There's plenty of Schadenfreude to go around Parliament right now.
Press Gallery muppets, formerly in thrall to the government spinners and shakers, have revolted over the Vance revelations. The scalp of the head of Parliamentary Services was offered on a platter, apparently for not telling National's Chief of Staff to go fuck himself before he would release Dunne's data. Fresh from voting for the second reading of the GCSB Bill, Peter Dunne is seeking legal advice over the privacy of ministerial communications.
In a forlorn effort to shut the whole thing down in an officialese version of the DDoS attack that took down several National party websites this week, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet dumped a redacted email trail late Friday afternoon.
The dump is repetitive and narrow. For example, it doesn't list the correspondence between DPMC, National Chief of Staff Wayne Eagleson, and the Henry Enquiry, Parliamentary Services and Ministerial Services. Curiously enough though, the DPMC's disclosure signature appears scattered throughout the email trail.
I hope the Parliamentary Privileges Committee gets access to all phone logs, notes from F2F meetings and emails between all these actors, in their inquiry into the inquiry into the leak.
The dump itself reminds me of working for Telecom's *123 mobile helpdesk back in the day. There's elements of The Office at play in there, as well as the usual bureaucratic Chinese Whispers and Pavlov Expectorations. There's occasional flashes of geek curiosity and BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) elation:
Annie was surprised. This is the level of novelty that the Henry witch hunt entailed. This is uncharted constitutional territory, and DPMC is drawing the map as it sees fit.
I suppose it is too much to ask for Dunne to reconsider his vote for the third reading of the GCSB Bill. Anything for yet another rigged game in Ohariu, eh.
It seems we have another neo-liberal experiment about to happen in Christchurch, joining Auckland as a guinea pig but with a larger knife. Dean Knight has bothered to read the legislation being crammed through parliament at near light speed, and he's not a happy chappy:
The Bill contains a massive Henry VIII's clause, allowing the Minister to re-write any legislation that is "reasonably necessary or expedient for the purpose of the Act". The power to direct the Governor-General to issue an Order-in-Council to "grant an exemption from, or modify, or extend any provision of any enactment" (including 22 specifically listed enactments - but thankfully not the Bill of Rights 1688, the Constitution Act 1986, the Electoral Act 1993, the Judicature Amendment Act 1972, or the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990). That's incredible power!
The recommendation of the relevant Minister may not be challenged, reviewed, quashed, or called into question in any court.
I'm pretty sure the courts would tell them to stuff off anyway, but that's not really the point - they shouldn't be trying to do this anyway.
I have often wondered what it would take for me to swear off a political party forever. It would be a very rare circumstance. Plenty of things would stop me voting for a party. I wouldn't support a party that intended to reintroduce the death penalty, for example, but swearing off a party forever is quite drastic.
It is a terrible and permanent thing to swear off a party, to eliminate a choice forever more. I've only cursed one party with that distinction; not Alliance (unworthy) nor Labour, but Act.
What began as misgivings in the mid 1990's turned to confusion when Owen Jennings ran for the Taranaki-King Country by-election. Apathy spanned the Donna years, replaced with vague hope when Richard Prebble stood down and it was either Rodney or Stephen Franks. Not long after Dancing with the Stars, that hope reverted back to apathy. Then, another glimmer of hope when Roger Douglas rejoined the anarchy. And then John Boscawen and David Garrett happened along, and then there was Lindsay Mitchell's mana abuse, and the bad fish n chip brigade stunt. And then the front fell off. Forever.
I can understand a bit why National are slamming through bits and pieces of dogma under urgency. They've got their 2008 election bribes to slam into place; the MMP referendum, DNA testing for all arrestees, three strikes. But it seems as if they're getting a bit too keen on the rush of power.
Ever since the introduction of select committees in the 1980's, I have kept an eye on the ever-increasing propensity for Order in Council motions. And this is the biggest bastard of them all. Order in Council powers to do anything short of declaring war on Antarctica. This is the executive picking winners like a horse race, and it's on the taxpayers' card.
Poor bloody Christchurch. They won't feel a thing. They won't even see it coming.
No Right Turn has been asking questions over the use of the Light Armoured Vehicles in the Napier Siege. While it's a common expression in NZ to "call in the army", there are very serious and explicit rules limiting the use of the armed forces in civilian situations. Search and Rescue this wasn't.
The NZ constabulary has many tools at its disposal, the Armed Offenders Squad and the Special Tactics Group among them. Calling in the army a la Sleeping Dogs requires the approval of the Prime Minister or a vote in parliament. According to the reply I/S received today, neither occured. The police under National have broken a big constitutional separation:
The Prime Minister did not provide a written authorisation under section 9 (4) of the Defence Act 1990, as he was not requested to do so by the Commissioner of Police.
Prime Ministerial approval is only required under section 9 (4) in cases where an emergency cannot be dealt with by the Police without the assistance of members of the armed forces exercising the powers that are available to constables.
The situation in Napier was dealt with by the Police and at no time were members of the Armed Forces required to exercise powers available to constables. Accordingly, there was no need for the Prime Minister to provide authority.
LAVs were called in. I doubt anyone outside the NZ Army is allowed to drive one of those things, for third party insurance reasons if nothing else. The NZ Army had set up base in Napier to oversee its deployed arsenal. I would be very interested to know what the chain of command looked like over the period, especially since the Independent Police Conduct Authority will not be investigating.
Have you seen this little beauty yet? Best sign yet that internet viral marketing has the fulcrum to destroy the old TV and advertising 30 second spot model.
Graeme Edgeler does a deep think on the role of grand juries in the NZ court system, in light of the recent police killing of Halatau Naitoko. Must admit, it would fill a vacuum in the system. Perhaps the admin could be done by the Supreme Court. I mean, something's got to fill in the time and space within the new building on the corner of Bowen and Molesworth.
Chris Trotter continues to blow strange new notes out of his old trombone. Social democracy more than just pragmatic Marxism, eh. We must all pull together. It's from each according to their talents, but not as we know it...
Of course, what Steve might actually be suggesting is that the middle and upper classes should bear the entire weight of the crisis on their own shoulders. If so, I would like to hear him explain why these Kiwis (who are also, presumably, innocent of any role in the creation of the global recession) should be the ones to make all of the sacrifices. Apart from utterly impoverishing these groups (and thereby transforming them into members of the working class) what purpose would be served by such an inherently unjust policy?
Haven't heard the story of John "Aladdin" Thane yet? Jon Stewart at the Daily Show sums it up in Stim City:
And BoingBoing points to this stunning portfolio of London from the air. You can almost see the Brit City from Judge Dredd, any day expecting to see motorways built on the roof of the city.
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The Panda has returned to take another swipe at Labour's House of Bamboo, this time on the risks of ad-hoc banana republicanism. A nibble at the Privy Council thing here, a munch on the bending of conventions there, a caustic piss over MMP in the corner. All of a sudden, the MSM and the Republican Movement are taking this meander as support for becoming a republic. Strange, that.
As Mike Moore points out in this bFM interview, he believes his thoughts have been misconstrued. All he meant to point out was the importance of process on any constitutional change. The implied thrust of his opinion piece was a dig at the Clark administration, not a rallying call to ditch the Queen tomorrow. In the media scrum however, any news is good news, especially on a topic as esoteric as republicanism.
The Ozzies are forming a cross-party consensus on becoming a republic, sez Mike. Inevitably, this will spur the limited imaginations of the New Zealand populace into raising the issue here. The Panda fears that a hatchet job of republicanism will leave the country worse off than the current way of things. A process should be put in place to deal with the matter when the public get around to it, lest some populist twit buggers up the thing completely.
One can have some sympathy for this concern. Witness the outpouring of emotion from Sir Ed's passing, with suggestions of public holidays, mountains and flavours of ice cream being named in his honour. Thing is, all it takes is a simple majority in Parliament or a nod from some quango, and wha-hey, it is. No disrespect intended to Sir Ed. I met the man only once, serving him at the James Cook Hotel a while back. Sir Ed is too big for words (which is more than one could say about the tetchy Dame Kiri). But if one needed an example of the epitome of what a New Zealander could be, then you could do worse than point to Sir Ed.
DPF's post on the lack of royalty attending His Most Beloved member of the commonwealth, Knight of the Garter Sir Ed's funeral has stirred the pot somewhat. I whole-heartedly agree with DPF on this, and it's not just because we are fellow members of the Republican Movement. Listen to talkback, get some feedback.
It seems most Kiwis had a similar idea of what Sir Ed's funeral would look like in their heads, well before the inevitable came to be. He deserved the best, full honours of a state funeral, the works. This is the man on the $5 note for god sakes. It's a fair expectation for the titular head of state on the other side of the scrip should follow the script. If you want to go with convention, a head of state always goes to a state funeral.
But conventions count for naught these days. All power, no responsibility; the role of the eunuch brought to modern times. Which describes exactly the role of Governor-General these days. In the Court of the Crimson Queen, everything is red, right down to the Government House staffers.
Convention has not prevented the Foreign Minister sitting outside cabinet, in essence reporting to Helen Clark only and not the government caucus. It has not prevented the Green party getting ministerial funding without even being part of government. Convention has not stopped the election rules being rigged.
In spite of efforts to constrain the powers of government with MMP, it is obvious that unbridled power is still in effect. The Supreme Court push was the right thing done the wrong way. Lucky for us, Dame Sian has shown sufficient judicial activism to demonstrate a greater check on government than the Privy Council. The jury's still out on whether the Supreme Court will pick up the Bill of Rights ball and do something interesting.
For some, it might be the Anti-Ear Flicking Law that brought things to a head. Others might have seen a line in the sand crossed by the manner and form of how the Electoral Finance Act was enacted (They had so much potential and Labour squandered it. A bit like the economy, really). For me, it was a combination of the New Jew Smoking Laws and the Tuhoi Terrorist surveillance.
I succinctly remember watching that Monday night's news showing the dawn raid on the Abel Smith St house and feeling nervous. They were arresting people willy-nilly. I am involved in a number of causes that might be of interest to the powers that be; Republican Movement, NORML, incendiary blogging, to name a few. Although I'm armed with nothing more than 26 letters and about a dozen punctuation marks, it doesn't mean the powers that be understand that. There was a knock at my door. On TV, cops were busting windows. "That'll be the cops," I thought. I was genuinely spooked when I went to the door. Collecting for Plunket, thank Dagg. No! Go away!
It shouldn't get to this, but it has. Reading the level of state surveillance Tame Iti's Flightless Circus was put under, I have been nagged by the thought of writing to Helen Clark. In her capacity as Minister responsible for the SIS, GCSB and other matters pertaining to civil surveillance, I wanted to ask for some reassurance that my life and habits weren't being monitored like Tame Iti's was. But would the reply be worth a damn?
Throw your mind back to Mike Moore's original Guerrilla Noun Attack in the Herald, when Moore compared Clark with the Muldoon who read SIS dossiers on his opponents. Save Happy Valley was infiltrated by SOE informants. The Tuhoe terrorists had an informant in their midst. I wouldn't be surprised if even NORML has a government spy in the membership somewhere. Maybe I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow too long, but I call it justifiable paranoia. What's stopping the state surveillance octopus sticking its tentacles where they don't belong?
The proposed Organised Crime Agency is something else we never agreed to sign on to, let alone the Neo-ANZUS biometric database from the Land of the Free and Home of the Paranoid. In no time at all, New Zealand will darken under the same security blanket foisted on the UK and US citizenship. If the loss of privacy and personal details is a small price to pay to protect the UK from Islamic Daleks, that's their choice. But since Islamic Daleks do not fucking exist, I strongly resent the unjustifiable intrusions into what is none of the New Zealand government's (or some foreign government's) business.
This is all getting too intense. Time for Spike Milligan as a Pakistani Dalek:
Ah, that's better.
Moore is correct in saying that a constitution is a limit on government, not a treatise of wish-fulfillment. It is not wish-fulfilment to want to keep the right to silence, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Yet it hasn't prevented the Criminal Proceeds Bill from wending its way through select committee, promising to not only penalise people on balance of probabilities, but make the police a fully-autonomous profit-making revenue stream. It hasn't stopped a retiring QC from describing the right to silence as outdated and should be abolished:
"I did not subscribe to the divine right of silence. Those rules were promulgated years ago in Great Britain when the public were uneducated, most of them illiterate."
These days, of course, we have no uneducated, illiterate people. Everyone is a legal expert.
So, a written constitution is the rights and responsibilities of the structure of government. The closest New Zealand has to such a thing is the Treaty of Waitangi and the Constitution Act 1986. The former was drawn up in a matter of days, a half-arsed ambiguously worded document. The latter outlines the very bare essentials of government. Elections every three years, etc. The Bill of Rights Act 1990 has so far been demonstrated as nothing more than a doormat for the government of the day to wipe its feet on.
I am a Republican because I believe that this country can do better than that. I believe that the citizens of this place shouldn't have to continually battle the state to maintain basic freedoms, freedoms that only require a simple majority in parliament to remove.
I believe in the ultimate supremacy of the people, not the allegedly greater glory of the Prime Minister. I believe in a clear enunciation of how executive government works, seeing as how MMP has smudged the margins of the Westminster system beyond recognition. Coalition-keeping has shifted the power from the caucus to the cabbalists. I believe that the role of Prime Minister needs greater checks and balances beyond the scope of the party caucus.
I believe that the state should only interfere in our personal lives if they have a list of bloody good reasons, not just paranoia, hunches, and latest research findings in the Women's Weekly. If someone ends up before the courts, justice should be swift, fair and open.
And I believe in a head of state that goes to the funeral of New Zealand's favourite son.
Splendid news from the British House of Commons, where the House of Lords has been democratised. While a quarter of the Upper House will be still be annointed/appointed, the snobs have lost their power.
