Drawn

A ballot for two Members' Bills was held this morning, and the following bills were drawn:

• Holidays (Bereavement Leave for Miscarriage) Amendment Bill (Ginny Andersen)
  
• Broadcasting (New Zealand on Air and Te Māngai Pāho Reporting Requirements) Amendment Bill (Melissa Lee)
  

Nothing terribly exciting, though Andersen's bill seems like a good idea which employers will hate and which will likely pass. Given the stuff National has in the ballot (e.g. eroding the right to silence), it could have been a lot worse. A full list of bills in today's ballot is here.

Why is NZ First opposing youth rates repeal?

When they ran for election, Labour promised to repeal National's hated and unfair youth rates - the system where employers could pay someone less simply for being younger. But NZ First is apparently holding up the process:

Labour's pre-election policy of ditching youth rates within its first year in power appears to be on the back burner for now as it negotiates with its coalition partner New Zealand First.

[...]

The New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters, said pre-election policies were irrelevant as there was now a coalition agreement.

"That is our policy, detailed as it is, if you don't find it there then it won't be part of any committment."

Youth rates are not mentioned in the Labour-New Zealand First coalition agreement.

Winston is typically evasive on why exactly he is opposing repeal, and its particularly odd given that NZ First supported their repeal in 2003 and opposed their re-imposition in 2013. Which suggests that this has been delayed as part of coalition bargaining - or, more bluntly, its a policy shakedown. Winston didn't agree explicitly to pass this, so he wants something (and probably something cruel or stupid) in exchange. But while he's haggling, young people continue to be discriminated against in the most basic way in the workplace. But I guess they're simply not a priority for the pensioner party.

More cronyism

Oh look! More cronyism from Labour. This time they've appointed the partners of two former MPs to a charity trust:

The partners of two former Labour MPs have been controversially appointed to the South Island's largest charity – the $600 million Rata Foundation.

Jane Sherriff and Philippa Burns are the latest appointments to the 12–member board of the former Canterbury Community Trust, which distributes about $18m in grants each year.

Rata made $42m from its investments in the year to the end of March 2017 and spent about $4m on administration and expenses.

Sherriff is the partner of former Labour minister Clayton Cosgrove and Burns is the wife of Brendon Burns, who was Labour MP for Christchurch Central between 2008 and 2011 and stood for Kaikoura twice without success.

This sort of appointment just reeks of cronyism, and as a result the Minister has been forced to go into detail about the process used to appoint them. Which includes this bit:

After advice from the Department of Internal Affairs, he had sought nominations from community trusts and from the caucuses of the Coalition Government in March and April 2018.

And this is the problem in a nutshell. Its done for every significant appointment, and odds are, if the final appointee is party-affiliated, they entered the process not by applying like a normal person, but because their name was given directly to the Minister by a fellow MP. Which immediately makes their appointment a prima facie favour and act of political patronage rather than anything to do with merit.

There's a name for dispensing government positions as favours and rewards: its called cronyism and corruption. And its not acceptable in New Zealand. And if we want to stamp it out, the best way to do so would be to end this institution of suggesting people to the Minister, requiring everyone to apply up-front, be considered on their merits by an independent panel, and requiring the Minister to report to Parliament or publish a gazette notice whenever they disagree with its findings. This sort of process is used in the State Sector Act for appointing chief executives, and it has been largely successful in preventing crony appointments in the senior public service. But given our politicians established culture of cronyism, we clearly need to extend it further, to board appointments as well.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, and one which should finally see the end of the ballot jogjam. But there's some other stuff to get through first before the House can get on to those first readings. First up is a local bill, the Gore District Council (Otama Rural Water Supply) Bill, which is about transferring ownership of a community-built water supply back to the community which built it. Next is the third reading of Jo Hayes' Marriage (Court Consent to Marriage of Minors) Amendment Bill, an uncontroversial piece of legislation which tightens protections against families forcing young people to marry. Next is the last ten minutes of Parmjeet Parmar's Patents (Advancement Patents) Amendment Bill, a corporate IP-grab which looks like it will be voted down, followed by Todd Muller's rather dull Companies (Clarification of Dividend Rules in Companies) Amendment Bill. The House should get on to Hamish Walker's KiwiSaver (Foster Parents Opting in for Children in their Care) Amendment Bill, and if they move really quickly, could even make a start on Rino Tirikatene's Electoral (Entrenchment of Māori Seats) Amendment Bill.

There should be a ballot for one or two bills tomorrow. National has been good about putting bills in the ballot over the long break, and it will be interesting to see what new ideas Labour is offering up.

Climate Change: The danger of a hothouse

Killer heat-waves in Europe. Enormous fires in California and Greece. Historic floods in Japan. Climate change is here. But worse, we may be heading for the hothouse:

A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned.

This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper that considers the combined consequences of 10 climate change processes, including the release of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost and the impact of melting ice in Greenland on the Antarctic.

[...]

Katherine Richardson from the University of Copenhagen, one of the authors, said the paper showed that climate action was not just a case of turning the knob on emissions, but of understanding how various factors interact at a global level.

“We note that the Earth has never in its history had a quasi-stable state that is around 2C warmer than the preindustrial and suggest that there is substantial risk that the system, itself, will ‘want’ to continue warming because of all of these other processes – even if we stop emissions,” she said. “This implies not only reducing emissions but much more.”

Positive feedback and non-linear effects are the biggest threat in the climate system, and not very well understood. The danger of a cascade shifting the climate to a new, much hotter state, is real, though we don't know the trigger points. Which suggests a precautionary approach is needed if we want to avoid catastrophe.

There's an easy solution for that

Today, the government finally settled pay talks with DHB nurses, giving them a significant pay rise and boosts to staffing. Meanwhile, another major employer of nurses - rest homes - are whining about it:

Rest homes say they are losing nurses to public hospitals at an alarming rate.

They are blaming higher wages being offered to hospital nurses, and say changes to immigration requirements are needed.

[...]

Chief executive Simon Wallace said nurses had always moved between the sectors but it was far more pronounced now, driven by pay rises being offered by district health boards in ongoing pay talks.

He said it was driving pressures in rest homes that received a 2 percent DHB funding boost this year.

There's an easy and obvious solution, of course: they could pay their nurses more. Its not as if these businesses can't afford to: Ryman healthcare made a profit of over $200 million last year, and Oceania made $77 million. But instead, they're demanding they be subsidised with migrant labour so they can avoid paying the going rate for staff. And the response of the government should be a firm "no".

A paranoid's veto

Don Brash was supposed to speak at Massey tomorrow as part of a series of talks organised by a student club. But given his views on te reo and Maori representation, and his support for visiting foreign Nazis, people were naturally planning to protest his presence. There's no suggestion that the protest would have involved anything other than some signs and shouting - the usual push and shove of democracy. But Massey has used it as an excuse to cancel the talk, citing "security" concerns:

Massey University has cancelled a booking made by a students’ politics club at which former politician and Hobson’s Pledge founder Dr Don Brash was invited to speak at the University’s Manawatū campus on Wednesday.

Club members had signed a venue and space use agreement form in which they agreed to manage the venue in accordance with the University’s Strategy, including recognising the values of a Te Tiriti o Waitangi-led organisation and ensuring its use would not adversely affect University operations, security, reputation or public safety.

The members later approached University management concerned about their ability to meet the agreement’s terms around security after becoming aware of social media posts suggesting the event could lead to violence.

The Univesity considered providing additional security for the event, but decided the risk of harm to students, staff and members of the public was too great, particularly at time of heightened tension over the issues around free speech and hate speech. Dr Brash was also a supporter of right-wing Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were due to address a public meeting in Auckland.

So, according to Massey, a bit of shouting and sign-waving is "harm". This isn't a heckler's veto on speech - its a paranoid's veto, of assuming that any protest means a riot and public slaughter. It would be laughable, if it wasn't so dangerous to our democracy. Because if any speech which attracts protest is banned, then we simply can't publicly discuss controversial (or, given trolls, even uncontroversial) topics. Or basicly anything at all.

I don't like Don Brash, but our democracy deserves better than this, especially from our universities. Brash should be allowed to speak, and those who don't like him should be allowed to express their views. Absent a specific, credible threat of serious violence, there's no justification to do anything else.

Just wrong

A couple of years ago, Fonterra was publicly castigated for using its market power to unilaterally decide that it wouldn't pay its contractors for two months after invoicing - effectively, extorting a free loan from them. The problem is widespread amongst New Zealand businesses, and is a significant drag on the economy. But we'd expect the government to be better than that, right? Wrong:

The Ministry of Education is being blamed for a badly leaking Auckland high school and for changing contracts so that builders can wait up to twice as long as usual to get paid.

The construction industry is holding these up as examples of government behaviour that's undermining builders even as some go to the wall.

[...]

The Education Ministry is also facing criticism from builders who have complained that it has changed a contract so they can end up waiting a whole month longer for payment than before.

Contract mediator Peter Degerholm said a medium-sized contractor came to him, confused over a claim he expected would be paid on 20 June, but has been told would be paid on 20 July.

The payment delay clause was hard to decipher, Mr Degerholm said, but he advised the contractor this was what he had signed up for.

We expect the government to work hard to get value for money in its contracting. But late payment isn't about value-for-money - its fucking people over for the sake of it. There's no benefit whatsoever to the public in doing this, and insofar as it puts the survival of contractors at risk, significant negative effects. But more importantly than that, its just fucking wrong. When people do work, they shoudl be paid, on time. The government should be setting an example on this, not adopting dodgy foreign business practices whose sole purpose seems to be to screw people over.

Victim-blaming from NZDF

A woman reports a rape, and as a result she is threatened with prosecution. Saudi Arabia? Indonesia? No - this happened in the NZ army:

Military police told a rape complainant she faced a charge of wrongly being in a male barracks room after she told police she was taken there while too drunk to resist and then sexually assaulted.

The threat came after the woman made a complaint to NZ Police, saying she had been raped by an instructor who offered to help her back to her room but instead took her to his quarters.

Police were told by the woman that she did not want to be there, did not want to have sex and was unable to consent.

The incident happened two years ago but the alleged attacker was only stood down from his position this week.

This is simply appalling, and it shows the lie behind NZDF's "operation respect". When push comes to shove, they protect abusers while threatening victims. The incentive that sets is terrible, and it raises questions about how many crimes weren't reported as a result.

The good news is that the people who set that toxic culture and allowed it to fester have been suspended, as part of the army's probe into sexual misconduct at The Army Depot. Hopefully they'll all be out on their arses. Because this just isn't acceptable.

The legality of cancelling Nazis

The visiting Canadian Nazis were supposed to be speaking in Auckland tonight, but it appears that their venue (or at least, a venue) has cancelled on them at the last minute, apparently after a very quick but persuasive public campaign. While everyone on Twitter is cheering about this, I'm not sure its so good. To point out the obvious, we have a Human Rights Act in this country, which prohibits discrimination in the provision of goods and services such as venue hire. One of the grounds it prohibits such discrimination is "political opinion". Pretty obviously, this means that its illegal for venues to refuse to serve the Labour Party, Unite, Greenpeace, or Tamaki Anti-Fascist Action. But it also means that its illegal for venues to refuse to serve Nazis, at least insofar as Naziism, white supremacy, or simply being a money-grubbing racist arsehat is deemed to be a political opinion.

Are these things "political opinions"? The term isn't defined in the Human Rights Act, and there's no easy caselaw I can find which defines it (at least, not with a quick google). From employment law, we know it applies to being a communist and to protesting against government policy, but there's nothing specific about Nazis. OTOH, these seem to be political views: they're about what policies governments should pursue, how the state should treat its citizens, and what laws it should pass (including, ironicly, laws like the Human Rights Act which protect people from discrimination). If you think that immigration policy is a political issue, that political parties should promote a non-racist society, and that governments should respect human rights, then I think you are hard-pressed to consistently deny that opposing those positions is not also a political position, and one which is therefore deserving of legal protection. Particularly if you also think, as many on the left do, that "everything is political".

Or, to put it another way: if you don't think you should be discriminated against for opposing racism, then you can't support discriminating against racists.

So if you're cheering this, you're an idiot, undermining the very law that protects us all. I don't like Nazis, but I think that that law and our ideal of a non-discriminatory society is more important than them. We should absolutely protest against these scum, and make it clear just how repellent we find their views. But we should not encourage unlawful discrimination while doing so - because that is a weapon which can so easily be turned back on us.

New Fisk

Look closely and you'll see Jared Kushner's cynical ‘deal of the century’ for Palestinians in action

Another bullshit idea

Water is one of the most contentious political issues in the country today. Overextraction is fuelling the polluting dairy industry, while overallocation is pushing the government inexorably towards a traceable permit regime. Meanwhile, the public wants to see foreign water bottlers - and, increasingly, farmers - pay a fair price for their use of a public resource. But solving any of this requires first reaching a settlement with the people who morally own that resource: Māori. Now, the government thinks it finally has a solution. Unfortunately, its another bullshit idea:

Cabinet has been debating the issue ever since and RNZ understands it reached an agreement.

While the government will not pursue any ownership rights for Māori, it will provide capital - most likely through the provincial growth fund - for Māori to develop water storage so they can make better use of under-developed land.

But Ngāpuhi negotiator and senior member of Labour's Māori Council Rudy Taylor said that would not float with iwi.

And no wonder. Compared to the value of the resource, its beads and blankets. But its also something that Federated Farmers wants, not something that iwi want. In the South Island, Ngai Tahu are currently fighting against water storage, because it disturbs their river while encouraging pollution.

I'm boggled that the government would think it was a remotely credible solution. But I guess that's what you're left with when you have NZ First categorically ruling out any real settlement. Which means it'll go to court, and instead of having to give iwi the usual 20% plus co-management (give or take), they may end up having to acknowledge total Māori ownership of freshwater.

ACC's privacy invasion

Last year the Privacy Commissioner ruled that the police practise of asking companies to "voluntarily" turn over information under the Privacy Act was illegal and that they should seek production orders instead. Now, ACC has been caught making the same demands, but to government agencies and for far more sensitive data:

ACC wrongly sought and received nine years worth of personal travel details from Customs after discovering a claimant had gone to the Cannes film festival.

Doing so has uncovered a slew of other cases in which ACC has done the same, raising questions about how it harvests information about people it is meant to be supporting through compensation and rehabilitation.

"I felt violated," said the claimant, astonished to find ACC had turned its casual interest over the Cannes trip into receiving details about every trip abroad since his compensation-related injury.

The corporation has since apologised to the claimant for seeking his travel records and found it has acted wrongly getting other claimants details in about a quarter of the 38 times this year that it used a legal manoeuvre criticised by the Supreme Court and the Privacy Commissioner.

Pretty obviously this is grossly intrusive, and ACC should be paying compensation for its unvasion of privacy. But its not just them we should be looking at, but also Customs, who handed out highly sensitive personal information without good reason. To get an idea of how sensitive that information is, remember that the police and SIS need a specific statutory authorisation to access it, and have been spanked for behaving illegally when that authorisation was ignored or expired. But here Customs was handing it out willy-nilly, essentially so a (government) insurance company could perv through someone's life to try and find a way to not pay out on a claim. Which simply isn't a good enough reason. Like banking records, this information should not be handed out without a production order signed off by a judge. And if ACC can't convince a judge that their concerns of fraud are serious enough to warrant that, then tough.

Ministry of fuckups

I've criticised MPI in the past for being captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, especially the fishing industry. But it turns out that when MPI does try and prosecute criminal fishers, they fuck it up completely:

An investigation into suspected "large scale fishing fraud" has collapsed following a ruling that a raid involving the Armed Offenders Squad that found evidence stashed in a sewer pipe was illegal.

The Ministry for Primary Industries laid 100 charges under the Fisheries Act based on torn documents found in a sewer breather pipe at the home of Auckland fish dealer Brett Edwards. Also seized was $72,730 cash.

But the charges were dismissed in May after a ruling that the raid was "complete overkill" and a "gross" breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights.

[...]

MPI was found to have ignored the law, been "high-handed", "exceptionally economical with the truth", insensitive or callous towards the target of its investigation and failed to own up to its errors.

Judge Raoul Neave said the conduct suggested that "insufficient attention is paid to ensuring that the enforcement officers are properly schooled as to the way in which they should be exercising their powers".

This is absolutely damning. And its not the half of it. There was illegal detention, unreasonable search and seizure, and lying in a plea-bargain. MPI tries to pass this off as "inexperience", but the Judge is very clear that it was "a deliberate tactic adopted by MPI and not a mistake or misunderstanding". But even if we take MPI's excuses at face value, its looking like they can't be trusted with the search powers they have. And it does raise serious questions about oversight. The police are scrutinised in the use of their powers by the Independent Police Conduct Authority. But who scrutinises MPI?

From the look of this, Edwards is owed significant damages for the abuse of his rights. I hope he sues and wins, because that seems to be the only way to get government ministries to obey the law.

How New Zealand was stolen

Stuff has a major interactive piece today on our history: New Zealand Made is effectively a story of how New Zealadn was stolen. It looks at the Treaty of Waitangi, the way it was systematically breached, and how much land was stolen. There's interactive maps of every Treaty settlement, explaining the government's crimes and the (puny) level of compensation. A subsidiary article looks at the methods the government used to steal Māori land, and its effects.

This is something that should be taught in every New Zealand school, so that we know who we are as a nation and why we need to fix this and make sure it never happens again (instead, we get the Tudors and Stuarts: interesting, but safely irrelevant). If you haven't already, you should check it out.

A colossal waste of money II

How much of a waste of money is the government's decision to blow $2.3 billion on high-tech American sub-hunting aircraft? An OIA request through FYI, the public OIA request site, has shown just how mythical the submarine "threat" actually is: while NZDF's record keeping is typically awful, the last time they say they detected a submarine with the Orions outside of an exercise was in 1998. The last time they detected a non-friendly submarine was in 1989: almost thirty years ago. They apparently haven't even bothered recording it since 2010, though they say that "submarine detections were still being reported orally on occasion".

So, that's how important sub-hunting is to NZDF: not important enough to document or record, but supposedly important enough to spend $2.3 billion on.

New Zealand has a clear need for maritime surveillance aircraft to perform fisheries patrols and search and rescue. But we don't need hi-tech sub-hunters. NZDF openly admits that when they say in their white paper that they can see no immediate threats, and that they expect a decade to rearm if one appears, so there's no need to spend this money now. The additional capability to fight this mythical threat is costing us about a billion dollars, and that's a billion dollars that could be better spent elsewhere at present.

Another crony appointment

The government has appointed former Labour MP Steve Maharey as chair of Pharmac. He's not obviously unqualified for the role, and if he was appointed on his merits via a transparent process in which he was obviously the best candidate, then that would be fine. Sadly, that's not something we can take for granted - Labour seems no better than National in this regard, shoulder-tapping their people and bypassing the usual process to shoehorn them into positions. As for whether that happened here, we'll find out in 20 working days.

Save the Rangitata

The Rangitata river is one of the most sensitive in Canterbury. It is currently subject to a Water Conservation Order, restricting the amount of water that can be taken from it. Despite that, ECan - still dominated by National-appointed dictators to prevent Cantabrians from protecting their water - has approved further takes for irrigation. Now, environmental organisations are appealing:

A "David versus Goliath" battle is looming as a group of anglers gets set to take a major Rangitata River irrigation scheme to the Environment Court

The New Zealand Salmon Anglers Association's appeal is one of three against a decision to grant the Rangitata Diversion Race irrigation scheme consent to take an additional 10 cubic metres of water per second when the river is at high flows. An Environment Canterbury-appointed independent hearings commission granted the consent on July 6.

[...]

According to Ngai Tahu's appeal, "the resource consent will have significant adverse impacts on the mauri of the Rangitata River and hence significant adverse cultural impacts on the appellants", while the decision to grant consent "does not recognise and provide for the relationship of the appellants and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, wāhi tapu, and other taonga".

Ngai Tahu is seeking to have the decision overturned in full, because the granting of the resource consent "results in uncertainty over potential benefits and mahinga kai opportunities for Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua, and for the ongoing involvement of Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua regarding the use of the water resource".

Good. The purpose of a WCO is to protect a river. But ECan seems to have ignored it in order to enable further pillage by greedy farmers. And the result will be not just an interruption of natural flows, but also more piss and more shit poisoning Canterbury's water.

2,000 employed under Labour

The labour market Statistics have been released, showing a slight rise in unemployment, to 4.5%. The number of unemployed is still down 2,000 from when the government took office, but its basicly treading water. Again, they haven't implemented any real policies to push it down yet - their tweaks to the Reserve Bank Act have only just been introduced to the House, and their KiwiBuild and billion trees programs (which should promote employment) are only just getting started. Hopefully when those policies are implemented, unemployment will drop again to the levels it was at during the Clark era.

Climate change: Uninhabitable

Last year we saw the first suggestion that climate change might make parts of our planet uninhabitable, with a combination of humidity and temperature making some places unsurvivable for more than a few hours. And today, we learn that one of the places where this is most likely to happen is the North China Plain:

The deadliest place on the planet for extreme future heatwaves will be the north China plain, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and the most important food-producing area in the huge nation.

New scientific research shows that humid heatwaves that kill even healthy people within hours will strike the area repeatedly towards the end of the century thanks to climate change, unless there are heavy cuts in carbon emissions.

[...]

The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, found fatal WBTs [Wet Bulb Temperatures] of 35C would strike the north China plain repeatedly between 2070 and 2100, unless carbon emissions are cut. Shanghai, for example, would exceed the fatal threshold about five times and the “extreme danger” WBTs would occur hundreds of times. Even if significant carbon cuts are made, the “extreme danger” WBT would be exceeded many times.

Or, to put it another way: climate change is going to cause death on an unimaginable scale, and a significant disruption to China's food supply, with all the flow-on effects that entails. And all of this by the end of the century.

China is already taking climate change seriously, and the threat to food will cause them to take it even more seriously, because they understand the link between food security and regime stability. Hopefully they'll do enough, and convince other large polluters to do enough too. Otherwise, the consequences will be dire.