A recipe for public squalor

The government has announced "reforms" for local government. The key one? Restricting rates rises to inflation plus population growth.

This policy has a name: TABOR, short for "Taxpayer Bill of Rights". Its widespread in America, and its a key reason why their public infrastructure is so decrepit. ACT has been pushing this piece of American wingnuttery at us for the last decade or so; now it sounds as if they've succeeded.

Contra Nick Smith, local body rate rises are not being driven by councils being "distracted" by social obligations. According to the Department of Internal Affairs, they're being driven by rising infrastructure costs, which are themselves the product of past underinvestment. The problem isn't that our councils are doing too much - but that they've done too little in the past (largely in an effort to keep rates low). Capping rises won't solve this problem. Instead, it will mean councils forced to underinvest, and therefore forced to fail to provide the public services and infrastructure we expect of them.

National's ACT-driven policy isn't a recipe for better councils, its a recipe for worse ones. And its a recipe for decaying infrastructure, leaky sewage pipes, dirty water, and potholed roads. But those problems will happen on someone else's watch, so therefore don't exist to National. Once more, they're mining our future, "saving" money today (for their rich mates, naturally) by piling up costs for tomorrow.

Ports and transparency III: The solution

Over the last two posts on this topic, I've pushed for more transparency in our ports. We own them, so we should be able to see what they're doing. We accept this principle for other businesses majority-owned by local government, and there seems to be no justification for ports to be an exception.

So how do we achieve that? Simple: we amend the definition of Council Controlled Organisation to remove the exclusion (and make a consequential amendment to the Port Companies Act). I've included a simple bill to do this below:

Local Government (Council Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill

The Parliament of New Zealand enacts as follows:

1. Title
This Act is the Local Government (Council Controlled Organisations) Amendment Act 2012.

2. Commencement
This Act comes into force on the day after the date on which it receives the Royal Assent.

3. Purpose
The purpose of this Act is to amend the Local Government Act 2002 to remove the exclusion of port companies and their subsidiaries from the definition of Council Controlled Organisation.

4. Principal Act Amended
This Act amends the Local Government Act 2002.

5. Section 6 Amended
Sections 6(c) and 6(ca) are repealed.

6. Consequential Amendments to Port Companies Act 1988
Section 6(4) of the Port Companies Act 1988 is repealed.

The question now is whether any politicians are willing to stand up and advocate for more transparency over publicly owned assets.

Goodbye Jim

Via DPF, it seems that Jim Anderton's Progressive party is no more, having been deregistered at its own request [PDF, p. 1009]. The party was only ever a vehicle for Anderton after he left the Alliance, but its demise marks the end of a chapter in our political history.

It also means there are now only five extra-Parliamentary registered parties. While these parties never get elected (thanks in part to the undemocratic 5% threshold), their number is a rough measure of the health of our democracy, of how involved and willing to participate people are. In the past year we've seen four deregistrations - the Worker's Party, Kiwi Party, New Citizen Party and Progressives - and only one new party (the Conservatives) gain registration. And with the Alliance and Democrats likely to disappear soon, that number will probably shrink further.

Creating a market

So, having signed contracts for a private prison in Auckland, the government is now busy creating a guaranteed market for it, by closing down regional prisons. This way, they can shuffle those prisoners off to Auckland, pay their crony-contractor Serco to handle them, and wait for the corrupt political donations to roll in.

Labour's response? It will cost jobs in those regional communities. This is deeply misguided; prison jobs are not jobs we actually want as a society. The real problem is that it will actively harm our efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce reoffending. We have regional prisons because we've learned the hard way that putting prisoners near their families makes them less likely to reoffend on release. Closing (rather than replacing) these prisons and shuffling prisoners round will increase average travel times for visits, and this will flow through into an increase in reoffending rates in a few years' time. But that'll be after National leaves office, so its Not Their Problem. In the meantime, they have cronies to feed...

New Fisk

Madness is not the reason for this massacre

Pillage

Thanks to the current banker-induced recession, the UK is broke. So broke that it is slashing benefits for the unemployed, the sick, and the disabled. So broke it has hiked student fees to £9,000 a year. So broke it is gutting the NHS.

So naturally, the Conservative government there is planning to cut taxes on the rich. Because obviously, the best possible time to do this is in the middle of a recession when you have no money.

Its the government equivalent of a CEO who pays himself a massive bonus when the company he runs is going bankrupt - and just as repugnant. In the depths of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealthy are feathering their own nests at the direct expense of everybody else. No wonder people are rioting over there...

How to deal with dirty dairying

A pair of Northland farmers have been fined almost $70,000 for dirty dairying:

Mark Allen Stanaway and his wife Kylie Wendy Stanaway were sentenced recently in Whangarei after they had earlier pleaded guilty to a combined total of 16 charges.

Each had faced eight separate charges relating to dairy effluent discharges, a silage leachate discharge and breaching an abatement notice.

[...]

The offending took place between 22 August and 28 September 2009 and had been “deliberate, or if not deliberate, occasioned by a real want of care, associated with large plural discharges, and exposing a disregard for effects on the environment”.

This wasn't a minor breach; as a result of these polluters' overstocking and failure to manage their waste, they polluted the local streams and the Kaipara Harbour with cowshit. Then, when confronted with it, they tried to blame their farm manager instead. Now, they're pleading poverty over the fines - but if it means they go bankrupt and have to get out of the dairying business, then it will be a win for the environment.

Ports and transparency II

Following up on Wednesday's comments about ports and transparency, I've done some digging into the history and ownership of port companies in New Zealand. When the Fourth Labour Government passed the Port Companies Act in 1988, it was directed at privatisation. Initially, port companies would be required to be at least 51% council-owned (sounds familiar, doesn't it?). As for transparency, they were never added to the schedule of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, and the Port Companies Act explicitly excludes them from the coverage of that Act.

Despite allowing up to 49% private ownership, councils tended not to sell their ports. Even when the National government removed that protection and pushed for a wholesale selloff of local authority assets, they failed. A report on Port Performance and Ownership [PDF] from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research notes that

Since reform in the 1980s, all commercial ports have remained majority controlled by one or more local authorities. The Port of Tauranga has the largest percentage of private ownership with just under 55% of shares held by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council through Quayside Holdings Ltd. Most of the minor ports have remained 100% local government-controlled since they were established.

Running the stats, eight port companies are 100% public owned. One (Lyttelton) is 93% publicly owned, two more (SouthPort and Tmaru) are more than 70%, NorthPort works out to ~65% once you do the maths, and Tauranga is 55%. Every single one of them would meet the definition of a Council Controlled Organisation if they were not specifically excluded.

So why are they excluded? The law is otherwise happy to impose LGOIMA requirements on companies with private shareholders, provided they are majority public owned. There seems to be absolutely no case for it. We own them. We should be able to tell what they are doing. It is that simple.

Monitoring America's Freedom of Information Act

Over the past couple of years I've taken it upon myself to monitor agencies' compliance with the Official Information Act here in New Zealand. In many jurisdictions, this is a legal requirement, and the Law Commission raised that prospect in its issues paper on the OIA [PDF] back in 2010 (their final report should be due out in a few months).

One of the countries which requires monitoring is the US. Unfortunately, its not working so well. An investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has found that eleven of 17 Cabinet-level agencies are failing to keep proper request logs, required for monitoring:

The report does not probe how often agencies grant or deny Freedom of Information Act requests, but instead focuses on a key facet of FOIA law requiring agencies to track every request made by people or organizations for public information. The committee, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), asked 100 large and small federal agencies to provide information on their FOIA tracking systems. Each agency received a letter grade based on a seven-point criteria, including whether agencies produced digitized records that included the date of a request, the name of the requester and a description of the information requested.

“A number of agencies demonstrated that they are able to track basic information about requests, while others either would not or could not provide such information as requested,” the report said. The fact that several agencies “struggle to demonstrate transparency about very basic information is troubling and necessitates greater scrutiny.”

In its report [PDF], the Committee comments:

One can imagine the difficulty journalists or ordinary citizens face in submitting requests to FOIA offices that cannot or will not even provide basic information to a Congressional Committee that exercises jurisdiction over FOIA about its efforts to manage and track requests.

I think this shows the value of outside monitoring. its not enough simply to require agencies to keep logs; someone has to actually look at them regularly to check compliance with the law (both on keeping logs, and on handling requests). Hopefully, we'll get such a body in New Zealand in the near future.

And now we wait...

Abortion was back in court on Tuesday, with the Supreme Court hearing Right To Life's appeal against the Abortion Supervisor Committee on whether it had the power to second-guess the clinical decisions of medical professionals in certifying abortions. The decision has been reserved, and is expected sometime in the next three months, but the Supreme Court is very clear about what's at stake:

Should the Supreme Court accept the submission of Right to Life and find that the Abortion Supervisory Committee has a statutory duty and the powers to hold certifying consultants accountable for the abortions that they authorise, it should result in certifying consultants being required to justify to the Committee the authorisation of the 98 per cent of abortions on mental health grounds.

Which in turn would mean reduced access. Its going to be a very nervous wait.

Is Labour giving up on inequality?

Inequality is a hot topic at the moment, thanks to The Spirit Level, the Occupy Movement, and the banks. So naturally, Labour is thinking of abandoning its policies to reduce it:

The Labour Party is understood to be considering ditching its pre-election policy of a tax on incomes over $150,000 and scrapping its proposal to expand Working For Families entitlements to include beneficiaries, as the party looks to reposition itself towards the centre.

I guess they have to get those rich ACT-donors on-side somehow.

Its another example of the sucking ideological void at the heart of the party. If a party of the left stands for anything, you'd expect it to be reducing inequality. And its not exactly difficult to make a case for: people intuitively grasp that inequality is both unfair and damaging, a pressing social problem we need to do something about. Fighting it is therefore both right and popular. But Labour doesn't make cases for its policies anymore; they follow rather than shape public opinion. And then they wonder why the Greens are eating them alive...

Saving ACC?

The Herald reports that the government may be abandoning its plans to privatise ACC, after it realised that Nick Smith's proposed solution of crippling it to guarantee the profits of parasitic Aussie insurance companies would cost serious money:

The Government is backing away from plans to rejig the Accident Compensation Corporation to allow competition from private insurers because of concerns it will drive up costs for small and medium businesses and the taxpayer.

[...]

"The political bottom line is it wasn't going to be possible to introduce competition on a basis that was level playing field between private sector and public without substantial increases in premiums or levies, particularly for small and medium employers," a well-placed source told the Herald.

Instead, they're apparently looking at extending the accedited employer scheme to small and medium businesses, allowing them to reduce costs by managing their own claims. Its better than giving away the entire scheme to foreign, for-profit parasites, but it still poses risks, in that employers can underprovide (and are backstopped by the public health system in doing so). Any extension needs to be tightly regulated to ensure that the cover it provides is at least as good as that provided by ACC.

Equality comes to Denmark

Denmark is to legalise same-sex marriage, making it the eleventh country (and the sixth in Europe) to do so. Unlike the UK, where plans to do the same have met with hostility from organised religion, Denmark's churches seem to be on-side with it. The big question is how difficult it will be for those already in a Civil Union to transition should they want to.

Again, I have to ask: isn't it time we acted, and legislated for equality? Or are we going to continue to enshrine homophobia in law?

A tale of two speeches

David Shearer gave a big speech this morning, which supposed to set out his agenda as Labour leader. Sadly, it was the usual vague waffle - aspirational, positive, but completely empty of detail, designed to make the listener feel good but communicating nothing. Oh, there's some pointers - Shearer wants to "make that [100% Pure] branding a reality" and grow the economy by building a smarter New Zealand - but its all kittens and apple pie, and there are no specifics. Even his comment about keeping the capital gains tax is non-committal and caveated. Which I guess is what happens when you throw away all your policies after every election loss and start again with a blank sheet of paper.

What I want to know from politicians is what they plan to do in office. Shearer fails that test. Verdict: come back in a year or two, when you actually have something real to say.

Meanwhile, on the proverbial other side of town, John Key is telling us what he plans to do, announcing a reshuffling of public service deckchairs, and promising to add 2,500 more people to the dole queue. The former just seems to be an exercise in change for the sake of it, and its hard to see how glomming together such disparate ministries as Economic Development and Immigration is really going to help (and creates problems with the agenda of the absorbed ministries being driven by economic development - which isn't such a good idea, and why we separate things in the first place). The latter will mean a further erosion of public service capability, compensated by a rise in expensive consultants, and will contribute to the current austerity-induced recession. If this is the government's plan for the next three years, then I hope its over soon.

Earning that reputation XI

Another day, another MP caught rorting the system, this time Labour MP Louisa Wall, who is renting her electorate office off her partner, which was purchased specially for the purpose. It is of course within the rules, as they love to say. At the same time, its transparently self-serving, an attempt to maximise capture of Parliamentary allowances and get the taxpayer to fund their property speculation. Clearly, Wall feels that the generous salary we pay her as an MP - $141,800 a year, plus expenses - is not enough to keep her in the lifestyle to which she wishes to become accustomed. And MP's wonder why we think they're all greedy, grasping pricks...

As for a solution, over in the UK they have altered Parliamentary allowance rules to require MPs to surrender capital gains in properties paid for through the allowance system. That sounds like a damn good idea to me. MPs need to have electorate offices, and they need to have them paid for. But they should not be allowed to use that to rort the system to their own advantage. They should be primarily thinking of how to represent their constituents, not how to enrich themselves at the public's expense.

Ports and transparency

In anticipation of a question: does what I said about Council-Controlled Organisations below mean we can use the OIA (technically LGOIMA) to oversee Ports of Auckland and find out e.g. how much its attempt at deunionisation has cost ratepayers, whether they have been leaking information to sewerbloggers, whether they are using private investigators to spy on protestors and striking workers, and how ratepayer's money much they have wasted on their advertising campaign (all questions I would love to know the answer to)? Sadly, no - because the definition of "Council-Controlled Organisation" in the Local Government Act specifically excludes port companies:

(4) The following entities are not council-controlled organisations: ...

(c) a port company or subsidiary of a port company within the meaning of the Port Companies Act 1988

Why is this the case? The provision seems to have originally been introduced into the Local Government Act 1974 by the Local Government Amendment Act (No 2) 1989 [PDF, large], which introduced new provisions about "Local Authority Trading Enterprises (LATES)", which specifically excluded port companies. The reason for that? Because the then-Labour government of Roger Douglas David Lange wanted local bodies to sell their ports. Again, privatisation was used to undermine the accountability of publicly-owned assets.

This is something that should be corrected. Again, the principle is simple: we own it, we should be able to see what its doing and how it is managing our money.

But beyond principle, there's also a strong pragmatic argument for treating ports like any other CCO. Firstly, most of them (e.g. Auckland, Wellington, Otago) are still wholly council-owned, meaning that the only effect of the provision is to reduce accountability over a publicly-owned asset. Secondly, councils have been managing part-owned companies subject to LGOIMA for two decades now, without any ill-effects. There just seems no reason to continue the exclusion. It should be repealed.

Privatisation should not be allowed to undermine transparency

There's a fascinating interview [Audio] on Nine To Noon this morning with former Ombudsman Mel Smith on privatisation and the OIA and Ombudsman Acts. Under the government's plans, companies the government plans to privatise would be immediately removed from the coverage of these Acts. Smith sees no reason for this:

My view is very clear. They should continue to be subject to both of those Acts... Acts such as those are very significant in terms of providing New Zealand citizens with an opportunity to pursue concerns that they have in respect of the organisations that are subject to the Acts. And I just can't see any argument at all to remove them.

Neither can I. If it was a local body - the Auckland Council, say - doing this, we would still retain those rights. Any company or organisation which is council-controlled is subject to both Acts. As a result, we can keep an eye on what they're doing with our money in our name.

And we need to. The OIA has been used to uncover wrongdoing by SOEs in the past - e.g. to investigate their use of PR companies to lobby government (their owners) to change policy, or the use of private investigators to spy on protestors and undermine democratic rights. Removing them from the jurisdiction of the OIA will remove that scrutiny.

The principle is simple: we own them, we should be able to see what they are doing. We apply that principle at a local government level. We should apply it to all crown-controlled companies as well.

Too many cows

Its been apparent for a while that New Zealand's biggest environmental problem is too many cows drinking our water, shitting in our rivers, and destroying the climate. And now, farmers are beginning to agree. Here's Jon Morgan, the Dominion-Post's farming editor, this morning:

I'm coming to the conclusion we have too many dairy cows in parts of New Zealand.

I know, many of you in the towns reached that point years ago, but be gentle with me. It's quite a step for me, long a believer in dairy farmers' untrammelled right to produce as much milk as they like.

It seems obvious to me that we have too many cows in the most sensitive parts of the country – sandy, shingly, free-draining areas laced with streams, close to groundwater and big recreational rivers.

And I think there's no doubt that these cows are the main source of the excessive nutrients that are polluting rivers and lakes in these regions.

Morgan's solution? Fencing waterways has failed, due to farmer cheating and the pollution already dumped into the ground and water table. So he is advocating "a reduction in cow numbers", at least in sensitive areas. This is heresy to farmers (who seem to believe they have an absolute right to destroy our environment for private profit). But its what we're going to have to do if we want clean rivers and streams. He concludes:

It is clear the pollution will only worsen if something is not done now. We should be thinking of the generations to come.

Let's face it, we are a selfish lot. Compared with previous generations we have it easy. We are guilty of endangering the future. It is our turn to feel a little pain so we don't leave future generations with a bigger mess to clean up.

When even farmers are agreeing that we've gone too far, we've gone too far. Its time government acted to solve this problem, by legislating for fewer cows near our rivers and on sensitive soils.

Institutionalised misogyny in the UK

On 28 November 2009, a UK woman was savagely raped by her husband. She called the police, and they arrested him. But before he was tried, she withdrew the allegation, after a sustained campaign of intimidation from her rapist and his family. And so the police prosecuted her - but not those intimidating her - for perverting the course of justice. She was convicted and sentenced to eight month's imprisonment.

This week, she was back in court to appeal her conviction. The court refused:

Despite accepting that the 29-year-old woman – known as Sarah – was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder at the time she retracted her allegations of rape, the court said he could not "quash a conviction on a broad, somewhat nebulous basis of unfairness where the conviction, following due process, is in every respect safe" because the woman was "undoubtedly guilty of a serious crime".

Their reasoning? The same old bullshit:

Lord Judge said: "The contemporaneous evidence available to the appellant's legal advisers, once she had decided to tell the truth, provided a great deal of mitigation, but no viable defence of duress.

"If she had been threatened by him with violence if she did not withdraw the complaint, as it seems to us, it is inconceivable that she would not have said so at the time [that she retracted her allegation of rape]. If she was asserting that he forced a retraction by raping her or threatening to rape her, there was no reason why she should not also have explained her retraction of the rapes by reference to any such threats."

"She didn't speak up at the time, therefore it must all be lies". Which number is that on the victim-blaming bingo card?

And then British police wonder why so many rapes go unreported. What's surprising is that any woman at all will have anything to do with a criminal justice system so institutionally misogynist that they regard prosecuting a rape victim as just.

Information thuggery

That's the only way to describe Ports of Auckland's leaking of an employee's personal information to a sewerblogger:

Personal details about Cecil Walker and the number of days he took off work in 2007 and 2008 while his late wife was terminally ill have been published by the right-wing blogger Cameron Slater on his website Whale Oil.

Walker says no one had the information - which includes specific details about how many days he took off in sick, compassionate and bereavement leave - except the port company.

Whale Oil also published details about Walker's new marriage and baby, saying the port company sent his new wife a gift basket after the baby was born.

This is par for the course for Slater, who specialises in such thuggery. But its a new low for a company in an industrial dispute. OTOH, they're simply taking the lead from Government Ministers, who have previously used this tactic to undermine and deter people from criticising them over cuts to benefits and health services. In that case, its likely to cost the government (though sadly not Bennett herself) a large amount of money. And the same is likely to happen to Ports of Auckland. The people of Auckland deserve better form those they trust to manage their assets.