Polluters should pay

Yesterday, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment released a report on Changing behaviour: Economic instruments in the management of waste, which examined the use of economic instruments in dealing with rubbish in New Zealand. For those who don't know, an "economic instrument" is policy-wonk-speak for "putting a price on something" - like, for example, the now abandoned carbon tax, which would have put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from everyone except farmers. The core concept here is a simple one: "polluter pays". Those engaged in activities which damage the environment, like emitting greenhouse gases or generating waste, should pay the full cost of their activities, rather than being allowed to dump them on wider society.

Unfortunately, the New Zealand government, and in particular the Ministry for the Environment, have been stunningly bad at applying this principle to waste. While the New Zealand Waste Strategy clearly envisions the use of economic instruments, MfE seems to have rejected them, and has instead relied on voluntary measures, which basically do not work. So our polluters get to continue polluting, and we get to effectively subsidise them by paying their extended costs. This doesn't encourage them to stop polluting (quite the opposite in fact), and so we are seeing more and more waste being generated.

(MfE's position is even more surprising when you consider that the New Zealand policy community has basically been obsessed with economic instruments since the 90's - a trend MfE has participated in to the full. For example, economic instruments have played a central role in the various climate change policies they have developed over the last decade. So why is waste immune to this trend?)

The PCE takes the government to task for this, and recommends that it start using economic instruments at a national level to discourage the generation of waste, as well as free up local governments to run their own schemes at a local level. And they're right; polluters should pay for ruining our environment. But given its inaction so far, I'm not sure whether the government is actually interested in acting, or whether they have already decided that it would be "bad for business" to make them pay for what they do.

Watching the mighty fall

Tony Blair's top fundraiser, Lord Levy, has been arrested and bailed in connection with New Labour's "cash for peerages" scandal. This doesn't just signify that the British police really are serious about pursuing political corruption within the government, it also (as The Independent points out) lays a trail that leads all the way to Blair. Levy is one of Blair's closest friends, and his tennis partner. It is unlikely that he would be making promises of peerages in exchange for large loans to the Labour Party without Blair's approval.

The BBC's Nick Robinson speculates that this might finally be the issue which brings Blair down (a view shared by The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland). I'd like to see it, but I really expect him to simply brazen it out and pretend that nothing wrong has occured, just as he has with Iraq. It all depends really on whether his fellow MPs are sick of the rotting smell emanating from Downing Street, or whether they once again fall for the argument that "Tony wins elections" and are willing to look past even a criminal corruption probe in the hope of electoral victory. In the meantime, Lord Levy is a pretty big fish, and I'm goign to sit here and enjoy the glee of watching the mighty fall.

More collective punishment

Last night, Hizbollah raided an Israeli military outpost and captured two Israeli soldiers. In response, Israel invaded Lebanon. Now, they're entitled to attempt to recover their missing men, but rather than taking limited action with special forces etc, they're indiscriminately bombing bridges and roads, and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert has promised "very painful and far-reaching" against Lebanon unless the captives are freed. The "strategy" then seems to be exactly the same as it is in Gaza: bomb infrastructure, destroy civilian targets, and generally smash things up in an attempt to make life miserable not for the guerillas, but for the broader Lebanese populace (who are innocent bystanders in the whole thing). When non-state actors do this, we call it "terrorism" - and that is exactly what we should call it when Israel does it as well.

New Fisk

Soft words - and hard questions

A victory for international law, or a smokescreen?

The US has announced that it will treat all detainees in accordance with the Geneva Conventions' Common Article 3, which bans torture, inhumane treatment, and kangaroo courts. This appears to be a victory for international law, and for the faction within the US military who have not abandoned decency in a short-sighted pursuit of vengance. On the other hand, the memo [PDF] itself states that

aside from the military commission procedures, existing DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders, and doctrine comply with the standards of Common Article 3...

Which is simply wrong. Just to point out the obvious, existing US policy allows strapado, waterboarding, threatening with dogs, and prolonged isolation - all of which expressly violate the Common Article 3 ban on "cruel treatment and torture" and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment". When members of the administration and top military lawyers are saying that this is not really a shift in policy, you have to wonder if this isn't just a smokescreen. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

Beyer next to go?

Georgina Beyer has announced that she expects to follow Jim Sutton into retirement before the next election, which will allow Labour to bring more new blood from the list. Meanwhile, Dianne Yates, who is frequently listed among those expected to go, has denied any intention to retire. Dover Samuels has announced he'll go at the next election, and Russell Fairbrother wants to stay, which means Labour's renewal hopes really depend on Jill pettis and Ann Hartley.

Meanwhile, its been suggested I do some quick and dirty analysis of what this means for the voting balance on conscience issues. In terms of potential outgoing MPs, a quick look at the CommoNZ voting database shows the potential outgoing MPs are all much of a muchness; they all voted for civil unions, they all voted against the marriage (Gender Clarification) Amendment Bill, and most voted against Death With Dignity. As for their potential replacements, there's a dearth of data. Lesley Soper (number 45 on the list, and next in after Charles Chauvel) has been in Parliament before, but has only been in one conscience vote (on raising the drinking age; she voted for). Assumptions can be made about Charles Chauvel based on his sexuality, but that's all they'd be. As for the next two on the list, Louisa Wall and Su'a William Sio, they're a closed book. I'd expect them all to be about as liberal as other Labour MPs (which is good enough for my purposes), but I really have nothing to go on.

It's a shame the renewal process isn't shuffling off some of Labour's real dinosaurs - but they all have safe electorates.

Downplaying equality

The government is downplaying yesterday's comments by Chris Carter that the government was looking at introducing legislation on gay adoption. Officials are indeed looking at the question, but

[Mark Burton] and Prime Minister Helen Clark's office were at pains to point out that gay adoption was not a specific term of reference for officials' work, nor was introducing legislation on the Government's agenda.

(Emphasis added)

I guess they're simply too afraid of Destiny Church (and Peter Dunne) to stand up for what they believe in...

Ngai Tahu's generosity

In 1991, the New Zealand government returned Bastion Point to its Ngati Whatua owners. And the first thing they did was give a substantial portion of it back to the people of Auckland to be used as a park. Now, Ngai Tahu is doing the same. Their 1997 settlement included three high country sheep stations around Lake Wakatipu, straddling the Greenstone and Caples tracks. Almost 90% of this area is now being leased or outright gifted back to the government, to ensure that the people of New Zealand have public access in perpetuity to this astounding scenic area.

It's a stunning act of generosity, especially in light of all that has happened. We fucked these people over for a hundred and fifty years, a fact acknowledged in the crown's apology to the iwi, and yet they are still willing to make this sort of gesture towards reconciliation and harmony.

I guess the very least I can say is "thankyou"...

Ahmed Zaoui Update: Hearing Delayed

The long-awaited hearings into Ahmed Zaoui's Security Risk Certificate, which were scheduled to start next month, have been delayed because the SIS has refused to provide information to its own "watchdog". They have also failed to provide a full summary of the allegations against Zaoui, making it impossible to mount any sort of defence. This is simply unacceptable. If this sort of foot-dragging happened in an ordinary court, then the SIS would face some harsh words from the judge, and the charges would be being thrown out for prosecutorial misconduct. But in the SIS's ad-hoc, kangaroo court, the "judge" works for them, and there are no "charges" - just an ever shifting series of allegations which will be endlessly raised, dropped, and raised again depending on the whim of the SIS. This makes a mockery of justice, and a mockery of Zaoui's right to natural justice under the BORA.

It has now been almost four years since Zaoui arrived in the country, and over a year since the Supreme Court made its final ruling on the background issues to his case - and the SIS still have not got their story straight. How much longer do they need? And how much longer is this embarrassment to our human rights record going to be allowed to drag on?

Justice sometimes takes time, but we are well past the stage of (re)establishing the basic ground rules here, and into the realm of simple foot dragging by the authorities. And where that happens, that other saying comes into effect: justice delayed is justice denied. The SIS clearly has no intention of allowing Zaoui to argue his case or rebut their "evidence", and in these circumstances, the government really only has one option: it should withdraw the Security Risk Certificate, and allow Zaoui to live here as a free man.

The cost of cold weather and the value of human life

The Dominion-Post has a followup-story on its weekend feature on the cost of cold weather, pointing out that the government spends twenty times as much on road safety as on insulating housing - despite winter illnesses exacerbated by substandard housing killing five times as many people as car accidents. It turns out the total insulation budget is higher than I thought - $5.4 million from EECA, and a $4 million scheme to upgrade state houses - but its still next to nothing compared to the scale of the problem. And this is shown by the modesty of its goals; EECA that there are 350,000 homes which lack ceiling insulation, and plans to upgrade a third of them - by 2016. But given that the amount of money involved is peanuts on a government scale (and it is; a $5 million program is chump change), that demand for subsidised upgrades massively outstrips supply, and the significant cost in human life, why not triple the funding and get them all done? It would result in significant savings in the health budget (other research points out that people in insulated homes go to hospital less often and take less days off work), as well as providing significant energy savings. And the latter makes it arguably exactly the sort of "bold goal" the government is looking for for its climate change policy...

This also allows us to calculate the value the government puts on a human life lost to cold weather: $5875 dollars. Whereas a life lost on the roads is valued at $620,000 - more than a hundred times as high. It will be interesting to hear the justification for this difference.

Finally, the article talks about the Sustainability Trust, which installs insulation in low-income homes in Porirua for $300. If you're wondering about similar services in your area, Dave Crampton has posted a helpful list here.

Government may adopt gay adoption bill

This morning's Herald reports that the government is giving "serious consideration" to introducing legislation on gay adoptions - or adopting Meyt's Adoption (Equity) Amendment Bill. According to Chris Carter, Meyt's bill

"has of course focused the Government's attention on the issue. I'm not the Minister of Justice so I wouldn't be prepared to say what we're doing, but I can confirm as a Cabinet minister that we are thinking about the issue seriously."

Of course, "thinking seriously" does not necessarily equate to action, but at the very least it shows that the progressives within Labour haven't given up without a fight.

The article also dispels a number of myths around gay adoption. There are already plenty of gay parents (by one means or another), and they seem to do no worse at raising their kids than straights. The law doesn't forbid gay adoption; single people of any sexuality face no legal barriers at all. The problem is solely around joint adoption being restricted to married couples, and it really is because the bill was written in the 50's, back when those were the only couples there were (or at least, the only couples our repressed society would deign to see). Given that we're now living in a far more diverse and open society, in which more and more people pursue their relationships without bothering to formalise them, this needs to be changed, if only to keep up with the times and recognise the facts on the ground. Finally, it points out the obvious: that the kids of gay parents do not necessarily grow up gay (though I'm not sure why it would matter if they did). I would expect then to be less likely to grow up bigots, and more likely to see gay families as completely ordinary and normal - and I suspect that that is precisely what the fundamentalists are afraid of.

Carnival of the Green

The 35th Carnival of the Green is up at Ester Republic.

Reminder

Submissions on the Electoral (Reduction in Number of Members of Parliament) Amendment Bill are due in on Friday. If you think its too late to send hardcopy, you can always email your submission to SC-JE@parliament.govt.nz.

Submissions on the Human Tissue (Organ Donation) Amendment and Young Offenders (Serious Crimes) bills are due the same day.

The beginning of renewal?

After three elections in which its vote share held fairly steady and incumbents were protected by the list, Labour is looking a little long in the tooth. There has been little new blood introduced into the Parliamentary caucus, which is dangerous for the long term. So one of Labour's big challenges for this term is to find a way to renew itself in office, shuffling off some of the older time-servers and bringing in new talent via the list.

That process finally seems to have begun. Former trade minister Jim Sutton is expected to announce his immediate retirement today. He will be replaced by Charles Chauvel, a lawyer and former chairman of the AIDS foundation.

So, who's next to go then?

Charged

The US Army has charged four soldiers with rape and murder over the rape of a teenage girl and murder of her family in Mahmudiya in March. A fifth soldier has been charged with dereliction of duty for failing to report the crime. This is good news, as it shows the US is at least vaguely serious about prosecuting its war criminals - but given the way the US military's "justice" system works, we should wait for convictions and sentences before celebrating.

Whack-A-Mole

Craig Murray is the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was removed from his post after complaining too loudly about human rights abuses and torture in a country that was, at the time, considered a vital ally in the "war on terror". He's recently written a book, Murder in Samarkand, detailing his experiences there and the dirty deals done by the UK. As part of this, he has also published several documents released under the UK's Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts on his website, so that people can read the documentary record for themselves.

Or at least, that was the plan. Shortly after publication, he was contacted by a lawyer for the Foreign Office demanding that the documents be removed. The reason? While they've been released under the FOIA, they are still covered by Crown copyright, and the FCO sees any publication of embarassing documents as being unauthorised use.

Clearly, this makes a mockery of Britain's freedom of information law, whose entire point is to allow people to hold the government to account by gaining access to information and publicising it. But the authoritarian Blair government doesn't seem to care about that where there are dissenters to squash. Of course, this is the 21st century, and now we have the internet, and so the usual game of online whack-a-mole has begun.

I don't have space to host the documents myself, but they're up at Dahr Jamail, and at Blairwatch, and at Many Angry Gerbils. Or you can get a zip archive (12.8 MB) from Politics in the Zeros. There's even a Torrent available, for those who prefer to help distribute as well as downloading. Of course, all of this is illegal under British law - but when the government uses the law solely to silence its critics, that law deserves to be ignored.

Has Australia joined the Axis of Impunity?

Today's Sydney Morning Herald has an article about the one-sided extradition arrangement between the US and the UK, which are likely to see three British citizens tried in Texas under Texan law for a financial fraud committed in the UK. But the interesting bit is what is said in passing at the bottom:

(Australia itself, in a little-publicised concession several years ago, agreed to indemnify all US citizens against extradition to face charges before the International Criminal Court, even though Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has been a big fan of the court's establishment all along and has fought hard for it.)

Has Australia joined the Axis of Impunity? There's a story from The Australian from 2002 which suggests that the Australian government had at least agreed in principle to American impunity - but I can't find anything else. I'd love to hear if anyone has anything solid on this, so I can update my map.

The end of "homosexual panic"?

The Sunday Star-Times reports that Labour whip Tim Barnett is working on a bill to repeal the provocation defence for murder, which in recent years has seen at least two people who have murdered gays primarily because of their sexuality receive more lenient sentences on the basis that they were "provoked" and suffering from "homosexual panic". The upshot is to deny gays the full protection of the law, and to effectively licence their murder.

This law is an infamy which has to be erased, and I'm pleased to see Barnett is moving on it. While the law covers more than "homosexual panic", and includes things such as racial epithets or calling someone's mother a whore, the idea that these should somehow licence violence or excuse murder is simply untenable in this day and age. Those subjected to such "provocations" should exercise self-control like the rest of us, not beat someone to death and then expect to be rewarded for giving in to violence.

Twenty years of freedom

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Homosexual Law Reform. I'm actually too young to remember the event - I was more concerned with playing D&D than politics at that stage - but looking back, it was a landmark, and (along with the BORA and the Human Rights Act) one of the great triumphs of modern New Zealand liberalism - and one well worth celebrating. Homosexual Law Reform meant that gays no longer had to live in fear of being arrested for who they were - but it also marked the defeat of bigotry and intolerance in New Zealand. Oh, the bigots are still there - Pope Tamaki and his blackshirts are proof of that - but they are now very much on the fringes, rather than at the heart of power. This also is worth celebrating.

GayNZ has a series of features to mark the anniversary, including a look at what it was like before decriminalisation, a two-parter on the "Coalition of Concerned Citizens" and their obsession with shit and communists, and a piece on Fran Wilde, the MP who fronted the bill. The Sunday Star-Times also has a piece on how things have changed. Together, they paint a picture of an entirely alien New Zealand, where people were arrested and fired and ostacised for their sexuality. I am very glad I live in this New Zealand, rather than in that alien past.

We've come a long way since 1986, and gays now enjoy near-equality in the eyes of the law. But there is still work to be done. Civil Unions are not enough, and at some stage the Marriage Act must be reformed to allow full equality. More immediately, there is the question of gay adoption. This was left out of the recent reforms, with the result that gay couples cannot jointly adopt children. This isn't a question of who makes better parents - plenty of gays have kids, and single gays face no barrier to adoption - but rather one of a pointless and stupid hangover from the benighted past. It is long past time this was corrected, and there is now a bill in the ballot to do so. I look forward to it being drawn and passed.

The cost of cold weather

Researchers at Otago University have quantified the cost in human life of cold weather - and found that it kills more people than car accidents. An average of 1600 more people die in winter than in summer, compared to an annual road toll of around 370. While some of these deaths are no doubt unavoidable, the piece cites another Otago researcher as saying that simple measures such as insulation have a significant effect on health. The upshot? Many of these deaths are avoidable, if we make sure our homes are warm and dry enough.

This makes me angry. According to the estimates of appropriation for Vote: Police, the government will spend $227 million this year on road safety, with the primary purpose of lowering the death toll on our roads. And it's been successful; the road toll has halved since 1989. How much will we spend next year on installing insulation in uninsulated homes? A paltry $2 million. It's like air pollution - which similarly kills more people in Auckland than die on the roads there - there are obvious, basic measures which could be taken, but which are not funded because the deaths are invisible. Car crashes get on the news and in the papers, but there are no photo opportunities when a 4 year old dies of pneumonia due to cold, or a pensioner dies of emphysema or lung cancer due to particulate pollution.

This is something the government should so something about. The most vulnerable in our society are dying needlessly and preventably. It should value the lives of those people at exactly the same level it values road-crash victims, and commit to funding preventative measures accordingly.