Genesis lied on coal

Back in 2015, SOE Genesis Energy committed to shutting down the last two coal-fired units at its Huntly power-plant by December 2018. Of course, they lied:

Genesis Energy has pledged to stop using coal to generate electricity except in exceptional circumstances by 2025.

And it will stop using coal entirely by 2030.

The company has been criticised for using coal to generate electricity at its Huntly power plants because coal produces far more greenhouse gas emissions per therm of energy than gas does.

Of course, there's no mention that this is a repudiation of their 2015 promise, and one which will cause significant damage to the climate. And while they complain a lot about "security of supply", as Greenpeace points out, there are over 3 GW of renewable generation already consented (up to 850 of it by Genesis in one wind farm). But that stuff isn't being built because Genesis is still flooding the market by burning dirty coal in its hugely inefficient 70's-era power station.

If we are to meet our renewable energy targets and save the climate, we need to stop burning coal. And that means shutting down Huntly - permanently.

Oh FFS

Labour is considering dumping plans to put cameras on fishing boats:

Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash said many in the fishing industry were unhappy with the camera proposal and all options were on the table - including dumping it entirely.

One of Mr Nash's first moves when he became the Fisheries Minister was to put the brakes on the rollout of electronic monitoring of the commercial fishing fleet.

The former National government came up with the plan last year, saying it would protect the sustainability of fish stocks and act as a deterrent against illegal activity, like fish dumping.

But Mr Nash said National forced it upon the sector, and he was getting advice from officials on what should be done.

"There are certainly concerns in the industry that there hasn't been a proper process followed and a complete and utter lack of consultation.

...which is like a burglar complaining about a "lack of consultation" when people install burglar alarms. Because that is what is going on here: an industry which is 80% criminal and which has relied for decades on regulatory capture to get away with serious criminal behaviour is finally looking at being properly regulated. So naturally, they are squealing about it. The government should ignore that squealing, regulate the fuckers, and target the loudest for investigation since they obviously have something to hide.

...and I'd expect the Greens to be demanding this of their "partners". Because this is fundamentally about environmental crime, and the Greens should not let NZ First and Labour turn a blind eye to it like they did in the past.

National's legacy

The Salvation Army released its annual State of the Nation report today, revealing the mess National has left us in:

The number of food parcels being handed out at the Salvation Army's foodbanks has jumped 12 percent in the last year, according to the organisation's latest State of the Nation report.

Between 2011 and 2016, the Salvation Army was handing out about 56,000 food parcels a year.

Last year, that number jumped to 63,000 - helping almost 32,000 families - and the report's author, Alan Johnson, said they were not exactly sure what's behind the increased demand.

The report attributes this to National's housing crisis. While MSD has become more generous with emergency assistance, its not enough to offset the squeeze on renters (and MSD are vicious arseholes which discourages people from seeking or receiving the help they are entitled to).

This is National's legacy - mass poverty and inequality. And no doubt they'll spend the next three years pretending to care about it and complaining that Labour hasn't fixed in five minutes a problem that it took them nine long years to create and exacerbate.

Australia's biggest tax cheats

Big companies are supposed to be good for us, right? They make money and pay taxes, allowing the government to fund the stuff we need. Except in Australia, that's just not true: their largest corporations pay no tax:

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, one of the most prominent supporters of the Turnbull Government's proposed big business tax cut, presides over a company that hasn't paid corporate tax for close to 10 years.

The period roughly coincides with Mr Joyce's tenure at the helm of Australia's flag carrier.

Despite generating income of $106.4 billion, the flying kangaroo has avoided paying tax on that bounty since 2009, thanks to Australia's generous tax concessions, depreciation provisions and the ability to offset company losses against past and future profits.

New analysis by the ABC reveals Qantas is not alone — its tax behaviour is consistent with about 380 of Australia's largest companies. ATO corporate tax transparency data — confirmed in email exchanges with company representatives — reveals about one in five of the country's biggest companies have paid no tax for at least the past three years.

The article has a long, long list of large companies who pay nothing, preferring instead to launder their money and play complicated shell games to steal from the public. It includes airlines, banks, mining companies, and media giant APN (which owns the New Zealand Herald). Which makes you wonder whether this happens in New Zealand. It almost certainly does, but unfortunately, we'll never be able to prove it, because while the Australian Tax Office publishes an annual transparency report on how much tax is paid by big business, IRD considers whether corporations are stealing from us to be "private". Which puts them in the position of actively covering up for tax thieves. It also leaves us in the position of not being able to decide appropriate policy, because the public is actively denied the data necessary to judge the scale of the problem.

There's an obvious member's bill here to set up a statutory transparency regime, for an MP who wants to stick it to the tax cheats. Does anyone want to take it up?

Good riddance to Bill English

So, Bill English has resigned as leader of the National Party and will be leaving Parliament. Good fucking riddance. He's done a lot of shitty things in his career, and I'm glad to see the back of him. There's his role in pushing climate change denial as National leader in the early 2000s, which delayed real action on climate change until... well, we still haven't seen it, have we? There's his racist response to the foreshore and seabed case, which in turn helped push Labour down the racist path of dispossession. There's his constant battle to undermine abortion rights and women's health. And then, there's his own personal dishonesty in claiming to live in Dipton so he could get the taxpayer to pay for the house in Karori he actually lived in. Bluntly, the man was a racist and a thief, and the sooner he goes, the better.

NZ's history is secure

Over the xmas break, we learned that the British government was conveniently "misplacing" documents from its national archives - documents which detailed the crimes of empire or which might be inconvenient or embarrassing for the establishment in the future. The mechanism for this crude coverup is temporary loan back to the originating agency, which then somehow "loses" the embarrassing file (or in some cases, only the embarrassing pages).

(That's of course the stuff that makes it into the archive. The British government has also had systematic processes to stop records of their crimes being archived in the first place)

When I read this, I was curious: New Zealand has a statutory process for temporary return of archive material, so does anything similar happen here? I used the OIA to ask Archives New Zealand some questions about temporary returns and missing documents, and the response I think is one that can give us confidence that our history is secure:

The number of items temporarily returned to originating or controlling public offices differs each year based on demand. The Government Loans service processed 3,482 files for offsite loan during the 2017 calendar year. For 2016, a total of 3,408 items were issued; 4,166 items were issued in 2015. These numbers cover all of our offices (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin).

[...]

We find that our government loans clients take the security of the items they borrow very seriously. There are 22 items listed as ‘Missing – Government Loans’ in our system.

I've asked for a list of those files, but the overall picture appears to be good. You'd expect a small rate of loss as part of the bureaucratic process, but this appears to be extremely small indeed. Unlike the UK, we don't appear to have systematic government destruction of our history. But I guess we have far less to be ashamed of...

"A lottery"

That's how UK immigration staff are describing their refugee decision-making process:

The British asylum process is a lottery and many asylum interviews are rushed, biased and resolved by “cut and paste” decisions by overworked Home Office staff, whistleblowers have told the Guardian.

Former staff employed in deciding asylum claims said some colleagues had a harsh, even abusive, attitude towards applicants, mocking them to one another and employing “intimidation tactics” during interviews.

As a result, the whistleblowers said, the asylum system was in effect a lottery, depending on the personal views of the decision-maker who picked up the file. They said some staff took pride in rarely, if ever, granting asylum.

[...]

“It’s just a lottery,” said another. “Because if you’ve got a caseworker who was particularly refusal-minded and was determined to catch you out then you’re going to have a hard time … There was one particular guy who had a reputation for never granting anything. He kind of took pride in that as well. On the one occasion when he did grant someone, I think someone brought him in a cake.”

It is difficult to see how this meets the requirements of international law, let alone administrative law requirements of fairness and reasonableness. But I guess if its dificult for people to get lawyers, then those requirements mean nothing in practice, and can be ignored.

Further on, the article talks about staff being required to process 225 applications a year - a rate which leaves them no time to properly read the cases, let alone make a good decision. Its reminiscent of the dystopian computer game Papers, Please, rather than the sort of thing you expect to happen in a civilised and functioning country. But I guess where refugees are concerned, the UK hasn't been civilised for quite some time, if indeed it ever was.

I'd like to think that New Zealand does a better job than this, but we've had the same budgetry pressures that the UK has had. Maybe its worth someone sending some pokey OIA requests about staff numbers, caseload, and expected work rates?

Worse than we thought

So, it turns out that National's housing crisis is much worse than we thought, with an enormous hidden pool of homeless people exiled from state housing, massive undersupply, and long-term consequences for health and our society. And fixing it is going to be far more work and far more expensive than Labour imagined:

Eaqub said the new Government was actually lacking ambition in the area - they needed to double the number of state houses and build 500,000 homes over the next ten years instead of 100,000.

He said the Government's budget responsibility rules were an unnecessary straitjacket which could hold the Government back from properly addressing the crisis.

The Herald version has some even blunter language about this:

Eaqub said investment was needed in infrastructure and housing such as the KiwiBuild programme yet the Government was restricted because of the fiscal responsibility rules.

He said the infrastructure issue could be resolved by "borrowing s***loads of money" and only a "fiscal idiot" would not have been borrowing money in the current climate or over the past decade.

So basicly we're going to need long-term and very expensive reinvestment to fix National's infrastructure deficit. And while the government is doing that, National will spend the entire time screaming about debt and taxes. Because fundamentally, National doesn't care about housing and everyone having a roof over their heads - that was clear enough from their policies. What they care about is rich people not having to pay for anything. Just like the local government morons who whine perpetually about rates while letting their sewage systems, roading networks, and other public infrastructure decay.

But it has to be done. The report makes clear that failing to fix this will cost us in health costs, education costs, and significantly in superannuation costs. Not fixing it is dereliction of duty. The good news is that building state houses is an investment: you borrow money, and you get an asset, which then rises in value and delivers social and economic benefits (e.g. reduced health costs). Eaqub is right: when interest rates are low, it is mad not to do that (even National accepts this, at least when it comes to interest-free student loans). The big problem is going to be the capacity of the building sector to deliver a mass house-building programme. So the government is going to have to do a lot of work building the capacity to build. The good news is that having permanent work from the government will remove the boom-and-bust cycle from the building market, and allow serious long-term investment to make it more productive. Assuming of course that a National government doesn't just come along and scrap the entire thing again.

The full report is here.

Bring them home and put them on a leash

Stuff has a piece this morning about research from human rights campaigner Harmeet Sooden about what NZDF is doing in Iraq. Sooden's full report is here, but the short version is that National expanded NZDF's mission from training to "advise-and-assist", including planning and coordinating the combat missions of a force which shows no respect for human rights. Naturally, they did this secretly, and just two months before the 2017 election. NZDF has also been involved in a US program to collect biometric data from the Iraqi population (similar to the program the SAS was participating in in Afghanistan, exposed in Hit and Run), which given the Iraqi government's penchant for torture and sectarian oppression, has significant human rights implications (effectively, we're helping them compile a sectarian hit-list). Again, they did all of this in secret too. So, its the usual story: NZDF goes to fight other people's wars and lies to us about what its doing.

We have seen this again and again over the years - in Iraq during Bush's war, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Gulf, and now in Iraq, and it has to fucking stop. We cannot tolerate a military which regards the people it works for - the New Zealand public - effectively as an enemy to be mushroomed, propagandised, and lied to. That is simply not acceptable in a democracy.

As for how, in the long-term we clearly need Parliamentary approval for any foreign military deployment. That automatically prevents mission creep and provides direct Parliamentary oversight. In the short term, the best way to stop NZDF misbehaving is to bring them home. Back in 2016, Labour promised to do just that, and withdraw kiwi troops from Iraq. The Australians (and presumably their American masters) are currently wanting us to extend our deployment (despite having declared victory over ISIS). We should resist that demand. And specifically, the Greens should put their foot down and demand it. After all, if they're going to be asked to compromise their democratic values as the price of getting along in government, they should get something for it. Ending our involvement in Iraq seems like a fair price for that stinky dead rat.

New Fisk

Israel's outrage over the Palestinian President’s new private jet is hypocritical

Good riddance to charter schools

The government has introduced legislation to end charter schools:

The Government has introduced a bill to scrap national standards and charter schools in New Zealand.

However, charter school operators wanting to be involved in education could apply to establish another form of school, such as a designated character school, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said.

The new legislation was introduced by Hipkins on Thursday, who said it was backed by the vast majority of the education sector.

Good riddance. Privatised, subsidised, profit-making entities have no place in our education system, especially when they're funded at a higher rate than state schools while being exempt from both any quality standards and any oversight via the OIA. I am glad to see them go. If their communities actually want them, then they can be turned into special character schools under existing provisions of the Education Act. Otherwise, they can and should shut down.

More cronyism

The government is apparently planning to give former Labour MP Annette King a diplomatic sinecure:

Former MP Dame Annette King is tipped to be appointed the next High Commissioner to Australia by the end of the year.

King left Parliament at the last election and was made a Dame in the New Year's Honours.

It is understood King is now in line to be appointed as High Commissioner for Australia in the middle of the year and will take up the post when the current High Commissioner Chris Seed leaves after August.

If true, this is simply more cronyism. While heads of mission are technically appointed by the Governor-General rather than the Chief Executive, they still become public servants. The principle of appointment on merit should apply - especially to our most important diplomatic position. The idea that you just appoint a crony as a political favour so they can drink themselves senseless for three years at public expense is a loathsome relic of the British monarchy and belongs in the dustbin of history with the rest of the imperial baggage.

Pre-election, Winston Peters reportedly said he would restore appointment on merit for diplomatic posting, and recall National's crony appointments. I'd like to see him keep his word on this. Those appointments were wrong and should never have been made. If Winston wants a legacy, ending this culture of high-level cronyism would be an excellent one.

But I guess then he'll never get the diplomatic post he's been dreaming of as a retirement sinecure... and so the self-interest and greed of our political class screws us all again.

New Fisk

On the front line in Syria, a confusing conversation with a doctor who may be an official of the YPG

4,000 employed under Labour

The labour market statistics have been released, showing a decrease in unemployment in the new government's first quarter in office. Where National ended its term with 21,000 more unemployed than when it began, Labour has already decreased it by 4,000. That's luck rather than policy - Labour hasn't yet made any changes to employment law or to the Reserve Bank's economic settings - but it does establish a baseline from which their future performance can be judged.

A change in government will mean a change in attitude. National believed it was helpless in the face of market forces, so abandoned the unemployed to the market, while complaining about the cost of its own inaction. Labour sees unemployment as a moral failing of government, a failure to set economic policy to ensure that everyone who wants to work can (and get paid well for doing so). Which means that if we get a shock to the economy in their term, they will at least try and do something to help, rather than just shitting on people.

A good start

When it was first elected, the government promised to end coal mining on conservation land. Now they've taken a step towards that, by blocking the sale of land on the Denniston Plateau to foreign coal company Bathurst Resources:

The government has blocked the sale of 19 hectares of land on the West Coast to a coalmining company.
The Stockton mine on the West Coast.

The Overseas Investment Office had recommended that Bathurst Coal be allowed to buy three separate areas on the Denniston Plateau.

But that recommendation has been rejected by the Conservation Minister, Eugenie Sage, and the Associate Finance Minister, David Clark.

The land required OIO approval because it was surrounded by land held by DoC. The OIO as usual rubber-stamped it. But the Ministers said no, on the basis that there was no economic benefit to New Zealand. Officially this was because the mine on the land was closed and Bathurst had no plans to re-open it. While its not clear if they considered Bathurst's real plans - using the land to force access to the conservation estate for a giant open-cast mine instead - recent experience with this company getting resource consent and stealing conservation land, only to shut down operations immediately suggests there's no economic benefit there either. And that's without even having to get in to whether the government would keep its promise to refuse access (if they do, no economic benefit either).

Either way, the net result of this decision appears to be preventing the possibility of a giant, open-cast coal pit in an environmentally sensitive area. And that's a good start on the government keeping its promise.

New Fisk

As my recent trip to Syria proved, wars can be at their most dangerous when they're coming to an end

A crony appointment

When National was in government, I spent years criticising their crony appointments. Now it looks like I'm going to be doing the same for Labour as well. The first one I've noticed: they've appointed former Labour MP and cabinet minister Pete Hodgson as chair of Callaghan Innovation.

Hodgson isn't a terrible choice for the role - he's a former Minister of Research, Science and Technology and chair of Otago University's technology spinoff company. If he was appointed on his merits via a transparent process in which he was obviously the best candidate, then that would be fine. But being appointed by his own party automatically raises doubts and suggests that it was a crony appointment. I guess we'll find out the truth in 20 working days...

Time to increase aid spending

Stuff reports that the government is reviewing its level of spending on foreign aid. Good. As the article shows, our level of foreign aid - which was never particularly good - was systematically underfunded by National, and has eroded from 0.3% to 0.23% of GNI. This compares badly with Australia (0.27%), the OECD average (0.4%), and our longstanding international commitments (0.7%). If we're to meet the latter, we're going to need to more than triple our funding to ~$1.5 billion a year.

This is a big ask, both in terms of priorities, and MFAT's capacity to actually do it. Its likely that we'll see a much smaller increase initially. But it would be good to see a pathway laid out for us to meet our international obligations.

Drawn

A ballot for four Member's Bills was held this morning, and the following bills were drawn:

• Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill (Simeon Brown)
  
• Employment Relations (Triangular Employment) Amendment Bill (Kieran McAnulty)
  
• Crimes (Offence of Blasphemous Libel) Amendment Bill (Angie Warren-Clark)
  
• Accident Compensation (Recent Migrants and Returning New Zealanders) Amendment Bill (Melissa Lee)
  

The repeal of blasphemous libel is something I've been pushing for for nearly as long as this blog has been around. I'm glad that it will finally make it to the House. The question is, will anyone actually oppose it?

Disappointed

Yesterday the House debated Chlöe Swarbrick's Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis and Other Matters) Amendment Bill - and voted it down 73 - 47. I'm disappointed. While the government has made some positive moves on medicinal cannabis, its regime doesn't go far enough. In particular, it doesn't cover long-term chronic pain, and it doesn't cover the problem of supply. These are serious problems which are causing real suffering (and seeing people unjustly prosecuted), and they deserve a serious response from our elected representatives. Instead - pushed mostly by the old farts in National who identify medicinal cannabis as "drugs" rather than "medicine" - they've ignored it and left people to suffer (often while voicing pious platitudes about how the problem needed to be "debated" or "investigated", while voting against a select committee doing exactly that). What a pack of arseholes.

This issue isn't going to go away. Sick people are going to continue to suffer, and continue to take cannabis to ease their suffering. The only question is whether that suffering is compounded by prosecution. Personally, I would prefer a government which treated the sick with compassion rather than victimising them. But apparently that's too much to expect.

In the meantime, the governments bill did go to select committee. When they call for submissions, it might be worthwhile submitting asking for the regime to be expanded. And if you don't like how they voted last night, I suggest you email your MP and express your disapproval.