Still unfit for purpose

The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has released their second annual report [PDF]. The headline news? The SIS is still unfit for purpose:

Overall, I conclude that some further work is required before I can assess NZSIS’s compliance procedures and systems as sound

Or, to put it in English: the Inspector-General does not have confidence that the SIS is obeying the law or will notice if it is not.

As the Inspector-General makes clear in their annual report, this is a fundamental requirement for any modern intelligence service. And the SIS has failed to meet it in both years when it has been required to be publicly certified. Which really calls into question the lawfulness of everything they've ever done.

And that's not the only problem. As the Herald points out, the SIS also appears to be resisting IGIS oversight:

In early 2015, Gwyn raised a serious issue about whether certain SIS activity was lawful and, if not, how that could be remedied.

"I raised the issue with the Director in June 2015 and provided the Director with detailed provisional findings on my view of the legality of the activity in August 2015. The NZSIS provided its first substantive response to the questions raised in March-April 2016," Gwyn wrote in the annual report, released today.

While she appreciated the issue was complex and substantial work is underway on the questions raised, Gwyn said the "time taken to engage with and resolve this significant issue is in itself a matter of concern".

With these sorts of problems, the government would be mad to even consider granting an agency like the SIS further powers. But that is exactly what they're doing. The opposition parties should reject these efforts and commit to repealing any extra powers given to this lawless agency.

So much for spam bills

The National Party became a subject of ridicule over the last few months when Nuk Koroko's Airport Authorities (Lost Property) Amendment Bill was drawn from the ballot. The bill did nothing, and apparently existed solely to take up space in the ballot and prevent Parliament from debating a more worthy bill. It was swiftly followed by Matt Doocey's Companies (Annual Report Notice Requirements) Amendment Bill, which isn't quite as pointless, but existed for a similar purpose. Both bills could easily have been incorporated into the Statutes Amendment Bill currently progressing through Parliament, and obvious questions were raised about why they weren't.

The good news is that now they have been, thanks to SOPs from Labour and ACT. And as a result, the House will be free to debate more substantive bills. Unless of course National comes up with a new load of spam to stuff into the biscuit tin...

Why is WINZ making people sign unlawful employment contracts?

NewsHub has exposed the fact that WINZ is forcing beneficiaries to sign blatantly unlawful employment contracts with an Australian labour-hire company to get them off their books:

A Newshub investigation has revealed a major recruitment company is signing up beneficiaries to legally questionable employment contracts.

Global recruitment company Manpower Group is looking for temporary workers and Work and Income is helping to provide staff.

[...]

[O]ne of the clauses in Manpower's contract gives the company power to collect and pass on their workers' sexual preferences and practices, race, religious beliefs and political views.

[...]

However it's not just what was in the contract, but also what wasn't.

There was no detail of the hours, pay rate, work description, location or duration of the job.

This very obviously breaches section 23 of the Human Rights Act (which prohibits the collection of information in a manner which indicates a desire to discriminate) and section 65 of the Employment Relations Act. Its so blatant that you'd expect even the muppets at WINZ to recognise it. And yet they're standing over people, implicitly threatening to cut their benefit if they don't sign.

I think WINZ owes us some answers on why they're leaning on beneficiaries like this and helping a foreign company break the law. As for Manpower, they should be prosecuted.

New Fisk

The tales of bodies and blood that surround a front line in Syria

A good move

The government is explicitly banning schools from using "seclusion rooms":

Seclusion will be outlawed following worrying cases where teachers locked autistic children in rooms alone for hours at a time.

Education Minister Hekia Parata said she planned to make the use of seclusion in schools illegal and release guidance, developed by an advisory group, so schools had a clear understanding of how to deal with challenging behaviour.

The majority of schools had good practices in place for managing challenging behaviour of a small number of students in a safe and inclusive way, Parata said, adding that dealing with this behaviour can be "very difficult".

"But in today's world there is no situation where it is acceptable for seclusion to be used in schools or early childhood education services, so I want to make that clear in the law."

Good, but given that Parata was first advised of this problem last year, you have to wonder why she took so long to act on it - and how many children were tortured by their schools as a result of her inaction.

McCully lied to Cabinet

The Auditor-General has released their report into Murray McCully's sordid Saudi sheep bribe. While they find it was not a bribe in the tightly criminal sense of whether Murray McCully is liable for prosecution under the Crimes Act (of course he's not - he was the briber, not the recipient), they're very clear that it was a payoff to Hmood Al Ali Al Khalaf to achieve a diplomatic objective (i.e. a bribe in the ordinary sense of the word). They criticise the contract under which the money was paid for deliberately obfuscating this objective and hiding the fact that it was first and foremost about resolving a diplomatic dispute. But most importantly, they find that Murray McCully basicly lied to Cabinet in his papers promoting the deal:

I found some significant shortcomings in the Cabinet paper, including that it:

• did not clearly explain that the Al Khalaf Group would own the goods and services costing the New Zealand Government $6 million;
  
• did not identify how the $10 million figure was arrived at (a figure that has since risen to $11.5 million);
  
• signalled the risk of a claim against the Government based only on the $20-$30 million figure that the Cabinet paper said was suggested by the Al Khalaf Group (there was no assessment by Ministry officials of the substance of that legal risk);
  
• did not include any analysis about whether there were any other potential obstacles to the signing or ratification of the free trade agreement, apart from the concerns of the Al Khalaf Group about the export of live sheep or the assertion by the Gulf Cooperation Council that this was the only obstacle to the free trade agreement; and
  
• identified that New Zealand exports could double to $3 billion in five years if a free trade agreement was signed with the Gulf Cooperation Council, without including any analysis.
  

Based on these significant shortcomings, I am concerned at the lack of robust analysis and the quality of information that was provided to Cabinet on this matter.

Cabinet approved the money based on these obfuscations by McCully. The Auditor-General deliberately refuses to comment on the quality of Cabinet's decision, but any flaws in it can only be the fault of the poor information supplied by McCully. More importantly, Cabinet Ministers owe their colleagues a duty of candour in Cabinet discussions. McCully has violated that duty. He should resign as a result.

Finally, the Auditor-General criticises the government for its secrecy on this issue. The public are owed transparency on what the government is doing with our money and what (if anything) has been achieved. They failed on this front as well - primarily due to the efforts of McCully to hide the fact that he had given poor advice and effectively bribed a foreign government. That's not acceptable either, and something he should be held accountable for.

23,000 unemployed under National

The Labour Market Statistics were released today, showing that unemployment has dropped to 4.9% - the first time it has been under 5% in National's entire 8 year term of office. And yet there are still 128,000 unemployed - 23,000 more than when they took office.

Not that 5% unemployment is anything to crow about. Labour managed to get it down to 3.5% and less during their term by manipulating monetary policy. National has simply let it fester to keep wages low. And the result is widespread poverty and a more unequal society. It would be nice to have a government which actually prioritised these issues rather than abandoning people to the market.

New Fisk

'We were living a real tragedy in east Aleppo': One family's journey across the city amid the bloodshed
Aleppo’s agony is far from over as Syrian general seeks further battles

The orcs are back

National wants to let an Australian mining company prospect on conservation land:

An Australian gold mining company is applying for consent to explore a large area of Northwest-Nelson conservation park land, but says it will only use hand-held tools in its exploration work.

Strategic Elements this week has been exploring 5559 hectares that contains the historic Aorangi gold mine bordering the Kahurangi National Park.

The company has been interested in the area for several years and in 2012 it gained a permit to study a 134 square kilometre area around the Golden Blocks goldfield.

It is currently seeking consent from the Department of Conservation to further explore a smaller area that includes the Aorangi Mine.

The Crown Minerals Act permits this sort of minimum-impact prospecting. But its sole purpose is to build a case for industrial gold mining in a highly sensitive part of the conservation estate.

The land in question should be part of Schedule 4. It was recommended for inclusion in Kahurangi National Park when it was formed due to its high conservation values, but excluded due to an unresolved Treaty claim. That claim has now been resolved, and thanks to the generosity of Ngāti Rārua the land has been gifted to the crown for conservation purposes. It should therefore be included in Kahurangi as quickly as possible. If its not, then I think we need to acknowledge that it is Ngāti Rārua's gold and that the government is violating its duty to protect it and its Treaty settlement obligations.

Donald Trump: Tax cheat

Now there's a surprise: it turns out that Donald Trump is a tax cheat:

Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver — which was later outlawed by Congress — Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

No wonder he won't release his tax returns.

And OTOH, do we really think any other member of America's financial-political elite is really any different? Their defining belief is that laws are for little people; I doubt they'd treat tax laws any different.

National's New Zealand

Another reminder that in John Key's "rock star economy", the real growth industry is foodbanks:

An increase in the number of people needing food donations is placing pressure on Palmerston North food banks and support staff in the build up to the busy Christmas season.

Methodist Social Services experienced a spike of new people in August, with 34 needing food donations - the highest monthly amount for the past three years.

A total of 106 new people required assistance in the past four months, more than half of the total amount for the 2014/15 financial year.

In the past four months the charitable organisation has already seen 1147 people, including a number of children.

And the reason for this is obvious: low wages, persistent high unemployment, sub-starvation benefit levels and a WINZ culture of denying people support. But hey, rich Auckland property speculating MPs are making out like bandits, so everything must be good, right?

Open Government: Shamed by Australia

Two weeks ago the government finally released New Zealand's second Open Government Partnership action plan. It was a pallid, unambitious document, continuing the government policy of trying to do as little as possible while not spending any money or changing anything substantive - in other words, exactly what the SSC ordered.

Australia has also just released its new action plan. It has twice as many commitments as ours, and they're substantial, rather than technical tweaks. And they're promising all the stuff that we demanded and didn't get: improved whistle-blower protection, improved transparency on beneficial ownership, greater political transparency, a whole-of-government framework for enhanced public participation, and real FOIA reform. Unlike New Zealand, these are ambitious and meaningful reforms which will make a difference. And it certainly puts us to shame to have this promised by the anti-transparency, anti-open government Australians.

The Australian plan is an example of what we could have done, if the process had been started earlier and if it had been overseen by a Minister and department actually committed to change, rather than viewing the OGP solely as an opportunity for PR and overseas junkets. And its a reminder that we can and should do much better in this area.

New Fisk

What it's really like to be in the middle of the battle for Aleppo
The strange case of the Scottish ambulance found among the rubble of eastern Aleppo
Massacre of innocents: As Syria and Russia bombard eastern Aleppo children are also dying in the west of the city

Dammit

Iceland went to the polls over the weekend, and while the final outcome isn't clear yet, what is clear is that the Pirate Party fell well short of expectations. Instead, they merely tripled their vote, from 5.1% to 14.5% - but its a long way from the 22% and leading place in the government coalition we were hoping for.

The various parties are trying to hammer out a coalition, but the decision is basicly in the hands of the new Revival Party, a Green liberal party which split from the incumbent Independence Party over Europe. They could go either way, so its really just a question of whether they want to support the corrupt political establishment, or the anti-establishment coalition.

Meanwhile, with 10 seats in the Althing, the Pirate Party should be able to exercise some influence. And hopefully we'll see that reflected in Icelandic policy on copyright, privacy, and human rights.

Happy Halloween

Its Halloween, which is as close to a religious holiday as I get. Pumpkins! Chocolate! Spooky plastic ravens! More chocolate!

If kids knock on your door asking for chocolate, be nice to them. Remember, thwarted kids grow up to try and take over the world.

A victory for the environment?

We've finally managed to get a marine protected area in the Ross Sea:

A joint New Zealand-US proposal to create the world's largest marine protected area in Antarctic waters has finally got across the line.

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully confirmed this afternoon that member countries of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) had agreed to the sanctuary in the Ross Sea after talks in Hobart this week.

The marine protected area (MPA) will cover roughly 1.55m square kilometres, of which 1.12m sq km will be a no-take zone.

...which means the other 430,000 square kilometres will allow fishing. So how is it a "protected area" again?

Looking at MFAT's page on the deal, it seems fishing for toothfish - a highly sought-after commercial catch - will be permitted for "scientific research". Which smacks of Japan's "scientific whaling" bullshit. It would be nice if we could get an environmental deal which doesn't include this sort of bullshit commercial carveout...

Climate change: The purpose of the ETS

Writing in the Herald, Brian Fallow looks at New Zealand's options for meeting our carbon budget. None of them look very credible. And part of the reason for this is that the government is just confused over the purpose of the Emissions Trading Scheme:

It is the Government's responsibility to ensure New Zealand meets its international obligation, at lowest cost.

But the purpose of the ETS is different. It is to set the economy on a decarbonising path. A path towards zero net emissions from these islands, hopefully within the lifetimes of most of the people who already inhabit them.

[...]

The object of the ETS is not to mitigate fiscal risk. It is to mitigate climate change.

The government's efforts to pervert a tool for reducing emissions into one for reducing costs is the main reason why New Zealand has failed spectacularly to lower its climate change footprint, and why future governments are facing a bill of $72 billion. As for how to fix it, the answer is simple: auction units rather than giving them away as pollution subsidies, and don't open the system up to international trade. But I guess that might cost National's donors and cronies too much money, and then they might not donate any more...

National bans protesting against US ship visit

Next month the US will be sending a non-nuclear-armed (but possibly cluster-bomb-armed) ship to New Zealand to participate in the New Zealand Navy's birthday party. As the representative of a military currently bombing children in at least seven countries, the USS Sampson is likely to attract protests on the water. So National has simply banned them:

Protest boats will be banned from parts of Auckland's harbour during a historic visit by a United States warship.

The US Navy is sending the USS Sampson to Auckland for the Royal New Zealand Navy's 75th birthday next month - the first visit by an American ship in 33 years.

Transport Minister Simon Bridges today declared the International Naval Review a Major Maritime Event.

That meant vessels not taking part in the review would have to stay clear of restricted areas in the Waitemata Harbour, Rangitoto Channel and parts of the inner Hauraki Gulf.

Bridges said the restrictions were intended to "ensure the safety of everyone on the water, including people who are not part of the event"

Bullshit. What it's actually intended to do is prevent the navy's birthday celebration being "marred" by the visible presence of people who don't like them or their choice of friends. And that's simply not a legitimate public purpose. This protest ban is a clear violation of the rights of freedom of expression and assembly enshrined in the Bill of Rights Act. The only question is whether the courts find that before or after National's police arrest someone under it.

Housing New Zealand lied on P-tests

For the past few years Housing New Zealand has been evicting tenants on the basis of dodgy tests for methamphetamine residue. Now it turns out that they had been warned repeatedly that the tests were not suitable for that purpose:

Housing New Zealand has ignored repeated warnings from senior government officials that it is misusing methamphetamine contamination guidelines to evict its tenants.

The Ministry of Health has repeatedly told Housing New Zealand that its methamphetamine guidelines were to be applied only for the clean up of former meth labs, and were not intended to monitor homes where the drug has been smoked.

Yet hundreds of tenants have been evicted from their state homes, after Housing New Zealand detected tiny traces of methamphetamine in them, and are often made to pay tens of thousands of dollars in clean up fees.

The ministry has just published new guidelines saying meth can be found at three to four times higher than the level being used as a reason to evict tenants.

The harm caused here is significant - and not just from evictions and cleanup fees. People's children have been taken on the basis of HNZC's dodgy tests. To inflict this harm on the basis of a test known to be unsuitable goes beyond mere negligence into knowing wrongdoing. And HNZC and its management must be held accountable for it. They could start by repaying all the money they wrongfully demanded, removing all blacklists, and giving their victims their houses back. Sadly, I expect they'll refuse to admit wrongdoing, and rely on their victims being too poor to pursue it through the courts.

New Fisk

The Syrian town shattered by war that may finally have seen an end to the fighting