Guilty

Former Labour local body candidate Daljit Singh has been convicted of electoral fraud:

A Labour Party candidate in the first Super City elections has been found guilty of two counts of using forged documents but has been acquitted on the remaining 18 electoral fraud allegations he faced.

Daljit Singh has been on trial in the High Court at Auckland on 20 charges of using forged documents to increase his chances of winning a seat on his local board.

The jury of 11 returned their verdicts this afternoon after deliberating for nearly five days.

Six other men - Gurinder Atwal, Davinder Singh, Mandeep Singh, Virender Singh, Paramjit Singh and Malkeet Singh - also stood trial for electoral fraud, but on fewer counts.

Good. The integrity of our electoral system is important, and its good to know that Singh will be held to account for attempting to subvert it.

An open and shut case

There's an interesting court case on te reo language rights happening today:

A Waitangi Tribunal claimant is taking the tribunal to court for stopping her lawyer asking questions in te reo of English-speaking witnesses.

The lawyer for Te Rohe Potae claimant Liane Green said it was an irony that a judge in what was probably the only judicial forum in New Zealand where te reo was regularly spoken should have ruled that lawyer Alex Hope could not use te reo Maori to cross-examine English-speaking witnesses.

Lawyer Karen Feint told Justice Alan MacKenzie in the High Court in Wellington today that the ruling Judge David Ambler made at a hearing in Te Kuiti a year ago and backed up in a written judgment in February had undermined the mana of te reo and demeaned it as a language, giving it a lower status than English. Judge Ambler's ruling had been wrong, she said.

This is an open and shut case. Section 4 of the Māori Language Act 1987 gives an absolute right to use te reo in legal proceedings, regardless of ability to speak English, and regardless of convenience. This right explicitly includes the Waitangi Tribunal. While the presiding officer can require notification so they can arrange translators, they explicitly cannot deny anyone the right to speak due to a failure to notify. Judge Ambler's decision appears to be contrary to all of this, and I am looking forward to it being overturned.

Equality loses in Australia

Australia's High Court has overturned the ACT's marriage equality law:

The judges found the ACT laws could not operate alongside federal laws as only the federal parliament had the power under the constitution to legislate on same sex marriage.

They said the Marriage Act does not allow or recognise marriages between same sex couples.

The court held the ACT Act provided for marriage equality for same sex couples.

Not, as the territory argued, for a form of legally recognised relationship which was different from marriage.

The finding means ACT Act cannot operate concurrently with the federal Act.

"Because the ACT Act does not validly provide for the formation of same sex marriages, its provisions about the rights of parties to such marriages and the dissolution of such marriages cannot have separate operation and are also of no effect," the statement said.

"The Court held that the whole of the ACT Act is of no effect."

So, all those happy couples who got married yesterday have just had their marriages declared invalid.

But while bigotry and hate have won today, this isn't over. The majority of Australians support marriage equality. And they're going to keep pushing for it until their bigoted federal politicians catch up with the modern world.

A $510,000 waste of money

The Rebstock witch-hunt into leaks from MFAT has finally reported back, and found... nothing:

An investigation into who leaked information about restructuring plans at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has failed to positively identify who was responsible.

A public version of a report to State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie from Paula Rebstock said the investigation was "unable to find definitive evidence of who was responsible for the unauthorised disclosure of the Cabinet Papers''.

However Ms Rebstock reported "a strong suspicion" that the leak of the Cabinet Papers was made a temporary staff member working within Mr Rennie's own department.

For $510,000 I'd expect something more than "a strong suspicion" and smears. If this is what the government considers "value for money", we should be demanding our money back.

The full report is here.

Another abusive digital search

My Twitter feed this morning has been full of tweets by, about, and in support of Sam Blackman, whose digital devices were seized at the border by Customs. No reasons were given for the seizure. Which would seem to be the very definition of an unreasonable search and seizure.

In the absence of reasons from Customs, all we have is suspicion. And on that front, its worth noting that Blackman had recently attended the Stop Bugging Us conference in the UK, and thinks that might have raised a red flag. If so, then Customs seems to be using border searches to persecute and surveill the political opponents (and those who might be opponents, such as academics and journalists) of state spies. Which doesn't really seem to be related to the enforcement of Customs controls at the border, and thus is an unlawful exercise of state power.

Unfortunately, unless Blackman has a few thousand dollars to throw away on a BORA case for unreasonable search and surveillance, we'll never know. Though there is one avenue. The Ombudsman has jurisdiction over Customs, and can investigate actions for unreasonableness. Anyone whose devices are searched at the border by Customs should immediately file a complaint with the Ombudsman's Office. At the least, you'll force Customs to disclose a reason, which can then be examined - and that's the first step to ending these searches.

National's New Zealand

Back in the Dark Ages, if a rich person murdered someone, they could just buy their way out of trouble by paying weregild. We ended the practice when we realised that crimes weren't just against victims, but also society, and that everyone should be equal before the law regardless of wealth of social status.

Sadly, the practice seems to be alive and well in National's New Zealand:

Twelve charges laid against former Pike River Coal chief executive Peter Whittall in relation to the 2010 disaster at the mine have been dropped.

In a shock development in the Christchurch District Court this morning, the Crown said that after an extensive review it was "not appropriate to continue with the prosecution against Mr Whittall''.

Mr Whittall has proposed that a voluntary payment be made on behalf of the directors and officers of Pike River Coal Ltd (in receivership) at the time of the explosions to the families of the 29 men who died and the two survivors.

It means $110,000 will be given to each of the families and survivors - totalling $3.41m.

This is what government of, by and for the rich gets us: rich pricks buying their way out of serious criminal charges. As for justice and the rule of law, clearly they're just for little people.

A living wage for Wellington

Wellington City Council has just agreed a living wage policy for its staff. Good. Local authorities are legally required to be good employers, and this should include paying their staff enough to actually live on. There's been a series of OIA requests through FYI to various local authorities requesting living wage information, and the results are pretty dismal - payment of substandard wages seems to be widespread. But with Auckland and Wellington moving in the right direction, it will hopefully force the others to end this exploitative practice - and push the labour market in the right direction as well.

Has Groser sold us out?

Last night the TPP negotiations in Singapore broke up without reaching a conclusion. But they did apparently reach agreement on some things, notably intellectual property:

Washington Trade Daily has reported that ministers from all TPPA countries, except one developing country, have dropped their objections to the US-based intellectual property chapter, with some modifications.

That means Australia, New Zealand and Canada have agreed to a ‘very high standards’ text with unspecified transition clauses for developing countries.

In other words, our government has backed down to US demands of copyright maximalism. So how much have we given away? Will we lose Pharmac or be required to impose US DMCA-style restrictions? Has Groser sold us out? Unfortunately, he refuses to tell us. And as a result, we're left here in the dark, expected to endorse a deal Groser has made in our name without knowing any of the details, and conveniently unable to hold him to account for his negotiations until after the face.

Whatever you want to call that, it isn't democratic. We need full transparency on foreign policy, so we can see what we are trading away, and hold negotiators accountable for the deals they are making in our name. And if Groser feels he can't work like that, he should resign in favour of someone who respects the sovereignty of the New Zealand people.

Anadarko are parasites

At the moment, Texan oil cowboys Anadarko are engaged in a risky drilling operation off Raglan in a desperate gamble to find oil. If something goes wrong, there will be oil on every beach from Kaipara to New Plymouth - but Anadarko haven't been required to post a bond or carry insurance for the potential costs of cleanup. And to add insult to injury, it turns out that - thanks to Labour - they're not even paying taxes either. And now National wants to extend this tax-free status for another five years.

This is simply a subsidy for fossil fuel production - something the government claims to oppose. And it is simply wrong. Companies that do business in New Zealand should pay tax here. And that goes double for companies that expect the Navy and Police to mount multi-million dollar operations to suppress freedom of speech on their behalf.

Anadarko and other oil companies are simply parasites. They expect the protection of the New Zealand state while paying nothing to support it. Meanwhile, they ruin our environment, so that profits can be siphoned off overseas. Rather than giving them a tax break, we should be forcibly evicting them from our country.

Winning the argument on paid parental leave?

Labour's Sue Moroney currently has a bill before Select Committee to extend paid parental leave to six months. The bill has a majority in the House, and will pass unless the government uses its unconstitutional financial veto. But now, it has delayed so that National can reconsider its position:

Labour believes the Government may be preparing to back down over paid parental leave after it asked to delay a bill extending the scheme to six months.

Labour MP Sue Moroney said she had agreed to delay reporting back her member's bill so National had time to consider its position on the bill.

The move followed talks between Labour finance spokesman David Parker and Finance Minister Bill English, the Labour MP said.

If National is backing down and allowing the bill to pass, its good news. We have one of the weakest paid parental leave provisions in the developed world (tellingly, only the sexist US and Australia are worse than us), and its a policy with clear benefits to children and wider society. Investing in children early on has clear benefits later, and more than pays for itself. So rather than being a "can we afford it?" policy, its "can we afford not to". And if National has finally seen that and will allow the bill to pass, then good.

OTOH, National may not be interested in the merits of the policy so much as an opportunity to rob Labour of one of their cheapest, easiest and most popular election pledges. But if we can get them to do the right thing for venal reasons, then I'm not going to mind.

East Timor should prosecute

East Timor claims to have identified the Australian spies who bugged their Cabinet office:

East Timor's government believes it has identified the members of a team of four Australian spies who allegedly bugged its government offices, describing it as "very disturbing" that they apparently used the cover of an aid program.

The revelations came as intelligence and development experts expressed their deep misgivings that aid was apparently used as the pretext for installing and then removing the eavesdropping equipment, saying it jeopardised important aid projects and potentially put Australian aid workers at risk around the world.

"We think we have identified the team of people who came in to do the bugging. We have their names," said Alfredo Pires, East Timor's Natural Resources Minister. "They are males, along with a possible lady spy."

East Timor would keep the names secure, he said. But he noted that at least one of them was still working overseas under the same name and may be at risk "if the names get out over the internet".

Bugging is usually illegal, and these people have presumably committed a crime. If they have, then East Timor should file charges and seek to extradite them from whereever they are hiding. And if that means that they can't work as spies for Australia anymore, then tough shit. Spies are criminals, and these ones need to be held to account.

Submit!

The Justice and Electoral Committee has called for submissions on the Harmful Digital Communications Bill. You can submit by filling out the form at the link above.

The bill implements the recommendations of the Law Commission on "harmful digital communications" - everything from cyberbullying to this. It is deeply problematic. I've called it a resurrection of criminal libel (but only online, of course); Vikram Kumar has pointed out that the "safe harbour" provisions are a recipe for widespread censorship (as we've seen with the US DMCA). While there's a need to protect young people from online bullying, this goes too far and needs significant amendment. Please submit in support of such amendments.

Not a Christian country

The 2013 Census data tables are out - which leads to my five (now seven, due to an earthquake) yearly post on religious demographics. The headline data:



[Data from table 28 here. For consistency with past practice, "object to state" has been excluded when calculating percentages]

That's right: Christians are no longer a majority in this country. In absolute number terms its even more stark - they've dropped by almost 200,000 in the last seven years, with traditional denominations such as Anglicans and Presbyterians seeing drops of 18% as their aging members die off. And we've seen that change in our society. 27 years ago, when Parliament decriminalised homosexuality, New Zealand was more than 74% Christian (1991 census figure), and MPs faced a sustained campaign of hate. By 2005, when they passed Civil Unions, it was down to fringe nutters like Destiny Church, and their "Nuremberg March" met with widespread condemnation. And this year, when they passed marriage equality, opposition was muted and it passed by a wide margin. And on that level alone, the decline of Christianity has made us a better country.

Metadata matters

Unconcerned that the NSA is tracking your movements via your cellphone and passing the info on to GCSB? Think that metadata doesn't matter? The American Civil Liberties Union has a lovely demonstration of how much they can learn from this, and how it can be used to reveal your friends, lovers, political activities, and even whether you might be driving drunk.

Metadata matters. It exposes intimate details of our personal lives that the government has no business knowing without probable cause. If we value our privacy, we need to shut down the spies, before it is too late.

An indecent society

Back in October, we learned that the Children's Commissioner had been forced to go begging to charity to fund ongoing monitoring of child poverty, after the government had refused to do so. The result was Child Poverty Monitor, a collaboration between the Children's Commissioner, the University of Otago, and the J R McKenzie Trust. Now they've released their first monitoring report [PDF] - and it paints a bleak picture:

More children living in crammed homes are ending up in hospital, as a new report shows one in four children remain mired in poverty.

A new rigorous measure of child poverty released today shows that about one in six Kiwi children are going without basic necessities. This could mean not having a bed, delaying a doctor's visit or missing out on meals.

It also shows hospital admissions for children with medical conditions linked to poverty are rising. Tens of thousands of children are admitted every year for respiratory and infectious diseases associated with living in damp, overcrowded homes.

Using international standard measures, 25% of our children are living in poverty. And its not due to "feckless, lazy parents" - its due to jobs that don't pay enough to live on, persistent unemployment, and insufficient benefit levels.

This is simply indecent, and what's worse is that it is entirely a matter of political choice. Our government could fix this, our government should fix this - not just for moral reasons, but for pragmatic ones: child poverty costs a fortune, now and into the future. But the current government chooses not to. And when confronted with the problem, they giggle at it. I guess sick and starving kids must seem funny if you "earn" $250,000 a year.

This is an indecent government creating an indecent society. They have to go.

Australia is a surveillance state: don't let it happen here

Way back in June, we got the first pre-Snowden glimpse of the extent of the US surveillance state, with the admission that the NSA was recording every phone call for later use. It turns out they're not alone: Australia has an identical system, which copies and stores all phone and internet traffic for later mining:

Australia's leading telecommunications company, Telstra, has installed highly advanced surveillance systems to "vacuum" the telephone calls, texts, social media messages and internet metadata of millions of Australians so that information can be filtered and given to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The Australian government's electronic espionage agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, is using the same technology to harvest data flows carried by undersea fibre-optic cables in and out of Australia.

[Image stolen from The Age, linked above]

So, they take it all, mine the metadata for relationship mapping, and access the content whenever they feel like it (because a warrant is no safeguard against spies with a rubber-stamp Minister). And Australia's interception capability law is what allows it all to happen. Under the guise of making ISPS and phone companies "interception capable", they've actually installed a Stasi-style panopticon, right there in a western democracy.

Meanwhile, the New Zealand government has just updated our own interception capability law, and amended the GCSB Act to allow them to spy on New Zealanders (and remove any control on the interception of metadata). The purpose of those two law changes is now obvious: the GCSB wants to build a panopticon to keep our digital lives under constant surveillance.

As for how to stop them, the solution is political. Labour is making comforting noises about inquiries and amendments to the GCSB Act and TICS, but that's no longer enough. We need a concrete assurance that the law will be changed to forbid GCSB or any government agency from building such a system - and that if one already exists, that it will be shut down and the hardware publicly destroyed. Our freedom is at stake here, and our politicians need to either defend it, or get out of the way for someone who will.

New Fisk

An obsessive’s documenting of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon can show us how the West lost respect for international law

National's New Zealand

The latest from National's New Zealand: a family forced to live in a tent in a public park because of Housing NZ cuts:

Welfare groups are helping a Christchurch mother and her three children move into a tent in a public park because they cannot find the family a home.

From today, Maori wardens will stand guard 24 hours a day to provide Nellie Hunt and her children some security at their tent in Waltham Park.

[...]

The single mother has been on the Housing New Zealand waiting list for months. She has applied and been rejected by dozens of rental homes and three different social agencies have combed the city for accommodation without success.

Her parents "haven't got much" and cannot take her in. Every camping ground she has contacted is full and with a teenage daughter, she is not eligible for a women's shelter.

Hunt, 35, and her children, Mahara, 16, Rawini, 11, and Manawa, 9, are now homeless.

The best option social workers could find was to pitch a tent in Waltham Park, and roster Maori wardens for protection.

This should not be happening in New Zealand. Making sure everyone has a roof over their head is one of the core duties of our government. It's what HousingNZ is for. But National has gutted it, restricting it to emergency cases. But if this isn't an emergency, then what the hell is?

Meanwhile, its worth noting: Gerry Brownlee, the Minister for "earthquake recovery" and Tsar of Christchurch, owns four properties in the city. If any of them are untenanted, Hunt should just move in there. Alternatively, I'm sure Brownlee has a backyard at his expensive Fendalton home; pitching her tent there might ensure that her case is dealt with swiftly and efficiently, as it should have been in the first place.

A public health emergency in the UK

How bad is the recession over in the UK? This bad:

The shocking impact of recession and austerity on England’s poorest people has come to light again in figures showing the number of malnutrition cases treated at NHS hospitals has nearly doubled since the economic downturn.

Primary and secondary diagnoses of malnutrition – caused by lack of food or very poor diet – rose from 3,161 in 2008/09 to 5,499 last year, according to figures released by the health minister Norman Lamb.

While the data does not include information on the circumstances of each diagnosis, the rise coincides with a dramatic increase in the cost of living, and a spike in demand for charity food hand-outs.

Public health experts are now calling this "a public health emergency", and they're right. What's worse is that its one which has been exacerbated by the government, through cuts to benefits and housing. But hey, its only the poor. And the government has much better things to pay for, like aircraft carriers and Trident.

This is simply fundamentally indecent. There's no other way to describe it.

And for the curious: according to NZ health statistics, there were only 65 diagnoses of malnutrition in

Climate change: More windfall profits

Earlier this year, in retaliation for our refusal to participate in a post-Kyoto climate change deal, we were locked out of international carbon markets. And now the government has finally been forced to recognise this, banning the use of foreign credit from the ETS from 2015:

Mr Bridges also announced a complementary decision around the use of existing Kyoto units in the ETS after May 2015.

The decision allows participants to continue to use Kyoto Protocol first commitment period Certified Emission Reduction units (CERs), Emission Reduction Units (ERUs), and Removal Units (RMUs) to account for surrender obligations up until 31 May 2015, after which these units will no longer be eligible for surrender. From then they will need to surrender New Zealand Units (NZUs) to meet their obligations.

Participants holding New Zealand Assigned Amount Units (NZ AAUs) will be able to use them to account for surrender obligations and will automatically have them carried over for surrender beyond 31 May 2015.

So, the ETS will be domestic-only, as it should have been. But spot the scam: those holding current NZ AAU get to keep it and use it in the future. So, you can collect your government pollution subsidy, pay for your emissions with cheap foreign hot air at 20 cents a ton, then collect windfall profits post-2015 when that AAU increases in value. And National's polluter-cronies will be laughing all the way to the bank...

And then they wonder why people think the ETS is just a scam.

If we want to fix this, we need to end carryover and cancel old credits. We also need to bring the scheme back into balance, by eliminating pollution subsidies. Carbon markets only work when there is a shortage of permits. At present, we don't have a market; we have a bad joke.