Ignorance and prejudice
Well, certainly ignorance, if the stats from David Slack's Treaty quiz are anything to go by.
I wonder which questions were the most correctly answered? My gut instinct would be the ones about who has the final say and Habeas Corpus - but it would be interesting to see.
And while we're on the subject
Galesburg has a good post on the deportation of Takshila and what it says about the "humanitarian discretion" of the Minister.
(It's annoying that there doesn't seem to be any permanent way of linking to Galesburg; the URL changes every week. Something the Listener should fix?)
Double standards from the Immigration Minister
Earlier in the week, the Immigration Minister (or rather, her deputy) refused to exercise her "humanitarian discretion" on behalf of a Sri Lankan girl, and had her forcibly sedated and deported back to her abusers.
Today, she has exercised that discretion to extend the work permits of two and a half thousand Zimbabweans.
That's some difference, neh?
I am not for a moment suggesting that she should be telling the Zimbabweans "outski" on the next plane - they are refugees, and deserve our help; of course we should be letting them stay. But I think that the two decisions reveal an enormous double standard, where the Minister bends over backwards to help refugees who are predominantly white, while mounting vicious attacks on those who are brown (and on anyone who dares represent them too effectively).
Perhaps the Minister should be explaining her reasons for the difference in treatment?
Meanwhile...
ACT is polling its members and asking whether it should merge with National. Certainly one can ask what the point of ACT is, when all their worst (or best, depending on your point of view) policies have been adopted by National...
Raising the level of the debate
"Warmongering flag-waving God-fearing conservative" Propaganda News Network has responded to David Slack's educational quiz with one more to his own liking... this being PNN, it is of course a thoughtful and informative depiction of the facts behind the Treaty debate, rather than a showcase for the prejudices of our local right-wingers. Really.
Did you know?
That we have a Foreshore And Seabed Endowment Revesting Act 1991?
The Act was passed by the then-National government in 1991, for the purpose of revesting in the Crown foreshore which was previously owned by harbour boards (there's a matching Dry Land Act which I haven't read). Interestingly, it includes a Treaty clause. However, it is the 1994 amendment which is of real interest - this set aside all Crown-owned foreshore and seabed and prevented the government from selling it except by specific Act of Parliament. (This is the status quo we all thought we had - a country where no-one could own the beaches, and where the government couldn't hock them off without anyone noticing)
But before anyone gets the wrong idea, there are two sticking points. First, as mentioned above, the Act applied only to foreshore and seabed already owned by the Crown; this was assumed to be everything that wasn't explicitly owned by anyone else, but the Maori Land Court may find otherwise in specific cases. Secondly, and more importanly, the amending Act specifically says it does not limit or affect "any interest in that land held by any person other than the Crown". National and ACT seem quite keen on ignoring this bit, but what it means is that if there was a Maori customary right over a patch of foreshore - or any other common law interest (such as a lease?) - it would not be extinguished.
DOC has a short bit on the Act and foreshore management here.
Update: Thanks to David Ritchie for taking the time to dig the URL out of legislation.govt.nz. As he says, "way to go with the accessibility issue there, guys".
This ought to stir some shit
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is going to call for Bush and Blair to apologise for waging an immoral war when he gives the annual Longford Lecture tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how Blair responds to criticism from someone with the moral and human rights credibility of Tutu.
It's his job
NZPols thinks that race relations commissioner Joris de Bres should not have "waded in". I disagree. He would have been remiss in his duty had he not decided to get involved.
The comments themselves were fairly mild. Pointing out that some statements were misleading and warning politicians to avoid using "broad slogans that did not reflect facts" to incite racial disharmony is accurate, reasonable, and well within his job description. The fact that National was singled out is more a reflection of the quality of their statements rather than an indication of bias.
The current debate is at its core about issues of privilege and equality between races, and may have far-reaching consequences for race-relations in this country. It's the commissioner's job to comment and act as a moderator on those sorts of issues, and he can't very well stop doing it simply because a political party has decided to stir things up in the pursuit of votes. The issue is simply too important for that.
I'm always glad I don't live in Feilding, but today I'm particularly glad.
(Though maybe I shouldn't be so glad yet - Horizons.mw shows the water level still rising in the upper Manawatu gorge, and people have just been told to go home from Massey because they're going to close the bridge. Fortunately I think I'm in one of the higher parts of PN...)
Anniversary
One year. 994 posts. Over 120,000 words of bloggage, 108,860 of them mine. A short novel's worth, or an over-long PhD thesis. Which kindof tells me what I could do, if only I could find the focus and an interesting topic. But then, I knew that already.
We've had 13,610 visitors, and are currently averaging 90 a day. It doesn't sound like much, but it's more people than I ever thought would be interested in my opinions, and a far cry from the beginning, when I knew every reader personally (and recognised their IP addresses).
Mike's email inviting me to join this blog was a simple "what do you reckon?" Well, I reckon that it's been a worthwhile experience, and that his nefarious plot to get me blogging has succeeded beyond his worst nightmares. What do the rest of you think?
Oh, and if you're interested, Mike's first ever post on No Right Turn is here.
Nate Cull has a beautiful post about Science Fiction and the Age of Rockets.
Disappointed
That's the only way to describe it. I'm disappointed that Don Brash can gain so much by playing the race card and pandering to ignorance and prejudice. I thought we were a better country than that.
I've been waiting around to see the promised additional questions from the poll, and I think the money stat is this one: 57% of respondents thought that Maori were "getting too much" from the government. This is a view that National and especially ACT have worked very hard at promoting - using dodgy statistics or simply making shit up if necessary - but a look at the facts shows that it's simply not the case. Treaty settlements - righting the wrongs of the past - have accounted for about 0.1% of total government spending in the past five years. And in health and education, Maori receive funding which is within one or two percentage points of their proportion of the population. Given the appalling statistics on Maori health, literacy, employment and life-expectency, I fail to see how that is "too much".
The comparisons to Pauline Hanson are entirely appropriate. Like Hanson, Brash has singled out a grossly disadvantaged group, accused them of privilege, and profited by it. Unlike Hanson, Brash is well educated, and ought to know better. That makes it all the more despicable.
While I don't for a minute believe that any of this will lead to "fighting in the streets" (we're definately not that sort of country, and Clayton Cosgrove should be ashamed of himself for that piece of hyperbole), it does stand a good chance of undermining the remarkable progress we've made on race-relations over my lifetime. We've gone from being a country which actively denied the past and relegated Maori to performing quaint little dances for visiting dignitaries to one which acknowledges and attempts to remedy its past mistakes, and where Maori are beginning to partake of the partnership that was promised to them. Understandably, some people (let's call them "our parents") find this threatening - but it is the only way forward. Denying the past will simply result in things festering and being endlessly relitigated. Only by resolving past grievances and ensuring that Maori - like other New Zealanders - partake fully in our society can we move forward.
Why don't people warn me about these things?
I was wondering why the traffic had spiked today, and it seems that (along with Russell and NZPundit) I got my URL in the Sunday Star-Times.
If I'd known, I might have actually written something, rather than slacking all weekend.
Public Address's David Slack has prepared a short quiz to illuminate the foreshore / treaty debate.
Stupid bastard
John Campbell obviously feels strongly about his "Corngate" interview, but trying to monster a judge? That's not just stupid, it's possibly criminal!
Hutton on the death of Thomas a Becket
From the Guardian's Huttonise history competition:
"I find the allegation by the Broadsheet of the Borough of Canterbury and its reporter, Andrew of Gillingham, that four knights acting on the orders of King Henry murdered Archbishop Thomas Becket to be totally without foundation and tantamount to libel."Archbishop Becket was a well known eccentric and I totally accept the evidence of the respected knights that he repeatedly ran at, and impaled himself upon, their swords when they entered the cathedral to make confession.
"The suggestion that the knights had previously had any communication with King Henry is a gross calumny on the part of the BBC.
"While the allegation that there had existed some dispute between the archbishop and the king is regarded by some as important, it is outside the remit of my inquiry and has no bearing on my investigation."
There's some other good ones there as well.
I just had to quote this
Via Crooked Timber: A response (prompted by Naomi Wolf) to gender imbalances in housework:
My first thoughts were to advise all my single friends to stay away from careerist husbands. Girls, go for the slackers. They might not make senior partner, but they’ll make your dinner and play with the kids. You might not be able to afford a house in a town with a good school district, but so what. He’s made lasagna for dinner.
Chocolate cake, anyone?
A black day for New Zealand
The immigration department has deported that 16-year-old Sri Lankan girl back home to be raped and abused by her family.
We should all be ashamed of this. If the concept of granting sanctuary to refugees and those in need means anything, it means protecting them from that.
But no doubt someone will step up and say that if we'd let her stay, girls would have been getting themselves raped in order to "jump the queue".
Best of both worlds, part II
MyRight completely misses my point. Tariana Turia was not talking about rights - she was talking about cultures. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting the best of both worlds where culture is concerned.
As for moving forward, arguably we already have the framework he wants; the sticking point is that we're still in the process of giving past events and wrongs due consideration. And it doesn't help that there are people on both sides who want to reject the past and pretend that it never happened, or who feel threatened by the whole process. Fortunately, most of them are old and will die soon, which will make things a hell of a lot easier.
If this is failure, what does success look like?
With the economy continuing to be better than its been for quite some time, the Business Round Table is of course demanding that the government acknowledge that its economic policies are a failure.
But if this is failure, what does "success" look like?
And if that "success" can only be had by a return to the policies of the 90's - policies which have been repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected by the New Zealand population - then why would we want it? What we have now is good enough - and certainly better for the middle class and the poor than the BRT's alternative.
Best of both worlds
MyRight seems to think that there is some problem with Maori wanting the best of both worlds. Why? All Tariana Turia is saying is that the choice between Maori and European cultures and ways of doing things is not necessarily a binary one, that there are options other than rejecting all that is European and (destructive) assimilation.
Thinking this is revealing or "an inadvertent frank admission" says more about MyRights attitudes than it does about Maori ones.
Well, this is a change
DOC is releasing rats onto offshore islands. It's to find out how they disperse when they first enter an ecosystem. The amusing bit is that they will be using islands which already have rats, to avoid affecting wildlife - so they'll be carefully de-ratting them first to ensure they get good data.
NZPols has a good post on the slipperiness of equality as a concept. I'll admit to sloppiness, and it should be clear from my post that I'm after a more substantive equality than the narrow, formal sense being propagated by Brash and his ilk. This involves both equality of life-chances (a minimisation of the effects of life's various lotteries, at least on the losers) mixed with big, fat globs of well-being and (self-regarding) preference-satisfaction.
The Amartya Sen article, "Equality of what?", can be found online here.
Equality as a front for expropriating the foreshore
What really gets my goat about Don Brash is that all his talk of "one law for all" and eliminating Maori "special privileges" is ultimately targetted squarely at the foreshore. Maori gaining customary title over the foreshore is denounced by Brash as "separatism", and the rights they would gain under such title as a "special privilege". They're not. As NZPols has pointed out, the foreshore is not about "special rights" for Maori - it's about "the same damn property rights that everyone else gets". And National's "solution" - legislating to claim ownership of all foreshore and seabed that is not currently owned by private landholders - is about as unequal and racially-based a policy as you can get.
The foreshore and seabed issue is all about property rights - and if there's one thing that the Treaty is absolutely clear on, it is guaranteeing that the crown would uphold the property rights of Maori. ACT makes a lot of noise about the crown having supposedly formally declared ownership over the foreshore and seabed in the middle of last century; the court apparently disagrees. But more importantly, it's not relevant. What matters is not who owns the foreshore now, but who owned it in 1840. If Maori were exercising property rights over the foreshore in 1840, then the crown had an obligation to respect those rights, and they can be passed on to the heirs and assignees of those iwi and hapu, just as you or I can inherit our grandparent's house, car or cat.
There's a substantive issue of fact over whether Maori did in fact own the foreshore in 1840, but that's why people are going to court: to see whether they did or not. National's "solution" is thus both a denial of due process and a racially-based expropriation. Calling this "equality under the law" is simply obscene.
What's worse is that legislating simply won't work. Any real solution to this dilemma has to be acceptable to the vast majority of New Zealanders, including the vast majority of Maori - otherwise it will simply go to the Waitangi Tribunal, fester, and be relitigated whenever there is a change of government. No matter what you think of the government's plans, at least they are trying to find an acceptable compromise rather than pretend that the Treaty never happened.
Equality
On the face of it, Don Brash's call for "equal rights for all" is uncontentious. Egalitarianism is one of the principles of our nation, and it's a good principle to aspire to.
But by ignoring the very real inequalities in health, education, and living standards that exist between Maori and Pakeha today, he turns it into nothing more than a sick joke.
Maori are grossly over-represented at the negative end of almost every statistic. Unemployment. Illiteracy. Life-expectancy. And as the Sunday Star-Times pointed out, it's not just about poverty - in many cases there seems to be a substantial difference between Maori and Pakeha of equivalent income. Race often serves as a proxy for need.
Fixing this requires targetted spending in the core areas of health and education. And we need to fix it, both on general welfarist grounds, and because the spirit of partnership underlying the Treaty demands it. Both reasons demand that Maori enjoy substantially the same life-chances as everyone else - Maori did not sign up to be an underclass, and we are not a society that wants one.
Such spending is of course unequal. So is a progressive tax system and targetting welfare benefits to the poor. We accept such inequalities on the basis that they primarily advantage the least-well-off in our society. So why the hue and cry over funding for disadvantaged Maori?
Brash is just the latest in a long tradition of beneficiaries of unequal status quos using egalitarian arguments to defend their advantages. But the sort of formal, legal equality that they espouse is about as useful as the formal, legal guarantees of human rights in the old Soviet constitution. There's an old line about the law, in its majestic equality, forbidding both rich and poor to sleep under bridges. That's exactly the sort of equality Brash wants to give us - the sort which allows both Pakeha and Maori to be poorer and die younger if they are brown.
NZPols has a trio of good, thoughtful posts on Brash, race-relations and equality.
The terrible human cost of Bush and Blair's military adventure: 10,000 civilian deaths
Just in case you haven't been paying attention to the body-counter on the left of the page...
Down the garden path
Following Bush's lead, Blair is adopting a "blame the spooks" strategy, claiming that he was led down the garden path by intelligence reports that incorrectly said that Saddam had WMDs and was an imminent threat to his neighbours or the world. The problem? The intelligence agencies said no such thing:
Tony Blair was sent three intelligence reports in the six months during the run up to the Iraq war, including one that warned him that information on whether Saddam Hussein still held any chemical or biological weapons was "inconsistent" and "sparse".[...]
...the intelligence services had already reported, before the war began, that Iraq's ballistic missiles had probably been dismantled, and that the presence of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq was making it difficult for Iraq to threaten anyone with weapons of mass destruction.
In other words, the spies were properly cautious about the information they had, and were providing what is in hindsight a relatively accurate picture of events in Iraq. The British government ignored that picture, preferring to believe worst-case scenarios and lurid fantasies of vast stockpiles deployable "within 45 minutes". The only person who led Tony Blair down the garden path was Tony Blair himself.
Starving them to death
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians - it's "closures", curfews, confiscation and destruction of farmland and interdiction of towns and cities - has led to levels of malnutrition as bad as anything in sub-Saharan Africa.
It's one thing to find and punish terrorists, but slowly starving an entire population to death is simply monstrous.
Police HQ orders staff to close ranks on past culture in the force
Looks like we have our very own "blue wall of silence"...
I know no-zink!
Blair is adopting the Sergeant Schultz defence, and claiming that he did not know that the 45-minute claim referred only to battlefield weapons.
And if you believe that, I have some money in the bank in Nigeria I'd like to split with you...
No surprise there
Turns out that Don Brash's story last night about research funding being denied because "there were no benefits for Maori" is a crock of shit.
Update: And so are his claims about special holidays for Maori in employment legislation. So he lies, and encourages employers to racially discriminate on the basis of that lie. That's fairly disgusting, no matter what side of the political aisle you're on.
Here's mud in your eye
I think its fair to say that, contrary to his assertions, Don Brash's policy speech has generated a fair amount of hostility among Maori...
Fishy business
One News is following up on the "dinnergate" scandal, tonight alleging that former MP Ross Meurant was working as a lobbyist for Simunovich Fisheries while also working as a policy advisor for NZFirst. But while it's very interesting, I don't see how this sticks to Winston - it's Meurant's conflict of interest (and possibly Simunivich's corruption), not his.
Strange
David Farrar on the Police gang-rape inquiry:
there will be no winners - only varying degrees of losers.
I wonder if he says this about every rape investigation?
I would have thought that there would be one clear winner from a thorough, independent investigation, regardless of its outcome: justice.
Just in time for the inquiry
Tony Blair is probably kicking himself for letting Bush force his hand and announcing an inquiry into pre-war intelligence - because the spies are refusing to play scapegoat. Dr Brian Jones, former expert on WMD in the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff, has claimed that intelligence analysts were overruled by their superiors, "resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."
Intelligence chief's bombshell: 'We were overruled on dossier'
Brian Jones: 'There was a lack of substantive evidence... We were told there was intelligence we could not see'
Unfortunately, the Guardian's description of the head of the inquiry as a "safe pair of hands" who is "unlikely to rock the boat" doesn't exactly give much reason for confidence.
(The Guardian also has more on Lord Butler's history and past positions here. Let's make that "no" reason for confidence... the problem with these supposedly "independent" inquiries is that the very people whose decisions are being inquired into get to choose their own judge and decide what can and cannot be investigated. And they wonder why the public has no confidence in the final result...)
EOTWAWKI
Another agreement with NZPundit - this time on the fact that Police Association president Greg O'Connor has a twisted sense of priorities:
it worries me that the head of the Police union appears to think public scrutiny and accountability is a 'distraction' rather than an essential tool for maintaining the rule of law.
I'm worried too. It is essential that we be able to have public confidence in the police. These allegations of a cover-up and police officers protecting their mates grossly undermine that confidence. While they're damaging, turning a blind eye is even more so - and that's not even considering the obvious justice aspects.
Something seriously wrong at the Immigration Service
I'm glad to see that Immigration has temporarily backed down from their plan to deport a 16-year-old girl back to Sri Lanka to be raped or murdered by her relatives. But I'm still troubled by the fact that they could even consider doing something so monstrous. Do you have to have your conscience surgically removed in order to work there or something?
Not so funny when you think about it
Somebody stop me from laughing. Gerry "the bruiser" Brownlee as National's new Maori Affairs spokesperson? Could they have selected anyone worse?
And he's now partly responsible for treaty negotiations as well. What will he do? Throw iwi representatives down the stairs?
Except that it's not funny. The transformation of National from a party dedicated to finally resolving New Zealand's historic injustices into a party dedicated to perpetuating and adding to them is more than a little scary. The sooner the urban liberal faction seizes control of National back from the rednecks and ideological propertarians, the better.
Reflections
I see the annual Waitangi Day angst is starting early this year.
Every year we hear the same chorus: "Waitangi Day is about guilt. We should replace it with a day that we can stand up and be proud of". The problem is of course that national pride of the sort being called for is a deeply un-Kiwi thing. To generalise, the average kiwi does not orgasm at the sight of the flag, has no particular desire to hang it in their front yard or salute it, and can barely remember the words to the national anthem. And IMHO that is a good thing. The last thing we want is a pathalogical flag-cult of the sort they have in the US.
Given who we are, our national day should be laid-back, low-key, and - yes - ambivalent about our progress. A day for relaxing, going to the beach, having a BBQ and enjoying the sun - not for whipping yourself into a patriotic fervor. And if we reflect on the state of our nation, we should remember the bad as well as the good. While we have things to be proud of (women's suffrage; the welfare state; our commitment to human rights; the fact that we didn't commit genocide on our indigenous people) we also have things to be ashamed of (our failure to live up to those ideals; the fact that while we didn't commit genocide, we dispossessed and subjugated and commited grave injustices). And that is as it should be. Nations are not gods - they are not infalliable. They have flaws, and make mistakes. Only by acknowledging this can we hope to do better. And unlike Don Brash and all his self-satisfied pakeha friends who have theirs and don't care too much about how they ultimately got it, I want to do better.
The chilling effect of Hutton
The BBC tried to pull the first episode of Stephen Fry's radio satire "Absolute Power" for fear that it "would upset No 10".
If this is how far they'll now bend over for a comedy, you really have to wonder what effect Hutton is having on the news...
Update 04/02/04: They didn't can it, but they did sanitise it. We can't have radio comedies being disrespectful of the PM, can we?
Our own governments are doing Al-Qaeda's dirty work
Secret trials. Judges and lawyers vetted by the intelligence services to ensure they reach the right conclusions. No juries. Lower standards of proof required for a conviction. A description of the Military Tribunals planned for the Guantanamo detainees and condemned by the British government? No - that same British government's own plans for terrorism trials, which it hopes to enact before the next election.
Al-Qaeda is winning. They haven't mounted a major attack in months, but they're still winning. They don't need to lift a finger to destroy western democracy - because our own governments are doing it for them.
The poor don't need lawyers anyway...
The British government is planning to end legal aid for first-offenders and petty-criminals. First time burglars, petty thieves and drink-drivers will no longer have lawyers provided for them, unless they are facing prison. Instead, they will be advised how to plead by the Magistrate or Clerk of the Court (!) So much for impartiality...
It's all about saving money, of course - but at the cost of justice and social equality. In particular, it raises the spectre of a return to a class-based justice system. Adequete representation is a significant factor in convictions; people with lawyers are far less likely to be found guilty than those without. British conservatives will no doubt claim that the wealthy simply don't commit petty crimes (of course not - they never drive drunk, their kids are never stupid teenagers, and they never stole a policeman's helmet in the wild days of their youth); and besides, they're not facing prison, only a fine, so it's not like it really does any harm, does it?
Obviously they've never been accused of something they didn't do. Neither have I, but unlike conservatives, I don't assume that everyone accused of a crime is automaticly guilty.
This is a significant erosion of the rights of the accused, and likely to lead to more miscarriages of justice, but it gets worse. The British government doesn't only want to stop the poor and vulnerable from consulting lawyers - they want to stop everyone:
Ministers also want to end the automatic right to legal advice after a defendant has been charged and before his or her appearance in court. Another proposal will limit the provision of legal advice in the police station to telephone advice in certain cases where a solicitor cannot "advance" the client's case by attending the police station.
In other words, it's all about upping the conviction rate by exploiting people's ignorance of the law to get them to confess or plead guilty. And this from a supposedly Labour government.
Once more, I'm glad to live in a sane country, where we understand that justice costs money, and that the poor as well as the rich need lawyers...
Inquiries
The Bush administration is to announce an independent inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq. The purpose of course is to pin the blame squarely on the CIA rather than the President and his cabal of NeoCon advisors. "War? We didn't want to go to war, but the CIA presented such damning evidence that we felt that we had to. But remember, the threat was not 'imminent', nosiree".
This flies in the face of the facts. The NeoCons spent the last two years slagging off the CIA for being too cautious in their assessments of Saddam's WMD capability and his links to al-Qaeda. They created a parallel intelligence apparatus dedicated exclusively to telling them what they wanted to hear. And now that things have gone sour, they expect the CIA to carry the can?
It will be interesting to see whether Bush's "independent" inquiry will investigate these matters, or whether it will be another Hutton-style whitewash. My money is on the latter.
(And in other news, the White House is continuing to stonewall an independent inquiry into the September 11th attacks...)
Moral Obligations
Sock Thief says:
it is hard not to accept that the international community has a moral obligation to intervene in circumstances of oppression
Sure. But such interventions should be embarked on cautiously, in full awareness of the mess it will involve and the fact that doing it wrong can make things much, much worse. I think the word I'm really looking for here is "humility"... we will fuck up, so we have to be damn sure its worth it. And we have to be damn sure that we're not being taken for a ride by someone using humanitarianism as cover for aggression... otherwise, we end up giving "humanitarian intervention" such a bad reputation that we can't do it when its really necessary.
It doesn't have to be perfect, but we can (and should) do a damn sight better than Bush's gung-ho cowboy act.
The vanishing case for Iraq
As the months have gone by and Saddam's WMDs have failed to be uncovered, supporters of the war have increasingly fallen back on humanitarianism as a justification for the Iraq war. "Saddam was a tyrant who oppressed his people", the usual refrain goes, "he had to be overthrown to save Iraqis".
So what do the real humanitarians think of this? Human Rights Watch - an organisation which was chronicling Saddam's crimes when Bush I was ordering his troops to stand by and let the Shi'ites be massacred - doesn't buy it. It's director, Ken Roth, examines the conditions under which humanitarian military interventions are justifiable, and concludes that the war in Iraq was not justifiable on humanitarian grounds.
The analysis parallels traditional analyses of when it is permissible for an individual to use force in defence of themselves or others. However, because war is such a messy and uncertain business, with far greater potential for death, destruction, and disorder, HRW sets the bar far higher. Without the consent of the local government, humanitarian intervention
...can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life
While Saddam had certainly met this threshold in the past (notably during his 1988 campaign against the Kurds, and in suppressing the uprisings against his regime following his defeat in Kuwait in 1991), there was nothing on this scale going on in early 2003, and no obvious preparations for such. HRW concludes that
Brutal as Saddam Hussein’s reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention
But what if it had been? HRW lays out five subsidiary conditions which must also be met. Military action for humanitarian motives must:
HRW concludes that even if the brutality of Saddam's regime had justified intervention, it did not meet these conditions. The war was not a last resort (quite the contrary - Bush has been looking for an excuse to attack Saddam since taking office); at the time it was sold as being all about WMDs, terrorism and preventing an "imminent threat" to the United States; it was conducted with significant disregard for civilian lives; post-war planning was inadequate to non-existent, virtually guaranteeing the total collapse of security and living standards we have seen, and inviting a civil war when the US departs; and there was no UN or multilateral support - the international consensus was firmly against the war.
That's a fairly thorough trashing of the "humanitarian justification". I wonder what ad-hoc excuse Bush's supporters will trot out next?
(As for Juan Cole's disagreement, the case of the Marsh Arabs is fairly well covered by those five criteria; the war that was planned and the war we got simply did not meet those conditions. Justifying the war as punishment for Saddam's past crimes is more interesting... self-defence theory rules out using force after the fact if there is no threat; if you see a murderer eating lunch in McDonald's, you can't just shoot him. However, if the US had pursued the course of action suggested - approaching the UN demanding action under the Convention on Genocide, and effectively deposed (in the medieval sense) Saddam for his crimes - then their actions would have been entirely justifiable...)
Sue the bastards
The police are grossly abusing their authority by continuing to keep registers of prostitutes, despite the fact that prostitution has been legalised. This is harassment, pure and simple. Now that prostitution is legal, they have no more reason to keep lists of prostitutes than of dairy owners. Unfortunately, it seems that some in the police just don't understand that, or are unwilling to accept that the law has changed. They need to be forcibly reminded that in this country it is Parliament that makes the laws, not the police.
Kay on WMDs
David Kay has gone from saying "I don't think they existed" to "they went to Syria" to "Saddam's scientists lied to him" to "The CIA got it wrong". Interestingly, he denies that the CIA was subject to government pressure to tailor intelligence to suit the White House's needs - which is frankly laughable. But it's the Official Republican Talking Point (because blame cannot rest with the President), so NZPundit is doing his best to spin it that way.
Lobbying
NZPundit thinks that my call to keep a closer eye on our politicians is all about class warfare. Well, no - it's about transparency and open government, and making it more difficult for our elected representatives to be captured by special interests post facto. While all parties have their preferred constituencies - "Labour works for the unions", "ACT is a pawn of big business" etc - I think that we would all benefit by knowing exactly how much sway these interests have, how much access they get, and who is whispering in our politician's ears.
Naturally, this goes for "unions, single-issue NGOs, Maori groups and law firms run by well-connected former Prime Ministers", as well as for businessmen, right-wing think-tanks, and consultancies run by well-connected former finance ministers.
Forcing our MPs to declare any gifts or hospitality received is no different from forcing them to declare political donations, or their financial interests. If there's a potential conflict of interest or improper influence, the public has a right to know.
As for the full-on American solution of registering lobbyists, I'd consider it, but I'm not sure that we need to go that far quite yet... especially when there are perfectly reasonable intermediate steps we can take first.
Moved
I'm still recovering from my move. My computer room just feels wrong, my books are still scattered in too many boxes, and I haven't yet caught up fully on the news. So here's some quickies:
The world according to John Ashcroft
For people who don't understand US Attorney-General John Ashcroft's denunciation of Saddam Hussein for using "evil chemistry" and "evil biology", I've prepared the following helpful table:
| Good | Evil | |
| Chemistry | Nicotine, ethanol | THC, Sarin |
| Biology | Plagues of locusts, Fusarium oxysporum | Botulinin, ricin, natural selection |
| Physics | Nuclear weapons (American) | Nuclear weapons (UnAmerican) |
| Mathematics | 3 | 3.1415927... |
| Geology | Floods | Plate tectonics |
Moving
Not the blog, just the blogger. I will probably be offline for much of monday as I desperately stuff everything into boxes, and for at least some of tuesday (depending on whether anything distracts me from setting up the computer at the other end). Normal bloggage will resume by wednesday, assuming there is anything interesting to talk about...
Shouldn't they be declaring this?
Winston has revealed that he was frequently shouted to dinner by fishing companies while sitting on a select committee overseeing the industry. He casts it as "being briefed" on the industry, but the proper term we're looking for is "lobbying".
I know that US federal politicians have to declare every free meal and gift they get (well, anything over the value of about US$5). Isn't it about time we made our politicians do the same? If we believe in open government, and in not letting the wealthy leverage their economic power into political power, we need to keep a far closer eye on our politicians.
"I don't think they existed"
David Kay, the head of the US attempt to find WMDs in Iraq, has resigned, and said that there were no Iraqi WMDs. No large-scale production in the 90's, no remaining stockpiles, no meaningful nuclear program, no serious R&D into biological or chemical weapons, zip, nada, zilch, nothing.
Or, in clear, plain English: it was all based on a lie. Ten thousand dead Iraqi civilians, an unknown number of dead conscripts, a country in ruins with no power, water, or security - and all on the basis of what is charitably described as a collective delusion, and more accurately as a planned campaign of deceit on the part of the Bush administration and Blair government.
And the fuckers have the gall to just keep on lying. Now they're claiming that Iraq’s WMDs may have gone to Syria. How can they have, when they never existed in the first place?
Bush needs to be de-elected, ASAP. Semen stains on a blue dress? That's nothing compared to lying your country into a war and killing ten thousand innocent civilians (not to mention five hundred US soldiers) in the process. If this isn't a "high crime and misdemeanor" - or a "war of aggression" as defined in the Nuremberg precedents - then what the hell is?
Horrifying
Thought that child labour was something that happened in other countries, or in the dark past of the Industrial Revolution, and certainly not in New Zealand? Think again. Caritas Aotearoa surveyed nearly 5000 schoolchildren, aged 10 - 17. 40% of them worked, and 45% of the workers were paid less than the minimum youth rate for 16 and 17 year olds (depending on the age distribution of respondents, this could actually be quite a good statistic, meaning that the minimum youth rate is being extended to under-16s). Children as young as 12 pumped gas (illegal for under-15s), children as young as 13 served alcohol (illegal for under-18s), and one 15 year old worked full-time in manufacturing for $2 an hour, in addition to trying to go to school. Some worked in unsafe environments, operated heavy machinery, or were beaten at work.
Most of this work is unproblematic - teenagers taking an after-school job in a supermarket, corner dairy, or working in a family business. But its clear that something needs to be done about the more egregious cases. There's nothing wrong with an after-school job, but it shouldn't interfere with education, expose children to danger, or be grossly exploitative. Introducing a minimum age of employment, limiting the hours that may be worked by children, and extending the youth rate down to that minimum age would all help to curb abuses and discourage those who seek to exploit children for financial gain.
Hopefully the government will be sorting this out if they adopt the ILO Minimum Age Convention.
Americans aren't the only ones with a stake in their election
Gwynne Dyer points out that Al-Qaeda has one too, and that they will do whatever it takes to ensure Bush is re-elected:
Terrorists generally rant about their goals but stay silent about their strategies, so now we have to do a little work for ourselves. If the real goal is still revolutions that bring Islamist radicals to power, then how does attacking the West help? Well, the U.S. in particular may be goaded into retaliating by bombing or even invading various Muslim countries -- and in doing so, may drive enough aggrieved Muslims into the arms of the Islamist radicals that their long-stalled revolutions against local regimes finally get off the ground.Most analysts outside the United States long ago concluded that that was the principal motive for the 9-11 attack. They would add that by giving the Bush administration a reason to attack Afghanistan, and at least a flimsy pretext for invading Iraq, al-Qaida's attacks have paid off handsomely. U.S. troops are now the unwelcome military rulers of more than 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people there and elsewhere are turning to the Islamist radicals as the only force in the Muslim world that is willing and able to defy American power.
It is astonishing how little this is understood in the United States. I know of no American analyst who has even made the obvious point that al-Qaida wants Bush to win next November's presidential election and continue his interventionist policies in the Middle East for another four years, and will act to save Bush from defeat if necessary.
It probably would not do so unless Bush's number were slipping badly, for any terrorist attack on U.S. soil carries the risk of stimulating resentment against the current administration for failing to prevent it.
Certainly another attack on the scale of 9-11 would risk producing that result, even if al-Qaida had the resources for it. But a simple truck bomb in some U.S. city center a few months before the election, killing just a couple of dozen Americans, could drive voters back into Bush's arms and turn a tight election around. Al-Qaida is clever enough for that.
I really hope she's wrong. OTOH, a competant US President - one who understands that the war on terror is not about force, but ideas - would be a disaster for Al Qaeda, and they might be willing to do something to prevent it.
More on prison labour
The Department of Corrections has responded to the questions on prisoner's employment rights posed in my previous post with a few answers and a PDF outlining their general policy. This bit sums up their position quite nicely:
The provision of employment for inmates by the Department does not constitute a formal employment relationship. Rather the employment is part of skill acquisition and should be regarded as a training initiative. Inmates do not have, therefore, the same access as free workers to wages, rights and other remedies. They do have protections under Corrections legislation and regulations. Inmates are not employees of the Department and are not, therefore, subject to the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992. However, the Department will observe the provisions of the Act for all inmate employment activities...
(My emphesis; no link, because its not on the web, however there's a FAQ on inmate employment here)
This isn't so bad when prisoners are working on community schemes, or even on "internal self-sufficiency" activities such as cooking and cleaning; it's easy to see these tasks as training and a way of giving prisoners something meaningful to do (both of which are laudable goals). The problem comes when they are working in a commercial enterprise which competes with the private sector (which Corrections claims to try not to do, but clearly does), or (worse) are rented out to private enterprise as part of a cooperative venture (something Corrections wants to do a lot more of). In both cases they not only displace ordinary workers, but also exert downward pressure on pay and conditions. And then there's that troubling aspect of slavery again - the workforce is literally captive, paid less than $1 an hour, and while they are technically volunteers, only a Libertarian would regard the choice as being free. If a private employer did this, they would be prosecuted for running a sweatshop, if not for kidnapping and slavery. Is it really any better if the government is doing it?
Trial by media
TVNZ flubbed it last night, and ended up looking like a bunch of muppets. But rather than back down, they've decided to wage a full-on trial by media instead. Winston certainly came out looking worse after tonight, but I still don't think there's anything there more than it looking bad. But politically, that's probably enough to have him hauled before the privileges committee, so that his numerous enemies can savour the feeling of being on the other end of a corruption allegation for a change.
Dismissed
Police have dismissed their charge against Bruce Hubbard because they weren't able to make their case. He will be applying for costs, and I hope he wins them. This case has been a farce from start to finish. It was clearly politicly motivated, pushed by a US embassy which equated criticism (or maybe just bad spelling) with threats. The police's response should have been to tell them that this is a democracy, where citizens enjoy free speech (maybe the US has heard of that?), and that New Zealanders have a right to express their views, no matter how much it annoys the US. Instead they bowed to pressure, charged Hubbard, and wasted time and money trying to prosecute him. This at a time when they are so underresourced that they can't investigate burglaries properly.
It would be nice to know how much this farce has cost the New Zealand taxpayer, and how many actual crimes could have been investigated with the money.
Slaughtered
MediaCow has gone to the great slaughterhouse in the sky. Which is a shame, because I'm sure they would have had an interesting slant on the Peters-free dinner scandal...
Canada takes pointers from Mugabe
Looks like the Canadian government isn't too hapy with the flack they've copped over Maher Arar (the guy who was deported by the US to Syria to be tortured - allegedly on information provided by the RCMP) - they've raided the home of a journalist who has criticised the government's role in the affair.
The "war on terror" is deeply corrosive of human rights and democratic values. Now we have Canada acting like Robert Mugabe...
Prison labour in New Zealand
I'm appalled to see that the American disease of selling prison labour is alive and well in New Zealand.
The Corrections Department claims that they "operate under the same commercial disciplines as private sector organisations and our prices are market-based", but this dodges the real question, which is "How much do they pay their workforce"?
According to the people I spoke to at the Department of Corrections, the answer is "up to $25 a week" - substantially below the minimum wage, let alone market rates. Participation is voluntary, but as refusal is bound to affect parole and whether a prisoner is regarded as "cooperative", there's a great deal of implicit coercion involved. I am still waiting for answers from Corrections on
I'm also waiting for responses from the Department of Labour on some of the above issues as well. It's not clear whether Corrections is breaching New Zealand labour laws, or whether what they are doing is perfectly legal (they may have an exemption) - but it is clear that it is wrong.
What we have here is the government using its coercive power over prisoners for commercial advantage. Market-weenies should be concerned because they are competing with private companies, while stacking the deck in their favour by ignoring regulations that affect everybody else. But I am more concerned with the human rights aspects. There's a word for people who are kept behind bars and work all day for the benefit of others - they're called "slaves". What's the difference between this and government-run slavery? It's awfully difficult to see...
Tilting the scales
The government is planning to prevent inefficient and expensive hung juries by doing away with the requirement for unanimous verdits, and allowing juries to reach a verdict by 11-1 vote.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a jury. Juries are not supposed to be efficent; the process is inherantly about reflection and doubt. This takes time and costs money, and sometimes results in deadlock, because in many cases it is possible for reasonable people to reach different conclusions (in mathspeak, the problem is sometimes underdetermined). Labelling dissenting jurors "rogue" and ignoring their input means that you prevent stroppy or unreasonable jurors from derailing the process, but you also prevent reasonable jurors from expressing doubts about the majority's view (the "Twelve Angry Men" scenario). The result will be more innocent people in jail, something I am unwilling to accept.
Goff's comment that "unanimity, in my view, is too high a threshold" makes it clear that this is really about making it easier for the crown to secure a conviction. And that is something we should all be deeply suspicious of.
Oh, where to begin
I skimmed Dubya's State of the Union speech, and it's just one long paean to war, fear, tax-cuts and bigotry. Not much on Saddam's WMD (America fought a war; shouldn't its president explain why?), but calls to renew the PATRIOT Act (it expires this year - good riddance to totalitarian rubbish), make the tax cuts permanent (yeah, rob from the poor to give to the rich!), and "defend the sanctity of marriage" (deny gays the same rights enjoyed by hetrosexual couples). I'm so glad I live in a sane country rather than the United States.
There's a great Tui moment in there as well:
The American economy is growing stronger. The tax relief you passed is working.
Which is why there are no new jobs, and more Americans living in poverty. Again, I'm so glad I live in a sane country (or at least one which is not run by a clique waging class warfare on the poor) rather than the United States.
But the best bit - the part that makes your eyes bug out with its Orwellian reversal of the truth - is this:
We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again
Yes, it's mistaken and condescending - so why the hell is the US trying to deny Iraqis the right to elect their own government? Doesn't this make them the very tyranny that Bush is talking about?
Russian army rescues kegs of beer
I guess armies are useful for something after all.
Why the Americans don't want Iraqi democracy
Everyone thinks its because the first acts of any democraticly elected Iraqi government will be to tell the US Army to fuck off, demand their oil back, repudiate Saddam's debt, and void all of those gouging contracts with Haliburton and Bechtel. But I think this might have something to do with it as well:
If Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein on trial, they want his former American allies shackled beside him."Saddam should not be the only one who is put on trial. The Americans backed him when he was killing Iraqis so they should be prosecuted," said Ali Mahdi, a builder.
"If the Americans escape justice they will face God's justice. They must be stoned in hell."
Ouch. I guess Rummy won't be paying another visit to Baghdad any time soon...
The Independent has a lovely collection of statistics showing the true State of the Union.
Defending American values
A group of US military lawyers have filed a brief in the Supreme Court's review of whether the Guantanamo detainees can access the US court system, equating the US administration's position with that of King George III:
The colonists who wrote our Declaration of Independence penned, among their charges against King George, that "[h]e has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power"; "depriv[ed] us, in many Cases, of the benefits of trial by jury"; "made Judges dependent on his Will alone"; and "transport[ed] us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences."Those charges describe the United States' legal position in this case.
It's good to see them standing up for America's founding values when the President and administration won't. They're doing their job extraordinarily well - but I wonder whether they'll get to keep it?
The fuss about cloning
NZPundit doesn't get the fuss about cloning. It's simple: some people have some very strange ideas about personhood and personal identity. Such as the person in the comments who asks whether killing a clone (who, no matter what their origin, is a human being) would be murder or a property crime.
These people need to be beaten about the head with the fact that genetic identity is not personal identity. Twins prove that. They may be uncannily similar in some respects, but they are distinct persons, and universally recognised as such. The best metaphor for a clone is that of the "differently aged twin".
This doesn't mean that we should leap into cloning. As another of NZPundit's commenters pointed out, there are significant technical difficulties at the moment. Tests on animals have a high failure rate, and a tendency to produce sickly and malformed clones. Until these bugs are ironed out (and I have no doubt that they will be), it's simply too risky to clone humans. But the only moral conclusion we can draw from this is that we shouldn't be cloning humans yet.
(I'd reccommend reading Nick Agar's Perfect Copy for a quick introduction to the cloning debate. My thoughts on it are here)
New Kiwi blog
My Right - being the thoughts of an "ordinary NZ'er, with a job, a flat, a student loan and more often than not, an opinion."
(But wouldn't "Mon Droit" have been a more stylish nom de guerre?)
We have RSS
Here.
I don't know if it works, or whether it is in an appropriate RSS version, but it was free, and didn't require me to do any work other than find my accursed BlogStreet password. So, syndicate away!
Sending Blair to The Hague
An international group of legal experts will make a formal complaint to the ICC in The Hague, accusing Tony Blair of being responsible for war crimes in Iraq. There's not much detail in the story, but I assume it's the same experts I talked about here. Rather than using the obvious, open-and-shut case against Blair for waging a war of aggression (which is unlikely to be considered by the ICC as it is still waiting for its signatories to provide an adequete definition of the crime), they will be focusing on specific violations of the Geneva conventions and international human rights treaties, leading to excessive numbers of avoidable civilian deaths.
Interestingly, the ICC has "contacted the panel in advance to ask for a copy of their report", which is perhaps a sign that they will consider the complaint rather than dismissing it outright.
Sock Thief has responded to my suggestion that the tide may be turning wrt Australia's refugee policy and suggested that it may not be turning in the way I think.
For those on Nauru and for children currently detained out in the desert, this move would represent a huge improvement in their circumstances... there are currently 284 detainees on Nauru including 93 children some of whom have been detained there (the conditions they face there are pretty well known) for more than two years without any prospect of release or judicial review. There are a similar number of children detained in camps within mainland Australia. This part of Labour's announcement by itself represents a shift back towards being a civilised country.
The main problem for the Australians is that the refugees are clogging up their court system with 80% of their high court cases being ones relating to refugees. True, Labour has not indicated whether they plan to resource the courts more appropriately or whether they plan to limit the ability of refugees to make appeals, but given the pressure coming from within the Labour party for an even more liberal (and I don't mean in the John Howard sense of the word) approach I can't see them getting away with limiting access to justice... we'll just have to wait and see if my excitement has been premature.
Ombudsman to look at treatment of Zaoui
Only those aspects handled by Corrections, Customs and Immigration - the Police and SIS are apparently outside the Ombudsman's jurisdiction - but it's a start. I expect the investigation will focus on why Zaoui was held in solitary confinement for so long, instead of being in a minimum-security prison or free on bail. But the real progress in his case is going to come because of the recent High Court rulings, particularly the ruling that the Inspector-General must consider Zaoui's human rights in his assessment. With Zaoui facing execution if he is deported to Algeria (or to any country where he is likely to be passed into Algerian hands), that shifts the odds heavily in his favour.
Tide Turning?
Australia’s last federal election was a nasty affair where John Howard grubbed votes by telling porkies about refugees throwing their babies into the sea and the two main political parties competed to see who could be nastier to refugees. In a welcome return to sanity, new Labor Party leader Mark Latham has signalled a change of direction.
Whilst Labor is still keen on mandatory detention for adult prisoners it has obviously recognised the fact that Australia’s refugee policy is damaging the country’s image overseas (making them look like a bunch of fuckwits basically) and has promised a number of changes that should result in fewer people going on hunger strikes or sewing their lips together.
Labor is keen to process refugees quickly promising that 90% of them will be possessed within 90 days. The sinister sounding “Pacific Solution” where refugees were sent to Nauru for processing (where coincidently not allowing them access to the Australian legal system) is also being abandoned. Latham indicated that it was “a very, very expensive commitment” and that it was “hard to see what benefits are coming out of it.” They’ve also promised to end private sector management of detention centres.
Most importantly they are planning on stopping the barbaric practice of imprisoning child refugees. "In a civilised society, we shouldn't have children growing up behind barbed wire," remarked Latham.
This is great…now all they have to do is win the election.
