More colonial bullying

Back in February the Cook Islands - a former New Zealand colony which is now "self-governing in free association with New Zealand" - signed a strategic partnership agreement with China. Winston Peters was upset, feeling that he should have been consulted about such a move, and jerked the colonial chain. And now he's jerking it harder, cutting off support funding for the Cook Islands government:

New Zealand has paused its core sector support funding for the Cook Islands after its government signed partnership agreements with China earlier this year, Winston Peters' office says.

The Foreign Minister on Thursday confirmed the message was sent to the Cook Islands government "in its finality" on 4 June

However, it only become public on Thursday (19 June) after media reports in the Cook Islands.

While its easy to see this as Winston sabotaging Luxon (who is in China ATM), I think Peters' outdated world view is the real problem here. Like his protégé Shane Jones, Peters is a fossil politician with a fossilised worldview. Born during WWII, his model of how our society and politics should work is frozen sometime in the 1950s and 1960s - when New Zealand "had the best race relations in the world" (Māori were seen and not heard), was a loyal vassal of Britain and the US, and communism existed outside of the imaginations of sad far-right weirdos. More relevantly, the Cook Islands were still a colony. While they became self-governing in 1965, the relationship was very much in favour of New Zealand, which exercised political control through its high commissioner, judicial control through New Zealand judges, and even sent New Zealand police to enforce the rulings of said judges when premier Albert Henry was found to have committed election fraud in 1978 (shortly before Winston first entered parliament after an electoral petition in 1979).

But things have evolved a long way since then. The Cook Islands are now basically an independent country, with diplomatic relations with over 60 other nations. Even MFAT admits that it "conducts its own affairs", and that New Zealand's role is limited to "respond[ing] to requests for assistance with foreign affairs, disasters and defence". And in that context, Peters' attitude looks like a very ugly colonial throwback, the sort of international bullying modern Aotearoa is meant to oppose. It also seems unlikely to actually help things. Instead, it sets a clear incentive for the Cook Islands to seek that funding from China instead. And if that comes with strings attached which Peters doesn't like, well, he will have no-one to blame but himself.

Stealing from their victims

Between 1950 and 1993 the New Zealand government tortured and abused up to 250,000 children in residential care facilities. Following decades of cover-up and denial, dragging out cases, slandering their victims, and denying redress, the government finally gave a two-faced "apology" last year. You might think that that would mean they'd finally provide proper compensation for their victims, but no - that would cost money. So instead, they're spending two-thirds of their announced $774 million package on "administration" - that is, on denying claims:

Less than a third of the government's $774 million abuse in care redress package will end up in the pockets of survivors.

Figures obtained by RNZ revealed only $205m was earmarked for paying new claims with $52m to go towards topping up previously closed claims.

In defence of the figures, Erica Stanford, the Minister leading the government's abuse in care response, said redress payments were not the most important thing for some survivors and some of the $774m in this year's Budget was going towards changing the care system and providing other supports.

However, $92m was for the civil servants who administered the redress funds and another $37m would pay for operating costs like premises and IT.

So basically they're stealing from their victims, while bundling up other costs to make a Big Number for PR purposes. Its revolting, the sign of a government driven more by austerity and PR concerns than by righting its past wrongs. And combined with the news that none of the public servants identified as being responsible will ever be held accountable, it makes it crystal clear that this government does not give a single sloppy shit about its victims.

Dismantling the state

The New Zealand state has traditionally taken an expansive role in our society, providing health, education, and welfare systems to enrich and enable all our people. But ACT's weirdo radicals want to change that, and are directing the weak National government into enacting their agenda of dismantling the state. There's charter schools, obviously - publicly funded, at inflated rates, but not accountable; as well as funnelling public money into private schools to subsidise the rich. But today they've taken two other significant moves. Firstly, there's directing Te Whatu Ora to outsource all routine operations on ten-year contracts, intended to strip the public health system of capacity while granting windfall profits to the providers. And then there's "reviewing" - meaning cutting - ECE funding, while "making trade-offs between the quality of early learning and its cost" (meaning dumbing it down, deskilling the workforce, and turning it back into a high-profit, low-skill business for their donors in the kiddy-farm industry).

The latter is especially stupid. We've known for literally decades that arly childhood education is one of the best investments we can make in the future of our society, with enormous returns in future education, wellbeing, and earning potential (and savings on crime and welfare). It should be nationalised and incorporated in the state education system, to ensure everyone gets a good start in life. But National simply sees it as babysitting; a cost on the state, rather than a positive benefit. And their cheapness here is going to have long-term consequences for the future.

The good news is that their stovepiped "review" won't report back until this time next year, meaning there will be little time for them to do anything about it before we throw them out on their arses at the next election. As for the health system changes, if the contracts do not allow Te Whatu Ora to set the volume of operations and bring them back in-house, I would expect a future government to simply legislate them away. We should not let this temporary regime steal our health system from us piece by piece, for the profit of its private donors and cronies.

Today in dysfunctional government

The big news this morning was that the Prime Minister thought the government he leads was going to steal your sick leave. But apparently even the ACT zealots could see that that would deeply unpopular, so they've "clarified" that the Prime Minister was wrong, and really they're just going to steal the sick leave of those lazy, shiftless part-time workers instead. Given that ~20% of those with jobs work part-time, its unclear how this is really much better. But what it does tell us is that the government doesn't know what its own policy is - its just dysfunction all the way down.

Meanwhile, if you're worried about your sick leave being stolen, join your union. Union collective contracts usually include sick leave provisions, which are often more generous than the statutory minimum. And even if they simply restate the current law, its then in the contract, meaning it doesn't just disappear because some government minister had a brain fart or took a bribe (sorry, a "donation") to change the law.

Trying to attract a stranded asset

Shane Jones is an outdated fossil of a minister. Born in 1959, his model of how our economy and society should look is stuck sometime in the late 70's: a dirty, fossil-fuel powered, racist, sexist, homophobic shitstain of a country which most of us never experienced, and most of those who did are glad we moved on from and desperately want to forget. But he's energy minister now, and that means being able to inflict his peculiar pathologies on the nation, including promoting the gas industry. And not content with moving to return us to the 70's by repealing the offshore drilling ban and making the government liable for oil companies' cleanup bills, he's currently touting for business in Singapore, offering new concessions in a desperate effort to attract foreign gas companies to come her and drill:

In a speech to the energy industry in Singapore this week, Shane Jones signalled a major change to New Zealand’s oil and gas exploration rules.

It appears the Government plans to remove restrictions that previously limited oil and gas exploration to defined block offer areas and instead allow oil and gas companies to apply for exploration permits across all of New Zealand’s territory.

Reading the speech, Jones doesn't just want drilling off Taranaki - he wants it in "the East Coast basin, Canterbury basin, and the Great South Basin" as well. Which would be a disaster for Aotearoa. But the good news for us - and the problem for Jones - is that no matter how far he lowers his pants to attract the oil industry, only a moron will take him up on it.

Part of this is what Jones calls "political risk" - the risk that the next government will simply ban drilling again and legislatively revoke all the permits without compensation. And part of it is because there's probably no gas to find (companies have been looking for years, and we haven't had any new offshore fields discovered since the early 2000s). But the fundamental reason is simply economics: even if they discovered a huge new field tomorrow, it would take a decade and a billion dollars to develop. And there simply won't be a market for gas in Aotearoa in a decade to repay the investment.

Gas was already dead - being driven out of the electricity market by wind and solar, and out of the industrial sector by the ETS and the push to reduce emissions. The writedown of supplies last week (if real, and not an industry scam to panic the government) is going to be the nail in the coffin. Methanex, the cornerstone user of the entire industry, won't stick around without supply, and will likely shut down permanently in a year or two (its already more profitable for them to simply onsell its gas to others). And the remaining big industrial users will see price hikes and supply shortages in their future and run for the exits. So, by the time a hypothetical new gas field came online in 2035 or so, it would be a stranded asset, with no-one to buy the gas. Anyone who wants to do it is ether a fool or a scammer.

Unfortunately, Jones seems unable to understand this. Which means we'll have to put up with more of his desperate efforts to "attract business" until we finally rid ourselves of him and his outdated worldview in 2026.

Doing less than the bare minimum

Last night, after nearly two years of genocide in Gaza, the New Zealand government finally began to do the right thing, and sanctioned two Israeli cabinet ministers for promoting genocide. Which is a good first step, but its not enough. Firstly, the sanctions are just a travel ban, saying "you can't come here", which is pretty whoop-di-shit as far as sanctions go. Secondly, wanted international criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are not sanctioned - and nor is the state of Israel itself. In other words, the New Zealand government is still doing as little as possible.

This isn't good enough. Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and an illegal occupation of the West bank, in flagrant violation of international law. We should be treating it like we treat Russia, with a full trade and investment ban and restrictions on financial dealings. IDF members should be banned from travelling here. Israeli officials complicit in or with political responsibility for these crimes should similarly be subject to asset seizures, travel bans, and trading restrictions, just like Putin and his cronies. And those sanctions should stay in place until the genocide and occupation stops, reparations (such as they can be) are made, seized land is returned, and everyone responsible is sent to The Hague to face justice before international courts. That seems like the absolute minimum we should be doing. Instead, though inaction, our government is sending a clear message that it approves of genocide. And that is not acceptable.

The problem is the regime, not MMP

There's an interesting article on The Spinoff, worried that with so many parties ruling out working with each other, MMP is collapsing back into left-right, "winner take all" politics. It points to a shift back to the pre-MMP elected dictatorship model of government by decree, "outsized" influence of small parties, and stronger political alignments between parties as problematic. I'm not so sure.

The first is definitely a problem. But its a problem specifically of this regime, and to a large extent it seems to be a self-correcting one, in that the public has shown little appetite for this government's preferred model of retrospective laws rammed through under urgency without consultation, and seems likely to punish them for it. As for the future, this sort of contempt for democracy seems to be a right-wing problem: in the past, National has always had a greater appetite for abuse than Labour, and the latter has been specifically constrained by coalition partners who denied the use of urgency outside of accepted norms (the budget, end of year wash-up, and the rare cases when things are actually urgent). National has usually not faced such constraints, and this term has had coalition partners who are explicitly anti-democratic and anti-constitutional. The lesson for voters is not to let that happen again, and to punish those parties until they credibly commit to respecting a democratic, consultative style of government.

On the second point, the article notes that

It is neither possible nor desirable to quantify the degree of sway a smaller partner in a coalition should have. That is a political question, not a technical one.

Ultimately, it is we voters who are going to decide how much of this we are going to accept - and what we do about it. And on that, I'd note that no parliament can bind its successor, and so what is done can simply be undone. If we don't like radical fringe parties using coalition bargaining and big-party weakness to impose unpopular, radical policies by undemocratic means, we can simply repeal them. And if we are successful in making this a one-term regime (or better yet, a half-term one), then that is exactly what we should do, with an Omnibus Repeal Bill to restore the status quo ante and make it as if this regime never happened.

(And to those crying foul over the threat of such policy ping-pong, I'd point out that its pretty much what the current regime has done; they just took a year and multiple bills to dismantle everything, rather than having the honesty to do it in one go.)

On the third point, there's the usual lament about the lack of a "center" party to change sides every election and moderate the demands of the wing parties. The traditional answer to this is to point to the long list of such failed projects in the past, and argue that people don't vote for that (or at least, not enough people; the unfair and undemocratic 5% threshold almost certainly has prevented such a party from gaining a foothold and then demonstrating credibility to potential voters). But I think we've also really already got two such parties, in National and Labour, who are naturally chasing the center voter in competition with each other. Normally this gives them an incentive to push back against demands from their respective wing-parties in coalition, and creates a dynamic where those wanting real change vote for the wings rather than the center. Where there are multiple coalition partners there are also usually competing demands, which means that everyone constrains everyone else. And again, what's unusual about the present regime is that this isn't happening: NZFirst and ACT are largely in policy agreement about racism and environmental destruction, while National, bereft of an agenda of its own, simply accepts the one handed to it by its "partners". So again, the problem is that this is not a normal regime, but that doesn't seem like it'll necessarily be a problem in future (especially if voters kick National out of power at the first opportunity as punishment for their abnormality).

And all of that said: none of this means I disagree with the final conclusion of the article: that our lack of constitutional safeguards means we need to "look beyond MMP for other ways to limit the power of its governments." Because that is one thing that this debacle of a government has made crystal clear. We need to shift power away from the over-mighty parliament (and the over-mighty executive which pulls its strings and uses it as a rubber-stamp), and move it back to voters, to local government, to the Waitangi Tribunal, and to the courts. As for those demanding we surrender even more power to this abusive institution via a longer parliamentary term, they can get fucked.

Climate Change: Labour chickening out again

For the past 20 years, agriculture has been the glaring gap in our climate change policy. Responsible for 50% of our emissions, it was initially excluded from the ETS, and then - under Green Pressure - was to be slowly bought in at a 90% subsidy. But National repealed all that, and so farmers are back to enjoying a free ride, spewing out methane while gouging us for butter.

We were all hoping that the next government would change that, and finally force farmers to pay their way. But of course Labour is chickening out again:

Labour might not campaign on putting agriculture into the Emissions Trading Scheme at the 2026 election, saying the longstanding policy is “under review”, along with the rest of Labour’s policy.

Asked about Labour’s policy on agricultural emissions, Hipkins told Herald Now’s Ryan Bridge “we’re reviewing all of that at the moment”.

“We’re talking to the farmers about that as we go through that review process,” Hipkins said.

But note who they're not talking to: the 90% of kiwis who live in cities, and who pay for every gram of carbon we emit. The 90% of us who have been subsidising the pollution of a privileged, wealthy, rural elite for the past 20 years, and will be expected to keep subsidising them if Labour gets its way. The 90% of us who might actually vote Labour, and whose votes actually determine elections.

But I guess no-one ever thought the Labour Party was smart. Their continued protection of the status quo and desperate attempts to appeal to people who will never vote for them, at the expense of people who actually do, shows that their political model is just fundamentally broken.

As for what to do about it, Hipkins' message is crystal clear: the Greens need to make bringing agriculture into the ETS immediately and with no subsidies a bottom line at the next election. And if you want real climate policy, you need to vote for it - not for Labour chickenshittery.

The rich-list is a social failure

RNZ has a piece this morning on the latest NBR rich list, reporting that the ultra-rich are doing great (despite the government-induced recession). The 119 individuals and families listed are now collectively worth more than $100 billion - 40% of Aotearoa's annual GDP.

Meanwhile, while they're revelling in their wealth, we have record homelessness, half a million kiwis are using food-banks every month, the government is driving children into poverty. And the Prime Minister - himself a wannabe rich-lister - thinks this is something we should be "celebrating".

Bullshit. The existence of such extremes of wealth and poverty in a country like ours is a failure, not a "success". We are a rich country and we have more than enough for everybody. And its hard to escape the conclusion that the reason so many people are so poor is precisely because we have allowed a clique of people who don't pay their fair share to use corruption, regulatory capture, wage theft, and (in some cases) outright fraud to steal the country's wealth and siphon it into their own pockets.

Its time we took it back. Its time we reclaimed our wealth, taxed the rich, and built a society where we all have enough. And if the rich don't like it, fuck 'em; we have more votes.

A parliamentary lynching

I have spent the afternoon watching the debate on the outrageous and anti-democratic privileges committee report on Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, and Rawiri Waititi. And after three hours, Waititi moved closure to get it over with. The government, which used its majority on the privileges committee to recommend an unprecedented punishment of Māori MPs for being Māori, has just used its majority to suspend them for 7, 21, and 21 days respectively.

I could talk about a dark day for our democracy, and so on, but fuck that. This is nothing less than a parliamentary lynching. The silencing of Māori MPs for being Māori violates the fundamentals of our democracy, stripping 210,000 people of their representation, precisely because it was too effective for the government's taste. Our government has now become a shitty Putinist tyranny, and it should be treated as such.

As for parliament, by deliberately excluding these MPs, it can no longer make any claim to represent Aotearoa. It has lost any shred of legitimacy it had. Instead, its just a shitty, colonial, white supremacist institution – a Westminster by the sea. Let it burn.

Giving the finger to democracy

So, the same day Rimmer is insulting the public by claiming everyone who disagrees with him is a bot, the Finance and Expenditure Committee is is insulting by voting - on party lines, of course - to refuse to read submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill. Instead they will be "read" by a bot.

This is an insult to every citizen who takes the time and effort to participate in our democracy and submit on the bill. And in addition to creating doubts about the process, it is a clear disincentive to submit. After all, why bother, if no-one is going to actually read it? It clearly signals that the government is not interested in running an honest democratic process. That it does not care what we think. That it will ram its bullshit bill through regardless, even in the face of mass public opposition.

Aotearoa is a peaceful democracy. One of the reasons we are a peaceful democracy is because so far successive governments have at least pretended to listen. But its clear that this regime is done with listening, and done with pretending. And that is both stupid and dangerous. Because when the government says "we won't listen", it invites people to make them. And our ways of doing that are a whole lot messier and uglier and more disruptive than filling out a form on a website saying "I oppose this bill and ask that it not be passed for the following reasons..."

Anyway, if you want to object to this, while staying well-within the polite end of the escalation ladder, I suggest objecting to the process in your submission, and emailing - or better yet, posting - a copy of your submission to every government member of the committee, with a polite note that its being sent to them because they voted to have submissions read by a bot, and how this is an insult to democracy. Their staff will at least inform them of the cover letter, and if they get enough, it may cause them to worry about their electoral future. And that ultimately is the solution: to vote these pricks out, pour encourager les autres...

Retreating into his far-right bubble

When Rimmer proposed his weirdo libertarian Regulatory Standards Bill, the public reaction was clear and unequivocal. 88% of the 23,000 submissions on the initial consultation rejected it completely. Only 0.3% thought it was a good idea. Faced with this level of public opposition, a sensible, reality-based politician - or at least one who could count - would have realised they were on dangerous ground and dumped the bill, or at least paused to reconsider. But not Rimmer. Instead, he's decided that everyone who did not completely support the bill was a "bot":

ACT leader David Seymour has claimed 99.5 percent of the submissions received on the Regulatory Standards Bill were created using "bots".

[...]

"You're smart enough to know that those 23,000 submissions, 99.5 percent of them, were because somebody figured out how to make a bot make fake submissions that inflated the numbers," Seymour said.

The figures quoted were "meaningless" and represented nothing more than somebody "running a smart campaign with a bot".

When asked what evidence Seymour had that the submissions were fake, he said it's because "we've looked at them. Because we know what the contents of them is".

...except they didn't. Because the Ministry for Regulation got an AI - a "bot", if you will - to "read" and categorise the submissions. And it didn't make any such finding. Neither did they find a huge number of duplicate or form submissions (as used by far-right groups in support of Rimmer's racist Treaty Principles Bill). Those 20,000 submissions clearly opposed to the bill? They're from actual people, iwi, and organisations. They're not "bots"; they're simply people saying things Rimmer doesn't like.

(I should note that normally submissions on this sort of consultation are released, so normally you'd be able to check all this yourself. But Rimmer's quack ministry has refused to follow the normal democratic process, and refused to release them under the OIA. Which conveniently allows him to lie about them with impunity. Which is another example of how this government weaponises secrecy to undermine democracy).

Someone on kikorangi observed that "Bot submitters are just the digital version of the paid protesters trope." That seems accurate. And like claims about paid protestors or "crisis actors", claims of "bot submitters" (or his new one about "online campaigns") are an attempt to delegitimise clear and public signs of opposition. Its a sign that Rimmer is retreating into his far-right bubble - a bubble in which people organising to oppose the government is somehow suspicious and undemocratic - rather than admit the reality that his agenda is deeply unpopular. But while he can spout these absurdities, there's something he's not going to be deny: when we vote him and the rest of his dogshit regime out at the next election.

Naked corruption and cronyism

It was foreign monarch's fake birthday over the weekend, which meant an honours list, which turned out to be a demonstration of everything wrong with the "honours" system. Those the government deemed worthy included outright cronies, a politician so reviled that her name is synonymous with social murder and whose grave will be a piss-soaked sewer when she dies (if we don't just dig up her corpse and stake it), and a man who had given $150,000 to coalition parties in 2023 alone (strangely, this was not mentioned in any of the media stories around his honour). The inclusion of these people on the list was a naked "fuck you" to the people of Aotearoa, not to mention an implicit defamation by association of all the actually worthy recipients.

This is a perennial problem, and the government gets away with it in part because it uses those other recipients as a human shield. It hides behind the worthy while reward its donors and cronies, and the media plays the game and lets them get away with it. They shouldn't. When the government introduced a corrupt and Muldoonist fast-track law, the media published stories about exactly how much fast-track applicants had donated, and what they were getting for their money. They should do the same with honours lists. And if the rich donors cry foul, well, maybe they shouldn't behave in a manner which looks so nakedly corrupt.

Long term, it is clear that the system needs to either be completely destroyed, or taken out of the grubby hands of politicians. Having honours recommended by an independent board, according to statutory criteria, with strict rules against rewarding anyone who has ever worked in government or politics (no honours for cronies and time-servers! No retirement perks!), or ever donated to a political party (no corruption!), would be a good start. But why would the politicians ever vote for that?

Climate Change: Maybe we can take the win after all?

Last month, He Pou a Rangi shockingly recommended increasing the supply of carbon credits auctioned under the Emissions Trading Scheme. Their reason for this was essentially that climate policy had been too successful - plant closures of major emitters had reduced both emissions and pollution subsidies, while auction failures had forced polluters to use stockpiled units. Meaning that the huge pile of the latter was being reduced "too quickly", and we might - gasp - overachieve our goals.

You might think that this was a good problem to have: long-term there's effectively a finite pool of government credits in the ETS, effectively representing a long-term emissions budget, with anything extra having to come from trees. Cancelling some of this pool rather than using it - which is what the auction failures did - reduces total long-term emissions, or at least requires them to be compensated (for what that's worth). And anything which reduces the supply of units increases the price, and hence the economy-wide incentive for emissions reduction. But He Pou a Rangi was weirdly fixated on the idea of reducing the surplus over the period to 2030, and not before. Doing it too early - in 2029, say - was Bad. So it had to increase auction allocations to stop that from happening.

The good news is that they don't get the final say. There's another round of consultation before a Ministerial decision, and the Ministry for the Environment has included an option of maintaining the lower status quo allocations, with a proportionate allocation for 2030. Which would mean auctioning 13.6 million tons less than He Pou a Rangi's recommendation:

...which seems like a good idea. Partly because surplus estimates seem to be very uncertain and move around a lot, so its avoiding having to reverse things in a hurry, and partly because insofar it increases the chances of us actually meeting the second emissions budget (something which is now looking in doubt thanks to National's stupidity) - not to mention reduces our Paris liability. But mostly because we should be using every excuse we possibly can to grind down emissions budgets so as to reduce emissions.

The consultation is open until 29 June. I urge people to read the consultation documents and submit on it.

Getting what they paid for

So, having stolen $13 billion from New Zealand women by shitcanning pay equity negotiations, the National government is again attacking women - this time by reversing long-standing pay equity provisions for ECE teachers and allowing ECE providers to go back to paying them minimum wage:

The Associate Education Minister is changing who decides how much new Early Childcare Education (ECE) teachers can be paid, leaving it up to individual centres to determine their starting salary - rather than be set by the government according to the pay parity scheme with primary school teachers.

David Seymour says it will help ECE centres stay "viable" and not pass on costs to parents.

The education union says the change scraps pay parity rates for new teachers, undermining the scheme which took decades to secure. The Greens are concerned it will drive down wages and Labour says it means new ECE teachers will be at the "whim of their employers".

What this actually means is bigger profits for corporate baby-farms. And on that front, its worth noting that the Wright family - who own and profit from the biggest corporate baby-farm, Best Start - donated $32,450 to the National Party in 2016.

I guess they got what they paid for.

Climate Change: Denying our obligations

In 2016, the then-National government signed the Paris Agreement, committing Aotearoa to a 30 (later 50) percent reduction in emissions by 2030. But since then, successive governments have failed to do enough to meet the target, leaving us with a huge shortfall, currently estimated at 84 million tons. The target is legally binding, and Aotearoa is expected to make up that shortfall using Paris' international cooperation mechanisms. But despite that clear international commitment, the government is refusing to publicly say whether it will meet our obligations. Instead, Ministers have repeatedly talked openly about cheating on the deal.

RNZ has a piece today about the problems this is causing. The lead is potential trade problems, as both the EU and UK FTAs include commitments to meet our Paris obligations (so: we can expect trade sanctions, likely targetted at the polluting dairy industry, if we don't). But its also affecting domestic policy. Currently this is predicated on the government meeting its obligations. But if it does not, then He Pou a Rangi will have to recommend stronger action, as they are legally required to consider "New Zealand’s relevant obligations under international agreements" as well as our (weaker) domestic targets:

The commission needed to clarify whether offshore purchases were still on the table, because otherwise it would need to change its recommendations on the level of carbon cuts the government should make here using the Emission Trading Scheme, in order to remain compliant.

The commission noted that making all the cuts here would be "costly and disruptive" and also not possible using only the country's main climate tool of the Emissions Trading Scheme, which covers less than half the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Basically, if the government isn't going to use international cooperation, then the Paris 2030 target becomes a default domestic 2030 target, and He Pou a Rangi will be legally obliged to recommend radical cuts to meet it. Of course, National could remove that obligation, but that sort of overt repudiation would completely end their game of pretending to care while doing nothing, alienating kiwi voters and triggering those international trade sanctions.

RNZ also talks about Treasury not knowing whether to recognise the cost of meeting Paris - estimated at up to $24 billion - as a liability on the government's books. Which is something that would both focus the mind and act as a clear financial incentive for emissions reduction policies, effectively setting a government carbon price of $285/ton for policies to be measured against. But it would also blow all future surplus projections out of the water, which is another reason why Ministers really want to talk up uncertainty and won't commit. And given what they did to pay equity to remove a liability half that size, uncertainty is probably the lesser of two evils at the moment.

But whether the government recognises that obligation or not, we will be paying regardless - if not under the international cooperation mechanism, then in cleaning up after floods and drought and fires and cyclones, plus the social costs of insurance retreat and sea-level rise. The Paris Agreement is meant to reduce those long-term costs. Refusing to meet it is just another example of the long-term problem of New Zealand governments: taking the cheap, short-term option, and refusing to invest for the future.

A people's select committee

Two weeks ago, National rammed the Equal Pay Amendment Bill through Parliament, nuking all current pay-equity claims and stealing $13 billion from New Zealand women. The bill was passed under all-stages urgency, so it didn't get a select committee phase, and the public had no chance to object. But now we do, thanks to Marilyn Waring:

Former National MP Dame Marilyn Waring has gathered a group of female former MPs to hold their own 'people's select committee' on the government's pay equity changes.

The unofficial committee is rounded out with former MPs Jackie Blue, Jo Hayes and Belinda Vernon from National, Nanaia Mahuta, Lianne Dalziel, Steve Chadwick and Lynne Pillay from Labour, Ria Bond from New Zealand First and Sue Bradford from the Greens. All are working on a 'pro bono' - unpaid - basis.

Independent consultant Amy Ross, previously the Public Service Commission's lead on pay equity, and former Parliamentary librarian and researcher Bessie Sutherland would provide additional research support, and would be paid.

Dame Marilyn said they were planning to hold their first session, hearing from submitters, in Wellington on 11 August with subsequent sittings via Zoom to allow for submitters to attend from around the country. All sessions would be public.

Full details, including how to submit, are here. Submissions are due by Thursday, 31 July 2025.

This is a completely informal process, which carries no legal weight. Its primary purpose is to embarass the regime and build a public case for immediate reversal of their theft. But it is still worth submitting to. While parliament is the formal center of politics, in a democracy it should be responding to what happens outside. This is part of showing that it needs to respond, and quickly, or else we will de-elect it and get a new one which will.

Aotearoa should not have places named after slavers

What do Picton, Ashburtn, Stokes Valley, and Ellice St in wellington have in common?

They're all named after slave-owners.

This is abhorrent. Naming stuff after foreign imperialists is bad enough, but slave-owners were participants in one of the greatest crimes against humanity in human history. We should not be naming our towns and suburbs and streets after them. Renaming these places seems like the least we can do.

Unfortunately, given the attitude of land information minister Chris Penk, who today refused to return Russell to its original name of Kororāreka, that seems unlikely to happen under this racist dogshit regime.

National's "investment boost"

I've been thinking a bit about National's "investment boost", the centrepiece of its dogshit budget. Its pitched by the government as encouraging big capital investments which will create jobs for the future. But I don't think there's much chance of that. The problem is that the policy just won't last long enough for that sort of investment.

The first reason for this is politics. We're due an election in the next 18 months - maybe sooner if the increasingly irritable Winston throws a tanty when Rimmer takes his job - and at best its a crap-shoot for National (and those odds will only have gotten worse after they stole $13 billion from women). A future Labour-Green government may toss the whole policy simply to make fiscal space for their own policy choices. At the least, they'll limit it to promote better investment, and rip out the bits promoting mining, fossil fuels, and farming, because they don't want to subsidise them. The second is that poor policy design means there is no cap to government exposure for this depreciation, meaning it runs the risks of a huge cost blowout and turning into another film subsidy disaster. So even if National somehow clings to power, they'll need to change it to stop the financial bleeding. They'll be slow about it, because they won't want to admit they made a mistake, but eventually it'll have to be limited, probably after three or four years.

What does that mean for the policy? Most obviously, it is not going to result in the sorts of big new capital investment National is talking up, because there's simply no time to get something conceived, designed, consented, and built (and so paid for) before the tax break gets changed. Planning a big, multi-year project around this tax break is a great way to lose money (though people may plan in hope, then shelve projects and whine for a handout when the inevitable happens. NZ businesses apparently love whining, and its almost as if that is their real business model).

So what will we get? Small, quick, cheap stuff. Utes and computers, obviously, which don't really do shit to boost productivity, and are effectively consumer spending for businesses. National is probably hoping that that might give them a quick economic juice before the next election so they can say "things are getting better". For bigger projects, it'll be either short planning cycle stuff - again, small and quick - or stuff which is already consented and planned for, which can be brought forward. And on that front, there's an obvious type of project which has plenty of pre-consented stuff sitting around, and which can be built in two years from saying "go": solar farms. Yes, National may just have strengthened our solar boom. Their farmer-cronies (who want rural land "protected" from more productive uses so they can instead use it to pollute) will be spitting.

(It may also help with wind farms - which again have a lot of projects pre-consented and waiting - but they take longer to build).

Which also brings me to how a future government could use this policy: use it solely to push decarbonisation. Building a renewable energy project, electrifying a factory and getting it off gas, switching your fleet of delivery trucks to EVs? Have a depreciation break. Want to keep buying old, fossil infrastructure? Fuck you. We need to decarbonise quickly, and this seems like an excellent way to bring that investment forward and make it happen.

Drawn

A ballot for three member's bills was held this morning, and the following bills were drawn:

• Local Government (Port Companies Accountability) Amendment Bill (Lemauga Lydia Sosene)
• Financial Markets (International Money Transfers) Amendment Bill (Arena Williams)
• Military Decorations and Distinctive Badges (Modernisation) Amendment Bill (Tim van de Molen)

The first would extend some (but not all) of the provisions covering council controlled organisations to port companies and their subsidiaries (which are excluded from the definition of CCO by s6(4)(c) and (ca) of the Local Government Act 2002). This would include the principal objective statement - setting up a legal clash with the principal objective clause of the Port Companies Act 1988 - and (most importantly) the LGOIMA and Ombudsmen Acts. If passed, it would be the biggest statutory expansion of transparency since the OIA was extended to cover Parliamentary Undersecretaries in 2016, but why its being done in this convoluted way rather than simply repeal the exemption isn't clear. Rachel Brooking, the original sponsor of the bill, told me there were "other consequences involving more moving parts" when she first put it in the ballot in 2021. Possibly there are worries about guarantees and lending, but it does also create direct conflicts of law, and set up problems for future (or past?) privatisations, in that all port companies would be subject to LGOIMA, regardless of whether they would be CCOs if not for the exemption. But that's what happens if you try and unravel a nearly 40 year old failed privatisation campaign, I guess.

The other bills are just basic consumer protection, and weirdo flagshagging (increasing the penalty for wearing medals you're not entitled to to $10,000, which seems wildly disproportionate - the penalty for equivalent offences under the Flags, Emblems, and Names Protection Act 1981 is $5000. But flagshaggers gonna shag flags, I guess). Given what else was in the ballot, it could have been much, much worse.

$13 billion

That's how much Nicola Willis thinks she stole from New Zealand women by repealing pay equity:

A tax incentive for businesses, boosts to health and education spending, and Crown funding for new gas fields are among new Budget initiatives made viable by nearly $13 billion in cuts to the pay equity regime.

[...]

The Government initially refused to disclose how much money it had saved as a result of the pay equity changes. However, the Budget says there is now $12.8b in “fiscal headroom” over the next four years as a result of the new, tighter system.

And she's using the money "saved" to pay for... more business tax cuts! Not health, housing, welfare, or any of the other countless things we desperately need as a result of National's cuts-driven recession, but to shovel more money to her donors and cronies. It's pure class warfare, based on outright theft. But that's so very very National, isn't it?

Meanwhile, there'll also be $200 million set aside for "co-investment" in the gas industry. This is an industry with literally no future - no future in electricity, no future in industry, and which faces a death spiral for its network. Only a complete sucker would invest in a pre-stranded asset. But then, its not about investment; its about creating a conflict of interest for the next government between its role as an investor and its role as a regulator and policy-maker, which will reliably generate advice and headlines about how much money the government will be burning by doing either. Essentially an ideological poison pill. The good news is that its a contingency, so there are no concrete plans yet for such investments (because there's no new gas fields to invest in), and this government has only 18 months left to run. And the quicker we kick it out, the less we'll lose on this bullshit.

National grovels to Trump

Its budget day, and the government has been whining about how it has no money and so can't afford anything. Meanwhile, they've just given away half a billion dollars a year to foreign fascist techbros:

New Zealand financial statements filed by tech firms including Google, Facebook and Amazon show how they're moving their local profits to tax havens like Ireland, allowing them to declare little or no taxable revenue here.

Treasury estimates a proposed Digital Services Tax would have pulled in $479 million from these firms over the next four years – but this week, under the shadow of Donald Trump's tariff threats, the Government announced it was dropping the bill from its legislative agenda.

The Herald has a closer look at Google's tax-cheating. They shipped over a billion dollars offshore by paying dodgy "service fees" to themselves, ensuring that there was nothing here to tax. If those profits had been taxed here instead of laundered through overseas tax havens, it would have been an extra quarter of a billion dollars we could have used to pay for the things we need. Instead, it will pay for political corruption and promoting fascism in the US.

A tax on tech revenue would have been one way of disincentivising techbro money-laundering. But National has cancelled it in order to grovel to Trump. But in the process, they've shown us a truth they'd rather deny: when they claim "there is no money", it is a choice, and a lie.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. Unusually, its not starting with bills; instead there will be two debates, the first on ACT MP Joseph Mooney's disallowance motion for the tikanga provisions in the Professional Examinations in Law Regulations 2008, and the second to authorise a select committee inquiry into online harm. After that there is the committee stage of the Auckland Harbour Board and Takapuna Borough Council Empowering Amendment Bill, followed by the first reading of Shanan Halbert's Enabling Crown Entities to Adopt Māori Names Bill and Andy Foster's Financial Markets (Conduct of Institutions) Amendment (Duty to Provide Financial Services) Amendment Bill. If the House moves very quickly, it might get to Debbie Ngarewa-Packer's Resource Management (Prohibition on Extraction of Freshwater for On-selling) Amendment Bill, but that seems unlikely. There should be a ballot for two bills tomorrow.

Parliamentary privilege is a threat to all of us

People are rightly outraged about psycho fascist Parmjeet Parmar "inquiring" about using the privileges committee to arbitrarily imprison her political opponents. As Chris Hipkins said yesterday, that is the sort of thing which happens in tinpot dictatorships, undemocratic and wrong, and a permanent stain on our Parliament. But its worse than that. Because parliamentary privilege doesn't only affect MPs, but all of us. Among the examples of contempts listed in the standing orders is:

reflecting on the character or conduct of the House or of a member in the member’s capacity as a member of the House.

Taken literally, this means that saying that Shane Jones is a corrupt mining industry stooge, or Winston is a senile old racist, or Casey Costello is a tobacco lobbyist, or David Seymour is a racist little incel are all contempts, punishable by parliament's private star chamber, the privileges committee. And its not just a theoretical problem: its not that many years since Matt Robson - then a private citizen, not an MP - was dragged before the privileges committee and forced to apologise for saying that Peter Dunne was in the pocket of the liquor and tobacco industries and had always faithfully delivered his vote for their interests.

That was outrageous enough when it was a mere apology. But now government MPs are discarding years of parliamentary precedent and openly speculating about throwing people in prison on the basis of pure political animus. That is beyond "outrageous"; it is a threat. A threat to every single one of us. Because "reflecting on the character and conduct of MPs in their capacity of MPs" is something we all do, and something we all should do. Our democracy is predicated on it. So when the government is "inquiring" about the ability of their kangaroo court to throw people in jail for breaching their bullshit "privileges", it sounds a lot like they are trying to outlaw democracy.

There is something we can do about this. Currently there is a bill before the House - the Parliament Bill - which would codify and re-enact the existing law around parliament, including parliamentary privilege. During its select committee hearings, several submitters raised the House's purported power to imprison for contempt, and recommended that they be explicitly repealed (just as its power to fine was limited in 2014). They were ignored. As a result, the House continues to claim the power to imprison people for up to two years (or maybe longer), for pretended offences like "making an MP feel bad", on the say-so of a kangaroo court which convicts on a partisan vote.

This cannot be allowed to stand. Parmjeet Parmar's "inquiry" turns this power from a theoretical historical anachronism to an active threat to each and every one of us. It is an active threat to our democracy and our liberty. It must be repealed.

(And while we're at it: in 2014 we also explicitly said that the House cannot expel a member, because of the impact of such a decision on democracy. Suspensions have a similar impact, so its time we legislatively limited them as well, to a maximum term of three days. Parliament clearly needs its wings clipped, and its time we did some clipping).

Update: Graeme Edgeler has already drafted the required amendment paper. So, which MP wants to stand up and move it?

A desperate delay

So, that was a bit of a damp squib. Everyone having geared up for an epic filibuster battle which would upset the government's legislative program for at least the day, National has now abused its parliamentary majority to adjourn the debate on its outrageous and anti-democratic punishment of Te Pāti Māori MPs until June. Officially this is to allow those MPs to participate in the budget debate, but Chris Bishop said the quiet part out loud: it's to "allow this week to focus on the Budget", rather than on a tyrannical government abusing parliamentary processes to effectively lynch its primary opposition. In other words, to ensure the government gets to control the headlines, rather than having to deal with the "distraction" of its own abuses.

The government is clearly hoping that public anger over this will dissipate. I am hoping it won't. And hopefully that anger will be shown to government MPs where-ever they go. This is a government which seriously suggested arbitrarily imprisoning its political opponents, merely for the opposing them. As Chris Hipkins noted in his speech, this regime is departing significantly from the democratic norms of Aotearoa. It is acting like a tinpot dictatorship. It is directly attacking our democracy. And that is not something the people of Aotearoa should tolerate or forgive.

(And yes, I'm glad to have been wrong about Hipkins on this; he moved that the penalty be reduced to a 24 hour suspension, in line with past practice, and seemed to be willing to fight for that).

National's move to ram through an adjournment caught everyone by surprise, including Brownlee. It was yet another abuse of parliamentary procedure to prevent debate and stifle opposition. Which is the central feature of this government: urgency and abuse of process all round. They are the worst, most abusive government we have had since Muldoon. And we should kick their arses out at the first opportunity.

Reported back

The Justice Committee has reported back on the Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Bill. The bill as introduced was a tyrannical law which threatened to outlaw protest and ordinary democratic activity in Aotearoa on the basis of government conspiracy theories and fantasies about its motivations. The good news is that its been made less bad, with the addition of "avoidance of doubt" clauses protecting protest, advocacy, dissent, and strikes, as used in the Terrorism Suppression Act. The bad news is that their attempts at a similar clause, clarifying that "protect[ing] information for a lawful purpose in the ordinary course of business, a profession, or an occupation, whether paid or unpaid" is not "improper", is too narrow, capturing only "jobs" (for want of a better term), rather than ordinary democratic activity. So if you organise a protest using invitation-only meetings and encrypted online messaging for the high-level planning, and you're not doing it as a job (if your "occupation" isn't "protest organiser"), then you're still at risk of the government having some fantasy about your motives and using it to imprison you. Likewise if you merely blog occasionally, rather than being able to say "actually, this is what I do". As for protecting journalism, the government (in its departmental report)is quite clear that it sees journalists as de facto enemy agents:

Journalism cannot be exempted from the definition of improper conduct because some journalistic endeavours are deliberately false or misleading and could be conducted for a foreign power intended to compromise a protected New Zealand interest(s).

...which confirms my suspicion that the government views even well-justified exemptions as undercutting its core purpose of all-encompassing criminalisation, so there are no "loopholes" for their "foreign agents" to wiggle through. The problem is that such "loopholes" are our democratic space, and blocking them blocks us. But I guess a government which will happily disenfranchise 210,000 Māori voters for 21 days by abusing its majority to kick their representatives out of parliament doesn't really give a shit about democracy.

Which side are you on, Labour?

Today will see an unprecedented moment in Parliament. A racist government whose leader opposes the "Maorification" of New Zealand is using its parliamentary majority to suspend opposition MPs from the House for being Māori, silencing them and the people they represent for up to 21 days. It is outrageous and anti-democratic; their own Speaker knows it is wrong, and they clearly do too. They're so ashamed of what they are doing - and scared of the public's reaction to it - that they have closed the public gallery, preventing anyone from watching their abuse of power.

This is a golden opportunity for the opposition Labour Party to stand up for our democracy and against this racist abuse of power. To show their voters which side they're on. To actually stand for something. So of course spineless jellyfish Chris Hipkins doesn't want to. Oh, he agrees the punishment is "too extreme", but he says Labour is "pretty unlikely" to filibuster the debate. So, he's going to take the leverage the Speaker handed him to force the government to compromise and adopt a more appropriate penalty, and he's going to do... nothing. Which is perhaps why the racist prime minister is now declaring there will be "no compromise" - because he knows Hipkins is weak and won't do anything other than whine and wring his hands.

But the Labour caucus isn't just Hipkins, and its MPs can speak even if its leader won't. And they should, if they want to continue in their gold-plated careers. Because their voters will be watching. And they will be judging. And silence, cowardice, and collaboration is unlikely to impress anyone.

Chipping away at National's gang-patch ban

National's racist gang-patch was clearly intended to humiliate gangs and allow them to be punished for being seen in public, and police have taken on that mission with enthusiasm, attacking funerals and kicking in doors to seize banned clothing (meanwhile, they've also abandoned domestic violence and mental health callouts, in a clear preference for violent, aggressive policing over core work). But while the government loves this, the courts might not. A local story in the Manawatu Standard last week about two gang members seeking the return of their seized patches shows the judiciary is showing some reluctance, especially where police have been unnecessarily aggressive in their seizure:

Nepia Wall, a member of the Black Power, had a sweatshirt seized by armed police at his family home, one that was given to him by his brother who had died.

Mongrel Mob member Raneira Tamaki was also asking the court to return his “side patches” that had been passed down generations, including from his own deceased brother.

Judge Lance Rowe said the Gangs Act 2024 made it an offence to wear gang insignia in public, but it was unclear whether the item could be returned to an offender or their whānau if it was proven to be of sentimental value.

[..]

[Wall] was not involved in any gang activity at the time, but it prompted armed police to go to his family home to seize the item, something which the judge said was concerning.

The judge is asking the police to explain why they thought guns were necessary for a seizure from someone not involved in gang activity, and signalling that excessive force will be relevant (because searches and seizures must be reasonable, and this seems... not to be). But the real red rag to National's racists is that the judge has said they will need to consider tikanga, mana, and whanaungatanga in their decision. To which we could also add te Tiriti, since an heirloom passed down for generations is a taonga, continued ownership of which is guaranteed by article two, and which should not be seized without a significant public policy reason. These are all part of the law of Aotearoa, and are clearly relevant here.

National will be spitting over this. But while they clearly intended that all patches would be seized and destroyed in order to humiliate their victims, the actual law gives courts discretion over their ultimate disposition. And return doesn't seem contrary to the purpose of the Act, which is explicitly about prohibiting public display, not about prohibiting private ownership. Where offending is low-level, the item in question is a taonga, and police have clearly been abusive in their seizure, then return does not seem at all unwarranted - if only to encourage the police to behave better in future.

We won't see a decision until June or July, but it looks like it will be interesting, and potentially litigated further up the chain. And while a positive ruling won't unravel the gang-patch ban, it will poke a few holes in it, and absolutely infuriate the government and the police.

Climate Change: Now what?

When National came to power in 2023, one of its first acts was to repeal all useful climate change policy. When they finally released their amended emissions reduction plan, it relied on a single project using a fantasy technology for the bulk of its reductions. And now, that project has fallen over:

Fully a third of the carbon savings needed to meet the government's legal obligations to cut emissions from 2025-2030 was supposed to come from carbon dioxide being stashed permanently under the ground of Taranaki, at the Kapuni gas field.

Kapuni's owner Todd Energy says the project's future is uncertain unless it gets some kind of extra incentive or subsidy from the government - something the government currently shows no signs of offering.

This was entirely predictable. As I pointed out when National first floated its CCS fantasy, carbon capture requires very high carbon prices. The perfect use-case - switching geothermal stations to closed- rather than open-cycle - did not happen when Aotearoa's carbon price was at $85 a ton with a credible pathway to keep rising. And since then, we've elected a climate-denier government, whose market-fuckery and lack of credibility on future emissions reduction policy has destroyed credibility in the ETS and crashed the carbon price to below $50 a ton (it has since recovered marginally to $55). So its entirely unsurprising that Todd Energy doesn't want to take the risk of investing in carbon capture when they won't get any financial return from it, and when National's ETS/forestry policy seems guaranteed to ensure they lose money.

Of course, Todd Energy is sticking their hand out for a subsidy. There are cases where that is justified - for example, when it would be offset by reduced pollution subsidies, or cause structural changes which would reduce emissions elsewhere (for example, by helping to destroy the future financial viability of the gas industry), or just when the cost of buying those reductions is substantially cheaper than the government would expect to pay. Glenbrook, the poster-child for the GIDI policy, did all three. But none of that is the case here. Instead, this particular CCS project would increase emissions, because Todd Energy would be using the "stored" CO₂ to push out more gas, both creating additional direct emissions and extending the lifetime of an industry we need to eliminate. And according to MBIE's highly optimistic Climate Implications of Policy Assessment, that would offset a huge chunk of any savings. But for National, subsidies aren't about economics, but about corruption and cronyism, and I expect they'll be more than willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars rather than publicly admit failure.

Even so, we are going to have a huge hole in our carbon budget. National won't want to do anything about it, because they clearly don't plan to be in government then to be held accountable for their failure. But the opposition needs to be planning now for how they're going to plug that hole, and drawing up policies to quickly reduce emissions by the required amount. And the ideal one, with some excellent knock-on effects for both reduced subsidies and destroying the gas industry, is to shut down Methanex permanently...

Maybe Little should actually win the election first?

So, Andrew Little thinks the Wellington City Council should cancel its plans for the Golden Mile, because there's an election in five months:

Andrew Little told Nine to Noon he'd be disappointed to see the council march ahead with the plan, given local body elections are to be held in October.

[...]

He said he'd repeat his message to the council - asking them to pause on signing more work contracts for the Golden Mile.

"Given that there is going to be a change of mayor after 11 October - and there'll be a new line-up in council - I don't think it's ethically correct for this council to be signing off significant new contracts that will bind the next council at a time when things are so sensitive for the Wellington economy."

...which is assuming a whole lot, not the least that Little will be elected as mayor, and that the future council will be as anti-redevelopment as he is. Meanwhile, the actually existing council were elected to serve a three-year term, which won't end for five months, have consulted repeatedly on this project, and many of them were elected on a platform of doing it. But apparently all of that counts for nothing against the whims of an unelected dude who feels entitled to power.

There's an obvious comparison here with US Republicans who refused to allow Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court, on the basis that their dude - Trump - would win the next election. And its as ugly and entitled and undemocratic from Little as it was from them

But then, ugly and entitled is Little's campaign to a t, starting from the moment he shoved Tory Whanau aside. The problem is that he needs Whanau's progressive urbanist pro-Golden Mile project voters to win. And if they correctly conclude that he is offering them nothing, and don't turn out for or second-preference him, and he loses, he will have no-one but himself to blame.

Brownlee stands up for democracy

Yesterday, parliament's white privilege committee recommended that three Te Pāti Māori MPs be suspended for up to three weeks for opposing the racist Treaty Principles Bill with a haka. The penalty is outrageous and antidemocratic - and surprisingly, even National's Speaker agrees. At the beginning of question time today, he denounced the recommendation as unprecedented and unfair, made the point that it could be amended, and effectively invited the opposition to filibuster and hold the Budget hostage to force the government to do so:

[T]he committee's recommendation was adopted by a narrow majority. That is an important point when the effect of the recommendation would be to deprive members of a minority party of their ability to sit and vote in this House for several days.

As the committee's report states, the Speaker has a duty to protect the rights of members of all sides of the House. In particular, there's a longstanding convention for Speakers to safeguard the fair treatment of the minority. I intend to honour that convention by ensuring the House does not take a decision next week without due consideration. In my view, these severe recommended penalties placed before the House for consideration mean it would be unreasonable to accept a closure motion until all perspectives and views had been very fully expressed.

[...]

As with many other situations when proposals are made to this House, it is not an all-or-nothing decision. I also note Standing Order 129, which provides that when an amendment has been moved, a member who spoke before the amendment was moved may speak again.

Just to spell that out: privileges committee reports trump all other business, and if everyone gets a 10-minute speaking slot, that's up to 1240 minutes - 20.6 hours - if everyone speaks once for their full time (550 minutes / 9 hours if only the opposition speaks, and 210 minutes / 3.5 hours if just the Greens and Te Pāti Māori do). And if an amendment is moved, everyone gets to speak again. There are 6.5 hours in a normal sitting day (less an hour for question time), and there are only two of them before the government wants to present its budget (and it wants to do some legislating before then, and hold a member's day). So if the government doesn't agree to vote for a more appropriate penalty (say, one day), this debate will drag on, eat their carefully-planned legislative calendar, eat Member's Day, and ultimately prevent their budget from being presented on schedule, disrupting their big PR setpiece.

So, I guess National gets to choose: do they want vicious racist vengeance and to undermine the legitimacy of their parliament? Or do they want to have the budget as normal?

Outrageous and antidemocratic

That is the only way to describe the Privileges Committee's recommendation to suspend the leadership of Te Pāti Māori for 21 sitting days for their haka protest against the racist Treaty Principles Bill (the haka's leader, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, gets only 7 days). Outrageous because this is the harshest penalty ever handed out by parliament; a clear case of the government abusing its majority to silence and exile the opposition - exactly like a corrupt tinpot dictatorship. And anti-democratic because in the process, they're depriving 210,000 Māori voters of their democratic representation, at the precise time the government will be introducing racist legislation to further undermine their rights, in the form of Rimmer's radical racist libertarian Regulatory Standards Bill.

I was expecting Te Pāti Māori to be convicted by National's kangaroo court, and I was expecting it to be both a badge of honour for its victims, and a source of shame for Parliament. But I was not expecting this level of punishment. It not only brings the entire house into disrepute; it undermines Parliament's very legitimacy. Because, very obviously, if Parliament ejects and suspends and gags its Māori members for vigorously defending, in a culturally appropriate way, the interests of their constituents, then it loses any claim to either represent or be owed allegiance by those constituents. And equally obviously, if a government can use its majority to do this to Māori, it can do it to everyone.

While a New Zealand government using the privileges committee and its House majority to suspend and silence all opposition was previously only a theoretical possibility, now it is real. And we must therefore defend ourselves, and our democracy, from that threat. And that means not just evicting this repulsive, racist, anti-democratic regime; it also means nobbling Parliament and ensuring it can never do this again. Parliament needs to actually be forced to follow the fundamental human rights it has promised to obey. As for how, repealing the 350 year old law which gives them their impunity and making them subject to the courts would be a good start. Politicians have shown they cannot be trusted, and will abuse whatever power they are given. Time to put some neutral adults in charge of them instead.

An alternative vision for Aotearoa

Its the budget next week, where National will inflict another round of cuts on kiwis in order to keep funding handouts to landlords and rich people. And while Labour is doing nothing (sorry, "keeping its powder dry"), the Greens are acting as the main opposition, releasing an alternative budget to show what we could be doing. The core idea? Tax the rich properly, with a wealth tax, higher company taxes, and reversing the landlord tax breaks, and using the money to pay for things people need: a better health system, more state housing, free dental care, free ECE, better public transport, and better support for students and people out of work. Oh, and there's a "fuck you" tax on private jet passengers, because fuck those people and their polluting luxury lifestyle.

Its a compelling vision, which shows us that we can have a better society; all we have to do is vote for it.

Naked corruption

When National passed its corrupt, Muldoonist fast-track law, they were criticised for accepting donations from fast-track applicants. You'd think that after such criticism, and the consequent effect on the reputation of our state, they might have ceased the practice - but of course not. Instead, they're still taking money from people whose cases they will later be deciding on:

Ministers Shane Jones and Chris Bishop continued to make decisions about several fast-track projects despite their respective parties receiving donations linked to the applicants.

One political scientist says such donations could be perceived as a conflict of interest and erode public trust in government.

However, both ministers said that donations to parties were not considered to be a conflict.

"The long-standing approach of the Cabinet Office to donations to political parties is that they are not generally treated as resulting in a pecuniary conflict of interest for individual Ministers belonging to the party," a statement said.

Which is a transparently self-serving approach. The stooges in DPMC, eager to please their political masters, may say it, and the politicians, out of self-interest, may (pretend to) believe it - but no member of the public does. No ordinary person outside the Thorndon Bubble believes that company managers, with legal obligations to their shareholders, give free money to politicians and expect nothing in return. And no-one belives for a moment that the politicians take tens of thousands of dollars and then says "fuck you" to the people who gave it to them. They reserve that attitude for us plebs, the people who vote for them without giving them enormous gifts.

NZ First has taken $121,680, and National $58,897.25 from fast-track companies. We should call these "donations" what they really are: bribes. And we should call the practice what it is: naked corruption. That is actually a crime in Aotearoa, and its time these ministers went to jail for it.

More constitutional vandalism

Since the national government embarked on its racist campaign against Māori, the Waitangi Tribunal has emerged as one of its chief adversaries, putting the impacts of its racist policies formally on the record so they can not be denied. National has responded by sabotaging it, replacing almost the entire membership with unqualified crony appointments. But apparently that's not enough, so they've decided to "review" the Tribunal to undermine it further:

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka has announced a review will take place into Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and the Waitangi Tribunal, in a move the ACT Party says will “rein in [the] activist tribunal”.

The review comes as part of a coalition agreement between National and NZ First, and aims to refocus the scope, purpose and nature of the Tribunal’s inquiries back to its original intent, Potaka said.

As ACT's response shows, this is simply more constitutional vandalism, intended to eliminate one of the few checks and balances on our overpowered executive. And its moving in completely the wrong direction. The lesson of this regime is that the Tribunal needs to be strengthened, not weakened, with stronger protections against government fuckery.

Hopefully Labour, the Greens, and Te Pāti Māori will make it clear that they will reverse whatever the racist dogshit regime does, and restore and strengthen the mana of the Tribunal. As for the government, it needs to think about it this way: it can either resolve claimed Treaty breaches calmly and quietly through a Tribunal, or it can resolve them through protest, occupation, and confrontation, with all the consequent impacts on the legitimacy of the state. Lawyers and historians, or Ihumātao everywhere. Their choice.

A calculated policy of deceit

This week the government rammed through legislation under urgency to cancel all outstanding pay equity deals and make them impossible to get in future, balancing their books by stealing $17 billion from New Zealand women. It was an outrageous abuse of the democratic process, and since it passed, we've learned just how abusive it was. According to an analysis by Stuff, the government first started plotting this move in December 2023, right after they gained power. The real work began in December last year, and was deliberately kept outside the normal policy process to prevent us from learning about it:

Even many officials who would normally work on a proposal like this were kept in the dark. For instance, no regulatory impact statement was made to assess the lawmaking.

Similarly, the BORA vet was - unusually - issued by the deputy Attorney-General himself, rather than the usual Ministry of Justice team (of course, he said stealing from women was OK, and absolutely did not impact their rights - a case of mansplaining away human rights?)

The government "justifies" this by talking about "legal risk". But what risk is that? The risk that the Employment Relations Authority would rule on and approve deals before they could legislate them away. Which is really a financial risk, that they wouldn't be able to steal as much money. But the real risk they were worried about was democracy: that we would object, that we would protest, that we would submit on the bill, that we would make it clear to their backbench that pursuing this misogynistic policy would result in a bunch of them losing their jobs. And to avoid that, the government pursued a policy of total secrecy, unseen before in modern policy-making.

In short, they followed a calculated policy of deceit, pissing all over our constitutional norms in order to steal from women and attack our democracy. And we should hold them to account for it. There are protests tomorrow in most major centers outside government MPs' electorate offices. Be there, and speak out against this dogshit misogynist regime.

Government of the 0.3%

A couple of months ago, the government held a public "consultation" on their proposed Regulatory Standards Bill. People responded en masse, and made it crystal clear what they thought of it:

The Ministry received approximately 23,000 submissions and worked with a specialist consultancy to quantitatively assess support and opposition to the proposed Bill. This analysis showed that 20,108 submissions (around 88 per cent) opposed the proposed Bill, 76 submissions (0.33 per cent) supported or partially supported it, and the remaining 2,637 submissions (almost 12 per cent) did not have a clear position.

76 supporters out of 23,000. That's not even lizardman's constant (the 4% of senile-dementia victims who habitually support the most cooked option). Its not even the ACT voter percentage they got for their racist Treaty Principles Bill. And meanwhile, it is crystal clear that the public overwhelmingly opposes this extremist libertarian bullshit.

So guess who the government listened to? Yes, the 0.3% of weirdos who want to drown them in the bathtub: they're advancing the bill. Meanwhile, they ignored the rest of us; our voices apparently don't matter. And of course neither does our time, which they wasted with their bullshit "consultation" (again).

But while the government can ignored our submissions, there are other things they can't ignore. Such as our votes. So, if they've wasted your time and ignored you. tell them to go fuck themselves at the ballot box, and vote the whole lot of them out on their filthy arses.

Still 34,000 unemployed under National

The March labour market statistics are out, showing unemployment unchanged at 5.1%. There are now 156,000 unemployed - 34,000 more than when National took office.

While better than expected, there's been a shift from full-time to part-time work, and total weekly paid hours has dropped - meaning people are working less, while nominally remaining in jobs. Underutilisation - people who would like to work more hours - is also up. So this isn't exactly good news. The questions is whether it will get worse, and how many people will throw in the towel and cross the Tasman for fairer work in response to National's misogynist attack on women.

Dropped

All charges against the Restore Passenger Rail protestors have finally been dropped. Good. But they should never have been laid in the first place, and it shouldn't have taken a jury telling the police to go fuck themselves (or the threat of them doing so again) for the state to see that.

The obvious question is whether the state will be properly held accountable for this abuse of process. Sadly, I think we all know what the answer to that will be.

National supports sexism

That's the only possible conclusion we can draw from their decision to legislatively terminate all pay equity claims, and make future claims much harder to win:

Workplace Minister Brooke van Velden announced the moves to raise the threshold for proving work has been historically undervalued to support a claim, on Tuesday saying changes back in 2020 had created problems.

"Claims have been able to progress without strong evidence of undervaluation and there have been very broad claims where it is difficult to tell whether differences in pay are due to sex-based discrimination or other factors."

Claims were concentrated in the public sector, with costs to the Crown of all settlements so far totalling $1.78 billion a year, she said.

"The changes I am proposing will significantly reduce costs to the Crown," she said.

So, they're explicitly going to balance the government's books and pay for landlord tax cuts and new war toys by paying women less. Sexist fuckers.

But there's a reason we have a legislated process for this: because the alternative is that workers go to court, and win a settlement that way - as they did in 2015. And if National cuts off that route, then it gets "negotiated" through industrial action - which, given that nurses are significant claimants, means hospital shutdowns and their healthcare metrics being shat out the window. But I guess their thinking is that that will all happen later, in another budget cycle, so it all gets ignored in favour of the short-term goal of making the books balance this year.

And that's what you get for putting the white male businessman parties in charge. I hope we all remember this at the next election, and kick them out on their arses.