continue with former prime minister John Key's commitment not to change the age of eligibility.

There was room for a "reset" around the superannuation scheme, which could mean a change in the retirement age or the way super was calculated, he said.

Cutting pensions (without affecting their own, of course) is something National have wanted to do for a long time - remember when they wanted to means test it back in the 1990's? To National, a superannuation scheme which largely prevents the problems of old-age poverty widely seen overseas isn't an achievement, its an expense, something which stops them looting tax cuts for their donors and cronies. So, under the guise of unaffordability, they push for slashing it - forgetting that its only "unaffordable" if you rule out higher taxes, and if you ignore the social costs - old people starving or freezing to death every winter - of not paying it. Because that's what happens overseas where people like Bill English have had their way: the elderly die, on a massive scale.

The good news is that Labour has finally flushed the 1%'s kool-aid, and is standing up for pensions again. Because that's what a left-wing party should do: protect social services. The question is whether they can exploit the massive opportunity English has just given them, or whether Labour muppetry will let National get away with it.

Is New Zealand backing the "She Decides" campaign?

One of the Trump regime's first acts in office was to reinstate the Regan-era "global gag rule", forbidding the use of US aid for NGOs that provide or even advocate for abortion - effectively cutting funding to all family planning and sexual health organisations. In response, a hastily-organised coalition of countries have raised €181 million to plug the gap. That's good news, but I'm wondering: is New Zealand part of this? Whose side are we on? The world's? Or Trump's?

I think the government owes us some answers. And if it is not already backing the She Decides campaign, it needs to get on board ASAP. Women's health is too important to be left in the hands of the religious right.

Meanwhile, individuals can contribute to the campaign as well. If you're interested, you can do so here. Maybe you could even do it in the name of Donald Trump, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, USA.

New Fisk

Theresa May wants British people to feel 'pride' in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly is there to be proud of?

Good riddance

Corrupt Panamanian money-laundering enablers Mossack-Fonseca have quit New Zealand:

The law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal has quit New Zealand.

[...]

"I'm not aware of Mossack Fonseca currently being active in New Zealand," Roger Thompson of accountancy firm Bentley's New Zealand said in an email.

Mr Thompson, who was mentioned in the Panama Papers, was an agent for the Panamanian law firm in New Zealand.

"We are not currently providing any services to Mossack Fonseca. We do not currently act for any foreign trust clients that have come through any association with Mossack Fonseca," he said.

Bentley's New Zealand partner Roger Thompson said the firm was not providing any services to Mossack Fonseca.

Mossack Fonseca has not responded to a request for comment.

It de-registered its local offshoot, Mossack Fonseca New Zealand, as a company in August last year.

I guess the prospect of even partial transparency to the IRD was enough to ruin their business model. After all, you can't launder money or cheat on taxes when the government is watching.

But while we've run these Panamanian crooks out of town, someone else could always set up shop, and there's plenty of local lawyers wanting a slice of the money-laundering pie. We need to strengthen our trust transparency regime to include public registers to put all of them out of business, permanently.

Good news from China

New Zealand's climate change inventory is due out in May, and is likely to show greenhouse gas emissions rising yet again due to our absence of effective policy. Meanwhile, in China, they're eliminating coal:

A third consecutive year of falling coal consumption and a renewable energy spending spree has made China the new global leader on climate change, some environmental groups claim.

Figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics this year revealed a 4.7 per cent year-on-year fall in coal consumption in 2016.

Coal production dropped even more, and the latest figures confirm a three-year trend of declining coal use for the country's massive electricity grid.

If this keeps up, then China will peak and start decreasing its emissions - which is exactly what we need to beat this. And while they've set a target date of 2030 for that to happen, the risk of air pollution causing social unrest is likely to make it happen even earlier. Meanwhile in the US Republican legislators are trying to ban the technologies which will save us in order to protect the profits of their coal industry donors. Sadly, those people are likely to see China's action as creating more headroom for the coal industry to spew its poison into the air, rather than following China's lead and eliminating it.

Would this work here?

UK Labour plans to force the rich to make their taxes public:

A Labour government would force all taxpayers who earn at least £1m a year to make their tax records public, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has said.

As Philip Hammond prepares to deliver his first full budget next week, McDonnell told the Guardian he hoped more transparency about individuals’ tax affairs would cut down on tax avoidance and encourage a more open civic culture.

He said that Labour had been inspired by the practice in some Nordic countries, including Norway and Sweden, where the publication of tax records is common.

“There is a big issue now about, people don’t have trust in the establishment – they don’t think they’re listening to them, don’t think they’re paying their way or being fair. So one way of re-establishing some element of openness and transparency would be, why not – over a million, you publish your tax return. Why not?”

Its clearly an anti-avoidance measure, but it only captures certain types of tax-dodging: people who do it on their own books. Whereas in New Zealand the problem seems to be the wealthy using trusts and other corporate vehicles to effectively hide their incomes and evade the top tax rate. So, while its a useful transparency measure, we'd need to combine it with others to effectively detect upper-class tax fraud.

A good move

Yesterday the Ombudsman formally reported New Zealand for violating the Convention Against Torture over its cruel, inhuman and degrading restraint of prisoners. Today, the government has announced plans to beef up the prison inspection regime:

New Zealand's prisons inspection regime is being beefed up, with the Government announcing regular reviews of all prisons and a new inspection team.

[...]

A new prisons inspection team would be set up to manage the inspections, "ring-fenced" from the general Corrections inspectorate which would continue to investigate specific complaints.

Upston said she would be provided with quarterly reports from the inspection team, which would be made public.

The Government would also provide new, wide-ranging powers for a beefed-up chief inspector's role, while there would be an increase in staff including eight new inspectors.

This is all good, a significant improvement from the status quo. And yet there's still a significant problem, in that the prison inspectorate is part of Corrections rather than being independent. And Corrections (and its Minister) have strong institutional incentives to ensure bad news does not emerge from it, and the political power to corrupt and bury reports.

If we want this done properly, the prison inspectorate needs to be totally independent of Corrections. And it needs to report to Parliament, not the Minister.

Australia admits spying on journalists

The Australian government has admitted that its spy agency, ASIO, has been targeting journalists:

Australia’s attorney general, George Brandis, appears to have granted the country’s domestic spy agency access to journalists’ metadata in a small number of cases, the agency’s head has revealed.

Duncan Lewis, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Agency (Asio), confirmed in parliament on Tuesday that the agency had been granted some journalist information warrants.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon has been pursuing Asio over the details of the warrants, and focused repeated questioning on Lewis in Senate estimates on Tuesday.

They warrants came into force in October 2015 in part to secure passage of Australia’s sweeping data retention laws that require telecommunications companies to store phone and web metadata for two years.

Pretty obviously, they're after leakers, but they're also likely to be targeting journalists working on refugee issues and human rights abuses in Australia's concentration camps in Nauru. The common factor here is that both are deeply embarrassing to the government. "National security" powers should be for exactly that - not for protecting politicians and officials from democratic oversight.

Open Government: Failure

How much did the government's first OGP action plan do to advance open government in New Zealand? Sweet fuck-all, according to the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism:

Today the Open Government Partnership (OGP) released its final report on New Zealand’s progress towards fulfilling its international commitments to transparency, accountability and participation.

[...]

At the end of New Zealand’s first two-year action plan, the New Zealand IRM report finds that the plan did little to advance open government.

“The plan consisted almost entirely of things the government was doing anyway, and most of those things weren’t directly related to open government,” said [IRM researcher Steven] Price. “So it’s not very surprising that it made little concrete difference to transparency, accountability or public participation”.

The report also criticised the way the plan was prepared. “The government fell well short of the sort of public collaboration that it promised when it signed up to the OGP,” said Price.

The good news is that our second action plan looks a bit better, though it still suffers from a lack of ambition. But the government has failed so badly on its first one that almost anything is an improvement.

Update: the full report can be read here.

Laws mean nothing unless they are enforced

Why is our environment degrading? One of the reasons is that our compliance and enforcement of environmental law is a bit shit:

Agencies tasked with enforcing environmental laws are "chronically under-resourced" and struggle to do the job effectively, according to new research.

Research by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) released on Tuesday found widespread problems with the enforcement of New Zealand's environment laws, particularly within agencies such as the Department of Conservation (DOC) and district and regional councils.

Compliance, monitoring and enforcement (CME) work was the "poor cousin" of the policy and planning cycle, it said, and routinely under-resourced.

The resulting impact was poor record-keeping, a lack of staff, limited oversight and political pressures affecting decision-making.

There's plenty of the latter going on in my local council, with the council retaining political control over prosecutions meaning that no-one ever get prosecuted. Throw in an official policy of allowing non-compliance, and of warning before inspections, and the result is no incentive for farmers to obey the law. Which means dirty rivers.

This has to change. Laws mean nothing unless they are enforced. If we want clean, swimmable rivers, the first step is to make our central and local government agencies actually enforce the law against polluters. And if Ministers and councillors don't want them to do that, we should sack them and replace them with people who do.

Cruel, inhuman and degrading

How bad are New Zealand's prisons? So bad that they're now getting formal warnings under OPCAT for cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment:

New Zealand prisons' use of excessive restraint is in breach of the UN Convention Against Torture, the Chief Ombudsman says.

The Ombudsman has found the use of tie-down beds and restraints in five separate cases - including one where a self-harming prisoner was restrained for 16 hours a day over 37 consecutive nights - constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment.

[...]

In another case at Otago Corrections Facility, a prisoner was continuously kept in a waist restraint with his hands cuffed behind his back, after self-harming. The cuffs were used for 12 weeks prior to his release from prison, and were removed for two hours during the day, and every four hours at night.

The prisoner was locked in his cell for 21 hours a day, and did not receive any psychiatric treatment during the 12-week period despite a recommendation.

His medication was stopped upon his imprisonment. As a result, he said his mental health deteriorated and his self-harm escalated.

These (and other) abuses of restraints breached both OPCAT and Corections' own policies, as well as New Zealand law. Which invites the question: will those responsible for these abuses be prosecuted for assault? Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that. Crimes by the state are never punished, and officials enjoy effective impunity for their abuses. And then we wonder why they keep doing these things...

Corrections (of course) says it will clean up its act. But one of the core problems here seems to be a lack of adequate mental health treatment for prisoners and the denial of basic care. Unless they fix those aspects (and e.g. make sure that prisoners get their medication), this is just going to keep on happening.

Bill English's bullshit victim-blaming

National has a problem: persistent high unemployment. Their solution? Blaming their victims, of course:

Prime Minister Bill English is blaming young Kiwis inability to pass a workplace drug test as one of the reasons why overseas workers are needed.

English's comments come on the back of record highs for immigration after it was revealed on Monday 71,300 more migrants had arrived in New Zealand than left in the year to January.

Speaking at his weekly media conference English said two or three business owners a week told him about the difficulty in getting Kiwi workers who apply for jobs to pass a drug test.

"It's a very common discussion - it's not exceptional at all these days for that discussion to be had."

He said he'd heard anecdotal evidence of it across most industries. His comments came on the back of a question about why the 140,000 unemployed people in New Zealand couldn't fill jobs in areas where there are skills shortages.

So we're expected to believe that National's cronies in the farming industry "have" to import immigrant labour to work their poorly paid, shit jobs because the 140,000 people on benefits are all drug addicts. I guess its a great story for the suits in the Koru Lounge - but it bears no relation to reality. To use WINZ's own figures, in 2016 there were nearly 32,000 WINZ-imposed drug tests on beneficiaries, and only 55 people were sanctioned for failing them - a hit rate of less than 0.2%. But hey, why should the facts get in the way of a good victim-blame?

Seems like a good idea

For decades, greedy farmers have been sucking our aquifers dry and polluting them with toxic cowpiss. We're seeing the results this year, with the groundwater-dependent Selwyn River drying up and health warnings around "blue baby syndrome" for water users in Canterbury. Now, the Greens have a plan to put a stop to it:

The Green Party has today launched a member’s bill that will keep water from underground sources, called aquifers, safe from pollution and contamination.

[...]

“By making the protection of groundwater quality a matter of national importance and putting stronger rules around discharges to aquifers in the Resource Management Act (RMA) as this Bill does, we’ll ensure that decision makers including Ministers and councils give greater weight to their protection in their planning and decision-making. It’s the very least our waterways deserve.

“Our aquifers - layers of water underground - have not been adequately protected and are vulnerable to pollution from land use.

The full bill is here. The short version: it makes protection of groundwater a matter of national importance under the RMA (which should end over-allocation), it requires resource consent for anything which will increase nitrate levels (such as intensive dairy farming) in groundwater, and it prohibits the contamination or pollution of groundwater. All of which seems like a damn good idea which we should have done years ago.

New Fisk

Marine Le Pen has arrived in Lebanon to find out that the Christians she thought were her allies aren’t on her side at all

The solution is obvious

The latest sign of the housing crisis: National has blown its emergency housing budget:

The Government has had a massive blowout in emergency housing grants, spending almost four times its annual budget in just three months.

As part of an overall $345m investment in emergency housing, the Government only budgeted $2m per year for an estimated 1400 emergency housing grants - which pay for urgent motel stays for families in need.

But in the December quarter alone, the Ministry of Social Development spent $7.7m on emergency housing grants.

There were 8860 grants in the final three months of 2016 - which is more than six times the Government’s expectations.

What this tells us is that the government had no idea how bad this problem is. Which is unsurprising, given that they actively deny it exists, and go out of their way to avoid measuring it. It also tells us how much of a disincentive to applying WINZ's old policy of treating emergency assistance as a loan (rather than a grant) was - and how much real need that single vicious bureaucratic barrier kept hidden. But now they've been forced to drop it, that need is obvious - so obvious that WINZ is trying to shuffle it back under the carpet by cracking down on the number of grants they give out (i.e. denying people assistance they are legally entitled to).

As for the solution, it is obvious: build more state houses. But National won't do that - they'd rather pay greedy motel owners inflated rates than invest in New Zealand's future.

Reported back

The Intelligence and Security Committee has reported back on the New Zealand Intelligence and Security Bill. Its being touted as a victory for oversight, and there's a little bit of that - and in particular stronger political neutrality clauses which do impose legal duties on spy agencies and limit their cooperation with foreign agencies which violate human rights (such as, you would hope, the NSA and GCHQ). But there's also a lot to be concerned about. In particular:

• The definition of "national security" has been repealed, meaning that it is suddenly a nebulous, undefined term that (except in the case of issuing an intelligence warrant targeting a kiwi) can mean anything. We know that in the past the SIS have regarded Maori and women's rights movements, and the peace and environmental movements - entirely peaceful and democratic movements - as "threats" to "national security". This invites them to do it again. The clause they deleted invited them to do it too, but it at least nailed it down so that there were some things they clearly couldn't do, and invited the prospect of gutting it later. Now, they'll get to decide what it means in total secrecy.
  
• Spy agencies can still use the "foreign organisation" dodge to target kiwis who are members of Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or similar NGOs.
  
• The Select Committee has inserted a new subpart allowing intelligence agencies to compel the production of "business records" from banks, ISPS and telecommunications companies, including call metadata and IP addresses, but explicitly not "web browsing history". While this effectively duplicates the police production order scheme, there's no judges, and little oversight. The Commissioner of Security Warrants is involved in granting broad approvals to gain these records - basicly saying "SIS can demand call metadata from phone companies whenever they want" - but has no role in overseeing individual demands (except that there is a register, which is more than the police have). So, once the approval is granted - and it is hard to see it ever being refused - the spies can demand such "business data" on anyone. Or, to put it another way: they can spy on Nicky Hager's bank and phone records permanently with absolutely no oversight. They can then pass this information to police, allowing them to effectively sidestep the limited safeguards of the production order regime.
  
• The buried lead in all that is "This information is currently provided on a voluntary basis". In other words, ISPs, banks and phone companies have been betraying their customers to the spies for years. Arseholes.
  
• The anti-whistleblower clause is retained, allowing the spies to jail anyone for up to five years if they tell us about their crimes.
  

So, a lot of work to be done to fix it. Unfortunately Labour collaborated on the bill, so I don't think we'll be seeing any solutions from them. They're fine with having an intelligence state provided they get a turn at signing the warrants. If we want real reform in this area, and real limitations on the powers of spies, we need to look outside the two establishment parties.