Climate change: Ambition

The UK government has announced that it plans to drive the domestic airline industry out of business, replacing short-haul flights within the UK with a high-speed rail network. It's an ambitious plan, but a good one - and the real question is why it has taken them so long. As the Guardian's map [PDF] shows, the UK is a laggard when it comes to high-speed rail, thanks largely to privatisation. France and Germany's major cities are already connected by high-speed routes, and it has had a dramatic impact on travel modes within those countries. The effect is even greater in Spain, where the opening of a high-speed link between Madrid and Seville has reduced the airline industry to a bit-player on that route.

This is the sort of government driven modal shift we need in order to tackle climate change and the eventual problem of peak oil. Unfortunately, it would require a massive investment, made worse by our geography (you can't take a high speed train down the Raurimu Spiral, and you can't drive one across Cooks Strait). But with emissions rising, the oil running out, and the threat of people being priced out of intercity transport in the future, its something we should start thinking about now.

30,000 out of work under National

The Household Labour Force Survey is out, and as expected, the news is bad, with unemployment surging to a 9-year high. There are now 30,000 more unemployed than when national came to power in November last year. But digging into the numbers, its actually worse than that - an equal number have given up looking for work and left the labour force entirely.

While National is not responsible for the global economic crisis, they are responsible for how they handle it. And on this measure, they are handling it badly. Their "stimulus" has not kept people in work, their nine-day fortnight has not protected jobs, and their cycleway scheme is a bad joke. They seem quite happy to leave the market to "sort itself out", while enriching themselves at the taxpayer's expense. The fact that this will cause real pain to a lot of people seems completely lost on them.

New Zealanders expect more from our government. In a crisis like this, we expect them to be doing something to help, not standing by idly comparing the size of their Parliamentary perks. If they don't start meeting those expectations, they are going to suffer for it at the next election.

In the ballot XXVII

Another batch of Member's Bills currently in the ballot. Previous batches are indexed here:

Animal Welfare Amendment Bill (Catherine Delahunty): currently a quirk in the Animal Welfare Act 1999 allows the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee to approve codes of practice for farming which violate basic standards laid out in the Act itself. This bill would amend the Act to ensure that such practices (such as sow crates and battery cages) were phased out within five years. While fronted by Catherine Delahunty, the bill is in fact one of Sue Kedgley's.

Crimes (Self-Defence) Amendment Bill (David Garrett): currently the law around self-defence distinguishes between people and property: you can reasonable force in defence of either, but you can only strike or cause bodily harm to someone when defending a person or your home. this bill - an old Steven Franks number, now taken up by the even more demented David Garrett - would change that, allowing people to threaten and use force, including weapons and firearms, to defend mere property. In other words, you could shoot someone over a TV set. And just to make it clear that that is what it is about, it would amend the Arms Act to ensure that people were exempt from the normal secure storage requirements for firearms "where it was necessary to ensure reasonable self-defence". In other words, you can keep a loaded rifle under the bed (or indeed, a loaded pistol on the bedside table if you have the appropriate licence) if you are paranoid about "crims", and then use it when some kid tags your fence.

This bill is a further step in the othering of criminals, and a recipe for disaster. I am hoping that it never gets drawn.

Smoke-free Environments (Removing Tobacco Displays) Amendment Bill (Iain Lees-Galloway): this would amend the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990 to ban the display of tobacco products and smoking accessories at the points of sale. Currently tobacco advertising is banned, but retailers (with the aid of tobacco companies) get around this by using the tobacco products themselves as an advertisement (the "powerwall"). The bill would require them to move their cancer-products out of sight of customers. They will still be able to sell them, but the only way they could advertise the fact would be with a price list and the standard "smoking kills" sign.

The bill obviously raises BORA-issues around freedom of expression; OTOH there is a strong argument that it is a justified limitation (significant public purpose? Check. Rationally connected to that purpose? Check. Proportionate? Given the number of people these products kill, quite possibly). But given National's alliance with the tobacco industry, I don't really expect it to pass.

As usual, I'll do more bills when I get round to them.

Neither reasonable nor necessary

I said the other day that I strongly supported MPs getting paid for the reasonable and necessary expenses required for them to do their jobs properly. But I have to say that Bill English's state housing rort seems neither reasonable nor necessary. Getting paid to live somewhere where you'd live anyway? Manipulating your corporate structure to lease your own home to Ministerial Services so you can get paid more money for living there? That simply stinks. So I'm more than glad to see he'll be repaying some of the money (and OTOH, wouldn't it be nice to be able to whip out a cheque for $12,000? That's more than half of taxpayers even earned in the six month period it covers). Unfortunately, he's not repaying enough.

The fundamental problem here is caused by using the electorate an MP represents as a proxy for where they live. But as we've seen in the case of John Key, that's not really tenable. For electoral purposes, people live where they say they live, even if they spend almost all of their time somewhere else. Any assessment of expenses should therefore be based on MP's actual situations, not on their electorate. Which means that as a Minister who actually lives in Wellington, Bill English should not be receiving any accommodation assistance at all, and should be repaying all of what he has rorted.

Abortion safe for now

Right To Life's legal battle against abortion seems to be over. Justice Miller's ruling was released yesterday, and he once again refused to make any orders, this time on the basis that the functions of the Abortion Supervisory Committee have been "clarified" and that Parliament would hold them to account. The good news is there will be no restriction of abortion rights, and Right To Life's case has effectively failed. The bad news is that Miller's impugning of the legality of most abortions performed in New Zealand (seemingly based on nothing but his own feeling that there are too many of them) will be allowed to stand. As before, no orders means no appeal is possible. So we get the status quo, with some bonus slander.

The fundamentalists are apparently happy with that, but I'm not sure how long that will last. The flip side of no orders is that Miller's "clarification" is a fiction which holds no actual legal weight. So, the Abortion Supervisory Committee can continue leaving clinical decisions in the hands of medical professionals as before. And its only a matter of time before the fundamentalists realise this and drag the issue back into court again - in the process putting the basic right of women to control their own bodies under threat.

This isn't good enough. Now that the immediate case is over, its time we stepped up to prevent it ever happening again. It is long past time we reformed our abortion laws, joined the modern world, and allowed abortion on demand. The Australian state of Victoria has provided the model; its time we adopted it here.

Correction: Now that I've seen the actual judgement, it is clear that the ruling can be appealed. Right To Life can appeal the decision not to grant any orders (and they may very well want to do that), while the ASC can appeal Justice Miller's interpretation of the law in his earlier judgement. So, its not over yet after all.

A challenge to double bunking

The government's plans to increase prison capacity by double bunking have hit a snag: the Corrections Association. They view it as a significant health and safety issue which puts their members in greater danger, and which violates the collective employment agreement they have agreed with Corrections. The case went to the Employment Relations Authority yesterday, who kicked it straight up to the Employment Court [PDF]. And the union shows every sign of taking it further if they have to. The lives of their members - and of prisoners - are potentially at stake.

The upshot: unless the government can come to a deal with the Corrections Association, its vicious prison policy is going nowhere fast. And its ultimate fate may very well be decided by the courts.

Drawn

Due to the discharge of Lianne Dalziel's Crimes (Abolition of Defence of Provocation) Amendment Bill, a ballot for member's bills was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Employment Relations (Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill (Darien Fenton)

The bill implements the recommendations of the Public Advisory Group on restructuring and redundancy for legislated minimum redundancy (something which incidentally protects jobs during a recession).

Labour continued to dominate the ballot, with 15 bills out of 30. And they're still using less than half of their potential.

There was one new bill in the ballot today: the Resource Management (Enhancement of Iwi Management Plans) Amendment Bill (Nanaia Mahuta). The Greens also engaged in some shuffling, with Sue Bradford returning to her ACC bill now that her benefit appeal bill has been drawn, and Kevin Hague taking up Meyt's old Adoption (Equity) Amendment Bill (which would clarify the law around gay adoption).

Sometime soon (really! This time for sure!) I'll do another "In the ballot" post on some of the newer bills.

Drinking Liberally in Wellington this Thusday

Drinking Liberally is on again in Wellington this Thursday, with guest speaker David Cunliffe on the opposition's inquiry into bank profiteering.

When: 17:30, Thursday, August 6
Where: Southern Cross, Abel Smith St, Wellington

Climate change: making 40%

Today the Greens released a report [PDF] on how we can achieve a 40% by 2020 climate change target, and I've spent some time this afternoon digging through it. Unlike the government - whose policy basically seems to be flinging up their hands in helplessness while emissions rise - the Greens set out to identify where emissions could be reduced and how to make it happen. The result is a package which gets us most of the way to 40% by 2020. We would still have to rely on buying permits on the international market for some reductions, but we could commit to an internationally credible target.

Given the business-as-usual projections for 2020 emissions, we will need to reduce emissions by 48 million tons by 2020 to make a 40% target. According to the Greens' proposals, a quarter of this will come from planting new forest, a quarter from management of native forest, a quarter from emissions trading (giving s an effective domestic target of 24% below 1990), and a quarter from everything else, including energy efficiency, shifting to renewables, and changes in agriculture.

Planting more trees is a no-brainer, and something the government should have started doing a long time ago. Native forest management is more troublesome. The short-term goal here is to improve pest control in areas where it will help scrubland naturally succeed into forest and so store more carbon. The problem for us is that at the moment this doesn't count towards our Kyoto balance - when we joined Kyoto, we chose not to account for management of native forests, primarily because the government thought that it would have an adverse effect on our emissions balance (all those possums eating trees...) We could reverse that decision, but if done honestly, it would involve an unpleasant change in our Kyoto liability - and it would mean that there would be additional emissions offsetting some of the benefits the Greens are relying upon.

The "everything else" changes are all sane and sensible measures. Increasing the amount of renewable generation while shutting down Huntly and relegating the Taranaki Combined Cycle to winter reserve would take a big chunk out of our emissions while being a manageable transition. Switching half of industrial coal use to wood sounded dubious, but having browsed around, its easily doable and would not require a vast increase in forest coverage. General energy efficiency is again a no-brainer - but requires the government to resource it properly to produce real savings (something Labour never did). And vehicle fuel efficiency standards and a greater emphasis on public transport in Auckland are similarly things the government should have been doing a long time ago.

The really controversial proposal is to reduce dairy farm stocking rates. The farmer-government is viscerally opposed to this, as - like primitive barbarians - they equate cows with wealth, while completely ignoring their environmental costs. But those costs are real, and the massive growth in the dairy industry is helping to kill the planet (and our lakes and streams as well). OTOH, if AgResearch's work on the economics of overstocking stands up, then low milk prices will mean the problem will solve itself. Sane farmers will reduce their stocking rates, while stupid farmers will go bankrupt. Either way, the environment will benefit.

Overall, the Greens have produced a credible document, which shows that we can commit to and make credible progress toward the tough targets necessary to solve this problem (though we may need to plant more trees to get there). Meanwhile, the government's response is to highlight the costs of 100% renewable electricity - something the Greens aren't even advocating. And that speaks volumes about their commitment to real emissions reduction and their level of engagement with the problem.

Guilty

Taito Philip Field has been found guilty on eleven of twelve counts of bribery and corruption as an MP, and 15 of 23 counts of perverting the course of justice.

Good riddance.

The race to end provocation II

The government introduced its Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill this afternoon. The bill is almost identical to Dalziel's bill, and will have identical effects. It will be available for first reading on Tuesday.

Labour have said they will support the bill (it would be decidedly odd if they didn't, given that its the same as theirs), so hopefully it'll be off to select committee shortly.

The transformation into Airstrip One contines...

The UK government is moving to a new, points-based system for assessing citizenship applications, which will include points for conforming to "British values". So what are these values? Well, they don't include freedom of speech: participating in anti-war protests will result in applicants losing points - disagreement with government policy apparently now being "unBritish". OTOH, if they do donkey-work for corrupt, self-serving politicians, they could get citizenship in one year instead of three (though given the thrust of the former, it is unclear if this will apply to all political parties, or only those deemed "acceptable" by the government of the day). So, subservience and docility (to the right people) will be rewarded, and dissent punished. As for active, democratic citizenship, it is forbidden. According to the British government, people should just shut up and do what they're told.

Meanwhile, via Charles Stross, the latest outrage: sticking people under constant CCTV surveillance in their own homes to ensure they send their kids to school, go to bed on time, and eat proper meals. Yes, really. Clearly, some UK politicians see 1984 as a guide to policy, rather than a warning. I'm just glad Jenny Shipley never had this idea...

Freedom week

This week is Freedom Week - Amnesty International's annual fundraiser. Throughout the week, Amnesty members will be participating in various fundraisers, including the Freedom Challenge and some home-organised dinners for dignity, culminating in their street appeal on Thursday and Friday. I'll be out there slinging a bucket for them on Friday; if you'd like to help, you can volunteer here. Otherwise, you can donate directly here.

Despite the worst excesses of our government, this is still a free country, and a good place to live. People like Amnesty help keep it that way. They also help make the world a better place by campaigning against torture, the death penalty, violence against women, and for arms control. Please help them keep up the good work this week.

New Fisk

Could Iran be plotting a Hizbollah offensive to take the heat off its leaders?

The race to end provocation

John Key announced in his press conference yesterday afternoon that the cabinet had agreed to repeal provocation, and that a bill would be introduced into Parliament this week. But Lianne Dalziel has already had her Crimes (Abolition of Defence of Provocation) Amendment Bill drawn from the ballot. So suddenly we've gone from a situation where no-one cares about provocation to one where both major parties are in a race to see who can repeal it first.

And it is a race. Standing Order 260(a) prevents MPs from proposing in the same calendar year

a bill that is the same in substance as a bill that received, or was defeated on, a first, second or third reading.

Which means not only that they can't progress both bills at the same time - but that, if they're serious about repeal, they have to vote for the first one to come up. Otherwise, if they vote it down, then it has been defeated at first reading and so blocks any similar bill for the rest of the year.

Dalziel's bill may come up for first reading next Member's Day (the 19th) - in just five sitting days time. A newly introduced bill must lie on the table for three sitting days (including the day on which it was introduced) before it can be debated. So if the government wants to be sure of pre-empting Labour and claiming the glory of repeal for itself, they need to introduce their bill tomorrow, and have the first reading on Tuesday the 18th. Otherwise, they may find themselves forced to vote for an opposition bill in order to enact their legislative agenda.

(Personally, I don't care who passes it - I just want the law repealed. But there's a danger here that we'll see the worst case scenario: National being too slack to do it themselves, then voting down Dalziel's bill out of spite because it's not theirs (their standard practice with member's bills) - meaning that repeal will be delayed until 2010 at the earliest).

Correction: The ever useful Graeme Edgeler has pointed out a slight change in Standing Orders at the end of last term: government bills introduced while the House is sitting lie on the table until the next Tuesday. So, the government has a little more time to get its act together than I thought, but still have to introduce their bill this week to beat Dalziel.

Climate change: a GM solution?

The ODT has a piece today about AgResearch's work on genetically modifying grass to reduce methane emissions from cattle. According to the article, they have something which they think works, and are seeking the support of the dairy industry for field trials to test it (which I guess means growing a bunch of it, feeding it to cows, and measuring their resulting gas output). If successful, they estimate that such crops could benefit the economy by $300 million a year - though it is not clear how much of that is the result of emissions reduction and how much is due to consequently bigger cows.

This is a good use for GM, and worth trialling. Unlike most GM applications, it seems to have positive environmental benefits, rather than just being about helping Monsanto to sell more pesticides. And once we have hard data on its effectiveness, we can decide whether its seriously worth pursuing. There are obvious ways in which genetic modification could help in the fight against climate change (GM trees tweaked for greater carbon uptake is an obvious possibility), and this is one of them.

The SAS, war crimes, and Afghanistan

Over the weekend, the Sunday Star-Times published a story suggesting that New Zealand SAS troops deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 had committed war crimes:

International legal experts say New Zealand broke the Geneva Convention and laws against torture when, from 2002, our elite SAS troops transferred 50-70 prisoners to the Americans at the Kandahar detention centre in southern Afghanistan.

The centre was known by US soldiers as "Camp Slappy", and prisoners there have described being severely beaten and tortured, drenched with water and left to freeze outside in winter.

Prisoners were turned over to the Americans despite the NZ soldiers knowing that they were likely to be tortured and abused - a basic violation of the Convention Against Torture. In addition, the SAS did not take proper details of those prisoners, effectively helping the Americans create "ghost detainees". Several of them are believed to have ended up in the US gulag in Guantanamo.

It should be deeply shaming that New Zealand troops were involved in this. It should be even more shaming that there has been no official inquiry, no serious attempt to learn what happened and establish policies to prevent it happening in future. Instead it has all been quietly swept under the rug.

It should also ring alarm bells about any future military cooperation with the US. According to a BBC report, the Americans were still torturing prisoners in Afghanistan as late as last year. The question the government needs to answer before it makes any further troop commitment to Afghanistan is how it will ensure that prisoners taken by NZ troops and handed over to the US are treated humanely and in accordance with international law. And if it can not or will not answer that question, it should not contribute. It is that simple.

(More on Pundit here)

Shrinking coalition watch

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq at the head of a "coalition of the willing". Over the intervening years, the coalition has shrunk and shrunk, as various countries have got sick of dying for America and pulled out. And now, following the Iraqi Parliament's eviction of the UK on Wednesday and the withdrawal of the last Australian troops on Friday, it has finally shrunk to a coalition of one...

Cycleway: costs and secrets

As should be clear from the response [PDF] to my latest OIA request on the cycleway - the one which showed conclusively that the Prime Minister had lied to Parliament - there were actually some documents included. These were:

• An aide memoire [PDF] on the New Zealand Cycleway (26 May 2009), giving a quick progress update.
• A briefing to the Minister of Tourism and Kevin Hague of the Green Party, titled "New Zealand Cycleway" (3 June 2009), giving a progress report, details on the organisation of "regional clusters" of councils, and a project timeline.
• A briefing to the Minister of Tourism and Kevin Hague of the Green Party, titled "New Zealand Cycleway: Engagement with Local Government" (9 June 2009), giving further details on relations with those "regional clusters".
• A comprehensive briefing to the Minister and Associate Minister of Tourism and Kevin Hague of the Green Party, titled "New Zealand Cycleway: Report Back on Initial Projects and Actions to Date" (26 June 2009; too long to scan, sadly), seeking formal agreement from the Minister for the initial selection of "quick start" projects and reproducing and expanding on the information here [PDF].

None of these documents contain any cost-benefit analysis. The final briefing does contain information on the projected benefits of those projects - but the response cover-letter notes that this information "is not based on full feasibility studies, and... should not be viewed as conclusive". More importantly, without any information on the project costs, there is no way of judging whether they are an effective use of public money. And now that the Prime Minister has made a public commitment to those projects, we're stuck with them - without any real analysis ever being done.

What is most interesting about these documents is not their content, but how they are handled: apart from the Aide Memoire, every single one of them is classified "In Confidence". According to Cabinet guidelines, this should only be done where

Compromise of information would be likely to prejudice the maintenance of law and order, impede the effective conduct of government in New Zealand or affect adversely the privacy of its citizens.

None of this applies in any way to this information (something made even clearer by the official DPMC classification guidelines). So why is it secret? Either ego, or good old-fashioned paranoid information control-freakery. But neither the Prime Minister's sense of self-importance or his desire to suppress public oversight and criticism is a good reason to classify this information. Instead, it is a waste of government resources, and an abuse of the security classification system.

Misleading the House

At the beginning of last month, Question Time saw the following exchange in the House:

Hon Phil Goff: What analysis did Treasury do on the cost-effectiveness of the national cycleway scheme in producing jobs, and is he prepared to provide the Treasury analysis, oral and written, to members of this Parliament; if not, why not?

Hon JOHN KEY: Rigorous analysis was done.

Based on a previous OIA response showing a complete absence of any cost-benefit analysis on the cycleway project, I called bullshit - and sent away another OIA request for the "rigorous analysis" the Prime Minister was referring to so I could prove it. The response to that request arrived on Saturday. I had expected it to contain either some new analysis, or nothing. I had not expected it to open with a candid admission of guilt from the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff [PDF]:

The response to the question was only "that rigorous analysis had been done", and not that this analysis was by Treasury, or that it was a cost-effectiveness analysis.

As stated in Clause 3 of the Executive Summary of the Cabinet paper provided in response to your previous request of 14 may 2009, the objective is to develop a series of 'Great Rides'. The actual development of a joined up network is part of a long term vision and may be achieved through branding supported by signage. Consequently, no economic analysis has been undertaken for a continuous 'national cycleway'.

(Emphasis and link added)

So, it turns out that the correct answer to Phil Goff's question was in fact "none". But that answer would have looked bad for the Prime Minister and his pet project, so instead of admitting it, he responded in a way designed to give the impression that a) there had been a cost-benefit analysis; and b) that analysis was performed by Treasury - both of which are false (and it is unthinkable that Key would not know that to be so unless he is a total lightweight who does not pay attention even to his own pet project). In short, he lied. But while you can get away with that in the business world, when you do it in Parliament it is called "misleading the House". And it is a very serious contempt of Parliament. This is where Key's government by spin gets us: casual lies, and contempt both for Parliament, and its function of overseeing the executive.

Unfortunately, from the discussion here, it looks unlikely that Key will face formal sanction for this. According to Standing Orders, a complaint of breach of privilege must be laid "at the earliest opportunity", and before the next sitting of the House. When it takes 20 working days to OIA the evidence, then Ministers can effectively lie with impunity. But if they can't be held to account in the House, they can at least be held to account in the court of public opinion. John Key lied to Parliament. And we should remember that every time he opens his mouth there.

Update (04/08/09): This OIA has now led to a complaint of breach of privilege against the Prime Minister. It will be fascinating to see where it goes.