Winston Peters is in court today, suing a bunch of former Minister and civil servants over their pre-election leak of his superannuation repayment. He's characterised the leak as malicious, and said that it is repugnant that his information was passed on to Ministers to use for political advantage. And he's absolutely right. WINZ had a legal duty to protect his privacy. And instead of doing that, they handed private data about a past issue which had been resolved to their satisfaction and which they had decided was not worthy of prosecution or further action to Ministers to be used for a shoddy political smear. They absolutely deserve to be taken to the cleaners over this, and the one disappointment is that the government is protecting those involved, rather than letting them carry the can personally for their bad-faith actions.
As for former ministers Anne Tolley and Paula Bennett, by leaking the information (and even by not immediately sacking the "public service" crawlers provided it to them) they demonstrated that they are unethical shitbags. They deserve to be taken to the cleaners too - and personally, rather than being protected by the government. which just smacks of a cosy establishment pact to protect each other from the consequences of wrongdoing. And that's the point where I disagree with Matthew Hooton: yes, Bennett and Tolley clearly can't help themselves. But that doesn't mean we should excuse their shitbaggery. To the contrary, it signifies their need for punishment, to deter other would-be shitbags. But it also demonstrates their absolute unfitness for public office: because someone who would abuse people's private data in this way is absolutely unfit to have access to anything.
Meanwhile, WINZ seems to be in full-on victim-blaming mode, which is just irrelevant. Because the issue here isn't how the error happened in the first place - they've previously accepted it was not Winston's fault when they decided to deal with it with a simple repayment - but that they decided to leak it to Ministers. Their choice of "defence" strategy shows that they still suffer from a sick culture of hating the people they are meant to be assisting. The current government has promised to change that culture, and "bring kindness back". Clearly, they still have a lot of work to do on that front.
Tuesday, November 05, 2019
Winston is right
Monday, November 04, 2019
New Zealand should not fund bigotry
Two years ago, the Cook Islands government announced that it was planning to join the civilised world and decriminalise consensual homosexual sex between men. Now, they've reversed their position, and decided to criminalise lesbians into the bargain:
Two years ago, in a step welcomed by many people including the gay and lesbian communities, the Pacific nation's Parliament removed "indecent acts between men" and sodomy from a draft Crimes Bill.
On Saturday, select committee chairman Tingika Elikana said they would reinstate the clause.
In fact, in an unintended consequence of moves to make legislation gender-neutral, the anticipated effect of the bill will be to also criminalise sex between women, as well as between men.
The select committee's recommendation to Parliament would reinstate a penalty of up to five years' imprisonment, and a sentence of seven years' prison for consensual sodomy.
New Zealand currently provides $66.17 million a year to the Cook Islands in development assistance - about a quarter of their entire government budget. I doubt New Zealanders are very happy with the thought of their taxes supporting a foreign government to support bigotry and put gay people in jail. Respect for basic human rights should be a fundamental condition of any funding, and if the Cooks refuse to observe them, we should cut it entirely.
More tyranny in Australia
The boycott is a fundamental tool of protest. By choosing who we buy from, we can send a message, and hopefully change corporate behaviour. Historically, boycotts have been effective, for example over apartheid in South Africa and Israel, in forcing divestment from Myanmar, and in ending bus segregation in the USA. Which is probably why Australia's increasingly tyrannical government wants to ban them:
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has accused environmental activists of "economic sabotage" and "indulgent and selfish practices" and says the government will look at legislation limiting potential damage to businesses.
Mr Morrison also said secondary boycotts were affecting small businesses providing services to industries such as mining companies, and the government would seek to protect them as they had farms in the wake of animal rights protests.
"We need to progress cautiously, but if it's not OK to have secondary boycotts being run by unions - and we got rid of those a long time ago - then it's not OK for environmental - not environmental, these are anarchist groups, and that's what they are - to be able to disrupt people's jobs and their livelihoods and to harass in the way that we've seen down in Melbourne, it's ugly and I don't think it's good for our country," Mr Morrison told radio station 3AW on Friday.
He also wants to crack down on protests, all to support Australia's dirty fossil fuel industry. Which sounds like another reason to boycott Australia until they start behaving like a civilised democracy again.
Friday, November 01, 2019
This government has a problem with secrecy
As introduced, the Zero Carbon Bill included an expansive secrecy clause, which would have covered virtually all decisions by the Climate Change Commission over our most important policy area. The Ministry for the Environment admitted this was a mistake (or as they put it, an "oversight"), and the select committee removed it. But at the same time, they introduced a new secrecy clause in s5ZV covering information requested by the Commission or the Minister about Adaptation.
How did they get here? Unfortunately the full advice isn't available yet (I have an OIA request in to get it, but they'll likely say "secret" again, just like they did with the original). But there's some clues in the supplementary advice given by MfE to the committee on the issue. The first thing to note is that this clause seems to have been proposed by MfE when proposing amendments to the bill. The committee expressed concern about it, and wanted to know why it went beyond the requirements of the OIA. MfE's response was to try and justify it:
The types of information that would be gathered through the adaptation reporting power may be highly sensitive in nature (e.g. trade secrets, privileged legal advice, financial information, etc.). Therefore, a mechanism to prevent public disclosure of this information is necessary. However, it is not proposed to be a blanket protection...But first, they have proposed a blanket protection, which would forbid any disclosure whatsoever, ousting all other law. Second, almost all of the agencies from which information can be requested are public agencies, already covered by the OIA, so the effect of the clause is to make public information secret. Third, for the few edge cases which aren't already covered by the OIA, this evades the obvious question. What about the existing protections in the OIA? Here, MfE's advice has a section titled "Limitations of the Official Information Act 1982 to protect sensitive information", but they don't actually provide any. They say nothing about why the OIA is supposedly insufficient. Instead, they seem concerned about it limiting the ability of the government to use the information it has requested. Which is exactly the sorts of fundamental misunderstanding of the law which led them to propose the original secrecy clause. It's advice so bad, it comes close to misleading the committee, and thereby misleading parliament, and I am absolutely astonished it was accepted.
So, to give the committee the advice MfE didn't: the OIA already protects trade secrets, commercially sensitive financial information, and privileged legal advice. It also protects information where production has been required by law and it is important that it is supplied in future. While these protections are all subject to the public interest in disclosure, that interest is much lower for third-party information, and in practice these provisions are some of the strongest in the Act. Absent some compelling reason - which MfE simply hasn't provided - there seems no reason to believe these existing protections will be insufficient. The clause is unjustifiable and should be struck from the bill at the committee stage.
Meanwhile, it has become clear from both this and other cases where such clauses have been introduced that this government has a secrecy problem. They, or a clique of public servants, do not trust the Official Information Act and are trying to gradually oust its transparency regime by stealth, a bit at a time. And this is not something we should accept. Government business is public business. Government information is public information. It belongs to us, not them, and any politician who does not accept that deserves de-election.
Update: And then, not ten minutes after posting this, I find the "justification" in another report (on p 121 - 125). And it basicly boils down to private sector paranoia about the possibility of disclosure under the public interest clause, and a complete failure to conduct any actual analysis of how likely that is or when it might happen. It then suffers from the same problem of fundamental misunderstanding of the law and drafting failures as the earlier secrecy work: they think they're not creating blanket secrecy, but they are. And it really calls the competence of MfE's advisers in this area into question.
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Happy Halloween
Its Halloween, so its time for annual pumpkin trepanning and chocolate eating ritual.
Climate Change: Disclosing the risks
The climate crisis is going to mean some pretty big changes in our country, both from its impacts and the policies required to address them. Most obviously, whole suburbs are going to be underwater by 2100, meaning people and businesses are going to have to relocate to higher ground. But also, anything which uses fossil fuels is likely to attract significant costs, and may become a stranded asset. This is obviously going to affect business. And now, the government is going to force them to disclose those risks:
Listed New Zealand companies could soon be required by law to make any climate change-related risks to their businesses known to their shareholders.
[...]
Shaw said the law, if passed, would mean companies would be required to assess and report on any of their climate-related financial risks to shareholders.
For example, if an airport was built on a waterfront which would likely be affected by climate-change-induced sea level rises, the company that owns the airport would be required to provide appropriate information to its owners.
The law would also mean companies would have to disclose any risk of stranded assets – assets that may suffer from unexpected value write-downs – as a result of climate change to their shareholders.
For example, shareholders would need to be informed that an investment in a coal mine could lose them money, given the Government's policies to move to 100 per cent renewable energy.
The logic here is simple: shareholders don't like losing money, so forcing transparency on these risks will drive change. And at the least, it seems like providing some basic protection, to stop companies from lying to their owners about their viability. And once information is provided, it should result in businesses either cleaning up or being dumped.
MPI fails again
Yesterday a dairy company was fined $483,000 for repeatedly failing to report listeria in its facility. Its a serious fine for a serious crime: listeria is a serious disease, and they were effectively trying to kill people with it. But there's another story hidden in there, and its not a good one:
MPI's Director of Compliance Gary Orr said that from 2012 to 2016, the company deliberately and repeatedly failed to report positive listeria results that were taken from a floor at the company's factory in Avondale. During this period, the company also falsified official related records.
Orr said a total of 190 positive listeria results went unreported during this time.
"This was serious, systematic and sustained deception – there's no other way to describe it," he said.
"The company was regularly audited to ensure its manufacturing environment was in accordance with regulatory requirements but it lied about what the true situation was.
[Emphasis added]
So what were those "audits" doing again? Because clearly, it wasn't any sort of actual checks; MPI only found out about this from a whistleblower.
If a company can be "audited" for food quality for five years and this sort of thing not be noticed, then our "audit" system is broken, and does nothing at all to keep the public safe. Instead, all it does is deceive us. We need real audits, real safety checks, so we can be confident our food is safe. unfortunately, given its demonstrated incompetence and captive internal culture, I doubt we'll be able to get them from MPI.
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
A partial release
The Ombudsman has ruled on the issue of Julie-Anne Genter's letter to Phil Twyford on the "Let's Get Wellington Moving" policy, and forced the release of some information. The Ombudsman's statement is here. The key point: the letter was written in part in a Ministerial capacity, and was official information (so no hat-game). But:
“I found that withholding the full letter is necessary to maintain the effective conduct of public affairs through the free and frank expression of opinions during the policy process,” Mr Boshier says.
“However, the Associate Minister’s statements in the House on the matter waived the confidentiality of this exchange to some extent. This resulted in some speculation and confusion about the capacity in which the document was held, and what it said.”
“Therefore, I considered there to be an overriding public interest in the release of some information about the letter and its context, to inform public understanding and promote public trust and confidence.”
Genter and Twyford's summary of the letter - agreed with the Ombudsman - is here.
The decision that it is "free and frank" is unusual - normally internal coalition discussions are protected under the "confidential advice" clause rather than "free and frank". But the real shift is that answering questions in the House at least partly waives the protection of this clause. Which sets a clear incentive for the Opposition to question Ministers closely so they can one way or another get answers. And that can only be a Good Thing.
Climate Change: California burning
Its fire season in California, and the state is on fire again, with tens of thousands evacuated and millions without power as forests and homes burn. And its so bad now that some are asking whether parts of the state are now too dangerous to inhabit:
Three years in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”. Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave.
If you're going to be evacuated every year, if your house burns down every three, you can't build any sort of life. And so places where that happens are just going to have to be abandoned, become places that people live in temporarily, rather than year-round. Its going to be a big change, but that's what we've done to ourselves.
California is where the future happens, but unfortunately our climate future is hostile. They're just seeing it before the rest of us. If you need a warning about why we need to cut emissions to zero and start drawdown, what is happening in California is it.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Unstalled?
Last month, I reported that BORA reform was stalled. Documents released under the OIA showed that there had been no advice on the topic since a proposed Cabinet paper was withdrawn in April (it also revealed some rather frank comments suggesting that the entire proposal had been nothing more than a shoddy legal tactic to fool the Supreme Court). But now Newsroom's Sam Sachdeva has followed up on the issue - and the government says it is "back on track":
Delayed proposals to give New Zealand's unwritten constitution greater strength have kicked back into gear, with legislation giving courts the right to declare a law inconsistent with the Bill of Rights set to go to Parliament before the end of the year.
[...]
Speaking to Newsroom, Little denied that [it was a legal tactic] and said Cabinet was likely to sign off on a final policy next month, with the relevant legislation introduced to Parliament before the end of the year.
There had been "a fairly intense set of discussions in the last three or four months", with the bulk of debate concerned with the balance between the role of any new legislation and what should be dealt with through Parliament's standing orders.
Which is great, if true, and I look forward to seeing the bill. But there's only six sitting weeks until the end of the year, so he'll need to get a move on.
"The most transparent government ever" again
When Labour was elected, they promised that "this will be the most open, most transparent Government that New Zealand has ever had". The reality:
Newly-released emails reveal Finance Minister Grant Robertson's staff tried to keep secret Treasury's criticism of a government proposal, but were unsuccessful.
Earlier this year, RNZ revealed Treasury had rubbished the so-called "feebate" scheme aimed at promoting electric cars, warning it would have virtually no effect on carbon emissions over two decades.
That advice was obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act, but fresh correspondence reveals Mr Robertson's office had tried to stop Treasury from releasing it.
And the reason for that is obvious: because it made the Minister look bad. Treasury pushed back against the Minister, but the Minister succeeded in having some of the advice redacted. Its a perfect example of how the "no surprises" policy is a recipe for Ministerial intervention in departmental OIA decisions - and of why we need to ensure that those decisions are made independently. Its also an example of how Labour's rhetoric on transparency fails to match reality. Because a Minister truly committed to transparency simply wouldn't be doing this. The fact that they are doing this, and routinely, tells us both that they are not committed to open government, and that they have something to hide.
Climate Change: The problem of free allocation
The government's new Emissions Trading Reform Bill would continue the existing system of free allocations. While it would accelerate phase-out rates, it would reset the base year for phase-out from 2012 to 2020, undoing all previous progress and potentially allowing polluters to claim a "refund". So who benefits from these pollution subsidies? Stuff has crunched the numbers, and discovered that 75% of them go to just four companies. And you can guess who they are:
[Image stolen from Stuff]
Three of those recipients are New Zealand subsidiaries of hugely profitable multinationals, companies which are in no need of a subsidy. It just seems to be a handout, a bribe to try and stop them from criticising the scheme or shutting down (which, ironicly, means bribing them to keep polluting - the exact opposite of what we need). The cost of the scheme has been relatively low so far, due to artificially low carbon prices. But if carbon prices rise as expected, then it could easily exceed a billion dollars a year by 2030. And that's a billion dollars a year we could spend on reducing emissions rather than maintaining them.
But the real problem is that, when combined with free pollution for agriculture, the free industrial allocation is basicly going to eat the entire 2030 carbon budget, leaving no room for anything else. Which, given that these polluters are only responsible for 6% of national emissions, suggests they are significantly over-allocated (again: bribes and handouts). So if nothing changes, what we're going to see in 2030 is these polluters making huge windfall profits from that over-allocation. And in some cases, they'll be making more money from carbon bribes than they do from their actual busines activity. For example, BlueScope Steel, the biggest recipient, made a profit of A$71.9 million last year, off revenue of A$463 million. In 2030, they'll be getting NZ$300 million worth of carbon credits a year. Tiwai Point made $207 million last year. In 2030, they'll be getting $260 million of carbon a year. Methanex's NZ plants produced 22% of its volume last year, or about US$125 million of their half-billion dollar profit. In 2030, they'll be getting NZ$165 million of carbon credits every year. In other words, these companies are going to go from producing products, with pollution and carbon credits as a side effect, to milking carbon credits, with products as a side effect. And the more they pollute, they more they'll get - the exact opposite of the incentive we need to set.
This is simple unsustainable, environmentally, financially, and politically. New Zealanders are not going to stomach seeing their tax dollars going to subsidise climate-destroying pollution by hugely profitable foreign multinationals. This system of free industrial allocation needs to be ended, and the sooner, the better.
Friday, October 25, 2019
Climate Change: Another history lesson
Yesterday the government introduced the Climate Change Response (Emissions Trading Reform) Amendment Bill, which (among other things) would change the rules around the phasedown of free industrial allocations. While it increases the phaseout rate - so it will now take 40 or 30 years for pollution subsidies to be eliminated - it also resets the baseline from which they are phased out to 2020, destroying the last 8 years of progress (and in fact it looks like the government will have to pay polluters the additional credits they didn't get under the old scheme). Perhaps for this reason the Minister was hardly effusive in his praise, merely saying that it phases down allocation "in a measured and predictable way". Its a slight improvement over National's free allocations, but only a slight one. And compared to the cuts we need to make, the lack of ambition is glaring. But its even worse if you have a memory longer than a goldfish.
Because the ETS didn't start with National in 2009. It was originally passed in the dying days of the Labour - NZ First government in 2008. The original version also included free allocation for "trade exposed" (whiny) industrial polluters. That allocation was not 90% of current pollution, but 90% of 2005 pollution. And it phased out not in 40 years, but in 22 - ten years of 90%, then a linear phase out over 12 years to 2030.
The kicker: Green co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons thought that phase-out was too slow:
The Greens have always assessed this bill against the two criteria of effectiveness and fairness. Both effectiveness and fairness were further compromised by the Prime Minister’s announcement in May that phase-out of free allocations would be delayed for a further 5 years, and the entry of transport by 2 years.
She also called the exemption of agriculture until 2013 and its allocation of free credits afterwards - like industrial allocations, phased out by 2030 - "a huge subsidy". I wonder what she thinks of James Shaw's sellout yesterday?
But one thing is clear looking at this history: as the urgency of the crisis has increased, the ambition of our politicians has gone the other way. Rather than rising to the challenge, they have simply given up, treated it as something to be negotiated and compromised with. But you cannot compromise with physics, and if allowed to continue, their lack of ambition will doom us all.
Brexit has broken the UK's democracy
The fundamental rule of democracy is that we settle issues by voting (and if you don't get your way, you just keep pushing for another vote). But thanks to Brexit, a large majority of the UK population is now willing to accept political violence:
Voters on both sides of the Brexit divide believe that violence against MPs and members of the public is a “price worth paying” to secure their favoured outcome, a new study has found.
A majority of both Leave and Remain voters would be happy to accept attacks on politicians and violent protests in which members of the public are badly injured if it meant they got Brexit outcome they want, according to a new polls.
Researchers said they were “genuinely shocked” by the findings, which come amid concerns about threats against MPs.
71% of English Leave voters and 58% of Remainers think violence against MPs is now acceptable. They've already had one MP murdered over this, and you'd think that would be a red light. Instead, it seems to have incited public bloodlust. Meanwhile, 69% of Leavers and 59% of Remainers think injuring members of the public is a worthwhile price to pay (it is unclear if they asked the natural followup of "what about a member of your family?")
This is not a sign of a healthy democracy. Instead, it is a sign of own spiralling down into violence and authoritarianism. And no matter which way Brexit goes - and does anybody outside the UK even really care anymore? - the damage to the political system is going to last a long, long time.
Climate Change: You cannot compromise with physics
This morning's media on yesterday's agriculture sellout is a perfect example of the problems of establishment game-focused political journalism. There are various articles praising the political cleverness of Shaw's deal, because it leaves National "stumped" and with nowhere to go, or celebrating compromise for compromise's sake. And meanwhile, in all of that bullshit, the urgency of the situation the policy is supposed to address has been lost.
So let's remind ourselves: the planet is warming like never before. We need to halve emissions by 2030 if we are to have an even chance of staying within the 1.5 degree limit, or cut them by 20% if we are to make the old 2 degree target. And contrary to Judith Collins' uninformed opinion, the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming is disastrous (the 4 degrees we are actually on track for is absolutely catastrophic).
Against this background, saying that agriculture, our biggest polluter, doesn't have to do anything until 2025 is committing to failure. And if we are to meet the emissions reduction targets necessary for human survival, it forces us towards policy paths that are extreme, like an actual cow-cull, rather than being able to reduce cow numbers by efficiency gains through the business cycle. We could afford to piss around like that in 2000, and maybe in 2008 (if we'd actually followed-through, rather than giving them a free ride). But now, we are out of time. You cannot compromise with physics, and anyone who thinks you can is trying to kill us.
So, no matter how many times Shaw and Ardern try to pull this act, when looked at against the policy background, this policy is a bad deal. It is inadequate, it is a failure, and it needs to be replaced as quickly as possible with real action.
The tragedy for the Greens is that, as The Spinoff notes, this is Shaw's deal. He owns it, which means he can't change it. If we want a better deal, we will need a different Minister, and a different Green Party co-leader.
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Climate Change: More hidden "features"
Apart from the agriculture sellout, today's ETS bill contains a few other unpleasant hidden features. Firstly, there's another secrecy clause (s30GF), requiring the auction monitor to "keep confidential all information that comes into its knowledge when performing its functions or exercising its powers". This echoes the existing secrecy clause applying to the EPA, and so will also override the Official Information Act. But as with that clause, it seems like overkill: existing OIA withholding grounds already protect any legitimate interest in confidentiality, while the clause goes well beyond them in declaring everything done by an agency to be secret. Not even the SIS or GCSB has such protection - but no doubt, based on these examples, they'll be demanding it. Meanwhile, I can't fail to notice that this just keeps happening: virtually every significant bill has a clause chipping away at transparency in one way or another with no justification for it whatsoever. The image is of a government which is now actively hostile to the public's right to know.
Worse, the bill doesn't just continue pollution subsidies - it undoes all the progress that has been made so far on removing them. At present, the ETS awarded polluters a 90% or 60% free allocation in 2012, dropping by 1% per year after that (so in 2020, the free allocation rate would be 82% or 52%, depending on whether an industry claims to be highly or moderately exposed). The new bill resets the base year to 2020, with a 90% or 60% free allocation, dropping after that. So polluters will get a higher subsidy than they did before the bill passed, effectively reversing the incentive to reduce emissions. Worse, it appear that after the law has changed, polluters will be able to claim for the free allocation they didn't get for the previous year, and the EPA could give them back up to four years. So its a recipe for windfall profits for our worst polluters.
I'd hope we can get both of these changed at select committee. But if the Zero Carbon Bill is anything to go by, the government will just give the finger to us again. Which means that if we want a better law, we will need a better government.
Still paying for the BMR
Back in 2004, a group of inmates at Auckland Prison took the Department of Corrections to court, alleging that the Department's "Behaviour management Regime" (BMR) amounted to cruel, degarding and inhuman treatment. When they won damages in 2004, the then-Labour government responded by passing (with the assistance of the Greens, who they then screwed over) the excreable Prisoners’ and Victims’ Claims Act, which attempted to prevent and deter such awards. But the victims weren't deterred, and went on to win hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that's not all - because the original claiments weren't the only victims of the BMR. 72 others have since lodged claims, and yesterday, the first of them won their case:
The first six of 72 prisoners unlawfully held in solitary confinement 20 years ago will finally be paid out by the government.It has taken fifteen years, apparently because Corrections has refused to consider settlement until now. Meanwhile, none of the Corrections managers who oversaw the BMR faced any employment consequences, despite costing their department more than a million dollars fifteen years ago. And with the amount of time that has passed, there seems absolutely no hope of them being held accountable now.
[...]
The first six have been offered $87,500 to be shared among all of them.
Assuming similar offers are made for the remaining 66, a final payout would exceed $1 million.
Update: Clarified that the current payments are settlements. The obvious question is why Corrections waited 15 years to make an offer - and how much they wasted on legal fees in the interim.
