A thought

Isn't it refreshing to see a political leader resign for their political failings? All too often we just get a wall of denial, and a refusal to recognise that allowing a perception of failure is, in a political leader, a failing. The result is an absence of accountability and people grimly hanging on long after their use-by date.

Pita Sharples could have done that for the sake of his mortgage. Instead, he has acknowledged the reality of his failure and accepted responsibility for it. It would be nice if certain other politicians would do the same.

Against karakia in schools

Over the weekend the Herald reported that teachers at Kelston Intermediate were objecting to being forced to lead pupils in a karakia every morning. They're right. The Education Act 1964 is crystal clear: teaching at intermediate schools (which are primary schools according to the Act's interpretation clauce) "shall be entirely of a secular character". That means that prayers in any language are inappropriate, and pretending its a "cultural practice" doesn't change that. If the school wants to hold religious observances, it must either do it outside normal school hours, or seek special permission from the Minister - and in both cases attendance cannot be compulsory. And regardless, it is inappropriate (and a violation of the right to freedom of religion) to require teachers to lead such observances.

This is settled law, and the school's Board of trustees should know that. And so should Pita Sharples. While karakia may be entirely normal in pupil's homes, it is not appropriate in schools. Compulsory schooling is not a vehicle for the religious beliefs of the majority to be rammed in the face of the minority (or vice versa, for that matter).

Meanwhile, its worth noting that while primary students are protected in this way, because secondary education was not compulsory when the original clause was passed in 1914, high school students are not. That has to change. Anyone want to take a member's bill to do it?

Property rights should not trump human welfare

This week, Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples suggested that Christchurch's growing number of homeless squat in abandoned red-zone properties rather than sleeping in their cars. The response with swift, with an outraged Gerry Brownlee saying that Sharples' suggestion was "not appropriate" and "completely out of order". Bullshit.

Despite the government's denials, there is a growing housing crisis in Christchurch. The earthquake has damaged homes, meaning that there are not enough to go around, and this shortage has been exacerbated by price-gouging landlords eager to make a quick buck off other people's suffering. Meanwhile, hundreds of homes lie empty in the red zone.

Contrary to Brownlee's fearmongering, these homes are not unsafe. They have been condemned as part of a policy of managed retreat, because the land cannot be quickly remediated and public services cheaply restored - not because they are structurally unsound. And while they are cold, unheated, and lack power and sewage, they're still enormously better than a tent or a car.

Squatting in these abandoned homes does no-one any harm, while delivering significant benefits to the homeless. Demanding that those in need eschew this, and instead continue to suffer, is privileging property rights over basic human welfare. And that is simply obscene.

Another crony appointment

Back in April, Pita Sharples and Bill English jointly appointer former National MP Georgina te Heuheu to the Board of Māori Television, with the explicit expectation that she would become chair. This seemed like a fairly blatant case of cronyism, so I submitted the usual OIA request seeking background details of the appointment.

After a lengthy delay, I received the response today. Sadly, in this case, there isn't much of a paper trail - no briefing to the Minister of the need to make an appointment to fill an upcoming vacancy, and no paper requesting the Minister to choose between several nominated and interviewed candidates. The only formal documentation is a paper to the Cabinet Appointments and Honours Committee [PDF], seeking approval for te Heuheu's nomination, and a subsequent appointment letter. The Minister does give an outline of the process in their response letter [PDF], but it is deeply unsatisfactory:

In response to your request, I can advise you that this position was not advertised. While there is scope for it to happen, state sector board positions are not usually publicly advertised. various state sector agencies manage registers of qualified candidates who are interested in being nominated for boards, and departments usually seek nominations from these registers...

In line with the usual appointment process as outlined above, I requested a list of candidates from Te Puni Kokiri for consideration for this position. Candidates for this position were nominated from the registers held by the treasury's Crown Ownership Monitoring Unit, the Ministry of Women's Affairs, and Te Puni Kokiri. Te Puni Kokiri provided a list of five nominees. the successful candidate was nominated for the position by me and the Minister of Finance, as jointly responsible Ministers for the Maori Television Service.

From this, and the lack of supporting documentation, it appears the Ministers simply imposed their shoulder-tapped candidate on the Maori Television Service, without even considering those other candidates. And again, that's simply not how things are supposed to happen. Appointments should be made on merit, not on political connections.

Quite apart from pissing on our reputation for clean government, Sharples and English have done te Heuheu a disservice. She's not Wayne Mapp, and its not inconceivable that she would have won a competitive appointments process. By not running one, English and Sharples have forever tainted her as a crony, who gained her position by favourtism rather than merit. And she deserves better than that.

This stinks

While everyone was paying attention to the election, he Herald on Sunday has quietly revealed what seems to be a case of full-blown political corruption in Pita Sharples' electorate office:

A key aide to a Government minister asked for money in an email that also discussed putting "political pressure" on an issue.

Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples' electorate manager Martin Cooper wrote to a local property owner that he wanted money, then spoke of contacting a Government minister.

[...]

Cooper replied saying: "Can you please pay another $1000 towards the car". He then detailed his plans to send emails supporting the owner's case to Hide, former Auckland mayor John Banks and the manager of a department at the former Auckland City Council.

"Political pressure will hopefully place the council into submission where they will be ordered to shut it down," Cooper wrote. "Given it is election year for the Super City, now they surely don't want this to become a council or even a political issue."

The owner said he initially refused, then agreed to pay. Cooper provided him with a bank account number.

There's a long and complicated backstory here about Cooper facilitating the sale of a building to his former gang, Black Power, but there's not enough to conclude that that was corrupt (as opposed to merely moonlighting while employed as a public servant). But the details above, asking for money in exchange for political support (and, as noted elsewhere in the article, arranging for Sharples to write a letter on Maori Party letterhead)? That seems to be a clear case of soliciting a bribe as an official. And it needs to be prosecuted. This sort of thing is simply not supposed to happen in New Zealand.

Astoundingly, Sharples is standing by this behaviour from his staffer. He needs to pay the political price for that. An MP who allows his electorate staff to behave corruptly and extort bribes for doing their jobs is no different from Taito Philip Field.

An explanation for the tupperwaka

Yesterday I expressed disquiet about the proposed ownership scheme for Pita Sharples' tupperwaka. While the government would be paying for almost all of it, Ngati Whatua will end up owning it. A friend who works in the public service has pointed out an explanation for this:

There is however an explanation for the ownership structure and that is that no government agency wants to wear the capital charge, depreciation and operating costs for an expensive idea that has come out of the blue, unbudgeted at a time when everyone's budgets are shrinking and when the government has no use for it after the tournament. People would have been falling over themselves to not own it.

But while that explains why no government department wanted it, it doesn't explain why it is being given free to Ngati Whatua rather than sold to the highest bidder. And that aspect smells of a sweetheart deal for a powerful iwi in a marginal electorate.

On the tupperwaka

Yesterday the government announced it would be spending $2 million on a giant inflatable waka for the Rugby World Cup. The decision has resulted in a fair bit of flak, some of it deserved, some of it less so. Unlike many, I think the idea of a Maori cultural display during a major international event is a good one; it doesn't sell New Zealand as a business (something about which I could not give a shit), but it tells our visitors a little about us. At the same time, it does not sit well with the government's slash-and-burn austerity message, and you don't have to look far to find other things they could be spending the money on. But what really annoys me is the ownership structure. The government is putting up 95% of the cost, but after the event, Ngati Whatua (who are contributing just 5%) will get to own the thing. Surely if the public is paying for it, the public should own it?

Then there's the stench. We have a government Minister up for re-election in an increasingly marginal seat dropping a $2 million windfall on the largest iwi in his electorate. You don't have to be John Boscawen to think that this smells bad. Our government is supposed to have procedures to prevent that sort of cronyism. It will be interesting to see whether those procedures were followed.

The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

This morning, the government announced its support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Good. As a country which supposedly supports indigenous rights, and which thinks of itself as having got its relationship with Māori right, we should have been supporting it all along. Labour's 2007 refusal to support it was utterly shameful, and a black mark on that party's history.

Some think the Declaration is a racist document which grants special rights to people on the basis of their ethnicity. This is bullshit. The rights affirmed in the Declaration - rights to life, non-discrimination, self-determination, language, culture etc - are primarily reaffirmations of rights already affirmed in other international legal instruments such as the UDHR, ICCPR and ICESCR. In most cases, these rights are clarified to give guidance on their implementation in the specific context of indigenous peoples, particularly in light of their past treatment. Even the "new" collective rights against genocide, dispossession, assimilation, forced integration and relocation fall into this category - they already exist in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In other words, what the Declaration affirms is the same damn rights everyone else has. And like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, its necessary precisely because those rights have been ignored and violated so often in the past.

Even the "controversial" Article 26, which affirms the right of indigenous peoples to retain their land, falls into this category, in that Article 17 of the UDHR affirms a right to own property and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it. But beyond that, this article is what the entire Treaty process has been about: coming to terms with the fact that we stole this country from its rightful owners, and doing what we can to make recompense for it. That has been a core principle of Treaty policy for 30 years now, and we should be upholding and promoting it on the international stage - not denying it.

(As an aside, anyone else find it ironic that ACT - the party of propertarians - thinks affirming the right of Māori to their property is wrong? I guess they really just are the party of Pakeha racists then...)

What should be controversial about the Declaration is not that we are supporting it, but the manner in which National has gone about it: flying a Minister to New York in the dead of night, making no mention of the fact in their media briefings, expunging it from the Minister's official diary (which, BTW, probably violates the Public Records Act, not to mention the spirit of the OIA. Someone should be prosecuted there). This extraordinary secrecy seems to have been aimed at one of the government's own support parties, who went nuclear in the House today and accused them of breaking their coalition agreement. It was disrespectful and dishonest.

Also dishonest are John Key's statements about what the declaration commits us to. As a small country with a mana-based foreign policy, we pride ourselves on our support for international law and on keeping our word. We make a point of not signing up to things unless we plan to implement them. But despite having his Minister of Māori Affairs announce our support for the Declaration, Key was today trying to argue that it was purely aspirational and that it meant nothing as it was non-binding. This is technically correct - its only a declaration, not a treaty, and even the latter have no effect unless implemented in New Zealand law - but at the same time it is grossly dishonest and two faced to say you support something in the morning and effectively denounce it that same afternoon.

Our government should stand by its public statements. If it did not intend to uphold the Declaration, then it should not have announced its support for it. It is that simple. Yes, such two-faced dishonesty is par for the course in the UN, as any student of UN human rights treaties would know. But we're meant to be better than that. Sinking to the level of dishonesty of China and Libya degrades us as a nation, and undermines the mana on which our entire foreign policy is based. And that is hugely damaging to our country in the long run.

Gone native

Pita Sharples, speech to PILLARS opening, 22 April 2008

Every Christmas, there is a standard feature that grabs space in every local paper.

It’s the prison Christmas menu. Last year, incidentally, it consisted of a portion of chicken, a serving of vegetables and luxury of luxuries, a Christmas mince pie. Hardly something to get excited about one would think, but the four dollar a day diet in our penal institutions falls into the same category as a series of other items that appear to fascinate readers.

You know the stories – those that ask WHY are prisoners playing petanque, watching flat-screen telly, getting access to Playstations, Xboxes, internet and benefiting from the luxury of underfloor heating?

Yet without fail, every Christmas, there are also articles missing from the paper which tell a different story than the lavish dinner in the School of Hard Knocks...

The Dominion-Post, reporting on now-Associate Corrections Minister Pita Sharples' visit to Rimutaka Prison, 19 December, 2008:

Associate Corrections Minister Pita Sharples rates the Christmas meal prisoners will eat next Thursday in 20 jails as better than basic average lunchtime restaurant fare.

Dr Sharples was treated to an advance serving of the Christmas lunch the 7600 prisoners will consume when he visited Rimutaka Prison yesterday in the company of Corrections Minister Judith Collins.

Dr Sharples, also the new Maori Affairs minister, tucked into the basic Christmas luncheon of vegetables, chicken and a Christmas fruit-mince pie that the prisoners will eat.

And the verdict? "Awesome." Dr Sharples joked he was looking to accommodate his family in a secure unit outside a New Zealand prison so he could feed them each for $4.50 a day.

That didn't take long, did it? He's had a Ministerial limo for exactly a month, and he's gone completely native. So much for the idea that the Maori party will change anything...

[Hat-tip: PA System].