Submit!

The Justice Committee has called for submissions on the Electoral Amendment Bill. Submissions are due by Wednesday, 31 August 2022, and can be made at the link above.

The bill improves disclosure of party finances, lowering the declaration threshold to $5,000 and requiring parties to disclose their annual financial statements. But it would also grant greater secrecy to ultra-rich donors, by ending the immediate declaration of donations over $30,000. And of course amendments to it would be a perfect way of plugging the loophole exposed by the NZ First Foundation trial, which now allows parties to bypass the entire transparency regime and receive unlimited amounts of money in secret, provided they launder it through a trust.

In short, this is an important bill, and if we don't want the rich buying our politicians and controlling our elections, we should speak up on it.

Government-sponsored debt-slavery

Stuff this morning has an appalling story about the exploitation of RSE workers in Blenheim, with workers being overcharged for substandard accommodation, denied sick-leave, and held in what is effectively debt-slavery:

Migrant horticulture workers are being housed six men to a room, charged $150 a week to sleep in freezing and damp conditions which see them fall sick repeatedly, and then refused paid sick leave.

One worker living in a crowded motel unit in Blenheim became so unwell he was coughing blood, but his boss initially refused to take him to the doctor, telling him to go to The Warehouse and buy paracetamol instead.

[...]

Conditions are so bad, some of the workers say they are desperate to go home, but have been unable because they are in debt to their employers for flights, work clothing, or tools. Some have so many deductions from their pay each week, they end up with as little as $100.

Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Saunoamaali'i Karanina Sumeo, who investigated this, is quite explicit in calling this as debt bondage, "where salary deductions are being used as a means to financially control workers". This is meant to be a crime in Aotearoa, but the way the RSE scheme is set up virtually guarantees it. Rather than being free to work for anyone, RSE workers are "bonded" to a particular employer, held captive to allow their exploitation. Effectively, we have a system of government-sponsored debt-slavery for the benefit of the horticultural industry.

We need to end this exploitative system. And the easiest way of doing it is to end bonding and give people real visas, so workers can move to non-exploitative employers. Of course, that would defeat the purpose - to provide the horticultural industry with cheap, captive labour to subsidise their profits. So I guess our chickenshit Labour government - supposedly a worker's party - will let this exploitation continue.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

In the past there's been a few interesting data points about the New Zealand Intelligence Community's desire to covertly manipulate public opinion through media and academic mouthpieces. In 2015 the Council for Civil Liberties revealed the existence of an NZIC "Strategic Communications Group" tasked with persuading the public that spying was necessary and that the spies could be trusted. And earlier this year, a briefing on data ethics - all about the need to build "social licence" for stuff the SIS wanted to do (or was already doing) with our data - talked about the SIS being provided with the contact details of "good external thinkers" who could be used to "amplify certain messages we would like to get out". Which again sounds like covert domestic political propaganda, rather than anything acceptable in a democracy.

Today we have another data point: someone used FYI - the public OIA request site - to request emails between the SIS and various media outlets, as well as "University of Waikato Law Professor Alexander Gillespie" (who has provided pro-SIS commentary in a number of media outlets). Today, the SIS finally responded. While they released (non-OIA-related) communications with journalists (which are as boring as you would expect), they refused to release anything about Professor Gillespie, and indeed refused to confirm or deny that such communications had taken place:

In respect of your request for emails between the NZSIS and Professor Alexander Gillespie, as provided for by section 10 of the OIA, I can neither confirm nor deny whether we hold this information. To do so would be likely to prejudice the interests protected by section 6(a) of the OIA, namely the security or defence of New Zealand.

You should not infer this to mean that we have any correspondence with Professor Gillespie. While correspondence between media and our organisation holds a public interest, this is not translated to private citizens.

Which is... interesting. If this was simply a matter of privacy (as suggested by the second paragraph), they would simply withhold under that clause. But hiding behind "national security" suggests something else. As noted above, Professor Gillespie has provided pro-SIS comment in a number of media outlets (for example. Or this). In the past, I've said that where the spies are confirmed, a refusal to confirm or deny is effectively an admission of guilt, and the same applies here. The allegation of covert propaganda is so damaging to the spies that they would deny it if they possibly could. The fact that they are conspicuously refusing to do so therefore tells us something, and something that is potentially very smelly indeed. In 1999 politicians and the public were outraged to find SOE Timberlands was covertly manipulating public opinion using lobbyists and PR companies. For the SIS to be doing so would be far, far worse.

Windfall tax now!

Inflation is through the roof, and "coincidentally" so is oil company profiteering. UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls it what it is: grotesque:

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has described the record profits of oil and gas companies as immoral and urged governments to introduce a windfall tax, using the money to help those in the most need.

Speaking in New York on Wednesday, Guterres said the “grotesque greed” of the fossil fuel companies and their financial backers had led to the combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year hitting almost $100bn (£82bn).

“It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities, at a massive cost to the climate,” he said.

“I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits, and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times.”

He's right, about both the problem and the solution. These companies are making mega-profits from destroying the planet. Those profits should be taken from them, redistributed, and used to reduce the harm they cause. Not only will this improve social justice, but it will also help reduce the incentive for such destructive behaviour in the first place.

So Labour, how about it? Do you stand with the people, or the oil companies? With the planet, or its killers?

Undoing Muldoon's crime

A little over 40 years ago, Falema'i Lesa won her appeal before the Privy Council, which ruled that she - and every other Samoan born under New Zealand colonial rule - was a New Zealand citizen. Then-Prime Minister Rob Muldoon didn't like that, so he had an urgent law passed stripping citizenship from all Samoans outside New Zealand. It has been called "New Zealand's most racist immigration law", and it is a permanent stain on our relations with Samoa.

And now the Greens are planning to fix it. Green MP Teanau Tuiono had a Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill in the ballot this morning. The bill isn't online yet, so I'm not sure about the fiddly bits, but if it does what it says on the label and reverses Muldoon's racist law, then it will remove a stain from our history. The Greens have an open letter in support of the bill; you can sign it here.

Drawn

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

• Housing Infrastructure (GST-sharing) Bill (Brooke van Velden)
• Prohibition on Seabed Mining Legislation Amendment Bill (Debbie Ngarewa-Packer)

Ngarewa-Packer's bill looks likely to start a shitfight with Labour, and not just because the latter seems to support seabed mining - the bill goes rather further than that, and would immediately end all offshore fossil fuel development as well. Which is something we need to be talking about and setting a concrete date for. Hopefully this bill will provide us with a vehicle to start that conversation.

Blowback on abortion

At the end of June, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, putting abortion rights in America under threat. The move was unpopular - abortion rights have had clear majority support for decades and only a tiny minority of religious bigots think it should be illegal in all circumstances - but Republican theocrats didn't care, and started enacting (or activating) abortion bans. One of these efforts was in Kansas, where Republicans ran a referendum to overturn a state supreme court ruling and remove abortion protection from the state constitution. Being Republicans, of course, they didn't want a fair vote - so they ran a physical vote parallel to the Republican Party primary (where Democrats and non-aligned voters wouldn't be voting), and pulled out all the usual scams to trick people into voting the way they wanted. And despite all that, they just had their arses handed to them:

Kansans secured a huge win for abortion rights in the US on Tuesday night when they voted to continue to protect abortion in the state constitution.

The race was called by a host of US groups like NBC News, the New York Times and Decision Desk HQ.

The move will be seen as huge a loss for the anti-abortion movement and a major win for abortion rights advocates across America, who will see the result as a bellwether for popular opinion.

And this is Kansas, about as red a state as you can get. If Kansas won't vote to eliminate abortion rights - by a margin of 60 - 40 - then it seems unlikely other states will if given the choice. And Republican legislators pushing for abortion bans may find themselves getting massacred at the ballot box come November.

A new standard for BORA consistency?

Golriz Ghahraman's Electoral (Strengthening Democracy) Amendment Bill will probably face its first reading today. And three months after it was introduced - pissing on the "as soon as practicable" requirement of Standing Order 269 - it has received a section 7 report from Attorney-General David Parker stating that its proposed donation cap is (potentially) inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act.

I say "potentially" above because Parker doesn't actually find that the bill is inconsistent. Instead, he makes the report because while

a donation cap is certainly capable of being a justified limit on the s 14 right [to freedom of expression], but I have insufficient policy information at present to conclude that the proposed cap is such a justified limit.

To which the natural question is "did he ask"?

The fundamental problem here is that, being a member's bill, there isn't a pile of background policy documentation analysing the choices made to demonstrate that the limit is proportionate to the limitation of the right. In the absence of such information, Parker has taken a conservative approach (as used by the Court of Appeal in the voting age case, and by Parker recently over the Rotorua District Council (Representation Arrangements) Bill) that the absence of justification means a provision cannot be considered justified. I welcome that approach - we should be cautious about limiting human rights and demand that limitations be properly justified. And I look forward to it being similarly applied to government bills, Labour member's bills, and existing archaic law.

At the same time, we need to recognise that this imposes a greater burden on member's bills than on government ones. The easiest solution of course is to amend Standing Orders to allow sponsors of member's bills to make submissions to the Attorney-General on justification before a section 7 report is issued. This should prevent the government using this structural unfairness to unfairly target bills.

The IPCA wants teeth

There's an interesting select committee report out today, from the Petitions Committee on the Petition of Conrad Petersen: The Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA). The petitioner raises some concerns about the slowness of the IPCA process and its lack of oversight, and suggests some solutions. The committee doesn't seem keen on them. But they did ask the IPCA what it thought, and the IPCA had some suggestions of its own...

The most boring one is greater oversight over the 75% of complaints they refer back to police, where basicly they don't get to say anything about it until the police get back to them with a "nothing to see here, guv". The IPCA expresses clear doubts over the police's ability to investigate themselves (which is basicly why the IPCA exists), but weirdly wants to keep letting them.

More interestingly, they want to be involved in police employment decisions following investigations; the power to conduct "own-motion" complaints rather than having to wait for an individual complaint or a referral from the police (who seem to drag their feet where they can); and, most explosively, the power to prosecute independently of police (which would require changes to the law to allow information given to the IPCA to be used in court).

This is basicly the agenda critics of the IPCA have been calling for for years. And now the IPCA supports it. The select committee meanwhile says "no hurry, eh?" and recommends that the government "consider the IPCA submission in due course", but it seems more urgent than that. Is there any MP willing to take a member's bill to give the IPCA what it wants?

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, but likely to be a boring one. There's no general debate today, and instead the House will move right into the third reading of the Canterbury Regional Council (Ngāi Tahu Representation) Bill, which will add unelected, inherently conflicted Ngai Tahu representatives to ECan. Then there's a two hour debate on a boring Treasury investment statement, and together these items will eat most of the available time.It should be able to finish the first reading of Greg O'Connor law-and-order-bullshit Child Protection (Child Sex Offender Government Agency Registration) (Overseas Travel Reporting) Amendment Bill and Chris Baillie's Repeal of Good Friday and Easter Sunday as Restricted Trading Days (Shop Trading and Sale of Alcohol) Amendment Bill, and make a start on Golriz Ghahraman's Electoral (Strengthening Democracy) Amendment Bill. If the early debates went quickly, it should also be able to make a start on Jacqui Dean's Increased Penalties for Breach of Biosecurity Bill. There should be a ballot for three or four bills tomorrow.

27,000 employed under Labour

The quarterly labour market statistics were released this morning, showing unemployment has risen slightly to 3.3%. There are now 96,000 unemployed - 27,000 fewer than when Labour took office.

The media narrative around this release has been... interesting. Unemployment was predicted to be as low as 2.8%, causing panic from the rich. Unemplyment is Bad, it seems, unless there's "not enough" of it and wages are rising, in which case its time for the Reserve bank to throw people out of work and the government to attract cheap foreign labour to keep those uppity workers under control. Which tells you who policy is made for, and it isn't ordinary kiwis.

Plugging the loophole

A couple of weeks ago the High Court exposed a loophole in our electoral donations law, enabling corrupt parties to take in unlimited amounts of secret money and explicitly sell policy to the rich. Pretty obviously, this is unacceptable in a country which wants to call itself a democracy, and so now the government has promised to fix it:

The Government will close a “loophole” in electoral law exposed by the New Zealand First Foundation court case, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.

Ardern, speaking to RNZ on Monday morning, said the court ruling in the case was an “unexpected interpretation” of electoral law that could be remedied in “quite a timely way”. Last week she cast doubt on whether the Government could legislate in response to the court ruling before the 2023 election.

“We have a piece of electoral law that covers issues of donation that is currently now in the process of going through the House.

“We believe there's a way that we can, without creating any unintended consequences, address this issue through that process.”

Good. Not that there's any virtue here on Labour's part - party officials are currently being prosecuted over Labour's own dirty financial dealings, and Ardern had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this (its as if the status quo parties are addicted to secret money or something). But the public is pretty firm on wanting big money out of politics, and I guess the focus groups were strong enough on this that Labour felt it had to listen. As for the "how", hopefully they'll give some indication in the House tomorrow afternoon before the Electoral Amendment Bill goes to committee.

A runaway success

This year the government finally got its clean car feebate scheme into place. But there's a problem: it's been too successful:

Transport Minister Michael Wood will shortly review the cost of the fees and rebates in the Government's "feebate" scheme after the runaway success of the policy has meant it is paying out millions more in rebates each month than it collects in fees.

[...]

The clean-car discount is meant to encourage people to buy cleaner cars by offering a discount of up to $8625 from the price of an electric or low-emissions car. These discounts are paid for by fees of up to $5175 on dirtier cars. The Government said it would regularly review fee and discount levels when it announced the scheme.

The scheme is meant to be self-funding, but it could become a victim of its own success, paying out millions more in fees each month than it collects in revenue. This could mean fees going up or discounts going down when the scheme is reviewed in just a year's time.

Firstly, this sounds like the policy has been a huge success at driving the change it was intended to. Which shows just how much difference these sorts of policy pushes can make. Secondly, increasing fees is going to make dirty cars more expensive, discouraging their use even further. The big worry here is that the government will worry too much about making the books balance perfectly, and so undermine the impact of the scheme, when what they should be focusing on is the extremely rapid change they're driving. Because we need to decarbonise as quickly as possible, and transport is one of the big sticking points in this. The faster we can do it, the better off we'll be.

Why we need an OIA review

Stuff has relaunched its "redacted" series on freedom of information, starting today with an examination of OIA delays, and a look at the government's broken promise of an OIA review. The latter has raised some doubts about whether a review is really necessary, including from Ombudsman Peter Boshier (who thinks its all a matter of bad public servants and that everything would be fine if they were just good chaps), and I agree there are real questions about whether the government can be trusted to meddle in transparency legislation (especially given the attitudes displayed by Ministry of Justice, the agency responsible for the Act). But for those doubting whether we actually need one, there is a very simple answer: the law is now 40 years old.

The OIA is, bluntly, the product of another era. And not the grim, pinched, haunted-by-a-piggy-cackle one we think. The attitudes which shaped it are even older. Alan Danks, the man whose name is on the report which gave us the OIA, was born in 1914. While his report Towards Open Government is a highmark of a liberal trend which had been opening New Zealand up since the 1960's, its also clearly shaped by the authoritarian, monarchist, deferential, anti-democratic attitudes of the society he grew up in, and which he helped undermine. A society where government was top-down, not bottom-up, distant and accountable only at elections (which effectively produced a triennial dictatorship), where foreign affairs and defence were "high matters of state" for kings and their anointed ministers, to be kept out of the mucky hands of the peasantry. Most importantly, a society where all government information was presumed to be secret, and its disclosure criminal.

The OIA (and Danks) changed that, and helped make us into a better, more open, more democratic society. Today, the attitudes underlying many of its withholding grounds seem highly questionable, if not downright suspect. Modern people approaching the same problem are likely to find a different balance between secrecy and transparency than Danks did - and one more in favour of transparency, because it has in many ways become a default.

But its not just about social attitudes. We've had massive constitutional change in that 40 years, most obviously in the form of the BORA and MMP. And the BORA is a particular issue, because it explicitly affirms the right to receive information. Meaning every OIA withholding ground prima facie violates it, and needs to be re-examined to see if it really is a reasonable limit which can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. Its been the law for 30 years now, but that exercise has never taken place. A review would let us do that.

And of course there's the fact that the rest of the world hasn't stood still. The OIA was one of the first right to information laws passed. Now there's 40 years progress overseas with a number of valuable lessons. Other countries make their parliaments, their courts, and even private bodies receiving substantial public funds subject to transparency laws. They have better complaints and enforcement mechanisms. They have legal requirements for proactive publication. We are decidedly behind the times.

None of this of course means we can trust the government to meddle with the OIA. Labour and the Ministry of Justice (the agency responsible for overseeing the Act) have shown their hostility to its values, and National isn't any better. Any review must be kept out of the hands of politicians and officials to ensure it is not captured and used as a vehicle for pushing greater secrecy. It must also be public and transparent, allowing for genuine consultation. That means - Labour - consultation when a policy is being shaped, not afterwards, as a rubberstamp (and it certainly does not mean "select committee submissions". They're a final fix-up of an end-product, not actual consultation). Which suggests that maybe we should just cut the government out of the process entirely, have NGOs and civil society organisations interested in transparency run their own review, use it to draft a bill or series of amendments, and then campaign for its passage.

Is the tide turning on secrecy clauses?

Over the last couple of years there has been a disturbing trend of new legislation containing secrecy clauses, which effectively make it illegal for affected government bodies to disclose information under the Official Information Act. Some of these are re-enacting old legislation from the pre- or early-OIA era (in which case they should be re-examined from the ground up to see if there is still a justification strong enough to support violating the BORA). Some are naked secrecy grabs to make agencies less accountable. Some seem driven by an oversensitivity to concerns about confidentiality from business (an interest which is already well-protected by the OIA). And some are ostensibly about allowing agencies to publish and disclose information, while in fact having the opposite effect. The good news is that there's been some movement on the latter. In addition to select committees amending those clauses to respect the OIA, newer-legislation is now also doing this explicitly from the beginning. For example, the new Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill forbids the newly-established Accessibility Committee from publishing information it requests from other government agencies, unless (among other reasons) "the publication or disclosure is made under the Official Information Act 1982 or is otherwise required by law".

Its a good change to see, and hopefully it will continue. At the same time, it makes the secrecy clauses which have slipped through unamended - like this one or this one - all the more glaring. They need to be removed. In 1987 the government reviewed all extant secrecy clauses, and repealed those which could not then be justified. 35 years later, we clearly need to do it again.

Climate Change: Freeing the ETS

The Emissions Trading Scheme is broken. Stuffed with free allocations and rigged with a "cost containment reserve" which floods the market any time prices get "too high" (for a definition of "too high" set in a different world), its basicly served as a machanism to subsidise the production of the pollution it ostensibly wants to get rid of, at a cost of billions of dollars a year. This is obviously unsustainable, so much so that even the foot-draggers in Labour have recognised it, and they finally seem to be fixing it. last week, they announced they'd be reducing free allocation (though dragging their feet on it at the cost of another billion dollars). And today, the Climate Change Commisison published advice on the topic of NZ ETS unit limits and price control settings for 2023-2027 - basicly, how much carbon polluters will be allowed to emit, and how much they will pay for it.

The changes proposed are massive. Comparing their new numbers (p11 - 12) to the current settings, they'll be ripping over 12 million tons out of the overall cap over four years, lowering it from 124.9 to 112.7 million tons. But it gets better, because that cap includes the Cost Containment Reserve volume, and they're increasing the trigger price (the point at which it becomes available) by about $100/ton, from $78.40 to $171 in 2023 (they're also moving to a two-tier CCR, with a small volume released at that price, and the bulk of it at a price ~$40 higher). CCR volumes have increased by about a million tons a year, but the massive price increase means those credits should effectively be unavailable. Meaning the effective volume available will be decreased by another 29.7 million tons to just 83 million tons. That's a reduction by a third. Unfortunately, past policy mistakes have left polluters with a massive stockpile of credits, but these changes should see most of them used up by 2026 (the Commission's goal is to force the stockpile to be used by 2030). The upshot: we're going to see a big increase in carbon prices, a reduction in the stockpile, and real price pressure on polluters to reduce emissions. The price increase should also be high enough to incentivise native forestry, so all those farmers currently hating on pine as a threat to their rural lifestyle will start sharpening the chainsaws for manuka and totara.

(The massive decrease also shows just how much the rest of New Zealand is squeezed by the exclusion of farmers from the ETS. They don't have to make cuts, so all the burden goes on us, and we'll be paying for it. And all to protect a tiny minority of dirty, rural rich people...)

Of course, this assumes that the government adopts the Climate Commission's advice. They have a good record on this in the past, but those changes have been fairly small and ineffectual. This is actually going to do something, so we can expect the pressure to go on from polluters to water it down and weaken it and keep the subsidies flowing. Which means we're going to see whose side Labour is really on: the planets, or the polluters'.

We need a windfall tax

New Zealand companies are using their oligopolistic market power to gouge mega profits, driving up inflation. Overseas, such actions have resulted in windfall taxes, which have been used both to drive down inflation, and ameliorate its impacts (while driving down emissions). With New Zealand petrol companies pocketing record margins and banks shipping record amounts of cash offshore to their foreign owners, it seems like we could do the same here. But is Labour even thinking about it? Of course not:

The Treasury said it had not been asked to conduct any work on a windfall tax for energy companies, and Finance Minister Grant Robertson confirmed no work was under way.

“We are closely monitoring margins in the fuel market to make sure savings are being passed on to motorists,” Robertson said.

So much for standing up for ordinary kiwis.

The Greens, the media, and democracy

The big news over the weekend was that Green party delegates at their AGM voted to re-open nominations for James Shaw's co-leadership position, effectively toppling him as co-leader. I'm not a member of the Greens, so its not really my place to have an opinion on who should lead them - it is a decision for their membership, not for rubbernecking bystanders like me. But something I can have an opinion of is the reaction of Aotearoa's political journalists, who have variously characterised this as "disruptive", "destabilising", an "existential crisis", a "self-implo[sion]". Which paints a fairly unappealing picture of a journalist class which prefers autocracy over democracy, and for our party leaders to be unaccountable to their members. Which seems to be somewhat at odds with the values they present to the public for their self-proclaimed "fourth estate"...

Part of the problem seems to be that its an Outside Context Problem for the media. They're basicly courtiers, who primarily deal with and report on other courtiers. For them, leadership issues are resolved by cabals and conspiracies, BBQs and fish n' chip clubs, secret deals made by "Great Men" and "Great Women" - all of which have self-serving insiders who will give them the gossip to fulfil their own agendas. They're also used to an environment of cynicism, in which policies are just something you espouse to get power, rather than the other way round. Parties which actually stand for something, and which hold their leaders to account for their delivery, are therefore something of a challenge (which they usually dismiss by labelling such parties "naive", promoting cynicism as normal and desirable). And when the peasants just rise up like this, they just can't process it, other than to recognise it as different, and therefore Bad. Which again is a pretty suspicious attitude to take towards democracy and accountability, especially from people who purport to be its champions. And its a pretty suspicious attitude to take towards the idea of member-controlled political parties, which is apparent the moment you ask the question: if parties don't serve their members, who should they serve?

The problem here isn't that the Greens have "too much" democracy - its that other parties have too little. And our courtier journalists are institutionalised into thinking that this is normal and desirable.

As for claims that this will be electorally bad for the Greens, I doubt it. Its not as if any core Green voters are going to turned off by their party being democratic and its leaders accountable. As for non-core voters, they've been driven to the Greens by issues like climate change, inequality, water and housing, which the Greens focus on and the status quo parties are trying to ignore. Sadly, it seems unlikely that those issues are going to get any less pressing, or that the status quo parties are going to be any more convincing (and if they are, then it'll be by adopting green solutions, which most Greens would regard as a victory). Which leaves nebulous attitudes of "trust". But that goes right back to journalists viewing and presenting democracy as bad and untrustworthy...

The Greens will solve their leadership issue democratically, as they always do. Whoever emerges as co-leader will have the endorsement of the membership, as they should. This is a normal process for a democratic party. The voices portraying it as weird or bad are telling us far more about their own anti-democratic attitudes than they are about the Greens.

So its worse then

When news about the New Zealand First Foundation broke, electoral law expert Andrew Geddis put it succinctly:

[T]he alternative conclusion is, if anything, even more worrying. If it turns out that the foundation and the party somehow are operating lawfully, as we should note Winston Peters maintains, then that demonstrates our electoral law simply is not fit for purpose.

[...]

If this is legal, then there’s no way that it should be. You can’t have a country’s political system run in this way and be considered the second least corrupt nation on the planet. Or, at least, you can’t do it for long.

Today the high court found that it was indeed legal (and granted those involved permanent name suppression, because being rich means never having to face the reputational consequences of your actions). Which means that it is worse. A political party can literally sell policy, taking donations in secret, then using its influence within government to benefit the donors, without even the usual paltry warning signs from our pathetic disclosure laws. It is a sign of the total corruption of our political system.

The question we should all be asking of our politicians is "what are you going to do about it?" Because I don't think this is acceptable to the vast majority of kiwis. Conveniently, the government just introduced its Electoral Amendment Bill, which deals with donations. I expect significant pressure at the select committee stage to patch this gaping hole in the law. And if the political class refuses to, we should regard it as both a statement of intent and an admission of guilt.

Climate Change: A quarter-billion dollar delay

Back in 2020, the government realised that the industrial allocations in the ETS - supposed to protect large polluters from unfair competition from countries who didn't pay for their carbon - was overallocated. They were giving away too many free credits, resulting in windfall gains to polluters. Having noticed this, the government promised to urgently fix this bleeding sore in public finances, which was costing $60 million a year.

...and then they did nothing. And then did more nothing. Last year, they finally started a review. And now, two and a half years, millions of tons of carbon, and something like $150 milion later, they've finally announced they will fix it. In 2024:

The Government is closing a $60m loophole that allows big polluters to make windfall gains.

Under the Emissions Trading Scheme, some heavy emitters get up to 90 per cent of their pollution credits free.

But outdated maths means some companies can earn up to three times the cost of their actual pollution– a loophole Climate Change Minister James Shaw has now promised to close starting in 2024.

...which means they'll be giving away more carbon, around another hundred millions dollars worth, before they fix it. A quarter of a billion dollars in total. No hurry, eh? And that's without even considering the decade of overallocation before that - another $600 million - or questions about what carbon price they're using (if they're using market prices rather than social costs, then it could easily be double that).

All up this colossal fuckup has cost us the thick end of a billion dollars (or double that), which has gone directly on the profits of these polluting companies. Normally that's the sort of thing that would agitate the current opposition, but because its gone to polluters they'll be whistling tunelessly over in the corner. Overpayments to polluters is also the sort of thing you'd expect to agitate the Greens, but because their Minister is in charge at the moment, they're not interested in accountability either. No-one in our political system is going to stand up for the public over this, and the polluters who benefited from this are going to be allowed to get away with it and laugh all the way to the bank.

They shouldn't be allowed to. When WINZ overpays a beneficiary, they take it back, clawing it out of future payments (or demanding weekly payments from those who have escaped them). We should apply the same approach to rich polluters: these overallocated credits should be reclaimed, either from future allocations, or directly from these companies' ETS accounts. That will not only give justice to the public - it will also restore integrity to the ETS by reducing the massive stockpile of credits.

Finally, it is clear that the government should have acted much faster to fix this. James Shaw owes us an explanation of why something supposedly so urgent took so long. Because while he didn't cause this problem - that's on National, and Nick Smith in particular - he is responsible for fixing it, and the length of time taken is definitely unacceptable.