The same-sex marriage battle in Australia

There's a couple of interesting stories today about the same-sex marriage battle in Australia. First, a piece in Green-Left Weekly about the revolt of the Labor grassroots on the issue. The Australian Labor Party formally opposes same-sex marriage, preferring to pander to conservatives - but 74% of their voters support it. By any measure, the party is wildly out of step with its voters. And as a result, we're seeing an increasing number of MPs, faction leaders and powerbrokers coming out in support of marriage equality to protect their own political futures.

Secondly, there's a couple of articles in the Sydney-Morning Herald about the political geography of same-sex marriage. From the summary:

Roy Morgan Research survey data shows areas with the most positive attitudes towards gays include inner-city electorates such as the Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese's Grayndler in Sydney's inner-west and affluent Liberal seats in Sydney, such as Wentworth and North Sydney, as well as Melbourne's Kooyong and Higgins.

Seats with the most negative attitudes include Liberal and Nationals country strongholds and some working-class Labor seats in big cities' outer suburbs.

Which is what you'd expect. But the study also shows that marginal seats are highly concentrated in areas with between 25 and 34 percent bigots. And its these people the ALP leadership are trying to pander to in taking a conservative approach. Rather than standing up for progressive principles, they are instead adopting a "small target" strategy and not giving people a reason to vote against them - with gays as the victims. Its an utterly despicable strategy, and if the ALP continues with it, they deserve to be rejected by their own base.

Credit where credit is due

I've blogged a bit over the last year about how our MPs earn their poor reputation through their self-serving behaviour and sense of entitlement. But I think its also important to highlight where they do the opposite, and take positive steps towards a more accountable and transparent Parliamentary culture. And we're seeing just such steps around MP's international travel perk thanks to Pansy Wong.

Lets be clear: the international travel discount for MPs is a completely unnecessary perk. It serves no Parliamentary purpose. It does not enable MPs to do their jobs (if they need to travel overseas for Parliamentary purposes, they can get free travel for it). All it does is give them cheap foreign holidays on the taxpayer. It is not compensation for low wages - MPs start at $131,000 (plus a $15,000 expense allowance, which puts them in the top 5% of the income distribution. It is a rort, pure and simple.

The good thing is that we are seeing party leaders and backbench MPs stepping forward to say so and call for change. Phil Goff. Rodney Hide. Metiria Turei. Even Peter Dunne. Among backbenchers we have Tau Henare, Heather Roy and Chris Hipkins. The odd man out is John Key, who is (as usual) waiting to do some polling before he makes a commitment (though said polling is amongst his Cabinet Ministers; I'm sure he knows what the public thinks on the issue).

They are right to do so. This perk is a pure rort, with absolutely no justification. And as Metiria Turei points out, it undermines public trust in Parliament. Getting rid of it would be a step in the right direction, a move to restore that trust. The question is whether the Speaker of the House will accept that, or continue to cling to the culture of privilege and entitlement of the past.

New Fisk

Canberra, Ankara and other 'fake' capitals

When will this end?

Julianne Shead was a farm-worker. In June 2009 she went on parental leave after becoming pregnant. So her boss fired her.

Her former employer has just had to pay $13,750 (including $8250 in lost wages and $5500 for hurt and humiliation) for that, but you really have to ask: how long is this going to go on? It's been illegal now for thirty years. And yet employers still keep doing it. How long will it take to get the message into their thick skulls that this sort of discrimination is simply not acceptable?

New Fisk

How Lebanon can't escape the shadow of Hariri's murder

We should not tolerate fraudsters in our Parliament

At a press conference a few minutes ago, Pansy Wong's press secretary apparently said she would resign from parliament. It was a slip-up - she's only resigning as a Minister - but its a shame. Because resigning from Parliament is exactly what she should have done.

Let's be clear about this: Wong abused her Parliamentary travel perk to the tune of thousands of dollars (and that's just the incident we know about). And that is fraud, or more technically, using a document for pecuniary advantage. We should not tolerate this. We should not tolerate fraudsters sitting in our Parliament.

Now doubt she'll pay the money back. But so (eventually) do the benefit fraudsters who get dragged through the court every week. That doesn't stop them from facing justice for their crime. We cannot have one rule for politicians and another for the poor. If the investigation currently underway by the Speaker's Office confirms Wong's admission of abuse, then she must be prosecuted.

Update: Ah yes, here we are: the Speaker's office solemnly confirms that Wong will repay the money "in the event that there has been misuse of this entitlement". No mention though of whether they would refer misuse to the police. That's simply not good enough. The Speaker's office should be promoting high standards in the use of public money. And that means prosecutions for serious abuse.

An Orwellian solution

Back in the early 2000's, Israel had a problem. Its policy of assassinating high-ranking Palestinians was drawing international condemnation. So they engaged a team of spin-doctors, and started calling them "targeted killings" instead.

It seems the New Zealand Police have adopted the same tactics to "deal" with the problem of the increased death toll from police chases. The police's policy of aggressively pursuing anyone who flees, on the basis that "they must have something to hide" (despite the empirical evidence showing that this is hardly ever the case) has cost 15 lives so far this year. But rather than accept the recommendations of the Independent Police Conduct Authority to change the policy and pursue only when the actual risk to public safety outweighs the risks of a high-speed pursuit, they have decided instead to simply stop referring to them as chases.

Meanwhile, a police chase in Lower Hutt last night has put another person in critical condition in hospital. The police are still risking our lives with lawless and dangerous behaviour. Its time they were stopped. Its time the IPCA started laying charges against officers who make poor pursuit decisions.

Sacked

So, it turns out that Pansy Wong used her Parliamentary travel allowance for her little business trip to China - a trip in which she failed to properly seperate her public and private roles. This is expressly against the Speaker's Directions [PDF], which state explicitly that

no rebate is payable in respect of any travel undertaken by the member for private business purposes

And so as a result Wong looks likely to be dumped as a Minister.

So much for Bill English's claim that this was just muckraking. Wong corruptly abused her Parliamentary entitlements to enrich herself. And there's a name for that: fraud. But no doubt, she'll just pay the money back, and everyone will forget about it. Meanwhile, if any one of us abused the system to falsely claim a benefit worth thousands of dollars, they'd be being prosecuted. But I guess justice only applies to "little people"...

The Pacific Solution is illegal

In 2001, in the wake of the Tampa Affair, the racist Australian government hit on a simple solution to its refugee "problem": they excised all their offshore islands from Australia's "migration zone", denying anyone who arrived in them illegally the right to apply for permanent refugee status or to have decisions about them reviewed by the courts.

Today, Australia's High Court unanimously ruled that that was unlawful. The entire process is a violation of natural justice and basic principles of judicial oversight. The fact that it applied only to those who arrived by boat - a method which produces bad publicity for the government - rather than the much larger number who arrive quietly by plane simply underlines this.

Its great news, and a victory for the rule of law in Australia, not to mention for common decency. The question is whether Australia's politicians will accept it, or whether they will continue to indecently pander to racists.

There's some interesting background on the case by David Marr in the Sydney Morning Herald here.

Dirty lakes

The government has a simple plan for economic growth: more cows. But what's the environmental cost? A report released this week - apparently suppressed until after the World Dairy Summit in Auckland had wrapped up - gave us a hint: dirty lakes:

Some of the country's filthiest lakes have been revealed – with a report suggesting that as many as a third may be unhealthy.

Environment Minister Nick Smith has used the report to sound a warning that New Zealand's clean, green brand is at risk and says it is unacceptable that more lakes are deteriorating in water quality than are improving.

The Niwa report provides only a snapshot of the country's waterways as it surveys just 112 of New Zealand's 4000 lakes, with only 68 reliably monitored since 2005.

But the authors believe the sample is enough to suggest things are getting worse in many lakes.

Their report shows that 19 lakes deteriorated over the survey period while eight showed improvement.

The problem was worst in Canterbury, where many of the 19 lakes that were deteriorating were found. But water quality was worst in low and intensively farmed areas such as Waikato and Manawatu.

Our lakes and rivers can barely cope with the amount of piss and shit our cows are pumping out as it is. And the government wants to more than double it. That's profitable for dairy farmers - but those profits will come straight out of the pockets of other New Zealanders, who will have to either pay to clean farmer's shit out of our waterways, or stop using them. National's "growth" is just an environmental wealth transfer, from us to its supporters.

Drawn

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

• Register of Pecuniary Interests of Judges Bill (David Clendon)

Given the recent debate about Justice Wilson, its a very timely bill, which will hopefully pass.

For some reason Labour only put one bill in today - Darren Hughes' bill to lower the drink-drive limit. Apparently they thought that increasing its odds from 1 in 40 to 1 in 25 was worth it, even at the cost of sacrificing all othe chances to advance policy. I disagree. Quite apart from wanting to see some of those other bills come out, when National is putting up bills with ominous titles like "Habeus Corpus Amendment Bill" (Habeas Corpus is the courts right to review why people are held in jail) or "Summary Proceedings (Warrant for Detention Conditions) Amendment Bill", then that's not something Labour should be doing.

Update: Red Alert has a full list of today's bills here.

Foreshore & seabed: Sinking...

It looks like prospects for the government's Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Bill are sinking fast, with the Iwi Leadership Group - a clique of powerful iwi leaders - rejecting it:

There is increasing division among Maori about it, with the leader of one of the most powerful tribes in the country saying it doesn't go far enough, and the pressure's starting to tell on the Maori Party which admits the bill may not pass.

Ngai Tahu leader Mark Solomon steers the waka for one of the biggest tribes in the country and he has delivered a message on the Government's new foreshore and seabed law: it's not going to work.

Mr Solomon's word carries serious weight; he spearheads the powerful Iwi Leadership Group which represents over 50 tribes.

The problem? The bill's test to gain customary rights is too difficult to meet. Iwi and hapu will have to prove not just that they owned and used an area or foreshore in 1840, but that they have continued to do so ever since. There's an obvious flaw in this test, and that is that if the crown has prevented the iwi or hapu from exercising their rights - for example, by stealing their land - then they are gone forever. In other words, the test stacks the deck in favour of the crown, allowing them to embed and legitimise past Treaty of Waitangi violations. You don't have to be Hone Harawira to recognise that this is unjust and wrong.

As for what this means, with the Iwi Leadership Group opposed the Māori Party are going to have a very tough time supporting the bill. Which means that if National sticks to its rhetoric on refusing to change it in any way, then it will likely fail.

The rednecks will no doubt cheer at that. But they shouldn't cheer too soon. The failure of this bill will not mean the issue goes away. Like the broader Treaty debate, it will never go away until Māori get justice. Instead, it will just mean that it gets relitigated through the coalition process at the next election. And with the expected demise of ACT, the Māori Party are likely to have a much stronger hand then, not to mention be much more willing to play hardball after the failure of their "doormat" strategy. Which will likely mean a much better bill for them.

In other words, Māori seem to have very little to lose by holding out for a fairer deal. As for the rednecks, this may be the best deal they can ever get. They should be careful what they wish for, because they might very well get it.

A question

If our politicians can't even read the right speeches, how can we trust them to guard our fundamental human rights?

That's a serious question, BTW. The Bill of Rights Act is explicitly predicated on the idea that our MPs know what they're doing. It allows Parliament to violate our fundamental rights, after they've been warned about doing so, because it assumes they're competent enough to judge the issue and make the decision.

Jonathan Coleman's little performance the other night, in which he read out the speech for a bill which passed over a year ago, ought to blow that idea right out of the water. These muppets read whatever is given to them, and don't even notice if its wrong. So much for the idea they're fit to judge on human rights. They're not judging at all.

If Parliament won't consider our legislation properly, its time we gave the job to someone who will. Its time we got an enforceable Bill of Rights Act, which allows the courts to overturn legislation inconsistent with fundamental rights. That way, at least, we'll know that someone is paying attention.

Justice for torture in the UK?

Over the weekend we learned that British interrogators in Iraq had been torturing people with beatings, starvation, stress positions and electric shocks. Now, some of them look likely to be prosecuted for it:

A number of British military interrogators may face war crimes charges after members of their unit filmed themselves while threatening and abusing Iraqi detainees at a secret prison near Basra, the high court heard today.

The men have been referred to the Director of Service Prosecutions (DSP) after an investigation considered whether they had breached the International Criminal Court Act, which prohibits war crimes.

The referral was accompanied by "a recommendation that he consider charges under the 2001 Act", Philip Havers QC, counsel for the Ministry of Defence, told the court. He added that Article 8 of the act defines and prohibits a number of actions as war crimes, including "committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment".

Of course, the DSP is hardly neutral; they should be being referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions instead. But this is at least a start. And hopefully, everyone involved will end up facing justice for what they've done.

Challenging prisoner disenfranchisement

In my earlier post, I suggested that the passage of Paul Quinn's Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill should result in a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee under the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR. So how would someone do this?

Firstly, a complainant would need to demonstrate that a right affirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has been violated. That bit is easy. Article 25 of the ICCPR requires that every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity to vote. The HRC has previously held, in a general comment on the right to vote, that the right to vote can only be denied on objective and reasonable grounds, and that

If conviction for an offence is a basis for suspending the right to vote, the period of such suspension should be proportionate to the offence and the sentence.

This suggests that a blanket ban on voting by everyone in prison would not be considered proportionate or reasonable - an interpretation upheld in court cases over the issue in Europe and Canada.

The real barrier is administrative. In order for a complaint to be admissible, the complainant must have exhausted all domestic remedies. The HRC notes in its FAQ on the complaint system that

This usually includes pursuing your claim through the local court system, and you should be aware that mere doubts about the effectiveness of such action do not, in the committees' view, dispense with this requirement.

Which means that while section 4 of the BORA effectively rules out any remedy through the courts, a challenge would have to go through the process anyway, and likely appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court, in order for the HRC to accept a complaint.

This would cost a fortune, but the real problem is that that takes time - so much time that the sort of prisoner whose challenge would be most effective, someone imprisoned for a very short period of time around an election, would have been released by the time the appeals process was complete. Meaning that appeals and/or any complaint could be dismissed because the point was effectively moot.

This is what the government is relying on: a judicial process so long and expensive that it effectively insulates them from international scrutiny of a serious human rights violation. And that is a serious failing of both our courts, and the international human rights system.

Protest works

For the past six months, residents of the lower South Island have been fighting to save their local neurosurgery service. The campaign has seen public meetings and protests, and has attracted mass support. Ten thousand people attended a protest march in Dunedin on the issue in August, while 55,000 people signed a petition to Parliament asking for local neurosurgery services to be retained. And today, they won, with the Director-General of Health announcing that the service will be retained in Dunedin.

The lesson in this is that protest works. If you get enough people to scream loudly enough, the government has to listen, if only out of fear for their electoral future. Remember that next time they do something you don't like, and organise!

Movement on judicial transparency?

Earlier in the year, Green MP Kennedy Graham put his Register of Pecuniary Interests of Judges Bill [PDF], which would force members of the judiciary to disclose their interests and hence their potential conflicts of interest, into the ballot. Now, thanks to the demise of former Justice Wilson, it looks like the government may adopt the idea.

This is a good move. Like politicians, judges are in a position of power and subject to potential conflicts of interest. And like politicians, we can't just trust them to behave honourably. While I have a lot more confidence in our judges than I do in our MPs, the integrity of our justice system is not something we should have to take on faith. We should be able to know that everything is above-board. And that means being able to scrutinise the interests of judges to ensure they do not behave in a corrupt fashion.

OTOH, I'm not sure how far we can trust Attorney-General Chris Finlayson on this. He's pointed at the Law Commission's review of the Judicature Act (which governs the structure and operation of the courts) as a vehicle for advancing this, but the Law Commission explicitly states that

It is not intended that the review will revisit major matters of policy underlying the present legislation.

So, either that intention has changed, or Finlayson is just giving us the brush off and continuing to protect the powerful from democratic scrutiny. Which is it?

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, one of the last for the year. Unfortunately we're well into the late-term logjam, where the Order paper is blocked by the later stages of bills sent to select committee early on, and so there won't be much overall progress.

First up is the committee stage of Paul Quinn's Electoral (Disqualification of Sentenced Prisoners) Amendment Bill, an appalling piece of legislation which would prohibit anyone in prison from voting. Quinn has introduced an amendment to patch the select committee's drafting error, which would have seen a bill about banning prisoners from voting actually allow it for anyone imprisoned prior to its passage, but the core problem - that it bans people from voting in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, in violation of the Bill of Rights Act and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, remains. If this passes, it will hopefully result in a test case followed by a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee under the ICCPR's First Optional Protocol (to which we are a party). Which means international humiliation. But Quinn either isn't planning on being in government to deal with that (HRC cases take years), or he just views it as another excuse to bang his drum and whip up hate.

Once that's done, we have the last half hour of the second reading of Heather Roy's Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill, followed by the second reading Tau Henare's Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill. There's a common link between all these bills, and its spite - spite towards prisoners, spite towards students, and spite towards unions. If this is how government MPs use power, then I pity whoever was at school with them.

If we're lucky, we might, just might, get started on Sue Kedgley's Animal Welfare (Treatment of Animals) Amendment Bill. But with the Order paper blocked up by all those second readings, we're unlikely to see a ballot anytime soon.

Britain's Abu Ghraib

Back in 2004, the world was shocked by graphic evidence of torture and abuse by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now it looks like the British have their own version:

Evidence of systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as the UK's Abu Ghraib emerged today during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was informed that there is evidence detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT).

It also received allegations that JFIT's prisoners were beaten and forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say they were subjected to sexual humiliation by female soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Starvation. Beatings. Sleep deprivation. Electric shocks. This is clearly torture, it is clearly a war crime, and it is clearly illegal under both UK and international law. Those responsible must be uncovered and prosecuted. Those in power who turned a blind eye or condoned it must be dragged screaming into the light of day and held to account. Instead, of course, they're arguing that they should be allowed to investigate it themselves, and stage the usual cosy whitewash (which no-one will believe). Hopefully, the UK courts won't let them.

More futility

Yesterday the government released its latest progress report [PDF] in its "war on P", in which it trumpeted its "progress". Apparently, police are seizing more P and arresting and convicting more people for using or selling it than ever before. This is interpreted as "progress", a positive sign, but its not - its just a cost of doing business. What matters is price, purity, and availability. And all of those indicators show no change whatsoever.

According to the report, the median retail price of P is $100g / point - exactly where it was 4 years ago. There has been "no significant change" in purity according to users - something the report masks by refusing to give statistics on the purity of samples seized by police. As for availability, it has "been largely stable in recent years". Which means that all those arrests, seizures and convictions are making no difference at all where it matters: to users trying to buy P on the street.

Albert Einstein famously said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That's exactly what the government is doing in its "war on P". It just keeps banging its head against the brick wall, and expecting it to move this time.

I don't have an answer to this problem, but I know that what the government is doing isn't it. Time to try something new.