In the ballot XV

Another batch of Member's Bills currently in the ballot. Previous batches are indexed here:

Sale of Liquor (Objections to Applications) Amendment Bill (George Hawkins): This would amend the Sale of Liquor Act 1989 to require every applicant for an on- or off-licence (meaning bars and restaurants) to conduct an evaluation of the social and economic effects of their proposed activities, and extend public rights of objection to any affected party (rather than the current situation where they are limited to anyone having "a greater interest in the application than the public generally"). The possible grounds of objection would also be extended.

Local Government (Rates Poll Demand) Amendment Bill (Rodney Hide): This bill is part of Rodney Hide's project to become the local Grover Norquist, and drown local government in the bathtub. It would amend the Local Government (Rating) Act 2002 to allow ratepayers to demand a local referendum on rate increases in excess of inflation. The poll itself is designed for maximum disruption - it must be held in the year in which the new rates apply (rather than before they are introduced) and requires refunds to ratepayers if successful. The aim is clearly to deter rate increases with the threat of additional costs and hassle. How local government is supposed to pay for the additional roads ratepayers and ACT politicians are clamouring for is left unstated.

Treaty Of Waitangi (Removal of Conflict of Interest) Amendment Bill (Pita Paraone): This bill would amend the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 to forbid serving judges of the High Court of Maori land Court from sitting on the Waitangi Tribunal. Currently, the Act requires that the chairperson of the Tribunal be a Judge or retired Judge of the High Court or the Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court, and allows the chairperson to appoint a Judge of the Maori Land Court as deputy chair. This provides the Tribunal with specialist legal expertise, but also creates the potential for a conflict of interest - particularly if the Tribunal becomes involved in an issue which had previously been before a judge in the courts (as it was in the case of the foreshore and seabed). I've yet to see any evidence of this actually happening - for example there was no overlap of personnel in the foreshore and seabed claim - but the poential is definitely there. NZ First's solution to this potential problem is to eliminate it by replacing sitting judges with retired ones. However, I'm not sure that's necessary. The general rule in the judiciary is that where a judge has a conflict of interest - where for example they would be ruling on an appeal against a case they have sat on - they stand aside. I see no reason why this couldn't (and wouldn't) be practiced by judges sitting on the Waitangi Tribunal.

As usual, I'll have more bills as they trickle in.

Ongoing support

(Date set to keep this at the top for a few days)

The Dominion-Post reports that unions have raised almost $100,000 to support the locked-out supermarket distribution workers. It sounds like a lot of money, but when you split it 550 ways, its only about $180 per person - not that much to cover 19 days so far without pay. More public support is needed, and it needs to be ongoing, for as long as the lock-out lasts. So, I'm proposing that we put our money where our mouths are, and make a commitment. I've created a pledge on PledgeBank saying

I will donate $20 each week to support the locked-out supermarket distribution workers but only if 10 other New Zealanders will too.

You can sign it here.

$20 is the cost of one call to the 0900 LOCK OUT number, and that's all I'm asking people to sign up for: call that number once a week (or donate by direct credit or online) until the lock-out ends. Obviously, don't sign up unless you can spare the cash.

I've gone for a deadline of Friday because I want to get donations flowing by the end of the week, and I've deliberately chosen a low trigger number because I want this to succeed. Note that there's nothing stopping people from signing up to a pledge has met its target, and I'd encourage people to do so. The more people who sign up and donate, the greater a show of support it will be.

This is the first time I've tried to use PledgeBank to raise money for a cause, and it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Update: well, that was quick - we've hit the target in less than 24 hours. Time to start making those donations...

Note that you can still add your name and commit to the pledge, as the deadline hasn't closed. The more people who sign up, the more effective it will be.

Update 2 (14/09/2006): Bumped to keep it at the top for a while longer. Currently there are 20 signups; can we make it 25 by the end of the week?

Some "revolt"

Since his shameless admission that the US has been holding suspected terrorists in a secret gulag and subjecting them to an "alternative set of [interrogation] procedures" (which everyone else would call torture), Bush has been trying to get Congress to push through legislation legitimising this treatment and establishing a set of one-sided kangaroo courts to hold show-trials for suspects. Now, the media is reporting that Republican Senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee have revolted to push through their own bill "establishing clear protection for the rights of detained terrorist suspects."

Some revolt. While the Graham / Warner bill indeed rejects Bush's attempts to redefine the protections of the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3 out of existence, bars the use of evidence extracted by torture or coercion, and ensures that suspects have access to the evidence used against them, even if classified, it also eliminates the right of detainees to take action against the US for anything (including torture), amends the War Crimes Act so that only "grave breaches" of Common Article 3 are war crimes, and (most disturbingly) writes US torturers a big fat "get out of jail free" card. If this is protecting the "moral basis" of the "war on terror", then I'd love to see what counts as undermining it...

Submit!

The Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee has called for submissions on the Human Rights (Women in Armed Forces) Amendment Bill. Two copies, by Friday, 20 October 2006, to

Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Secretariat
Bowen House
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

I know this one is a bit of a no-brainer, but if you do have a strong opinion on it, then it is worth letting the committee know. A submission is not difficult - it can be a letter as simple as "I support/oppose this bill" and stating the reasons why. If you need help, the Office of the Clerk has a helpful guide here.

A generational thing

Writing in Salon, David Brin (yes, that one) asks why Johnny can't code. His son apparently still learns from maths textbooks so old that they have sections at the end of each chapter titled "try it in BASIC", with short programs illustrating how to solve mathematical problems as well as teaching the rudiments of programming.

"BASIC?" I hear some of you ask, "What's that?"

BASIC, short for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", is a programming language from the dark ages - after we'd figured out that you didn't need to code everything in ones and zeros or switches on a panel, but before we'd decided that procedures were the way to go (objects being not even a dream back then). It had line numbers and handled everything by sequential processing, with the ability to jump around the program with statements like "GOSUB" and "GOTO" (the latter now considered harmful and eliminated from all serious programming languages). The important point is that from the early 80's, every home computer shipped with a copy of BASIC, which you were forced to use if you wanted them to do anything. So thousands of children got their first taste of programming with "programs" such as this:

10 PRINT "IDIOT IS COOL!"
20 GOTO 10

(The eyes! The mouths! The tentacles!)

This seems to have been a universal experience among people of a certain age who had any contact at all with computers. Most then got bored and wandered off (or learned how to load games) - but some stuck at it and learned the basics of how to tell a computer what to do (and that it would do exactly what you told it to - no matter how stupid), which then provided them with a good grounding (as well as some bad habits) when it came time to learn a real programming language in later life.

Brin's problem is that children just don't get this experience any more. No computer ships with BASIC or any other comparably simple programming language as standard (and no, the Microsoft Visual Basic built into Word doesn't count, being both inaccessible to most people and a bit too complex as an introduction). In the end, he bought an old Commodore-64 over the net to ensure that his son could "see the lines that weave through the fabric of cyberspace" and get a basic grasp on how computers work "under the hood". But this is obviously an far from perfect solution, and instead it would be far easier if every computer had a toy language in a sandbox built into its operating system so that children can learn the basics. And it certainly seems like a good idea, given the increasing importance and ubiquity of computers in modern society...

Carnival of the Liberals

The twenty-first Carnival of the Liberals is now up at Archy.

Shrinking icecaps

One of the sure signs of global warming is the shrinking of the polar icecaps. And according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, it seems to be happening. The full article (here) reports that the amount of perennial ice - the permanant cap - in the East Arctic ocean shrank by 70% in the last year. It can be graphically seen in the images below:

There was some growth in the West Arctic, but nowhere near enough to compensate; the total icecap shrank by 14% in a single year. The normal rate of shrinkage, averaged across the last few decades, is between 0.64% and 0.78%. Some of this is almost certainly the result of unusual wind patterns pushing ice from east to west - but two thirds of the ice area was lost in the process, and the resulting area of exposed water has a much lower albedo (10% vs 40 - 50%), meaning it will warm quicker, making it more difficult for the seasonal ice to reform and possibly leading to a runaway melting of the whole icecap. This won't affect sea levels, as the ice is floating to begin with, but it will accelerate the warming trend, not to mention pretty much destroying the Arctic ecosystem. I guess we'll have to wait and see whether this is repeated over the next few years, but if it is, we can pretty much kiss the polar bears goodbye...

Reversing inequality

Over the past couple of months, I've been following an interesting series of posts by Kevin Drum on income inequality in America. His core thesis is that government policies aimed at keeping unions weak and inflation low have kept a lid on wage growth, allowing the wealthy to capture virtually all the economic growth of the last few decades. The result has been spiralling inequality, an enormous increase in the wealth of the already-rich - and stagnation or decline for everyone else. Median incomes have fallen across much of the US in the last six years (by 2.8% nationally, and more than 10% in some states), and the average, median-income-earning male is now worse off in real terms than they were in 1972. The US has become what Joseph Stiglitz calls "a rich country of poor people".

If this seems like a familiar story, it's because it is exactly what happened here during the 90's. The smashing of the unions under the ECA, the adoption of tight anti-inflationary policies, and the manipulation of unemployment levels to create a constant labour surplus neatly channelled the fruits of growth away from the many, and into the hands of the few.

How can we reverse this? One way is by more progressive taxation. Another is by strengthening unions and allowing them to fight (and win) improvements in wages and conditions. This will slowly begin to rebalance the distribution between wages and capital (which had shifted significantly over the 90's in favour of the latter), and slowly reduce inequality. Labour has done both of those things, and now it’s just a matter of time waiting for them to work. Unfortunately, all their good work could be upset if National gets back into power and restarts the Revolution...

What's at stake

What's at stake in the supermarket lock-out? Tapu Misa lays it out:

The dispute between Progressive and its 500-plus distribution workers and their union, the National Distribution Union (NDU), is shaping up as a critical last stand for unions. "If we lose this," says one union organiser, "we'll go backwards."

Employers, too, see the dispute as an ideological one. Alasdair Thompson, the chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, said that "if they were to pull this off then it could well lead to other situations where other employers who operate nationally see this sort of thing tried out against them".

Where "this sort of thing" is workers using their numbers to strengthen their bargaining position and demand better wages and conditions - clearly, not the sort of thing we can have in a competitive market economy...

The last few years have been as good as it gets economically speaking. Reasonable economic performance combined with a labour shortage so severe that employers are "hoarding labour" are exactly the sorts of conditions you'd expect to produce an improvement in working conditions and a distributional shift away from shareholders and towards employees. If workers can't extract better wages and conditions now, when the hell can they?

Pointing the finger

I was planning to avoid any comment on Don Brash's leave of absence. Unlike some, I don't think his clumsy election smear over Helen Clark's marriage allowed open season, and unlike Russell or Chris Trotter on Campbell Live last night, I don't really think the identity of the other party really does either (but talk about being in bed with big business...). It might be amusing, it might be titillating, it might be unexpected, but fundamentally it's Brash's business who he screws, and not really any of mine. It's not like he's Graham Capill, after all...

That said, I do have to comment on Judith Collins' attempt to blame this on Labour. Yes, Trevor Mallard and David Benson-Pope are creeps for their comments in the House last week - but those comments were not reported, and Brash's activities stayed out of the public arena (despite apparently being an open secret around Parliament) until one of his own colleagues stuck the knife in by raising the matter in caucus and with the media. Whether this was simply revenge for past slights, or an effort to force a change in leadership is unclear (though my money is on the latter) - but the fact remains that it was National who brought this to public attention, not Labour.

The new latifundia

2000 years ago, the Roman Empire was fed by latifundia, large rural estates, the first example of industrialised agriculture in the world. The workers on these estates were slaves. The prosperity of Rome and its ability to maintain a highly cultured urban population depended on a brutal system of agricultural slavery in which people were treated as property and killed, maimed or tortured on a whim.

Today, the system of latifundia still exists. So do the slaves. Only instead of using Dacians and Africans and Slavs captured in battle or through conquest, they use illegal immigrants from Romania, Africa and Poland. They treat them just the same though - the account of Fabrizio Gatti in L'espresso of his life amongst the slaves of Puglia would be easily recognisable to any ancient slave - or to any American one:

To protect their affairs, farmers and landowners have created an army of ruthless gang masters: Italians, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans. They lodge their workers in makeshift shacks that are avoided even by stray dogs. Without water or electricity, in disgusting hygenical conditions. They make the men work from 6 AM to 10 PM. And they pay them only - when they pay them - 15 or 20 Euros per day. Complaints are dealt with by beatings with a steel bar. Some workers decided to seek the assistance of the Police, in Foggia: thanks to the Immigration Law named after Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini, they were arrested or expelled from Italy because they didn't have the necessary work permits.

Others ran away. The gang masters searched for them all night long. It was a scene similar to the manhunts in Alan Parker's film, "Mississippi Burning." In the end, some of them were captured and some of them were killed.

There's more, and its worse. People being beaten for dropping a case of tomatoes. people being beaten for talking to outsiders. People being beaten and killed for shopping somewhere other than the company store, with its inflated prices and rotten meat.

The fact that this is still happening in Europe is absolutely abhorrent. And there are two causes. The driving force is what Rutherford Waddell called "the sin of cheapness" - the drive for lowest cost production in order to maximise profits. But the thing that really makes it possible is harsh laws against illegal immigration, which prevent illegal immigrants from complaining to the police about their treatment, and effectively place them beyond the protection of the law. Assault, murder and slavery are all illegal under Italian law, but it does no good if no-one can ever complain about them.

Now, at least, someone is beginning to notice: the Polish government is kicking up a stink about 123 Polish citizens who have disappeared while working as farm labourers in Italy. Some farms have been raided and some gangmasters arrested. But the core problem of illegal immigrants being denied the protection of the law remains, and as long as that is the case, so will this form of slavery.

Verdict on the 100 MP bill

The Justice and Electoral Committee has reported back [PDF] on Barbara Stewart's Electoral (Reduction in Number of Members of Parliament) Amendment Bill. Their conclusion?

The committee recommends that this bill not proceed. We consider that any benefits gained by reducing the number of members of Parliament from 120 to 100 would be outweighed by adverse effects on Parliament. The current number of 120 members ensures proportionality and diversity in Parliament and thus contributes to its effectiveness; and we consider it essential that these benefits are not compromised... with the growth in population, 100 members of Parliament would be inadequate in either an MMP or First-past-the-Post system, and the number of members would have to be increased regardless of any change to the electoral system.

Not quite "we recommend that this bill be burned, and the ashes placed in Te Papa as a monument to stupidity", but its close.

They seem to have relied quite heavily on DPF's submission, to the extent to reproducing one of his tables in an appendix. Kudos to DPF.

National produced its own minority report, supporting the conclusion, but echoing most of the "pro" submitters in voicing their "grave doubts about the effectiveness of the MMP electoral system" - more effective representation, diversity, democracy and a greater trust in government (see the report's Appendix D) apparently taking a backseat to whether the government system allows a government without majority (and possibly not even plurality) support to run rampant and impose its demented vision on the rest of us.

So, as it stands, the bill is as good as dead. Next Member's Day is early October, but I think the bill will still be "below the line" then, so we won't get to see it finally go down in flames until October 25th.

Sedition in Australia IV

The Australian Law Reform Commission has tabled its final report in its review of Australia's sedition laws. Fighting Words: A Review of Sedition Laws in Australia [long] makes a number of recommendations, chief of which is removing the "red-rag" term of sedition. While the offences of inciting political or inter-group violence will be retained, the law will be tightened so that urging violence must be intentional, and to require that "the person must intend that the force or violence urged will occur". This is a significant change, and stands in stark contrast to current New Zealand law, which criminalises speech which merely

incite[s], procure[s], or encourage[s] violence, lawlessness, or disorder

a far lower standard which has led to numerous atrocities against freedom of speech in this country.

The ALRC also recommends strengthening the "good faith" defence to carve out greater protection for journalists, artists, and labour unions, all of whom have expressed concern about being targeted by the law as written. It further recommends amending the law criminalising "assisting the enemy" to make it clear that such "assistance" must be material, rather than simply rhetorical. And it makes clear that while the government should claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over such crimes, they should only apply to Australian residents or citizens, ending the nonsense that someone who was not Australian and had never set foot in the country could be found guilty of "treason" against Australia.

Overall, these are welcome changes, which significantly improve the law. I am still concerned that the bar for "inciting political violence" is lower than that for other forms of incitement, but it is still far better than what is currently on the books.

Religion in schools

I've been sent an article from the Kapi-Mana News (a local rag serving Tawa and Porirua), about a Christian group at Tawa College which conducts services during lunchtimes in the school hall. This is presumably the sort of thing people were afraid the Ministry of Education's now-abandoned guidelines on secular education would have banned - after all, if you supposedly can't teach history, then you obviously can't have a full-on religious service either. Except that, like Seatoun School's "KidsKlub", it would fall entirely within the guidelines. It's opt-in, run outside normal school hours, and (as a bonus) completely student-led, so there's no implication that its anything to do with the school at all. I'd go even further and say that attempts by schools to ban such groups violate the right to manifestation of religion and belief affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act.

The proposed guidelines would have barred schools from using their authority to ram religion down student's throats. They would not have barred students from voluntarily partcipating in religious services and teaching. And I don't think that's anything that anyone should feel threatened by.

Analogous defences

DPF, in full spin mode, likens Labour's defence of its use of Parliamentary Services funds for its pledge card to a defendant who stands up in court and says

Yes your Honour, I did kill Miss Muggins. However I also killed someone in 1999 and 2002 so it would be unfair to hold me accountable now, because I thought it was okay. Plus the law was confusing and in my own mind I did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, it's the wrong analogy. The correct analogy is someone who stands up in court and says

Yes, your Honour, I did do it - but it wasn't an offence at the time.

Section 26 (1) of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act states that

No one shall be liable to conviction of any offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute an offence by such person under the law of New Zealand at the time it occurred.

While they're not facing conviction for the supposed misuse of Parliamentary funds, the same principle applies. Labour's pledge card did not violate the rules for use of Parliamentary funding as widely understood and implemented at the time. It did not explicitly solicit for votes. It did not explicitly solicit for funds. It did not explicitly solicit for members. It was released around election time, in such a way that any reasonable person would conclude that it was in fact doing exactly those things (to the extent that the Chief Electoral Officer believed it should be counted as an election expense) - but the rules governing Parliamentary advertising only forbid explicit solicitations. And for good reason: everything politicians do is aimed at soliciting votes, so barring implicit solicitations would in effect bar everything - including National Party flyers like this)

If National thinks the rules should be different, then it is free to try and change them. But they should not be trying to rewrite them retrospectively so as to punish people after the fact. That is manifestly unjust and unfair - but then, since when has National ever cared about justice or fairness?

(Note that I am not trying to let Labour off the hook in any way for their election overspending. As I note above, the conclusion that the pledge card appeared to encourage or persuade voters to vote for Labour (thus falling under s221 (1) (b) of the Electoral Act 1993) is perfectly reasonable. But I don't see any inherent incompatibility which automatically rules out something which falls within the Parliamentary spending rules from being an election advertisement. Labour clearly thought there was (what other reason could they have for disputing that it was attributable expenditure?) - but there's no exemption in the law that I can see).

One law for all, for everyone but National

While tidying the other day, I came across a pile of flyers I'd saved from the 2005 election - including several from the Brethren. But given the current fuss over the pledge card, one in particular caught my eye. Here's a scan:

Note the presence of both a smiling Don Brash, and a Parliamentary Crest, indicating that this was paid for from National's Parliamentary Services budget. I'm not sure when exactly I received this - possibly it was before the election had been announced, as part of National's pre-election campaign in which they spent millions outside of their election spending cap. But content-wise, it clearly appears to encourage or persuade voters to vote for National, just as the pledge-card did for Labour. "One law for all, for everyone but National" again, it seems...

Pushing the market

How can we solve the problem of climate change? The broad answer is that we have to push the market towards lower carbon emissions, through a combination of price-setting and regulation. The carbon tax was one way of doing this, across the entire economy (except for the farmer's sacred cows). But while the government has abandoned the broad measure, it is moving ahead on the narrower front with the release of a biofuels sales obligation discussion document outlining its proposed biofuels policy.

The proposal is simple: every year from 2008, fuel companies such as BP, Mobil etc will be required to sell a certain percentage of biofuels. That percentage will be in terms of energy, rather than litres, and will start out as 0.25% in 2008, rising to 2.25% in 2011 and later years. Failing to meet the obligation will incur a penalty of $60 million per PetaJoule, but companies can both roll over the first two years obligation (because the government understands that the infrastructure isn't there yet), bank a limited amount of early overachievement for later use, and trade that obligation amongst themselves provided such trades and the sales they represent can be independently verified. The latter is basically a cap and trade scheme in reverse, similar to the Australian Renewable Energy Certificates, and sets an economic incentive for overachievement.

Another way of looking at this is that the government is planning to set a price of $60 million / PJ for biofuels, or about $1.40 / L for bioethanol and $2.10 / L for biodiesel. If it costs less than that to get to the pump, then it is worth selling, in order to avoid the penalty or onsell the overachievement. Given that biodiesel costs around $1 / L to make (an expensive estimate), this sets a fairly strong incentive.

The proposal is good. While the timelines look distant, it will take at least a year for this to move from being a discussion document to law. The biggest criticism is that there is no "stretch" in the targets - they have been set to be easily achievable based on potential domestic biodiesel production, rather than to encourage innovation and the development of new sources. But its a start, and if the targets continue to rise after 2012, we may be able to push the market even further.

Turning full circle

Abu Ghraib prison was notorious during the reign of Saddam Hussein as the place where his regime tortured and murdered its opponents. Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the prison was first emptied - then filled again with the opponents of the occupiers, who abused, tortured, and murdered them in turn. When that became public, the US government first promised to demolish the prison, then to turn it over to the Iraqis. That handover happened last week, and we're already hearing reports that Abu Ghraib is once again (still?) a place of torture:

Inside the 100-yard long cell block the smell of excrement was overpowering. Four to six prisoners shared each of the 12ft by 15ft cells along either side and the walls were smeared with filth. The cell block was patrolled by guards who carried long batons and shouted angrily at the prisoners to stand up.

Access to the part of the prison containing terrorism suspects was denied, but from that block came the sound of screaming. The screaming continued for a long time.

"I am sure someone was being beaten, they were screaming like they were being hit," the witness reported. "I felt scared, I was asking what was happening in the terrorist section.

"I heard shouting, like someone had a hot iron on their body, screams. The officer said they were just screaming by themselves. I was hearing the screams throughout the visit."

It has also become a place of murder: last week, 27 prisoners were hanged in a mass-execution, the first since Saddam's fall.

So, it seems that despite the US occupation, Iraq has turned full circle. The same people are doing the same things in the same place; only the identity of the victims has changed. Was that really worth killing 46,000 people for?

On their best behavior

Watching Question Time today, the two major parties seem to be on their very best behaviour. No interjections during questions or answers, no frivolous points of order, no chanting, hooting, shouting, or screaming. Either the police gave the Speaker, rather than Helen Clark, a taser, or she has banged a few heads together and pointed out the consequences of continued bad behaviour. Regardless, its good to see. Question Time had become completely unmanageable, to the extent that it was being compared unfavourably with the Parliament of Weimar Germany. Now that the major parties have drawn back from the brink, possibly we'll be able to see Parliament function again.

Hope for change in Tonga?

Following the death of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, the media have now turned their attention to his successor, now King Siaosi Tupou V. Siaosi is a corrupt kleptocrat who has personally profited at the expense of his people via privatisations of Tonga's electricity and telecommunications monopolies and internet domain, and control of royal monopolies over air transport. And he reportedly has nothing but contempt for his people, being quoted as calling them "squatters" who

left to their own devices they would urinate in the elevators. As it is, they see nothing wrong with allowing their pigs to run all over their townships leaving pig droppings everywhere.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, he also reportedly recognises the need for democratic reform:

King Tupou V has said he does not fear change. In 1990 he was sympathetic to democratic reforms, favouring a Westminster model. He is partly credited for his father's move last year to allow for extra Cabinet ministers, two elected by the people and two by the noble families, to supplement the hand-picked Cabinet of 12.

In March King Tupou IV also appointed Dr Sevele as the first commoner Prime Minister.

On Australian radio last year the Crown Prince suggested all future Cabinet ministers apart from the Prime Minister would come from those winning seats in Parliament.

If he follows through on this, then it will be a significant step forward, though obviously not far enough. But reform takes time: it took Britain over 300 years to make the shift from a toy Parliament to responsible government by a process of incremental reform. The process in Tonga will go much faster, partly because Tongans can see how democracy works overseas, but it's still not going to happen overnight unless the king is foolish enough to resist it.