Southland acts on dairy farming

Southland has a problem. Dirty dairying has produced a tide of cowshit, tainting Invercargill's water supply and threatening the internationally protected Waituna Lagoon. The good news is that Environment Southland has stepped up to solve the problem, by requiring all new dairy farms to have resource consent. Farmers, of course are outraged.

Its a good solution, which will limit the growth of the problem, but at the same time, its not enough. The core problem in Southland is that there are too many cows, producing too much shit. Now that its curbed future growth, Environment Southland needs to work on reducing cow numbers, and on making farmers mitigate the damage they do by fencing waterways, by riparian planting, and most of all by reducing stocking rates. And other councils need to follow their lead. This is a nationwide problem, which affects us all. Farmers are poisoning drinking water and polluting rivers in Canterbury, in Manawatu, and the Waikato. Its time they were forced to clean up their act everywhere, not just in Southland.

Drawn

A ballot for three member's bills was held today and the following bills were drawn:

• Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months Paid Leave) Amendment Bill (Sue Moroney)
• Illegal Contracts (Unlawful Limitation on Regulators’ Powers) Amendment Bill (Lianne Dalziel)
• Lobbying Disclosure Bill (Holly Walker)

Walker's bill (inherited from Sue Kedgeley) has been covered here.

There were a lot of new bills in the ballot today, especially from Labour, which now has 29 bills for 34 MPs. Many of those bills are reintroductions of bills raised last term, but there are some new ones as well which I'm looking forward to covering.

The full list is on Red Alert, here.

This will be amusing

Earlier in the week, the British government announced plans to monitor everything people did on the web, Big Brother style. GCHQ's spies (and perhaps others) would be able to snoop on who was talking to who, and what websites people were reading, in real time and without a warrant. ISPs would be required to log all internet data for two years in order to allow it to be easily retrieved should the spies want to delve deeper. They're backing away from those plans now, in the face of widespread outrage, but in the meantime some enterprising person has decided to see if the government really believes in the policy, by lodging a Freedom of Information Act request for all of the Home Secretary's internet traffic data for the past twelve months. Emails sent, emails received, skype calls made, web pages viewed - exactly what the Home Secretary wants the spies to be able to view.

The request will almost certainly be refused. And that in itself will speak volumes about the British government's double standard on privacy.

Voting against democracy

Two years ago, the National Party repealed democracy in Canterbury, replacing the elected Canterbury Regional Council with a clique of unelected dictators. Last night, Labour finally managed to bring a bill to reverse that situation and force immediate elections for ECan to the floor of the House.

National, ACT, Peter Dunne and the Maori Party voted it down.

National's vote isn't really so surprising. They've consistently shown that their default solution to any problem is dictatorship, and they're not going to surrender power back to the people until that dictatorship has irreversibly given away the regions water to their farmer-cronies. Banks and Dunne are just sock-puppets. But the Maori Party? What do they have against the people of Canterbury? And do they really think that "Maori should have guaranteed political representation while the people of Canterbury should have none" is a sustainable position?

I am, as usual, disgusted. This is a fundamental democratic right. Our Parliament has just voted against it, for the second time. They're really not showing themselves to be good guardians of our democracy, and its another argument for an enforceable Bill of Rights to keep them in line.

Meanwhile, think about this: democratic means to restore democracy in Canterbury have just failed. What option does that leave now?

In the ballot XLVI

Another batch of Member's Bills currently in the ballot. Previous batches are indexed here:

Oaths and Declarations (Upholding the Treaty of Waitangi) Amendment Bill (Te Ururoa Flavell): would allow anyone making an oath or declaration to add the words "Ka whakaūngia e au te Tiriti o Waitangi" or "I will uphold the Treaty of Waitangi" without affecting the validity of their declaration. I would prefer to see more modern and relevant declarations, which reflected modern New Zealand society rather than British feudalism - and this is a good start.

Plain Language Bill (Chris Hipkins): would require all government agencies to write all of their public documents in "plain language", defined as "language that the intended readers can easily understand and use after 1 reading because it is clear, concise, and well-organised, and follows recognised guidelines of plain language writing". It is based on the US Plain Writing Act of 2010

Wild Animal Control (Increased Fines and Sentences of Imprisonment) Amendment Bill (Ian McKelvie): Updates the penalties for illegally hunting wild animals in contravention of regulations from a $500 fine to a $5000 one, and allows imprisonment for subsequent offences. The original penalties were set in 1979, and have effectively been reduced by inflation. Like many of National's "Member's bills", this should really be a government bill, but is being run as a Member's Bill to spam the ballot and reduce the chances of opposition bills being drawn.

As usual, I'll have more bills as I acquire them.

Educating schools about the OIA

Back in February, Christchurch Student Matthew Taylor began publishing the results of a series of OIA requests to schools about school formals and homophobia. The first result was that schools were unfamiliar with (and largely hostile to) their statutory duties under the Act, with over 150 not responding at all, and the majority of the rest demanding to know who he was and why he was asking. Now, the Ombudsman has published guidance on The OIA and school boards of trustees [PDF]. Among that guidance:

OIA requests can be made by any New Zealand citizens and permanent residents or anyone in New Zealand... requesters don’t have to be associated with the school. BOTs can ask a requester for information that is necessary to ascertain whether that person is eligible to make an OIA request. However, they should not impose unnecessary or unreasonable requirements.

(And even if they're not eligible, the response must still be "reasonable" - which generally means handling it under the OIA)

And:

A requester may give reasons for making an OIA request but there is no obligation on them to do so. BOTs can ask for this information if they think it would be helpful in reaching a decision, but they cannot insist that it be provided. BOTs should be careful not to suggest that the supply of reasons by the requester is a prerequisite for getting an answer to their OIA request. If a requester chooses not to state their reasons for making an OIA request the BOT must still fulfil its legal obligations under the OIA.

I think that's a pretty comprehensive spanking for the schools, and hopefully it will result in better OIA compliance in the future.

The strategic deficit

When national introduced its "tax switch", they claimed it would be revenue neutral. Higher taxes on ordinary kiwis would make up for the billions they were giving away to their rich mates, and so they wouldn't have to borrow or cut to fund them.

The reality is a bit different:

The government took in less revenue than expected from income tax, company tax and GST in the eight months ended February 29, widening its operating deficit more than forecast.

The operating balance before gains and losses was $5.5 billion, or $395 million higher than forecast, the Treasury said in a statement.

While core Crown expenditure was $1.4 billion below expectations, that was offset by core Crown revenue being $1.2 billion below its estimate.

The government's three main tax types continued to run below forecast in the first eight months of the year, the Treasury said.

The fact is that National's tax cuts devastated the government revenue base, forcing more borrowing. And this is just more data proving it. And yet National continues to call themselves "good economic managers", and paint Labour - who consistently kept the books in order and ran large surpluses - as being feckless spendthrifts. Which turns reality on its head. After three years, its clear that National couldn't manage a pig farm. Their outdated NeoLiberal ideology and insistence on putting their cronies first means they are driving us further into debt. As for their "plan" of a return to surplus by 2015, that's looking more and more like a pipe-dream, supported by heroic assumptions about record wage (and therefore tax) growth in a time of high unemployment. But its already clear that things just aren't panning out that way. Sadly, the result is likely to be National trying to cut its way to growth - and thus deepening the recession with more austerity - rather than admitting they were wrong.

Member's Day

Today is a Member's Day, and one which might see some progress made. Tau Henare has delayed the third reading of his Employment Relations (Secret Ballot for Strikes) Amendment Bill, so first up is Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi Military Manoeuvres Act Repeal Bill, followed by the second reading of Michael Woodhouse's Fair Trading (Soliciting on Behalf of Charities) Amendment Bill. Both are non-controversial and should fly through. After that its Kennedy Graham's Sustainable Biofuel Bill. This received its first reading back in 2009, then spent the next two years buried in committee before finally emerging last year with a recommendation that it not be passed as sustainability should be left to the market. National will vote it down as part of their anti-environment agenda. And then, if there's time, the real fun begins: Metiria Turei's bill to strengthen Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act and Ruth Dyson's bill to restore democracy in Canterbury. Both will probably fail - but the government will look appalling in voting them down.

There will be a ballot tomorrow if the House gets on to any first readings.

Ports and transparency IV: Labour takes up the challenge

Last month, I did a series of posts on ports and transparency, noting that port companies were excluded from the coverage of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act despite every single one of them being majority council-owned and therefore meeting the definition of a Council Controlled Organisation if they had not been excluded. There is a basic democratic principle at stake here: we own these companies, and so we should be able to see what they are doing. We recognise that principle (at least in relation to local government) for almost any other sort of company; we should recognise it for ports too.

The final post in that series presented a bill to rectify the situation. Now that bill has been taken up by Labour's Darien Fenton:

The Government should have no problem supporting a bill to make ratepayer owned ports accessible under the Official Information Act, says Labour MP Darien Fenton.

“Ratepayers have the right to information surrounding the management and functioning of public assets.

“At the moment, ports are specifically excluded from public information requests under the Local Government Act – a situation that means the ratepayers who own port companies and those who use them have no right to request information about how they are run.

“My members bill - the Local Government (Council Controlled Organisations) Amendment Bill - offers a simple measure to ensure all public-owned entities are held equally accountable,” Darien Fenton said.

This is good to see. As Fenton points out, its ridiculous that we can request information from our schools, local libraries, and SOEs (and hundreds of other organisations) - but not from our council owned ports. And as far as support goes, its a no-brainer; the government cannot credibly support secrecy on this, in the face of the long-established principle that council control equals transparency.

Fenton will be tabling the bill today, and it will hopefully be in a ballot tomorrow. The sooner it is drawn, the better.

Roads and waste

Last week, Auckland transport blogger Stu Donovan pointed out the central flaw in the government's transport planning: kiwis are driving less. Overall road use has been stagnant since 2005, and per-capita demand seems to be dropping by about 1% a year (neatly offsetting population growth). And its not just New Zealand - this is a worldwide trend. So why is our transport planning predicated on endless increases in demand?

Today in Parliament, Green MP Julie Anne Genter asked exactly that question. The answers were unsatisfactory:

JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) to the Minister of Transport: Why is the Government prioritising State highway projects with low benefit cost ratios, given that traffic volumes are back to 2004 levels and the Crown is borrowing $12 billion a year?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister of Transport): There has been a slight fluctuation in measured traffic volumes over the years, but it is not enough to show a trend that would mean that this Government would abandon its proposals for the ongoing road-building programme. Taking no action to improve our roads would assume that our roads were at their optimum point in 2004. The previous Government did not believe that, we do not believe that, and we are going to go ahead with our programme to build roads, because of the economic benefit, the social benefit, and the safety benefits for New Zealanders. The assertion that the Government is borrowing for the roading programme is wrong. That is paid for by the Land Transport Fund, which is funded by road users.

Julie Anne Genter: Why does the Government claim that the roads of so-called national significance have been selected because of their economic importance, when the projects were announced in early 2009, well before the business cases had been undertaken?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I think the point is that a Government comes in with a programme and does what it thinks is necessary to create the environment for economic growth. There is not a successful economy in the world that has achieved results by stopping roading progress.

Julie Anne Genter: What evidence supports the claim that the roads of national significance will increase economic productivity, given that they have not been updated to reflect the reality of higher oil prices and stagnant traffic volumes?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: I think the roads of national significance are going to have a massive effect on economic growth in New Zealand. And I think it is very hard to argue against history, where you would find not one country in the world that has abandoned roading projects and achieved economic success.

[snip Point of Order]

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Those last two criteria are very cyclical, so there is no reason to believe that in the long term, they would make a difference to the business case.

Julie Anne Genter: Will he review the plans to prioritise the roads of national significance, given warnings from the New Zealand Transport Agency and the Ministry of Transport that the programme could lead to a budget blowout of billions of dollars?

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: No, but I will challenge him to make sure that does not happen.

This is troubling, to say the least. Transport is a huge area of government expenditure, costing us $3.2 billion dollars in 2011 [PDF]. That money should be spent wisely, and in line with actual demand. Instead, it seems to be being spent based on a dream of endless growth, with the empirical evidence that that model is false dismissed by a fact-free Minister, so they can keep funnelling public money to their construction-industry cronies.

This ought to concern people across the political spectrum. In a time of austerity, we can't afford waste. And here we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars a year of bad spending, "justified" by business cases predicated on fiction rather than reality (assuming they get done at all - because as the above shows, the decisions get made before the case is made). Whether you're left or right, that's just not acceptable. And the people responsible for it should be sacked.

The end of policing by consent in Britain

"Policing by consent" is the foundation of UK (and by descent, New Zealand) policing. it is at the core of the Peelian Principles. But as David Gilbertson note sin the Guardian, it has been eroded, to the extent that Britain's police are at war with the people:

Confrontational – yet frightened and defensive – officers are nowadays trained to see the public as a threat to their very existence. Preventive patrolling has been abandoned – notwithstanding the soothing and wholly false spin of the Met, which continually we still have "bobbies on the beat". Few such officers have been deployed for at least 10 years, and their barely visible replacement – comprised largely of police community support officers, are but a pale imitation of what people expect and deserve.

From Stephen Lawrence to Mark Duggan; from the kettling of peaceful protesters, to the riots of last year; from the manifest incompetence of the first phone-hacking inquiry to allegations of corruption at the Leveson inquiry – a path has been beaten towards the edge of a precipice, and it is time for those concerned about the vital role of policing to challenge what is happening.

This matters. As Peel noted, "the ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions". When consent is denied, the police are less able to do their jobs. And in the UK, thanks to repeated police abuses, that consent is increasingly absent. As Gilbertson notes,

What incentive will there be for any black British mother on a sink estate to search out her local police to express concern about her son or his friends? Who can be surprised at any hard-working black member of our society taking the view that an organisation that allegedly views him or her as a "n****r" isn't worth their trust?

But its not just the UK. The New Zealand police are walking the same path, albeit slower. We need to stop them before it is too late. Otherwise, we're going to end up in the same place as the UK, where a police force has slowly been allowed to morph into an army of occupation on our streets.

A denial of responsibility

One of the core conventions of our constitution is that of individual Ministerial responsibility, summed up by the Cabinet Manual as follows

Ministers are accountable to the House for ensuring that the departments for which they are responsible carry out their functions properly and efficiently. On occasion, a Minister may be required to account for the actions of a department when errors are made, even when the Minister had no knowledge of, or involvement in, those actions.

But as Bryan Gould points out in the Herald today, Murray McCully's answers last week about the MFAT restructuring ignore this convention:

In an interview last Thursday on Morning Report, he solemnly proclaimed that - as minister - he was no more than "the purchaser of the ministry's services." This is free-market ideology gone mad. It is an astonishing new take on what the role of a minister is and should be, and betrays a shocking ignorance of what parliamentary government is about.

On this view, ministers in this Government, it seems, no longer decide policy or frame strategy. The actions of the ministries and departments they are appointed to lead have nothing to do with them, and they are no longer accountable to Parliament or to anyone else.

This isn't even pointing the finger at public servants - its an outright denial of Ministerial responsibility. And it just isn't acceptable. Ministers are responsible to Parliament. If their public service chief executives are making policy decisions they do not like, it is their job to correct them, and they are responsible for that. It is that simple. Allowing this to be eroded doesn't just mean we have rogue Ministers, but also a rogue public service. And that is not something we should accept.

Missing the point on dual candidacy

Over on Public Address, Graeme Edgeler has a piece arguing for the elimination of dual candidacy. Not for the usual reason of "zombie MPs" - he's perfectly comfortable with them - but in pursuit of "strong local representation":

And I think [Vote for Change's Jordan Williams is] right. The tendency may not be great, but it is a factor. We've never had (under MMP or FPP) the Westminster tradition of crossing the floor (I don't think government backbenchers in New Zealand have ever taken out newspaper advertisements opposing government policy, for example), so the effect might not be as great, but it could manifest itself in other ways. But maybe under first past the post – out of fear of losing their jobs, with no plan B – local MPs in marginal or somewhat marginal electorates were more likely to more forcefully put their constituents' views in caucus, and were able to forestall unpopular changes, or obtain concessions. It certainly seems likely that an MP who, if they lost their electorate, would be out of a job, would take that part of the representative function more seriously.

Note that this isn't "strong local representation" in the sense of MP's doing constituency work for their constituents - because they all do that, regardless of their method of election. It's "strong local representation" in the sense of more independent MPs and weaker parties.

The problem is that we've never had this under FPP, even in the sense of advocacy-inside-caucus Graeme describes. The 80's and 90's, where unpopular changes were rammed through regardless, prove that. Part of the reason is that parties have strong internal rules against dissent. Part of it is that New Zealand voters vote for parties, not individual MPs (how many de-selected former MPs have been successful running against their own party outside of a mid-term by-election? Bugger-all). But part of it is also because they don't just choose list candidates, but electorate ones as well. The result is that an electorate candidate is just as much a slave of the party as a list candidate. Display loyalty, and you get to contest a winnable seat. Don't rock the boat, and you get re-selected. Cause trouble, and you end up like Brian Connell or Brian Neeson (and those examples are from National, which is more democratic than most). So eliminating dual candidacy doesn't seem likely to achieve the desired effect, while having significant costs (and not just to minor parties. Dual candidacy means more and stronger competition for electorates, which directly benefits voters).

Napoleon once said "if you want to take Vienna, take Vienna". In this case, its "if you want to weaken parties, weaken parties". Dual candidacy is an inefficient means of doing this. There are far more direct mechanisms to achieve that goal, without incurring the costs of single candidacy. Open lists is one. But the best seems to be simply taking away the power of party bosses to choose candidates. And the way to do that is by a stronger requirement for democratic candidate selection, both for the list and in electorates. Let party members vote, and choose for themselves whether they want yes-men or boat-rockers. Its a democratic solution, which lets voters find the level of independence we want, rather than having someone else's model of how independent an electorate MP "should" be imposed on us.

Legislating by press release

Stuff reports that some changes to the student loan scheme, involving a shorter repayment holiday for students travelling overseas, have taken effect. But as pointed out by the Greens' Holly Walker, the bill hasn't passed the House yet. So how can it have taken effect?

The answer is that it can't. Even though the bill is retrospective, it still doesn't take effect until it is passed. Any Minister pretending otherwise is engaging in

the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by Regall Authority without consent of Parlyament

which is explicitly made unlawful by the Bill of Rights 1688. In this country, you cannot legislate by press release, and you cannot prospectively implement retrospective legislation. Fitzgerald v. Muldoon settled that back in 19736; I'm surprised the government has forgotten.

Big Brother will be watching

UKanian? Use the internet? The British government wants to watch everything you do, in real time:

The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon.

Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time

[...]

A new law - which may be announced in the forthcoming Queen's Speech in May - would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant.

But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited.

This is serious "Big Brother" stuff - a vast surveillance system, keeping an eye on what people are reading, and who is talking to who. Its incredibly intrusive, akin to keeping everyone under 24/7 camera surveillance - and yet they will be able to do all of this without a warrant, and without any sort of supervision. The potential for abuse is obvious - as is the potential for false positives. And given their past record, that probably means more innocent dead people.

The core of privacy is the right to be left alone. This violates that right - grossly, broadly, on a massive scale. In an increasingly networked world, it will mean the government looking over your shoulder on everything you do. And that's just not something we should accept.

National in pictures

Bernard Hickey had a great piece in the Herald on Sunday in which he analyses the Treasury's latest Monthly Economic Indicators. The piece included some shocking graphs which showed the effects of the government’s tax cuts for the rich on revenue:

and on the government's fiscal balance:

National calls this "good economic management". Hickey calls it something else:

It is clear now that the Government has effectively cut the income tax rate and paid for it by borrowing money overseas, in large part from China. It is an act of economic treason and generational selfishness when a government has decided an already-wealthy part of the population deserves higher incomes paid for by loading foreign debt on future generations of taxpayers.

...and we'll be paying for it for generations to come, through debt and crippled public services.

But then, that's what National does: pillage the state for the benefit of their rich mates (and then use the mess it makes to justify more pillage). They did it in the 90's, and they're doing it again now. And the only way to stop it is to vote the fuckers out of office.

New Fisk

Watch us lead the UN donkey up the Khyber
On Lebanon's border, silent Syrians are flocking to an unknown future

Collins should pay for her own lawsuit

Last week, ACC Minister Judith Collins began a defamation suit against Radio New Zealand and Labour MPs Trevor Mallard and Andrew Little, over the latter's criticism of her handling of the ACC leaks saga. Its a little known fact, but the Cabinet Manual allows the government to pick up the tab for such suits, indemnifying the Minister for costs accrued as a plaintiff. Cabinet will apparently make that decision today. Hopefully they will refuse to fund it, and tell Collins to pay for her own lawsuit.

Why? Firstly, because the idea of government Ministers suing their political critics with taxpayer's money over political comments is incompatible with a robust democracy. Its explicitly used as a silencing tactic in "managed democracies" like Singapore (which aren't), and Collins' suit seems to be the same sort of measure: an effort to bully and intimidate and silence to deter criticism. Secondly, it seems to conflate the public and private roles of the Minister, and treat the public purse as the Minister's private funds. Both of these ideas may be completely acceptable to National (which admires authoritarian Singapore, and has established a reputation for cronyism and corruption in office), but they are not acceptable to the New Zealand public.

Extending flexibility

National is actually doing something positive for ordinary people for once, with plans to extend flexible working hours provisions - which currently apply only to caregivers - to all workers. Its a good move. The Department of Labour's review of the provisions found that there had been no problems with their implementation (contrary to the wailing from employers when the law was passed), and that it produced significant benefits for employers (such as reduced turnover and improved productivity):

At a minimum, the research shows that flexible working is cost neutral for the large majority of employers, but may in fact result in considerable cost savings and productivity improvements for many employers. Overseas evidence shows that the experience of employers with flexible working provisions has been largely unproblematic, and few employers have encountered the costs, increased litigation, or flood of requests anticipated prior to the introduction of flexible working legislation (Hegewisch, 2009). The Department’s surveys found that this also appears to be the case in New Zealand.

They also found that there was a widespread informal practice of employee-driven flexibility extending beyond the statutory right of caregivers, but that some groups (particularly low-income and low-skill workers) were missing out. Cementing this practice in statute, by creating a clear right to request flexibility and obligation to grant it unless certain conditions were met will remove that problem and extend the benefits to everyone.

Even Business New Zealand now admits this is "common sense legislation". And its good to see that National can in fact be convinced by the evidence, rather than reflexively supporting the sort of "Master-Servant" model promoted by the likes of Talleys and Ports of Auckland.

The laws still mean nothing

The police have announced that they will not be laying charges over John Key's pre-election radio show. Their reason? "Insufficient evidence". Because obviously, merely having recordings of the thing, and the paper trail showing that the Prime Minister had his grubby paws all over it isn't enough.

(The police might credibly have been able to argue that the law wasn't clear, due to the disagreement between the BSA and Electoral Commission - but they didn't)

Its a highly convenient decision for John Key - and highly convenient for the police, who won't end up offside with the people making their budget decisions. But it again shows the flaws in our electoral law. Once again the police have been handed clear evidence of a breach, and once again they have failed to act. They've also failed to act on any of the dozen other cases handed to them last election cycle, and its hard to escape the conclusion that they just don't see it as a "real" crime. Unlike, say, recording politicians in a public place at a media event they called...

Again, it has to be pointed out: this is a real crime, and it threatens the integrity of our democracy. If the police are unwilling or incapable of dealing with that crime, then its time we gave the job to a body which can. And that body is the Electoral Commission.