Time to end this rort

Parliamentary Services has released its annual report, showing that former MPs and their partners rorted us for $1.1 million in travel in the last year:

Travel perks for former MPs and their spouses or partners cost $1.1 million in the past year - but at least two of the ex-MPs, with quite differing ideologies, are dubious about the allowances.

The figures are included in the Parliamentary Service annual report for the 2017-2018 year. They show more than $350,000 was spent on former MPs, along with more than $320,000 on spouses or partners. Fringe benefit taxes added a substantial $435,000.

Among the top spenders were Roger Maxwell and his partner, who spent $22,180 between, Steve Maharey and his partner with $21,652, Warren Kyd and his partner with $20,614, and Sir Lockwood Smith and his partner with $20,064.

The allowances can be paid to former MPs elected before 1999, and their partners. The amount also depends on how many terms they served. There's no allowance for those with fewer than two terms, and most former MPs don't get anything unless they spent three terms in Parliament.

As I've argued over the years, this "perk" has never been justified. MPs have never been poorly paid (except perhaps in their own minds), and the other myths trotted out by the entitled rorters to "justify" it turn out to be false as well. On the flip side: every single one of these former MPs was handsomely paid while in Parliament. How much longer should we be expected to subsidise their sense of entitlement?

It is long past time to end this rort. Doing so will require an Act of Parliament. Which MP wants to put up the bill?

Voter suppression right here in NZ

Entrust is a regional electricity trust. It owns a majority of lines monopoly Vector, and distributes the dividends to 320,000 households in Auckland. Its supposedly democratic, with elected trustees - and in fact, there's an election on right this minute. But you wouldn't know, because those elected trustees - all of them from National's Auckland subsidiary, Citizens & Ratepayers - have forbidden the electoral officer from advertising it:

City Vision has discovered that current C&R Entrust Trustees have banned the independent Electoral Officer from promoting the Entrust election turnout in a cynical attack on democracy.

Peter Neilson the City Vision Leader sent emails yesterday and today to the Entrust electoral office, asking if they had or planned to make a media statement encouraging people to vote in the Entrust Election for 5 trustees. Judith Ofsoske the Director and Operations Manager for election services the Entrust election’s returning officer, Dale Ofsoske, advised today that “Unfortunately, the Trust has limited the press releases we are able to make-we are unable to promote the election. Dale has raised this with the Trust again this week.”

“While the first day turnout was well up on the last election in 2015 as of today the turnout is less than 10% and on current trends may barely exceed the abysmal final turnout of 12.84% achieved at the last election” says City Vision Team Leader Peter Neilson.

Four of the trustees have also refused to give any interviews for the election, despite standing in it.

This is classic voter suppression: if you can't convince people to vote for you, you try and stop people who won't vote for you from voting (in this case: people who don't already know about Entrust and might have different views on what it should do with the community's money). Kiwis have long considered this to be an American evil. But the right here is swimming in American memes (see their frequent calls for voter ID laws to deter voters), and it looks like now they've caught the full-blown disease.

As for what to do about it: vote the pricks out. No-one who attempts to suppress turnout belongs on any elected body. If you live in Auckland you can still vote by delivering your ballot to the Independent Elections Services office at L2, 198 Federal Street, Auckland by 17:00 tomorrow. Given low turnout, every vote will make a difference, and it will be well worth doing just to throw these arseholes out of office.

As for the longer term, as a quasi-local government body, Entrust seems like it should be covered by LGOIMA and the Local Electoral Act.

A reason to support public funding of political parties

As with MMP, just look at who is against it.

Public funding would reduce political parties' dependence on wealthy donors. It would therefore reduce the influence of those donors over policy (and correspondingly, increase the influence of those of us outside the top 1%). Its no surprise therefore that the voices of the wealthy virulently oppose it, the same way they oppose anything which might reduce their power, influence or wealth.

Looking into it II

The Ombudsman has officially confirmed that they will be investigating Callaghan Innovation's OIA practices. Good. This agency seems to have a problem of political handling of requests, culminating in the wrongful release of the personal information and contact details of requestors they had decided were "enemies". That's absolutely something which needs to be investigated and corrected.

Unfortunately, the Ombudsman has also continued his attacks on requestors:

"I don’t have any formal powers to investigate the conduct of requestors. However, I feel strongly that both requestors and agencies need to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law."

"The use of fictitious names by requestors isn’t unlawful but I believe they need to be up front about who they are unless they have good reason to keep their identities secret."

He can believe it all he likes. But in seeking to impose an extra-legal requirement on requestors, he is undermining the very Act he is supposed to protect. As for "good reason", there is ample evidence from across the public sector of requestors being treated differently based on agencies' perception of political risk, and it is well-documented in Stephen Price's 2005 study of the Act. Throw in Callaghan's wrongful release of personal information, and there seems to be good reason for every requester to use false names and throwaway identities, just to protect their privacy from vengeful rogue agencies.

Climate Change: The consequences

For the past week in Question Time, the National Party has opened with a question complaining about high petrol prices. In doing so, they're suggesting that petrol prices be lower, and that therefore greenhouse gas emissions increase. In other words, they're demanding that the government destroy the planet. Meanwhile, there's a scary article today on what climate change is doing already. The short version:

• The tropical dry zone is getting bigger by half a degree of latitude a decade;
  
• The Sahara desert has increased by 10% since 1920;
  
• The boundary between the wet part of the continential US and the Great American Desert (previously on the 100th meridian) has shifted east by 140 miles;
  
• Tornado Alley has shifted 500 miles east in 30 years, endangering more people;
  
• US plant hardiness zones are moving north at 13 miles per decade. This is a proxy for natural ecosystems, so what it means is shifting climates and the potential extinction of plant species;
  
• Canada's permafrost line has moved 80 miles north in 50 years. Again, this means shrinking natural ecosystems;
  
• Australia's wheat belt is moving 160 miles south per decade, meaning reduced production.
  

None of this is good news. But by supporting lower petrol prices, this is what National is implicitly demanding: the continued devastation of our natural ecosystems, more disasters, more drought, less food. These are not responsible policies. They are not humane policies. And parties which advocate for them do not deserve your vote.

An admisison of guilt

Over the weekend, former National MP Jami-Lee Ross was "sectioned" to a mental health facility. The police and health system respected his privacy, and didn't talk about it - in fact, the reason we learned of it at all is because the National Party gloated publicly about it and talked about "seeking advice from medical professionals and involving police wherever necessary to ensure support is made available to Mr Ross."

This naturally led to suspicions that National had had him detained in order to silence him. National Party leader Simon Bridges was explicitly asked about that this morning - and dodged the question:

Simon Bridges is staying tight-lipped on whether the National Party was involved in Jami-Lee Ross being sent to a mental health facility over the weekend.

"I'm not going to comment on the details, and I'll tell you why: I only learnt about it after the event," Mr Bridges told The AM Show on Wednesday.

"I have some second hand accounts of what has happened, but the reality is I don't know for sure, so I'm not going to engage in that."

The idea of a political party weaponising mental health and engaging in Soviet-style tactics to silence their critics is one that most kiwis would find utterly abhorrent. Given how damaging the allegation of National involvement is, if Bridges could truthfully deny it, he would. The fact that he refused to speaks volumes.

Reserves are not for mining

The Court of Appeal has made a significant decision today in the ongoing battle over the Te Kuha mine. The orcs want to rip the top off a mountain on the West Coast to dig an open cast coal mine, but there's a sticking point: most of the land is protected by the Reserves Act. Strangely, neither the mining company nor their supporters on the Buller District Council saw this as a problem. Even more strangely, relying on an archaic provision of the Reserves Act which referred to some even more archaic and long-repealed laws, neither did the High Court. In a shocking decision back in February, the High Court ruled that the Crown Minerals Act trumped the Reserves Act, effectively opening every reserve in New Zealand to mining.

Today, the Court of Appeal reversed that. The decision isn't very long, but the short version is "if Parliament had meant for that to happen, they would have explicitly said so". The slightly longer version is that the Crown Minerals Act regime is so different from the long-repealed legislation that the usual interpretive presumption of reading references to repealed acts as references to their corresponding replacements simply does not apply:

There is nothing that “corresponds” to the old regime in relation to minerals or coal. Those repealed provisions and the concepts behind them are gone. An entirely new regime has been put in place.

Instead, the Court of Appeal relies squarely on the Crown Minerals Act provision that mining is subject to all other applicable legal obligations, and ruled that access to dig the mine is subject to the Reserves Act. Which you would hope would kill it. Of course, it will probably go to the Supreme Court, because the mining industry will not accept such a limitation on its "right" to destroy our environment. But you'd hope that they'd uphold the obvious: that reserves are for protecting, not mining.

Climate change is a threat to global security

One of the expected effects of climate change is famine and water shortages, resulting in forced migration, political instability and conflict. And according to the Red Cross - who are on the sharp end of this - it is already happening:

Climate change is already exacerbating domestic and international conflicts, and governments must take steps to ensure it does not get worse, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross has said.

Peter Maurer told Guardian Australia it was already making an impact and humanitarian organisations were having to factor it into their work far earlier than they were expecting.

“In many parts of the world where we work it’s not a distant engagement,” he said.

“When I think about our engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, in Somalia, in other places of the world, I see that climate change has already had a massive impact on population movement, on fertility of land. It’s moving the border between pastoralist and agriculturalist.”

[...]

He said changing rainfall patterns change the fertility of land and push populations, who may have settled and subsisted in one area for centuries, to migrate.

“It’s very obvious that some of the violence that we are observing … is directly linked to the impact of climate change and changing rainfall patterns.”

And as the temperature rises, its only going to get worse. Which invites the question: at what stage is the global community going to start considering nations who refuse to act to reduce emissions a direct threat to global security? Because like those who "harbour terrorists", they're exporting instability - not just to their neighbours, but to the entire world.

Byelections have consequences

Over the weekend Australia held a byelection for former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's vacated seat - resulting in the government losing one of the safest seats in Australia on a record-breaking swing. More importantly, they lost their majority, meaning that things are going to get very difficult for them over the next few months. And one of the things they're getting difficult over is refugees. New MP Kerryn Phelps immediately declared that getting refugees off Nauru was her first priority - and suddenly, its happening. Overnight, the Australian government transferred eleven kids to Australia for medical care, and there's suddenly pressure in the Senate and the House for the government to take up New Zealand's offer to rescue the refugees. Part of this is sticking a lifetime ban on entering Australia on anyone they've imprisoned in their gulags, but if its what gets them out of there, that's acceptable - that particular piece of shittiness can always be overturned later. The priority is to save the kids from the concentration camps. Justice - including prosecuting those responsible for establishing and running those camps before the International Criminal Court in The Hague - can wait.

So, byelections have consequences. It would be good if people remembered that more often.

No "compensation" for those who want to destroy the planet

The government is currently progressing legislation to ban offshore oil exploration. The oil industry doesn't like this, because its the first step towards putting them out of business. And now they're outrageously demanding "compensation" for the violation of their "property rights":

A body representing seismic testing companies is demanding more than $100 million in compensation for its members if the Government passes a ban on issuing new exploration permits.

[...]

IAGC members claim they have invested heavily gathering data on areas not covered by exploration permits. While this has led to claims that the business model is highly speculative, MinterEllison partner Rachel Devine, representing IAGC before the environment select committee, said the Government encouraged companies to seek data to make the block offer process competitive.

"They've spent money in reasonable expectation that the regime would be the way it is, it's been set up to entice them to come in and do these things for the benefit of the New Zealand government," Devine said, claiming that the legislation would strip the companies of property rights they had spent $104 million acquiring.

"Passing this bill will put New Zealand on a blacklist of countries with sovereign risk," she said.

Get that? If this law is passed, they might sulk and not "invest" here. Which is the point of the bill, because "investing" in destroying the planet isn't an "investment" we want anybody to make.

As for the idea of "compensation", its as odious as Britain's compensation of slaveowners when they abolished slavery, and as justifiable as the idea of compensating some Saudi wide-boy for banning live sheep exports. There should be no "compensation" for people whose business model is literally the destruction of the planet. Democracies are entitled to change their minds, and that's exactly what we're doing. If companies doing business here haven't factored that risk in, then they're simply fools. Our right to govern ourselves and set policy according to the will of the people is not subject to a foreign financial veto, and isn't actionable in any court. And again, if foreign companies don't like it, they can just fuck off. In fact, the quicker they do that, the safer the world will be.

Reminder: Saudi Arabia kidnapped people from New Zealand

Earlier this month, journalist Jamal Khashoggi visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He was then beaten, drugged, and dismembered - apparently while still alive - by a 15-man Saudi kill team who had been specially flown in for the purpose. Its a horrific act, and one which should make Saudi Arabia an international pariah. But Khashoggi is not the only victim of the Saudi regime. As Stuff reminds us, in 2014 they apparently kidnapped a refugee from New Zealand:

Friends of Khalid Muidh Alzahrani, who they called Daniel, know what the Saudi regime is capable of.

Four years ago, the refugee disappeared from his sparse flat in Redwood, Christchurch, and they haven't spoken to him since. They fear he's been executed.

Daniel had converted to Christianity - a crime in Saudi Arabia - and his friends believe he was forcibly repatriated, possibly with his family's help.

The original media stories are here and here. And as this story makes clear, Alzahrani wasn't the only one: in May 2013 an unnamed Saudi refugee was apparently snatched off the street in Auckland and rendered to Saudi Arabia, where he was reportedly tortured.

The New Zealand government owes a duty of care to those we have granted refugee status, and we have an obligation to protect them from this sort of shit. The Stuff article argues that we should be demanding "proof of life" of these snatched refugees from the Saudis, and they're right. And if they don't provide it, we should cut ties with that tyrannical monarchy.

New Fisk

The story of the Armenian Legion is finally being told – and it is a dark tale of anger and revenge

Time to ban gag clauses

Yesterday, we learned that the National Party was arseholes all the way down. They'd known about bullying and sexual harassment by Jami-Lee Ross for years, and their response had been to sit on it, cover it up, and ultimately try and use it as leverage in their internal political squabbles rather than doing the decent thing and getting an arsehole harasser out of their party. And yesterday afternoon, we learned they'd gone further, explicitly gagging Ross' victims to keep them silent. Its a story we've seen time and again from overseas, where gag orders are used to silence victims and allow their abusers to keep on victimising. But we've also seen the solution: ban them. California for example prohibits confidentiality clauses in civil settlements for sexual assault. And just a few months ago, they went further, banning them in sexual harassment cases. Settlements can be used to protect victims, but never to silence them.

Isn't it time New Zealand, as a progressive country, followed suit?

Drawn

A ballot for one Member's bill was held this morning, and the following bill was drawn:

• New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income (Fair Residency) Amendment Bill (Mark Patterson)
  

The bill is typical NZ First racism, seeking to make it harder for immigrants to gain access to superannuation. A similar bill proposing a pro-rate entitlement based on residency (rather than simply extending the residency qualification) was defeated in 2015. Though the bad news there is that both Labour and the Greens voted for it. Hopefully they will refuse to vote for this piece of racist shit.

Queensland decriminalises abortion

When running for election, Labour promised to take abortion out of the Crimes Act. That promise has been shunted off to the Law Commission for the moment, but while Labour is pissing about and covering its arse, over the Tasman Australians have stolen a march on us, with the Queensland state parliament voting for decriminalisation:

Nineteenth-century laws making abortion illegal in Queensland have been scrapped, in one of the state's biggest legislative reforms.

The government's controversial plan to decriminalise pregnancy termination passed through state parliament with a comfortable margin of 50 votes to 41.

The laws mean abortion will be available, on request, at up to 22 weeks' gestation.

It also allows an abortion to take place after 22 weeks if the medical practitioner performing the termination has consulted with a second medical practitioner and both agreed that "in all the circumstances" the abortion should be performed.

So how long will it take in New Zealand? The Law Commission says they will be providing a response to Andrew little "within eight months of the Minister’s 27 February 2018 request", which is around the end of this month. Which means we should see legislation passed next year.

Arseholes all the way down

So, National has dumped the dirt on Jami-Lee Ross, revealing a series of harassing, threatening relationships with four women. I've said repeatedly that I'm not interested in the details of MP's private lives. If everyone involved is a consenting adult, then its really no business of mine. But there's a consistent thread here of manipulation, harassment, threats, abuse, and bullying, both in private and in the workplace. It makes it clear that, to put it mildly, Jami-Lee Ross is not a very nice person.

But he's not the only one on the hook for this. Much of this behaviour happened in the workplace environment of Parliament and the National Party. We know from earlier stories that some of the victims apparently complained. And the response of the National Party was to not to act immediately to ensure a work and party environment free of harassment, but instead to sit on those complaints and save them to use as leverage later. Which makes it clear that they are not very nice people either. Its arseholes all the way down.

Ross was a former party whip, so dumping the dirt on the guy whose job was literally to know where all the bodies were buried may not have been the best ideas. But to be honest, they're all arseholes, so why should we care what they do to one another? Burn them all, and we can toast marshmallows on the flames.

Will Labour vote to weaken workers' rights?

Labour's Film Industry Working Group has reported back on National's "Hobbit law", which arbitrarily excluded film industry workers from basic employment protections. But rather than recommending that it be repealed, they have recommended massively expanding it to cover all "screen production work", including local TV and internet video and computer games. And while they have recommended repealing the ban on contract workers in those industries collectively organising, and allowing the negotiation of collective agreements with minimum standards, they propose an explicit ban on any form of industrial action - meaning such "negotiation" will be one-sided, favouring bosses, with workers limited to basicly asking nicely. Which is basicly the situation we had in the C19th, before the union movement.

The "justification" for this is that the foreign film industry is "unique" and "internationally mobile". But as we've seen with climate change, every industry makes these sorts of self-serving claims in an effort to gain regulatory subsidies. The foreign film industry also "needs certainty", but they can have that whenever they want it by employing their workers as employees rather than trying to treat them as disposable serfs.

These are not recommendations the government should accept. Weakening workers' rights in one industry undermines them for everyone (as we're seeing with the attempt to expand the law: local TV producers have looked at the foreign film exemption and decided they'd like to be able to legally treat their workers like serfs too please). Rather than enacting these recommendations, the government should repeal the Hobbit law, and then restore the right to strike to contractors. And if the foreign film industry doesn't like the prospect of having to treat their workers with basic dignity, then can fuck right off.

Time to fix electoral donations

Jami-Lee Ross' explosive allegations that National Party leader Simon Bridges criminally laundered donations to hide their origin has put the issue of electoral donations and transparency back int he spotlight again. In a background piece, Stuff highlights the horrific fact that the 'least corrupt country in the world" has virtually no transparency at all in this area, with 80% of donations to parties happening in total secrecy:

In 2017, it was reported at least four out of every $5 donated to the two big parties is given secretly.

More than $31 million has been donated to registered political parties in the past six years, most of that to National.

Smaller parties like the Greens publicly disclose who provided most of their funding, but the big parties are secretive. 83 per cent ($8.7m over six years) of the money donated to National is from anonymous donors, and 80 per cent ($2.8m) of that donated to Labour.

[...]

The worst offender is NZ First: Most years, it allows every single one of its donors to remain secret.

The reason? Because self-serving politicians set the disclosure threshold at a level where they would hardly have to declare anything, and then launder donations to flal under it to boot.

As for how to fix it, the answer is simple: align both the party and candidate disclosure thresholds (to prevent Bridges' trick of laundering candidate donations through his party), and significantly lower them to a level where we actually get transparency. $500 seems about right - more than any normal person would give a party, but small enough that splitting becomes too much damn work. Plus of course we need to actually enforce the law, and prosecute any party or politician who attempts to evade disclosure.

But of course, we have the fundamental problem: why would those corrupt, self-serving hypocrites in Wellington ever vote for any curb on their own behaviour?

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, and the long slog through later stages of bills continues. First up is the committee stage of Jan Tinetti's Education (National Education and Learning Priorities) Amendment Bill. Following that, there's the second readings of Gareth Hughes' Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill and Simeon Brown's Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill. If they finish that, then its more law and order bullshit with Alastair Scott's Land Transport (Random Oral Fluid Testing) Amendment Bill. As the House is unlikely to get any further, there probably won't be a ballot tomorrow.

Climate Change: More bad faith from Labour

Remember when Jacinda Ardern called climate change "my generation's nuclear-free moment"? It turns out that she didn't really mean it. At least, that's the impression you'd get from the government's actions in granting foreign oil giant OMV a two year extension on its exploration permit for the Great Southern basin:

The Government has just granted oil giant OMV a two-year extension to drill in the Great South Basin, despite issuing a ban on new oil and gas exploration permits in April.

Greenpeace climate campaigner, Kate Simcock, says the decision by the Ministry for Business, Employment and Innovation (MBIE) to grant the extension is essentially a way to give the oil company a new permit.

“The Government is breathing new life into this permit, and the extra two years could be the difference between finding and drilling for new oil and gas reserves, or not,” she says.

And drilling for that oil means more emissions at a time when the IPCC is ringing the final warning bell.

If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change and the famine, war and death it entails, we need to end the oil industry - not in twenty of fifty year's time, but now. If the government had refused this extension, that is exactly what would have happened: the permit would have expired in a few months, and (if you take OMV's rhetoric seriously), they would have left the country in a huff, dropping a bunch of other permits in the process. That is exactly what needed to happen. Instead, the government has given them time to organise a drilling campaign, and increased the chance of them finding, exploiting, and most importantly, burning oil and gas - and burning the planet at the same time.

As for what to do about it, MBIE's decision seems prima facie unreasonable given the climate change context, and could potentially be judicially reviewed as such. And if it is upheld, I suspect there will be protests on the water if there is any effort to drill. Because unlike the government, the environmental movement is taking this problem seriously, and will do what they can to stop it.