Submit!

The Education and Science Committee is seeking submissions on the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms (Approvals and Enforcement) Amendment Bill. 20 copies, by Friday, 15th April 2005, to:

Kirstin Lambert
Education and Science Committee Secretariat
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

Unfortunately the pilot project allowing submissions to be submitted electronically hasn't started yet, so you'll have to post it.

I am not yet sure whether I will be submitting on this bill, but those of you out there who feel strongly about GE may want to. Submitting on legislation is not difficult; there's a guide here, but if you can't be bothered going to all that trouble, you can simply write them a letter. Democracy works best when people get involved, so please make your opinion known.

Correction: Well, I look like a plonker, don't I? I had posted this notice - without having had time to read the bill - because I had assumed from its title that the bill covered GE. But as has been pointed out in the comments, it actually only deals with hazardous substances. Which makes it rather less interesting...

We ought to be ashamed

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has slammed the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 as discriminating against Maori by extinguishing possible customary title over the foreshore and seabed without providing a guaranteed right of redress. This violates our obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and particularly Article 5, which guarantees everyone, "without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin... equality before the law" as well as "the right to equal treatment before the tribunals and all other organs administering justice". I have not been able to find the actual report, but we are mentioned in this press release - right below the "Decision on Situation in Darfur":

In a decision on New Zealand, the Committee noted its review of the compatibility of the New Zealand Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 with the provisions of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in the light of information received both from the Government of New Zealand and a number of Maori non-governmental organizations and taking into account its General Recommendation No. XXIII on indigenous peoples. The Committee expressed its appreciation at having had the opportunity to engage in a constructive dialogue with the State party and the State party’s written and oral responses to its requests for information related to the legislation, including those submitted on 17 February and 9 March 2005. Bearing in mind the complexity of the issues involved, the legislation appeared to the Committee, on balance, to contain discriminatory aspects against the Maori, in particular in its extinguishment of the possibility of establishing Maori customary title over the foreshore and seabed and its failure to provide a guaranteed right of redress, notwithstanding the State party’s obligations under articles 5 and 6 of the Convention.

The Committee acknowledged with appreciation the State party’s tradition of negotiation with the Maori on all matters concerning them and urged the State party, in a spirit of goodwill and in accordance with the ideals of the Waitangi Treaty, to resume a dialogue with the Maori community with regard to the legislation in order to seek ways of lessening its discriminatory effects, including where necessary through legislative amendment. Moreover, the Committee requested the State party to monitor closely the implementation of the Foreshore and Seabed Act, its impact on the Maori population and the developing State of race relations in New Zealand and to take steps to minimize any negative effects, especially by way of a flexible application of the legislation and by broadening the scope of redress available to the Maori.

I'm hoping that the full report will eventually show up here. A description of the submissions process is here.

This is a decision we should all be ashamed of. But what's even more shameful is that this had to go before the UN in the first place. The bill's violation of the equal right to justice was identified the moment it was put before the house, and yet the government chose to ram it through anyway. Now our international reputation is suffering because of their desire for a "quick fix" to satisfy the redneck vote...

The committee's decision is only going to strengthen Maori resolve over the foreshore - not to mention providing the Maori Party with a serious piece of ammunition in its competition for the Maori vote. And if they are successful in sweeping the Maori seats, we may find the Foreshore and Seabed Act being revisited...

Farce based on lies

The UK's Prevention of Terrorism Act is barely 24 hours old, and it has already been used to impose control orders on ten detainees just released from Belmarsh prison, where they had been kept in solitary confinement for up to three years without charge or trial. But the detainee's release and the imposition of the orders has turned into a total farce:

On a day laced with high drama and farce, the police warnings came after one of the suspects had to be taken to the psychiatric wing of a London hospital. The police tried to transfer him to a secure flat, but had to break in because they did not have keys. A 24-hour hotline that was supposed to have been installed was also not working, meaning the man had no access to Home Office officials. Psychiatric social workers deemed it unsafe to leave him alone in the flat.

Another former detainee was released with no money or food and spent yesterday alone and hungry in his empty accommodation. He had been served with a control order which prevents him from making phone calls, inviting anyone into his accommodation or arranging to meet anyone outside unless he has prior permission from the Home Office.

The latter is particularly cruel. The penalty for violating a control order is up to five years in jail - a handy way around the need for actual proof - but people are being left in conditions where the conditions simply cannot be met, or where they must choose between eating or going back to jail, with no official support. You'd almost think the government wanted the orders to be violated...

The Guardian has more, as well:

Suspects must phone a private tagging company before they leave the house. But in one case, suspect P, who has no arms, was supplied with a phone that had not been adapted for his disability.

Lawyers acting for Abu Rideh, a Palestinian also held at Broadmoor said police had told him that they knew he was no danger to the public.

The mother of one former detainee visiting from abroad had been thrown out of the family house because she was not on a list of people authorised to visit the suspect under the terms of the control order.

So we have people being forcibly seperated from their families, being demanded to do the impossible, and being subjected to all of this because the government cannot admit it made a mistake. And to top it all off, we find out that - once again, Tony Blair lied about what he had been told by the intelligence services:

At Prime Minister's question-time last Wednesday, Tony Blair suggested intelligence chiefs had specifically warned against a Tory proposal to set a time limit on the legislation: 'It would be contrary to the strong advice given to us by our security services and our police and I am simply not prepared to do it.'

But a senior intelligence source told The Observer MI5 'was not driving this process', adding: 'They gave an assessment of the threat and allowed [the government] to decide what was to be legislated.'

This whole farce has been driven by one thing: politics. In the run-up to a general election, the British Labour Party is desperate to portray themselves as "tough" (and the opposition as "soft") on terrorism. And if doing so requires ramming an ill-thought-out law through Parliament with no debate or planning, pissing all over due process and the rule of law, and grossly violating the fundamental human rights of a few suspected terrorists, well, you don't win an election without breaking eggs.

One way or the other

Having failed to gain access to Attoney-General Lord Goldsmith's advice to the British Cabinet on the legality of the Iraq war through the UK's new Freedom of Information Act, those seeking democratic accountability for the Iraq war are trying another method: they have laid a complaint with the Bar Council (the British equivalent of the Law Society) asking that Lord Goldsmith be struck off for failing to provide proper advice. The basis of the claim? Reports from Britian's top civil servant that the final opinion was a single piece of paper. As one lawyer said, this is "frankly extraordinary";

You can't produce serious legal advice on a single piece of paper. I would expect legal advice on war to run to 10 to 20 pages of argument at least supported by a couple of ring binders of documents

Will it work? I don't know. But one thing it does show is that, despite Blair's fervant wishes, the public is not going to "draw a line" under Iraq. One way or another, there will be justice; one way or another, we will get them.

New Fisk

In the Middle East, those who are about to die believe profoundly in the afterlife

Against Parliamentary Censorship

Nick Venter had an excellent piece in the Dominion Post yesterday (sadly not online) on Parliament's plans to censor press coverage from the debating chamber so as to prevent MPs being shown in a poor light. Not that they're putting it like that, oh no - but a vital part of their plan to broadcast Parliament seems to be the removal of all other TV cameras. And the resulting footage will be fully under control of MPs themselves.

To see what this ultimately means, we only have to look across the Tasman. The Australian Parliament has an in-house unit to provide TV and still images of Parliamentary debates. And when President Bush visited in 2003, this footage was sanitised by the government to avoid "embarassment". The Australian media were reduced to having to buy footage from CNN - who had illegally filmed proceedings within the chamber for their US audiance - in order to show the interjections of MPs opposed to Bush, and the way their were roughly manhandled out of the chamber. Later, still photos of Bush meeting the leader of the opposition were banned, while those of him with Howard were provided to the media; the Australiam government used its control over footage to present itself in the best light, while denying the opposition coverage.

But we don't need to go to such Orwellian extremes to see that Parliamentary control of footage would be a Bad Thing. Members of Parliament are rather touchy about their image, and so Parliament already place heavy restrictions on what the media is and isn't allowed to film. Apart from the occasional wide-angle background shot, the media are currently allowed to film or photograph MPs only when they are on their feet and speaking. They are not, for example, allowed to film them yawning, knitting, reading the paper or sleeping in their seats - and as Venter recounts, illustrating a story about MPs granting themselves a pay rise with footage of them laughing in the chamber results in being summoned to the Speaker's office.

There is a word for this - censorship - and we should not tolerate it. Instead, we should demand that Parliament operate in a fully open and transparent manner, and allow the media free access to film whatever is most interesting or newsworthy. In the television age, media coverage is a vital means of ensuring democratic accountability, and that is far more important than MP's dignity.

Stupidity

No, not ACT President Catherine Judd's vicious attack on National, but would-be ACT leader John Banks' contention that National's recent change of direction is wrong because

a drift to the centre and the politics of ‘me too’ don’t attract additional votes.

Now, it may be true insofar as National hasn't managed to gain much by doing so, but that does not change the fact that under MMP, you win an election by capturing 50% of the vote. And as a simple matter of political sociology, this means that a party (or rather, the broader coalition of which it is a part) must gain the support of the political center ground. This means presenting policies which appeal. And the problem for ACT is that their policies don't (and are in fact regarded as pure poison by a large segment of center voters, who suffered under them during the Revolution). The fact that ACT does not understand this simply shows how deluded they are.

The broader problem for ACT is that the unpopularity of their policies may make it difficult to put together a governing coalition on the right. On current long-term polling trends, any such coalition will have to include a "centrist" party - and both the possible alternatives are likely to have significant problems with wholesale privatisations and cuts to health and education spending. This means that one or other party is going to have to swallow serious dead rats, to the extent that it may suffer a grassroots revolt from its constituency. Needless to say, this is not a recipe for stable or long-lasting government...

New Fisk

Syria reasserts power in Lebanon as its ally returns as prime minister

Improving MMP

New Zealand Political Comments considers ways to improve MMP. His suggestions include changing the formula used to assign seats so that a majority of votes guarantees a majority of seats (something not guaranteed under Sainte-Laguë), removing the electorate seat exemption to the threshold, and using preferential voting for the party vote. But there's a far easier way of ensuring that everybody's vote counts: removing the threshold entirely (or rather, lowering it to 0.8%, the amount required to get one seat). This would remove the greatest distortion to proportionality - the fact that around 5% of votes are simply ignored. More importantly, it would allow new parties to rise to challenge the existing ones - something the threshold seems designed to impede. And while most of those who would benefit from such a change are parties I despise - Christian Heritage, ACT, maybe even the National Front - I cannot deny that if I am worthy of Parliamentary representation for my views, then so are they.

As for the discussion in the comments regarding the Maori seats, I see them both as an important way of guaranteeing Maori representation and as no more distorting than any other electorate seat (the "Auckland seats" are equally likely to produce an overhang, for example, but nobody is contemplating getting rid of them). And the fact that Maori have voted with their feet to be represented in this manner, despite the electoral disadvantages of doing so, strongly suggests that the seats should be retained.

A stunning victory for Al Qaeda

The Prevention of Terrorism Bill has finally passed, after the government compromised by allowing the bill to be reviewed in a year's time. But they have not compromised on the substantive amendments to the bill regarding judicial oversight and the burden of proof - meaning that the UK is now the only western democracy which allows its citizens to be imprisoned in their own home on "reasonable suspicion" solely on the word of a government Minister. It's a stunning victory for Al Qaeda, and one that did not require a single terrorist act on British soil. Instead, all it needed was for politicians to sacrifice the very thing they are supposed to be defending in favour of a sordid bidding war about who can be "toughest" on terrorism.

The bill has yet to receive the Royal Assent, but it will - and this should thoroughly disabuse local Monarchists of the notion that the Queen is somehow "the defender of democracy". No bill has been rejected since 1707, because to do so would spell the end of the British monarchy. As a result, any power the monarch might have to defend democracy and human rights is effectively neutered. So why keep the fiction?

"High-tax" New Zealand

An incessant mantra from National and ACT is that New Zealand is a "high-tax" country, with the the tax burden here being heavier than in other, comparable countries. We saw a classic example of this earlier in the week, with National declaring that "5% in ’05 won’t go far under high-tax Labour". But how does this claim actually stack up? Not very well, it seems. According to a report from the OECD, New Zealand's tax burden is among the lowest in the developed world. The overall tax rate for a single-income couple with two children earning the average wage is just 20.7% - the tenth lowest out of thirty OECD nations. Workers without children compare even better; while the tax burden is the same, we rank third lowest for this group, behind only South Korea and Mexico.

The opposition is, in other words, talking shit. But is this really surprising? For years they've been harping on about the need to cut the top personal tax rate "to remain competititve with Australia" - despite the fact that Australia has a higher top rate than us, as well as dedicated payroll taxes. I expect they'll pay a similar lack of attention to today's data...

The UK's last defenders of freedom

It's more than a little ironic that in the current struggle over anti-terrorism legislation, the House of Lords, the rump of the British aristocracy, are turning out to be the UK's last defenders of freedom.

For those who haven't been following the story, in December the Law Lords ruled that the UK's system of detention without trial was discriminatory as it applied only to those who were not British citizens, and thus violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The British government's response was to try and introduce an even more draconian system of "control orders" allowing suspected terrorists (regardless of citizenship) to be subjected to restrictions on their freedom of movement, speech, and association, solely on the word of the Home Secretary. These restrictions extend to house arrest with a ban on all visitors. The only difference between this and detention without trial is that the incarcerated victim pays for their own prison cell.

The bill has passed the Commons after an acrimonious debate which saw one of the largest backbench rebellions in recent years, but it has run into trouble in the House of Lords. The Lords have insisted on a number of amendments to key parts of the bill, including increasing the burden of proof required for an order from "reasonable suspicion" (the standard required to get a search warrant) to a balance of probabilities (the standard used in civil cases), insisting that all control orders be issued by a judge rather than by the Minister, and insisting on a "sunset clause", making the bill expire unless renewed by Parliament. This is simply unacceptable to the Blair government. As a result, the two houses of the British legislature are now engaged in a game of legislative "ping-pong", bouncing different versions of the bill back and forth, back and forth, with neither willing to give in (and the government presumably unwilling to use the Parliament Act to force the bill to become law). The bill will apparantly fail unless the Lords and Commons can agree on a version soon, and IMHO this is the best thing that can happen to it. As Lord Hoffman said in his judgement on indefinite detention,

[t]he real threat to the life of the nation... comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.

The Lords, it would seem, agree.

New Fisk

Half a Million Gather for Pro-Syrian Rally to Defy Vision of U.S.

Sedition by Example VII: Harry Holland

(An ongoing attempt to excite hostility or ill-will against our archaic law barring sedition)

Harry Holland, editor of the Maoriland Worker, addressing a meeting of striking workers at the Basin Reserve, Wellington, October 26th, 1913:

The waterside agreement was broken when the men were obliged to take a day off; when Mr Liverpool - Lord Liverpool - the gilded popinjay, the figure-head of capitalism in New Zealand, landed here; and the same thing occured when Sir Joseph Ward's Dreadnought called. I remind them [meaning the police] of words used by me at Broken Hill, in Australia, the occasion when I was sentenced to two years' imprisonment on a charge of sedition. I told the miners. "If they hit you with a baton, hit them with a pick-handle, and have something at the end of it. Here is your opportunity, you John Hops [meaning the police]. They [the employers] want to give you a miserable eight bob a day, and the soul and clothes of a slave, and want you to scab on Labour".

...and at Newtown Park, Wellington, November 2nd, 1913:

You have a Gatling gun on the wharf to-day, and there is one on the turret of the Post Office, they tell us. When Massey's Cossacks come down upon us - I was going to say "men," but I don't want to be guilty of libel. The 2000 men offering in the Waikato are heroes, because they will come fully armed, provided Massey gives them full protection. If free labourers are put on, they will work with a revolver in their belts and a bludgeon beside them. I urge the navals present [meaning sailors from HMS Psyche, then lying in Wellington Harbour], when they are ordered to shoot, to remember where their class interests lie, and point their guns accordingly. The railwaymen should not carry free labourers. Let the trains rot and rust. The strike was not made by the working classes, but by the master classes, who are pouring their armed hundreds into Wellington, not by daylight, but like thieves in the night, coming utterly ashamed of the work they are undertaking. They sneak in in the midnight hours, but grey-headed women come to jeer them as they pass. The railway men have said that they are prepared to stop the trains. The drivers can stop the carts, and the seamen the ships. The uniformed police can deal a staggering blow by tearing off their uniforms, and standing by the watersiders. We are going to win, and by God, we are going to do it, no matter what means we are going to use.

If these "speeches" make little sense and read like "a hopeless jumble of words", it is because they are. Both are highly condensed versions of Holland's actual words, consisting of those passages believed to be most seditious, shorn of context and sometimes rearranged - both the mark of a hatchet job and a consequence of having to transcribe speeches in shorthand. But despite such flawed transcriptions, Holland was prosecuted for sedition for promoting feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes (waterside workers and employers), and sentenced to 12 months imprisonment. He was released after 3½ months, and later went on to become leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

(Source: Twelve Months for Sedition: Harry Holland's Speech from the Dock and the Chief Justice's Remarks in Delivering Sentence, Maoriland Worker, 1914).

Gutter Politics

Did anybody else's stomach turn at Winston's behaviour in the House today? Using Parliamentary privilege to accuse someone of paedophilia without a shred of evidence really is plumbing new depths, even for him. Frankly, I'm surprised that his NZFirst colleagues can sit next to him. But then, considering the shit some of them have spread - Enoch Brown and Bill Gudgeon in particular - they seem to go together perfectly.

If Peters has real evidence of either child abuse or the sale of objectionable material (rather than simply material he objects to), then he should pass it to Police. It's that simple. If he is unwilling or unable to do that, then I think its fairly clear that he is, as Rodney Hide put it, "a homophobic member of Parliament attack[ing] someone simply because that person happens to be a friend of an MP".

Voting on the Omnibus Bill

DPF has posted the voting record for the Second Reading of the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill. Highlights include Taito Phillip Field being the only Labour MP to oppose the bill (which is another reason to vote against him in Mangere), over half of supposedly "liberal" ACT opposing a liberal measure, and Don Brash - who had previously indicated that he would support the bill - again deciding to chase the bigot vote. Do we really need any more evidence that the guy has no principles beyond getting elected so he can cut taxes to the rich?

Kudos to Peter Dunne for standing by his principles in the face of his overwhelmingly traditionalist caucus, and to the Greens and Progressives, who were unanimous in support. It is now crystal clear which parties offer social liberals the most bang for their vote, and it isn't the opposition...

New Fisk

Beirut: An historic day in the life of my city

Trying to make reality fit the theory

Having argued that the generous income top-ups available under the Working for Families package meant that workers would have little incentive to improve their pay, the National Party is now trying to argue that those same generous top-ups mean that workers should not bother pushing for a wage-rise. Talk about trying to make reality fit the theory...

As usual their example - a teacher on $50,000 a year with two kids - is carefully chosen for maximum effect. But this is fairly high up the payscale. The average wage is only around $35,000, and the median wage - the point at which half of all wage and salary earners earn more, and half earn less - is lower than this. While workers on lower incomes still have their top-ups abated as their income rises, the effect is significantly less. And of course not every wage-earner has children.

But underneath this is a principle which the unions seem to grasp and which National doesn't: that generally speaking, in a market economy, employers should be paying for people to live. Yes, people may not be as well off from an increase as they think due to the abatement regime. But they'll be earning that money rather than getting it from the government. Isn't that something the National Party, with its constant harping on about personal responsibilitiy, "middle-class welfare", and government expenditure, should support?

Worse than I thought

In my post supporting the CTU's 5% in '05 campaign, I noted that the wage share of the economy had dropped, from 55% in the early 90's, to 50% now. It's actually far worse than I thought. According to Bernard Hickey's opinion piece in the Domion-Post on saturday, in 2004 wages made up only 43% of gross national income. And the difference has gone straight into corporate profits, which are now up to 44.5% of GNI. This is a massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of workers into the pockets of shareholders - and one that workers have every right to be upset about. In fact, what's surprising is that they haven't got upset about it earlier...

In the same column, Hickey suggests two solutions, one from the left and one from the right. The first is for the government to engage in greater redistribution through the tax system, by hiking the corporate tax rate to 35%. Looking at how much ordinary working New Zealanders have lost, that would seem to be justified. Hickey's second suggestion is for the government to encourage an ownership society by publically floating the state-owned energy companies. But this doesn't encourage an "ownership society" - it encourages an owned society, and one owned by exactly the same people who own most of it now. At the moment, those assets return money to the government, which uses it on behalf of the taxpayer. Hickey's suggestion would simply result in a greater transfer of wealth to the already-wealthy, via the power bills of the poor (it's no accident that he is suggesting privatising monopolies).

But it doesn't have to be that way. If privatising state assets is the way to create an ownership society, then there's an obvious way to ensure that that ownership is widely distributed, rather than simply being confined to the currently wealthy: distribute the stock equally to all New Zealanders. But strangely, that's not something the right seems keen on. I wonder why?

Support from an unusual quarter...

In the Herald this morning, Chris Laidlaw reports that Prince Charles supports New Zealand becoming a republic:

"Well, to be frank, I think it would come as a great relief to all of us," said Charles. "It would remove the awful ambiguity we have at the moment. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier for everybody if you all had your own completely independent head of state.

"I certainly never want to be dragged into any constitutional disputes in New Zealand or anywhere else. I simply can't imagine how difficult it would be to be faced with having to dismiss a New Zealand Prime Minister."

I'm with DPF on this. When the man in line to be king of New Zealand says it would be better for us to do things our own way, we should listen. The only question is what "our own way" will look like...