Read the fucking room, Chris! II

Chris Hipkins wants a four year term. Look who else supports it:

Harry Mowbray has been behind an advertising drive to persuade conservative voters to split their party and electorate votes to engineer an overhang for the centre-right parties.

[...]

But to him, this week is only a step towards a bigger goal. He expects the election night party at Coatesville will mark a pivot from election campaign to electoral reform campaign.

Mowbray plans to explain the "next stage" to his guests. That will entail pushing for changes to New Zealand's 30-year-old MMP electoral system, and extending Parliamentary terms to four years.

And the reason for both is to have less democracy and less accountability. So politicians will work for billionaires like Mowbray, and not for us.

This is who Hipkins has effectively allied himself with: billionaires who want to overthrow our democracy. And we can all see it. Time to repudiate this position, Chris, unless you want people to make the connection with opposing wealth taxes and start drawing unpleasant conclusions...

America defends its democracy

Americans went to the polls yesterday in midterm elections, and delivered an electoral bloodbath for Republicans. The Democrats regained control of the House and Senate by huge margins, as well as capturing a swathe of state governors and legislatures. Texas is now a blue state. Texas!

Its a stunning rejection of the Trump regime. And, if the results are allowed to stand, it will mean Trump's agenda is fucked for the rest of his term. Congress won't pass his laws, fund his programs, or appoint his stooges. And it will investigate his cronies, and hopefully impeach him and his criminal cabinet. On the state level, the shift will mean undoing Republican gerrymandering, ending cooperation with ICE, and hopefully activating the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, effectively ending the anti-democratic electoral college.

The Democratic leadership is trying to downplay all of this, showing how unsuited they are to the moment, but hopefully they'll be rolled and replaced by people who recognise the task ahead of them: not raising money for Democrat political consultants, but defending and enhancing America's democracy and delivering for its people. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani showed the way, and hopefully the rest of the party will follow.

But while its good to see this, and great to see Americans marching to the polls to defend their democracy - Americans who think this signifies a return to normality with the rest of the world are mistaken. That ship has sailed. Electing Trump once could be taken as an aberration; re-electing him shows a systematic weakness in American politics - that they can just go fascist, tear up all their agreements, and start bombing people for shits and giggles like a mad emperor. America has shown that it fundamentally cannot be trusted anymore, and that the rest of the world will have to work around it if we want stability and normality. And we will. The upshot is that the American empire, which depended fundamentally on soft power and cooperation rather than coercion, is over. And Americans better start getting used to the idea.

52,000 unemployed under National

The September labour market statistics are out, showing unemployment has risen again to 5.7%. There are now 174,000 unemployed, 52,000 more than when National took office.

This, I guess, is the "plan" National wants us to stick to. The sheep they don't want us to leave half-shagged. A plan which sees tens of thousands of people thrown on the scrapheap to Keep Wages Low and maintain the wealth of the rich. If you think that this "plan" is madness, then you know what to do: find a polling place, and vote them out.

Read the fucking room, Chris!

Four days until the election, and with overhangs a hot topic, The Post asked parties how they would fix them. Labour's solution? Do nothing - but introduce a four-year term!

But a spokesperson for the party said it was not proposing any changes to the overhang or to the 5% threshold.

On four-year terms, the party was more open to a change.

“A four-year term would let governments slow down and get things right rather than rushing to have something to show at the next election. A change this significant would need to be decided by New Zealanders in a referendum.”

For fuck's sake Chris, learn to read the fucking room! We've just had the worst government in living memory, a regime which has attacked te Tiriti, shat on the BORA, undermined democracy, abused the parliamentary process, taken bribes, and even tried to rig an election - and Chris's answer is to say we should hand such regimes more power and make them even less accountable to the public.

This is why we hate you, Chris. Because faced with... this... his most pressing concern is to pad his own arse, secure his own fat salary for 25% more time, and he can't recognise how hideously unpopular it is.

If this regime is anything, it is an argument for a shorter term, not a longer one. Our problem has never (except in the mind of Chris) been "good governments not getting enough time". Governments in Aotearoa get exactly as much time as they can convince us to give them. Instead, our problem is that we can't throw out a bad government when we need to! imagine how much less harm this regime could have done if they had faced an election last November, rather than now. Imagine how it would have modified their behaviour! Imagine how we could have nobbled them and taken the edge off their excesses - or thrown them out completely. That's what we need to do. We need to cut the parliamentary term from three years to two. And if the politicians don't like it, well, fuck them. If they want to live in a dictatorship, they can move to America.

National disenfranchised more than 44,000 voters

Last year the regime attempted to rig the election, overturning 77 years of settled law to cut off enrolment two weeks before the vote. At the time they were warned that this could stop up to 100,000 people from voting - but that was the point. Those late enrolments were seen as mostly young, and mostly opposition-supporting - voters National did not want to have their say.

National's artificial enrolment deadline has now closed. And it has had the expected result: overall enrolment is down 1.1%:

The Electoral Commission says the provisional enrolment rate for the election is 93.6 percent, compared to 94.7 percent at the 2023 election.

[...]

The provisional rate for 18- to 24-year-olds is 74.2 percent, short of the 77 percent in 2023. A big push to get them enrolled saw that rate rise from just over 50 percent in July, an increase of more than 20 percentage points or 85,000 people.

Using the estimated eligible population figures from the Electoral Commission's enrolment statistics page, that turns out to be 44,500 people, 12,300 of them under 24. That's twice what the Attorney-General estimated in her report which found the change was inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. And that's a minimum figure - there's also the people who would have enrolled during the advance voting period, who now can't.

And now we have a number, we also have an answer to an ugly question about the legitimacy of the next government. If the regime holds power by 45,000 or fewer votes, then they absolutely stole the election and should be treated as illegitimate by the people of Aotearoa. And the same applies if they hold power by a massive overhang because the electorate votes of people who have moved were disallowed.

And on the other hand, its also a reason for hope. 45,000 is not a lot. If people turn out, we can overcome this unlawful, unconstitutional election-rigging, and vote in a government which will topple the regime and repeal its works. As we've seen this week, when the left votes, we win. So go off and vote, and throw out this criminal regime of election riggers!

A tide of change?

There's been a bunch of elections in the last week, and - so far - they all seem to be going the same way. In Serbia Vučić is out, losing to the leftist, anti-corruption Student List. In Brazil, Lula has been re-elected, and Bolsonaro Jnr has fled the country to avoid prosecution for corruption. And in Israel, it looks like Netanyahu is out, though its not clear if anyone else is in to replace him (because Israeli parties are racist and refuse to work with Arab-Israeli representatives).

There's a common theme in all of these victories: people actually showed up to vote. Turnout in Serbia went from 59% last election to 69% this time. In Brazil, turnout unusually went up for the runoff round. In Israel, turnout seems to have gone from 71% in 2022 to 78% this time.

There's a lesson here for us: while the regime has tried to suppress the vote, if people who want change turn out and vote for it, we can still topple them. And given the closeness of the polls, it probably won't take much.

Early voting is open. Find a polling place, get your family and friends,a nd go off and vote for regime change. We can have nice things, if we actually vote for them.

An "opposition" that doesn't want to win

I was going to post today about how I was bored with the election: I know who I'm going to vote for, National's "don't change sheep midshag" campaign is the saddest since Wag the Dog, and Labour's pathetic, cringing, small-target strategy means they are utterly uninspiring. There's so much wrong with the country, and Labour are explicitly promising to not fix it. They won't end austerity, which underlies all the other problems. They won't tax the rich, despite clear public support for doing so. They won't do the necessary on climate. They won't reverse National's racism. And just to reinforce that today, Hipkins has forced the resignation of a Labour candidate for having relatives who are gang members:

Labour's Tāmaki Makaurau candidate Kerrin Leoni has resigned after a video emerged of her campaigning alongside Mongrel Mob members.

The footage showed Leoni, wearing a Labour Party jacket, talking to gang members about enrolling to vote and changing the government.

[...]

In a Facebook post on Thursday, Leoni said she had not visited a gang pad during the campaign but admitted attending a "whānau function" in early October where some close relatives who were gang members were present.

"I will not turn my back on them or pretend they are not my whānau because of their associations," she wrote. "I've always tried to be a role model for my whānau."

Fuck Chris. People don't get to pick their families. And trying to convince them to do the right thing and enrol and vote is being a decent human being. But there's clearly no room for that in Hipkins' Labour Party, at least not for people with the Wrong relatives.

(Meanwhile, look at who its OK to meet with: rich people. Pedophiles. Tobacco lobbyists. Oil companies. Farmers. But I guess all of those are acceptable to the richwhites Chris thinks are his party's base...)

If (when?) Labour loses this election, and the regime ushers in another three years of cruel, corrupt, bigoted tyranny, we will know exactly who to blame: Chris Hipkins. This mediocrity is so afraid of wining that he's now sabotaging his own campaign. And even the Greens' massively overperforming and winning 15% can't make up for a Labour Party which won't do the work and hold up their end. The sooner they're driven down to 20% and the Greens take over as the real core of the left vote, the better.

A victory for trans kids!

In November 2025, out of the blue, weirdo fundie Simeon Brown banned the use of puberty blockers in trans (but not cis) healthcare, over-riding the medical decisions of doctors. The decision was swiftly enjoined by the courts, ensuring it did not come into effect, and today it was officially overturned on the grounds that the Minister had failed to consulted queer kids, and that it was discriminatory. Interestingly, the latter was not on the basis of sex - Crown Law has long held that the Human Rights Act's prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sex includes trans people - but on the basis of disability. Trans kids are seeking healthcare for clinically recognised mental disorders; the ban would have denied them access to appropriate healthcare on the basis of those disorders, and this is pretty obviously discriminatory. The regime's arguments that there was no discrimination and that this was just about the effectiveness of the medication and that the ban was a justified limitation on the basis of side-effects (a concern which somehow does not apply to cis kids) were laughed out of court. This allowed the court to sidestep the entire question of the definition of "sex" in the Human Rights Act, and leave it for another case.

This seems like a pretty good result, and one we should celebrate. The question now is whether the regime will accept the decision of the court, appeal it, or (if re-elected) pull their usual stunt of over-ruling them by fiat legislation. The risk of the latter makes the election all the more important: if you support trans people, vote this hateful regime out!

MMP was not designed for major party weakness

Back in 2012, in its Review of MMP, the Electoral Commission identified a significant flaw in the system: the number of electorate seats was increasing, while the total number of seats was capped, meaning fewer list seats. If the ratio got too bad - somewhere around 75 electorates to 45 list seats, something expected to happen around 2026 - this would lead to an increasing chance of disproportionate outcomes. To prevent this and preserve proportionality, the Electoral Commission recommended fixing the ratio of electorate to list seats at 60:40.

That didn't happen, of course, as the major parties bickered and refused to implement the Electoral Commission's recommendations for partisan political reasons. Meanwhile, changes in population distribution delayed the predicted armageddon: we currently have 72 electorates, the ratio the Commission recommended, and it will shrink to 71 at the election. But we still face the problem, from the other direction. Why? Because everyone hates Chris.

Most electorates are won by the major parties. Effectively, give or take the Māori seats and a general seat here or there, the electorates are reserved for the major parties. National and Labour won 60 of the 65 general electorates last election, though only one of the seven Māori seats. Worse, electorate results are massively disproportional. While Aotearoa is a multi-party system, our electorate results between the two major parties still roughly follow the cube-rule, which sees small differences in electorate vote share magnified to huge differences in seat share. So last election, Labour won 31% of the electorate vote and 17 seats, while National won 43% of the electorate vote and 43 seats. This election the polls are closer, but an e.g. 37:33 electorate vote split is likely to mean a 1.4:1 split in the share of electorates (so 35 seats to 25, assuming major party electorate share is retained), and even 36:34 leads to 1.2:1 (so 32 seats to 28). None of which mattered when the "major" parties were big and collectively winning 75% of the vote. But when everyone hates Chris, and the major parties are polling 57% between them, it is going to cause problems.

We're aware of the "danger" of National not getting any list seats because its vote share is so low. But its not just National, because both "major" parties are polling in the shitter. A 28% party is only entitled to 34 seats in Parliament. it takes only a slight preference in the electorate races to get more than that, and if a major party expands its lead over its rival while the overall purple vote remains static, the problem gets worse. A 30% party is entitled to 36 seats, but a 38:32 electorate vote split will probably see it win 38.

Basically: major party weakness is a recipe for disproportionality. And disproportionality isn't just undemocratic: if it matters, if it keeps or puts people in power, then it is a recipe for government and state illegitimacy.

How can we fix this? The problem is due to electorates, but we probably can't eliminate them and move to a pure list system. Electorate service is one of the things Aotearoa's MPs have traditionally done well, and retaining it is worthwhile. So we're left with the Electoral Commission's solution: fixing the ratio of electorate to list seats and expanding the size of parliament to fit. The Commission's suggested 60:40 ratio is already problematic, so we need to go lower - to 50:50, or even 40:60 to allow room for growth. On the latter point, expanding Parliament to its optimum size of ~175 MPs while retaining current electorates gives us close to 40:60, while giving all the other advantages of a larger parliament. And it should protect us from electorate shitfuckery for a long time to come.

National is murdering our health system

A tale in three headlines:

Nursing workforce growth has stalled despite Government claims vacancies are falling, The Post, 28 July 2026:

The number of nurses employed by Health New Zealand has barely changed in two years, despite the Government pointing to falling vacancy rates and an active recruitment drive to address workforce shortages.

Analysis of Health NZ workforce data by health economists Bill Rosenberg and Jacqueline Cumming shows nursing numbers increased rapidly through 2023 and early 2024 but have since plateaued.

[...]

Nursing FTEs increased by more than 3000 between March 2023 and March 2024, but have grown by just 54 positions in the two years since, Health NZ’s quarterly workforce reports show.

Government tells nursing schools to stop training so many nurses, Stuff, 14 october 2026:

The Government has told nursing schools to train fewer nurses next year.

The edict came from the Tertiary Education Commission, to the surprise of many nursing professors and lecturers last week. And it arrived at a time when nursing levels have become a charged election issue, with nurses at hospitals raising alarm about “crisis” level staffing and growing concern about aged care too.

In a letter to nursing schools last week, the Tertiary Education Commission instructed them to revert nursing student numbers back to 2025 levels for the 2027 year. That would mean fewer people would be training to be nurses, according to academics Stuff spoke to.

Starship hospital delays child cancer treatments for up to a week amid nursing shortage, Govt confirms, New Zealand Herald, 15 October 2026:

A “horrified” nurse says Starship children’s hospital has suspended chemotherapy treatment and bone marrow transplants for cancer patients as it grapples with a staffing crisis.

[...]

The nurse told the Herald that management informed staff of the development last week. Hospital bosses were “terrified” the information would be made public “because of how bad it will look”.

The nurse said she and other staff were “horrified and appalled” at the postponements, which had the potential to adversely affect patient outcomes.

Refusing to hire people to cut costs. Refusing to train them to avoid stories about graduates unemployed because of the hiring freeze. And now, we get the consequences: staff shortages causing service collapse.

Its pretty clear now that the collapse of Aotearoa's health system isn't a passive thing which "just happened"; it is a deliberate act of murder by the regime. And like all austerity, it will have a bodycount. The Starship hospital collapse is likely to make that bodycount explicit.

Which invites the obvious question: when are we going to start prosecuting politicians for the social murder they commit?

Showing us their priorities

When almost-Police Commission Jevon McSkimming was convicted of possession of child sexual abuse material and the IPCA found a concerted cover-up among senior police, the government's response was full of thunder. Police Minister Mark Mitchell called it "utterly disgraceful", and promised they were "acting decisively to install the strongest statutory oversight mechanism available to it – an Inspector-General of Police."

You'd have expected that would result in quick action, but instead it resulted in... nothing. Six months later there was no timeline for when the change would be implemented. Legislation was only just introduced last month, right before parliament rose, but wasn't given a first reading or sent to select committee. And today the Herald reported why: because after promising decisive action, the regime simply hadn't bothered to fund it:

The introduction of a new police watchdog, aimed at building back trust after the Jevon McSkimming scandal, has been pushed back with the law-and-order portion of Budget 2026 “heavily over-subscribed”.

Officials had sought an “urgent invitation for priority funding” in this year’s Budget to help set up the Inspector-General of Police – which went unfunded.

That's right: when we are getting near-daily headlines about corruption and criminality within the police, when senior cops are being convicted of serious crimes, when police conspire to cover all this up and hide it behind a cloak of "employment matters", the regime doesn't think this is a priority. The police appear to be rotten to the core, a sewer of bullies and rapists and child abuse fans, and Mark Mitchell thinks it isn't worth spending any money to stop that.

"Show me your budget, and I'll show you your priorities" indeed.

TOP betrays its supporters

TOP - now the Opportunity Party - was founded for one purpose: to promote a radical shift in Aotearoa's tax system, from taxing income to taxing land. The right hate the idea, saying it will lower house prices (boo hoo) and drive farmers out of business (showing they were shit at business to begin with). Chris Luxon had ruled out any coalition with the party because they promoted it. And in the face of this pressure, TOP has surrendered and complied in advance - first leaving tax reform off its list of coalition bottom lines, and now saying they're willing to agree to abandon it for a term in order to keep the door open with National:

Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong says agreeing to no progress on tax reform in the next term would be “worth considering” if there were other significant policy wins from negotiations as part of a potential National-led coalition.

Wong is also not ruling out publicly accepting those terms ahead of negotiations if National leader Christopher Luxon continues to insist he won’t talk to Opportunity after the election.

It comes as the party, which prides itself on being able to work with Labour or National, could hold the power after the November 7 election with two of three polls this week putting Opportunity in the kingmaker position.

Which raises two obvious questions. The first is what is the point of TOP, if they're willing to abandon their core policy, the reason for their existence, so completely? I am not a TOP supporter, but I take their policy position seriously, and expected them to fight hard for it in any coalition. And while I didn't expect them to win - 6% only gets you so much leverage, unless you're ACT - I expected them to get some progress: an inquiry to produce a clear statement of tradeoffs and an implementation pathway, which could then be used to build further public support and beat future governments with. Or a smaller shift, a tax-switch from income to land, to build the infrastructure and demonstrate viability. Offering to rule even that out means the party is effectively abandoning its core policy. So why bother witht hem at all?

The second is why are they so desperate to do a deal with National? Because pretty obviously, if (as the polls show) they are in the "kingmaker" position, and get to decide who the government is, they can just say "This is what we exist for as a party. You've ruled us out, but we'll get what we want from Labour". And since any Labour coalition will mean working with the Greens, who also want tax reform (albeit direct taxation of wealth, rather than only land), they'll have powerful allies to force concessions. Instead, they've publicly set fire to their ostensible principles, while reinforcing every narrative about them simply being a trojan horse for the right, intended to remove or siphon left votes.

Effectively, TOP is betraying its own supporters here. The onus is on those supporters to punish them. If not, well, I guess what you vote for: insincere, deceitful opportunists who will lie to your face about what they supposedly stand for, them ignore every promise they made in order to prop up a cruel, corrupt, tyrannical regime.

Election-rigging violates the BORA

Last year the regime attempted to rig the election, overturning 77 years of settled law to cut off enrolment two weeks before the vote, in a desperate effort to stop 100,000 mostly young, mostly opposition supporting people from voting. It was naked American-style election-rigging, of a sort not seen before in Aotearoa, and even at the time the Attorney-General said that it violated the bill of Rights Act, because it overturned longstanding expectations around enrolment. And now, the regime has formally admitted that in court. But they don't think the court should do anything about it, because Parliament already knows it has violated the law:

Courts do not need to declare recent electoral changes breach the Bill of Rights Act (BORA), because any future government would already know, according to the Crown.

But Christopher Carrol - who is seeking a declaration of inconsistency in the High Court regarding the government's controversial 13-day voter enrolment deadline - says given the concession from the Crown the Bill of Rights Act had been breached, there was a need for the court to both acknowledge and respond in some manner.

Justice David Boldt, presiding over the case, said he would not be silent on the "seriousness" of the breach: "The only question is whether that needs to be a declaration, or whether something… a bit lower voltage will do the trick."

But parliamentary knowledge isn't the problem - its parliament's refusal to act on that knowledge. And that's where a formal declaration of inconsistency is valuable, because it sets in motion a formal process where the government is notified and has to publicly respond, while creating clear pressure for it to remedy the breach.

Which is also why I find the judge's statement that he "likely would not reach a decision ahead of the election" to be completely unsatisfactory. To see this, just imagine a situation where the regime narrowly holds power because its self-admitted illegal "law" worked as expected, and 50 to 100 thousand kiwis were denied the right to vote. In such a situation, a declaration of inconsistency will effectively be a statement that the election was rigged and the resulting "government" is illegitimate. That will be hugely inflammatory (and rightly so!), and the judge may be deterred from making it, no matter what the law requires.

This is why we must know early. The actions a free and democratic society must take in advance of a potentially rigged election are hugely different from those it must take afterwards. While a declaration of inconsistency will not in and of itself change the law, it will allow us to change our behaviour, and vote accordingly. And that is something we deserve to be able to do.

(In the meantime: don't let the regime steal your vote. Enrol to vote or check your enrolment status here.)

A clear choice on transport

There were a couple of campaign announcements today, showing that Aotearoa has a clear choice on transport this election. From national, we have - of course - m0ar roads! Even in the South Island this time, though of course they're spending the big bucks up north, where nobody actually wants the things. Meanwhile from the Greens we have a promise to make the trains run on time - or indeed, run at all - with new intercity routes, light rail or busways in major cities (whichever the Infrastructure Commission recommends), and more regional buses to connect it all. And while its focused on passenger transport, the infrastructure renewal required will help freight too, helping to get trucks off the roads. Its a pretty compelling vision of the future, even if it draws on the past, and one which would massively improve life in our cities and regions far more than a handful of truck mega-highways would.

Labour, meanwhile, is left out of the conversation. All they have is a collection of stronger consumer rights and some policies for marginally cheaper petrol. Its hardly rising to the occasion, and the latter seems to be desperately missing the point. But I guess that's what you're left with when you don't actually want to spend any money, and want to suggest that everything will really be just the same, only with different people in charge. And then they wonder why they're polling so badly...

Labour on democracy and trust in government

Labour released its democracy and trust in government policy today, and it looks like a good start. They're promising:

• A lobbying register and code of conduct, and stand-down periods for Ministers;
• Limiting urgency and requiring post-enactment referral to select committee of any bill which skips the select committee phase;
• Lowering the voting age for local body elections and abolishing the landlord vote;
• Mentioned in the full speech, reform of the OIA to codify proactive release and include penalties for ministers who conspire to hide things

Which is all good, but note what's not included: caps on political donations or public funding to get money out of politics; stopping the revolving door for senior public servants as well as Ministers; a lower voting age for general elections. I'm also suspicious of any effort to "reform" the OIA which is government- rather than civil society-led, because their interests are not aligned with ours and they will write the law to suit themselves and enable more secrecy.

Lowering the (general) voting age will be because it is hard, but they're unwilling to say "we will put a bill before the House and make National pay the price if they vote it down". As for donation capping, Labour has never really wanted money out of politics, because they're stupid enough to think they'll get a share of it when they're in power. This election's statistics should disabuse them of that notion: the uber-rich are using their money as a weapon to undermine our democracy, and a genuinely democratic party would wage war on that bullshit. You can draw your own conclusions about what Labour's refusal to do so says about them.

On the other hand, with a donation cap a bottom line for TOP, Labour is going to have to attack the rich if they want to be in government. So they'd better start getting used to the idea.

Climate Change: Actions have consequences

In 2022, the government of Aotearoa made a historic free trade agreement with the European Union. In addition to the usual clauses about tarriffs, quotas, trade barriers, and so on, it included clauses in which the parties committed not to undermine the Paris climate agreement or weaken their environmental protections, and the power to apply sanctions if those provisions were breached. Since then, the National-led regime has repealed all effective climate policy, broken the linkage between our domestic goals and our Paris targets, refused to follow the spirit of the Paris agreement in setting new targets, and openly talked of refusing to meet our commitments when they come due. In other words, they've Fucked Around. And now they're about to Find Out, with a Dutch group launching a formal complaint that Aotearoa has broken the FTA:

A Dutch environmental group claims New Zealand has broken its climate change promises in the free trade agreement with the EU and is lodging the first complaint of its kind through the European Commission.

The group, Both ENDS, is using the complaints mechanism known as Single Entry Point and said this first climate test could be precedent setting.

The most extreme consequences could be losing access to the lucrative European market, but the group is seeking compliance rather than the suspension of trade benefits.

It claims New Zealand failed to uphold its legal commitments in the EU-NZ FTA not to weaken environmental protections in order to "encourage trade or investment," and to effectively implement the Paris Agreement.

But the Trade Minister is firing back, saying its "not for overseas countries, organisations or lobby groups to tell New Zealand how to meet its obligations".

But actually it is, since we agreed to that in the FTA. But I guess we can't expect this regime to understand the treaties it is party to, since it wilfully misunderstands te Tiriti, the treaty which legitimises it and permits it to exist.

As for what's at stake, McClay was crowing just a few months ago about how the FTA had led to $3 billion of extra trade with the EU. All of that of course is contingent on New Zealand keeping its word, and it will go away if we don't. The solution of course is for National to keep its word: to uphold the Paris Agreement, meet our emissions targets, and not roll back environmental policy to advantage business. If they don't want to do that, then we should get a new government which will.

Bottom lines

Another poll was released last night, confirming the same story as previous polls: everyone hates Chris, and TOP gets to choose the next government if it makes it over the threshold. And today the party has laid out its bottom lines, giving some indication of how it will make that choice. It wants lobbying regulation, a ban on bottom trawling, a ten-year funding plan to fix the health system, a full commitment to the Paris agreement and protection of He Pou a Rangi's independence, and a Commerce Commission crackdown on supermarkets.

Its a pretty moderate list for a party which hopes to enter parliament for the first time, though the absence of even a study of their big bang land tax / UBI tax switch is a bit unusual. But it bodes well for the left, because there's nothing on that list that Labour and the Greens would disagree with, and much of it is already in their policy platforms. Its another sign that, in terms of policy, the parties are natural allies.

Meanwhile, its very bad news for the right bloc. The right parties collectively oppose lobbying regulation, support the pillage of nature, and oppose health spending (because they'd rather have tax cuts for the rich). Both ACT and NZ First explicitly want to withdraw from Paris, and ACT wants to disestablish he Pou a Rangi (National merely wants to nobble it). And ACT thinks regulating supermarkets is "unethical" (they're fine with price gouging duopolies screwing us over). In other words, any arrangement will be a mess of vetoes and counter-vetoes, and seething resentment over that. Which is not a recipe for a deal, or for a stable government afterward. But then, if TOP's board would rather keep the regime in power, that's what will happen, and all their policy positions will be revealed as just so much hot air...

Which is one of the reasons I'm not voting for Opportunity. That, and the fact that everything they offer is already being offered by the Greens, often better, and with more certainty that that is where they actually stand. But I'll be happy to see them as part of a left coalition, and they should be a useful hammer to beat Labour with and pull them to the left.

Taxing the rich is popular

The election is just six weeks away, and the parties of the rich are frantically trying to scare us about tax. If a left-coalition forms after the election, then Labour will impose a capital gains tax! Or they'll be forced to accept the Greens' proposed wealth-tax on the uber-rich! Shock! Horror! Won't someone think of people worth tens of millions of dollars with multiple houses?

Meanwhile, while they're trying to frighten us, it turns out that the public actually supports these taxes. And they support a wealth tax more than they support Labour's least-they-could-possibly-do, protect the rich CGT:

[Image stolen from Ipsos Issues Monitor, via RNZ]

Note that this is asking about the specific policy proposals of the various parties, rather than vague propositions. So 64% of those polled explicitly support the Greens' proposed wealth tax. I guess they recognise what the problem is - the rich - and won't accept half-measures. Which includes TOP's land tax, because it explicitly excludes financial capital, while also taxing the urban rich at lower rates than the rest of us (and fuck that).

Labour and the Greens should be taking heart from this. Despite all National's scaremongering, people recognise very well that the only people negatively affected by taxing the rich will be... the rich. Which is why they and their paid stooges are screaming so loudly. As for the rest of us, it means a better life. Taxing the rich is a popular policy, and the left parties should push on it as hard as they can.

Good riddance to LNG

Back in February, in an effort to keep gas prices (and gas retailer profits) high, National announced a mad plan for an LNG import terminal, to be fast-tracked by a special law, with contracts signed before the election. It was a stupid plan, locking us into high-cost, highly vulnerable, highly polluting energy for decades, right when we are on the verge of eradicating it from our local energy mix. Fortunately, it now looks like its just not going to happen, with both of National's coalition partners vetoing the idea:

The Government’s hopes of signing a contract for an LNG terminal before the election appear in tatters after NZ First leader Winston Peters revealed Cabinet “decided not make a decision today” and the ACT Party voiced objections.

ACT leader David Seymour said the Government should leave the decision on whether to underwrite an LNG import terminal until after the election. Signing a contract before then would be “irresponsible”, he said.

NZ First deputy leader Shane Jones, who has referred to potential misgivings over a quick decision on LNG, hinted that was also NZ First’s view, but said he would leave it to Peters to make any announcement.

And hopefully that will be the end of it. When even corrupt, fossil-mad NZ First and ecocidal arsonists ACT can recognise its a stupid idea (in addition to every other party along the political spectrum bar National), then its a strong suggestion that it really is stupid. And hopefully after the election we'll have a new government which will end this stupid plan for good, and the gas industry can die a quiet death.

Submit!

Last week the regime introduced three anti-Tiriti bills under urgency, then rammed them through their first reading in a rare Saturday afternoon sitting to avoid public scrutiny. Those bills were sent to the Justice Committee, which has now called for submissions on them. There is no formal submissions deadline, but they encourage submissions by 1 December 2026 so they can be ready to be handled by the next Parliament. Submissions can be made on the form linked above, or by post (free!) to:

Justice Committee Secretariat
Justice Committee
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

The committee is handling all three bills as a group due to their closely related subject matter. If you're looking for things to say (beyond that they are a racist pile of shit and a horrific breach of Te Tiriti which will cause a generational delegitimisation of Parliament and the New Zealand state), they have been denounced by both the Waitangi Tribunal and Human Rights Commission. In terms of the committee's proposed new mandate to focus on producing "high-quality legislation", I suggest that is impossible. The only way to ensure high-quality legislation is not to pass them.

And if parliament complains again about getting "too many" submissions, I'd suggest that if Parliament keeps trolling the public like this, they can hardly complain when the public responds in kind. If they want fewer submissions, and less heat in their committees, maybe they should stop doing that, and just be less shit.