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While its easy to see this as Winston sabotaging Luxon (who is in China ATM), I think Peters' outdated world view is the real problem here.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?