Submit!

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

Justice Committee Secretariat
Justice Committee
Parliament Buildings
Wellington

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

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

More lightning legislating

The House has been in urgency this week, as the regime struggle against the clock to pass its agenda. In addition to the inherent abuse of urgency, this has led to other abuses, with parliament once again returning to being "the fastest legislature in the west" to ram things through. And now there's another one: National has rammed its corrupt bill to protect polluters from liability for the climate change they are causing - the same bill a Ministerial Adviser violated the Public Records Act and hid the lobbyists' draft of from the OIA - through its first reading and sent it to committee. The committee report back date? 30 July. So the committee will have less than a month to "consider" this corrupt atrocity against the rule of law, turning it into little more than a rubber-stamp for Cabinet.

Submissions are open, and due by 9.00am, Monday, 13 July 2026 (note the dirty time chosen; you need to have this in by 12 July to be safe). So we have less than ten days to submit on this corrupt violation of constitutional norms. And this is what National calls "democracy".

The opposition has committed to repealing the bill if it becomes law, so any benefit Fonterra and Z Energy get from their corrupt lobbying will be transitory, lasting only until the repeal bill is passed and Mike Smith (or someone else) files a new case against them. Its probably worth supporting that in your submission, so Labour knows they're doing the right thing. Again, National's over-reach and abuse of power creates the potential to push back, and so we should push back hard, and demand not just repeal, but that polluters have absolute liability for the damage caused by their pollution. Fonterra and Z and their polluting mates have undermined our democracy to protect their profits. We need to punish them harshly for that, just so they don’t do it again.

A busy week

Do you hate the regime? Do you hate their tyranny, their transphobia, and their desire to destroy the environment? If so, you're in for a busy week - because submissions on bills on all of those things all close on Thursday.

The details are on Parliament's select committee page. Submissions on the following all close at 11:59pm on Thursday 2 July:

• The Conservation Amendment Bill. This bill allows the regime to sell off the conservation estate to foreign billionaires, repurposes DoC towards economic exploitation of conservation land, disestablishes regional conservation boards, and violates Treaty settlements.
• The Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill: NZ First's anti-trans hate bill, which seeks to legally define trans people out of existence.
• The Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill, which aims to persecute the homeless while also allowing police to ban any public protest.

Also closing at the same time is the Local Government (Port Companies Accountability) Amendment Bill, a members bill which would bring some much-needed transparency and accountability to port companies. That one's worth submitting on too if you're a transparency advocate, though in support rather than opposition.

Stacking up controversial bills like this seems to be a clear attempt to deter submissions. So don't be deterred. We've already seen that if we scream loud enough at the regime, it backs down, and its likely to be even more sensitive in the lead-up to the election. So scream at them. If you don't have time to write a full submission on everything, pick one to do a good job on. For the rest, saying "I oppose this bill, and recommend that it not be passed" is a perfectly valid submission, though it will count for more if you can specify particular things you hate. And if you can, submit early - with so many controversial bills due at the same time, parliament's servers may end up overloaded by the backlash. Submitting early, rather than trying to do everything at once, may avoid this.

Crown solicitors deserve scrutiny

Graeme Edgeler had an interesting piece the other day advocating for crown solicitors to be subject to the Official Information Act. Uniquely in the western world, Aotearoa has privatised its most important prosecution decisions to private law firms. These make public decisions in the name of the state, decisions that if they were made by any other government functionary would be able to be scrutinised using the OIA. But because they are appointed by royal fiat, rather than simply a contract, they are not subject to the OIA:

This isn’t true of all prosecutions. The serious fraud office conducts prosecutions – including jury trials – of serious fraud. You can request information about these prosecutions under the Official Information Act. And when Police prosecute more minor offending, and Police prosecutors are making the same sorts of decisions around plea bargaining that Crown Solicitors make, Police are covered by the Official Information Act, and their decisions can be subjected to public and media scrutiny.

And the same goes for importation prosecutions by Customs, and fisheries prosecutions undertaken by the Ministry of Primary Industries, and District, City and Regional Council prosecutions, and even the exercise of prosecution powers by local Fish and Game Councils when people fish or hunt without a licence.

[...]

But, if that charge wasn’t fishing without a licence but was instead murder, the Official Information Act will not help you understand the decisions made by those prosecuting on behalf of the State, because the law says that there is no public interest in allowing OIA oversight of murder prosecutions.

This is, quite obviously, fundamentally wrong. And even the solicitors themselves recognise that! A 2021 investigation of crown solicitors by RNZ quotes one of them as being uncomfortable with the lack of scrutiny of their decisions not to prosecute (it also highlights other issues deserving of scrutiny: the lack of diversity, the level of expenditure, the way that these warrants have been held by the same clique of law firms for a century. Which just... smells. But the state protects itself from investigation by denying basic transparency...)

Not mentioned in Graeme's article: crown solicitors are subject to the Public Records Act. And the terms of their appointment state that all their information belongs to the state, and they must make it available to the Solicitor-General on request. Which simply reinforces his point: these are public officials, making public decisions in our name. As he says, "given the power Crown Solicitors possess, conducting the most serious prosecutions on behalf of the Government, there is no good reason not to subject them to the same scrutiny as Fish and Game wardens."

Graeme has set up a petition to parliament asking for the OIA to be extended to cover them. I've signed it. You should too. Because the people who make decisions about whether to prosecute rapes deserve at least the same level of scrutiny as fish and game wardens.

Submit!

The Environment Committee has called for submissions on the Environment (Disestablishment of Ministry for the Environment) Amendment Bill. Submissions should be made tot he link above, by 4.30pm on Wednesday, 11 March 2026.

(Yes, they're going with a middle-of-the-day deadline rather than the usual midnight one, in an effort to make it just that much harder for people to submit. Because that's the sort of "democracy" we are now).

There will no doubt be proper submission guides from various NGOs in due course, but the TL;DR is that the bill does exactly what it says on the label: destroys the Ministry for the Environment. While the regime is pitching this as a minor, technical change, part of folding it in to a new mega-ministry, the effect will be to silence the voice for the environment, reduce it to a budget line and an internal debate within an overwhelmingly development-focused agency, avoiding embarrassing notes in Cabinet papers with formal warnings of environmental impacts and consequences. And of course it will enable the shreds of that voice to then be quietly cut.

This is how the regime sees the environment: something which should be kept out of sight and out of mind, while the big boys pay to play with their bulldozers. I don't think kiwis feel this way. And if you don't, submit, and tell them so! Sure, the regime will ignore you and pass the bill anyway, because autocrats gonna stomp on your face. But speaking up still matters. National hates headlines like "100,000 oppose bill; government passes it anyway", they hate everyone seeing that everyone hates them, and that's why they try so hard to stop people submitting. And that's why we have to. Every voice raised against this bill imposes a political cost on the regime. It encourages the present-opposition to commit to restoring an independent MfE, and it encourages other voters to vote out the regime and get one which respects the environment.

An avalanche is made up of pebbles. Be a pebble, and help crush this government. Submit on the bill.

Ratfucking our democracy

One of the major themes of this regime has been its contempt for democracy and the parliamentary process. The statistics on this were laid bare recently in the Clerk of the House's submission on the triennial Review of Standing Orders, where they detailed just how much the regime (ab)uses urgency and extended sittings to ram its agenda through. But one of the other issues they highlighted was the constant skipping or truncation of select committee consideration. Parliament has decided that bills should generally receive six months' consideration by select committee, and has procedural safeguards in place to protect that, requiring a long debate on any move to reduce consideration below six months. Despite this, only 44% of bills get full consideration, 22% get between 4 and 6 months, 13% get less time, and 20% are never considered at all.

The Clerk proposes stopping this trend by strengthening procedural safeguards. Meanwhile, national has found a new way of bypassing them and undermining the parliamentary process. Last Thursday, the House passed the Fast-track Approvals Amendment Bill through its first reading. The bill makes a number of significant changes to National's corrupt Muldoonist fast-track regime, including strengthening ministerial powers to dictate outcomes while removing the right to submit on or challenge decisions in court. Its significant legislation and deserves significant scrutiny (not least to avoid repeating the process we're going through now, where major legislation is getting major amendments within a year because the government rushed it in the first place) - and at the first reading debate RMA minister Chris Bishop gave the impression that it would be, asking for no special instruction to committee, meaning the default six-month consideration would apply.

Despite that, just a few days later, Catherine Wedd, the chair of the Environment Committee advertised that there would only be 11 days allowed for submissions, and that she expected the committee to report the bill back early so it could be passed by christmas.

[Interlude: You should submit on this bill. You have until Monday. Submissions are open here, and there are submission guides here and here. You know the drill. Go and bury them. Don't let them say no-one cared. And don't let the opposition think they can leave it in place.]

Wedd has been questoned in parliament about this twice this week, and after trying to hide behind a standing order which does not grant her the power she says it does, she claimed that there had been no collusion with any ministers or ministerial advisers over the changed deadline. Which is obvious bullshit - firstly because select committee chairs don't make this kind of decision from nowhere, and secondly because Bishop clearly planned it all along: at first reading he simply said "I nominate the Environment Committee to consider the bill", without the usual "for a period of six months" (or "four months and one day" or whatever). So this is another planned assault on our democratic process and on the right of Aotearoans to have a say in our own laws.

Unfortunately during that questioning Speaker Brownlee said outright that this was a "loophole" - that it was "within the rules", as the politicians like to say - and that he had raised it with the business committee:

yesterday I spoke at the Business Committee, and, whether we like it or not, this is best described as a gap or a loophole in our Standing Orders. There is a problem with that, it is the Standing Orders Committee that will need to consider it, and I have said I will put it on the agenda for that committee to review.

Meanwhile, while he's "reviewing", rather than putting his foot down over a clear misleading of the House, we've had three bills reported back early today: the Patents Amendment Bill (two months early), the Retail Payment System (Ban on Merchant Surcharges) Amendment Bill (two months early), and the Land Transport (Clean Vehicle Standard) Amendment Bill (No 2) (one month early). National seems to be using that loophole for everything they can. In the process, they have turned the Ministers who advanced those bills and suggested they would receive real consideration into liars and put them in the position of having misled the House (which BTW is how to deal with this: a complaint against Bishop for misleading the House, because the smirking fuck obviously did so).

The select committee process exists for good reason - not just to improve legislation, but also to legitimate it, by ensuring we can have a say and be heard. It helps us believe that government in this country is something that happens by consent, rather than being a naked exercise of power, and that legislation is somehow well-considered and rational (in some sense of the word), rather than being a poorly-drafted corrupt joke. It is essential to trust in government. Guillotining the process destroys all that. It destroys that trust. It directly undermines the legitimacy of parliament and the state. Which you'd think a bunch of people whose power rests on that legitimacy might worry about. But hey, whatever it takes to meet this quarter's KPIs, right?

This can be fixed: parliament can and should pass a sessional order to plug the loophole and prevent select committees from truncating consideration periods unless explicitly granted permission by the House. If the regime refuses to do so, it tells us everything we need to know about their intentions towards our democracy, and everything we need to know about how we should treat them and their bullshit rubberstamp "parliament" in future.

Sometimes you win

I'm a regular submitter on legislation, and one of my pet topics is transparency. A lot of recent laws propose secrecy clauses - excluding particular information from the scope of the Official Information Act, or creating new, bespoke statutory barriers to release, usually after whining from some industry lobby shocked at the existence of a constitutional law that has been on the books for 40 years. But there are also cases where some body, whether unintentionally or by design, is excluded from the OIA.

One of these bodies was the Valuers Registration Board, the body which is meant to register and discipline valuers (the people who decide how much land is worth, for example if you're a Prime Minister who wants your holiday home valued at a lower level so you can pay less rates). It was created by a 1948 law, and viewed as a mostly private institution, so its absence from the Act wasn't surprising. But the law is being updated by the new Valuers Bill, which weirdly had failed to add it in. So I did a quick submission, copying the boilerplate from the last time I'd done this, pointing out that attitudes to transparency had significantly shifted since 1982 (when presumably someone made a decision not to include it), and in particular it seemed odd that a publicly-owned and funded, ministerially appointed body for registering and disciplining valuers would be treated differently from similar bodies overseeing teachers, builders, architects, plumbers, and security guards. And rather than feeding the submissions to an AI and then saying "fuck off, peasants!", the committee actually listened:

On balance, we consider that the Board plays a public role, given the importance of valuations to property markets and property rights. In our view, the Board meets key criteria for being subject to the OIA. We also heard that applying the OIA would not place an unreasonable administrative burden on the Board.

We recommend amending Schedule 4 of the bill to insert the Valuers Registration Board into Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Ombudsmen Act. We note that an organisation named under Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Act is subject to the Official Information Act.

So that's a win. Now if only they'll listen when it comes to the Commerce Commission or Shane Jones' secrecy shield for fishers...

We should be celebrating democratic engagement, not limiting it

This parliamentary term has seen a succession of deeply unpopular legislation, leading to an unprecedented number of select committee submissions as people take the only opportunity they've been given to tell the regime that they hate its agenda. Given that we're supposed to be a democracy, you'd expect the government to be celebrating this massive increase in democratic engagement. Instead, they want to limit it:

The MP in charge of handling record-breaking submissions on the controversial Treaty principles bill says politicians may need to think about requiring proof of identity or citizenship if a surge in feedback is not kept under control.

[...]

“While it is natural for controversial legislation to draw wider engagement, the rise of coordinated, largely online campaigns risks undermining the committee’s ability to identify and consider substantive, good-faith submissions.”

Meager said MPs could need to consider whether organisations should be allowed to submit on behalf of others, or if individuals should have to submit their own views.

With few restrictions in place on making a submission, it was possible proof of identity or citizenship could be necessary to guard against abuse of the select committee process, including any use of artificial intelligence tools to generate submissions on behalf of fake people.

“I do not think that is a road our Parliament wants to go down, but it is a very real and possible consequence of recent submission campaigns,” Meager said of implementing additional verification processes.

Which I think again shows the anti-democratic instincts of this regime. Not content with election rigging and suppressing protest, they want to stop us from telling them (and each other) what we think of their bullshit laws. We should not stand for it. A parliament which walls itself off from the people ceases to be a representative body - with all that that implies for its legitimacy and durability.

Ironically, one reason submission numbers are so huge is precisely because of the contempt the regime has shown for the normal democratic process by avoiding the normal consultation and policy development process. If they'd followed those processes, people would likely have had their say earlier, and ideally the regime would have got the message that we hate them and their laws and backed off a little. So maybe its a case of "we'll be less activist if you'll be less shit"...

Open Government: Business-as-usual, as usual

Aotearoa has been a member of the Open Government Partnership since 2013. And it has never taken its core mechanism of co-creation with civil society seriously. Our first national action plan was a hastily cobbled together pile of business-as-usual actions, imposed without any real engagement. The second was a little better, in that they actually pretended to consult civil society and ask for policy proposals, before chucking anything actually ambitious in the bin and (once again) doing what they were planning to do anyway. There were some signs that they were beginning to learn, and the third action plan seemed to have some real consultation, which foundered on the lack of any budget or process to get one for anything civil society proposed. It was quite apparent by this stage that civil society was wasting its time on this, and being used as a PR prop by a state unwilling to listen to them, let alone actually do anything real, and top civil society organisations wrote to then Public Services Minister Chris Hipkins telling him so. Hipkins actually listened, and the fourth action plan actually had some stuff in it suggested by civil society (though watered down by the bureaucracy, of course). Which was then simply chucked in the bin by the current government, who just saw it all as a waste of money (not to mention harmful to their money-laundering, tax-cheating backers).

And so we come to today, when Te Kawa Mataaho has announced a new "consultation" on a new action plan... which will center on their pre-existing action plan to strengthen Public Service integrity. In other words, the outcome is pre-determined, and its pure business-as-usual, as usual.

I will not be wasting my time with this farce. I have better things to do than making suggestions which will be rejected, or engaging with people who are not there in good faith. I recommend others do the same. When the government actually wants to co-create something with civil society, then I might be interested. But I'm not interested in being a PR prop for their bullshit, so they can tick a little box saying "consultation!" and pretend that it means something. Fuck that, and fuck them.

If this is all they're going to do, maybe they should have quit after all. And if they don't quit, I hope the OGP activates its accountability mechanisms and throws us out.

A parliamentary purpose?

Rimmer's Regulatory Standards Bill is unpopular, and like his unconstitutional Treaty Principles Bill, has seen a massive outpouring of public opposition. So for the past week, he has been using his platform as deputy prime minister to publicly attack high-profile submitters, with a series of ads calling them "victim of the day". It is effectively a hate-campaign against submitters, attempting to incite harassment and violence against them, in an effort to deter submissions in future. It has already resulted in thousands of hate-filled online messages directed at Rimmer's targets, including misogyny, racism, and threats of gender-based violence.

That's bad enough. But to add insult to injury, at least one of those ads bears a Parliamentary logo. It's being done with out money!

Parliamentary communications "must only be used for parliamentary purposes". Readers might want to consider whether organising harassment campaigns against members of the public who submit on legislation is a "parliamentary purpose". And if it turns out that it is "within the rules" - as MP's love to say when caught doing something immoral - whether those rules, or indeed the entire institution, is fit for purpose.

Secondly, among the examples of contempt of parliament are these:

intimidating, preventing, or hindering a witness from giving evidence, or giving evidence in full, to the House or a committee...

assaulting, threatening, or disadvantaging a person on account of evidence given by that person to the House or a committee.

Rimmer is not (to my knowledge) sending hate-filled messages himself to intimidate, threaten, and disadvantage committee witnesses in retaliation for their evidence - he has an online mob to do that for him. Which he is inciting. And on that front, anything which "has a tendency, directly or indirectly, to produce such a result" qualifies as contempt.

Some MP should lodge a complaint. And if the Privileges Committee finds him guilty, then he should be hoist by his own petard, and suspended for a month.

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.

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.

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.

The people have spoken

The Justice Committee has reported back on National's racist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, and recommended by majority that it not proceed. So hopefully it will now rapidly go to second reading and be voted down.

As for submissions, it turns out that around 380,000 people submitted on the bill - 75,000 of them as part of a "collated" (template) submission which were counted as one per group. This included 31,200 for racist political party ACT and 24,706 for white supremacist group Hobson's Choice. While the committee officially accepted only ~37K submissions (the others will be accepted and entered into the parliamentary record at a later date), they took the unusual step of getting the Ministry of Justice to analyse the rest before they were accepted. The result found overwhelming opposition to the bill, with 90% of all submissions opposed, and only 8% in favour. The people have spoken very loudly on this, and you'd expect Parliament to listen. If they refuse, or try and subvert it, then you can expect the sort of discontent we had with the political system in the early 90's, and a similar movement to further constrain and humiliate politicians.

With so many people submitting, this could have been a signal moment for democratic engagement. Instead, National turned it to shit, by trying to throw our submissions in the bin to meet their arbitrary, self-set timeline. That should have consequences too. Most obviously, by voting them out at the next election. But also, the political elite are currently pushing for a four-year term, to make themselves less accountable to us. Absurdly, they are predicating this on giving greater power to select committees. Given what we've just seen about how a government majority can abuse that process and nullify any real scrutiny of a bill, we should be telling them to get absolutely fucked. And if you'd like to do that, you can do it here.

Again, this government needs to be voted out. The National Party needs a good electoral decimation to teach them a lesson. They agreed to this hateful, racist bill in order to gain power. Not a single one of them crossed the floor to vote against it, showing them all to be a pack of racist arseholes. Then they abused the select committee process to try and shut down opposition and silence submitters. They agreed to it, they own it. And we should hold them responsible for this entire shitshow, and never let them - or anyone else - forget what they did. They are a racist, white supremacist, anti-democratic party, and they should bear that label forever.

The fix is in

So, having broken its promise to the nation, and dumped 85% of submissions on the Treaty Principles Bill in the trash, National's stooges on the Justice Committee have decided to end their "consideration" of the bill, and report back a full month early:

Labour says the Justice Select Committee is expected to report back on the Treaty Principles Bill on Friday - more than a month ahead of time.

Parliament set down a deadline of the 14 May, and a Cabinet minute shows the committee was set to consider it until 16 May.

But Labour's Justice spokesperson Duncan Webb - who had previously sought an extension to avoid thousands of public submissions being excluded - now says the timeline has been moved up.

"The committee finished more than a month ahead of the 14 May deadline set by Parliament with the report expected to be presented and available tomorrow (Friday)," he said.

Webb said the Committee had "rammed it through with outrageous haste" and the early report would exclude those thousands of submissions.

There is absolutely no reason for this haste. The original May deadline was set by the government, and could easily have been moved to allow for full analysis and consideration of the submissions. Especially as National has repeatedly said publicly that they will be voting the bill down at second reading. So I guess we can conclude from this that the fix is in, and Rimmer is going to get the racist referendum (and associated hate-crimes) he is thirsting for. And National is going to collude with him on this.

As I said earlier, this is not democracy. National's abuse here makes it clear that the entire parliamentary process is a sham and a fraud. It undermines the legitimacy of parliament, and of our democracy. And that is something no government should do. We need to vote these tyrants out at the first opportunity.

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.

300,000!

Over the holidays, there was a rising tide of calls for people to submit on National's repulsive, white supremacist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, along with a wave of advice and examples of what to say. And it looks like people rose to the occasion, with over 300,000 submissions received so far:

Initial estimates showed that over 300,000 submissions have been lodged online. The committee said more than half of those submissions came on Tuesday, which caused the site to crash.

The previous record for submissions was just over 100,000 on the conversion therapy legislation in 2021.

Assuming that they're all kiwis, and not foreign MuskBots, that means more than 5% of the population of Aotearoa felt strongly enough about this bill to speak up about it. Which is a massive level of mobilisation.

We don't know yet - and won't know for months, given the numbers - whether the balance of submissions favour or oppose the bill. But Luxon's hopes of being able to vote this down at second reading and put the issue to bed quietly are clearly dead. No-one is going to be talking about anything else for as long as this bill is before the house, and even once it is voted down or voted through, people are not going to forget. Especially if it is voted through, because there's clearly enough of a motivated base of activism here to drive a significant anti-government protest movement if National passes this law, and to push for it to be reversed (I'm less concerned about the other case, because while there are clearly some motivated racists - the National and ACT caucuses, for a start - its not like there were a hundred thousand of them in front of parliament calling for the Treaty to be abolished).

Given the numbers - three times the previous record - its no wonder the parliament website melted under the load. The good news is that the Justice Committee has done the right thing, and extended the submission deadline for another five days. So, if you haven't already, Submit!. History is watching, and like the Tour, people in twenty or forty years time will want to know which side you were on. Are you going to do your part, or stay silent in the face of white supremacy?

Submitted!

Submissions on National's racist, white supremacist Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill are due tomorrow! So today, after a good long holiday from all that bullshit, I finally got my shit together to submit on it.

As I noted here, people should write their own submissions in their own words, so I'm not going to post the thing. But in keeping with the idea of not wanting to waste my time on what is essentially a disgusting ACT trolling exercise, or in trying to compete with recognised Tiriti and constitutional experts who will say things better than I ever could, I kept it short. My key point was that the bill effectively unilaterally abrogates te Tiriti without consultation with the Tiriti partner, let alone negotiation or agreement, and that this is deeply dishonest and dishonourable. Sadly, I failed to include a Darth Vader reference, but that's probably for the bests. ACT would probably think being compared to one of SF's most notorious villains is cool, because like sad little incels they took all the wrong lessons from those movies.

I also pointed out that Parliament has shamed itself and undermined its own legitimacy by even considering the bill, and that it needs to make restitution for this. Most obviously, this means killing the bill dead. But they need to do more: apologising to Māori and the people of Aotearoa for even considering this bullshit, publicly censuring the Minister for bringing the bill to the House, and putting safeguards in place to prevent similar actions in future. I suggest a BORA-style mechanism to help prevent unwitting Tiriti breaches, as well as legislation similar to Tākuta Ferris' Treaty of Waitangi (Empowerment of Waitangi Tribunal) Amendment Bill (currently in the biscuit tin) to ensure Parliament is well-informed and prevent executive interference in the Tribunal's functions. I don't expect the current pack of racist arsehats to consider either option - but hopefully the opposition will be more committed to protecting the basis of our constitution from racist meddling.

Submit to defend te Tiriti!

The Justice Committee has called for submissions on National's racist and constitutionally radical Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill. Submissions can be made at the link above or by post, and are due by Tuesday, 7 January 2025. But I'd get in quick, in case National grows a spine and shortens the select committee period.

There are already template submissions floating around for this bill. Please don't use them. As people who have worked inside the sausage factory have pointed out, form and template submissions are grouped and ignored. You will have more impact and be more effective if you write your own. It does not have to be long, just a few sentences: who you are, your top reason(s) why you oppose the bill, and a request to appear before the committee (if you want to do that - and remember, it can be done by phone or zoom). If someone else - a big NGO, say - says something you agree with, then saying "I support the submission of [X]" (optionally, "on [issue Y]") is good - but make sure to also say something in your own words. Don't just crib and rearrange their language, because it is very obvious, and then your submission goes in the template bucket.

[This BTW is why I stopped posting my submissions here: people were just copy-pasting them, which undermined my impact and theirs]

There are many, many critiques of this bill which you can mine for ammunition. The Waitangi Tribunal reports, politicians' first-reading speeches, Helmut Modlik, Ngati Toa, senior lawyers, Geoffrey Palmer, Chris Finlayson, even Jenny fucking Shipley. You can pick one problem, try and cover them all, or just go with the general vibe that this bill misrepresents our history and would be (in the words of the waitangi Tribunal) "worst, most comprehensive breach of the Treaty/te Tiriti in modern times". Just be polite, be brief, and above all, resist the temptation to tell the politicians what complete arsehats vandals they are for even considering this piece of shit law. (This is always the hardest bit for me. Submission voice is different from blog voice is different from Kikorangi voice...)

Rimmer will be looking for a big show of astroturfed support from Hobson's Pledge. It's our job to outnumber them, to bury them in opposition. The marchers showed that today with the hikoi (which is now being estimated at 40 or 50 thousand, with some estimates in the 80's); time to show it at select committee as well.