"Capital poor"

One of the eternal truths about Aotearoa's economy is that we are "capital poor": there's not enough money sloshing around here to fund the expansion of local businesses, or to build the things we want to. Which gets used as an excuse for all sorts of things, like setting up kiwisaver (good!), not taxing rich people properly, or selling the country to foreigners. For example, here's Chris Luxon doing the latter at his "investment summit" last week:

Low capital intensity has been identified as one of the major causes of that low productivity.

In order to increase our productivity, we need more capital investment. And David Seymour has been changing the rules to ensure we can.

Meanwhile, here's another story from last week: NZ bank profits hit $7.2 billion: KPMG. By way of comparison, that's more than the amount kiwi employees pay into kiwisaver each year. But unlike kiwisaver, it goes straight overseas into the pockets of those banks foreign owners.

Maybe we wouldn't be so "capital poor" if we hadn't allowed our wealth to be siphoned overseas for decades by a rapacious foreign oligopolies?

Arbitrary or worse

Back in December, Lands Minister Chris Penk rejected proposals to recognise the proper names of Manawatū and Pito One. Both proposals were strongly supported by their communities and so recommended by Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa / New Zealand Geographic Board. Despite this, Penk rejected them. I was curious about his reasons for this, so I asked for the advice. The response [part 1 part 2] was unfortunately incomplete (to the Ombudsman!), but showed no offical advice recommending rejection. So I asked directly for his reasons. I got the response to this today, and after some obfuscatory waffle, he tehn says this:

I have no specific reasonings for Manawatu or Petone in particular.

Whether that is because there are in fact no reasons - making the decisions arbitrary - or just none that Penk is willing to publicly admit to - making them biased and improper - is left as an exercise for the reader. But there seems to be a definite pattern in the overall decisions he announced, and it doesn't look appealing.

So what can be done about this? Likely nothing. The law says "The Minister’s determination on a proposal is final", would would probably present a high barrier to any judicial review. But we could fix it for the future. Because the current law, allowing essentially arbitrary decision-making, is no longer a good fit for the Way We Do Things In Aotearoa. It is, in an Aristotelian sense, unconstitutional. As for how to fix it, section 30GC(7) of the Climate Change Response Act provides a good guide to how we do things now: when a Minister disagrees with an expert-body following a public submissions process, they need to give detailed reasons for doing so both to parliament and the public. Its an essentially shame-based mechanism, but tends to deter poor and arbitrary decision-making, while ensuring that any departure from expert recommendation is properly supported. Amending section 20 of the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008 to include such a mechanism would make a nice little member's bill for some MP.

Drawn

A ballot for a single Member's Bill was held today, and the following bill was drawn:

• Resource Management (Prohibition on Extraction of Freshwater for On-selling) Amendment Bill (Debbie Ngarewa-Packer)

The bill does exactly what it says on the label, and would effectively end the rapacious water-bottling industry which is sucking us dry and robbing us blind.

It was another full ballot, with 75 bills this week.

How to fight back against Trump's tariffs

In the US, the Trump regime is busy imposing tariffs on its neighbours and allies, then revoking them, then reimposing them, permanently poisoning relations with Canada and Mexico. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on agricultural goods, which will affect Aotearoa's exports. National's response? To grovel for an exemption, on the basis of our past good relations. As for how successful that will be, Australia has adopted a similar approach to Trump's threats to impose universal tariffs on imported aluminium and steel. And the Trump regime has told them to fuck off. Being a long-standing US ally counts for nothing. So if they're going to impose tariffs on Australia, they are absolutely going to impose them on Aotearoa.

So the question is what National is going to do about it. Beg some more? But Trump responds to weakness by doubling down on oppression. Canada and Ukraine show that the way to get policy change from the US regime is to stand up to them and force it. As for how we could do that, counter-tariffs would just disrupt supply chains and raise the cost of living here. As a small country without a lot of leverage, we need to be smart.

Fortunately, there are some smart ideas lying around. America's economic power is currently built on fascist oligarchic techbros, who are also directly backing Trump's regime. And tech (and SF) writer Cory Doctorow has suggested that countries target them directly, by repealing the US imposed IP laws which underpin their wealth and power and allow them to fuck over their customers:

Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity"

[...]

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Doctorow was talking about Canada, but Aotearoa also has such laws. Section 226C of the Copyright Act criminalises circumventing "technological protection measures", or publishing information which shows people how to do it themselves. In other words, it makes jailbreaking your devices, or blocking techbro surveilance or advertising, or telling people how to do it, a crime. There's an exception to enable lawful use - which is why we all have region-free blueray players - but that doesn't cover protecting your privacy, or using your hardware in an unapproved way, or letting you fix your own stuff. Repealing those sections would let us do all those things, and create a new export industry for jailbreaking Big Tech.

Unfortunately, due to US influence, we have similar obligations in FTAs with other countries. So any tariff-response repeal would need to target the US directly. The best way of doing this would be a simple amendment to the Copyright Act, inserting a section saying that sections 226 to 226E do not apply to technological protection measures applied by US-controlled companies. The definition of "US controlled" would need to cover the various money laundering schemes used by the tech monopolies to dodge taxes, but I think its within the wit of our drafters to do so. And that should give us open season on US techbro bullshit, while complying with our obligations to everyone else.

The question is whether the government will have the courage to do this, or whether they will accept bullying by America and let Trump's techbros continue to pillage us and invade our privacy.

Fixing school lunches

The free school lunch program was one of Labour's few actual achievements in government. Decent food, made locally, providing local employment. So naturally, National had to get rid of it. Their replacement - run by Compass, a multinational which had already been thrown out of our hospitals for producing inedible slop - has been a disaster. Inedible food, which does not meet dietry requirements, and which is sometimes contaminated with plastic or causes severe injury. The only thing we haven't seen yet is a mass-poisoning, but that's probably only a matter of time. And now the primary subcontractor has gone bankrupt as a result of lowballing the bid, putting the whole scheme in doubt.

The good news is that the former providers are ready to step up and fix things. It would be a popular move: a Talbot Mills poll released today shows that 60% of people want the old system restored. A sensible government responsive to voters would recognise this, and do it. But for National, it would mean admitting that they made a mistake. And rather than do that, they'll likely just cancel the entire system out of spite, having set it up for failure in the first place. Because when faced with a choice between feeding kids, and admitting they fucked up, they’d rather let kids starve. It’s just the sort of monsters they are.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day. First up is the Auckland Harbour Board and Takapuna Borough Council Empowering Act Amendment Bill, a local bill to alter the purposes for which some land in Auckland can be used. Following that is the third reading of Camilla Belich's Crimes (Theft by Employer) Amendment Bill, which should pass into law today. After that, the House should continue with the first reading of Hūhana Lyndon's Public Works (Prohibition of Compulsory Acquisition of Māori Land) Amendment Bill. If it has moved quickly on earlier business, it should make a start on Laura McClure's Employment Relations (Termination of Employment by Agreement) Amendment Bill, another nasty ACT bill to undermine workers rights. And if it gets that far, there should be a ballot for a bill tomorrow.

This is why we have juries

Back in October 2022, Restore Passenger Rail hung banners across roads in Wellington to protest against the then-Labour government's weak climate change policy. The police responded by charging them not with the usual public order offences, but with "endangering transport", a crime with a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail. Effectively they were being treated like people who had blown up a bridge or sabotaged a plane, simply for dangling a banner.

It was obvious police over-reach, and today a jury in Wellington told the police to go fuck themselves, acquitting one defendant, and refusing to convict the other three. A retrial has been ordered on the latter, but the question now is whether the police will actually go ahead with it, or give up rather than run the risk of another jury sending a stronger message.

And this is ultimately why we have juries: so we can tell the state where to get off when they go overboard. Because no matter what the law says, we can always simply say "no".

Aotearoa should sign the Disappearance Convention

There's horrible news from the US today, with the Trump regime disappearing Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student, for protesting against genocide in Gaza. Its another significant decline in US human rights, and puts them in the same class as the authoritarian dictatorships they used to sponsor in South America.

How can Aotearoa signal its disapproval of this abuse? Back in 2006, the UN agreed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). The Convention requires its parties to take various steps to prevent forced disappearance, as well as criminalising it in international law. When it was established, Aotearoa refused to sign, officially because of a slight technical difference in wording with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but really because our "ally" the US was disappearing and torturing people as part of its extraordinary rendition program. And we wouldn't want to disagree with that, would we?

But times - and the international situation - have changed, and its time to revisit that decision. When Aotearoa refused, the ICPPED had fewer than 20 parties. Now it has almost a hundred - including almost all of Europe and South America. Basically, everyone we consider to be "like-minded" in supporting that "rules-based international order" we talk about so much. These states are all also members of the International Criminal Court, so its pretty clear that the inconsistency we were supposedly so worried about can be managed to the satisfaction of the majority of the international community.

Signing and ratifying the Convention would establish safeguards against disappearance here and improve human rights in Aotearoa. It would also signal our disapproval of disappearance internationally, and allow us to punish those responsible if any of them ever set foot in Aotearoa. That seems like a Good Thing. The question is, will the government do it, or are they still chickenshits about human rights?

Judging their own case

Yesterday National announced plans to amend the Public Works Act to "speed up" land acquisition for public works. Which sounds boring and bureaucratic - except its not. Because what "land acquisition" means is people's homes being compulsorily acquired by the state - which is inherently controversial, and fairly high up the ladder on coercive uses of state power. Currently the law recognises this with objection and review processes, to ensure that such acquisitions are necessary, reasonable, and not exercised in a discriminatory manner (for example, by targeting Māori land - one of the government's go-to tactics for stealing Aotearoa from its original owners). But National plans to get rid of all that, and instead replace it with Ministerial fiat:

Landowners would no longer submit their objections to the Environment Court, but through the Minister for Land Information (Penk) or the local authority for faster resolution.

"Over the past 10 years, 49 objections have been received for compulsory land acquisitions just for NZ Transport Agency projects," Bishop said.

"The new accelerated objections process will mean we can work through any objections far more quickly. Then we can get on with delivering important infrastructure projects that will help grow our economy, so New Zealanders can get ahead."

So, the same Minister or local authority who decides they need your land for a public work will get to decide whether their decision is "reasonable". Which doesn't even pass the laugh test. It certainly doesn't seem to meet the natural justice requirements for public decision-making in the BORA, and for obvious reasons: it violates the fundamental rule that no-one should be judge in their own case.

But clearly National thinks that adhering to fundamental norms of justice means they might not get what they want. And that, right there, is why they shouldn't be allowed to do this.

Submit!

The Justice Committee has called for submissions on the Term of Parliament (Enabling 4-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill. Submissions are due by 1:00pm Thursday, 17 April 2025 (note unusual time!), so in practice you need to get it done by 16 April. You can submit at the link above.

If you're looking for reasons to oppose the bill, there's some here. Alternatively, you can just look at this government, and imagine how much worse it would be with an extra year. And possibly, you could imagine how much better it would be if we could get rid of them after two years rather than having to wait for three.

Want change? Don't vote Labour

The current National government is one of the worst in Aotearoa's history. And because of this, its also one of the most unpopular. A war on Māori, corrupt fast-track legislation, undermining the fight against climate change, the ferry fiasco, the school lunch disaster... none of these policies are making friends. People want them gone, and want the next government to make repealing them its first item of business. So naturally, Chris Hipkins has said he'll keep them all:

He also used his speech to advocate for a more collaborative approach to governing, referencing the coalition’s decisions to reverse many of Labour’s policies.

“I am not going to stand here and ask you to give your support to the Labour Party just so we can put everything back in place - and start the merry-go-round again,” he said.

“And I can assure you we aren’t going to spend our first year back in government pausing, cancelling, and reviewing everything.

“No more throwing the baby out with the bathwater just to make a political point.”

Or, to put it another way, "don't vote for us, because we won't change anything".

And Labour wonders why people have such contempt for them...

But this isn't just about Labour's spinelessness - its also a problem for our democracy. Because if elections don't change anything, if we just get the same shit policies delivered by the same apparatchiks, if major party collusion means the only real difference between them is the colour of their tie, then our democracy is simply a fraud and a scam. And if enough people get that idea, then we might actually try and change things for real, by means other than elections. And that's not the sort of outcome anyone should want.

A recipe for waste

With the Trump regime in the US causing growing global instability, the government is banging the drum about increasing defence spending. And this morning we have a bunch of defence lobbyists pushing to double the size of the navy to four frigates, at a cost of $8 billion.

Which sounds like a great way of wasting billions of dollars. Lest anyone forget, the navy doesn't have enough staff to crew the ships it has got, let alone new ones. Half the navy's fleet of inshore patrol vessels were effectively mothballed just a few years after purchase, due to lack of crew (they were eventually sold to Ireland). The same then happened to the navy's offshore patrol vessels. And as the article itself pointed out, three of the navy's eight helicopters were grounded last year due to insufficient staff.

All of which suggests that unless the navy solves its staffing problem, exactly the same will happen to any new frigates: they'll be tied up and left to rot, hugely expensive white elephants. But that's what you get from performative defence spending. It would be an even bigger waste than the government's Cook Strait ferry fiasco, and if National is willing to throw billions down the drain on new war toys but baulked at iRex, then it shows there is something seriously wrong with their priorities. At least ferries are useful. War toys are pure waste.

(I do not know how to fix NZDF's staffing problem, and I honestly don't care. If people don't want to work as trained killers or support staff for trained killers, that seems great to me. But the people pushing for increased spending need to recognise it as a problem, and explain how they're going to solve it, because there's no point buying toys when there are no people to play with them).

But if the goal is to increase nominal spending to appease the Trump regime, then there are better things to spend it on than war toys. Defence housing is unfit for human habitation, and could be upgraded. That at least would be useful. But I guess that just doesn't benefit international arms companies...

A complete fiasco

When National cancelled the iRex ferry contract out of the blue in a desperate effort to make short-term savings to pay for their landlord tax cuts, we knew there would be a cost. Not just one to society, in terms of shitter ferries later, but one to the government, which would eventually show up on its books. And now we know: $300 million:

New documents reveal the coalition has set aside $300 million to cover broken infrastructure contracts and a break-fee with Hyundai, after the government ended a contract with the Korean company to build two new Interislander ferries.

The Cabinet paper was released by Treasury just half an hour after Finance Minister Nicola Willis had repeatedly refused to confirm that figure to reporters.

The broken contracts for associated infrastructure costs - for example, port upgrades - have been resolved, but the exact amount to be paid to Hyundai is still being negotiated.

And note that that's just what they've set aside, not necessarily what the actual cost will be. And on that front, there's this:

The inside word from KiwiRail is that the original contract break cost was the entire $551m and the $300m now budgeted for is Hyundai offering a discount on the break fee *if* they win the new contract to build the reduced capacity/capability ships.

Note that we'd be able to verify this, and hold both the government and KiwiRail to account for fucking this up so badly / agreeing to that contract, if KiwiRail had released the contract. But they refused. And you can see exactly why both parties have a very strong incentive to keep the details completely secret.

This is a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to pay a fucking fortune to get less than what we were going to, and later, just so National could make the books look marginally better in 2024/2025 and pretend to be "better economic managers". But this isn't "better economic management" - it's pure stupidity and waste. And we need to hold the government to account for it.

United States of betrayal II

Like everyone else outside Russia, I watched Saturday morning's shitshow between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in horror. Sure, the US had already thrown Ukraine under the bus, demanding that it accept Russia's theft of land - but there's a difference between that, and berating someone in front of the world for refusing to surrender to a genocidal invader. With this, the Trump regime - and the US Republican Party - has made it crystal clear which side it is on. And it is not the side of democracy and human rights.

Fortunately, Europe seems to be stepping up. And they've also got the message - also sent last month, but not really believed because it was a reversal of 80 years of policy - that the US will not defend them either. And that even if there is regime change in the US, no future US regime can be trusted ever again on anything. And now they've got that message, they can move forward on building a European defence alliance serving European priorities, rather than just being an adjunct of the US. Which almost certainly means less European involvement in American imperial wars in future (great for Europe, bad for the USA, which will have to do all its own dying. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind).

It should also be focusing minds here. Because if the US won't defend Europe, it sure as shit won't lift a finger for Aotearoa (assuming they can even find us on a map). The AUKUS partnership they are trying to tempt us into is worthless. In fact, given their explicit support for tyrannical regimes and of global corruption, we should be regarding them as an enemy, not a friend. And we should be withdrawing from the Five Eyes, rather than continuing to feed intelligence to a corrupt and hostile threat to global peace.

Meanwhile, the US is now openly threatening to withdraw from the UN. Which is terrible: the withdrawl of fascist states from the League of Nations was one of the reasons for its failure to prevent the Second World War. OTOH, if they're going to do it, we can't do anything about it, and at least there's a silver lining. Because the UN has a veto problem, and one of the major impediments to fixing it is... the US veto. If they leave, then it is at least an opportunity to fix that, and the world should refuse to let the US back in unless they accept it.

An inappropriate candidate

Last month I dug into the appointment of fossil-fuel lobbyist John Carnegie to the board of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority. Carnegie was rejected as a candidate in two appointment rounds, being specifically not recommended because he was "likely to relitigate board decisions, or undermine decisions that have been made" and "likely to create tension or conflict with fellow board members". Despite this, then-Energy Minister Simeon Brown appointed him anyway. So how bad a candidate was he? RNZ's Eloise Gibson has done some digging of her own, and turned up a rather disturbing interview (on a cooker platform, to boot) where he rails against EECA's work:

"[Oil and gas companies] are asking what will happen in six or nine years if we get someone who basically a) wants to reintroduce Onslow [a massive pumped hydro electricity scheme], who basically wants to go back to the old policies so, b) wants to make fossil fuel technology harder to consent, reintroduces a 100 percent renewable electricity target, reintroduces GIDI... that was the state subsidised demand destruction... that's the question investors are going to be asking," he said.

GIDI was the Government Investment in Decarbonising Industry fund, under which EECA gave grants to heavy industrial companies to subsidise the costs of converting coal and gas boilers to electric or biomass.

GIDI has been scrapped. But EECA's core functions still reduce demand for oil and gas.

Whether he will effectively do that work, or whether he will try and sabotage it from within is left as an exercise for the media. But MBIE had pretty clearly reached their own conclusion on that question, which is why they recommended not appointing him.

Meanwhile, that rant - reintroducing Onslow (killing winter demand for fossil fuel peaking), making fossil fuels harder to consent, a 100% renewables target (now looking entirely achievable in an average year thanks to solar), reintroducing GIDI, and state-sponsored demand destruction to drive the fossil industry out of business - looks like a solid policy agenda which would give us both energy security and cheaper power. And hopefully we'll see exactly that when we throw this corrupt, climate change denying government out on its arse.