Member's Day

Today is a member's day. First up is the Paige Harris Birth Registration Bill, an uncontroversial private bill to properly recognise a particular child's parent. Its being whizzed through with all its final stages taken as one debate after a lightning short select committee stage. No-one opposes giving this family some dignity, so I expect debate will be pretty short (not least because MPs may be saving it for Coffey's bill later).

Following that is the third reading of Louisa Wall's Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion (Safe Areas) Amendment Bill, which will be followed by the rest of the second reading of Steph Lewis' Biosecurity (Information for Incoming Passengers) Amendment Bill. Following that the House should get most of the way through Nicola Willis' Unit Titles (Strengthening Body Corporate Governance and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. If things move quickly, the House should make a start of Tāmati Coffey's Improving Arrangements for Surrogacy Bill, which (in part) addresses the general issues raised by the Paige Harris bill. Its a worthy bill, and I'm hoping it passes.

There are still plenty of first readings on the order paper, so there won't be a ballot tomorrow.

Climate Change: A convenient "error"

Last year, the government released its draft emissions reduction plan. The plan further weakened the Climate Commission's already-weak emissions budget, allowing an extra two million tons of pollution over 2022-25. The "justification" for this was supposedly that "landowners and forest managers [plan] to increase afforestation and decrease deforestation". That explanation was pretty fishy in and of itself - more trees means lower emissions, not higher - but its worse than that: it was simply a lie:

In October, the Government suggested the first budget (2022-25) be loosened, with later budgets tightened, citing a survey of forest owners as justification. But Stuff discovered the data does not support official statements.

The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) drafted the faulty explanation in documents provided to the public and Cabinet – who pre-approved the change to the country’s draft budgets. In a statement, the ministry admitted the mistake, which it attributed to “genuine human error”.

The error could mean the 2022-25 budget is brought back in line with the commission’s original advice, after Stuff raised the issue with officials and the Climate Change Minister.

While the public was told that newly planted forests were to blame for the extra pollution in the 2022-25 budget, because the planting would release soil carbon, ministry data shows that an increased appetite to chop down trees is the driving factor.

The Stuff article has more details, but basicly MPI massaged away the increase in deforestation, pretending that it was decreasing, while attributing increased emissions to planting more trees. As noted above, MPI says this was a "genuine human error". Whether that is really believable given their history of total industry capture and opposition to climate action is left as an exercise for the reader.

The good news is that the budget is yet to be finalised, and Cabinet has an opportunity to reverse this change. And hopefully they will. Because fundamentally, the idea that the budget should be increased because polluters plan to pollute more is self-defeating and morally bankrupt. And rather than saying "OK, go ahead", Ministers should be pointing at the ETS cap and saying "good luck with that".

Climate Change: No duty of care in Australia

Last year, in a victory for the climate movement, an Australian court ruled that ministers owe young people a duty of care over climate change. But today, that ruling was overturned by the Federal Court:

The Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley does not have a duty of care to protect young people from climate change harm when considering fossil fuel projects, such as mines, a court has ruled.

The ruling of the full bench of the Federal Court overturned an earlier decision that found in favour of eight teenagers who brought a class-action case that challenged a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to extend its Vickery coal mine, near Boggabri in NSW.

[...]

“The court is unanimous in the view that the duty should not be imposed upon the Minister. The three judgments of the court have different emphases as to why this conclusion should be reached,” Chief Justice James Allsop said in his judgment on Tuesday.

Which immediately invites the question: if the government doesn't have a duty of care to the young, what exactly is it for? Unfortunately, in Australia the answer appears to be "protecting the profits of old, rich, fossil-fuel polluters".

Making the costs clear

The government today has buckled to right-wing pressure, and "temporarily" cut fuel excise taxes. But at the same time, they're halving the price of public transport for the same period. And the relative costs of these policies are interesting:

[Finance Minister Grant Robertson] said the $350m cost of the petrol change would be met by reprioritised spending from the Covid-19 response fund – notably the smaller expected spend on managed isolation.

The public transport subsidy would cost between $25m and $40m and would also be met from the Covid-19 response fund.

Which seems really, really cheap, and suggests that a full "free fares" policy would cost only ~$200 - $320 million a year at current useage rates. That would be a hefty chunk of the government's $4.5 billion, four-year decarbonisation fund, but given the importance of transport in our emissions, it might be worth it to promote the mode-shift we desperately need. And the current reduction is certainly going to provide some hard data on how public transport use responds to price changes.

It also puts a ballpark on what it would cost to provide free public transport for everyone, that is, if the mode shift is wildly successful, most people in cities use public transport, and only rurals regularly use cars anymore. This would mean a roughly tenfold increase in public transport useage (some people walk and cycle, remember), so ~$2 - $3.2 billion a year. Which is an awful lot of money, but by comparison the government spent $5.3 billion on motorways in 2020, and you don't need nearly as many of them when people are using buses and trains (or rather, you don't need them as big, or to spend as much on maintenance). In other words, this looks like a transition we could make in the long term, without breaking the bank. And we could certainly afford to make it halfway, let alone to Climate Commission's 2030 target of a 120% increase in public transport use. It is just a question of priorities.

Copyright term extension violates the BORA

Last night I did a last-minute submission on the international treaty examination of the UK-NZ Free Trade Agreement, focusing on the issue of Labour's sneaky extension of the copyright term. After making the obvious points that this was not in our interests (the FTA's National Interest Analysis is pretty explicit on that) and that it was undemocratic to make this sort of change via an FTA, I noticed that the NIA said there was "[n]o effect on human rights in New Zealand". Which led to another point: extending the copyright term violates the BORA.

Copyright is a restriction on freedom of expression. Restricting the right to disseminate and distribute copyrighted works to their owners is clearly a limitation on the right to receive and impart information affirmed in section 14 of the BORA. It does this so that creators can make money and earn a living, thus incentivising the creation of further works.

As we've seen in the case of vaccine mandates, a limitation on a right may be justifiable if it is a "reasonable limi[t] prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". This means that it must serve an important public purpose, and be rationally connected to and proportionate to that purpose, and impair the right no more than is reasonably necessary for that purpose.

Incentivising the creation of cultural works is clearly an important public purpose, and a limited period of exclusivity is clearly rationally connected to that purpose. The question is one of proportionality: how long should that period of exclusivity be? There is obviously a range of possible answers here, depending on how the copyright term is structured, but the important thing to note here is that we are talking about a change. And it is clear that if a longer term would not result in a greater incentive for the creation of new works, then it is disproportionate. And on that point, we can just look at the NIA, which says explicitly:

there is no evidence that increasing the term of protection for copyright and related rights would incentivise either the creation of new copyright works or the dissemination of older works (which are the primary policy goals of copyright protection).

This is effectively an admission of disproportionality, and therefore of inconsistency with the BORA. Under the BORA, Parliament is the first guardian of our rights, in that it is supposed to scrutinise proposed legislation and not pass laws which are inconsistent with it. It needs to do its job here, and reject England's copyright extension. And if it doesn't, then this seems to be a prime case for a declaration of inconsistency in future.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering where the hell MFAT gets off on proposing a treaty which is inconsistent with our constitution (because that's what the BORA is: a key part of our constitution). The answer is probably that they just didn't think about it - FTA's are about money, not human rights. But its their job to think about it: the BORA imposes standing obligations on all branches of our government at all times. At the least, this means that it should not make agreements contrary to the BORA as a matter of public policy, but I would go further and argue that it does not have the legal power to make such agreements at all (basicly running the "contracts are subject to statutory obligations" line of Wyatt Co (NZ) Ltd v Queenstown-Lakes District Council, but on MFAT and the BORA, rather than on a local body and the OIA). Either way, MFAT appears to have overstepped here, and we need to know what safeguards they have to prevent them from doing so in future.

Stop giving personal information to Ministers

When Charlotte Bellis complained about MIQ, Covid Minister Chris Hipkins leaked private information about her in an effort to smear her. Now, the Herald reports that he did it despite being specifically told not to:

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins publicly disclosed private information about Kiwi journalist Charlotte Bellis who was stuck overseas despite officials telling him it was "not for public comment".

Meanwhile in Question Time today Hipkins is suddenly clamming up, refusing to discuss why he disclosed personal information because it is "not in the public interest to do so". Its a fine example of how Ministers consistently conflate the public interest with their own personal political interests, while ignoring the actual public interest in accountability. But when have politicians ever really been interested in that?

This is just the latest case of Ministers leaking personal information for political advantage (or simply petty revenge), and it is clear that it is a consistent problem across our political culture. Once Ministers have tagged someone as an "enemy", they lack both the ethics and self-control to resist smearing with whatever weapon is at hand. Agencies sticking warnings on such information is clearly not effective in preventing such abuse. The solution seems obvious: if Ministers cannot be trusted with personal information, agencies simply should not give it to them.

Another starving watchdog

The Independent Police Conduct Authority is meant to investigate complaints against police and uncover illegal behaviour. But it is collapsing under the weight of complaints, with 50% staff turnover:

Police’s independent watchdog is facing “material risk” in its ability to deliver its core functions amid a 64 per cent rise in complaints over three years, meaning a new plan to promote its services to vulnerable communities remains on hold.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority expects the number of complaints will continue to increase, after recording 4257 complaints for the 2020/2021 year, up from 2592 in 2017/2018.

[...]

In a meeting with the Ministry of Justice last October, the authority reported the increasing demand was causing capacity restraints and impacting its ability to deliver its core functions in a timely manner.

The most obvious reason for this is underfunding. While the IPCA has received a small budget increase over the last few years (from $4.1 million in 2017/18 to $5.7 million in 2021), that's clearly nowhere near the increase in workload, or enough to retain staff. And the result is that they're in the same position the Ombudsman was in a few years ago: constantly trying to do more with less, and failing as a result. And pretty obviously, this has an effect on public confidence in both the IPCA and the police. If the government wants to stop that erosion of confidence, it needs to increase the IPCA's funding so it can actually do its job properly, rather than just starving it. And if its wondering how to fund that, actually sacking police officers found by the IPCA to have broken the law would free up some money...

Decarbonisation for peace

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, people were quick to point out that his war was funded by fossil fuels. 60% of Russia's export revenue comes from oil and gas. Europe's dependence on Russian gas is effectively funding Putin's war to the tune of US$285 million a day. Cutting that revenue would limit Russia's ability to wage war and commit acts of aggression against its neighbours.

Meanwhile, we are in the middle of a climate crisis, and desperately need to reduce global emissions to avoid destroying our civilisation and making the planet uninhabitable. And suddenly, the solution to one of these problems is looking like the solution to the other. The US has banned Russian oil. The UK is doing the same. The EU is cutting its dependence on Russian gas. In all three cases, making things work is going to require crash investment in decarbonisation - renewables, energy efficiency and EVs - to avoid significant damage. Meaning a permanent shift away from fossil fuels, and permanent emissions reductions.

But its not just Russia: globally, some of our worst tyrannies - Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Venezuela - are petrocracies, and rely on oil revenues to fund their wars and repression. (The USA, the world's largest oil producer, also engages in wars of aggression, but it is not a petrostate like the others are). Again, cutting those revenues will make them less powerful, less capable of hurting their own people or others. Reducing emissions is a way of defunding war everywhere. Sadly, it has taken a major war of aggression to remind everyone of this. But now it has been bought to our attention, we should seize the opportunity, decarbonise, and watch the tyrants shrivel.

Ending restraint of trade clauses

Back in January journalist Tova O’Brien became the public face of "restraint of trade" clauses when she was banned from working for two months. O’Brien was a high-paid journalist, so it mattered less, but the case highlighted the growing use of these clauses by New Zealand bosses eager to retain a captive labour force. Now Labour's Helen White has put up a bill which would effectively gut them.

The Employment Relations (Restraint of Trade) Amendment Bill would do three things: limit the use of these clauses to cases where employers actually have a "proprietary interest" which is specified in the contract, make them completely ineffective where people are paid less than three times the minimum wage (so around $125,000 a year, assuming a 37.5 hour working week), and where they are effective, require employers to continue to pay the worker at least half their regular salary for the duration. So it should end the bullshit of trying to lock in low-paid workers, while imposing a real cost on employers of high-paid workers who want to do so. The requirement to specify the interest supposedly protected (and for restrictions which are no greater than necessary) will also make such clauses far easier to challenge.

This bill looks good and necessary, and hopefully it will be drawn from the ballot soon.

Rules for effective OIA requests

After seeing one too many terrible requests over FYI, I've tried to put together some basic rules on how to make an effective OIA request. These are really aimed at beginners, and intended to help them avoid unnecessary frustration by avoiding common pitfalls (because there's more than enough frustration in the OIA process, and we can at least avoid inflicting it on ourselves).

1. Don't rant: I've seen far too many requests introduce their subject with an angry tirade, filled with hostility and accusations. Don't do this. For a start, its being an arsehole, and that's never a good approach when you want something from someone. While "requester was an arsehole" is not a valid withholding ground under the OIA, it certainly primes the people processing your request to think of it as vexatious from the start, and it is not going to encourage them to be extra-helpful in the way you want them to be. Secondly, its a distraction. A frothing rant may feel good when you type it, but it distracts from the focus of your request, and makes it harder to work out what exactly you are asking for. And you will likely get a worse answer as a result.

   What should you do? The OIA is a process for requesting information, so request information. If you are asking for a specific document, don't waste space on a preamble, just ask for it. If your request is less specific, then you may need to provide context, but keep it to a minimum. Lots of my requests are sparked by media stories, so I usually go for an intro like "Today Stuff reported that X (ref to headline so they can see what I'm talking about). I would like to request the following information under the OIA..." - and that's enough. You don't need to write a huge introduction, let alone an angry rant.

2. Know exactly what you are looking for: This is easier said than done, and not helpful advice to beginners, but pretty obviously if you know how government works and what sort of information it generates and where, you can get more value out of the OIA and be more effective.

   What if you don't? I didn't when I started out, so I made requests asking for "all advice and communications" on a particular policy. That's a useful phrase, but in some cases it may turn up a bit much, and the agency may ask you for a specific timeframe or whether you want emails. If you're not sure exactly what you're after, its better to narrow the request rather than risk a refusal for "substantial collation and research". After all, you can always ask for the other stuff later. And as you build up specialist knowledge in your area of interest, you'll get more of an idea of what might be there to find.

   Whatever you are requesting, be as clear as possible about it, since this will avoid mutual frustration over misinterpretation later.

3. Ask the right agency: If you ask the wrong agency, they have a duty to transfer the request, which is another 10 working days and some unnecessary frustration. You can avoid that by asking the right agency in the first place. Again, knowing how government works and which agency does what helps here. If you don't, who to ask should be apparent from the circumstances that provoked the request (a media story will usually suggest who to ask, a consultation process will be run by some particular department, and if you've had unsatisfactory dealings with an agency then they will hold the information about their policies and procedures). If you're still not sure, there is a thing called the Directory of Official Information, which lists all government agencies, what they do, and what types of information they hold.

4. Know what you can get: The OIA includes numerous withholding grounds, and some of your request may be redacted or refused (you can challenge such refusals via the Ombudsman, but that's really beyond the scope of this post; if you want to learn to be effective at that, start reading the Ombudsman's guidelines)

   Requests for the following information will almost always be refused, and so it probably isn't worth asking for unless you specifically plan to challenge a refusal:

   • "national security" stuff
   • specific communications with other countries
   • details of active criminal investigations / court cases
   • upcoming budget docs
   • legal advice

   Other things you shouldn't bother asking for: court records, and stuff clearly done by politicians in a "political" (party leader / MP) or personal capacity rather than in their capacity as a Minister (e.g. coalition negotiations, where they went on holiday, what they had for lunch). Neither of these are "official information" in terms of the Act, and you can't get them via the OIA.

The massive cost of climate change

How much will climate change cost us? Waikato Regional Council looked at just one aspect - coastal defences for a handful of Coromandel holiday towns - and found it would cost them $1.1 billion:

[W]hile there are no ballpark costings done yet on a regional basis, a new report is hinting they could be a very hefty burden for ratepayers and other funders.

Information prepared for this week’s Waikato Regional Council climate action committee says there’s a potential $1.1 billion price tag up to 2120 for coastal defence works at eight key Coromandel sites.

To put that in context, that's 10% of WRC's entire rates income, every year, for a century. And that's just to protect these eight towns. The real cost - fire, flooding, relocating infrastructure - will be substantially higher. And that's just one local authority. Other councils all around the country will be facing similar costs, which will likely only get higher as climate change begins to bite.

The "keep rates low" brigade will no doubt be pushing for us (or rather, them) not to pay those costs, or not to pay them yet. Which means pushing them onto future generations, or paying them in fire and flood and cleanup, or in reduced quality of life (or all of the above). But one way or another, we will be paying them; the only question is how.

Of course, we could reduce the amount we have to pay, by reducing emissions instead, and encouraging other countries to do the same. Rapidly cutting the most damaging greenhouse gas - methane - will substantially reduce warming, hence damage and the cost of protecting against it. That means polluters paying now. But that seems significantly fairer, since the costs of climate change are really costs polluters are dumping on the rest of us. The polluters made this problem, so as far as possible, they should be the ones to pay for it.

The selfishness of tax cuts

National leader Chris "I used to run an airline" Luxon gave a state of the nation address on Sunday, in which he proposed National's bold new policy to solve New Zealand's problems: tax cuts for the rich!

[Luxon] also promised National would repeal every extra tax hike or added levy the Labour Government had imposed, since 2017.

That would see the removal of Auckland’s fuel tax.

It would also see the removal of the 10-year extension to the “bright line test”, which imposes what is effectively a capital gains tax on people selling investment properties within 10 years of buying them.

He said it was unfair for the Government to have removed interest deductibility on rental properties.

(He also promised indexing tax thresholds to inflation, which is a bit meh. Adjustment is something the government needs to do every so often, and whether it is periodic or automatic is a question of how much you like automatic stabilisers...)

Labour's main income tax change has been a new top tax rate for high earners. Reversing it would benefit those high earners. Ditto reversing the extension of the bright line test, and restoring interest deductibility - effectively a subsidy to landleeches. So Luxon is nakedly promising to redistribute income upwards to benefit people like himself, at the expense of everyone else.

And it will be at the expense of everyone else, because taxes pay for things: schools. Hospitals. Public transport. Pensions. Cutting taxes on the rich means the money will be ripped right out of those things, hurting people like you and me, so a bunch of rich pricks like Luxon can compare the size of their pile and buy themselves another yacht.

Taxes also discourage things we don't want, like fossil fuels and utes and house hoarding. Cutting those taxes will mean we have more of those bad things, so that old rich people can keep destroying the planet and sucking us dry through parasitic landlordism.

The biggest effect though would be to starve the government of resources right when we are facing multiple crises. We have covid, a housing crisis and climate change, and fixing or mitigating all of these needs money: money to fund our health response, money to build state houses to protect people from landlords, money to decarbonise our economy and reduce emissions, money to rebuild and relocate infrastructure (and entire towns) because anything less than 2 metres above sea level is at risk and needs to moved or protected. The clear implication of Luxon's demand to cut taxes is that he doesn't want us to solve these problems. Or rather, he thinks rich people getting another BMW is more important than us not dying of covid, than us having secure and affordable housing, than us not burning down or flooding (or both) due to the methane spewed into the atmosphere by his farmer friends. Its a completely selfish worldview. But isn't that what National ultimately stands for?

Why Labour buried the OIA review

Why did Labour bury its promised review of the OIA? When the news first broke, it was about priorities: the Ministry of Justice was simply too busy with other things. A subsequent OIA release made it clear that austerity was partly to blame: years of penny-pinching by successive governments had eroded MoJ's policy capacity, to the extent it was unable to meet Ministerial demands for advice and was forced to prioritise. But now, a further release forced by the Ombudsman has made it clear: Labour killed the OIA review so MoJ could focus on the "higher priority" of giving them a four-year term.

The link is explicitly made in a less-redacted copy of a 2020 briefing on "Policy Projects". After noting the need to prioritise due to lack of capacity, the briefing included a table of projects that could be deferred. Only the OIA review line is shown (the rest being out of scope of the request), but it explicitly links deferral to the new government's "electoral projects":

What were the government's "electoral projects"? Back in December 2020 when this briefing was prepared, it included controversial changes to MMP to make the system less representative, and a surprise proposal to extend the parliamentary term from three to four years, reducing the accountability of politicians. So a project intended to improve accountability was killed in favour of one to reduce it. Which I guess shows exactly how much of a priority they place on being "the most open, most transparent Government that New Zealand has ever had"...

No accountability means no confidence III

Its a given in New Zealand that when the police break the law, they refuse to prosecute their own. Even when the Independent Police Conduct Authority makes findings amounting to criminal behaviour, the police at best respond with a "confidential employment process", the outcome of which is kept secret. This undermines public confidence in the police, because there cannot be confidence without public accountability. A few years ago, after reading two appalling IPCA reports in quick succession which detailed seriously illegal (and arguably criminal) behaviour by police, I challenged this, lodging an OIA request seeking the outcome of those employment processes to see whether there had in fact been any accountability at all. The police refused, though they did confirm that "all the officers involved in both incidents remain employees of NZ Police".

Now, after an Ombudsman's complaint, they've finally been forced to release a "summary" of the relevant employment outcomes. "Remedial action" was taken against officers in both cases, though there are no details as to the nature of that action. Whether this builds public confidence in the police's handling of crimes by their own is left as an exercise for the reader.

While this seems to be an unsatisfying outcome, it has at least established a precedent that police must provide summaries where they take employment action. Hopefully people will start doing that whenever the IPCA publishes a report.

Send Putin to The Hague

The International Criminal Court has formally opened an investigation into war crimes in Ukraine, after being asked to by 39 countries:

The prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague has announced that he will launch an investigation into possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Karim Khan said that although Ukraine was not a member of the ICC, it had awarded jurisdiction to the court. He said that there was grounds to open an investigation based on a previous preliminary investigation on Crimea and the Donbas published last year, and on current events in Ukraine.

“I have already tasked my team to explore all evidence preservation opportunities,” Khan, a British lawyer, said.

Which is good, because war crimes and crimes against humanity are undoubtedly being committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and they need to be prosecuted. But thanks to a quirk of the Rome Statute, the real crime here - the crime of aggression ( "the supreme international crime" which "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole") - will not be part of the investigation. Neither Ukraine or Russia is a party to the Rome Statute (though Ukraine has accepted jurisdiction), so the ICC cannot prosecute for aggression. Which means firstly, that we need to reform the Rome Statute so that it can; and secondly, that until that happens, we will need a special-purpose tribunal to prosecute this crime and hold Putin accountable.

The IPCA is a joke

Another day, another IPCA finding that police unlawfully arrested and assaulted someone. And as usual, the police simply refuse to accept the finding:

The arrest of a man using excessing force and resulting in a head injury was not justified, an investigation has found.

The Independent Police Conduct Authority said the arrest last year in the early hours of Sunday 27 February on Wellington's Courtenay Place was not lawful.

[...]

Meanwhile the police have again denied the arrest was unlawful, and sought legal advice in the decision.

Acting Wellington District Commander Tracey Thompson said police are satisfied staff made the right decision that night.

If you or I knocked someone over, causing a head injury, then stuck them in a truck and locked them in a room, that would be assault and kidnapping and we would be charged. But repeatedly, the police refuse to acknowledge breaking the law, and on the rare occasions when they do, decide that it is "not in the public interest" to prosecute their own, hiding behind a "confidential employment process" (though in this case they didn't even bother doing that). And when the IPCA tells them they're wrong, they just ignore it.

This is not acceptable. The IPCA exists to provide oversight of the police. It is therefore incumbent on the police to accept their oversight body's decisions (just as the SIS must accept the decisions of IGIS). I've argued for a long time that the IGIS needs independent powers to prosecute police staff where police won't; its clear we also need to extend that to include the employment relationship, and allow them to discipline and fire officers where they have made a finding against them (and discipline and fire officers who cover for them). Otherwise, this institutional corruption in the police will never end.

The NOIAs

This government has promised to be "the most open and transparent government ever". But its practice seems to be diverging further and further from that ideal. Now, the Media Freedom Committee has launched a new series of awards recognising this:

The NOIAs (No Information Awards) are the creation of the Media Freedom Committee, the pan-industry group representing national publishing and broadcasting outlets, including NZME media outlets the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB.

Journalists working for organisations represented on the committee are invited to nominate examples of particularly frustrating interactions with communications staff and officials, primarily involving requests submitted under the Official Information Act (OIA) and Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.

[...]

Categories in the inaugural NOIAs include the Terrier Award, for the most tenacious journalist; the All Black Award, for the most redacted OIA response; and the If You Didn't Laugh Award, for the funniest reason for a response being rejected.

"We do want to acknowledge that there are lots of hard-working people doing their best to help journalists too," added Alexander. "That's why we're including a 'Little Ray Of Sunshine' award for the individual who has gone above and beyond in their commitment to transparency."

Sadly, only members of the MFC can nominate. Otherwise, I have a few suggestions...

Thoughts on a riot

Like a lot of Aotearoa, I spent today watching the police's efforts to clear the anti-vaxx / pro-Nazi occupation from Parliament and surrounding streets. Initially, it was mostly pushing and shoving, with some fire extinguishers and pepper-spray when things got heated. But after police began to take back Parliament grounds, it rapidly devolved into a full-on riot, with occupiers setting fires and throwing metal poles and cobblestones at police. They burned the Parliamentary playground, and tried to burn down the Old Government Building, the largest wooden building in the southern hemisphere. At one stage, they (again) tried to use a car as a weapon, reversing rapidly into a police line. I am amazed that no-one was killed.

It was probably always going to end this way. This occupation was violent from the start, with nooses, death threats, and execution lists from day one, and (fortunately muppetlike) attempt to storm Parliament in the first few days. As it embedded itself, it harassed and intimidated locals, while relying on the persistent threats of violence to discourage police action. And when the police finally did take action to stop it from taking over the streets and making them unsafe for local residents, the occupiers escalated their violence, throwing shit and acid and driving cars at police lines. This was just more of the same.

In the aftermath, I'm concerned about what this will mean for the right to protest, and particularly the right to protest at Parliament, where the government has to see you. Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard is already talking about turning it into a walled fortress, allowing the government to lock the gate whenever it doesn't want to hear from the peasants, and in the wake of this shitshow - which was nothing like any protest I have ever seen before in Wellington - he might be allowed to. A better idea would be to focus on the actual problem, and block cars, not people, either temporarily when required, or by pedestrianising the entire government precinct. Parliament's grounds are the People's Lawn, a taonga, and Mallard needs to guard them on our behalf, not try and lock them away from us.

I'm also concerned about what it means for police use of force. Generally, this was very restrained (which is good), but the final stages saw the police using rubber bullets on the streets against stone-throwing rioters. Which is not something I recall happening before in Aotearoa, and seems to be a significant escalation. It may have been a justified and proportionate use of force - cobblestones can cause serious injury, or even kill - but no-one should be comfortable with it, and we should all be deeply concerned that the police will start taking such weapons to protests in future, rather than keeping them in reserve for extreme situations (its bad enough that they're allowed to take tasers, which should never be required at any normal protest in Aotearoa).

Finally, I hope the "celebrities", media figures, and politicians who enabled and excused this shitshow are taking a good, hard look at themselves at the moment. Today's events may not have been what people like David Seymour or rich white boat dude intended, but its how it ended up, and the public are fully entitled to judge them for their role in it, both politically and socially. If you were a friend to the occupiers, you should expect to have no friends now, because that stench sticks. And if they don't like that, well, maybe they should have shown a bit more care in their choice of friends.

Climate Change: Our future is on the line

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released the next part of its Sixth Assessment Report, on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and its grim. Fire, flood, famine, plague, sea-level rise, wet-bulbing, and that's just if we stay below 1.5 degrees. If we go higher - and we seem to be on that path at the moment - then things are going to be even worse. The Summary for Policymakers ends with a very strong and simple statement:

The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.

The quicker we act, the less bad things will be. And we know what action we need to take: massive and rapid decarbonisation of the global energy system, which means the complete destruction of the global fossil fuel industry. Interestingly, the solutions to our crises are combining: Russia's invasion of Ukraine is funded by oil and gas revenues, so decarbonisation is also a measure for a more peaceful world. And it seems the government of Germany recognises that, bringing forward its 100% renewables target by 15 years so they can get off Russian gas.

In Aotearoa, our government finally has the beginnings of a policy. But it needs to use this as an opportunity to increase its ambition, and push further and faster for decarbonisation. We clearly can do it; the question is cost and who pays for it. And the government is still dragging its feet, trying to do things on the cheap and protect polluters like the dairy industry. But if we are to have a liveable future, we need to drive these ecological criminals out of business. And the longer we delay in doing so, the worse things will be.

Locking away our culture

Back in October, we learned that the government had reached an "in-principle" free trade agreement with the UK. This morning, we learned that they signed it. Unfortunately the deal includes an extension of the copyright term from 50 to 70 years, threatening to lock away major cultural works which are soon due out of copyright (such as James K Baxter and Bruce Mason, plus Tolkien, Christie and Wodehouse from overseas) for an additional 20 years. Its pure rent-seeking by the copyright-mafia, a 40% increase in how long they can continue to collect rent from the works they own. And it serves no public purpose; in the long list of "disadvantages" of the move, the National Interest Analysis (p 70) notes that

there is no evidence that increasing the term of protection for copyright and related rights would incentivise either the creation of new copyright works or the dissemination of older works (which are the primary policy goals of copyright protection).

The sole good news is that the extension will not apply to works already in the public domain. Combined with a 15 year implementation period, this means that if we drag our feet, we can get those works out and in public so that everyone can use them. That implementation period is also 15 years we have to lobby for the change to be reversed, and for a shorter copyright term in general.

So why did we sign up for it. Essentially because MFAT negotiators gain status and prestige from cutting deals, and saw this as something they could just trade away. But it also seems to be a perfect example of undemocratic (and hence illegitimate) foreign policy, and an example of why we need transparency in trade negotiations: so our government - or our unelected bureaucrats - can't trade stuff away without our consent.