Must-read

Crooked Timber's John Holbo on Libertarianism, Property Rights and Self-Ownership, which argues that Libertarians' focus on property and its privileging over (or conflation with) liberty gives you something that looks an awful lot like feudalism. Similarly, their stunted definition of freedom results in odd things such as slaves being "free" even when subjected to the lash, and women and non-whites being free even when subjected to widespread discrimination and victimisation, insofar as such treatment comes from society rather than the state. Whatever you call that, it isn't freedom.

ECan: The people are angry II

Another night, another (according to Russel Norman's twitter feed) packed out public meeting in Christchurch about the abolition of their local democracy. People in New Zealand are generally quite politically inactive, and when a government policy is resulting in meetings like this, they should be very afraid. At this rate, National is going to be met on the campaign trail next year by a mob with torches and pitchforks.

There is however still space for them to back down. While ECan's councillors are giving their valedictories, legally they haven't been sacked yet. That doesn't happen until "replacement day", which is a date set by the government by a Gazette notice. While the government is talking about 1 May, no such notice has been issued yet (at least according to the Gazette online, which seems to be up to date). While the Minister must set a date, they could simply not set one for the time being, subject ECan to intensive monitoring, and use the hanging threat of replacement as an incentive for better performance. The problem then is that thanks to sloppy drafting, the cancellation of this years elections is not contingent on replacement - meaning the current ECan councillors would continue in office until 2013 or replacement (unless, I suppose, they called a special election themselves, which they can still do - and in fact could do on their last day in office as a final "fuck you" to the government).

Actually, looking at that further, the ECan Act only cancels the regular 2010 election, and has no effect on any other election. So, if before it left office ECan called a special election for, say, July, it would proceed as normal - triggering resumption day and the automatic expiry of the dictatorship (and in such a case, the new councillors would hold office until 2013).

ECan should do this. They should fight for the democratic rights of the people they represent. Anything less is chickenshit.

New Fisk

Hizbollah's silence over Scuds speaks volumes to Israel

Democracy comes to Tonga

Tonga's Legislative Assembly has passed a political reform package, increasing the number of people's representatives to 17. While electorate boundaries are still to be set (and are an issue of some debate), the key change has been made: representatives of the people will hold a clear majority in the next Tongan Parliament.

Unfortunately, the government has been doing all it can to try and limit that. Their latest move was an attempt to raise the non-refundable deposit to stand for election to US$500. In a country with an average income of only T$3,376, or US$1,790, that is a massive amount, and was a clear attempt to restrict elections to a contest among the wealthy elite. They didn't succeed, but were still able to raise it to US$200 - more than 10% of the average income, which will probably be enough to have the desired effect (though parties will be able to fundraise to pay it). Lowering it to ensure that everyone can contest elections should be among the first priorities of the new Parliament.

(Deposits are useful to limit the electoral contest only to "serious" candidates, but the aim should be to make people decide whether they really want to go through with it, not to impose a financial barrier to participation. In New Zealand, the deposit is $300 - not a token amount, but at the same time not beyond the means of most people, let alone a substantial fraction of people's annual incomes. You have to stop and think, but you don't have to be rich. It could probably achieve the same goal while being lower - $100 is most people's stop and think limit - but it probably couldn't go much higher without beginning to pose problems).

The next step for Tonga is elections in November, which will hopefully deliver a solid majority of - and government to - pro-democracy MPs. And then the real work of unravelling the damage done by monarchical cronyism will begin.

First prisons, now schools

Hot on the heels of its decision to build a private prison, the government is now planning on using PPPs for schools. Uunfortunately the media reports are unclear about whether the government will merely be using the PPP to fund construction (in which case it will effectively be a school run in rented facilities, which is not a big deal in principle) or whether a private company will be operating it as well. Support for the latter is given by Bill English's statement that

it will be a "worthwhile experiment" to allow one where the people who built the school are responsible for its operation, English said.

But of course we already have such experiments, in the form of private schools. So what does English think we would learn from such an "experiment"? How much excess profit a private operator can gouge out of the state through a poorly-negotiated, badly-worded contract? That's not an experiment I think is worth performing.

Tokelau shames us again

Tokelau has declared its exclusive economic zone to be a whale sanctuary. This brings the number of whale sanctuaries in the South Pacific to eleven, covering most of the area's ocean:

(Key: Green = whale sanctuary, blue = whales protected, but no explicit sanctuary. List of countries from here; map based on this)

Not a lot of space for the Japanese to murder whales there, is there?

Interestingly, MFAT is getting grumpy about this. Tokelau is an NZ dependency, and MFAT seems to think the move should have been discussed with them. But this is essentially an internal matter of fisheries regulation, something Tokelau has power over, rather than one of foreign policy. And in any case, it would be wrong of MFAT to overturn the decisions of Tokelau's democratically elected government, just as it would be wrong for our foreign monarch to veto those of our elected Parliament.

More evidence that private prisons are a scam

Yesterday, the government announced plans to tender for a private company to build a new private prison in South Auckland. The government's argument for this is that private prisons are cheaper. Today, the Herald reports a new study of Florida's private prisons has found no evidence that that is the case.

The actual report - Are Florida's Private Prisons Keeping Their Promises? by the Florida Centre for Fiscal and Economic Policy - is here [PDF]. It notes that while there is a difference in headline annual incarceration costs - $17,216 for a private prison vs $18,980 for a public facility - this cost is largely the result of private prisons being newer and handling lower-security inmates. If the government built a new low-security prison, it would receive those "savings" too. Beyond that, it finds that the procurement process means that it is very difficult to determine what, if any, savings are being delivered; there are no actual costs computed for parts of the public system, so they just can't tell if the legally required 7% saving is being delivered or not.

In addition to that, the report finds no evidence that private prisons reduce recidivism. According to a 2003 report from the Florida Department of Corrections, there were "no statistically significant differences in recidivism rates were found between public and private inmate groups" and "no empirical justification for the policy argument that private prisons reduce recidivism better than public prisons". So much for the government's second argument.

These findings are consistent with those for PPP projects in general. The CTU yesterday highlighted a study by the Independent in the UK, which found that the UK government was massively overpaying for assets through the Public Finance Initiative, paying £262 billion for assets with a capital value of only £55 billion. PFI investors are making out like bandits, making huge (17 to 23 percent) rates of return, by funding projects which could have been built cheaper with public money. Rather than saving money, PPPs are simply wasteful exercises in corporate welfare, another way of looting the state and transferring wealth from the many to the few. And rather than expanding such arrangements to schools and hospitals, we should be banning them - because in every case, the public is the loser.

Monitoring Canada's Access to Information Act

A reader pointed me at a report from the Canadian Information Commissioner on Systemic Issues Affecting Access to Information in Canada [PDF, large]. In response to complaints of continual delays and poor implementation of the Act, the Information Commissioner has started monitoring and preparing report cards on individual departments. This year, they assessed 24 agencies, responsible for 88% of all AIA requests filed. The headline result? None of them had an average response time within the statutory 30-day limit. Overall, just 57% of requests are processed within the statutory time limit. The government is basically ignoring its own law.

The report includes a report card for each department, showing the number of requests it processed, the "deemed refusal rate" (number not processed within 30 days, average response time, details on complaints, and so forth. Much of this is possible because departments are required to annually report these statistics - which is something we should do here. It also reports on the leadership and administrative structures of agencies, which in some cases has produced a dramatic turnaround. This reporting has produced change - the Department of Justice has dropped its deemed refusal rate from 40% to 4% and improved its rating from "F" to "A" in response to public scrutiny of its record. But in other cases - e.g. Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, which has a deemed refusal rate of 60% and an average response time of 160 days - it doesn't seem to be doing much. In these cases, political leadership is required to make the public service comply with the law.

It would be interesting to see similar statistics for New Zealand. Unfortunately, the Ombudsmen's office is a neutral arbiter rather than a monitoring body, so there's no centralised collection. But departments will be collecting statistics internally, which means they can be requested. Maybe I'll give it a go.

ECan: The people are angry

Last night, the Greens organised a public meeting to discuss the government's abolition of democracy in Canterbury. They were expecting about a hundred people, but more than three hundred turned up, overflowing the venue and resulting in a second, impromptu, meeting being held on the footpath outside. People were willing to stand around in the cold of an autumn Christchurch night to hear about this issue, and have their say on it. People don't do that when they're happy.

Labour's Lianne Dalziel has her report of the meeting here.

If you're in Christchurch, angry, and want to do something about the government's seizure of Canterbury's water, there's another meeting at the Great Hall in the Arts Centre tonight:

When: 19:30 - 21:30, Thursday 15 April
Where: Great Hall, Arts Centre
Contact: c.todd@forestandbird.org.nz

Be there, and show your anger.

Update: More from Sue Kedgley here.

Climate change: Obama is no different from Bush

In November, the world will meet in Cancun, Mexico for the latest round of climate change talks, aimed at agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Unfortunately, it is already clear that the US is working hard to make the talks a failure. First, they (along with other rich countries) opposed a series of pre-meetings aimed at hashing out the details before the actual summit. And now, the leaking of their PR strategy shows they are adopting a unilateralist, take it or leave it approach to their pathetically weak "Copenhagen Accord" (backed, of course, by denying aid to countries who want real action).

These are not the actions of a nation concerned about climate change and seeking a fair global deal to combat it. Instead, they are the actions of a nation committed to polluting as much as possible, and screw everyone else. On this issue, Obama is no different from Bush.

A dangerous anomoly?

Chris Trotter returned to crude race-baiting in his weekly column on Friday, with an attack on the Māori seats. Now that they are no longer a guaranteed Labour fiefdom, Trotter wants to get rid of them. His chief ammunition? That in the 2008 election,

it took 35,446 votes to elect a General MP, [but] only 20,476 votes were needed to elect a Maori MP.

On this basis, Trotter does a Brash and concludes that Māori are being accorded a greater right to electoral representation than Pakeha - something he labels unfair and aristocratic. But while the discrepancy is real, his conclusion is simply bullshit. The Electoral Act is very clear: Maori electorates are the same size as general ones, their size set by the same method used for North Island electorates (divide the relevant population by the South Island quota - the population of the South Island over 16 - round up or down accordingly to get the number of seats, then ensure that the electorates are all evenly sized to within 5%). So, formally at least, Māori have the same damn electoral representation as anyone else.

So, why the difference? One factor is turnout. Those same statistics Trotter used to get his figures would have shown him clearly that while the turnout in general seats is 80.9%, the turnout in Māori seats is only 62.4%. So, part of the reason is that fewer Māori vote. But its fairly obvious even without a calculator that that's not the full explanation - equal turnout would still mean 26,000 voters vs 35,000. So what's going on here?

The answer is demographics. For reasons of administrative simplicity, electoral boundaries are determined by the total population, not just those on the electoral roll. Which means that children and teenagers - people ineligible to vote - count towards the quota. Which means in turn that electorates with a younger demographic, and a lot of children and teenagers, will have fewer actual voters in them.

Take a browse through Parliament's electorate profiles, and look at the information on "Age Groups of the Usually Resident Population". The average age in a Pakeha electorate is the mid 30's or so, and the average proportion of residents eligible to vote is about 75%. The average age in Māori electorates (technically, of the Māori Descent Population, because the census does not gather data on who is on what roll) is 23, and the average percentage of eligible voters is around 60%. And that's the reason for the difference right there: fewer Māori are of voting age.

This doesn't just effect the Māori seats. Electorates in South Auckland, such as Māngere, Manukau East and Manurewa, also have a lower average age and a lower proportion of eligible voters (and yes, fewer people voting on polling day - only around 27,000 people in each).

So, the upshot: this isn't a case of "racial privilege", as alleged by Trotter, but an unintended consequence of demographics and basing electorates on total population. And the conclusion it supports is not abolition of the Māori seats, but reform of the way we set electorate boundaries (though such reform, to use the eligible or actually enrolled population, may have serious problems of its own). But somehow, I suspect that Trotter is as interested in that as he is in the actual differences between SM and MMP, or the real causes of overhangs (to pick up on two more of his rhetorical points). He'd rather engage in dishonest race-baiting instead.

Against privatised welfare

So, not content with privatising ACC, the government are now trying to privatise welfare, with the appointment of a Welfare Working Group to look at compulsory unemployment insurance. To which I can only repeat the response of Jackson Wood: We already have compulsory unemployment insurance. It's called tax.

Its not the best system. Notably, the amount you get on the unemployment level is fixed, rather than being a proportion of your former salary (worse, it was fixed at below-starvation levels during the Richardson Black Budget of 1991, in order to provide an "incentive" for people to find jobs which weren't there. Another example of the sadism of the right). But it at least has the advantage that everyone can get it. In a privatised insurance-based system, this is not the case: time-limits and eligibility rules mean that many people fall through the cracks and into poverty. Plus of course there's the fact that insurance companies make higher profits by denying claims (AKA cheating people out of the service they have paid for). We have enough of that from ACC, without inflicting it through the welfare system as well.

In Canada, the country the working group is holding up as a model, the insurance system has seen reduced entitlements and large numbers of people excluded from coverage. Only 80% of insured job-losers actually receive benefits. Which means that one in five people made unemployed get nothing. That's not a "safety-net" - it's a scam. And the losers, as always, will be the poor and those in casualised, low-security work (just imagine how this will interact with a 90-day probation period in employment. Not very pleasant, is it?)

But beyond the sheer unfairness, there is another problem: that a privatised, insurance-based scheme would not be politically accountable to Parliament. Which means, effectively, that poverty and unemployment would no longer be the government's problem. The government is trying to wash its hands of a core social function here, and we should not let them get away with it.

Saving the whales

Japan has released its catch report on its annual "scientific" whale hunt in the Southern Ocean - and revealed that they killed only half as many whales as they were planning to. The reason? Sea Shepherd:

Whalers said they were angry, and blamed what they described as "violent interference" from the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Clashes at sea between Sea Shepherd and the whaling ships paralysed the hunt for 31 days.

No matter what you think of their methods, Sea Shepherd are certainly effective. This year, they saved almost 500 whales from Japanese freezers (I'd say "dinner plates", but no-one buys the stuff). No wonder the Japanese are pissed.

March against mining in Auckland

Last month, 500 opponents of the government's plans to mine on conservation land protested outside Parliament. Next month, they're hitting Auckland:

When: 11am, Saturday, 1 May
Where: Lower Queen St, Auckland.
Bring: Your voice, your anger, your friends

If you're in Auckland, and you value our conservation land, then please go along.

Reasons not to visit the US

Via In A Strange Land, a horrifying story of how the US (mis)treats visitors to its country. In this case, the victim - a kiwi - escaped relatively lightly. She was not, for example, beaten, pepper-sprayed, and then charged with assault for questioning the whim of a border-thug (the victim in that case is now facing two years jail for "obstruction", meaning "failure to comply promptly and without question". As Cory Doctorow points out, its about obedience and the criminalisation of any questioning of "authority"). Others have suffered worse.

So, the lesson is: if you want to be treated with dignity and respect - including having your personal relationships recognised and respected, rather than being denied by an illiberal and morally authoritarian government - don't visit the US.

Tasmania gets a government

last month, Tasmania went to the polls in state elections. The result, thanks to STV, was a hung Parliament, with the Greens holding the balance of power between Labour and the Liberals. Initially, it seemed like Labour would surrender government to the Liberals, who gained a higher proportion of first-preference votes. But with a statutory requirement that a government be in place a week after the results are finalised, and an announcement by the Greens that they will support Labour on confidence and supply, a Labour Cabinet has been sworn in and will test its support on the floor of the House. I guess DPF got it wrong then.

Interestingly, the Cabinet so far is the minimum three members (Prime Minister, Treasurer and Attorney-General) - the rest won't be selected until next week. And with such a small legislature, there's a real chance that the Greens will end up around the Cabinet table. If that happens, it will be a first for Australia, and a valuable demonstration of how proportional representation and coalition government works. And hopefully other Australian states will follow Tasmania's lead and implement both.

Schama on New Zealand

In an article for the BBC Magazine, historian Simon Schama reacts to the proposal that New Zealand join Australia. His assessment? "It would be a sad step for a country which has used its independence to set an example for the rest of the world".

[T]he exceptional New Zealand history that needs to be preserved is human. Whatever its ethnic and social battles, New Zealand has often led the way. In 1893 it was the first country in the world to give women the vote, and it was the first to offer old-age pensions to the poor.

But it's the story of Maori and pakeha, the settlers of European origin, that - for all the pain, betrayals and suffering - still deserve to be known and celebrated as offering a different model of cultural encounter than anywhere else in the world.

[...]

Of course there have been serious problems of unequal social opportunity, of street gangs. But if there is anywhere in the post-colonial world where two cultural worlds truly live an engaged life alongside each other, it's in New Zealand.

Such stories don't come along very often. Cherish them. Chant them. Dance them.

This perfectly captures the reasons I am quietly proud of New Zealand. Other countries find misguided pride in their military conquests, their past empires, the wealth of their upper classes (a measure which always ignores the poverty and injustice that wealth is built on and sustained by). What we have to be proud of isn't war, but peace; not empire, but the end of empire; not the wealth of a few, but the equality of the many. Its not perfect - I spend hours a day posting about that - and it never will be. But on an international scale, its pretty good.

The problem is that the advocates of a merger - the usual suspects on the right and in the business community - are not interested in any of this. They have never believed in this country; they suffer universally from a massive colonial cringe which sees New Zealand as small, and therefore valueless. According to them, our natural role in the international order is not to be independent, but subservient, a "loyal ally" which needs to be taken under the wing of a more powerful protector (once the UK, then the US, and now Australia). There's more than a hint of feudalism about their view that military service must be exchanged for protection and trade deals.

But beyond that, these people see only money. They measure the worth of a society solely in terms of GDP. As a result, they are utterly blind to our real achievements, and place no value on them. Which is a shame, because as Schama points out, we have achieved something quite special here, and quite different from Australia (which is still militaristic and racist, though it shares our ideals of equality and social justice). And we shouldn't need Schama to tell us that that is something worth celebrating, protecting, and advancing.

Three strikes ignores retribution

In an opinion piece in the Dominion-Post today, lawyer Richard Ekins points out the most serious problem in the government's "three strikes" regime: that it ignores actual retribution:

After two warnings, doesn't an offender deserve the maximum? No, because not all crimes are the same. What an offender deserves, what retribution demands he receive, is a punishment that fits the crime - the graver the wrong the more severe the punishment should be. An offender deserves more punishment if, for example, he abuses the victim's trust, if his crime was premeditated, if he was especially cruel to the victim, and if he tried to coerce the victim into remaining silent. An offender's crime is also worse, and deserves more punishment, if he has previously committed similar offences.

However, an offender deserves less punishment if, for example, he was a minor party in the offending, if he turned himself in or made a guilty plea, if he is remorseful and apologises to the victim, or if he testifies against other offenders.

The basic problem with the three strikes law is that it ignores almost everything that is relevant to assessing what an offender deserves.

(Emphasis added)

Ekins has a couple of examples which clearly demonstrate that the rote application of non-parole periods and maximum sentences result in sentences out of all proportion with the severity of the offence or the culpability of the offender. And this is simply unjust. The basis of retribution is that is must be proportionate - if someone wrongs me, I am entitled to have that wrong remedied, no more, and no less. The same applies to society. "An eye for an eye" is barbaric, but it does at least capture that principle. Three strikes ignores it. The result isn't retribution, but revenge.

That is exactly what the advocates of this policy want - revenge, not retribution, the infliction of disproportionate suffering in a futile attempt to make them feel better. That is simply vicious, sadistic, and morally repulsive - just like them.

Climate change: Saving the planet?

People concerned about climate change tend to fall into two camps: those who think technology is the problem, and those who see it as also being a solution. Those in the former camp see coal-fired power plants and fossil-fuel dependent cars; those in the latter also see wind farms, wave farms, solar towers, electric and hydrogen powered vehicles, and the (always twenty years away) promise of fusion power.

That list of technologies focuses on hardtech. But there's a source of energy all around us, which harvests sunlight at low efficiency - far less than a modern solar cell - and turns it into energy. That source is plants, and they do it by photosynthesis. Now, a group of scientists have succeeded in recreating that process in the lab:

Scientists have made a fundamental breakthrough in their attempts to replicate photosynthesis – the ability of plants to harvest the power of sunlight – in the hope of making unlimited amounts of "green" energy from water and sunlight alone.

The researchers have assembled genetically modified viruses into wire-like structures that are able to use the energy of the sun to split water molecules into their constitute parts of oxygen and hydrogen, which can then be used as a source of chemical energy.

If the process can be scaled up and made more efficient, it promises to produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen fuel, a clean source of energy that can be used to generate electricity as well as acting as a portable, carbon-free fuel for cars and other vehicles.

The importance of this cannot be underoverstated. If this technology works out - and they expect to have a commercial prototype within two years - then we have a clean, solar-based, storable energy source, able to operate whereever there is sunlight and water. Effectively, an artificial plant which will produce hydrogen we can use directly.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with the real problem: implementation. As the list at the top of this post shows, we already have technologies - some of them quite cheap - capable of generating electricity cleanly and so reducing our carbon footprint. The problem is getting people to use them. That requires active, interventionist government policy, and it harms established and powerful interests tied to dirty technologies - both of which are anathema to our current government, and indeed to governments all over the world, both right- and left-wing. In other words, the real problem isn't so much technological, but political.

More police spying

In 2008, it was revealed that the police had engaged in extensive spying on left-wing groups using a bribed undercover informer. They spied on unions, they spied on political parties, they spied on legal cases against them (including on legally privileged material). When all this was revealed, Commissioner Howard Broad said

[w]e're not interested in the to-ings and fro-ings of protest groups who may be wanting to stand outside a building and put placards up, or do all the sorts of things that you would associate with lawful protest in a free and democratic society

He lied. A comment in the police's 2009 annual report referred to 84 operational orders to police public demonstrations. An OIA by Peace Action Wellington has revealed those protests. Some of them are legitimate - for example, large protests do need traffic control. But there are also protests outside embassies, outside sporting events, outside workplaces (typically as part of a strike), a Bible group protesting outside the US embassy, a candlelit vigil for Tibet, a group of local residents protesting the lack of a swimming pool in Otahuhu - in other words, people standing around outside buildings with placards, the very activity the police have declared they have no interest in.

We are supposed to live in a democracy, with freedom of speech. But it seems that the police are still stuck in the mindset of the C19th and the Six Acts, viewing protest not as a legitimate expression of opinion but as "public disorder", if not sedition. This has to change. Protest is the lifeblood of a democratic society, and the police have no business snooping on it or trying to "contain" it.