Farmers ruin another lake

Farmers have ruined another New Zealand lake, flooding it with nutrients and causing a toxic algal bloom:

Another lake in the Far North has succumbed to algal bloom, with health warning signs going up at Lake Waiparera, north of Kaitaia.

[...]

Northland Environmental Protection Society president Fiona Furrell said the bloom was entirely preventable.

"Cattle graze both the DoC reserve and the council strip margin surrounding the lake, and cattle sunbathe themselves and cool off in the lake regularly. So if cattle defecate in a perched lake, that's exactly where it stays, because there is no river to flush that lake."

Ms Furrell said the Department of Conservation and the Far North District Council never bothered to fence the land around the lake.

I think the answer here is obvious: keep the cows out. But its a little late for Lake Waiparera.

New Fisk

If I were the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, I'd be cynical about this state visit

More government spying

Southern Response is a government agency responsible for settling claims arising from the Christchurch earthquakes. They've made a pretty shit job of it, but now they've done something even worse: instead of settling those claims, they've instead been using government money to hire New Zealand's most infamous private spy agency to spy on claimants:

A Newshub investigation has found Christchurch earthquake victims trying to settle insurance claims with the Government were spied on by private investigators, in operations paid for by the taxpayer.

[...]

The operation, running from February 2014 to April 2017, cost $177,349 of taxpayers' money. It's not known how many people were spied on, but hundreds of people were involved in protests following the Christchurch quakes.

Cam Preston, a father, chartered accountant, and victim of the Christchurch earthquake, was also deemed a "threat" who needed to be monitored.

Mr Preston was one of the main targets of an operation set up by Southern Response using "protection agency'' Thompson and Clark Investigations.

Yes, that Thompson and Clark Investigations. The ones who have previously been caught spying on Greenpeace and anti-coal activists, and which used illegal tracking devices on animal rights activists. You'd think that after all of these high-profile cases of democracy-suppression, no government agency would touch them with a barge pole. Instead, they're a recommended provider on MBIE's all-of-government procurement site.

Hundreds of people could have been spied on, because they quite rightly wanted what they were owed by their insurance company. The State Services Commission has already launched an inquiry into whether Southern Response breached government ethical standards, but I think we also need to be asking why we allow a company to provide democracy-suppression services in New Zealand, and why our government continues to hire it. We also need to ask who was spied on, what information was collected, and how many other people T&C falsely reported to the police in an effort to discredit them (which is what they did to Preston). Then, we need to hold Thompson & Clark accountable for those crimes.

Another failure of "collaboration"

When they were in power, National liked to use "collaborative processes" to deal with environmental issues. In theory, this means getting environmental advocates and environmental destroyers together in a room, to try and find common ground. In practice, it meant using the collaborative process to silence and suborn "critics" while increasing social licence to pollute. The process used for water fell apart messily, when environmental groups figured out it was a sham, publicly called bullshit and abandoned it. And now another of National's sham collaborations has fallen apart:

The group set up to get agreement for the first marine reserves on the Otago coast has failed to get consensus and handed in two different plans.

Representatives of the fishing industry and environmental lobby say the process has failed and they are bitterly disappointed with the outcome.

The South-East Marine Protection Forum has been meeting for four years to identify areas to protect on the coast between Timaru and Waipapa Point in Southland.

[...]

The report spells out two separate proposals, one by the environmental and tourism representatives to protect 14 percent of the coastline (covering 1267sq/km), and the other led by the commercial fishing industry for 4 percent (366sq/km) of the coast.

Neither proposal meets the aim set for the forum of reaching a single proposal to protect parts of all the marine habitats found along the coast, though the first, dubbed Network 1, is much closer.

The central problem here is that there really isn't any middle ground to find. Environmental advocates and the fishing industry have opposed goals, and so "collaboration" was always pointless. All it did was potentially boost social licence for the fishers. And why would anybody want to do that?

The decision on Otago marine reserves is now in the hands of Ministers. Hopefully we'll see something closer to Network 1 than Network 2.

Climate change: The PCE on a climate commission

Before she retired last year, former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright recommended that New Zealand enact a UK-style Climate Change Act, with a legislated long-term target, regular carbon budgets laying out a pathway to meet it, and independent advice and reporting on those targets by a climate commission. The new government has seized on this, and is promising to enact a Zero Carbon Act to implement it. But what would such an arrangement look like in New Zealand? A report from new PCE Simon Upton, A Zero Carbon Act for New Zealand: Revisiting 'Stepping stones to Paris and beyond', gives his views on the detail.

Firstly, Upton is an enthusiastic supporter of the idea. But New Zealand is not the UK, and while all parties are in theory committed to stopping climate change, the blunt fact is that we have a less supportive environment for far-reaching change than the UK did when it enacted its legislation. In particular, the new leadership of the National Party has not yet gone on record as supporting strong action, rather than the lukewarm, farmer-protecting foot-dragging it engaged in in office. So this is likely to mean problems both in setting a long-term target, and with the shorter-term budgets.

Institutionally, Upton supports a primarily advisory body, with recommendatory and advisory functions. This seems weak, but the central problem here is one of getting future governments (e.g. a future National-ACT government in 3 - 9 year's time) to do things they do not want to do and which will hurt them politically. The way to do this is to make it institutionally unthinkable not to. It also respects a proper division of responsibility between unelected advisors telling us what we need to do and whether we are doing it hard enough, and democratically elected politicians making the actual decisions and being held accountable at the ballot box for it. While Greenpeace wants the climate change commission to have more teeth and direct executive powers to change ETS settings, what that does in practice is incentivise governments to appoint commissioners who will not exercise such powers - effectively undermining both action and the independence of advice. Its also strongly undemocratic for unelected agencies to be able to act without a democratic mandate in that manner (and the same applies to the Reserve Bank too).

There's some interesting technical suggestions in there about different targets for different gases, and for a six year budget period with an interim report to better align with New Zealand's three-year electoral cycle, and I expect these will be taken seriously by both the government and Parliament in considering the legislation when it eventually emerges.

The business geniuses in the National Party

Imagine that you're hiring a builder to do some repairs to your home. Now imagine that they refuse the job unless you include a clause in the contract indemnifying them from any costs arising from flaws in their work and promising you won't sue them if they screw up or don't do the work at all. You'd tell them to get lost and find someone else, right?

Unfortunately for the residents of Christchurch, the National government and EQC signed exactly such a contract for earthquake repair work with Fletchers. Naturally, its turned into a complete disaster, with shoddy work needing further repairs, affecting both existing homeowners and innocent third-parties who bought supposedly repaired houses. The public aren't happy, but Gerry Brownlee effectively gave away the right to sue when he allowed his department to sign the contract.
(Meanwhile, just two days ago National's Stuart Smith was suggesting the government sue Fletchers. I guess Brownlee just didn't bother to tell him...)

And yet somehow, people still seem to think National are business geniuses. The only "genius" they have is for signing shitty deals which fork over piles of cash to cronies. As for the public, we get robbed and screwed over. Thanks, National!

Fuck up fucks off

Having failed to attract more than a handful of votes in the National Party leadership contest, Steven Joyce is retiring from politics. Good riddance. While he somehow had a reputation as a "Mr fix-it", like Gerry Brownlee Joyce fucked almost everything he touched. He fucked up transport by starving the regions of funding to build pointless superhighways in Auckland for the trucking industry. He fucked up science and innovation by stealing funding from CRIs, then making them compete for it all over again as laughably underfunded "national science challenges". He fucked up tertiary education by limiting access to loans and allowances, creating a teacher shortage which is going to last for years. He fucked up economic development by signing a crony deal with SkyCity allowing them more pokie machines for an undersized and unnecessary convention centre. And he fucked up finance by being memorably unable to count during the election campaign. This isn't a record any politician should be proud of, and I am glad he's fucked off, so the only thing he can fuck up anymore is himself.

New Fisk

To Putin, Assad’s enemies in Syria are the same as Russia’s in Chechnya

Less than open

Remember the Minister for Open Government? Last year she was publicly shamed in the House over her apparent refusal of a fairly standard OIA request (a refusal which it turns out was directed by a Senior Ministerial Advisor in the PM's office). But eventually she started releasing the basic lists of briefings people had been asking for, so I took the opportunity to request her Open Government Partnership briefings to see what she's been doing. The short version:

• SSC is currently planning the engagement process around the 2018-20 OGP National Action Plan. There's an acknowledgement that they need to spend more time on it to better engage with the public, which is good.
  
• Curran took a paper to Cabinet about proactive release of government information. Unfortunately, all the details are secret.
  
• SSC has been thinking about a new "strategic approach" to Open Government. All the details of that are secret too.
  
• Curran was invited to attend the OGP Asia Pacific Leaders Forum 2017 in December. But as there's no mention of it either in her official press releases or Twitter feed, it appears she blew it off and dumped the job on the local NZ ambassador instead.
  

Of course, that's just November. But if she's been doing more open government work since, she's kept it... secret. Which isn't exactly what I'd expect from a Minister of Open Government.

Shoulder-tapping a crony

Last month, the government appointed former Labour MP and cabinet minister Pete Hodgson as chair of Callaghan Innovation. As current chair of Otago Innovation Limited and with qualifications in veterinary science and public policy, on the face of it Hodgson is reasonably qualified for the job. But did he get it because of his qualifications, or because of his connection with the Labour Party? Sadly, it appears to be the latter. I sent in my usual OIA request about the appointment, seeking information about the process and how Hodgson had entered it. The appointment documents (such as they are) are here, but the real smoking gun is in the cover letter. The Minister. Megan Woods, is deliberately vague about how Hodgson's name entered the process:

The targeted search for potential candidates led by MBIE and with input from myself, resulted in a list of nine candidates. The list, which contains brief details on a range of experienced people alongside Mr Hodgson, was discussed With officials at a meeting of 20 November 2017.

A subsequent email got this admission from the Minister's staff:

The Minister initially raised Peter Hodgson’s name, along with a number of others, during a discussion with officials.

Note that Hodgson hadn't even been approached at this point. So basicly, the Minister shoulder-tapped him, then had him appointed without even the formality of an interview. There was no competitive process, and so no chance for the candidates to be assessed on merit.

If Hodgson had entered the process by e.g. applying in an open, transparent and competitive process, then it might be possible to believe he was appointed on merit. But with this process, its pretty clear that it was simply a crony appointment, Labour paying off a past MP and stacking the boards with people it trusts. And that is not how our public service is supposed to operate.

Time for new taxes

The Tax Working Group is considering a variety of new taxes:

A wealth tax, a tax on financial transactions, a broader capital agains tax, a land tax and new environmental taxes will all be options considered by the Tax Working Group, its chairman Sir Michael Cullen says.

Cullen said those new taxes would be among the options canvassed in a "background paper" that will be published on Wednesday week.

[...]

Speaking to the International Fiscal Association conference in Queenstown on Friday, Cullen gave several strong clues on his own thinking on the direction of the tax system.

Cullen appeared warm to the idea of taxes on environmental and social ills, such as greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and the causes of obesity.

Good. Firstly because the government clearly needs more money to rebuild the state after National's nine years of vandalism, secondly because we need environmental taxes to deal with pollution and climate change, and thirdly because taxing things other than income will reduce the opportunities for the rich to rort the system and avoid paying their fair share. The problem with taxing income is that it is relatively easy to hide - the rules enable rich people to hide income in companies, trusts, or overseas. And we know that they do this because it shows up every year in income distributions, in a spike just below the top tax-rate. That spike is rich tax cheats hiding their income.

I'm not sure what the best addition is. General wealth taxes on the uber-rich are appealing, but probably easy to avoid. Land taxes are very easy (you can't hide land, and the government already values it for rates), but don't capture all wealth (OTOH, some is better than none, and it would make farmers pay their way properly). Water and carbon taxes are obvious moves, though a bit messy to implement (requiring settling with iwi and repealing the ETS respectively). But throwing something else into the mix to make a fairer and environmentally better system seems like a no-brainer to me.

Secret trials are under the control of the SIS

Last week New Zealand had the appalling spectre of a secret trial, from which the public and the media were excluded and evidence was explicitly kept secret (and effectively insulated from challenge) from one party. But it gets worse - because the security rules mean the court is effectively completely under the thumb of the SIS:

A copy of the protocol governing passport cases where courts are asked to consider evidence classified as secret has been obtained by the Weekend Herald.

The protocol, signed last January by then-attorney-general Chris Finlayson and chief justice Sian Elias, prescribes: The extensive use of "tamper-proof envelopes"; requirements for court staff to stand watch over locked cabinets during lunch breaks, and; a ban on the public, media and even those accused by such evidence - or their lawyers - from being present during its presentation.

The eight-page protocol also allows for the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) to insist that hearings be relocated from a courtroom to any location or their choosing, or to require judges writing up their decision to only use a computer supplied by the intelligence.

As the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties points out, all this security theatre lends credence to the government's secret "evidence" - even if (as turned out to be the case in the past) its a collection of media reports from the internet. Meanwhile the ability of the SIS to set the location and even dictate how the judge writes up the case gives them complete control and makes a mockery of judicial independence. If a criminal trial took place in a police station, the police had a veto on who could enter, allowing them to exclude witnesses or lawyers, and arranged to give themselves the power to spy on (or even edit) the judgement as it was written (oh, and keep all records secret so any precedent could never be used), we'd call it what it is: a kangaroo court which cannot possibly produce a fair outcome. But that is exactly what is happening here. And we should treat the outcome of this mockery of a process with the utter contempt it deserves.

It just became easier to petition Parliament

On Thursday, Parliament adopted a temporary change to Standing Orders to allow petitions to be submitted electronically rather than on paper. And they've moved very quickly to implement it - the parliamentary e-petition system is now live.

You can start a petition here, but I'd recommend reading the guide first. To start a petition you will need to provide physical contact details, but these aren't published. However, your name and the subject of the petition will be. Once your petition has been started, it will show up for signature on the petitions page, and people can sign it by entering their email address.

Its great that parliament has done this, and it should make petitioning them far more accessible than the old paper-based system. And hopefully they'll follow it up with a system to enable petitions to force a formal government response or a debate in Parliament, as done in the UK.

A good move

The Green Party has a reputation for clean and open government. And at their conference over the weekend, they reinforced that, announcing proactive release of Ministerial diaries and a ban on all MPs and staff accepting corporate gifts:

Green Party Co-leader James Shaw has today announced two important new transparency measures, which will apply to Green Party Ministers, MPs and staff, to help counter the influence of money in politics.

Green Party Ministers will soon proactively release their ministerial diaries, to show who they’ve met with and why. Additionally, Green Ministers, MPs and staff will not accept corporate hospitality, such as free tickets to events unrelated to their work.

Good. While nobody calls it that, corporate "hospitality" is simply a bribe, an attempt to gain favour by picking up minor (or major) expenses. Corporations don't do it unless they expect to gain from it, and the tale the pecuniary interest records tell of how such bribes are distributed show us that that is exactly what is going on. Its good to see a party living up to its values on eliminating corruption from politics, and its a challenge to other parties to follow suit.

But while media attention has focused on the refusing bribes aspect, the proactive release of Ministerial diaries may be more far-reaching. This is something transparency advocates have been calling for for years, because it will expose who is attempting to influence Ministers. Lobbying is so effective partly because it is secret, behind closed doors. Being able to connect the dots between Ministerial meetings and policy changes will mean exposing that influence, and force Ministers to either publicly justify policies, or refuse lobbyists' demands. And that's good for the public.

It also puts Labour's "Minister for Open Government" to shame. Shouldn't she be announcing measures like this? Or does their view of "open government" not actually extend to real openness?

Past time to end fossil fuel exploration

Over on SciBlogs, Massey University's Ralph Sims argues that we should end exploration for oil and gas. The basic argument is that we have already polluted the atmosphere with too much carbon, and if we are to have any hope at all of avoiding dangerous levels of climate change, most of the fossil fuels we know about will have to stay in the ground. Which means that future exploration is pointless - after all, what's the point in discovering new sources of fuels that can never be burned or utilised?

And he's right. In the current carbon situation, future exploration is pointless. All it does is create a temptation to destroy the planet, and ammunition for foreign fossil fuel companies to whine about how they should be allowed to profit by doing so. Instead of allowing exploration and issuing new permits, the government should be sending a clear message to the fossil fuel industry that it has no future. The foreign shareholders in that toxic industry will kick and scream, but its basicly them or the planet - and if we want to save the world and keep our own coastal cities above water, they have to go.

New Fisk

Erdogan has released the genealogy of thousands of Turks – but what is his motive?

Rebuilding state housing

During its time in office, National vandalised the state housing system, embarking on a mass-selloff of state homes, including disposing of all Housing New Zealand homes in Tauranga. Now, Labour is making a start on rebuilding state housing:

Housing Minister Phil Twyford has announced that up to 155 new state houses in the regions will be ready by June this year.

The houses will be spread across 15 regional centres, with Napier/Hastings getting almost 50.

The homes will be built on vacant Housing New Zealand land and on underutilised lots.

"This is the first step in building more new homes to help those most in need in our regions. In total, it will build more than 270 bedrooms for individuals or families in the areas where they are needed most," Twyford said.

A handful of small houses doesn't seem like a lot. But its a start, and a step in the right direction. And hopefully it'll be followed by a lot more.

Worth an OIA: Ministerial weekly briefings

Want to know what the government is doing? Every week, every Minister receives a weekly briefing for each of their portfolios, setting out what they need to pay attention to, areas of particular interest, upcoming events, current media coverage, Cabinet papers and OIA requests. Its basicly the Minister's high-level picture of their portfolio. These briefings are subject to the OIA, so they can be requested. And they're illuminating. I've recently requested the briefings from the latter part of last year from the Minister of Conservation, and while information has been withheld for various reasons (mostly because it is under "active consideration" or legal advice), they still reveal a huge amount about what the government is doing. Most notably - and something I didn't see any media reports of - the Minister of Conservation has already been protecting conservation land from mining by denying a "minimum impact permit" exploration permit to a mining company in Golden Bay (the application is reported here, but the denial seems to have gone unnoted). There's also regular updates on the battle for our birds, myrtle rust, and various one-off issues. The lists of Cabinet papers and briefings show that the Minister is looking at preventing mining and drilling, as well as the Kermadecs Marine Reserve proposal, while the list of OIAs give a good picture of what people ask DoC about (largely 1080, but it also shows how wrong Peter Dunne was about who uses the OIA).

The Conservation briefings are here:

• Week beginning: 6 November 2017
  
• Week beginning: 13 November 2017
  
• Week beginning: 20 November 2017
  
• Week beginning: 27 November 2017
  
• Week beginning: 4 December 2017
  
• Week beginning: 11 December 2017
  
• Week beginning: 18 December 2017
  

Finally, these sorts of briefings would seem to be a perfect candidate for proactive release, in that they are hugely informative about the business of government and enable people to both see what is being done and follow up with more specific queries. An initial release after a month or two should give a good picture, but it would need a followup after six months to release information initially withheld for active consideration. Alternatively, people could just adopt a Minister and start requesting (ideally using FYI, so the responses are public), and eventually they'll get sick enough of the work to proactively release anyway.

Missing the obvious

The Court of Appeal has ruled on Phillip John Smith's right to wear a wig in prison, finding that it doesn't engage the protections of the right to freedom of expression affirmed in the Bill of Rights Act. Reading the judgement, its a bit more complicated than that: technically they find the appeal moot, because Corrections has given Smith his wig back, and formally declined to answer the question - but said that that's how they would rule if they had to. Digging down, its essentially because they think wearing the wig wasn't an attempt to convey meaning to another (at 46) or because it attempted to convey normality rather than difference (at 51). Because obviously, being "normal" doesn't mean anything. Meanwhile, if you ask a person on the street what a bald man wearing a wig expresses, they will tell you quite clearly: insecurity. And beyond that, a desire to be seen as young, virile, whatever.

This part of the judgement misses the obvious: that even in what we think of as an informal society, we have elaborate codes of dress telling us what our clothes, hair, makeup and appearance in general express (even if its "fuck all that fashion shit"). If you look at someone, you make judgements based on their clothing and appearance, and people seek to manipulate these judgements by changing how they look. If I wear a suit to a job interview, I communicate one thing, if I wear combats and a hoodie instead, I communicate another. And only a moron (or a Court of Appeal Judge) would think that I wasn't trying to communicate information by how I chose to look. The judicial system is on-record as thinking disco-pants in court communicate something inappropriate, and you can bet that if I turned up in the Court of Appeal and just sat there wearing a parody judge outfit, with robes, a wig, and drunk-face makeup, the judge would damn well think I was expressing something (contempt, probably).

More generally, how we choose to appear is one of our most basic forms of day-to-day expression. Appearance expresses to ourselves and others who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to be seen. That's why they seek to control it in prisons, schools, the military, and other conformist institutions such as the law. I'm not going to pretend that its high-falutin' Milton poetry or something a member of our snobbish judiciary would think is socially valuable, but to pretend it is devoid of expressive content and conveys nothing to others is a form of social blindness I'd expect only from aliens.

Time to lower the voting age

Children's Commissioner Andrew Becroft raised the issue of a lower voting age at Parliament yesterday, arguing that it would lead to stronger citizenship and improved policy:

Judge Andrew Becroft mooted the proposal at Parliament on Wednesday, when he appeared in front of the MPs on the Social Services Select Committee and said those teens would be "up for the responsibility".

"I'm calling for a genuine discussion," he said.

"All that I have seen about our democratic system, shows that those that are least involved and invested in it are our young. The lowest voting turnout is the 18-29 age group, we've got to do better.

"I think provided it went hand-in-hand at good civics education, with a commitment to teach about the operation of Government, how kids can be involved, what voting means, everything I've seen indicates that 16 and 17-year-olds will be up for that responsibility."

This is an issue I have long supported, and I would love to see progress in this area. The basic moral argument for a lower voting age is unassailable - young people have interests, and those interests should count equally with everyone else's. Denying them a direct voice and pretending they are represented by their parents leads to policy outcomes which favour the old over the young - policies like destroying the climate, running deficits to pay for tax cuts, and introducing student loans. Becroft is absolutely right that those policies would change if political parties had to appeal to those presently excluded.

But perhaps that's what they're afraid of?