Foreshore & seabed: Sinking...

It looks like prospects for the government's Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill are sinking fast, with the Iwi Leadership Group - a clique of powerful iwi leaders - rejecting it:

There is increasing division among Maori about it, with the leader of one of the most powerful tribes in the country saying it doesn't go far enough, and the pressure's starting to tell on the Maori Party which admits the bill may not pass.

Ngai Tahu leader Mark Solomon steers the waka for one of the biggest tribes in the country and he has delivered a message on the Government's new foreshore and seabed law: it's not going to work.

Mr Solomon's word carries serious weight; he spearheads the powerful Iwi Leadership Group which represents over 50 tribes.

The problem? The bill's test to gain customary rights is too difficult to meet. Iwi and hapu will have to prove not just that they owned and used an area or foreshore in 1840, but that they have continued to do so ever since. There's an obvious flaw in this test, and that is that if the crown has prevented the iwi or hapu from exercising their rights - for example, by stealing their land - then they are gone forever. In other words, the test stacks the deck in favour of the crown, allowing them to embed and legitimise past Treaty of Waitangi violations. You don't have to be Hone Harawira to recognise that this is unjust and wrong.

As for what this means, with the Iwi Leadership Group opposed the Māori Party are going to have a very tough time supporting the bill. Which means that if National sticks to its rhetoric on refusing to change it in any way, then it will likely fail.

The rednecks will no doubt cheer at that. But they shouldn't cheer too soon. The failure of this bill will not mean the issue goes away. Like the broader Treaty debate, it will never go away until Māori get justice. Instead, it will just mean that it gets relitigated through the coalition process at the next election. And with the expected demise of ACT, the Māori Party are likely to have a much stronger hand then, not to mention be much more willing to play hardball after the failure of their "doormat" strategy. Which will likely mean a much better bill for them.

In other words, Māori seem to have very little to lose by holding out for a fairer deal. As for the rednecks, this may be the best deal they can ever get. They should be careful what they wish for, because they might very well get it.

A question

If our politicians can't even read the right speeches, how can we trust them to guard our fundamental human rights?

That's a serious question, BTW. The Bill of Rights Act is explicitly predicated on the idea that our MPs know what they're doing. It allows Parliament to violate our fundamental rights, after they've been warned about doing so, because it assumes they're competent enough to judge the issue and make the decision.

Jonathan Coleman's little performance the other night, in which he read out the speech for a bill which passed over a year ago, ought to blow that idea right out of the water. These muppets read whatever is given to them, and don't even notice if its wrong. So much for the idea they're fit to judge on human rights. They're not judging at all.

If Parliament won't consider our legislation properly, its time we gave the job to someone who will. Its time we got an enforceable Bill of Rights Act, which allows the courts to overturn legislation inconsistent with fundamental rights. That way, at least, we'll know that someone is paying attention.

Justice for torture in the UK?

Over the weekend we learned that British interrogators in Iraq had been torturing people with beatings, starvation, stress positions and electric shocks. Now, some of them look likely to be prosecuted for it:

A number of British military interrogators may face war crimes charges after members of their unit filmed themselves while threatening and abusing Iraqi detainees at a secret prison near Basra, the high court heard today.

The men have been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions (DSP) after an investigation considered whether they had breached the International Criminal Court Act, which prohibits war crimes.

The referral was accompanied by "a recommendation that he consider charges under the 2001 Act", Philip Havers QC, counsel for the Ministry of Defence, told the court. He added that Article 8 of the act defines and prohibits a number of actions as war crimes, including "committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment".

Of course, the DSP is hardly neutral; they should be being referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions instead. But this is at least a start. And hopefully, everyone involved will end up facing justice for what they've done.

Challenging prisoner disenfranchisement

In my earlier post, I suggested that the passage of Paul Quinn's Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill should result in a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee under the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR. So how would someone do this?

Firstly, a complainant would need to demonstrate that a right affirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has been violated. That bit is easy. Article 25 of the ICCPR requires that every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity to vote. The HRC has previously held, in a general comment on the right to vote, that the right to vote can only be denied on objective and reasonable grounds, and that

If conviction for an offence is a basis for suspending the right to vote, the period of such suspension should be proportionate to the offence and the sentence.

This suggests that a blanket ban on voting by everyone in prison would not be considered proportionate or reasonable - an interpretation upheld in court cases over the issue in Europe and Canada.

The real barrier is administrative. In order for a complaint to be admissible, the complainant must have exhausted all domestic remedies. The HRC notes in its FAQ on the complaint system that

This usually includes pursuing your claim through the local court system, and you should be aware that mere doubts about the effectiveness of such action do not, in the committees' view, dispense with this requirement.

Which means that while section 4 of the BORA effectively rules out any remedy through the courts, a challenge would have to go through the process anyway, and likely appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court, in order for the HRC to accept a complaint.

This would cost a fortune, but the real problem is that that takes time - so much time that the sort of prisoner whose challenge would be most effective, someone imprisoned for a very short period of time around an election, would have been released by the time the appeals process was complete. Meaning that appeals and/or any complaint could be dismissed because the point was effectively moot.

This is what the government is relying on: a judicial process so long and expensive that it effectively insulates them from international scrutiny of a serious human rights violation. And that is a serious failing of both our courts, and the international human rights system.

Protest works

For the past six months, residents of the lower South Island have been fighting to save their local neurosurgery service. The campaign has seen public meetings and protests, and has attracted mass support. Ten thousand people attended a protest march in Dunedin on the issue in August, while 55,000 people signed a petition to Parliament asking for local neurosurgery services to be retained. And today, they won, with the Director-General of Health announcing that the service will be retained in Dunedin.

The lesson in this is that protest works. If you get enough people to scream loudly enough, the government has to listen, if only out of fear for their electoral future. Remember that next time they do something you don't like, and organise!

Movement on judicial transparency?

Earlier in the year, Green MP Kennedy Graham put his Register of Pecuniary Interests of Judges Bill [PDF], which would force members of the judiciary to disclose their interests and hence their potential conflicts of interest, into the ballot. Now, thanks to the demise of former Justice Wilson, it looks like the government may adopt the idea.

This is a good move. Like politicians, judges are in a position of power and subject to potential conflicts of interest. And like politicians, we can't just trust them to behave honourably. While I have a lot more confidence in our judges than I do in our MPs, the integrity of our justice system is not something we should have to take on faith. We should be able to know that everything is above-board. And that means being able to scrutinise the interests of judges to ensure they do not behave in a corrupt fashion.

OTOH, I'm not sure how far we can trust Attorney-General Chris Finlayson on this. He's pointed at the Law Commission's review of the Judicature Act (which governs the structure and operation of the courts) as a vehicle for advancing this, but the Law Commission explicitly states that

It is not intended that the review will revisit major matters of policy underlying the present legislation.

So, either that intention has changed, or Finlayson is just giving us the brush off and continuing to protect the powerful from democratic scrutiny. Which is it?

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, one of the last for the year. Unfortunately we're well into the late-term logjam, where the Order paper is blocked by the later stages of bills sent to select committee early on, and so there won't be much overall progress.

First up is the committee stage of Paul Quinn's Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill, an appalling piece of legislation which would prohibit anyone in prison from voting. Quinn has introduced an amendment to patch the select committee's drafting error, which would have seen a bill about banning prisoners from voting actually allow it for anyone imprisoned prior to its passage, but the core problem - that it bans people from voting in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, in violation of the Bill of Rights Act and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, remains. If this passes, it will hopefully result in a test case followed by a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee under the ICCPR's First Optional Protocol (to which we are a party). Which means international humiliation. But Quinn either isn't planning on being in government to deal with that (HRC cases take years), or he just views it as another excuse to bang his drum and whip up hate.

Once that's done, we have the last half hour of the second reading of Heather Roy's Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill, followed by the second reading Tau Henare's Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill. There's a common link between all these bills, and its spite - spite towards prisoners, spite towards students, and spite towards unions. If this is how government MPs use power, then I pity whoever was at school with them.

If we're lucky, we might, just might, get started on Sue Kedgley's Animal Welfare (Treatment of Animals) Amendment Bill. But with the Order paper blocked up by all those second readings, we're unlikely to see a ballot anytime soon.

Britain's Abu Ghraib

Back in 2004, the world was shocked by graphic evidence of torture and abuse by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now it looks like the British have their own version:

Evidence of systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as the UK's Abu Ghraib emerged today during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was informed that there is evidence detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT).

It also received allegations that JFIT's prisoners were beaten and forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say they were subjected to sexual humiliation by female soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Starvation. Beatings. Sleep deprivation. Electric shocks. This is clearly torture, it is clearly a war crime, and it is clearly illegal under both UK and international law. Those responsible must be uncovered and prosecuted. Those in power who turned a blind eye or condoned it must be dragged screaming into the light of day and held to account. Instead, of course, they're arguing that they should be allowed to investigate it themselves, and stage the usual cosy whitewash (which no-one will believe). Hopefully, the UK courts won't let them.

More futility

Yesterday the government released its latest progress report [PDF] in its "war on P", in which it trumpeted its "progress". Apparently, police are seizing more P and arresting and convicting more people for using or selling it than ever before. This is interpreted as "progress", a positive sign, but its not - its just a cost of doing business. What matters is price, purity, and availability. And all of those indicators show no change whatsoever.

According to the report, the median retail price of P is $100g / point - exactly where it was 4 years ago. There has been "no significant change" in purity according to users - something the report masks by refusing to give statistics on the purity of samples seized by police. As for availability, it has "been largely stable in recent years". Which means that all those arrests, seizures and convictions are making no difference at all where it matters: to users trying to buy P on the street.

Albert Einstein famously said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That's exactly what the government is doing in its "war on P". It just keeps banging its head against the brick wall, and expecting it to move this time.

I don't have an answer to this problem, but I know that what the government is doing isn't it. Time to try something new.

Inconsistent

Yesterday, the government introduced its Alcohol Reform Bill to Parliament. The bill will repeal and replace the Sale of Liquor Act 1989 to implement some of the recommendations of the Law Commission, including a split drinking age and national opening hours (AKA the national bedtime), as well as a host of changes to the licensing and enforcement regime. Today, the Attorney-General found that some of those latter provisions are inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act [PDF], violating the right to silence and the right to be free from arbitrary arrest and detention.

The big problems are around the power of arrest to enforce local authority liquor bans. The bill will turn violating such a ban into an infringement offence, but intentionally retain the explicit statutory power of arrest. So, you can be arrested and detained by police for an arbitrary period of time for an offence for which you can never serve jail, and which has been explicitly judged to be on the same level of seriousness as a speeding ticket, without any oversight whatsoever. Because there will be no formal criminal charges or court process, the normal protections around arrest (which assume there will be) will not apply. The result is to render the arrest arbitrary, and detention potentially indefinite.

The problem here, which the wowsers fail to understand, is that arrest is a criminal punishment. You get stuck in a cell, deprived of your liberty. And that requires serious justification. The normal justification is to ensure people show up for trial. But that justification is obviously absent for infringement offences, where there is no trial. In this case, the power of arrest is apparently driven by concerns about "public disorder". But there are already existing powers (e.g. offensive or disorderly behaviour, fighting in public) to deal with that. If it doesn't reach that level, sorry, but it is not a crime for young people to have fun in public.

Related to this, the bill includes a power for the police to demand from anyone believed to be committing an infringement offence "the name and address and whereabouts of any other person connected in any way with the alleged offence", on pain of a $5,000 fine. This is an obvious and clear breach of the right to silence. That right exists for very good reasons - basically to prevent the police from fabricating "confessions" or beating them out of people - and it should not be eroded, particularly for something so trivial. While its obviously in the interests of police to be able to find out who sold people their last drink, or who your mates you were dancing in that fountain with are, they should not be allowed to threaten us in any way in an effort to force an answer.

There are other problems - reverse burdens of proof upon people who have no ability to prove themselves innocent because the evidence is held by others is one egregious example - but the overall impression is one of an overreach by enforcement authorities and laws made primarily for the convenience of police rather than with a proper respect for the liberty of the public. And that just isn't good enough. The government and Parliament have a legal obligation to uphold and protect our rights. Instead, they're giving in to moral panic and engaging in lazy authoritarianism.

English's death spiral

Yesterday, we learned that the economy is in a death spiral. People don't have enough money, and so aren't spending. As a result tax and GST revenue are down. In addition, the government's books have taken a massive hit due to EQC paying out $1.5 billion for the Canterbury earthquake. Which means the government is having to borrow more money. Their response to this? Cuts, of course:

The Government is signalling it will tighten its belt another notch, with new figures showing the deficit has blown out by $2.2 billion since the May Budget forecasts and recovery is still sluggish.

[...]

Finance Minister Bill English said the lower revenue was largely caused by lower consumer spending, as New Zealanders paid off debt and saved more. He said the Government was still committed to "ongoing spending restraint".

Which sounds good and thrifty and all, and its exactly what an individual would do if their income wasn't meeting their expenses. But the government isn't an individual - or rather, it has duties to manage the economy and protect us from its excesses as well. And those duties make cutting spending in this sort of recession exactly the wrong thing to do. More cuts will mean people have less money to spend. Which means less demand and less consumer spending, and that's exactly the problem we're in. Faced with a death spiral, the government is hellbent on making it worse.

If you're getting a sense of deja vu, its because this is exactly what Ruth Richardson did in the early 90's. And the result was a prolonged recession, mass unemployment, and the creation of a permanent underclass. English, who learned at Richardson's knee, is repeating her mistakes. And we will all suffer for his stupidity.

Equal love

Six years ago, in a step forward for equality, the UK introduced the Civil Partnerships Act 2004. The Act granted same-sex couples marriage in all but name. But to stress that this wasn't "really" marriage, it was a deliberate "separate but equal" regime. Gays could get a civil partnership, but they couldn't marry. Straight couples could marry, but couldn't get a civil partnership. The result is unequal love, and continued stigmatisation and discrimination.

Now, that separate but unequal system is being challenged. Last week, a same-sex couple went to their local registry office and applied to marry. Tomorrow, an opposite-sex couple will do the same in an attempt to gain a civil partnership. The inevitable refusal will form the basis of a legal challenge to Britain's discriminatory marriage regime. Which, because the UK's human rights laws have teeth, may see the twin bans overturned (and if not, at least build political pressure for action by Parliament).

In New Zealand, our system isn't quite as discriminatory as the UK's. Our civil unions are open to both same- and opposite-sex couples, and several of my friends have been civilly unified in preference to marriage. But same-sex couples still can't marry, and this is a stain on our nation. It is long past time we erased that stain, allowed same-sex marriages, and allowed equal love.

Can we have a real Minister of Women’s Affairs please?

Today, the Human Rights Commission released their biennial New Zealand Census of Women’s Participation [PDF], which showed a yawning gender-pay gap in the public sector and a failure of the private sector to demolish the glass ceiling. So what did Pansy Wong, National's Minister of Women’s Affairs have to say about this? Simply that they are "not new issues". Well, no, they're not - but it is her job to solve them. So what is she doing about it?

[Wong] says that is why in the two years she has been Minister she and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs have made getting more women into leadership and closing the gender pay gap two of their three priorities.

They've "prioritised" it. Woo-hoo. Meanwhile, the public service has fewer female CEOs than they did when Wong became Minister, while the government is appointing fewer women to statutory entities than it did in 2006. Meanwhile, the Auckland CCO boards, a chance for the government to show real leadership, had even fewer appointments than the average - 27.6% as opposed to the average 41.5% across the public sector.

It is Wong's job to push the government towards equality. And by any measure, she is failing at it. Can we have a real Minister of Women’s Affairs please?

More than unwise

Yesterday, we learned that the SAS had been hosting "training days" for wealthy business executives with penis-size problems who wanted to play with guns and think of themselves as "elite". For $500 a head, they got to play with guns and hang around with soldiers. This has been subjected to well-deserved scorn and ridicule, and the Minister has called it "unwise" and promised a review. So he should. Because if you look at what happened to the money, we're actually looking at something rather serious:

Defence said proceeds would go to the NZSAS Trust, established in 2004 to support families of agents and their families.

Think about that for a moment. A bunch of government employees abused government resources to solicit funds for their regimental slush fund, from which they and their families would personally benefit. That's not just "unwise" - it is corrupt.

Women going nowhere under National

Every two years, the Human Rights Commission has just publishes a New Zealand Census of Women’s Participation, tracking the participation of women across the public and private sector. Its a useful tool to tracking gender inequality in our society, allowing us to identify sectors with persistent problems and persistent discrimination, as well as see where things are improving. They've just released the latest edition [PDF], and it paints a dismal picture. In most areas, there has been no progress. And in some, things have actually gotten worse.

The most surprising area is the public service. They've been working on eliminating gender discrimination since the Government Service Equal Pay Act was passed back in 1960, and you'd expect them to be leading the way. But what the report shows is that the proportion of female chief executives has fallen in the past two years, while the public sector's average 15.4% gender pay gap has remained unchanged. That average statistic hides some truly appalling ones, with 12 departments having a greater than 20% gap, and two - including the Ministry of Education, which has a female CEO, 57% women in senior management, and 81% women across all staff - having more than 30%. The report includes a selection of excuses from the departments, which tend to focus around gender segregation in roles - but no department then seems to ask "OK, so why are our top managers all men, and their PAs all women"?

(Oddly, the SSC, which provided this data, calculates the gender pay gap on average FTE male and female wages, rather than median. This is a bit unusual, and means we can't really compare it to the headline society-wide gap, which uses median hourly earnings).

Meanwhile, beyond the public sector, the proportion of women serving as company directors (another headline statistic) increased marginally, but we still rank well down the table, behind the US, UK, and Australia. At 9.32%, our proportion of female business leadership is half that of Spain and Sweden, and less than a quarter that of Norway. And this matters. Boards without a women's voice make decisions which ignore them, which allows discrimination to fester. The HRC suggests following Australia in some rather mild measures to improve representation, but if we're serious about the problem, then we need to follow Norway and set quotas as a condition of listing. Its not as if there aren't talented women out there to take these roles; the problem is that our business community is run by a cosy little old-boy network which excludes them because they didn't go to the right (boy's) school.

The rest of the report is similarly depressing. There's been no progress in the judiciary, and glacial progress in the police and law firms. The proportion of women elected to local government fell, as did the proportion of women appointed to statutory bodies. In other words, while we have formal, legal equality, in practice we have anything but.

This has to change, and it is the government's job to lead the way and set aggressive policy to ensure that appointments and pay rates are made on merit, not on gender, and to ensure we don't waste the talents and frustrate the dreams of half the population. But National, the representatives of that business old-boy network, are part of the problem, and I don't see them taking serious action any time soon.

New Fisk

Only justice can bring peace to this benighted region

Submission

Below is the draft of my submission on the Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill:

1. I oppose the Manukau City Council (Regulation of Prostitution in Specified Places) Bill for the following reasons:
2. The bill seeks to reverse the effects of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 by effectively recriminalising prostitution within the bounds of Manukau City. While Manukau has a problem with streetwalkers, it is largely a problem of its own making, caused by the effective outlawing of small brothels by local bylaws.¹ While this bill targets street prostitutes and their clients, when considered in combination with existing bylaws the effect would be to outlaw the entire sex industry within Manukau. This is clearly contrary to the intent of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003.
3. Recriminalising prostitution in Manukau would once again place sex workers outside the law, allowing them to be victimized with impunity. The PRA was passed precisely to end that situation. Any response should be based on the paradigm of harm-minimization, not on recriminalisation.
4. In 2005, a similar bill (the Manukau City Council (Control of Street Prostitution) Bill) was rejected by the House. At the time, the Local Government and Environment Committee noted [PDF] that the bill

   would present enforcement and jurisdictional difficulties. While local legislation typically addresses issues unique to a particular locality and does not involve itself with the criminal law, this local bill creates offences that criminalise behaviour that exists throughout New Zealand. If the bill were passed, citizens would be subject to conflicting criminal laws, depending on their current geographical location.

   It rejected this balkanization of New Zealand law, as well as the implicit attempt to overturn the PRA through local legislation.
5. The current bill has exactly the same problem. That alone is enough reason to reject it.
6. A review of the problem by the Ministry of Justice found that outlawing street prostitution in Manukau was unlikely to be effective, and would instead simply move street prostitutes to other areas while impairing their health and safety. It recommended a local community response instead.
7. The penalties for soliciting proposed by the Bill are disproportionate and draconian, and ten times higher than those which existed before decriminalization. If the bill is passed, these penalties should be reduced.
8. I do not wish to appear before the Committee.

¹ Chapter 3 [PDF] of the Manukau City Consolidated Bylaw 2008 restricts brothels to land zoned Business 4, 5, or 6, and not within 250m or sight of the entrance to a school, church, or community facility. This effectively restricts brothels to the outskirts of the city.

The UK and international justice

In 2003, Mongolian dissident Damiran Enkhbat was kidnapped from a McDonald's car park in Normandy. Attacked by four men with stun batons in full public view, he was beaten, forced to drink a sedative, and stuffed into the boot of a car. He was then driven across Europe before being forced onto a Mongolian Airlines flight in Belin and rendered to Mongolia. In Mongolia, he was tortured to death.

The man allegedly responsible for that kidnapping, Bat Khurts, has since been promoted to chief executive of Mongolia's National Security Council. And he is now in jail in the UK awaiting extradition to Germany, having been arrested the moment he stepped off the plane on a diplomatic visit.

This is a victory for international justice, but at the same time, it highlights its continued imperfections, especially in the UK. The British establishment normally conspires to shield visiting international criminals from the law, even going so far as to tip them off so they can escape arrest. And at the same time as they have arrested Khurts, the British government is promising to amend the UK's war crimes law to protect Israeli politicians from prosecution. The message is clear: international law applies only to the weak. The strong are allowed to commit crimes with impunity.

This has to change. The law has to apply to all, or it means nothing. The problem is forcing self-interested, back-scratching, war-mongering government ministers to accept it.

National's plan for growth: More cows

Earlier in the week I blogged about what the OIA had uncovered about National's "plan" to catch Australia. While focused on highlighting Gerry Brownlee's dishonesty over the existence of milestones and targets (short version: he lied to Parliament), it has turned up some interesting information - such as the fact that their "plan" rests on discovering massive amounts of oil. Ignoring such optimistic assumptions, what does that leave?

The presentation to the Cabinet Strategy Committee, Achieving New Zealand's Economic Potential: Exploiting International Opportunities by Harnessing our Strengths (15 September 2009), recommended a strong focus on the high-tech manufacturing and services sectors. The key policies were supposed to be government coinvestment to help firms overcome capital constraints, and a strong focus on assistance with R&D (described as "replacing the R&D tax credit"). Neither of these has happened, or looks likely to. Which means that National's ambitious growth targets there won't be met. So what does that leave?

That's right: farming. And in particular, dairy farming.

Somewhat oddly, Brownlee attempted to withhold all information on the dairy industry's current and expected growth on the basis that it would "prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand or the international relations of the Government of New Zealand". More likely that it would prejudice the popularity of the government. Because he stupidly missed a bit. And that shows that National plans a massive expansion of dairy farming. Currently, the dairy industry is worth $10.15 billion a year. At its expected growth rate of 3% a year, they expect it to be worth $16.9 billion in 2025. They want it to be worth $25.9 billion. In other words, they want to double the growth rate, and more than double the size of, the dairy industry.

Some of this growth will apparently come from increased offshore production, driven by a restructuring of Fonterra to allow them to raise capital more easily (the information on that is largely withheld, unfortunately). Some of it - but not much - will come through more efficient cows. But most of it will come through simply increasing the size of the dairy herd. In other words, their plan for growth is "more cows". Which means more shit and nitrates fouling our waterways, and more greenhouse gases fouling our atmosphere. We can barely cope with the environmental footprint of dairy farming as it is, and National is planning to double it. At the same time, they plan to

promote NZ as synonymous with products and services that are safe, secure and sustainable that are good for the consumer and for the planet.

How they intend to do this when we are drowning in cowshit is anyone's guess. maybe a glossy PR campaign, and hoping that no-one ever actually looks at a river?

Meanwhile, there are a few other scary ideas in their dairy plans. "Review[ing] incentives for rational irrigation, storage, and water use decisions" for a start. In other words, giving all the water to farmers for free. When government Ministers like David Carter spout ignorant bullshit like "Here in Canterbury 96 percent of all water flows out to sea" (that is, we have rivers), then you have to worry.

Then there's this little bit in the "Barriers and issues" section:

Market acceptability of GM would have to be tested and may require modifications to the HSNO Act.

So, the government wants genetically modified cows. But at the same time, it wants to promote us as safe and sustainable. Good luck with that. European customers have spoken: they hate GM, and don't want it in their food chain. So quite apart from any domestic issues, its just a dumb commercial decision. But as we've already seen with water and climate change, farmers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed when it comes to environmental branding.

So, National's plan for growth is to do the same thing we've always done, only more of it and dirtier. Its exactly the sort of plan I'd expect from narrow-minded, jealous farmers. But it won't see us catch Australia anytime soon. On their core promise, National has no real plan to deliver.

The Human Development Report

The United Nations has released its annual Human Development Report. And in a bit of a shock, it ranks New Zealand as the third most developed country in the world. Oh, sure, our GNI is low compared to other western nations - but our non-economic indicators, things like health and education, more than make up for it.

The reason its a bit of a shock is because previously NZ has ranked much lower, in the high teens. The reason our ranking has improved is not because of any improvement in the underlying data, but because of a methodological change in the way they are combined (previously, they were simply averaged; now they use the geometric mean, which results in a lower score where there are wider gaps between the dimensions. This means that instead of being three of four places above our GNI rank, we are now thirty.

(Not that our underlying scores are anything to sniff at. NZ's life expectancy is pretty standard for a developed country. But our mean length of education is two years higher, and our expected length of education four years higher. In other words, we do well because we have a high school-leaving age, a lot of ECE and mass tertiary education. Together these mean our combined non-economic value is 0.98, compared to ~0.9 for most other developed nations).

The UN has also introduced a subindex which corrects for the effects of income and gender inequality. Unfortunately, there's no data on this for New Zealand, but it tends to result in substantial decreases, which get worse the less developed a country is. At the bottom end, some countries lose 30 - 40% of their score on this measure, which tells you that development is spread very unevenly. Its a good addition, especially in light of the recent focus on the effects of inequality, and hopefully it will lead to a greater focus on equal development rather than on development for the rich.

You can download the full HDR here [PDF, large].