A new entry in the political lexicon

Kicking the tyres: to promote radical change for the benefit of the few.

We've seen National try this little piece of spin twice now, first on MMP, and now on ACC. In both cases they clearly have a specific plan in mind - rolling back MMP in favour of an unfair and non-proportional system of plurality rule and rolling back core ACC entitlements and privatising the scheme so as to transfer wealth to their donors and cronies in the insurance industry respectively - and in both cases the public of New Zealand is the loser. But National isn't there to serve the public of New Zealand - they're there to serve the interests of their big business buddies, and they have absolutely no shame about it.

Meanwhile, it seems that ACC Minister Nick Smith has acquired a habit of trying to lie his way out of trouble. On Sunday, he was denying that the proposals uncovered by the Sunday Star-Times were even being debated; today, he admits that they are under active consideration. Quite apart from the merits of the proposal (and I agree with the ACC schemes architect, Owen Woodhouse: there aren't any), that sort of deceitful attitude is simply unacceptable in a minister and unacceptable in a government. But I guess the reality of their plan is so unpalatable - "we want to make you worse off so our friends will get richer" - that deceit is their only option if they want to get elected.

Provocation repeal gets a step closer

The Justice and Electoral Committee has reported back [PDF] on the Crimes (Provocation Repeal) Amendment Bill, and recommended that it be passed with a minor tweak to clarify that the common law defence of provocation is also abolished. The bill will now go back to the House, and will hopefully be law by the end of the year.

The select committee report does deal briefly with some of the myths of provocation - primarily that it protects battered or mentally ill defendants, rather than violent bigots and misogynists - and dismisses them. There is simply no justification for this relic of the past to continue in New Zealand law, and the sooner it is expunged, the better.

New Fisk

You don't need colour to see the full bloody horror of war

Surely this is contempt?

Not content with trying (and failing) to forbid the Guardian from reporting on the fact of an upcoming debate in Parliament about their work on behalf of one of their clients, UK solicitors Carter-Ruck are now trying to prevent Parliament from having the debate.

Surely this is contempt of Parliament. Yes, Parliament respects the courts and does not debate matters which are sub judice. But they do it out of politeness, not because they can't. And purporting to forbid a Parliamentary debate seems to me to be trying to interfere with the conduct of Members in their duties - a classic case of contempt.

Climate change: We are all terrorists now

Worried about the environment? Want the government to actually act on climate change? That makes you a terrorist, according to the UK police:

Terror legislation was used to stop a British climate change activist from travelling to Denmark, it has emerged.

Chris Kitchen, 31, said he was prevented from crossing the border on Tuesday at about 5pm when the coach he was travelling on stopped at the Folkestone terminal of the Channel Tunnel.

Mr Kitchen told the Guardian that police officers boarded the coach and, after checking all passengers' passports, took him and another climate activist to be interviewed under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a clause which enables border officials to stop and search individuals to determine if they are connected to terrorism.

He was asked what he intended to do in Copenhagen and also about his family, work and past political activity.

Mr Kitchen said he pointed out that anti-terrorist legislation did not apply to environmental activists but said the officer replied that terrorism "could mean a lot of things".

And so the UK has now joined the list of countries - like Fiji and the former Soviet Union - which restrict their people's freedom of movement based on their political views. Meanwhile, the conflation of democratic participation and public protest - already well-advanced in the UK - continues.

Climate change: The PCE on the ETS

The government's proposed changes to the ETS lack transparency and will remove any incentive to reduce emissions.

That was the opinion of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment - an independent officer of Parliament (like the Ombudsmen) with the task of "hold[ing] the Government to account for its environmental policies and actions" - at the Finance and Expenditure Committee yesterday. Their submission [PDF] takes the government to task for its move to unlimited intensity-based allocation, pointing out that they would effectively remove the price signal altogether for some sectors, and result in no reduction in emissions:

My greatest concern with the proposed amendments is the changes to allocation after 2012. The allocation of free carbon credits to industrial processes, industrial heat generation and petroleum refining sectors is extremely generous. Using the industry average baseline for allocation instead of aiming for better, the lack of a limit to the number of credits given away, and the increasingly slow phase-out, all result in allocation at very high levels. This essentially removes the price signal to this emissions-intensive sector, where New Zealand needs a carbon price signal the most.

Removing the price signal doesn’t remove the cost of emissions, since the taxpayer must pick up the tab. And without the incentive to invest in low carbon-intensive technology, emissions will continue to rise. This is not consistent with the stated purpose of the ETS.

The lack of a cap will allow emissions to grow, the phase-out rate is incompatible with the government's stated goal of a 50% reduction by 2050, and there is no justification for the allocation to agriculture. As for "protecting jobs", they point to research that the cost could be as much as $109,000 per job saved. Which is simply utter madness. Again, if we're willing to pay that much, then we can find something for these people to do which does not involve destroying the environment.

The second big problem is transparency. Allocation involves giving away billions of dollars of government money, yet it will all happen in secret. All the public will get is a total number. The PCE recommends that this be broken down by sector or industry, and with the free allocation justified in each case. I'd go further and break it down by firm - that way we can tell if we are really getting our money's worth (and whether the government's claims of "protecting jobs" are holding up). Screw commercial sensitivity - when they're sticking their hand out for millions of dollars a year in pollution subsidies in perpetuity, we have a right to know.

The PCE also pointed out that the allocation scheme is not politically durable as the Labour Party does not support it. I think that for the sake of the environment, Labour needs to be making a lot more noise about that. Business needs certainty on carbon costs to make investment decisions; denying them that certainty means they will not invest in pollution. Labour needs to be crystal clear: polluters may get a free ride under National, but that will end the moment the government changes, and large polluters will be paying the full cost of their activities. As for the Greens, they need to be making it clear that they will be demanding this as a bottom line in any future confidence and supply deal. And if business stupidly makes dirty investments in the face of such statements, they deserve to lose their money.

More wind

Mighty River Power has been granted resource consent for its proposed 12.5 MW windfarm at Long Gully near Wellington. Its a small project, but one of the advantages of wind is that it does not have to be big. And looking at the New Zealand Wind Energy Association's list of operating and under construction wind farms, it seems that there are several of these small clusters planned around the country.

Also looking at that list, it looks like we will pass 500 MW of generating capacity soon. meanwhile, there is over 2500 MW currently working through the consent process. Not all of this will be built, and the financial crisis has put some of the projects on hold, but its a good illustration of the potential we have available. We can have a renewable, sustainable future if we want; all we need is the right policy framework.

No freedom of speech in Russia

Back in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, Russians could not talk about the crimes of their government, and if they did, they got arrested.

Sadly, nothing has changed:

A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities.

Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia's security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail.

It seems the former KGB thugs who now run Russia want to establish an official version of history which whitewashes their crimes and cases Stalin as a hero, and are turning back to their own habits to achieve it. This isn't just a gross violation of freedom of speech - it is actively dangerous. Remember Orwell: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future".

Rubberstamping pollution

The Tarawera River is one of our most polluted waterways. While the upper reaches are crystal clear, the lower parts are stained black due to pollution from the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill in Kawerau. The mill dumps 150,000 tons of polluted mill waste into the river each day; as a result, the river is too filthy for most fish to live in, the water cannot be used by local orchardists or recreationally, let alone the local iwi for kaimoana.

The RMA explicitly rules out such pollution. Section 107 states that no resource consent shall be granted for discharging contaminants into water if it results in "any conspicuous change in the colour or visual clarity" of the water, renders it unsuitable for consumption by farm animals, or has a significant adverse effect on aquatic life. However, just this week, Environment Bay of Plenty granted the mill resource consent to continue polluting for the next 25 years.

How? Because section 107 also includes an exemption allowing consents to be granted in "exceptional circumstances". What's "exceptional"? Whatever the council wants it to be, of course. And so we're now in the Orwellian situation where the ordinary business-as-usual situation - pollution - is considered "exceptional" in order to please a powerful regional employer too cheap to run a clean operation.

This isn't good enough. The RMA is supposed to protect our waterways, not act as a rubberstamp for pollution. Green MP Catherine Delahunty has suggested tweaking the law to make it clear that consents granted in "exceptional circumstances" must be strictly temporary and require the polluter to clean up their act. It sounds like a bloody good idea to me.

Smith undermines accountability

Today in the House Speaker Lockwood Smith decided to dock the opposition of a supplementary question as punishment for misbehaviour.

Quite apart from questions of bias (which is becoming apparent; Smith is very good at forcing Ministers to actually answer questions, but he is terrible at enforcing standards on his own party, and his consistency on this is woeful), this is a terrible way of enforcing discipline. Since Smith has so obviously forgotten, I'll remind him: Ministers are accountable to the people of New Zealand through Parliament. The chief day-to-day mechanism by which that accountability is enforced is supplementary questions in Question Time. By docking the opposition of a supplementary question, he punishes not them, but us.

This isn't good enough. By all means, he should throw misbehaving MPs out. But he should not protect his colleagues from scrutiny and undermine the government's accountability to the public.

Climate change: National loses

This morning I posted about National's attempts to limit hearing oral submissions on the Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill. National had planned to hear all oral submissions today, restricting the number heard to 27 (out of 160 who had asked to make an oral submission). Submitters were to be given just ten minutes each on what is the most significant change to the economy since the introduction of GST, and those contacted had been given the impression that if they did not take the opportunity to speak today, they would never be heard at all.

The good news is that National lost. First, the opposition pushed for everyone who had asked to be heard to be given a slot, then for the committee to sit next week to hear them. Both motions passed with the support of Labour, the Greens, the Maori Party and ACT, with National voting against. It is still a pathetic amount of time to hear submissions on legislation this complex, but it is far better than the fake process National was proposing.

Celebrating Labour Day

Next weekend is labour weekend, when we celebrate the achievement of the eight-hour day in New Zealand. To remind people of what its all about, the Tertiary Education Union has stuck up a site, http://www.labourday.org.nz/ with information on the history of labour day, the achievements of unions in winning better conditions for ordinary kiwis, and what still needs to be done.

Blowback

Back in World War I, the British government was concerned about the "reliability" of Italy as an ally and its commitment to the war. So they paid a small-time journalist to publish pro-war propaganda in his newspaper and organise groups of veterans to beat up anti-war protestors. His name? Benito Mussolini.

Well, that worked out well, didn't it?

Climate change: A mockery of the select committee process

Last month, the government's Climate Change Response (Moderated Emissions Trading) Amendment Bill, which guts the ETS and pays enormous, financially unsustainable subsidies to polluters, passed its first reading and was sent to select committee. Submissions to the Committee closed on Tuesday, and on an important bill like this you'd expect the Committee to spend a fair amount of time chewing them over.

Apparently not. Carbon News reports that National will move to have the Committee hear all oral submissions today, giving them just 10 minutes each (and 4.5 hours in total) on legislation which would make the most important change to the economy since the introduction of GST. As for what happens to submitters who wanted to make an oral presentation, but aren't available to do it on two hours notice in Wellington, I guess its just tough shit.

This is a mockery of the select committee process, and it turns any pretence of "consultation" on the changes into a bad joke. The government is simply not interested in people's views on this legislation. Instead it wants to ram it through in as short a time as possible, so it can start writing cheques to its corporate polluter cronies. Which makes you wonder why they bothered having a select committee at all...

Update: I hear ACT is demanding more time for submissions, which means it all comes down to the Maori Party. Will they support democracy or betray it?

Lockwood Smith: Freedom of speech for some but not for others

One of the core principles of Parliament is freedom of speech. Parliament is meant to be a place of open debate, where all views can be expressed.

Speaker of the House Lockwood Smith does not agree with this principle. Today, he ruled that labour MPs must remove signs calling for fair pay for Parliamentary Services workers (IIRC, he has previously asked them to remove badges). Meanwhile, he does not consider badges in support of breast cancer research to be disruptive of order. When pressed on his ruling, he claimed that Labour MPs should be able to tell the difference between one cause and the other. In other words, he thinks causes he thinks are important should be allowed, while causes he does not think are important - such as worker's rights - should not be.

This is a clear content-based restriction on freedom of speech. And its worth pointing out here that the Speaker has an interest: as de facto Minister for the Parliamentary Service, he is responsible for the wage dispute. So, he is effectively abusing Standing Orders to prevent criticism of his own position.

This stinks. It is dictatorial and authoritarian. But exactly what I've come to expect from National's "feudal overlord" style of government.

National sticks it to the poor again

National has announced its changes to ACC to "restore" financial sustainability (which was never under threat). So, what are they? First, the usual assortment of headline-grabbing but inconsequential changes which will make no real difference (strengthening disentitlements for criminals, and removing entitlements for suicide and self-inflicted injury, even when the latter is inflicted as a result of mental-illness). Secondly, introducing a threshold for hearing loss, effectively allowing employers to gradually deafen their employees and making us wear the cost for their unsafe practices. But most importantly, they plan to reverse the 2008 changes which extended greater (and fairer) cover to part-time, casual and seasonal workers.

The latter is important. A quarter of the workforce is now part-time, casual or seasonal. They pay premiums. But under National, they won't get as much cover, and will have to bear far more of the cost of workplace injury themselves. And they are the people worst-placed to do so - insecure employment arrangements are more common at the bottom end of the labour market, where people are less likely to have savings to fall back on. The upshot: at the bottom end, workplace accidents will drive people deeper into poverty - exactly what the ACC scheme was intended to prevent.

This will decrease compensation costs, meaning reduced premiums to employers. But it will effectively shift the burden of paying for ACC's beaten-up accounting crisis onto the poor. That is not fair and it is not just, and we as a society should not accept it.

A victory for freedom of speech in the UK

Yesterday, UK libel law hit a new low when a law firm representing corporate criminal oil-traders Trafigura (who some may remember were responsible for the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast back in 2006, killing 17 people and injuring over 30,000) sought to prevent the Guardian from reporting on Parliament. The good news is that Trafigura's lawyers have now backed off, following mass violation of their suppression order on the internet. So, freedom of speech appears to win for the moment. But the bad news is that judges are still handing out these "super-injunctions", preventing not just publication of the material in question, but any mention of the case at all.

Open justice in the UK is under threat, and being twisted towards secrecy by the rich and powerful. its a disturbing, authoritarian trend. But hopefully Trafigura's overstepping of the mark yesterday will help put a stop to it.

Bringing on the republic

Republicanism has been a sleeping issue for the past decade or so. Most politicians freely acknowledge that it is "inevitable" that New Zealand will grow up and become a republic, but none seem willing to do anything to bring that about.

Today, that changed, with the drawing of Keith Locke's Head of State Referenda Bill from the ballot. The bill would establish a two-step referendum process on whether to become a republic. In the first referendum, we would be offered a choice of the status quo, a republic with a President elected by a supermajority in Parliament, or a republic with a President directly elected by the people using STV. If any option gets a majority (unlikely, given that republican support will be split on the issue of election), then we go with it. If none does, then there will be a run-off between the two strongest options.

The important thing to note is that this bill makes the absolute minimal changes to create a republic. It would not see a powerful executive President with powers to veto legislation. Instead, if we go republican, the President would have exactly the same powers and be bound by convention in exactly the same way as the present Governor-General. All that would change is their method of appointment and who they work for: us, or a foreign monarch.

The Republican Movement has a guide to the bill here. If you want to show your support, you can join them here.

Drawn: the Republic

A ballot for member's bills was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Head of State Referenda Bill (Keith Locke)

So, we get to have the debate. It will be interesting to see which way people will jump.

There were only two new bills in the ballot this week: John Boscawen's KiwiSaver (Contribution Flexibility) Amendment Bill and Raymond Huo's Local Government (Auckland Council) (Asian Advisory Board) Amendment Bill. While the Greens and ACT are continuing to make full use of their ballot slots, National and Labour continued to underuse theirs, with only 5 and 13 bills (out of a possible 35 and 43) respectively.

The full list of bills is on Red Alert here.

Can the Greens work with the right?

A favoured meme on the right is that the Greens are "too far to the left", and that a true environmental party would lend confidence and supply to National to advance their environmental goals. The underlying assumption is that what stops the two parties from cooperating closely is that most of the Green MPs are lefties. That's part of the picture - though the commitment to "social responsibility" in the form of a "just distribution of social and natural resources" in the Green Charter is more important than the present MPs - but it misses the real problem: National's present anti-environmentalism. There is very little ground for cooperation with a party which wants to dig up our national parks. Or not pull our weight on climate change. Or weaken environmental standards. Or gut the RMA. National is an anti-environmental party which thinks coal is "sexy"; supporting them in power harms the environment rather than helps it. And now that National has revealed its "dig it up and burn it" policies, that cooperation deal the Greens signed back in April (and which I thought was worth trying on the narrow slice of common ground they could find) is looking like a big mistake, simply a chance for National to greenwash itself a little while in reality destroying our environment.

Overseas, its a different story. In Germany, the recent Saarland state elections have resulted in the first ever CDU-FDU-Green coalition (called a "Jamaica" coalition due to the colours of the parties). Partly, this is because of a conservative local Green party, and partly its because the CDU-FDU offered them a very good deal (two important ministries - education and environment/energy/transport - when the Greens have only three MPs). But what ultimately makes it possible is that the German right is simply far greener than its New Zealand equivalent. The coalition won't be trouble free - the Saarland Greens are already coming under fire for a backdown on nuclear energy - but its at least contemplatable. But with National's current anti-environment stance, the same cannot be said of New Zealand.