Who else is spying II

Last month, when the story of Solid Energy's spying on protestors broke, I wondered aloud who else was spying, and speculated in particular on Crown Research Institutes which had been the subject of anti-GE protests, notably AgResearch and Crop & Food.

Fortunately, a regular reader had the same idea, and lodged a couple of OIAs. They're still waiting on a response from AgResearch, but can confirm that neither Crop & Food, HortResearch or Landcare have ever used the services of Thompson & Clark, or other private investigation firms. That's some good news at least.

Update: GNS also denies having used Thompson & Clark, or any other private investigators.

Thirty months

Cheney consigliere Lewis "Scooter" Libby has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for obstruction of justice and perjury over his outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame in the leadup to the Iraq war. All I can say is that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

The question now is how long it will take George Bush to show some uncharacteristic mercy (but characteristic contempt for the law) and pardon him.

Journalistic laziness

I was woken up this morning by the radio blaring that a poll on the world's largest Maori website had found that Maori were overwhelmingly in favour of outlawing gangs and throwing children in jail. The story is ultimately sourced from a press release from the Sensible Sentencing Trust, and has since shown up on TV3 as well, but you'd think that our journalists would at stop and think a little before checking the broadcast - or at least look at the polls in question. Unfortunately, they didn't. So, here's the bits they should have noticed.

Firstly, as I keep having to remind people, online polls are not statistically reliable. The sample is self-selecting, rather than randomly selected, and thus is unlikely to represent a true cross section of the community's views. They should therefore be treated with a grain of salt, rather than as serious news.

Secondly, looking at the poll results in question, we find that a grand total of 68 people expressed an opinion on whether gangs should be outlawed, and 43 on whether children accused of serious crimes should be tried and punished as adults. Both polls were held open for a month on what the Sensible Sentencing Trust calls "the largest Maori membership website", so its hardly a ringing endorsement.

Thirdly, even if by some miracle the self-selecting samples were random, rather than consisting mostly of angry rednecks wanting to vent their spleen, the margin of error on the two polls would be 12% and 15% respectively. Nobody, not even a social scientist (who are actually quite strict about such things) would consider that to be a credible or useful result.

In short, this story is a perfect example of lazy journalism, of reporters copy-pasting a press-release without bothering to check the facts for themselves. Meanwhile, if the "hang 'em high" brigade are down to relying on a handful of people in a self-selecting poll on an obscure website for support, they really are clutching at straws.

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NZ Media & other stuff

Fiji: six months on

Six months ago, on December 5 2006, the Fijian government of Laisenia Qarase was overthrown by a military coup. It was not a good government, but it was an elected government, and therefore a legitimate one. While I disagree with the policies it proposed, they were lawful and constitutional and well within their power to choose. In overthrowing it, the Fijian military both undermined Fiji's constitution, and frustrated the democratic desires of the Fijian people. For that, they deserve to be condemned.

In the six months since the coup, we have seen the progressive dismantling of Fiji's constitution, the "sacking" of its politicians, public servants, police and judges, and its replacement by an interim regime intent on imposing its chosen policies without any democratic mandate. We have also seen a series of human rights abuses, with critics of the regime barred from leaving the country and subject to arbitrary detention, military questioning, and beatings. The military has also murdered two men while "questioning" them (though neither was a political detainee), and there have been reports of other horrific and sadistic abuses. The country is now reportedly in a state of fear, with people too terrified to raise their voices for fear of being dragged off to the barracks and tortured, and Fiji now seems to be well on its way to becoming the Myanmar of the South Pacific. While the regime has promised democratic elections in 2010, there is no guarantee that they will not again veto the people's choice if the resulting government looks too likely to implement policies they disagree with or attempts to hold them to account.

What can we do about this? Precious little. Even if the military regime's abuses were widespread enough and vicious enough to justify military intervention - and they fortunately do not even come close - such would be beyond both the capabilities and the willingness of New Zealand. Instead, it seems all we can do is condemn it, apply sanctions, and work to ensure the Fijian regime is isolated by its neighbours until it returns power to an elected government. That, and help those speaking out against the regime in any way we can, in the hope that the Fijian people get angry enough to try their hand at "people power" tactics. That's not much, and its not even likely to be effective, but as much as it pains me to say it, its pretty much all we can do.

The leopard doesn't change its spots

Back in the 1990's, the then National government attracted widespread opposition for its policy of corruptly flogging off state-owned enterprises at bargain-basement prices to their donors, who then ran them into the ground in an attempt to maximise their profits. Since then, they've been desperately trying to disown that dirty history. Their 2005 State-owned Enterprises Policy promised to retain a host of SOEs, including TVNZ, the rail network, and the electricity companies (though as The Hollow Men revealed, this was simply a lie for public consumption, and internally National was as committed to asset sales as it was in the 90's). More recently, John Key has attempted to use his ascension to the leadership to position National more towards the centre, and imply that those heartless, Revolutionary, hard-right neoliberal policies are in the past (though without ever going on record to explicitly disclaim them, of course).

Anyone tempted to believe that National really has changed might want to read this little slip from SOE spokesperson Gerry Brownlee on Agenda on Saturday. While talking about Mercury Energy's killing of Folole Muliaga, he said:

SOEs are there because the state in New Zealand was very very involved in a whole range of activities over a number of years, they were a transition place where the government of the day, a Labour government actually said maybe the state doesn’t have to be involved with all this stuff let's park them up for a few years and see what happens. It's been 20 years, no reconsideration of the model and no development of the model either, and one of the interesting things is Mr Mallard talked about the scrutiny of select committees and other such, I think we do our best but I don’t think we get the same scrutiny as you would if there was a series of large institutional shareholders

(Emphasis added)

In other words, Brownlee wants to privatise some of our most productive assets, our state-owned electricity companies. And he's suggesting this as a response to the heartless killing of a sick woman by an electricity company - which any reasonable person would take as a sign that our SOEs are already behaving far too much like the private sector.

The leopard does not change its spots. National is as heartless and devoted to serving the interests of their rich donors as they were in the 90's. Anyone who thinks any differently simply hasn't been paying enough attention.

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Quest for Security - named after Bill Sutch's book The Quest for Security in New Zealand 1840 to 1966. It's aiming high, but if it reaches even a fraction of what it aspires to, it will be better than the vast majority of blogs out there.

The surge has failed

In February, the US began an escalation of the occupation of Iraq, commonly known as "the surge". So how's it going? Badly:

Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

As for why, it seems that the Iraqi forces have no real interest in collaborating in the occupation of their own country. Funny, that. Meanwhile, casualties have risen, and the whole thing has turned into another part of Bush's great Iraq clusterfuck.

Climate change: asking the right questions

In her positioning speech in which she sought to define the ground for coalition negotiations following the next election, Green co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons also asked Helen Clark and John Key two symbolic questions on climate change. The first relates to both parties' policy for an emissions trading scheme, and asks them to put some hard numbers on it by asking where the cap will be set and how permits will be allocated. The second is aimed at the longer term and asks basically what the parties are willing to do about the dairy industry.

The first set of questions are absolutely vital to judging whether the parties' proposed schemes will be effective, equitable, and morally acceptable. As Jeanette points out, the level of the cap ultimately determines the price, as well as how much the New Zealand taxpayer will be forced to pick up. Setting it too high means permits will be cheaper; it also means polluters will not have to reduce their emissions as much, leaving us with a bigger deficit beyond our Kyoto assigned amount which will have to be met by the government buying carbon credits on the international market. In other words, the higher the cap, the less effective the scheme will be. Obviously, I favour a low cap - setting it at the 1990 baseline seems entirely appropriate - but more important is the principle that, whatever initial level the cap is set it, it gradually sinks. This will drive further emissions reductions and push us towards whatever long-term emissions goal we set ourselves.

Permit allocation OTOH makes no difference to the effectiveness of the scheme - but makes a large difference to the bottom line of the participants. Grandparenting permits - giving them away for free to existing polluters - not only rewards bad behaviour, but would also be a massive transfer of wealth from the New Zealand public to private industry. Auctioning OTOH is fair and transparent, and has the added advantage of generating revenue which can in turn be used to fund other emissions reduction projects. It ought to be no surprise which option I favour. Like the Greens I believe that partial grandparenting can be used where there is a serious risk of emissions leakage or danger to competitiveness, but the basic presumption should be that polluters pay, rather than benefiting from a billion-dollar-plus windfall.

The second question is the thorniest. Dairy cows were responsible for 10.5 MTCO₂-e in 2004 - one seventh of our total (and this doesn't include their contribution to energy and transport emissions, or fertiliser - this is the cows alone). Fonterra, the dairy industry's largest player, has set itself the goal of growing at 4% per year, indefinitely. This doesn't mean a 4% increase in dairy emissions every year - emissions per tonne of milk solids dropped by about 1.3% per year between 1990 and 2002 due to more efficient cows - but it still poses a massive challenge. If this growth is sustained, emissions from dairy cows will more than triple by 2050, to 35.75 MTCO₂-e - more than 80% of our 1990 total. Unless we do something about this, we have no hope of reaching the National Party's stated goal of a 50% reduction by 2050, let alone Labour's one of carbon neutrality.

On this front, National's response -that they will not restrict growth in the dairy industry - is neither surprising nor a hopeful sign. It's all very well to hope for some technological solution to come along to reduce dairy emissions - but as I have said before, hope is not a strategy. Both parties need to confront this issue, and give us some serious answers on what they will do while they are waiting for their miracle. Because it is clear to me that just waiting around and letting the herd grow is not an option - it just makes the problem that much bigger when you have to confront it (something we learned the hard way over electricity sector emissions in the 1990's). We can not, as a society, subsidise the polluting habits of the dairy industry any longer. If we are to have any hope of meeting our climate change targets, they have to pay their own way.

Defining the ground

The Greens held their annual conference over the weekend, and co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons took the opportunity to position the party for future coalition negotiations next term by putting forward some symbolic questions to Helen Clark and John Key. Two of the questions were about climate change policy, and are really worthy of another post; the others highlighted the Greens' interest in social justice, and made their position clear. To John Key, she asked:

what you intend to do about the people you have labeled as the "underclass". Will you make a public commitment now that benefits levels will not be cut and the conditions for receiving them will not be made more stringent under any government you lead? Will workers still enjoy the options of seeking collective agreements? Will the minimum wage be frozen at the level you inherit or will it continue to rise? Will we see bulk funding or vouchers introduced in education?

While to Helen, she asked:

how you feel about the growth in inequality since you came to power, and what plans you have to address it

and highlighted benefit levels, child poverty and housing affordability as areas that need government attention. The message is clear: that if National wants to govern (and despite recent polling, they are likely to need a partner post-election, and their options are likely to be limited to the Greens or the Maori Party), they are going to need to restrain their urge to screw the workers and transfer wealth to their rich donors, while if Labour wants another term, it is going to have to do much, much better than it is at present. The ground should naturally favour Labour, but given the slow progress we've seen on these issues (particularly that of benefit levels), I'm not sure they can be relied upon to rise to the challenge. And OTOH, the latter two are centrist issues, of interest to both of Labour's current coalition partners, so they may have political room to move.

And as part of my ongoing snark against Jordan: this is an example of a political party definining the political ground, and trying to lead public opinion rather than cravenly following it. It would be nice if Labour would try and do the same, rather than continually wasting its bully pulpit.

The lion's last roar

For the past six weeks, Amnesty International has been touring New Zealand on a campaign to raise awareness about human rights abuses in China. The centrepiece of the campaign is a petition to the Chinese government, in the form of a large, colourful, Chinese parade lion. But now the campaign is over, and its time for the lion's last roar: being presented to the Chinese Embassy in Wellington.

When: Tuesday, 5 June, 13:00
Where: Chinese Embassy, Kelburn Parade Glenmore St, Wellington (right opposite the botanic gardens)

I don't know how many people signed it, but they were running out of room when it hit Palmerston North.

New Fisk

Can the Lebanese army fight America's war against terror?

Climate change: preventing progress

The G8 will be meeting in Germany next week for its annual summit, with climate change expected to dominate the agenda as Europe pushes for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The US has been fighting tooth and nail to block any progress, however George Bush has suddenly announced that the US will lead a series of seperate talks bringing together the world's 15 worst carbon polluters with the aim of agreeing a long-term goal for reducing greenhouse gases by the end of 2008.

This sounds good, but the message is in the fine print: despite bringing major emitters together to negotiate, the US rejects any national targets, or any qualitiative goal which could help to define them, or any move towards a global emissions trading system. In other words, they're proposing a "climate change treaty" which is worse than those already negotiated and which, by definition, cannot achieve any meaningful progress.

(But then, preventing meaningful progress is after all the point. Gotta keep those oil and coal profits rolling in...)

Like the AP6 (also coincidentally announced at a G8 summit which showed too much chance of moving forward on climate change), this is simply an attempt to undermine negotiations and allow the US to buy themselves a few more years in which they can pollute freely. And they should not be allowed to get away with it. If the US is not going to participate meaningfully in negotiations, they should be excluded, and the rest of the world should press on without them. Then, when we have a deal, we should use border taxes to force them to sign up for it. But one thing is clear: the charade in which the US uses negotiations not to reach a deal, but to prevent other countries from reaching one cannot be allowed to continue.

Torture ship visits Wellington

The Chilean naval vessel Esmeralda will be visiting Wellington on Sunday. It's a very pretty ship, but it has a dark past: during the Pinochet regime it was used as a floating torture chamber, in which hundreds of people were subjected to beatings, water toture, electrocution, mock-execution, and rape for their supposed opposition to the regime (Amnesty International has some background, including statements from some of those tortured on the Esmeralda, here).

Chile has moved on from that era, but it has not yet fully acknowledged the atrocities committed aboard the Esmeralda, or held those responsible to account. Until that happens, this ship should not be allowed to visit civilised countries.

There will be a protest on Sunday to mark the Esmeralda's arrival, from 12ish at Queen's Wharf.

Breaking deals

Two years ago today, the Green party made a deal with the Labour government: they would agree to support the Prisoners' and Victims' Claims Bill to stop it from getting any worse, provided the bill had a sunset clause.

Today, I noticed that the government had tried to go back on the deal. A little-noticed part of the Criminal Justice Reform Bill proposed to extend the life of the (now) Prisoners' and Victims' Claims Act to 2010. The clauses have been removed by the select committee, but in the report the government made sour comments about their disappointment that Green and National MPs opposed an extension, and there's some possibility that they will seek to re-introduce it via a Supplementary Order Paper.

This IMHO would be violating the original deal with the Greens that the Act would have a limited life, after which it would expire. And I think it would be appropriate for the Greens to remind the government that they expect them to keep to their agreements. Otherwise, there's no reason for the Greens to keep theirs - for example, the one that keeps the government in power.

Why we should not allow secret "evidence"

Someone has just pointed me at a perfect example of why we should not allow secret "evidence" in parole board hearings: the police in opposing bail for the man accused of driving his car into a crowd of partygoers a few weeks ago presented "facts" which weren't even true.

They did this shamelessly in open court. Imagine what they'll try if they know their "evidence" can not be effectively challenged.

Against secret evidence

The government's Criminal Justice Reform Bill has been reported back [PDF] from select committee. Much of the bill, dealing with the introduction of home detention as a criminal sentence and a shift in the balance between parole and overall sentence length is unobjectionable. But the committee has made a major change in allowing parole boards to hear secret evidence in deciding applications. This not only pisses in the face of the right to natural justice affirmed in the BORA - it also attacks one of the bedrock principles of our legal system: the principle of audi alteram partem or "hearing both sides". And this is absolutely vital in order for our adversarial system to function properly. Discarding it will allow "evidence" to be introduced without being properly tested, and without giving the person it affects any chance to explain it. We have only to look at the Ahmed Zaoui case, or the US's kangaroo courts in Guantanamo Bay to see the parody of justice results.

If we want out justice system to actually deliver justice, then it is vital we protect the rights of those subject to it to effectively challenge the evidence against them. Otherwise we don't so much have a justice system as an organised lynchmob.

Local government authoritarianism

Wanganui District Council has voted unanimously to send their Wanganui District Council (Prohibition of Gang Insignia) Bill to Parliament. The bill will now have to be publicly notified and made available for inspection - a process which takes about a month - before being introduced to the House. Chester Borrows is reportedly confident that the bill will pass, but I'm not so sure. While MPs may be quite willing to ignore the BORA issues in a craven attempt to appear "tough on crime", this Parliament has shown great reluctance to create a patchwork of local criminal laws. So while I expect the bill to make it to select committee, I expect the committee to ultimately recommend against it.

Meanwhile, the Herald piece last week on the government's plans to introduce UK-style ASBOs to New Zealand also noted that Rotorua District Council was proceeding with its plans to punish criminals without trial by using trespass orders to bar them from the city centre. A bill has been drafted, but is waiting on further advice from the Minister of Police (and presumably other bodies) before it can be notified and introduced. Meanwhile, it seems that the local police have been exploring other options; papers obtained under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act reveal that the Rotorua police were investigating the use of "voluntary" Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (another UK innovation) for young offenders, as well as seeking legal advice on whether judges could order exclusion from certain geographic areas at sentencing so they could "brief local judiciary with a proposal". I'd have thought such orders - effectively a sentence of internal exile - would require explicit permission in statute, and there seems nothing allowing them in the Sentencing Act 2002 - but the police didn't seem concerned about that. I'll have to dig into this further and find out whether anything has come of it.

Fiji: the end of the emergency?

Fiji's military regime has officially ended the state of emergency in place since the December 5 coup. However, that apparently doesn't mean an end of military repression, with a military spokesperson warning darkly that Fiji's Public Order Act (which bans the incitement of violence and racial antagonism, disturbing the peace, the holding of protests without a permit, and the spreading of "false news" to "create or foster public alarm and anxiety") will be "strictly enforced". Fortunately, though, it will be done by the police rather than the army.

The regime has done this in an effort to access $350 million of aid from the EU, which had been made conditional on an end to the "emergency". However, that aid is also conditional on the regime holding elections by March 2009 - something the military would rather delay until it has completed its program. So, hopefully we'll see the EU use this leverage to move things in the right direction: towards a full restoration of democracy and the prosecution of the Fijian military's high command for treason.

Meanwhile, the military continued its persecution of its critics right up until the last minute. A civil servant in the Public Service Commission was dragged off to camp yesterday, and the regime has also threatened that students at the University of the South Pacific will have scholarships withdrawn if they are found to be contributing to blogs criticising the regime. Again, these are not the actions of a regime comfortable with its behaviour - but what they're really worried about is that other people will be uncomfortable as well.

New Fisk

The scar of Hariri's murder will never heal in Lebanon