Climate change: What NZ should do

The Greens' Kennedy Graham has a pair of posts looking at the climate change policies pursued by Denmark and Sweden. Both countries have pursued strong regulation-based policies right from the start, and as a result they have significantly reduced their emissions. By contrast, New Zealand sat on its hands for 18 years, before passing a largely ineffective market-based policy in 2008, which was then immediately gutted by the incoming National government. The result is that our emissions have risen by 20% since 1990, and look set to rise even higher.

So, assuming that a future government actually wants to fix this problem (alternatively: will be denied confidence and supply by the Greens unless it promises serious policy), what should it do? We could do a lot worse than following the Scandinavian examples Graham cites.

Electricity isn't really a problem for us - while the 90's saw the construction of gas power plants, we've begun a shift to wind and geothermal without needing the subsidy mechanisms employed overseas. Restoring the thermal ban would help cement that trend and prevent wind farms from being monstered by pollution-subsidised gas or coal, but we shouldn't need to do much else. Our wind resource is good enough to stand on its own two feet if pollution subsidies are removed, and there's a huge backlog of consented wind protects waiting to be built.

Our real growth areas of emissions in the past 20 years have been transport and agriculture - cars and cows. Transport emissions have increased by over 5 million tons since 1990, agricultural emissions by 3.5 million tons. The former has been driven by an increase in car and truck use, but that has now plateaued - we hit peak car in 2005, and peak truck a few years later. So policy doesn't need to be aimed at getting people to drive less, so much as getting them to drive more efficiently. And on that front there seems to be a host of policies we can steal from Sweden and Denmark which help: a carbon tax on fuel (technically done by the ETS, but compromised by pollution subsidies), mandatory emissions standards on new cars, taxes on inefficient vehicles / rebates for efficient ones, and an obligation to sell biofuels should do the trick. These are long-term policies, not a magic wand which will work overnight, but they should gradually reduce transport emissions.

Agriculture is more difficult, but even there we could go a long way simply by taxing the crap out of nitrogen-based fertilisers (which led to nitrous oxide emissions, as well as polluting waterways). We will also need regulatory solutions around stock densities. In the longer term, it has become clear that our environment cannot stand so many cows shitting and pissing into our rivers and water-table. Which means that we need to reduce overall numbers. If dairy farmers want to retain their incomes, they will need to increase the efficiency of their herds, or invest to create higher-value products rather than just exporting raw milk powder. Or find something else to farm that doesn't trash the environment and poison their neighbours.

Denmark and Sweden managed these sorts of changes without any appreciable economic damage. We can to. We just need to decide to do it. Hopefully we'll be able to after the next election.

Prosecuting Cunliffe

David Cunliffe's election-day tweet has been referred to police. Good. Its a clear (though minor) breach of the law, and the Electoral Commission has to uphold the rules. Unfortunately, judging by their past performance, the police won't - they have no interest in electoral crimes, and even less in prosecuting politicians who could one day decide their budget and powers. So naturally, Graham McCready is stepping up and offering to bring a private prosecution.

I have two comments on this. Firstly, that its a sad state of affairs that this is necessary. We ought to be able to have faith that our police will protect the integrity of our electoral system, but we can't. And that suggests that the police are in serious need of reform, and that we should shift prosecution power for electoral offences to a body which can be trusted, such as the Electoral Commission. Secondly, if McCready brings a case, Cunliffe should plead guilty. He's already admitted posting the statement, and its intent to influence voters is clear. The offence carries a fine of up to $20,000, but its hard to see the maximum being enforced for a minor breach which was immediately corrected, reported and admitted. And it is not severe enough to require resignation from Parliament. Political honesty and the integrity of our electoral system would be served by Cunliffe admitting it, paying the fine, and moving on.

A convenient coincidence

The first legal case against the US "no-fly" list, Ibrahim v. DHS, started in San Francisco this week. A crucial witness in the trial is Rainan Mustafa Kamal, Dr Ibrahim's daughter, who was expected to testify about how she and her mother were refused boarding permission in 2005. But there's a problem: she's in Malaysia. And oddly, she was unable to travel to the US to testify because she was on the "no-fly" list. A convenient "coincidence", neh?

This is what the secret exercise of unaccountable power inevitably leads to. And its precisely why we should never permit the government to hold such power over us.

[Hat-tip: Cory Doctorow]

Drawn

A ballot for a member's bill was held today and the following bill was drawn:

• Overseas Investment (Owning our Own Rural Land) Amendment Bill (Phil Goff)
  

There were 75 bills in the ballot today, another record. No new son what's new yet, but the full list will be up shortly here.

The NSA knows where you are

The latest NSALeak: the NSA is tracking everyone's cellphone, all the time:

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

[...]

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.

By "hidden relationship" they mean "being in the same building" or "being on the same bus" as a person of interest - which makes you a "co-traveller". In Pakistan, that's probably enough for a US drone to kill a bunch of children in your village.

There's information on the technical details here. Naturally, it relies on the cooperation of phone companies, whose data-sharing with each other enables the NSA to spy on everyone just by compromising a few providers. I expect some national legislatures (e.g. the European Parliament) will be asking their telecoms companies very pointy questions about that in the near future, and what can be done to protect privacy while also enabling global roaming.

And again, there's the obvious question: does the GCSB do this here? Or do they merely enjoy access to data gained by the NSA through the compromise of the international telecommunications network? Either way, its an unprecedented level of spying, and one our government should be protecting us from, not enabling in secret.

The actions of a guilty government

Back in 2004, Australia allegedly bugged the leaders of East Timor, getting ASIS agents to infiltrate their offices disguised as aid workers in order to listen in on their negotiating position over oil and gas rights in the Timor Sea. The case is currently before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and it looks pretty convincing - thanks to the willingness of an ASIS whistleblower to testify as to his government's dirty deeds. But today, in a clear effort to disrupt the case, the Australian government raided the Canberra office of East Timor's lawyer, and detained its star witness:

ASIO officers have allegedly detained a man and raided the office of a lawyer who claims that Australian spies bugged the cabinet room of East Timor's government during tense negotiations over rich Greater Sunrise oil and gas deposits.

The lawyer, Bernard Collaery, is representing the East Timorese government, which has declared the treaty governing Greater Sunrise invalid and is seeking arbitration in The Hague this week.

East Timor, also known as Timor Leste, will tender evidence of the eavesdropping as part of its case. Mr Collaery, who just arrived in The Hague, told Fairfax the raids were a ''disgrace''. ''How dare they?'' Mr Collaery said. ''These tactics are designed to intimidate the witness and others from coming forward. It's designed to cover up an illegal operation in 2004 by ASIS [the Australian Secret Intelligence Service].''

The whistleblower's passport has also reportedly been seized, in a clear effort to prevent him from giving evidence.

Australia's spy Minister, George Brandis, says that the raids have nothing to do with the case and are instead about "national security". Bullshit. These are the actions of a guilty government, trying to silence its opponents and prevent justice from being served. Witness intimidation and the wholesale violation of attorney-client privilege is the sort of thing you expect to see in Putin's Russia, not in a supposedly democratic country like Australia.

More police spying

Operation 8, the police's "unlawful, unjustified and unreasonable" attack on Tuhoe, involved widespread surveillance, including wiretaps, computer searches, and unlawful video surveillance. Now it appears that the surveillance dragnet was even wider than we thought:

Well-known New Zealanders not associated with paramilitary training in the Te Urewera National Park were monitored by police during Operation 8, Maori Party co-leader Te Ururoa Flavell says.

Flavell, who said the surveillance carried on for some time after the raids, is demanding answers from police.

A surveillance log obtained by Flavell and which he has asked police to verify relates to the 2007 armed raids near the eastern Bay of Plenty town of Ruatoki.

The log, given to him by a member of the public, details who was being surveilled, what they were doing and who was nearby and records information such as internet searches.

It covers a period of three years before Operation 8 and some time after, he said.

This raises several questions: most obviously, why exactly were the police spying on these people? If they weren't associated with the paramilitary training, then there appears to be no case to justify surveillance. But beyond that: if the police have obtained internet searches from these people, it means they either obtained interception warrants, or they got the GCSB to use PRISM to obtain them in violation of New Zealand law. Either way, it is a gross intrusion of privacy, and one we deserve serious answers on. While we expect the police to protect the public, they must be proportionate in exercising their powers - and on its face, this appears not to be.

Something to be proud of

We've topped the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index as the world's least corrupt country again:

New Zealand has retained its top spot and gained a point from last year in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index.

Both New Zealand and Denmark received a score of 91 out of 100 for joint leadership in the index, which ranks the transparency of public sectors across 177 countries.

The figures, released by the Transparency International Secretariat in Berlin, rank countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be.

Australia came ninth on the list, below the Netherlands and Switzerland.

But while this is good news, you do have to wonder how much that perception reflects reality. There have been several disturbing cases of public service corruption in recent years (and our politicians remain as venal and self-aggrandising as ever). Which really does make you wonder how much is going on undetected...

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, though a fairly boring one. There's a couple of boring local bills to get out of the way first, followed by Paul Goldsmith's uncontroversial Electronic Transactions (Contract Formation) Amendment Bill, which should whizz through. Then we have Home Harawira's Education (Breakfast and Lunch Programmes in Schools) Amendment Bill, which National will vote down on the basis of their one-off charitable donations to their corporate friends. If we're lucky, the House will make a start on Clare Curran's Electronic Data Safety Bill.

There should be a ballot for two or three bills tomorrow. The only new bill to be put in the ballot since last time is Brendan Horan's Land Transport (Promoting Safe Driving and Compliance with Speed Limits) Amendment Bill, which requires speed cameras to be clearly signposted so everyone can slow down for them.

Good riddance to John Banks

So, John Banks has finally admitted that he's a political dead duck, and decided not to stand for re-election. Good riddance. Quite apart from the alleged electoral expenses fraud, this is an MP remember who said that the problem with homosexual law reform was that "so many of these creeps have now boldly crept out of the wardrobe", and that "six inches of barbed wire shoved up gay mens arses" would be "a waste of good barbed wire". And this wasn't back in the dark days of the 80's; he was still spouting his homophobia, bigotry and hate only five years ago. So I'm not in the least bit sorry to see him go (and in fact, I'd like him to go sooner). And maybe this time ACT can find a candidate who is actually a liberal, rather than a conservative bigot solely interested in the "freedom" of the rich not to pay taxes.

The cost of anti-environmentalism

National's refusal to protect the critically endangered Maui's Dolphin has been making international headlines. And now its drawn the inevitable response: a call for a boycott from a German environmental group:

A German conservation group is calling for a boycott of New Zealand seafood over our Government's heavily-criticised protection plan for Maui's dolphins.

NABU International says it will challenge what it believes is an inadequate approach to saving the critically endangered cetaceans in the High Court.

It's also urging the world not to buy New Zealand seafood.

This is what happens if the government deliberately undermines our "100% Pure" image: those industries who rely on it suffer.

An explosion of spying

The SIS's Annual Report was released today, and as usual I've been browsing through it. There's some interesting news in it: apparently the SIS deployed people to Afghanistan to provide "intelligence support" to the NZDF Provincial Reconstruction Team prior to its withdrawal. As for their annual excuse for their increased budget and intrusive powers, this year it is the "threat" of kiwis returning home after fighting in the Middle East and Northern and Eastern Africa, and "new manifestations of traditional threats (espionage and, potentially, sabotage) through the medium of cyber [sic]". That's right, hackers are the new security "justification". Keith Ng, they're coming for you.



[New SIS domestic interception warrants by year. Data extracted from SIS Annual Reports here]

There's also this worrying data point: the number of domestic interception warrants issued last year increased to 22, the highest on record. There seems to be no public threat to justify such an increase, so either we are looking at a massive new security threat which is completely invisible to the public, or the threshold for granting such warrants (which allow phones to be tapped, computers hacked, and homes burgled) has reduced significantly. Unfortunately, because its all done in secret, we'll never know.

Naylor's cossacks

In Wellington, the city council uses an "alternative giving" campaign in an effort to sweep away the human reminders of economic failure. In Palmerston North, the mayor wants to threaten them with rugby players:

Rugby players have been suggested as a better deterrent than a bylaw in discouraging begging in Palmerston North.

Mayor Jono Naylor said rather than spend about $10,000 making a bylaw that would achieve "zip", he would rather give the money to the Kia Toa Rugby Club to get players out on Broadway Ave to discourage beggars.

"If we could get them to shadow these people around the streets, we would have it solved by Christmas."

So, his preferred way of dealing with economic distress is thuggery and intimidation. I'm very glad I didn't vote for him.

[Thanks to @SirWB for the post title]

David Cunliffe: Bullshitter or muppet?

So, David Cunliffe may have broken the law against election-day advertising by tweeting in support of Poto Williams on the day of the Christchurch by-election. On the face of it, no harm seems to have been done - the tweet was deleted almost immediately - and given past practice from the Electoral Commission I do not think it will result in prosecution. At the same time, Cunliffe's explanation doesn't quite wash:

"I take responsibility for that, the tweet was sent in error and deleted within seconds and it was reported as soon as possible to the returning officer," he said.

It was a draft which he sent unintentionally and deleted immediately before reporting it to his campaign who he said reported it to the returning officer.

He was not aware of the rules at the time it was sent but said no one else pointed out his mistake to him before he deleted it.

So, it was a draft which he sent "unintentionally" - but if it was a draft, then that strongly suggests an intention to send it later, despite clear law that that would be illegal. He claims to have been ignorant of that law, but immediately deleted the tweet and reported it to the campaign - why do that unless you knew it was illegal? Finally, Cunliffe has been an MP for 14 years, and fought 5 election campaigns - and we're supposed to believe he's unaware of one of the most fundamental rules of New Zealand electoral law? I don't think I'm the only one who will be smelling bullshit here.

But even if we do accept his explanation, then Cunliffe has admitted being a total muppet who doesn't learn from his campaigns and cannot be trusted in possession of a social-media account. And that's hardly any better. Either way, he needs to get his shit together.

But do we believe them?

John Key says the GCSB is not engaged in the "wholesale collection" of metadata:

Prime Minister John Key yesterday sought another assurance from GCSB director Ian Fletcher that the spy agency had not been involved in wholesale collection of metadata on New Zealanders - and was given it.

But Mr Key was unable to tell reporters later whether the United States National Security Agency collected wholesale information on New Zealanders for its purposes.

"I don't know," he said.

[...]

Mr Key said yesterday: "I rang the head of the agency and said, 'Can you confirm for me that New Zealand didn't collect wholesale metadata about ordinary New Zealanders?' and the answer was, 'We didn't, and because we didn't, we couldn't have shared it'.

But do you believe them? There's plenty of wiggle room in that denial - how widespread is "wholesale", for example? - and this is an agency with an established track-record of lying. Given their apparent reinterpretation of their governing to permit domestic metadata interception (despite a clear prohibition on anything of the sort), we would be fools to just take them at their word.

Meanwhile, Key has opened another can of worms with this comment:

"We share information in isolated cases about New Zealanders with our partners, and we do that when there's a really good reason to do that."

Obvious question: was this shared information intercepted communications? If so, the GCSB have been breaking the law. Key needs to come clean about exactly what these "isolated cases" are. In the meantime, the only way to restore public trust in the GCSB is through a full public inquiry with full access to all their collection programmes.

Tax-cuts and asset-sales

The Greens' Russel Norman points out the obvious: National's asset sales are driven by the need to make up revenue given away in tax cuts. And the plan is failing:

National’s tax cuts for the top 10% of income earners are costing more than the revenue generated by National’s asset sales, Green Party Co-leader Dr Russel Norman said today.

Parliamentary Library and Green Party calculations show that, by the time of the 2014 election, the reduction of the top income tax rate for the top 10% of income earners will have cost over $4.5 billion. The asset sales programme produced only $3.9 billion worth of proceeds to the Crown to date, even before sales costs are deducted.

“National isn’t selling our assets to pay for schools and hospitals; they’re flogging them off to fill a hole left in the budget by the tax cuts that they gave the top 10%,” said Dr Norman.

“John Key’s assets sales are part of a money go round. The well-off got tax cuts from National, they then bought shares in National’s asset sales, and the sale proceeds are going towards covering the cost of those tax cuts.

If we hadn't had tax cuts for the rich, we wouldn't "need" asset sales, and we wouldn't be driving ever faster towards a more unequal society. But National probably regards the concentration of wealth in the hands of its donors and cronies as a feature, not a bug.

Australia offered to spy on its own citizens

The latest NSALeak: Australia's Defence Signals Directorate offered to spy on their own citizens:

Australia's surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share "medical, legal or religious information", and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.

The Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.

"DSD can share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata as long as there is no intent to target an Australian national," notes from an intelligence conference say. "Unintentional collection is not viewed as a significant issue."

The offer was made at a meeting of "Five Eyes" partners in the UK in 2008. GCSB was in attendance, which invites the obvious question: what did the GCSB offer? And what have they ended up sharing?

(It would of course have been illegal for GCSB to offer and share anything, as it would involve intercepting the communications of New Zealand persons. But we already know that the GCSB had "reinterpreted" the law to exclude metadata, in apparent violation of Parliamentary intent. And now John Key has legalised that practice, rewriting the law so that it excludes only "private" communications. Law changes like that happen for a reason - and the obvious reason is to provide legal certainty to an existing program of bulk metadata collection and sharing).

Juggling MMP

One of the common questions that arise when considering changes to MMP is what effects those changes will have. While this is difficult to do for future elections, as voting patterns inevitably change with the system, we can judge from past elections. And now Keri Henare has developed an online calculator to do it automatically, allowing you to set thresholds and whether overhangs are allowed. It automatically calculates both the results and the Gallagher Index, allowing the proportionality of various systems to be compared.

You can play with it here.

New Fisk

Nearly a century after the Armenian genocide, these people are still being slaughtered in Syria

Margaret Thatcher: Tax cheat

Who'd have think it? The hero of the right, Margaret Thatcher, was a tax cheat:

Flag-waving former PM Margaret Thatcher may have avoided millions in inheritance tax by keeping a chunk of her fortune offshore.

A copy of Tory Baroness Thatcher’s will shows she left a £4.7million estate to be shared among family members.

But the £12million Central London mansion where the Iron Lady spent the last years of her life is owned by an anonymous trust registered in the British Virgin Islands – a ­notorious tax haven.

Through this arrangement she could have avoided up to £5million in inheritance tax – the 40% that would have been due if it was owned by a UK individual.

I guess £100,000 a year in "expenses" and an enormous pension just wasn't enough for her. And then, having cheated on her taxes, she got a £3.2 million public funeral (most of it the cost of suppressing the public's real verdict on her).

Tax cheats are not deserving of public honours or public funerals. Her estate should pay those costs back.