A ditch for him to die in

Last week, English Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly declared that he would rather die be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit. Unfortunately for him, the UK parliament accepted the challenge, and promptly dug one for him. The "rebellion bill" requires him to ask for and secure yet another temporary Brexit delay, and it has just received the royal assent. And if he refuses to lie down and shoot himself in it by obeying the law, then it will be the perfect thing to unite the UK's fractured opposition into voting no confidence and appointing a different Prime Minister to carry out parliament's will.

Climate Change: The wrong kind of trees?

Newsroom today has an excellent, in-depth article on pine trees as carbon sinks. The TL;DR is that pine is really good at soaking up carbon, but people prefer far-less efficient native forests instead. Which is understandable, but there's two problems: firstly, we've pissed about so long on this problem that we need to soak up carbon really fast; and secondly, that all our tree nurseries are geared for pine and other exotic forest species rather than natives, because that's what commercial forestry uses.

The proposed solution is hybrid forests - using pine as a nursery crop to provide shade and shelter for native seedlings underneath. When the pine dies, you have a native forest waiting to take over. People already do a similar thing with gorse (leave it be and rely on succession to do the rest), and it sounds viable in areas where you can already do that. Though apparently many landowners hate pine enough that they want nothing to do with it - in which case, we'll just see foreign forestry companies buying them out and planting it instead.

One point that needs to be made is that forest sinks aren't a way of avoiding emissions reductions. Yes, you can offset temporarily, but ultimately our emissions are going to have to be reduced to near-zero. Instead, forests are really a mechanism for drawdown: soaking up some of the carbon we've spewed into the atmosphere and locking it away in the biosphere instead. Given the amount we've emitted, we're going to need to plant an awful lot of trees, so we might as well start now.

No freedom of speech in Turkey

Canan Kaftancioglu is a Turkish politician and member of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP). Like most modern politicians, she tweets, and uses the platform to criticise the Turkish government. She has criticised them over the death of a 14-year-old boy who was hit by a tear gas grenade during a protest, and over their nakedly oppressive response to the 2016 coup attempt. And as a result, she now faces almost ten years imprisonment after being convicted of insulting the government and "spreading terrorist propaganda":

A leading secular politician in Turkey has been sentenced to nearly 10 years in jail for "terror propaganda and insults" against the Turkish state.

Canan Kaftancioglu, 47, was convicted mainly over tweets which date back several years.

She has said the charges were politically motivated and remains free pending an appeal.

Just another example of how Turkey is not a free democracy, but an oppressive, authoritarian state.

Good little vassals

The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has published their report on whether the SIS and GCSB had any complicity in American torture. And its damning. The pull quote is this:

The Inquiry found both agencies, but to a much greater degree, the NZSIS, received many intelligence reports obtained from detainees who, it was subsequently revealed, had been subject to torture. On one occasion the NZSIS provided questions to the CIA to be put to a detainee. While the NZSIS was not aware that detainee interrogations involved torture, it was known that the individual was being held by the CIA in an undisclosed location.

As the report notes, this should have been a red flag for human rights abuse, but it wasn't treated as such (which ought to raise serious questions about the types of people working at SIS). Neither were the widespread public reports that the US was engaged in torture and disappearance, or the fact that partner agencies were launching inquiries into it. Instead, the SIS seems to have culled all mention of those facts from its files of media reports - as if they were deliberately turning a blind eye. The report also notes that the directors of the SIS and GCSB did not inquire with the Americans about the allegations, or seek assurances from them. And it is said explicitly and repeatedly that the reason for that is that those directors did not want to upset the Americans:

...Directors also noted the risk of compromising intelligence flows of vital importance to New Zealanders... if they had challenged their US counterparts...

...there was an unspoken general rule that one did not ask direct questions about the operations of Five Eyes counterparts...

...[the directors] felt constrained not to do anything which would have risked or reduced New Zealand’s role as part of the alliance or to the flow of intelligence...

...they saw other risks, particularly the risk of compromising vital intelligence flows at a vital time, if they asked questions of their partner agencies...

...As one of the former Directors said, it was not realistic to think that New Zealand could have said “please explain” to the United States, the most powerful country in the world. Realistically the response would have been that New Zealand would again have been cut out of the recently resumed intelligence flow, at a time when it most needed it.

Its the same problem we've had all along: it turns out that the people at the top of "our" spy agencies are more loyal to America than they are to us. They're good little vassals to their foreign masters. And we were were paying them for that.

The inspector-General is very clear that the directors had a duty to assess the risks of torture and complicity and raise them with Ministers. They didn't. And that's a dereliction of duty right there. Not raised in the report, because it is outside the Inspector-General's jurisdiction: but equally important: where was the Minister? Because faced with those media reports in 2003, I'd have expected a popular and competent Minister to seek assurances from her agencies that everything was alright and that they were neither complicit in nor contaminated by criminal American behaviour. There's no evidence that she did. Even when interrogation reports of a "senior Al-Qa'ida detainee" were landing on her desk. So perhaps the spies weren't the only ones who were wilfully blind to this.

The report notes that it is "not possible to know" whether the SIS's questions resulted in the detainee - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - being tortured to extract responses to their questions. But to me, it looks like complicity. The legal framework has changed since then, and you'd hope that this review has made them more aware of the issues and their legal and moral duties. OTOH, given that everything these agencies do is secret, how would we ever know?

New Fisk

Lebanon’s crisis is almost unstoppable. Drone warfare is on the horizon

Labour's failure

When National was in government and fucking over the poor for the benefit of the rich, foodbanks were a growth industry. And now Labour is in charge, nothing has changed:

A huge demand for emergency food parcels means the Auckland City Mission is struggling to prepare for the impending arrival of Christmas.

The social service provider has seen a 40 per cent increase in demand for food parcels this year, with a total of 23,020 flying out the door by June.

Missioner Chris Farrelly told the Herald the "cupboards are bare" and without an emergency food drive he is worried about how the charity will continue to provide for those in need.

"Literally we cannot do it at the moment. We are struggling just to get through what we need to do day by day, there is not much we can actually put aside for the pre-Christmas period," he said.

Labour ran on a kinder, gentler New Zealand, on ending extreme poverty. Implicitly, on putting foodbanks out of business. No-one expected them to fix the damage caused by decades of NeoLiberlaism overnight. But I at least expected them to stop things getting worse. But on this, as on so many other things, they're just a giant disappointment.

Cleaning up the water

Today the government released its Action Plan for Healthy Waterways, aimed at cleaning up our lakes and rivers. Its actually quite good. There will be protection for wetlands, better standards for swimming spots, a requirement for continuous improvement, and better standards for wastewater and stormwater. But most importantly, there's a new National Environmental Standard for freshwater, which will impose controls on dairy conversions, intensification, and winter grazing unless they can prove they will not increase pollution. Farmers will also be required to have nutrient management plans and apply good agricultural practice. Federated Farmers are already whining that it will end pastoral farming in some parts of the country, so that's a definite sign that its headed in the right direction.

In the longer-term, councils are going to have to incorporate all of this stuff into their plans - so they won't just be able to turn a blind eye to nitrogen anymore. Which again highlights the importance of getting the right people on regional councils in this local body election and the next. Because if we let farmers continue to dominate regional councils, they will use their positions to sabotage implementation and enforcement, so they and their mates can keep on polluting for profit.

Fronting up

Today I appeared before the Environment Committee to give an oral submission on the Zero Carbon Bill. Over 1,500 people have asked to appear in person, so they've divided into subcommittees and are off touring the country, giving people a five minute slot each. The other submitters were a mixed bunch: three high school students, a bunch of angry farmers, a biochar advocate, a random greenie, a climate change denier, and a member of the IPCC (who wasted time to deny that the IPCC was telling newspapers in Whanganui what to print). Most submitters didn't explicitly address the bill, but instead just talked about climate change of peripheral issues.

My submission was a mess. Yes, I said what I needed to, but the nervousness at talking to people meant I was at least 50% "um". If you ask me to be a serial killer or a tortured prince or a Sci-Fi senator or a regency gentleman for an evening, I'm your guy. Plonk me in a chair and get me to talk about something I'm actually knowledgeable about, and I go to pieces. Clearly I should have written myself a character sheet.

I don't think there were any permanent members of the committee present (I had Kiritapu Allan, Adrian Rurawhe, and Ian McKelvie, along with someone else I didn't recognise). Which might be good news, because the committee seemed awfully taken in by those angry farmers complaining that their rural way of life was under threat from evil trees. Its kindof disconcerting that the fate of our environment (and the world) depends on these people. Still, there's one good thing: they didn't entertain the climate change denier for an instant.

Still juking the stats

The State Services Commission and Ombudsman have released another batch of OIA statistics, covering the last six months. Request volumes are up, and the core public service is generally handling them within the legal timeframe, though this may be because they've learned to extend rather than just ignore things. And the police - who are counted seperately - have learned how to report timeliness again (they also seem to have reported a whole year's worth of requests, twice as many as the rest of the public service put together. And its amazing how despite reporting 96.3% timeliness, they're almost always late with anything I ask them. But I guess that, like Mark Hanna, I'm just a statistical outlier, right? But I suspect what's happening here is that all of their court / legal process OIAs are handled in a timely fashion, while their political / policy ones are absolute shit. The only way to fix this is to report them separately so they can see where the problem lies).

The real problems seem to be in Crown Entities and DHBs. Some of these are small, and a single late request can make a big difference. But South Canterbury DHB stands out for its sheer shitness. They're not a low-volume agency; 60 requests a year is bigger than some ministries. But they manage only a 56.7% on-time rate. If these statistics are to mean anything, then SSC must respond to this appalling result and sort them out. Otherwise what good are they?

Meanwhile, the Ombudsman's statistics tell an interesting story. Complaints for full refusals are up again, reinforcing the idea that agencies are meeting their timeliness requirements by just issuing a blanket "no" (another example of why SSC needs to report outcomes rather than just timeliness: so we can identify such behaviour. But that's probably exactly why they don't want to). And the Ombudsman has moved even further towards informal resolution, with a massive 57% of complaints this half-year resulting in no investigation. The number was elevated by last half-year's massive number of complaints against school boards, and in a break with past-practice, they're claiming credit for remedies even when no investigation is undertaken. Which is both fair - getting a pre-investigation call from the Ombudsman is often all that is required - but also irritating, in that it destroys my time-series on the proportion of resolved complaints that resulted in a remedy (i.e. the proportion of noticed poor decision-making). While I could go through the data set and produce a back-compatible one, to be honest I can't be arsed dealing with it; I'll just wait to see if they produce compatible statistics next time, and start again.

Not impressed

KiwiBuild was one of the Ardern government's core policies. The government would end the housing crisis and make housing affordable again by building 100,000 new homes. Of course, it didn't work out like that: targets weren't met, the houses they did build were in the wrong place, and the whole thing turned into a steaming PR disaster.

So today they "reset" it. What does that mean? Nothing much. The government will apparently build houses - but won't bother with having targets by which it could be held accountable. They're loosening rules around KiwiBuild purchases, allowing them to effectively become speculative vehicles, while lowering deposit requires for HomeStart assistance (which makes no difference if you can't afford the mortgage payments anyway). Oh, and they're throwing $400 million at a poorly-defined "progressive ownership" scheme to benefit 4,000 families (which is probably nice if you're one of them, but with no detail, who knows?)

And meanwhile, rents are rising and people are living in garages. The above won't do anything to sovle this. In fact, if anything, it will make things worse, by pumping money into the housing market, preventing prices from dropping. But the latter, I suspect, is the point. Because while the obvious policy we need is a mass house-building programme of state and affordable homes, to crash both house prices and rents, the property owning class - which includes almost every MP - don't want that, because it would devalue their assets and their landleach income-streams. So instead we get this sort of bullshit, spending billions on producing the impression of action, while actually doing nothing much, because those selfish fucks want to preserve their and their friends' wealth, even if it means locking an entire generation out of home ownership for good and creating an English-style hereditary class structure.

I expected better from a Labour government. But like climate change, this is just another one of their broken promises.

Solar beats coal

As the climate crisis escalates, it is now obvious that we need to radically decarbonise our economy. The good news is that its looking easy and profitable for the energy sector. Wind is already cheaper than fossil fuels, and now solar is too:

The levellised cost of solar PV has fallen so far that all across Europe it is now beating spot wholesale electricity prices, and even with the addition of two hours’ storage it is still beating spot prices in some countries.

Those are two of the findings of a new report from Christian Breyer, professor of solar economy at Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology, who has wrapped up new data and forecasts and reinforced the view that solar PV is by far the cheapest form of bulk energy in many parts of the world, and is still competing with the addition of storage.

It gets better, because the price of solar is expected to halve in the next decade, and drop again by another third before 2050. Breyer notes that the changes are happening so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up, and policy decisions are being made based on years old information. Which isn't good when we are trying to decarbonise. OTOH, the market is good at finding profits, so it may get us there anyway. The question is whether it does it quick enough.

(And on that point, its worth noting that Marsden Point, an oil refinery, is going to host NZ's biggest solar farm. We're in early days yet, but our solar resource is comparable to Europe's, and there's no reason we shouldn't see the same cost structure. Its also worth noting that while they take up a lot of space, solar panels combine well with some forms of agriculture, particularly sheep. Which suggests an obvious thing for all those Canterbury farmers to farm instead of dirty cows: the sun).

Universities back the climate strike

On September 27, School Strike 4 Climate will be striking for a future to pressure the government for meaningful climate action. This time, they've asked adults to join them. And now, Lincoln University and Victoria University of Wellington have signed on:

Victoria University of Wellington has joined Lincoln University in endorsing a strike by students at the end of September.

[...]

Both are encouraging their staff and students to take part and neither will need to take annual leave nor explain their absence if they do so.

As VUW vice-chancellor Grant Guilford points out, the students are taking charge of their future, so the university needs to support them. And so do the rest of us. I look forward to other universities and employers following suit.

Another constitutional outrage

Another day, another constitutional outrage in the UK. This time, the government is saying that if parliament passes a law to stop Brexit before being prorogued, they may just ignore it:

A senior cabinet minister has suggested Boris Johnson could defy legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit if it is forced through parliament by rebel MPs.

The prime minister was accused of presiding over an “elective dictatorship” after his ally Michael Gove refused to guarantee the government would obey a bill barring the government from pursuing a disorderly departure.

In an astonishing admission, Mr Gove said “let’s see what the legislation says” when asked repeatedly whether the government would accept rebel legislation.

Last I checked, the UK purported to be a democratic state, in which the government was subject to the law rather than above it. But Brexit seems to be pushing Britain further and further into dictatorship and tyranny. And unfortunately, a chunk of UK citizens seem to be perfectly happy with that. They're willing to toss democracy overboard to get there way. But by doing so, they invite everybody else to do the same.

Ending dairy in Canterbury

Environment Canterbury has finally proposed nitrogen limits to stop dairy farmers from poisoning Christchurch's water supply. And naturally, farmers are whining about it:

A proposed move by Environment Canterbury (ECan) to protect Christchurch's drinking water by setting tough – some would say, draconian – nitrate reductions in the decades ahead and stop the nasties creeping below the Waimakariri River has some dairy farmers in states of high anxiety.

There are about 1.3 million dairy cattle in the region, a doubling from 2003 made largely possible by the expansion of irrigation schemes.

[...]

Some farmers consider the schedule of reductions beyond 2030 as a disincentive to keep going or encourage the next generation into the business.

Good. Nitrate kills children and increases long-term risks for bowel cancer. If it gets into Christchurch's drinking water supply, it will be a public health catastrophe. And while farmers are following the climate change playbook and trying to pin the blame elsewhere (the canterbury foothills, mate), we simply didn't have this problem before their cows started shitting everywhere during the dairy boom.

On climate change, on freshwater quality, and now on nitrate toxicity, the message is clear: if we want to survive, we need to massively cut back on dairy farming. Farmers simply need to find something else to do with their land. And if they've loaded up on debt to bail in to peak dairy on some of the hottest and dryest land in the country, they made a poor business decision, and they deserve to pay the price for that (Seriously: Canterbury is a terrible place to grow cows. The only stupider places are the Mackenzie Country and Hawke's Bay, and anyone stupid enough to do that deserves to lose their money). As for what they can do instead, I hear trees are reliably profitable now. Or they can always move to a city and get a job in an industry that doesn't rely on destroying the planet for private profit.

New Fisk

As Trump flip-flops on Iran talks, the reality is that the ‘crazed’ rogue leader now sits in Washington not Tehran

Is National the party of climate arson?

The Zero Carbon Bill is currently before select committee. While its targets are weak, its a generally sensible bill that promises to establish a long-term framework to guide emissions reductions. But National hasn't made up its mind on whether it will support it - and according to Andrea Vance in Stuff, there's a real chance their internal squabbles will see them go full denier on it:

A raft of angry opinion articles, full of wild speculation, questionable numbers and dodgy science, have recently begun to surface as the extreme elements in the [farming] sector looks to exert pressure on Parliament over the Zero Carbon Bill and emissions trading scheme.

Collins, the daughter of a Waikato dairy farmer, was ahead of the curve in harnessing that anger. In late July, she told a rural radio show the Government had thrown farmers under a bus.

By taking such a public and decisive stance on climate change legislation, Collins is throwing down the gauntlet to Simon Bridges who has pussy-footed around his position.

The disgruntled rural rump would be a powerful force to harness heading into the election.

Parties should represent their supporters. But it turns out that some of National's most vocal supporters are climate arsonists, who want to destroy the planet for their own profit. National then needs to choose who it wants to represent: the arsonists, who are minuscule in number and don't have anyone else to vote for, or suburban New Zealand, which wants to see a solution and is where elections are actually won.

Sadly, I think we'll all know which one they'll choose. While National has occasionally pretended to care, its record shows they have always been the party of climate inaction and foot-dragging. Their natural instincts are to oppose action. Unfortunately, at this stage of the crisis, inaction is as bad as active denial. And suburban voters should punish them for that.

Local elections need STV

Local body elections are underway, which is causing people to look at local government for once. And many of us don't like what we see. Our local government is basicly a gerontocracy, stuffed with dead white males. There are more councillors named "John" than there are councillors born after 1980. This is not representative, it looks nothing like New Zealand, and it discourages anyone under 60 from voting.

What is the cause of this problem? Writing in The Spinoff, Hayden Donnell has a simple answer: its the voting system, stupid. FPP and the block vote allow a narrow demographic - old people - to utterly dominate local government, converting their plurality into absolute dominance. But there's an alternative, STV, which is used in a few areas. And the evidence shows that local authorities which use STV have more representative councils, which look more like their voters.

Currently only 11 councils use STV (I am lucky enough to live in one, and my council looks a hell of a lot better than the West Coast's). This needs to change. STV is more democratic. It produces more representative outcomes. It is likely to boost long-run turnout, as younger voters see councillors who actually look like them. It should be adopted nationwide.

Feeding the kids

The government is trialling a free school lunch programme:

The Government has launched a trial free lunch in schools programme which it expects to extend out to 21,000 children once the policy is fully rolled out in two years' time.

Starting next year, roughly 5000 year 1-8 children across 30 schools in Rotorua and Hawke's Bay will receive a free lunch five days a week as part of the policy's trial.

The Government is expecting those 30 schools will become 120 once the full policy is under way in 2021.

Good. It is simply indecent that children are going hungry in New Zealand, and this programme will help stop that. But its also a good investment: child poverty costs a fortune, and this will help reduce that cost, giving kids a better future. My only question is why they didn't do this sooner.

A constitutional outrage

That is the only way to describe Boris Johnson's request to suspend the UK parliament to prevent it from voting on Brexit (or voting him out of office). The UK parliament is the sole source of democratic legitimacy for that country's government. For the executive to purport to suspend it, nakedly to prevent debate, calls its right to govern into fundamental question.

Brexit has now become a full-blown constitutional crisis. There are already calls to protest in the UK. MPs are saying they will simply occupy the chamber and that the police will have to drag them out. Last time anything like this happened in the UK, that country got a civil war and the tyrannical executive lost their head. Hopefully it won't come to that. But the fact that this has even been tried underlines how urgently the UK needs democratic reform, to make it impossible.

It turns out that someone does own the water

For the past decade or more the government has been looking at water issues, trying to find better ways of allocating it and of protecting our environment (or, in the case of National, allowing farmers to shit in the rivers without restriction). Lurking in the back of this work, resolutely unaddressed by the government, has been the Treaty. In 1840, Māori owned all the water in New Zealand, and it is legally questionable whether those rights have ever been extinguished. The government is in denial about this, claiming "no-one owns water" (while handing out property rights in it worth billions to farmers and foreign water-bottlers). But the Waitangi Tribunal has finally ruled on the issue, and they are crystal clear: water is a taonga, and it belongs to Māori.

In case anyone has forgotten, the Treaty of waitangi guaranteed Māori te tino rangatiratanga (or, in the English mistranslation, "full exclusive and undisturbed possession") over their lands, villages and all their treasures. This includes water. The RMA's water management regime and its predecessors have systematically violated this right by failing to recognise proprietary rights, by excluding Māori from use of what is ultimately their resource, and by failing to actively protect it as a taonga. Their conclusion:

Our view is that the Crown must now recognise Māori proprietary rights and provide what the New Zealand Māori Council called ‘proprietary redress’. We recommend that the Crown arrange for an allocation on a percentage basis to iwi and hapū, according to a regional, catchment-based scheme. We also recommend an allocation for Māori land development, and that the feasibility of royalties and other forms of proprietary redress be investigated.

Its a perfectly doable solution, and we've done it before for fish (which were similarly a taonga, rights over which were never extinguished). With a bit of patience, we could craft a reasonable settlement with a decent chance of sticking, and which would improve water management into the bargain. But pretty obviously, that would threaten established interests - all those farmers who have benefited from colonial theft, all those water bottlers getting "their" water for free then sticking it in bottles and on-selling it for a fortune. And where there's money on the line, there's going to be politics. I expect we'll see the National Party go full Brash over this, banging the drum for a racist extinguishment of Māori rights to prevent their cronies and backers from having to pay their way. As for Labour, they're such chickenshits they'll probably betray their Māori support base again, bow to National's hate, and turn it into Foreshore & Seabed 2.0. And if they do, they will deserve to be tossed out on their arses.

Finally, the Tribunal apparently recommended that Māori bring a test case to claim their rights, and the New Zealand Maori Council has taken them up on it. The government is not going to be able to dodge this. Instead, they're going to have to say whose side they're on, and suffer the political consequences.