The rich are trying to buy the election

The Herald this morning reports on the rich's efforts to buy this year's election. And you'll never guess who their chosen vehicle is:

The National Party may start election year with a $2.3 million war chest raised from 24 big donors in 2022, while Labour has declared just $150,000 in large donations, according to Electoral Commission records.

The disparity has seen National raise more money from large donors in one year than Labour has raised in nearly a decade.

Most of National’s funds are thanks to a fundraising blitz from former deputy leader Paula Bennett who tapped richlisters, including New Zealand’s wealthiest man, for as much as $250,000 each last year. It is not clear how much of this funding was spent in 2022, and how much has been put aside for campaigning this year.

So we have a tiny elite throwing huge amounts of money around in an explicit attempt to subvert the democratic process and buy themselves power. Which you'd think is the sort of thing our electoral laws ought to prohibit...

The obvious question is what National has promised them in exchange for all this money. Because nobody forks over quarter of a million dollars for nothing. Especially a rich person.

But what really bites is that this is the last time we'll have such easy access to these figures. Because just before the holidays, Labour changed the law to make large donations less transparent. Where previously parties have been forced to declare them within ten working days of receipt, we'll now only get that level of disclosure in an election year (and then only up until polling day). Donations outside of that period - like the $2.3 million given to National reported on above - will only have to be declared annually. Which makes it much harder to link donations to policies (which was the point of rapid disclosure).

The public understands that there is too much money in politics, and the people providing it are getting something in exchange. Lower donation thresholds and real-time disclosure - the obvious methods to try and limit this - are overwhelmingly popular. And once again, the big parties effectively conspired with each other to write the law to suit themselves and cut us out. Just like they always do. And then they wonder why an increasing proportion of the public views them as institutionally corrupt? Maybe they should look in the mirror for once.

Democracy means one person, one vote, and all votes are equal. Money subverts this. We need to cut the rich out and level the playing field between citizens again. Which means not just transparency, but public funding, a ban on corporate donations, and a cap on individual ones. And actually jailing people who try and subvert our democracy, rather than looking the other way.

Climate Change: A successful policy

The Herald has an annual roundup of electric vehicle stats this morning, and it shows us that the government's clean-car-discount - which sees buyers of dirty vehicles pay to subsidies purchases of clean ones - has been a hugely successful policy:

New Zealand broke two records for electric vehicles in the month of December, capping off a year of surging demand for clean cars.

[...]

The policy is so successful at driving the uptake of EVs and suppressing the uptake of petrol vehicles, the Government may have to rethink the level of discounts and fees - lowering one or raising the other.

In December 2022, just over 20 per cent of all new vehicles were fully battery-electric, a record.

The same month over a quarter of new passenger cars, a category that excludes vans and utes, were fully battery electric - also a record.

And its only just getting going. Now we have a clean car standard backing it up, forcing vehicle importers to import cleaner vehicles (on average) every year, which will further push the market towards low emissions options. We can do more - we really need a cutoff date for fossil imports and a later one for registrations, plus a scrappage fee and tailpipe emissions limits to take the dirtiest vehicles off the roads for good, and public transport and urban form improvements to make cars unnecessary - but we're clearly now on the path we need to be on to eliminate small vehicle transport emissions (trucks will longer). We just have to keep doing it.

So naturally National - which has always been opposed to climate action - wants to stop, seeing it as a cost rather than a long-term benefit. But if they're worried about short-term costs, there are two very obvious solutions. The first is to charge ute buyers even more, which would have the added bonus of further incentivising the shift away from these dirty, unsafe vehicles. The other is to use ETS revenue to meet any shortfall, effectively spreading the cost across all petrol and diesel users (so the polluters pay for the cleanup again). If National opposes such measures, they need to be asked how exactly they plan to reduce transport emissions to meet our climate change goals and ensure a liveable planet for their children. But I doubt they have any answer to that.

Westminster means hate

When England was an empire, it used colonialism to spread bigotry and hate, leaving a legacy of homophobic legislation around the world. And now, they're using colonialism to force bigotry and hate on Scotland, by vetoing Scotland's gender recognition law:

Rishi Sunak’s government has blocked legislation passed by the Scottish parliament that would make Scotland the first part of the UK to introduce a self-identification system for people who want to change gender.

The Scottish secretary, Alister Jack, announced that he would use section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 for the first time to halt the gender recognition bill after a review by UK government lawyers.

This is a Scottish law for Scottish people, and nothing to do with England. It was passed overwhelmingly by the elected Scottish Parliament, which is meant to be able to pass such laws. And its being vetoed by an English government trying to appeal to English voters by running a transphobic hate campaign. Its an affront to both basic decency, and to the promise of Scottish devolution. Its an explicit attack on Scottish democracy, and the right of Scots to govern themselves.

Fortunately there's a solution for the latter. The only way Scotland will be free of English bigotry is independence. Leave Westminster to fester in its own hate. Scotland should make its own future, away from those terf arseholes.

ANPR should require a warrant

On Tuesday, the Herald broke the news of a massive increase in ANPR surveillance by police, from mere dozens of uses in 2020 to thousands in 2022, and that police had lied in their internal documentation when they said the system was audited to ensure use was legal. And today it got worse, because it seems that the police are deliberately circumventing warrant requirements for these searches, by pretending real-time surveillance is "historic":

No warrant is required by police searching for number plates captured by CCTV surveillance networks, even when the vehicles are snapped at the time of the search or seconds before.

Inquiries by the Herald have confirmed that the police definition of a “historic” search - and so not needing a warrant - includes number plates “captured at, or very close to, the time of the query being made”.

[...]

The “real-time” option requires police to seek a surveillance warrant from a judge or a forward-looking production order from a senior officer, to whom officers have to justify the crime being investigated warrants the breach of privacy involved.

OIA data showed police were able to access the vGRID system in June this year and had logged 119 specific “plates of interest” on which to receive “real-time” alerts. In the same period, police made 43,758 “historic” searches.

And this is only one of two systems, so the problem is clearly much bigger. And it makes you wonder whether they're applying the same workaround to things like text messages or emails (the interception of which in real time requires a surveillance warrant, but "historic" data - literally the moment after they are sent or received - does not).

But the core problem here is that the police treat this highly invasive form of surveillance - in which people can be tracked in real-time, their past movements traced, and a picture of their life pattern built up - as a private question between them and their (highly cooperative, promoted by police) partners. They talk of information being provided "by consent", but its the "consent" of the surveillance capitalists, not of the people they are tracking. And this partnership and "consent" is clearly being used to sidestep legal limits on surveillance which exist to protect our right to go about our business unmolested.

This isn't good enough. This surveillance needs to be regulated. Ideally, I'd like to see private use of ANPR (and facial recognition) banned. But at a minimum, any police or state access to such information must require a warrant and probable cause. And for proper law enforcement use - rather than gratuitous snooping - it should be no burden at all for police to give a reason to a judge why they need this information.

Climate Change: End pollution subsidies now!

Stuff reports that Tasman Steel - the latest name for what used to be NZ Steel - made a $340 million profit last year. The kicker? $117 million of that was from government pollution subsidies:

New Zealand Steel’s holding company Tasman Steel increased its profit by 153% to a bumper $340 million in the year to June while receiving free carbon credits worth $117m from the Government, according to accounts filed with the Companies Office.

The Government provides carbon credits to other large industrial emitters that compete with overseas firms and the steel business’ chief executive, Robin Davies, said they essentially “neutralised” carbon costs that were passed through to the company in its electricity bills.

...which means they face no real incentive to reduce their emissions.

As the article notes, the "justification" for this subsidy is that Tasman - one of our biggest polluters - might shut down and be replaced by dirtier production overseas. The latter is simply false - Glenbrook is one of the dirtiest steel mills on the planet, producing 2.5 tons of carbon per ton of steel versus the global average of 2 tons. So shutting it down would almost certainly result in a net gain for the planet. But also, does anyone really think they'd pull the plug if they were making only $220 million a year rather than $340 million? If they merely made the same outrageous profit they made last year? Really?

These pollution subsidies are unjustifiable. They must be ended immediately. And if this causes big polluters like Glenbrook to shut down and fuck off, so much the better.

This is what the right stands for now

Two years ago, supporters of failed presidential candidate Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow America's democracy and overturn the results of an election they had lost. And today, just a few days after the anniversary of that event, supporters of Trump's ally Jair Bolsonaro did the same in Brazil. Fortunately they also failed. But the mere act of doing it - of challenging the peaceful, democratic transfer of power with violence - destabilises democracy. And it encourages future attempts, which may not fail. And not just in America and Brazil - these countries are now exporting their anti-democratic instability to the world.

When Trump and Bolsonaro were in office, they were wholeheartedly embraced by mainstream right-wing parties in other countries - including in Aotearoa. Former National Party leader John Key says he would have voted for both (and this was after Trump's riot). And Key isn't alone in that. Key honestly attributes that to right-wing tribalism, but that's actually the problem here: the refusal to look past partisan affiliation and say "actually, this guy is anti-democratic, an actual fascist, I don't support that".

If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. The natural conclusion about the right-wing parties around the world who embraced Trump as a leader and Bolsonaro as an ally is that they support the same things - not just inequality and bigotry, but insurrection and the violent overthrow of democracy (the latter is sadly a reversion to historical type). That's basicly what the right stands for now, until they prove otherwise.

Climate Change: Grovelling harder

Back in October, Labour grovelled to the sacred cow, accepting a nightmarishly complicated system to pretend to price farm emissions while really shovelling money at farmers for bullshit "offsets". Today they've doubled down on that shit decision, committing to insulating farmers from the ETS carbon price and instead subsidising them so they pay the "lowest price possible":

The Government is promising farmers that it will charge agricultural emissions at the “lowest price possible”, and won’t regularly alter the prices – to give farmers more certainty.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the commitment on Wednesday, confirming the Government plan to price agricultural emissions was on track to start in 2025.

This means two things: firstly, the scheme will be even less effective at reducing emissions, as farmers will face a lower incentive to cut. And secondly, you and I are going to pay for it. Because every extra ton of carbon farmers emit thanks to low prices will have to be paid for in 2030, so low prices for them means higher taxes for us.

To put a number on that, in 2020 agriculture emitted 39.425 million tons of CO₂-equivalent. The difference between the default option of putting agriculture in the ETS at the processor level and this bullshit low carbon levy was a 16% reduction vs a 10% reduction. So, the government has committed to emitting an extra 2.4 million tons a year. At their expected 2030 international carbon price they'll need to pay to cover this extra pollution of $150 / ton (which is almost certainly too low), that's $355 million going straight overseas. And that's without even considering the overall subsidy from free allocation - which will amount to $4.8 billion a year in 2030. If you want to know where your schools and hospitals and public transport systems are - all that stuff Grant says the government can't pay for - they're in a paddock, polluting the atmosphere and shitting in a river.

Which just shows that if we want nice things (and not just clean rivers), we need herd-reduction, now. Anything less is ripping off the rest of Aotearoa for the benefit of this tiny, entitled, ute-driving minority. But we clearly won't get that from Labour. If we want progress, we need a radical, anti-climate change government.

Democracy returns to Fiji?

In December 2006 then-Commodore Frank Bainimarama overthrew Fiji's elected government in a military coup. While Fiji officially returned to democracy in 2014 with new elections, post-coup decrees on political parties, public meetings, and freedom of expression kept the opposition out. But now, its over: Fiji went to the polls last week, and despite opposition candidates being arrested and a convenient election-night "anomaly" with the results, produced a hung Parliament. And now, after a few days, the party holding the balance of power - SODELPA, the successor to the government which was overthrown in 2006 - has made its decision, and there's the happy sight of every opposition political party uniting to throw out Bainimarama and the coup regime. After 16 years, Fiji will finally be getting a new Prime Minister: Sitiveni Rabuka. Yes, this guy:

On the morning of 14 May, around 10 am, a section of ten masked, armed soldiers entered the Fijian House of Representatives and subdued the national legislature, which had gathered there for its morning session. Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, dressed in civilian clothes, approached Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra from his position in the public gallery and ordered the members of parliament to leave the building. They did so without resisting. The coup was an apparent success and had been accomplished without loss of life.

There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, including seven years in which Rabuka was elected Prime Minister (under a stacked constitution he wrote, just like Bainimarama did), and apparently he now regrets his actions, but still: couldn't they find anyone better? Anyone not... tainted by dictatorship and authoritarianism?

Still, this is a moment of hope: the coup regime is out. Fiji once again has a chance to move back towards being a normal democracy. Hopefully the military won't fuck it up for them this time.

A judicial earthquake

In 2015, racist Australia started dumping its problems here, deporting people who had lived in Australia for their entire lives to New Zealand on the grounds that they born here. The government panicked at the thought of having thousands of hardened criminals sent here, and so passed legislation under all-stages urgency to subject them to a post-arrival parole and supervision regime, even if they had completed their sentence in Australia.

Today, the High Court found that that regime was not retrospective, and so simply did not apply to one of the people subjected to it. Their rights - and by extension, those of every other returnee in similar circumstances - were breached. They further found that as it was punitive in effect, then it constituted double jeopardy, banned by international law. The question of damages will be resolved by other hearings, but given the number of people involved - everyone who had been sentenced before the law was passed - then the wrong could be substantial. Which is a pretty big judicial earthquake just before the holidays.

The ruling is entirely orthodox, resting on a prior finding that Extended Supervision Orders - a similar post-sentence "control order"-style regime - was punitive, and the obvious proposition that if Parliament wanted to over-ride the BORA and Aotearoa's obligations under international law, it would explicitly say so. Having not said so, the BORA is therefore assumed to apply as usual. On this point, then Attorney-General Chris Finlayson's oh-so-clever advice that these orders weren't punitive, but merely a means of protecting the public, and therefore the issues of retrospective punishment and double jeopardy did not arise, looks very poor. It also highlights the underlying flaw in the BORA's section 7 regime: the Attorney-General is advising Parliament, but in practice they work for the government, and their advice constantly reflects that, being crafted to fit the government's political needs and sanitising and downplaying issues. Its an inherently conflicted role, which results in Parliament being poorly-served and fed bullshit by a government spokesperson, and shows the danger of listening to Someone Else's Lawyer. For Parliament to fulfil its proper role under the BORA, it needs its own advice, rather than advice from a government mouthpiece.

As for what happens next, this is a big legal problem for the government, and they'll likely respond to it in the way they have responded to previous big legal problems: with more urgent, all-stages legislation to patch their earlier urgent, all-stages legislation, overturn the judgement, and get them off the hook. This is neither moral, nor respectful of the rule of law, and would once again shows how poor a guardian of our human rights they are. Which would be a further argument for taking the job of BORA oversight off them entirely and giving it to the courts.

Climate Change: Labour is on the side of polluters

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is Aotearoa's major policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While Labour improved it with the Zero Carbon Act, their changes around price controls - which undermine the purpose of the ETS by trying to stop carbon prices from rising - have resulted in a fundamentally broken market, with polluters deliberately triggering the "cost containment reserve" (CCR) to get the government to flood the market with additional credits, on the basis that they'll be worth more later. This is costing us a billion dollars a year, while allowing millions of tons of extra pollution which would not otherwise occur.

Back in July, the Climate Change Commission recommended fixing this, reducing auction volumes to use up the stockpile polluters had built up, while raising the CCR trigger price so that it only triggered if the market hit truly absurd prices. At the time, I said that this would make a difference, and so be a real test for the government. We were going to see whose side Labour is really on: the planets, or the polluters'.

Well, Cabinet finally made a decision on this, and now we know: its the polluters:

Cabinet papers show the Government has gone against the advice of both the independent Climate Change Commission and Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

Shaw recommended following the commission’s advice and letting the price of carbon rise – and stopping pumping extra credits into the market so frequently. That would have given big polluters more incentive to rein in planet-heating emissions, as heat waves, floods and droughts keep worsening.

Instead, Cabinet has chosen to allow only small, inflation-linked price rises.

But its worse than that, because they're also not cutting the auction volume, while handing over more free credits to polluters. Which makes yesterday's projections of a small but useful cut in emissions by 2035 a bit of a joke: the government has just ensured that won't happen.

As for Labour's "nuclear-free moment", and it's "climate emergency", they were both lies. This government is deliberately trying to keep emissions high. They're just climate criminals, hostis humani generis. And we need to vote them out on their arses next election, and replace them with a government who will actually confront our biggest problem, rather than desperately trying to preserve the rotten, polluting status quo.

Climate Change: Another baby step to decarbonisation

In 2018 the government banned issuing new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. It was the first baby step towards decarbonisation, essentially cutting off part of the pathway to new supply, gradually phasing out the industry. And it has worked - there were 22 offshore exploration permits in 2018, and now there are only four (the number of onshore permits has also reduced from nine to six). The fossil fuel pipeline is being slowly closed off. So now the government has announced the next baby-step: banning onshore exploration:

In a continuation of the Government's staged phase-out of fossil fuel exploration in New Zealand, Energy Minister Megan Woods will pause the issuance of any new oil and gas permits until after next year's election.

[...]

The fate of the next onshore block offer has been uncertain for the better part of a year, amidst mounting evidence that the world cannot exploit most known fossil fuel reserves without blasting past the 1.5C and even 2C temperature goals.

Now Woods said she will pause any further block offers until the next Parliamentary term.

"“I am not committing to any further block offers now. Decisions will be made early in the next Parliamentary term when there will be a better evidence base of future demand," she said.

Which is good, but before anyone gets too enthusiastic, this is basicly an extension of the existing policy (which has seen only three new onshore permits issued since the ban, and no new block offers), and it is only until the election (meaning that they might reverse it afterwards). In other words, rather than actually doing something, they're playing the usual mealy-mouthed chickenshit game and not actually committing. And this is a policy they need to commit to. If we are to survive the climate crisis, that means no new gas, oil or coal, which means cutting that pipeline now. But more than that, it means phasing out existing fossil fuel production and banning imports of these destructive, environmentally damaging substances. And that means setting a date or dates to kill this industry. Sooner is better, but the mere act of setting a date will give us all certainty about the need for change and let us move forward.

Instead of doing what is necessary, Labour is trying to cling to the past and trying to pretend that nothing needs to change. And this makes them little different from the dirty climate deniers in National and ACT.

Fiji's election "anomaly"

Fijians went to the polls yesterday in the third post (latest) coup election. In the leadup to the poll, the (now elected) coup regime arrested opposition candidates and there were allegations that regime Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum had visisted the ballot-printing centre and ordered the CCTV cameras turned off while he was there. Last night, the release of initial results was delayed. And then this happened:

Initial results indicated a strong, then very strong showing for opposition parties, before the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) advised of issues with the provisional count at around midnight last night.

Elections supervisor Mohammad Saneem held a press conference late in the evening, saying the FEO had detected an anomaly in the system.

"To cure this, Fijian Elections Office had to review the entire mechanism through which we were pushing our results," Mr Saneem said.

[...]

The updated provisional results published early this morning, with about 60 per cent of polling venues counted, showed a surge in votes for the incumbent ruling party.

Fiji First, led by incumbent Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, was narrowly ahead with 45 per cent of votes when the FEO announced it would stop processing provisional results this morning.

All of which invites the suspicion that the "anomaly" was that the wrong people were winning, and that the regime chose the Mexican solution: a "computer problem" followed by new results. And the opposition is already planning to challenge the results on exactly that basis (whether they'll get justice in regime courts with regime judges is another question).

There are international observers present, so it will be very interesting to see what they have to say about this "anomaly", and about whether the poll was free and fair and the results honest.

Freedom comes to Barbados

Last year, Barbados they threw out the colonial monarchy. And now, they've legalised gay sex:

A top court in Barbados has struck down colonial-era laws that criminalize gay sex, becoming the third nation in the conservative Caribbean region to do so this year.

The ruling issued Monday by the Barbados high court is a pivotal moment for activists and non-profit organizations who have long fought against such laws on the eastern Caribbean island, including one that demands up to a life sentence for gay men found guilty of having sex.

“It’s gone from a certain ripple effect to a tidal wave in the Caribbean, which is what everyone involved set out to achieve,” said Téa Braun, chief executive of the London-based Human Dignity Trust, a human rights organization.

There's now only 6 countries in the Americas which still criminalise gay sex, and only 67 in the world. This sadly includes far too many in our own region - Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands and Niue all criminalise gay sex, though like Barbados none really enforce it. But as in Barbados, the mere existence of such a law is discriminatory and stigmatises LGBTQ people. It would be nice if these countries followed through on their promises of legalisation.

Another example

Last week, I asked "why won't Labour keep its promises" when implementing them would be overwhelmingly popular with voters? And today, we have another example: climate change. According to a poll in the Herald today, 60% of kiwis think the government should be taking stronger action on climate change - and its 70% in the 25 - 34 demographic. And yet they're dragging their feet on pricing agricultural emissions, and have just introduced legislation to increase pollution subsidies in the Emissions Trading Scheme - the opposite of what the public wants.

Again, this suspicion that the government is working for lobbyists and donors, rather than the people who elect them. Again, it undermines trust in both Labour and the political system. And again, it means that people who care about climate change have no reason to vote for Labour. And given that climate change is a significant issue, which is only going to grow in salience as the climate crisis gets worse, that cannot be good news for the Labour party.

Good riddance

Its the end of the political year, and with an election coming up, the pre-election retirements have started. Paul Eagle is going, and that's good, because he was a waste of space who spent his time as an MP trying to become mayor of Wellington, rather than doing his job. But the retirement I'm most glad to see is Aupito William Sio. In case anyone has forgotten, Aupito was a rabid opponent of marriage equality, protesting against it alongside people who compared gay people to animals, demanding that the bill be withdrawn, and ultimately voting against it. And as of last year, he regrets none of it. The man is a bigot who panders to the worst bigots in our community. And our parliament is better off without him.

Now can Damien O'Connor fuck off too please?

Bad faith all the way down

When the government created state-owned enterprises in the 1980's, Māori were concerned. Land stolen from them could be transferred to these SOEs, and effectively put beyond the reach of future treaty settlements. So the New Zealand Māori Council took the government to court, and won a landmark ruling that that the government had to safeguard Māori interests. As part of the settlement of this case, the government agreed to pass legislation making land transferred to SOEs subject to a permanent right of resumption if ordered by the Waitangi Tribunal.

While the law was passed,it wasn't used, with iwi preferring to negotiate with the government rather than go to court. Until 2010, when a Wairarapa hapu decided that it wanted its land back. That land was on the Waikato river, had been stolen by the government from other iwi before being gifted to the Wairarapa group, and is the location of a pretty important power station, so its a complicated case which has been in court for over a decade. But on Friday the Supreme Court finally ruled on it, declaring that it was a problem for the Waitangi Tribunal to sort out. Which seems sensible: they're the appropriate body with the specialist knowledge to determine who, if anyone, the land should be returned to. And that's ultimately what the 1987 settlement envisioned: the Waitangi Tribunal would consider claims, and order return if required.

But the government isn't going to let that happen. In the interim they've negotiated a settlement with the "large natural grouping" the hapu belong to. Naturally, it includes the usual clause declaring the crumbs the government gives back to be a full and final settlement of all historical claims and cancelling all the resumptive memorials allowing land to be returned. In effect, kill the process, keep the land, and fuck you. They've done this despite advice from the Waitangi Tribunal not to do it, and despite pointy questions from the Legislation Design and Advisory Committee (LDAC - an independent body which oversees legislation to stop this sort of thing) about why they're legislating when the court process is still ongoing (rather than, say, removing the case from the settlement so it can take its course). And they're ramming it through tomorrow, just to make sure everyone knows that Māori will never get their land back except by the grace and favour of the government, and that while the law says they have legal rights, in reality they have none at all.

It is difficult to see this as anything other than a tremendous exercise of bad faith, which effectively overturns the 1987 SOE court settlement and makes the promise of resumption a lie. As for the Treaty "partnership", is it really a "partnership" when one party calls the shots without consulting or considering the other? And of course its another ongoing Treaty breach. And I can't think of a better way of undermining the entire settlement process than this.

(OTOH, it is also going to undermine the concept of "full and final" settlements. A settlement is not full and final unless the victims agree it is, and continue to agree that it is. Effectively, they're only final by ongoing Māori goodwill. And the government's weaponisation of settlement legislation is likely to significantly erode that goodwill...)

This is unjust. It is wrong. It is stupid. The government should not do it.

Another useful OIA decision

Back in June I asked Ministry of Health for information about long covid. At the time, I was challenging extensions, and Ministry of Health knew it, so they tried a new tactic: on the due date, they sent me this:

Pursuant to section 15(1)(a) of the Act, the Ministry is writing to advise you that a decision has been made on your request; however, it will take us some time to prepare the information for release. As it stands, some information will be withheld under the following section 9(2)(a) of the Act. We will send you the information by 11 August 2022.

Which smelled a lot like a 20 working day extension by another name, so I complained to the Ombudsman. Today, they issued their final opinion on the question. The short version: Ministry of Health hadn't actually made a decision, and even if they had, the delay before actually releasing the documents would have been unreasonable. There's some useful stuff in there about what actually constitutes a "decision": they need to actually decide what will be released and what will be withheld, and the specific grounds for the latter, as well as complete any consultation and review involved (the discussion there makes it clear that Ministry of Health's claim to have made a decision was an outright lie, and it was just a shameless grab for more time). There's also useful guidance on exactly when a delay between decision and release will be reasonable - basicly, when its huge. And 6 documents totalling 20 pages doesn't remotely qualify.

Ministry of Health has been ordered to apologise, and I guess I can add that to my collection. But more importantly: another dodgy tactic has been squelched at the outset, before it could become established. And that's ultimately why I challenge: because otherwise, the government would get away with shit like this, and the system wouldn't even pretend to work.

(As for the actual information, the documents they released are here, and my commentary is here).

Why won't Labour keep its promises?

Back in 2017, Jacinda Ardern promised "There will be no new mines on conservation land". NZ First stopped her from doing it in her first term, but since winning an absolute majority in the 2020 election Labour has refused to move on it - and has explicitly voted down a bill which would implement that promise. So why? Its not as if keeping conservation land for conservation is unpopular. Quite the opposite:

But a new poll commissioned by Forest and Bird found the majority of Kiwis (66 percent) think the Government should implement its 2017 promise to stop new mines on public conservation land. Sixteen of the respondents disagreed and eighteen percent were undecided.

That's a pretty big public mandate, and more people than voted for Labour and the Greens in 2020. Actually keeping their promise would be a popular move. So why won't Labour do it? Do they work for their voters, or just for a small clique of big donors?

This sort of betrayal undermines trust in the Labour Party, and in the political system as a whole. It builds the impression that politicians are just liars. But its also a driver behind Labour's fall in the polls. After all, Labour clearly doesn't care about its voters. So why should they care whether Labour stays in government?

Putting the environment in the BORA

Since the 1970's there has been a growing recognition that environmental rights are part of - and necessary for - human rights. The 1972 Stockholm Declaration began its principles with a statement that "Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being". More recently, the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment was formally recognised by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2021, and by the UN General Assembly in July. And now, Green MP Julie Anne Genter has a member's bill to recognise it in the BORA.

The bill itself is simple, and adds a new section 18A to the BORA, with the UN-recognised language: "Everyone has the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment". If it passes, then laws would have to be assessed for consistency with the right, and laws could be declared to be inconsistent and the declaration referred to Parliament so the law can be corrected.

What this would mean in practice would depend significantly on the standard of scrutiny adopted by the courts and the degree of latitude they grant to the executive. On that front, the courts have already said that climate change policy requires the highest level of scrutiny because of its impacts; less significant issues will likely have a lower standard (just as the right to be free from torture has a higher standard of scrutiny than the right to be free from discrimination). Being inconsistent with the right is likely to be a high bar to cross. So as with the BORA, a lot of the actual impact would come from the pre-legislative scrutiny, forcing the government to run a stricter environmental ruler over policy before introducing legislation, and from the courts interpreting existing legislation in order to be consistent with the right. And given how much change that process has led to in e.g. public order or search and seizure law, having it happen to environmental law is likely to be significant. So I'm hoping this gets drawn from the ballot next year.

Drawn

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

• Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Shared Leave) Amendment Bill (Nicola Willis)

The bill allows paid parental leave to be split between carers of a child and taken at the same time. Which isn't necessarily a terrible idea, but I'd rather just see a straight-up expansion.

There were 69 bills in the ballot today.