As we all know, New Zealand has banned the export of live animals for slaughter. So what's the penalty for violating this ban? A paltry $10,000 fine.
What about the Animal welfare Act? That requires live animal exports to be certified for animal welfare purposes. The penalty for breaching the recommendations of an animal welfare inspector on this? A $25,000 fine.
This is simply bullshit. These penalties are so small that they will neither effectively punish or deter offending. Instead, companies will view them as simply a cost of doing business. Assuming they can be enforced at all - because there's no protection against animals exported for breeding purposes simply being sold to a slaughterhouse (or re-exported to one) at the other end.
Our law is toothless. And its time our politicians strengthened it. An increase in fines would be a start, but there needs to be the capacity to seize profits and additional damages on conviction as well.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Toothless
Time to end live animal exports for good
When the Labour government banned the export of livestock for slaughter back in 2007, we thought this horrific trade was over, it was for good reason: the long-distance trade was cruel and inflicted terrible suffering on the animals. Overcrowding and overheating (not to mention just the dangers of a sea voyage) meant that these ships would leave a trail of corpses behind them, and the survivors would be disgorged half-dead. That wasn't acceptable to the New Zealand public, so we banned it.
But as Murray McCully has reminded us in the last month, there was a loophole: the law only bans the export of live animals for slaughter. The export of live animals for other purposes, such as breeding, is still perfectly legal. And so we have this:
Guarantees have been given the 50,000 live sheep exported from drought affected areas of Canterbury to Mexico have been sent for breeding purposes, amid condemnation from animal advocacy groups and opposition politicians concerned the sheep would be slaughtered upon arrival.
The livestock carrier Nada docked at Timaru on Tuesday to begin loading 50,000 sheep and 3000 cattle destined for Mexico for breeding purposes.
But while there are "guarantees", the government is not actually going to do anything to see whether they are adhered to. So there's nothing to stop these animals being redirected to another destination once they leave New Zealand, or simply loaded onto another boat once they reach Mexico.
(Well, we can watch the voyage though the ship's AIS beacon, and journalists and animal rights activists could do the followup that the government refuses to do. But really, it shouldn't be up to third-parties to police this)
But more importantly, the animal welfare concerns which saw the slaughter trade originally banned don't disappear simply because the transport is for a different purpose. These animals will still face two weeks at sea. They will still be overcrowded in unsanitary conditions. Thousands of them will still die, and the survivors will suffer terribly. And that's simply not something we should accept. Its time we ended this vile trade for good. Farmers should consider their social licence revoked.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
The cost of stat-juking
The Scottish government is to cease publishing crime statistics. Why? Because they've been manipulated so much that they're simply not reliable:
SCOTTISH Ministers are proposing to wash their hands of recorded crime statistics amid claims the figures are routinely manipulated by police.
[...]
However, as revealed by the Sunday Herald, the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) refused to rubber the stamp the Government's crime stats last year.
"We conclude that the statistics do not currently comply with several elements of the Code of Practice," the body noted.
The watchdog added that the Scottish Government should seek "strong levels of assurance" about the quality of the figures, but warned: "This report concludes that the Scottish Government lacks sufficient evidence to be able to provide such appropriate reassurance."
The correct course of action would of course be to fix the problem, by ensuring those statistics are reliable. Ending political pressure on the police to lie would be the start of that process. Instead, the Scottish government plans to keep up that pressure, and just shift responsibility for the statistics entirely to the police - allowing them to encourage lies while washing their hands of the consequences. The public should have no confidence at all in the result.
Meanwhile, this bit is eerily familiar:
Police sources said the recorded total was deliberately kept low by crimes being left as "incidents" by officers and kept off the books.
Officers are said to be using their "discretionary powers", such as verbal warnings, to stop incidents being upgraded to crimes.
In other cases, it has been alleged that victims of crime decline to pursue complaints after being told by officers that they will have to give evidence in court.
The violent crime figures can also be manipulated by recording serious assault as common assault, the latter of which is a lesser category.
Or, as Prez put it:
"Juking the stats ... Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before."
The consequence, of course, is that police resources get misallocated, because they're tailored to an increasingly false picture of reality. The Soviets found out that you couldn't run an economy like that; how long will it be until the west realises you can't run a democracy like that either?
The problem
Writing in the Herald, Brian Rudman puts his finger on the problem with housing policy:
In present-day New Zealand, instead of helping voters become property owners, MPs seem more skilled in amassing property portfolios for themselves. When you exclude the seven who own no property and the 34 who have just one each, the remaining 80 average more than three each. And that's excluding shareholdings in assorted Maori blocks. Among the haul are 60 investment or commercial properties, 17 lots of "bare land" and more than 170 houses, flats, holiday homes and "residential".
Could it be that as landlords and "investors", rather than renters, there's an understandable reluctance among MPs to bring the Wild West that is the residential renting market under control.
Dr Smith lists only a residential property, Mr English a family home and a farm, Mr Key a family home, a Huapai office, a London apartment and holiday homes in Omaha and Hawaii. So none would be personally affected by a warrant of fitness, either as landlord or tenant.
However, as a group, fewer than 6 per cent of MPs are non-home owners, compared to 35 per cent of all households. Is it any wonder that while they mouth support for minimum standards on rental housing, the landlord in most of them ensures the Emma-Lita Bournes continue to suffer.
And its worth noting that those multiple property-owners are overwhelmingly National MPs - the same people making decisions about standards for their rental homes. Its a huge conflict of interest, but it reveals a bigger problem: our MPs are no longer representative of us. They don't live the same sorts of lives as us, they don't face the same sorts of problems. They live in a completely different world. And its no wonder then that they ignore the real problems that ordinary kiwis face - because the closest most of them ever come to those problems is across an electorate office desk.
National doesn't care if poor people die
With two deaths explicitly linked to poor quality state housing in the last week, you'd expect the government to be falling over itself to be seen to fix the problem. But not Housing Minister Nick Smith. Instead, he's washing his hands of the issue:
The poor condition of state houses has been blamed for the second death of a tenant in a week, but the Housing Minister says people dying from respiratory illnesses is not new and the Government can't prevent them all.
[...]
"People dying in winter from pneumonia and from other illnesses is not new - we have many homes, and that is why our Government has put so much emphasis on insulating every one of our 48,000 state homes that were not, and can be, as well as the 300,000 homes that massive programme of insulation."
There were lessons to be learnt from the cases that had emerged in the last week, as well as others, but the Government could not stop people dying from illnesses in winter.
"If we sit here and pretend that we are going to be able to eliminate every case of where a person dies from respiratory illnesses or the like, they are kidding themselves," he said.
Translation: "we can't do everything so we're not going to do anything". But this is bullshit: while he can't eliminate such deaths, he can at least prevent state houses from contributing to them (as they clearly are now). And this isn't just a moral requirement, but simply sensible. The cost of insulating a house and making it fit for human habitation is apparently less than the cost of one night in hospital when someone gets sick. Decent state houses aren't just a moral imperative - they can cut health spending, or allow it to be reprioritised to other areas. In other words, like relieving child poverty, its an investment, not a cost - and one which pays off fairly quickly.
But this isn't a government which invests in New Zealand, or looks to the long term. Instead, they're basicly strip-mining our public services, letting them rot while they hand out largesse to their corporate cronies. And they don't care if care if poor people die as the cost of doing this. Because its not as if they vote National, is it?
Turning a blind eye to child abuse
The latest vileness to emerge from the Australian Senate's inquiry into immigration detention? Immigration Minister Scott Morrison turned a blind eye to child abuse in his gulags:
Scott Morrison was made aware in December 2013 of serious allegations of sexual abuse at Australia’s detention centre on Nauru, almost a year before a full review into allegations was commissioned, a Senate inquiry has heard.
A committee in Canberra is currently investigating serious allegations of sexual assault at the Nauru detention centre. The inquiry has heard evidence that the immigration department regularly interfered with medical assessments on Nauru and asked medical staff to change reports.
The committee heard from two former Save the Children child protection workers on Tuesday, Viktoria Vibhakar and Kirsty Diallo, who both raised significant concerns about the process for reporting and mitigating risks surrounding sexual assaults at the Nauru centre.
In relation to one serious sexual assault by a cleaner against an asylum seeker in November 2013, Diallo said the then immigration minister Scott Morrison was made personally aware of the allegations as well as in an incident report from the service providers on the island.
And he did nothing. Because hey, who cares if children are being raped? They're only refugees.
This is not an acceptable attitude in a Minister responsible for people's welfare. The good news is that he's no longer Minister for Immigration. The bad news is that he's now Minister for Social Services. I wonder if he'll bring those same toxic attitudes to the treatment of Australian children in the care of his department?
Also today: the Immigration Department admitted that it knew its contractors had spied on an Australian Senator. Supposedly, they disapprove. In which case, why are Wilson Security still contractors? They should have been fired immediately.
Tuesday, June 09, 2015
Housing NZ kills again
Housing New Zealand Corporation's shit housing has killed another of its tenants:
Soesa Tovo died in his Papakura state house on August 15 last year.
He died in his lounge after being treated for heart and lung problems and pneumonia in hospital.
He was surrounded by his wife Amelia and their 6 children.
Doctors and the local DHB had requested, on a number of occasions in the year leading up to his death, that this family be moved, because of his health and the cold and damp state of the house.
Their repeated pleas did not trigger Housing NZ to move the family. They were told they had ‘no argument’ according to Amelia.
Because Housing NZ is apparently happy to rent people homes that make them sick. After all, those hospital visits and school absences aren't on their balance sheet. But their failure to act on repeated requests means that this is no longer simply a case of neglect. Instead, it verges on depraved indifference. And the Housing NZ staff responsible need to be held accountable for it.
An obvious question is whether this house - which was apparently partially insulated, but uncarpeted and unheated, would meet National's proposed "standards". And if the answer is "yes", those standards are obviously not high enough.
Climate change: Hope
Among all the bad news about melting ice-caps and foot-dragging governments, some hope: China's emissions may peak by 2025:
China’s greenhouse gas emissions will probably peak in 2025, five years earlier than its stated target, a study said on Monday, in a boost for hopes to curb climate change.
On current trends, the world’s biggest carbon emitter will discharge 12.5-14bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2025, after which emissions will decline, it said.
The work was carried out by two research institutes at the London School of Economics (LSE).
“Analysing trends in the key emitting sectors, we conclude that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to peak as late as 2030, the upper limit set by President Xi Jinping in November 2014, and are much more likely to peak by 2025,” said the paper, co-authored by climate economist Nicholas Stern and analyst Fergus Green.
“They could peak even earlier than that.”
China's coal use has already peaked; its other industries are likely to follow as it pushes for lower emissions. And meanwhile, our government drags its feet, and won't even commit to a credible responsibility target, let alone actually do something to cut emissions. You'd almost think that John Key and Tim Groser wanted the world to burn...
Half-measures on housing quality
Last week we learned that a child's death had been explicitly blamed on the poor quality of the state house she lived in. The government's polling must have been telling them about how angry the public are about that, because yesterday the government flip-flopped from calling housing standards "extreme" to promising to introduce them:
Rental properties will have to meet a set of minimum standards under rules to be unveiled by the Government next month.
The move will stop short of a full "warrant of fitness" for rentals but is aimed at ensuring all tenants have a safe and healthy home to live in, Government sources confirmed.
That is likely to include a requirement for insulation, although sources said there was still work to be done to set any standards at a practical level. It is due to be announced next month by Building and Housing Minister Nick Smith, along with an assessment of a warrant of fitness trial in state houses, and would apply to all rentals both private and public.
Any improvement is better than what we've got now, where there seems to be no obligation on landlords to ensure that their houses are fit for habitation and don't kill children. At the same time, we should recognise that this is pathetically weak. There's no mention for example of things like carpet, heating, or houses being required not to leak, despite these all being contributing factors to Emma-Lita Bourne's death. As with capital gains taxes, National is reacting to overwhelming public demand by doing the least it possibly can, in order to protect the profits of its slumlord friends and MPs. But as with capital gains taxes, it means that it will be much easier for a future left-wing government to strengthen those provisions and require every rental home to be warm and healthy.
Ding dong, the supercity's dead
Which old supercity? The Wellington supercity:
Some Wellington mayors believe a controversial plan to roll the region's nine councils into one is being thrown out today.
[...]
Those mayors, from Porirua, Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt, Masterton, and Wellington's deputy mayor, all said they had heard the supercity proposal was out.
"[The announcement] will set aside the current proposal for one regional council across all of Wellington, and will look to change that, and back to the drawing board to come up with a new proposal," said Justin Lester, Wellington's deputy mayor.
Lower Hutt's mayor, Ray Wallace, had heard the same thing.
Good riddance. The only people who wanted a Wellington supercity were local body politicians who wanted to be its mayor, and businesses who wanted to remove democratic representation. The actual people who would be subject to it don't want a bar of it, and for good reason: it would have removed their say in the government of their own region. What's surprising though is that the Local Government Commission appears to have listened to them...
Monday, June 08, 2015
A landed gentry
Problems of the Auckland property bubble: we're getting a landed gentry again:
High house prices are creating a class system in New Zealand that's frighteningly similar to that of Britain, economist couple Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub claim in their new book Generation Rent.
In fact, the pair dub property-owners as this country's "modern landed gentry" whose fortune in owning homes will be passed on to their children.
Though they don't use the term, in a country with property landed gentry, those unable to afford houses are clearly property peasants forever paying rents to the gentry, dependant on their goodwill not to be evicted.
Caveat: Auckland property owners. Things elsewhere are nowhere near as insane. But we're looking at a permanent wealth divide, both between home-owners and renters, and between Auckland and everywhere else. And imagine what's going to happen when landed Aucklanders start leveraging their bubble-wealth to start buying up the rest of the country...
The Eaqubs call this "a serious and persistent attack on New Zealand's identity as an egalitarian society" - and they're right. Auckland's property bubble is challenging the core values of our society. As for how to fight back, just look to history: in the late C19th New Zealand was developing an unwelcome landed gentry of high-country farmers with vast estates. The Liberal Government strangled that would-be-aristocracy at birth with land taxes, which forced the breakup of those estates. We need to do the same again - not just capital gains taxes on property speculators, but estate taxes and restrictions on the use of trusts to counteract those disparities of wealth and prevent them from accumulating.
Immigration, citizenship, and globalisation
In their efforts to defend us from the Teeming Foreign Horde, Immigration NZ has long been in the habit of separating kiwis from their partners. But now they've plumbed new depths, by trying to seperate kiwis from their children:
A Kiwi's plan to return to New Zealand to raise his family is in limbo after Immigration New Zealand granted permanent residency to only one of his young sons.
German-born Andreas Mahon, 35, is a New Zealand citizen and has lived in Auckland on and off since 2004.
His Malaysian wife, Jo-Lene, holds a permanent resident visa and they have two overseas-born sons, Nolan, 13 months, and Liam, who is 3.
Liam has been diagnosed with Williams syndrome, a non-hereditary genetic condition, and Immigration NZ thinks he may be a burden on the health system.
This seems crazy. The parents are kiwis. They live in New Zealand. Surely their children should be allowed to as well? Secondly the very idea of treating children as independent from their parents on residency decisions seems crazy as well. What's a 3-year-old going to do? Say "sorry mum, sorry dad, guess I'll stay here without you"? Because no parent is going to abandon their child, the effect of such a decision is effectively to deprive the parents of their residency rights. And that seems absolutely unjustifiable (not to mention of questionable legality).
But this is also an example of what is likely to become a growing problem. Kiwis are highly globalised. For decades, young kiwis have been travelling the world on OE, meeting people, settling down, and having kids. Legally, we recognise those kids as kiwis, and rightly so. But what happens if they come home, then go off and do the kiwi thing again? They end up like Andreas Mahon. By two accidents of birth, his kids are legally foreigners, despite both their parents being kiwi and having a strong connection with New Zealand. And its easy to imagine worse examples. What if Mahon had returned to New Zealand as a child, rather than an adult, and lived here all his life, before leaving on OE and meeting someone? I suspect we'll be seeing those sorts of cases soon.
The fundamental problem here isn't just Immigration's cruelty and overriding urge to exclude people from New Zealand - its that the Citizenship Act 1977 was written in a different age, when people were less mobile, and shifts overseas more permanent. That's no longer the case - and the law needs to recognise this. Starting with recognising that citizens by descent who have returned to New Zealand are full citizens, not second-class ones.
A total clusterfuck
Last month, we learned that the government would let Relationships Aotearoa, its contractor for court-ordered counselling services, fold. The consequences of that decision? Its clients will be abandoned:
Relationships Aotearoa says thousands of its clients will be left without counselling support when it closes its doors on Tuesday because the Government has failed to line up other services to help.
Two weeks ago Social Development Minister Anne Tolley said she was "delighted that a number of well-respected providers have come forward" to ensure the continuation of services to the 7000 clients Relationships Aotearoa is thought to work with.
But the agency, which the Government refused to bail out, closes its doors at 5pm on Tuesday and at this point the only organisation still at the negotiating table is Stand Children's Service.
Basicly, the other providers the government said they had lined up to take over the work have backed out because they are unable to do it. And that means that it just won't be done, and as a result victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence won't get the counselling they need. A vital government service, and its just going to cease to exist because a contract ended (rather like rape crisis centres, really).
It gets worse: the government apparently has no idea how many clients Relationships Aotearoa was serving, and therefore how many people are going to be cut off by their budget cut (you'd have thought it would be in the contracts MSD signed, and that it would have been strictly enforced, but apparently not). So, they have no idea what the impact of this is going to be. The whole thing is turning into a total clusterfuck.
"Extreme"
Last week we learned that a child's death had been explicitly blamed on the poor quality of the state house she lived in. This week: the Minister responsible for the organisation which killed her calls the the idea of rental housing warrants of fitness "extreme":
The Government won't support "extreme measures" like warrant of fitness checks for all houses because it will drive up rent and push housing stock out of the market, says Finance Minister Bill English.
[...]
Labour leader Andrew Little had resubmitted Twyford's [Healthy Homes] bill but English told TVNZ's Q+A it was unlikely the Government would adopt it because it would result in "mass inspection of every house in the country".
"We're not going to adopt extreme measures, we want to get something practical and affordable that will start lifting the standard," he said.
"We're trying to find the solution that helps lift the standard of housing without making the problem worse by forcing housing stock out of the market or people out of houses they can no longer afford."
Because obviously its unreasonable to require landlords - including government ones - to ensure that the houses they rent are fit for human habitation and don't kill people. Whatever next? Warrants of fitness for cars? Safety standards for children's toys? Not letting people put asbestos in food?
This is bullshit, and English knows it. Health standards for rental homes should be a basic condition of participating in the market. And if this puts slumlords out of business, and requires Housing New Zealand to stop behaving like one, then that's a Good Thing, not a bad one.
Friday, June 05, 2015
No death with dignity in NZ
The High Court has ruled in Seales v Attorney General, finding that there is no right to die in New Zealand. Its disappointing, but understandable. While I agree with Andrew Geddis that there was a clear path available of reinterpreting the law so as to be consistent with the BORA, I can also see why the High Court (rather than a higher court) wouldn't want to take that path. Unfortunately, there was no time to appeal: the plaintiff died last night.
The good news is that MPs are listening:
Both Labour and National MPs are talking about moving forward with action on assisted suicide following the death of Wellington lawyer Lecretia Seales.
[...]
Lees-Galloway on Friday said Seales' personal sacrifice could be honoured by Parliament now looking seriously at the issue of euthanasia.
"I thought Lecretia was incredibly brave and the fact that she continued her fight literally right up to the end was amazing - her family should be incredibly proud of her, and I really hope that the effort that she put in makes a difference."
Lees-Galloway said he was interested to see what the Judge had decided in the case, but ultimately thought euthanasia was for Parliament to legislate on and clarify, rather than have the courts decide on a case-by-case basis.
[...]
Speaking on the Paul Henry Show, National MP Judith Collins said she thought Parliament would have to deal with the issue, but in the past private Members' Bills had been "a bit short and sharp", without considering all the factors.
Collins said MPs were the right people to start the conversation, but a wide range of people needed to be consulted and heard on the issue.
From the sound of it, an upcoming petition from the End of Life Choice Association will provide a basis for a select committee inquiry, and hopefully a cross-Parliamentary push for reform. Change is still a long, long way away - the government isn't interested (no money in it for big business and no "kick a crim" headlines), so presumably there will need to be a member's bill put in the ballot as part of that process. And while things could be sped up by ballot-spamming, as happened with marriage equality, we're still looking at probably a two-year process.
Who voted against warm rental houses?
Three months ago, Parliament voted on the Healthy Homes Guarantee Bill, which would have required landlords - including Housing New Zealand - to ensure the homes they rented were warm and dry. The following MPs voted against the bill:
(Stolen from @nzdodo)
Now that Housing NZ's poor housing has been blamed for the death of a child, I really hope those MPs are reconsidering their position. And if they're not, they're nothing more than murderers.
Australia's gulag-insdustrial complex spied on a Senator
Australia's policy of rendering refugees to Pacific gulags to be tortured and brutalised in the hope of convincing them to return to states which will torture and brutalise them is a 10 billion dollar industry. Naturally, the participants in that industry - the private prison providers who provide the offshore gulags, the private security contractors who staff them - want to protect that income stream. So its not entirely surprising that they spied on an Australia Senator during her investigative trip to Nauru:
Private security guards at the Australian-run detention camp on Nauru allegedly took the extraordinary step of running a secret surveillance operation on an Australian senator.
A former guard has alleged Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was given the codename "Raven" and covertly followed and her hotel watched when visiting the asylum-seeker detention centre on the Pacific island nation.
Wilson Security – the company contracted to guard the detainees – has rejected the claim a team was organised to spy on Senator Hanson-Young during the December 2013 visit but admits "individuals" have been disciplined for "acting beyond their brief".
The security company has said the primary motivation was security for the senator but the activity was "not authorised".
An outraged Senator Hanson-Young has sought legal advice and intends to refer the allegations to Parliament's powerful privileges committee.
Naturally, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott is fine with this spying on his political opponent, saying that she was being "looked after". From what? There aren't any security threats on Nauru. Instead its very clear that the spying was done to identify who she talked to, so they could be intimidated or sacked.
Australia's gulag policy has already effectively destroyed Nauru's democracy. Now it seems to be threatening Australia's as well. Or are Australians so racist that they're happy to live in a surveillance dictatorship in order to keep brown people out?
And stinkier
Murray McCully's Saudi sheep bribe just keeps on getting worse:
Nearly 200 of the pregnant ewes flown to Saudi Arabia to stock an agri-business hub were bought by taxpayers from the same businessman the Government gave them to as part of a multi-million dollar deal.
A total of 900 pregnant awassi breed ewes were flown to Saudi Arabia for a "pilot research breeding programme" on a farm owned by Hamood Al Ali Al Khalaf in October 2014.
A spokeswoman for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise - one of the agencies involved in setting up the farm - said 195 were awassi ewes from Mathews Station in central Hawke's Bay, which is owned by Awassi NZ.
The rest of the sheep were bought from private on-farm sales and through an auction system.
Brownrigg, as lead provider, was responsible for that, NZTE said.
Al Khalaf's Awassi NZ Land Holdings company owns nearly a quarter - 24.9 per cent - of Brownrigg Agriculture Group.
So, just to make that clear, NZTE gave Hamood Al Ali Al Khalaf a pile of money to buy sheep for himself - and he bought them from himself. And MFAT thought this was OK. Whereas from the outside, it simply looks like blatant corruption.
