You’ve gotta love Hone Harawira’s style. By refusing to use the right words in his oath, Hone exposed the ridiculousness of our representatives swearing allegiance to a Queen on the far side of the world and calling on the aid of a deity that only 50% of us believe in. Lockwood Smith had no choice. The oath is law. It’s the law that needs to change.
An alert reader sent us this video of Wayne Mapp swaying, slurring and rambling his way through Question Time.
No Right Turn now has a post with some information saying that Mapp is not in the state what he appears to be in. Instead he is just being inept. We don’t know. Check it out yourself and make up your own mind.
Ianupnorth does ‘the Whale’ and has a dig around the National Party websites. It turns out they are registered and run by Parliamentary staffers. In fact, National and ACT’s MPs’ sites are all publicly-funded, while other parties’ MPs’ are not. Is NACT breaking the rules? No doubt everyone’s least favourite cetacean will be on to it.
After intense criticism for using government-owned helicopters for personal trips, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has reimbursed the state for the cost of the flights. I look forward to John Key following Christie’s lead and repaying us for his flights to watch the V8s in Hamilton.
Hekia Parata is our Minister of Energy. She is also a shareholder in Contact Energy. Whether the shareholding is large or small, it’s a conflict of interest. Her decisions can affect the value of her shareholding. The slackness displayed by Key’s ministers towards these shareholding conflicts, starting with his own Tranzrail shares, is not good enough.
The out of touchness, she burns! In a few short replies, the Nats said so much this week. The stories of perk abuse have been rolling out almost too fast, in fact. Each needs following up, each minister needs to be hounded, but there are so many targets. The galling thing is in a fortnight the Nats will tell us ‘everyone has to tighten their belts’.
An interesting post from Political Dumpground looks at how MPs are allowed to edit the Hansard record of what they say. Putting the transcript of what Katrina Shanks actually said during the recent debate on the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill beside the Hansard shows how MPs can amend the record to hide their stupidity.
I was going to write about how ludicrous it is that National is abandoning the idea of a warranty or bond system for builders in the new Building Act designed to stop a repeat of the leaky homes debacle, given that we’re about to embark on the largest rebuilding programme in the country’s history. But then I realised it no longer matters what laws say.
There’s been increasing concern over the past week or two that not only has the government failed to communicate its plan for the Christchurch recovery, it doesn’t actually have one, and isn’t particularly worried about getting one. Yesterday in the House, Labour took Key to task on this important issue. And he was found terribly wanting.
It seems odd at first, blocking our closest friend’s leader from speaking in our Parliament, but the Greens were right to look at the higher principle. The debating chamber is where our sovereign assembly meets, it is not a place for foreigners to come, at the government of the day’s invitation, and lecture our elected representatives. I think the NBR put it best..
The Nats regard parliamentary process as an inconvenience to which they must pay lip service, but nothing more. They started as soon as they took office, with repeated abuse of urgency. The current disgraceful process over the foreshore & seabed legislation is just the latest instalment.
In this post, I’ve embedded the speeches from John Key, Phil Goff, and Metiria Turei during yesterday’s first day of Parliament. Key presents no new vision, just an agenda of cuts and false statistics couple with sheer delusion about his government’s record. Goff tears him apart. And Turei’s speech is simply breath-taking – incredibly moving.
Mallard has laid a Privileges complaint over Brownlee’s Hobbit lies. Good. Brownlee and Key deserved to be hammered for their part in the Warners/Jackson shake-down that cost just $34m and work rights. Lockwood won’t uphold the complaint though. He hates Brownlee. Not enough to severely embarrass his party in election year though.
It seems we don’t have a government at the moment. John Key is incommunicado in Hawaii. The Acting PM, Bill English, and Key’s press people refuse to speak for him. Someone needs to front up because serious questions are emerging about the honesty of statements Gerry Brownlee and Murray McCully made in Parliament and to the New Zealand people.
The Auditor-General seems certain to launch an investigation into the Wongs’ taxpayer-funded travel as even more evidence shows the Parliamentary report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. A majority of Kiwis want her to resign. Why John Key hasn’t already called on the A-G to investigate, as he did with Phil Heatley, is beyond me.
A reader responds, pretty curtly, to John Key’s wholly inadequate explanation for why the select committee hearings on extending the SIS’s already broad powers will be secret. “It won’t be in the public interest to have it open, for a whole bunch of reasons I don’t want to go into,” Just doesn’t cut it.
With a majority of votes counted it’s clear that Kris Fa’afoi is going to be the next Labour MP for Mana. We’re sure […]
Yesterday, Jonathan Coleman was handed the job of doing the introductory speech on the Taxation (International Investment and Remedial Matters) Bill 2010. Coleman was reading from a prepared speech that someone had handed him, and it was the wrong speech for the wrong Bill. Coleman, without seeming to realise anything was amiss, proceeded to repeat verbatim a speech Peter Dunne gave a year ago for the Taxation (International Taxation, Life Insurance, and Remedial Matters) Bill.
National is finding new exploitative ways to try save their by-election campaign in Mana.
Last week Speaker Lockwood Smith rolled back transparency on MPs expenses, by making travel spending secret again. John Key came out “against” the move. Yesterday Labour and the Greens called his bluff by releasing their details. Over to you John, once again you’re too late to lead, but you can still follow…
Last year MPs’ spending was opened up to public scrutiny, and many hailed a “new era” of openness. Well it didn’t last long. Now MPs’ travel costs are to become secret again. We won’t get to know about cases like Rodney Hide and Chris Carter. This will prevent incidents like the Carter witch-hunt. But on balance I have to come down on the side of transparency. This move to start rolling it back is a mistake.
The Hobbit Enabling Act is meant to do is say ‘you’re an employee if you are called an employee in your contract, if not, you’re a contractor’. But it doesn’t say that and it doesn’t override the Bryson case that caused the ‘uncertainty’ Warners supposedly feared. Now, nobody knows what the law actually is. Well-founded disagreements will mean court cases.
Select committees are very important. They take Bills after first reading, hear submissions, and recommend alterations. Ministers do not (usually) sit on them and they are not meant to be mere rubber stamps for the government. But Harawira’s removal from the foreshore committee shows this government doesn’t care about good lawmaking.
Ministerial staffers who have worked under the National and Labour governments of recent years have begun commenting on some of the differences between each.
Apparently, one key difference has been that National ministers refuse to hire staff from other ministerial offices to avoid being labelled by their ministerial colleagues as staff-poachers.
A group of 27 legal scholars from New Zealand and overseas has written an open letter outlining their deep concerns over the constitutional implications of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act 2010.
In the aftermath of the twin towers, the dust that accompanied their collapse gave rise to a health crisis in the medium/long term that continues to play out to this day. And given the prevalence of asbestos in Christchurch buildings, it just might be that the earthquake will result in a number of preventable deaths after all…
A few days ago Charles Chauvel wrote a piece on Red Alert on why Labour voted for CERRA. I have two big problems with it. 1) Labour may have won concessions that improved CERRA but they didn’t get the key one. 2) There’s a dangerous mindset in the position that Labour had to vote for dictatorship or get pilloried in the media and lose votes.
Lockwood and Nick did good work yesterday. So praise where praise is due: Keep it up boys.
Great video of Clayton Cosgrove getting right stuck into the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s Garth McVicar over his hypocrisy on David Garrett. Cosgrove’s certainly no bleeding heart liberal so I’d say McVicar’s credibility on law in order is now pretty much shot.
Andrew Geddis (Associate Professor of Law at Otago and writer at Pundit) is an expert on democratic theory. He has become required reading for politics junkies. His latest piece — a brutally honest analysis of the recent work of the Law and Order select committee — should be required reading for everybody.
The ‘shock doctrine’ is how (capitalist) elites use moments of crisis to make power grabs while the normal checks are offline and/or the political opposition and media are swept up in a ‘unity’ mantra that prevents them acting to protect democracy. Last week, National used it to make us a dictatorship.
The Gerry Brownlee Enabling Act is a Dictator’s Charter, and all we can do is hope Brownlee doesn’t abuse it. Even the Herald is against the unwarranted and excessive powers that have been conferred on one man with no meaningful checks or balances. This isn’t about Left or Right but too many on the Right seem happy with unfettered State power.
