Hungary to set up concentration camps

Hungary's authoritarian nationalist government (in coalition with actual fascists) has just voted to detain all refugees in concentration camps:

Human rights groups have heavily criticised a vote by the Hungarian parliament to force all asylum seekers into detention camps as the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, called migration “a Trojan horse for terrorism”.

The asylum seekers will be kept in converted shipping containers while they wait for their cases to be heard via video-link as part of measures Orbán said were designed to save Europe. He considers the migrants, many of whom are Muslims, as a threat to European Christian identity and culture.

And so they'll be echoing Australia: detaining them in concentration camps and psychologically (and sometimes physically) torturing them until they "choose" to return to persecution. Its a gross violation of both the Refugee Convention and EU law, and arguably a crime against humanity. The question is whether the European Union will stand up for human rights, or whether it will allow concentration camps in Europe again.

The rebellion begins

Last year the Ministry of Social Development started imposing new contracts on community agencies requiring them to hand over highly personal information on their clients in exchange for funding. Now, Rape Crisis has said "no":

Rape Crisis will not accept funding contracts from the Ministry of Social Development if it is required to hand over clients' private details, the service says.

More than 800 social services will have to provide client names, birthdates, ethnicities and the personal details of any dependents under contracts taking effect from July.

Rape Crisis spokesperson Andrea Black said victims were telling the service they would no longer come to it for support if they knew their private information was being handed over to the government.

Ms Black told Nine to Noon her organisation was concerned the new policy would compromise people who already struggled to seek help, and so it would not accept ministry contracts if clients' private details were required in return.

Good. Rape Crisis is on solid ground here about the effects of the policy, and they're standing up for their clients. And its not as if the government can refuse to fund them - just think of the optics. More generally, the government depends on these agencies to deliver vital social services. If they all refuse to do so - go on strike, if you will - unless they can protect the privacy of their clients, then the government will have to either see those services go undelivered, or back down. Because having gutted their own capabilities, they're hardly in a position to do it all in-house.

If the social services sector wants to stand up for itself and force a better deal for their clients, an election year when the government is hyper-sensitive to bad news is the perfect time to do it.

Member's Day

Today is the first Member's Day of the new Parliamentary year, and it promises to deliver the government a defeat. After Alastair Scott's Crimes (Increased Penalty for Providing Explosive to Commit Crime) Amendment Bill - a government spam bill - the House will debate the first reading of Jan Logie's Domestic Violence—Victims’ Protection Bill, which the government has been forced to back. Which means the bill will apparently now pass its first reading with unanimous support, unless ACT decides to go full regressive on it.

Following the main event there's Kelvin Davis' Housing Corporation (Affordable Housing Development) Amendment Bill and Gareth Hughes' Student Loan Scheme (First Home Repayment Diversion) Amendment Bill. If things go quickly then the House should make a start on Scott Simpson's Employment Relations (Allowing Higher Earners to Contract Out of Personal Grievance Provisions) Amendment Bill. There should be a ballot for at least three bills tomorrow.

Bowing to the inevitable

The government has announced that they will support Jan Logie's Domestic Violence—Victims’ Protection Bill:

The Government says it will back a Green Party proposal to give domestic violence victims extra leave from work.

In a reversal of its previous position, National said it would support the bill in the name of Green MP Jan Logie at its first reading tomorrow.

Justice Minister Amy Adams said the bill "needed work", and did not commit to supporting it into law. But she said it was an issue worth discussing.

If passed into law, the bill would allow victims of abuse to get up to 10 extra days' leave a year and would classify family violence as a workplace hazard.

Note that National isn't doing this because they actually support the bill or helping victims of domestic violence. Instead, its because NZ First announced this morning that they would support it, meaning the government does not have the numbers to vote it down. So, rather than standing by their principles, they're supporting it, simply to prevent a headline saying "government loses vote". A classic case of doing the right thing for entirely the wrong reason.

Not in the same boat

The Herald reports that National's under-45 Cabinet ministers Nikki Kaye and Simon Bridges support the government's plans to increase the retirement age for the young. Of course they do. One of our basic constitutional principles is Cabinet collective responsibility, under which Cabinet Ministers agree to support Cabinet decisions. Its entirely unsurprising that Cabinet Ministers follow this principle, regardless of their age. And if they didn't, they'd be sacked - which would cost them ~$100,000 a year. Which is also 100,000 reasons to keep silent.

But its also worth pointing out that simply by virtue of being Cabinet Ministers Kaye and Bridges will have a very different perspective on this from their victims. They're paid over $250,000 a year. They have gold-plated superannuation schemes thanks to a generous parliamentary subsidy. Plus they have the possibility of crony jobs and sinecures, or simply using public office as a stepping stone to a private sector influence-peddling position. On any issue involving pay and public services Ministers are simply in a completely different boat from us. They're members of the 1%, they'll never have to rely on public superannuation, and they'll never feel the consequences of their decisions. Its no wonder then that they're so comfortable fucking us over for the benefit of their fellow one-percenters.

Ending a sham collaboration II

Last month Nick Smith announced with great fanfare a target for 90% of New Zealand's rivers to be swimmable by 2040. Except it turned out that most rivers were in fact excluded, and his idea of "swimmable" was literally bullshit. Now it seems that his bullshit standard ignored advice from the Land and Water Forum - and Forest & Bird has pulled out of it in response:

Forest & Bird have pulled out of the Land and Water Forum in protest against the government's new "timid" freshwater standards.

[...]

The forum gives more than 50 stakeholders, including industry groups, non-governmental organisatins (NGOs), iwi, scientists and others a chance agree on recommendations to be made to government.

However, Forest & Bird said those recommendations had been largely ignored in the government's plan to make 90 percent of rivers swimmable by 2040.

Forest & Bird said the recommendations had buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders and incorporated the best scientific advice, but what the government had come up with was very different.

I'm surprised its taken them so long - because it is clear that the government regards "collaborative processes" such as the Land and Water Forum simply as a way of suborning and silencing critics while increasing "social licence" to pollute. Fish and Game bailed years ago because of this, and with Forest & Bird's departure, the Environmental Defence Society is now the only environmental voice among a sea of polluters on the Forum. The quicker they quit, the sooner the sham ends, and the sooner we can stop pretending that there is anything to be gained by collaborating with polluters.

Eliminating land-bankers

One of the problems of New Zealand's property boom is that wealthy property owners often find it easier to leave houses vacant rather than providing a home for anyone. The Australian state of Victoria has a good solution for this: tax it!

Owners who leave properties vacant will be slugged with a new tax under a Victorian government push to free up more housing for sale and reduce rents.

The new vacant residential property tax is expected to raise about $80 million over four years, coming into force on January 1.

The tax is among a suite of changes the government has announced to make housing more affordable, including scrapping stamp duty for first home buyers on properties worth up to $600,000.

This seems like a good idea. Auckland has a ghost home problem, and its even worse in Queenstown. Taxing vacant properties would help eliminate it.

Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of land-bankers who deliberately leave land under-developed to wait for capital gains. But that's what land taxes are for.

Intergenerational warfare

Bill English has come clean about his plans for superannuation, and announced that he wants to fight the election on making you worse off:

The Government will progressively lift the age of eligibility for NZ Superannuation from 65 to 67, starting in 20 years’ time, Prime Minister Bill English announced today.

“New Zealanders are healthier and living longer so adjusting the long-term settings of NZ Super while there is time for people to adapt is the right thing to do,” Mr English says.

The changes will be phased in from 1 July 2037 and will not affect anyone born on or before 30 June 1972.

In other words, it will target the same people who have got tertiary fees, student loans, mass unemployment, benefit cuts, health cuts, climate change, and a housing bubble. Meanwhile, the people who received free education and healthcare and tax cuts for Africa while destroying the global climate will laugh all the way to the bank in their bubble-inflated houses. Its pure intergenerational warfare by the Boomer Prime Minister against anyone younger than him.

The good news:

The change will be legislated for next year.

In other words, it will only happen if National is re-elected with an easy majority of Boomer or crazed 1%er parties (so, basicly ACT). If we change the government, Bill English can't fuck us over.

I'd call that an incentive.

The banality of evil

Last week the Ombudsman formally warned that people were being subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in our prisons. Corrections tried to pretend that it was a matter of medical care (as if that would justify unnecessary use of restraints), but the truth is far worse. Corrections was abusing these people because it was cheaper to do so:

In one case, a prisoner was tied to a bed for 16 hours a day, for 37 consecutive days - a total of nearly 600 hours.

Yesterday Corrections chief executive Ray Smith defended the actions, saying staff were trying to save the patient's life.

But Judge Boshier said that was disingenuous, and it was an economic decision, rather than a welfare one.

"Prisoner A was able to be managed when there was sufficient resourcing. The tie-down coincided with the need for the prison to manage its own resourcing. In other words, it was expedient. So I think it is disingenuous to say there was no choice other than to do this."

This is where National's cuts and austerity have taken us: to a place where Corrections tortures and abuses people because it is the "cheapest" way of managing them.

And that's the case even if you factor in the cost of lawsuits - because the Prisoners and Victim's Claims Act, which Labour introduced and National made permanent, effectively denies compensation to the people Corrections has tortured. They're prisoners, so in the eyes of our major political parties, they simply don't count, and their lives and dignity have no value.

Again, people need to be prosecuted over this. Unfortunately, while the law can assign blame to those who tightened the straps night after night, and maybe even to those who purported to "authorise" the unlawful use of force, it appears helpless against the budget cutters and bean counters who seem to have driven this abuse.

Opportunity knocks again

Six months out from the election, and Bill English is openly threatening people's retirement security:

Prime Minister Bill English has hinted at changes to the age of retirement.

Speaking on TV3's The Nation on Saturday, English said he would not continue with former prime minister John Key's commitment not to change the age of eligibility.

There was room for a "reset" around the superannuation scheme, which could mean a change in the retirement age or the way super was calculated, he said.

Cutting pensions (without affecting their own, of course) is something National have wanted to do for a long time - remember when they wanted to means test it back in the 1990's? To National, a superannuation scheme which largely prevents the problems of old-age poverty widely seen overseas isn't an achievement, its an expense, something which stops them looting tax cuts for their donors and cronies. So, under the guise of unaffordability, they push for slashing it - forgetting that its only "unaffordable" if you rule out higher taxes, and if you ignore the social costs - old people starving or freezing to death every winter - of not paying it. Because that's what happens overseas where people like Bill English have had their way: the elderly die, on a massive scale.

The good news is that Labour has finally flushed the 1%'s kool-aid, and is standing up for pensions again. Because that's what a left-wing party should do: protect social services. The question is whether they can exploit the massive opportunity English has just given them, or whether Labour muppetry will let National get away with it.

Is New Zealand backing the "She Decides" campaign?

One of the Trump regime's first acts in office was to reinstate the Regan-era "global gag rule", forbidding the use of US aid for NGOs that provide or even advocate for abortion - effectively cutting funding to all family planning and sexual health organisations. In response, a hastily-organised coalition of countries have raised €181 million to plug the gap. That's good news, but I'm wondering: is New Zealand part of this? Whose side are we on? The world's? Or Trump's?

I think the government owes us some answers. And if it is not already backing the She Decides campaign, it needs to get on board ASAP. Women's health is too important to be left in the hands of the religious right.

Meanwhile, individuals can contribute to the campaign as well. If you're interested, you can do so here. Maybe you could even do it in the name of Donald Trump, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, USA.

New Fisk

Theresa May wants British people to feel 'pride' in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly is there to be proud of?

Good riddance

Corrupt Panamanian money-laundering enablers Mossack-Fonseca have quit New Zealand:

The law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal has quit New Zealand.

[...]

"I'm not aware of Mossack Fonseca currently being active in New Zealand," Roger Thompson of accountancy firm Bentley's New Zealand said in an email.

Mr Thompson, who was mentioned in the Panama Papers, was an agent for the Panamanian law firm in New Zealand.

"We are not currently providing any services to Mossack Fonseca. We do not currently act for any foreign trust clients that have come through any association with Mossack Fonseca," he said.

Bentley's New Zealand partner Roger Thompson said the firm was not providing any services to Mossack Fonseca.

Mossack Fonseca has not responded to a request for comment.

It de-registered its local offshoot, Mossack Fonseca New Zealand, as a company in August last year.

I guess the prospect of even partial transparency to the IRD was enough to ruin their business model. After all, you can't launder money or cheat on taxes when the government is watching.

But while we've run these Panamanian crooks out of town, someone else could always set up shop, and there's plenty of local lawyers wanting a slice of the money-laundering pie. We need to strengthen our trust transparency regime to include public registers to put all of them out of business, permanently.

Good news from China

New Zealand's climate change inventory is due out in May, and is likely to show greenhouse gas emissions rising yet again due to our absence of effective policy. Meanwhile, in China, they're eliminating coal:

A third consecutive year of falling coal consumption and a renewable energy spending spree has made China the new global leader on climate change, some environmental groups claim.

Figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics this year revealed a 4.7 per cent year-on-year fall in coal consumption in 2016.

Coal production dropped even more, and the latest figures confirm a three-year trend of declining coal use for the country's massive electricity grid.

If this keeps up, then China will peak and start decreasing its emissions - which is exactly what we need to beat this. And while they've set a target date of 2030 for that to happen, the risk of air pollution causing social unrest is likely to make it happen even earlier. Meanwhile in the US Republican legislators are trying to ban the technologies which will save us in order to protect the profits of their coal industry donors. Sadly, those people are likely to see China's action as creating more headroom for the coal industry to spew its poison into the air, rather than following China's lead and eliminating it.

Would this work here?

UK Labour plans to force the rich to make their taxes public:

A Labour government would force all taxpayers who earn at least £1m a year to make their tax records public, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has said.

As Philip Hammond prepares to deliver his first full budget next week, McDonnell told the Guardian he hoped more transparency about individuals’ tax affairs would cut down on tax avoidance and encourage a more open civic culture.

He said that Labour had been inspired by the practice in some Nordic countries, including Norway and Sweden, where the publication of tax records is common.

“There is a big issue now about, people don’t have trust in the establishment – they don’t think they’re listening to them, don’t think they’re paying their way or being fair. So one way of re-establishing some element of openness and transparency would be, why not – over a million, you publish your tax return. Why not?”

Its clearly an anti-avoidance measure, but it only captures certain types of tax-dodging: people who do it on their own books. Whereas in New Zealand the problem seems to be the wealthy using trusts and other corporate vehicles to effectively hide their incomes and evade the top tax rate. So, while its a useful transparency measure, we'd need to combine it with others to effectively detect upper-class tax fraud.

A good move

Yesterday the Ombudsman formally reported New Zealand for violating the Convention Against Torture over its cruel, inhuman and degrading restraint of prisoners. Today, the government has announced plans to beef up the prison inspection regime:

New Zealand's prisons inspection regime is being beefed up, with the Government announcing regular reviews of all prisons and a new inspection team.

[...]

A new prisons inspection team would be set up to manage the inspections, "ring-fenced" from the general Corrections inspectorate which would continue to investigate specific complaints.

Upston said she would be provided with quarterly reports from the inspection team, which would be made public.

The Government would also provide new, wide-ranging powers for a beefed-up chief inspector's role, while there would be an increase in staff including eight new inspectors.

This is all good, a significant improvement from the status quo. And yet there's still a significant problem, in that the prison inspectorate is part of Corrections rather than being independent. And Corrections (and its Minister) have strong institutional incentives to ensure bad news does not emerge from it, and the political power to corrupt and bury reports.

If we want this done properly, the prison inspectorate needs to be totally independent of Corrections. And it needs to report to Parliament, not the Minister.

Australia admits spying on journalists

The Australian government has admitted that its spy agency, ASIO, has been targeting journalists:

Australia’s attorney general, George Brandis, appears to have granted the country’s domestic spy agency access to journalists’ metadata in a small number of cases, the agency’s head has revealed.

Duncan Lewis, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Agency (Asio), confirmed in parliament on Tuesday that the agency had been granted some journalist information warrants.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon has been pursuing Asio over the details of the warrants, and focused repeated questioning on Lewis in Senate estimates on Tuesday.

They warrants came into force in October 2015 in part to secure passage of Australia’s sweeping data retention laws that require telecommunications companies to store phone and web metadata for two years.

Pretty obviously, they're after leakers, but they're also likely to be targeting journalists working on refugee issues and human rights abuses in Australia's concentration camps in Nauru. The common factor here is that both are deeply embarrassing to the government. "National security" powers should be for exactly that - not for protecting politicians and officials from democratic oversight.

Open Government: Failure

How much did the government's first OGP action plan do to advance open government in New Zealand? Sweet fuck-all, according to the OGP's Independent Reporting Mechanism:

Today the Open Government Partnership (OGP) released its final report on New Zealand’s progress towards fulfilling its international commitments to transparency, accountability and participation.

[...]

At the end of New Zealand’s first two-year action plan, the New Zealand IRM report finds that the plan did little to advance open government.

“The plan consisted almost entirely of things the government was doing anyway, and most of those things weren’t directly related to open government,” said [IRM researcher Steven] Price. “So it’s not very surprising that it made little concrete difference to transparency, accountability or public participation”.

The report also criticised the way the plan was prepared. “The government fell well short of the sort of public collaboration that it promised when it signed up to the OGP,” said Price.

The good news is that our second action plan looks a bit better, though it still suffers from a lack of ambition. But the government has failed so badly on its first one that almost anything is an improvement.

Update: the full report can be read here.

Laws mean nothing unless they are enforced

Why is our environment degrading? One of the reasons is that our compliance and enforcement of environmental law is a bit shit:

Agencies tasked with enforcing environmental laws are "chronically under-resourced" and struggle to do the job effectively, according to new research.

Research by the Environmental Defence Society (EDS) released on Tuesday found widespread problems with the enforcement of New Zealand's environment laws, particularly within agencies such as the Department of Conservation (DOC) and district and regional councils.

Compliance, monitoring and enforcement (CME) work was the "poor cousin" of the policy and planning cycle, it said, and routinely under-resourced.

The resulting impact was poor record-keeping, a lack of staff, limited oversight and political pressures affecting decision-making.

There's plenty of the latter going on in my local council, with the council retaining political control over prosecutions meaning that no-one ever get prosecuted. Throw in an official policy of allowing non-compliance, and of warning before inspections, and the result is no incentive for farmers to obey the law. Which means dirty rivers.

This has to change. Laws mean nothing unless they are enforced. If we want clean, swimmable rivers, the first step is to make our central and local government agencies actually enforce the law against polluters. And if Ministers and councillors don't want them to do that, we should sack them and replace them with people who do.

Cruel, inhuman and degrading

How bad are New Zealand's prisons? So bad that they're now getting formal warnings under OPCAT for cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment:

New Zealand prisons' use of excessive restraint is in breach of the UN Convention Against Torture, the Chief Ombudsman says.

The Ombudsman has found the use of tie-down beds and restraints in five separate cases - including one where a self-harming prisoner was restrained for 16 hours a day over 37 consecutive nights - constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment.

[...]

In another case at Otago Corrections Facility, a prisoner was continuously kept in a waist restraint with his hands cuffed behind his back, after self-harming. The cuffs were used for 12 weeks prior to his release from prison, and were removed for two hours during the day, and every four hours at night.

The prisoner was locked in his cell for 21 hours a day, and did not receive any psychiatric treatment during the 12-week period despite a recommendation.

His medication was stopped upon his imprisonment. As a result, he said his mental health deteriorated and his self-harm escalated.

These (and other) abuses of restraints breached both OPCAT and Corections' own policies, as well as New Zealand law. Which invites the question: will those responsible for these abuses be prosecuted for assault? Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that. Crimes by the state are never punished, and officials enjoy effective impunity for their abuses. And then we wonder why they keep doing these things...

Corrections (of course) says it will clean up its act. But one of the core problems here seems to be a lack of adequate mental health treatment for prisoners and the denial of basic care. Unless they fix those aspects (and e.g. make sure that prisoners get their medication), this is just going to keep on happening.