Members' Day

Barring urgency, today is a Member's Day, and with a bunch of National member's bills having emerged from select committee, the House has some second readings to get through. The first of these is for Paul Quinn's renamed Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill, a poorly-drafted, undemocratic disaster of a bill which is a perfect example of why we need to emasculate Parliament and make all our laws subject to a supreme, entrenched Bill of Rights Act. It directly contravenes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and if passed will do serious damage to our international reputation as a supporter and upholder of human rights. But National, desperate for the redneck vote, will pass it anyway. After all, the inevitable spanking from the United Nations Human Rights Committee likely won't happen on their watch, and they'll get to scream and pound their shoe on the table about being "soft on crime" when we're forced to repeal it.

Second up is Heather Roy's Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill, a nasty spiteful little bill aimed at eliminating student government (and all the services it provides to students) simply because so many Labour politicians start off there. It's ACT's agenda writ small, opposed not just by student's associations (who have a certain amount of self-interest here), but also by students (who value those services) and universities (who will have to pick up the pieces). But again, it'll pass anyway, and our future tertiary students will pay the price for it.

Third up is Tau Henare's Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill, but they're unlikely to get to that. Meanwhile, with the top of the Order Paper clogged with second readings (which means committee stages and third readings), things are likely to slow down somewhat. We're unlikely to see another ballot for the rest of the year.

We can clean up the Manawatu

The Manawatu River is one of the most polluted in the western world. It is unsafe to swim in or drink from. In places, it smells like burnt sheep and faeces. Its easy to despair when you read reports like that. But it doesn't have to be that way. And looking overseas, the tale of the Thames shows that rivers can be cleaned up:

Filthy, opaque and stinking of rotten eggs: this was the River Thames of 1957. Declared biologically dead thanks to its soaring pollution levels, Britain's most famous waterway was paying the price for decades of human use – and not for the first time. Since the 18th century, it has been a hotbed of industrial activity; during the "Great Stink" of 1858, the stench of human waste along the riverbanks forced Parliament to drench its curtains in chloride of lime and almost prompted the city's law courts' evacuation to St Albans.

A century and a half later, things look rather different. With 125 different species of fish navigating its curves, 400 invertebrates wallowing in its mud, and a selection of seals, otters and dolphins to be spotted, the Thames has achieved a transformation of staggering proportions. Eighty per cent of the Thames is now judged to have "very good" or "good" water quality, while the past five years have seen almost 400 habitat enhancement projects and more than 40 miles of river restored.

In the case of the Thames, that didn't come about from a single, co-ordinated effort - just from the gradual tightening of standards over the years. We can, and should, do the same here.

Vote for the next Governor General!

Sadly, not really. Despite being a democracy, we have an enormous democratic deficit in our highest office - the Governor General is selected by one man (John Key) by an opaque process which excludes any public scrutiny. To highlight this, the Republican Movement has been running an online election. The top ten nominees are profiled here, and you can cast your vote here.

Another eye on Parliament

Scoop launched a new service today: Parliament Today, "dedicated to the timely and accurate coverage of the New Zealand Parliament". It compiles the material issued by the Clerk on questions for oral answer with Tom Frewen's "Today in Parliament" service and updates about business before the House. While some of this information can be gleaned from the Order Paper, there are also reports of votes taken, which will be very useful when I'm trying to find out what has happened on bills I care about.

Contempt for the public

One of the problems with our democracy is that people don't involve themselves enough in it. There are many reasons for this - lack of interest and lack of time being two obvious ones - but one thing is certain: abusing people who bother to submit to select committees, as Tau Henare did the other day, is not going to help:

James Sleep, 18, convener of the the [sic] Council of Trade Unions youth sector, gave evidence to the transport and industrial relations committee on the Employment Relations Amendment Bill last month.

He said the list MP used "bullyboy tactics" by interrupting his submission and accusing him of lying about his evidence in "a bit of a tirade".

"I was telling the story about how a worker had been sacked under the 90-day trial ... We have several cases ... and in my written submission I had talked about another story and he just went off his head really.

"He interrupted and said: 'You are just a liar, you are bullshitting.' I went on and he stopped [me] again: 'You're just lying, you are misleading us."'

And then MPs wonder why no-one submits, why only a small fraction want to give evidence in person, and why the public generally treats them with contempt. Here's a hint: because you treat us that way. And every time one of you abuses one of us, you earn that reputation just a little bit more.

If MPs don't want their collective reputation tarnished by Henare's bullying, then they have a simple solution: publicly condemn him, either individually or by a formal motion of censure. If you don't speak out against it, your silence will be taken by the public (however unfairly) as complicity. Your reputation is in your hands. How do you want to be seen?

Housing New Zealand thinks it is above the BORA

Yesterday a case was heard in the Court of Appeal which is important for all of us. Last year, Housing New Zealand evicted three women from their state houses for being partners of gang members. They've been challenging it on human rights grounds ever since. The reason that its important is because of the argument advanced by the government:

Housing NZ should have the same legal rights as a private landlords which meant they could serve a 90-day eviction notice without cause, [Housing NZ's lawyer Karen Clarke] said.

Or, to put it another way, "Housing New Zealand thinks the BORA does not apply to it".

But this is simply nonsense. The BORA is very clear: it applies to any act by the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the government and to anybody exercising a public function. Housing New Zealand is captured by both clauses. It is a public body, exercising statutory powers. And it is a branch of the executive. The BORA therefore applies to every decision it makes. While this includes the obligations of the Human Rights Act, it goes beyond that - in addition to not discriminating, Housing New Zealand must also respect the freedom of expression and freedom of association of tenants (oh, and not torture them - but that is less likely to be relevant). Any decision it makes contrary to those rights is unlawful and void.

Whether the tenant's claims to be the victims of discrimination are correct, and whether the tenancy tribunal can consider the lawfulness of Housing New Zealand's eviction order are open questions (though on the latter, the tenancy tribunal is likewise bound by the BORA, and the interpretation clause suggests it must, unless there is a clear legal prohibition on doing so). But the idea that Housing New Zealand, a government body, can act like a private landlord simply fails the laugh test.

[More from Dean Knight here]

The stupidity of drone attacks

On Friday, US drones killed another ten people in Pakistan. As usual, the victims were mostly civilians. Meanwhile, in the Independent, Johann Hari points out the obvious: these strikes are stupid, counterproductive, and endanger us all:

David Kilcullen is a counter-insurgency expert who worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and now advises the State Department. He has shown that two per cent of the people killed by the robot-planes in Pakistan are jihadis. The remaining 98 per cent are as innocent as the victims of 9/11. He says: "It's not moral." And it gets worse: "Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially as drone strikes have increased."

Professor of Middle Eastern history Juan Cole puts it more bluntly: "When you bomb people and kill their family, it pisses them off. They form lifelong grudges... This is not rocket science. If they were not sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qa'ida before, after you bomb the shit out of them, they will be."

In other words, by indiscriminately killing people, they're feeding the insurgency they are trying to suppress, and driving people to the very behaviour they're supposedly there to prevent. These tactics are threatening our lives. But I guess they keep the CIA and military in business.

"An excellent offer"

Teachers will be going on strike this week after unanimously rejecting the government's pathetic pay offer. Meanwhile, the government is trying to point the finger at them, saying that they had turned down an "excellent offer". Really? Let's look at it:

Teachers were offered a half-per cent pay increase in the first year, a 1.9 per cent increase in the second year, a one-off payment of $1000 and an additional 3000 middle management allowances worth $1000 each

That compared with an earlier offer of no increase in the first year, a 1.8 per cent increase in the second, and the one-off payment.

A claw-back in teacher conditions was still on the table, and a previous offer of preparation time for part-time teachers had been taken away, Ms Gainsford said.

So, in exchange for claw-backs and reductions in working conditions, they get half a percent, around a third of inflation. As for next year, they're being offered 1.9% when inflation is expected to top 4%. These aren't pay increases - they're cuts.

If that's all the government is offering, then its no wonder teachers are going on strike. And unless they start offering something of actual benefit, then the strikes will continue, and the parents of New Zealand will have to start minding their own kids.

Choice

At the Labour Party conference over the weekend, Phil Goff signalled a change in economic direction, promising restrictions on foreign ownership and land sales, amendments to the Reserve Bank Act, better labour laws and a more interventionist government position. The commentators have been quick to catch on: as Vernon Small put it, for the first time in over twenty years voters will have a real choice on the economy:

It will be the first time since the late 1980s that the two parties will not be arguing from roughly the same bedrock of economic "orthodoxy" inherited from the Rogernomics and later Ruth Richardson eras.

Helen Clark and Michael Cullen took some steps in that direction, but National tended to dog their footsteps on issues such as KiwiSaver, Working for Families, interest-free student loans and the Cullen fund.

This time there is little possibility that John Key and Bill English will follow in lock- step.

And so we'll actually get to vote on NeoLiberalism - a vote that has been denied us since 1990. Its an exciting prospect. And also, hopefully, a vote winner. These policies have impoverished us as a nation. They have widened the gap between rich and poor, lowered the living standards of the majority of kiwis, reduced social mobility and killed people. And now, finally, we'll have a chance to vote them out and get something different. Its ironic that this change is being led by Goff, a former Douglas acolyte - but unlike Douglas, he seems to have changed his mind in response to the failure of these policies. Though it would be nice if he actually stood up and said so, rather than treating us like goldfish.

As for National, they'll try and pretend that these policies spell economic ruin. Given their track record in government - higher unemployment, lower living standards, a promised decade of deficits to fund their tax cuts for the rich and ETS subsidies - that will be hard to take seriously. Alternatively, they can try and differentiate themselves by moving even further to the right - but that takes them away from being moderates into truly toxic territory. Labour's shift to the left leaves them with nowhere to go, isolated as the only supporters of a failed economic system (the Greens and the Maori Party don't support it, and ACT and United Future likely won't be around). Which will only make their coalition game harder.

There is one concern though: what happens if Labour loses? The usual course of events would see the blame heaped on the policies, which would then see Labour recommit to NeoLiberalism. That would be a tragedy for the New Zealand left. We need to make sure it does not happen.

Labour on the republic

Labour held its annual conference over the weekend, and on the first night, party president Andrew Little committed to moving towards a republic:

"It's a cop-out to say, 'Yes, I'm a republican, but it's not time', that it be left up to somebody else.

"That's a failure of leadership, in my view," said Mr Little.

He was not saying it was something that had to be done tomorrow.

"But it is saying we are committed to making a move and we do it in a courteous and respectful way."

The Republican Movement's Lewis Holden (who ran "fringe" sessions onthe issue at the conference) puts this down to realpolitik - National's return to feudalism has created the space for Labour to differentiate itself on this issue. That's certainly part of the explanation. But it wouldn't be happening if there wasn't already a large base of support in the party. Labour MPs voted en-masse for Keith Locke's Head of State Referenda Bill so that the issue could be debated, and so a shift wasn't done in a rush around a royal funeral. And its no wonder. Labour is a progressive party. But monarchy just isn't progressive. Instead, its a symbol of the old British feudal order - and one that has no place in a modern, democratic, multicultural nation like Aotearoa.

New Fisk

What I learned the day I took tea with Ian Blair

Goff postures on police chases

Phil Goff's response to the police killing 15 people so far this year in police chases? Increase penalties for people fleeing police! Yeah, that'll make a difference - not. As the Independent Police Conduct Authority pointed out in their report [PDF] on police chases, the typical driver is a stupid, scared teenager who isn't thinking about the consequences of their actions. Increasing penalties will not deter such people, because they are not thinking about them. But it lets Goff posture as "tough on crime", and gets him a few headlines. Meanwhile, the real problem - poor police decisionmaking and a police culture of wanting to punish people for contempt of cop - goes unsolved. Until that is addressed, until the Minister stops supporting the police in their defiance of the IPCA, the bodies will keep piling up.

The UK's deportation system claims a life

We've known for a long time that the UK's deportation system is a human rights scandal. A 2008 report from Medical Justice [PDF] found that private security guards hired to accompany deportees engaged in "widespread and seemingly systemic abuse", including beatings, kicking, stomping, and that this sometimes resulted in serious injury. That trend has now reached its nadir with the death of a deportee at the hands of security guards last night:

A man who died while being deported to Angola was being heavily restrained by security guards and had complained of breathing problems before he collapsed, a witness has told Guardian.

Jimmy Mubenga lost consciousness while the British Airways flight was on the runway at Heathrow on Tuesday night. The commercial flight was cancelled and Mubenga was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Kevin Wallis, a passenger on the aircraft, said he had been sitting across the aisle from Mubenga and watched as three security guards restrained him with what he believed to be excessive force.

Wallis said he heard Mubenga complain: "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" for at least 10 minutes before he lost consciousness, and later observed that handcuffs had been used in the restraint.

The death is being blamed on positional asphyxia, an inability to breathe due to the position Mubenga was restrained in. But the real cause is the attitude of the security guards, who want deportees to shut up and be quiet, will use force to achieve that, and ultimately don't give a shit about their health. A similarly callous approach led to the death of Joy Gardner at the hands of police in 1993; because she wouldn't shut up, they wrapped her head in 13 feet of duct tape, and smothered her to death.

UK police are apparently investigating, but it'll almost certainly be the usual whitewash. The UK police care as little for deportees as the security thugs, and certainly don't want to create a precedent of holding people accountable for excessive use of force. After all, it could be applied to them.

Meanwhile, its worth noting that the company these guards worked for - G4S - is one of those the government wants to run our prisons. Given their involvement in this incident, and in assaults and beatings, they should be barred from security operations in New Zealand. Their organisational culture is clearly incapable of treating prisoners lawfully, let alone with the level of dignity and humanity required by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. If the government ignores this and hires them, then they will be directly responsible for the inevitable subsequent abuses.

Against regulating the blogosphere

Yesterday in Parliament, Justice Minister Simon Power announced that he had asked the Law Commission to look at ways of regulating the blogosphere. The reason?

“It’s a bit of a Wild West out there in cyberspace at the moment, because bloggers and online publishers are not subject to any form of regulation or professional or ethical standards.

"Issues I’m concerned about include how trials can be prejudiced by information posted on websites and seen by jurors, real-time online streaming of court cases, breaches of court suppression orders, and re-publication of a libel.

These are all things worth looking at, because the law needs to keep up with the technology (if it can). But Power is fundamentally mistaken about two things. First, he's fundamentally mistaken in thinking bloggers should be treated as if they were professionals, because we simply aren't. The typical blogger is a private individual mouthing off on the internet. Some of us know a little about what we are mouthing off about, some of us don't - but fundamentally, its no different from people talking in a cafe. The government wouldn't dream of trying to regulate and force "professional standards" on that, and rightly so. So why is it trying to regulate and force professional standards on the same conversations in the blogosphere? It smacks of another example of the old problem of things being suddenly scarier the moment you attach the word "internet" to them.

Secondly, the claim that we are not subject to any form of regulation is simply false. As a blogger, I'm subject to exactly the same laws as Power is in issuing his press releases. If I defame someone, I can be sued. If I publish objectionable material, I can be prosecuted. If I breach a court suppression order, I can be fined. Rather than showing that the blosophere is a "wild west", the recent Whale Oil case showed that the law is perfectly capable of dealing with it.

The problem for the justice system isn't the blogosphere, but the net's combination of strong anonyminity and a free market in legal jurisdictions. The same technology that allows human rights activists to hide from the Iranian regime and circumvent the Great Firewall of China also allows people to read or post or host information which undermines our justice system. It could be used, for example, to set up a website whose sole function is to violate New Zealand suppression orders. If located in the right jurisdiction, such a site could never be taken down at source. It could never be effectively blocked - "the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is an old saw, but its also true (in that such blocks are also fundamentally ineffective). And unless the authors were very, very stupid, they would never be caught.

But there's nothing the government can do about that. Nothing. The collective minds of the world's most powerful dictatorships can't stop it, so I doubt New Zealand could. More importantly, adding new laws does nothing to help. The problem is not that such behaviour wouldn't be illegal, its that we now have reliable technological means to not get caught.

But the blogosphere isn't in that space. Its already subject to existing laws. And those laws seem to generally be up to the task. We don't need new ones.

New Fisk

Israel comes face to face with the man who would wipe it off the map

"Change"

President Obama was elected on a platform of change. He promised to repeal the US military's bigoted and discriminatory "don't ask, don't tell" policy. So why is he appealing to preserve it?

Instead of change, it looks like Americans are instead getting more of the same.

Bolger recants

Having led a privatising National government during the 1990's, former Prime Minister Jim Bolger seems to be backing away from privatisation:

The sale of Telecom in 1990 was a mistake and New Zealand Governments have generally proved themselves inept at privatisation, says former Prime Minister and departing NZ Post chairman Jim Bolger.

Telecom was split off from the NZ Post Office in 1987 and sold by the Labour Government for $4.25 billion shortly before Bolger's Government was elected in 1990.

[...]

Looking back, he said "some of our privatisations were done for a song".

"Sir Roger Douglas was worse than hopeless at privatising, to be honest."

While he defends his government's unconscionable sale of New Zealand Rail (which led to it being strip-mined and run into ground by a consortium of greedy foreign investors), his overall thrust is clear: the privatisation of the 80's and 90's was a mistake. If only he'd said that at the time, rather than waiting 20 years...

Acquitted!

The Australian couple charged with procuring an abortion have been acquitted by a jury. As for why, we'll never know. But the judge gave them a perfect excuse to acquit with this:

Judge Everson said if the jurors were not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the drugs supplied by Mr Brennan and taken by Ms Leach were “noxious”, both defendants should be acquitted.

He defined noxious as a substance that was harmful or injurious to the health or physical wellbeing of the person taking it.

(Emphasis added).

Which means that guilt comes down to the effect on the mother, not the foetus.

But regardless of the reason for acquittal, this barbaric episode in Queensland's legal history is over. And now hopefully the state legislature will do what it ought to have done in the first place, and reform the law to decriminalise abortion.

Discrimination on the foreshore

Meanwhile, over on Pundit, Andrew Geddis asks whether ACT's proposed amendment to the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill is discriminatory. No. Customary rights aren't freehold title, and its invidious to directly compare the two. What matters is whether the rights accurately reflect those held in 1840. And insofar as they do, and that free public access does not interfere with them, then ACT's amendment isn't discriminatory (though as pointed out in my previous post, it does seem motivated by an underlying racist mindset).

The bill as a whole OTOH is another story. It suffers from the same problem as the original: that no matter how strong a claimant's case, usage-based customary rights are all they can ever get. If an iwi or hapu in practice exercised full ownership over a patch of foreshore and seabed in 1840, the law does not permit that ownership to be recognised. Except if they sold it to Pakeha, where the private property rights of "established" (meaning white) landowners suddenly reign supreme.

That is discriminatory. Its also irrational. Either the property rights exercised in 1840 amounted to freehold title, or they didn't. If they did, then the court should be able to award that title. If they didn't, then the claims of Pakeha landholders to exercise it over the foreshore should be ignored, as the rights they thought they were buying never existed. But the current position - that Māori can never own foreshore, but Pakeha can - is discriminatory and wrong.

As for the solution, obviously I'd like to see the bill amended to permit Māori to receive full freehold title from the courts. And if this does not happen, and a specific case strong enough to support freehold title presents itself, then we will see the law relitigated through the coalition process until the discrimination is removed.

ACT: Property rights for all, except for Maori

There have been appalling scenes in Parliament this week, as new ACT MP Hilary Calvert takes up her predecessor David Garrett's cause of whipping up racism over the foreshore for political profit. The focus of ACT's ire is the spectre of Māori charging people to go to the beach - something the bill doesn't really let them do, and something they've consistently said they're not interested in doing anyway. But through this fearmongering, ACT has now managed to get the government to agree to amend the bill to prohibit charging for public access. And so now they're turning to their real target: access for business:

Hilary Calvert: Does the Attorney-General agree that iwi customary marine title holders will be able to charge a fee for new mussel farms over the foreshore and seabed for which they have title, via a veto that his bill gives them through the planning process?

Note that a mussel farm by its nature restricts public access. So, ACT's position is that marine farmers should be able to restrict access, but that iwi and hapu shouldn't be able to, and certainly shouldn't be able to ask for consideration from those farmers as compensation for them not being able to exercise their customary uses. Māori should just surrender their property rights, however defined, to Pakeha, for free. Which is a pretty toxic attitude for ACT to take. Such attitudes in the past are one reason why we're having to go through a Treaty settlements process today.

On the face of it, an amendment which prohibits Māori from doing something they didn't want to do anyway shouldn't matter much. But the danger here is that such racist pandering will undermine Māori consent for the bill, and hence its legitimacy. This bill is effectively an informal settlement, and thus depends crucially on the consent of the iwi and hapu whose rights are being affected. If it comes to be seen by them as just another redneck dispossession, then it will fail. That may suit ACT very well. But its bad for the rest of us, who want a fair, just and durable solution.