Out of the rubble of last year’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake that hit Vanuatu’s capital Port Vila on December 17 and the snap election due next week on January 16, a new leadership is required to reset the country’s developmental trajectory.

Persistent political turmoil has hampered the Pacific nation’s ability to deal with a compounding set of social and economic shocks over recent years, caused by climate-related and other natural disasters.

The earthquake is estimated to have conservatively caused US$244 million (VUV29 billion) in damage, and the Vanuatu government’s ability to pay for disaster response, the election, and resume public service delivery will require strong, committed and stable leadership.

Prior to the devastating quake and dramatic dissolution of Parliament on November 18, economist Peter Judge from Vanuatu-based Pacific Consulting warned of an evolving economic emergency.

Vanuatu’s US$1 billion economy faced a concerning decline in government revenue from value-added tax, down 25 percent on the previous year.

This was a ripple effect from the decline in economic activity after the collapse of national airline Air Vanuatu last May, as well as the falling revenues from the troubled Citizenship by Investment Programme.

Both were plagued by lack of oversight by parliamentarians.

Struggling economy
In 2024, Vanuatu is expected to record about 1 percent economic growth, as it struggles to climb out of the red and back to pre-pandemic levels.

Conversely, Vanuatu has a much more positive, although somewhat contradictory democratic profile.

According to the Global State of Democracy Initiative, Vanuatu is one of the more democratic states in the Pacific islands region, and currently ranks as 45th in the world.

But this performance comes with a significant price. Leadership turnover is frequent, with 28 prime ministerial terms in just 44 years of statehood, 20 of those in the last 25 years — the highest frequency of change in the Melanesian region.

The impacts of disrupted leadership and political instability are highly visible. Government decision-making and service delivery is grindingly slow.

In Vanuatu’s Parliament, the legislative process is frequently deferred due to regular motions of no confidence, with several critical bills still awaiting MPs’ attention.

Last October, for example, the Vanuatu government proposed a 2025 budget 10 percent smaller than 2024’s, due to reduced economic activity and declining government revenue.

Sudden dissolution
Parliament was unable to approve this year’s budget due to its sudden dissolution on November 18, only two-and-a-half years into a four-year political term.

This is the second consecutive presidential dissolution of Parliament, the previous one in 2022 also occurring barely two-and-a-half years into its term.

The Bill for the appropriation of the 2025 budget now awaits the formation of the next legislature for approval. In the meantime, earthquake recovery and election management costs accumulate under a caretaker government.

With deepening economic hardship and industries facing slow economic growth across multiple sectors, voters are looking for leadership that can stabilise the compounding cost of living pressures.

The new government will need to urgently tackle overdue, unresolved issues pertaining to reliable inter-island transport and air connectivity, outstanding teacher salaries and greater opportunities for the nation’s restive youth.

The youth unemployment rate is at 10.7 percent and rising.

Democracy with political stability is the holy grail for Vanuatu. But attaining this legendary and supposedly miraculous prize comes with costs attached.

Rules come into force
In response to civic and youth activism in late 2023 calling for political stability and transparency, the last Parliament approved a national referendum to make political affiliation more accountable and end party hopping.The rules come into force in the next parliamentary term for the first time.

The referendum passed successfully on May 29, 2024, but cost US$2.9 million. The 2022 snap election required US$1.4 million and the 2025 poll is expected to require another US$1.6 million.

While revenue from candidature fees of US$250,000 does cover part of these costs, each legislature transition also weighs on the public purse.

The current crop of outgoing 52 parliamentarians were paid out US$1.62 million in gratuities and benefits — around US$31,000 per MP — even though most did not see out their full terms.

Vanuatu’s average annual household income in 2020 was US$9000.

Whatever the outcome of the 2025 snap election, the incoming government will need to refocus attention on stabilising the trajectory of Vanuatu’s economy and development.

The next legislature — the 14th — will need to commit to stability in the interests of Vanuatu’s people and the nation’s development.

Budget, earthquake recovery priorities
The most immediate priorities for a new government should be the passage of the 2025 national budget and the implementation of an earthquake recovery and reconstruction plan.

In the 45 years since throwing off the British and French colonial yoke, citizens have enthusiastically done their duty at elections in the expectation of a national leadership that will take Vanuatu forward.

Now their faith appears to be waning, after the 2022 poll saw voter turnout — a key indicator of the health of a democracy — dropped below 50 percent for the first time since independence.

This election therefore needs to see a return on the considerable investment made in Vanuatu’s democratic processes, both in terms of financial cost to successive governments and donors, and more to the point, a political dividend for voters.

Anna Naupa is a ni-Vanuatu scholar and currently a PhD student at the Australian National University. Republished from BenarNews with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As thousands take to the streets this week to “honour” the country’s 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the largest daily newspaper New Zealand Herald says the massive event is “redefining activism”.

The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been underway since Sunday, with thousands of New Zealanders from all communities and walks of life traversing the more than 2000 km length of the country from Cape Reinga to Bluff and converging on the capital Wellington.

The marches are challenging the coalition government Act Party’s proposed Treaty Principles Bill, introduced last week by co-leader David Seymour.

The Bill had its first reading in Parliament today as a young first time opposition Te Pāti Māori MP, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, was suspended for leading a haka and ripping up a copy of the Bill disrupting the vote, and opposition Labour Party’s Māori Development spokesperson Willie Jackson was also “excused” from the chamber for calling Seymour a “liar” against parliamentary rules.

After a second attempt at voting, the three coalition parties won 68-55 with all three opposition parties voting against.

In its editorial today, hours before the debate and vote, The New Zealand Herald said supporters of Toitū te Tiriti, the force behind the Hīkoi, were seeking a community “reconnection” and described their kaupapa as an “activation, not activism; empowerment, not disruption; education, not protest”.

“Many of the supporters on the Hīkoi don’t consider themselves political activists. They are mums and dads, rangatahi, professionals, Pākehā, and Tauiwi (other non-Māori ethnicities),” The Herald said.

‘Loaded, colonial language’
“Mainstream media is often accused of using ‘loaded, colonial language’ in its headlines. Supporters of Toitū te Tiriti, however, see the movement not as a political protest but as a way to reconnect with the country’s shared history and reflect on New Zealand’s obligations under Te Tiriti.

“While some will support the initiative, many Pākehā New Zealanders are responding to it with unequivocal anger; others feel discomfort about suggestions of colonial guilt or inherited privilege stemming from historical injustices.”

The Herald said that politicians like Seymour advocated for a “multicultural” New Zealand, promising equal treatment for all cultures. While this vision sounded appealing, “it glosses over the partnership outlined in Te Tiriti”.

“Seymour argues he is fighting for respect for all, but when multiculturalism is wielded as a political tool, it can obscure indigenous rights and maintain colonial dominance. For many, it’s an unsettling ideology to contemplate,” the newspaper said.

“A truly multicultural society would recognise the unique status of tangata whenua, ensuring Māori have a voice in decision-making as the indigenous people.

“However, policies framed under ‘equal rights’ often silence Māori perspectives and undermine the principles of Te Tiriti.

“Seymour’s proposed Treaty Principles Bill prioritises Crown sovereignty, diminishing the role of hapū (sub-tribes) and excluding Māori from national decision-making. Is this the ‘equality’ we seek, or is it a rebranded form of colonial control?”

Heart of the issue
The heart of the issue, said The Herald, was how “equal” was interpreted in the context of affirmative action.

“Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that true equality acknowledges historical injustices and demands action to correct them. In Aotearoa, addressing the legacy of colonisation is essential,” the paper said.

“Affirmative action is not about giving an unfair advantage; it’s about levelling the playing field so everyone has equal opportunities.

“Some politicians sidestep the real work needed to honour Te Tiriti by pushing for an ‘equal’ and ‘multicultural’ society. This approach disregards Aotearoa’s unique history, where tangata whenua hold a constitutionally recognised status.

“The goal is not to create division but to fulfil a commitment made more than 180 years ago and work towards a partnership based on mutual respect. We all have a role to play in this partnership.

“The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti is more than a march; it’s a movement rooted in education, healing, and building a shared future.

“It challenges us to look beyond superficial equality and embrace a partnership where all voices are heard and the mana (authority) of tangata whenua is upheld.”

The first reading of the bill was advanced in a failed attempt to distract from the impact of the national Hikoi.

RNZ reports that more than 40 King’s Counsel lawyers say the Bill seeks to “rewrite the Treaty itself” and have called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the coalition government to “act responsibly now and abandon” the draft law.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards – the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

The number of voices raising concerns about the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill is rapidly growing. This is especially apparent now that Parliament’s select committee is listening to submissions from the public to evaluate the proposed legislation.

Twenty-seven thousand submissions have been made to Parliament about the bill. This is one of the highest numbers ever submitted about legislation, which reflects how community anger is growing against the controversial bill.

Background to the bill

The Government’s Fast-Track Bill has been created to help speed up and streamline the ability to build things in New Zealand. Everything from dams to roads to housing developments are expected to be put through this new mechanism which essentially bypasses New Zealand’s relatively slow and challenging resource consenting processes.

Most controversially, the new mechanism empowers three ministers to make the final decisions on infrastructure proposals. Those ministers merely have to be convinced that an application contains “significant regional or national benefits”. In agreeing to a project, the ministers can override the expert panel assisting them as well as existing environmental laws.

I’ve already written about the processes in these three columns:

1. The Government’s new fast-track invitation to corruption
2. Time for “Fast-Track Watch”
3. The Case for the Government’s Fast Track Bill

The Select Committee process

The Government introduced the Fast Track Approvals Bill into Parliament for its first reading in March. It now has to be examined by a select committee, which will report back on its recommendations on September 7.

The bill is currently being considered by the Environmental Select Committee, which has allocated six weeks to consider public submissions and presentations. However, due to the extremely large number of submissions, the select committee has had to cut back on hearing from everyone.

Of the 27,000 submitters, about 2900 have requested to appear before the select committee to discuss their feedback on the bill. Given these vast numbers, a decision has been made to restrict oral submissions to just 1100. The Committee has decided to allow appearances from 550 organisations who want to speak to the committee. They will get ten minutes each.

Regarding the individuals, 2,350 submitters have requested to be heard at the hearings, but only 550 appointments will be made. To decide who gets these, the committee has opted for a ballot to be used as a mechanism for random selection. Some higher-profile individuals, such as former MPs, will be automatically selected. All individuals are being allocated five minutes each.

The opposition parties have opposed curtailing the process, saying that the hearing schedule should be extended to accommodate all the requests.

Green MP Lan Pham says: “I think the fact that this bill runs across so much other legislation, and impacts so much of what we understand, and sort of like, the legislative baseline of how Aotearoa works, we thought that it was really important that everyone got to have their say” – see Giles Dexter’s RNZ report today, Fast-track submissions: Hundreds will miss out on speaking at committee

Similarly, Labour’s Rachel Brooking says that it’s even more vital to hear the submissions than usual: “one of the things that the bill does is stops public participation and processes where there normally would be public participation. So it’s even more important that those people are heard”.

As the RNZ report explains, the chair of the committee – National’s David MacLeod – points out the Fast Track Bill has attracted an exceptionally high level of individual submissions that are essentially just duplicates of the templates that organisations like Forest & Bird and the Environmental Defence Society encouraged their supporters to send in. MacLeod says: “clearly, a form submission, once you’ve read one, you’ve read the whole lot. It doesn’t particularly add more value to that process.”

The situation has been labelled “absurd” by veteran political journalist Richard Harman. In his daily email newsletter yesterday, Harman criticised “pressure groups” trying to “flood” the parliamentary process with low-quality submissions. Although the process should involve “depth and time spent questioning submitters”, according to Harman, this won’t occur.

Submissions mostly oppose the Fast Track Bill

It is clear that the vast majority of submissions oppose the Fast Track Bill—mostly because thousands of individuals have submitted them at the urging of various environmental groups. Of course, there is something of a dichotomy in which environmental groups oppose the bill and business groups support it.

Yet this dichotomy has been less apparent than might be expected. So far, several business and farmer groups have provided some critique and recommended significant changes to the bill.

The Employers and Manufacturers Association presented to the committee yesterday. Although they support the bill in general, they criticise it and say it is vital that the new processes are only temporary. This is best covered by Richard Harman’s article today, Our slow regional councils (paywalled)

Harman reports that Alan MacDonald representing the Employers Association at the select committee hearings, and said the real answer to the problem with consenting processes was to replace the existing Resource Management Act with a new environmental consenting process that had buy-in from all: “that’s something that we need to agree on cross-party and very quickly.”

MacDonald explained that his lobby group had been working with environmentalists such as the Environmental Defence Society to progress this, and he didn’t want to see the Fast Track Act deflect from this urgency. Therefore, he suggested that the legislation should contain a subset clause to ensure the Fast Track doesn’t become permanent or stick around too long.

The Association also expressed discomfort with ministers making final decisions on resource consents, saying that “We’ve had them in the past, and they’ve been challenged all the way to the High Court and beyond, where they have been gotten wrong on both sides of the House.”

According to Harman, MacDonald also criticised the bill in what it proposed for the makeup of the various authorities involved in the new consents process: “We do think that the panel and both the ministerial side and the advisory panel could do with a bit more balance, perhaps including the Minister of Environmental Conservation and also in the advisory panels.”

The presentation yesterday from Federated Farmers was also surprising. Although they support the Bill’s objectives, they have serious concerns, especially around excluding the public from the Fast-Track decision-making process. The farmers’ group emphasised the importance of “fair process” and the community’s ability to feed into decisions, especially if infrastructure projects involve private land use.

Harman reported that the Federation’s principal policy advisor, Natasha Berkett, said broader community consultation and debate were needed: “These types of projects don’t occur in isolation; they occur in communities… And, if people feel that land has been taken in an inappropriate way or a process has not occurred in an appropriate way, then there can be a lot of discord around that project. And that leads to this loss of social license and lack of support for the project as well.”

For more on business critiques of the Fast-Track, see Fox Meyer’s Newsroom article, Mining lobby: Fast-track bill’s ministerial powers ‘not unusual’ 

This reports that Meridan Energy, as with Federated Farmers, opposes the concentration of decision-making powers in Cabinet, “suggesting that the final say ought to rest with the expert panel.”

Likewise, for more on Federated Farmers’ submission and why they are reluctant to support it, see Fox Meyer’s Federated Farmers’ support for fast-track bill ‘ambiguous’

Environmentalists passionate opposed

Unsurprisingly, environmental organisations have been presenting the most passionate submissions against the Fast-Track. One group that stood out in their presentation yesterday was the Friends of Pākiri Beach, who have spent years trying to stop sand mining in the waters off their beach. They have had successes in the Environment Court but are concerned that companies such as McCallum Bros, who have also submitted in favour of the bill, will get the green light despite their previous failures to obtain consent.

The submission of the Friends of Pākiri Beach, amongst others, was covered yesterday in RNZ’s Pākiri residents would be ‘crushed’ if sand mining fast-tracked, committee told

For a more in-depth look at the campaign of these environmentalists and why they’re worried about the new bill, see Farah Hancock’s RNZ report, Why Pākiri locals fear the Government’s Fast Track Bill could steal away protection of their pristine coastline

But for the most passionate and articulate environmental submission on the bill, it’s worth reading Anne Salmond’s: My open submission on this radical, flawed fast-track bill

She concludes that New Zealanders, once they realise how the legislation favours companies over communities, will realise “that like the economy, Parliament is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful, and our democracy is broken. Around the world, we can see what happens when this kind of cynicism and anger is ignited. It’s a frightening prospect.”

Finally, one of the main objections to the Fast-Track is about the influence of vested interests and the need for more transparency in businesses lobbying ministers to get their projects pushed through. And today, Newsroom’s David Williams reports that there are good reasons to doubt that the processes will be transparent and above board – pointing to the interactions between one potential Fast-Track applicant and one of the ministers who will have the power to grant consents – see: Jones suggested fast-track bid at undeclared dinner (paywalled)

According to this report, the Minister for Resources, Shane Jones, had dinner with a coal mining company boss, Barry Bragg, on the West Coast in February. Jones didn’t record the meeting in his officially released ministerial diaries because he says it was an unscheduled “last-minute” event. Three days later, Bragg wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure Christopher Bishop and said: I had dinner with Resources and Regional Development Minister Shane Jones last Friday and he suggested I write to you to ask that the Te Kuha coal project be considered for listing in the fast-track and one-stop shop bill.”

The article also reports the response of Forest & Bird’s advocacy group manager, Richard Capie, who says the fast-track legislation “opens the gateway to unbridled lobbying” and “This letter represents the tip of the iceberg.”

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

“Follow the money” is the classic directive to journalists trying to understand where power and influence lie in society. In terms of uncovering who influences various New Zealand political parties and governments, it therefore pays to look at who is funding them.

The political parties are legally obliged to make declarations about the donations they’ve received each year. They pass this information on to the Electoral Commission, and the donations from the 2023 year have now been published on the Commission’s website.

Below are the aggregated total donations for each party elected to Parliament last year. The total donations received by these parliamentary parties were nearly $25m. Of this total, the parties of the new government (National, Act, and NZ First) received 16.5m, and the parties of the Opposition (Labour, Greens, Te Pati Māori) received the lesser amount of about $8.2m.

Total donations

Huge totals of donations received

National has declared a total of $10.4m of donations for the 2023 election year – which has captured media headlines about the release of the donations declarations. Journalists reporting on this have used the terms: “staggering” (Stuff), “enormous” (Newshub), and “massive” (The Herald and Newsroom).

The $10.4m raised is indeed significant and illustrative of just how popular the National Party is at the moment with wealthy individuals and companies. However, some caution is also required in the interpretation. For example, some reports have compared the $10.4m figure with smaller totals that National have received in the past, suggesting a significant increase in funding for National. But this is a case of apples being compared to oranges.

The reporting rules have changed significantly for the 2023 election-year donations. Whereas previously, the parties were legally required to declare donations of $15,000 or more, this threshold has now been considerably lowered to include any donations over $5000. This means National’s donation reporting captures many more donations than in the past.

Furthermore, parties also now have to report on the quantum of donations received that are below the declaration threshold. For 2023, National has declared about $6m of below-$5000 donations. The larger donations only make up about $4m, or about 40 per cent, of National’s declaration.

The $10.4m raised by National is still highly significant and note-worthy. However, there should also be caution with the claim made in the media in the last few days that this figure is the largest ever received by a party in New Zealand’s political history. It’s worth noting that at the 1987 general election, the Labour Party of David Lange and Roger Douglas received about $3.5m in donations. When this figure is translated into 2023 dollars, it’s about the same as National received last year.

Large donations

The 2023 election year certainly contained quite a few huge donations from wealthy individuals and companies. By far the biggest was the $500,000 donated to National by business owner Warren Lewis. Although this has been reported to be the largest recorded donation given to a political party, back in 2005, businessman Owen Glenn infamously gave $500,000 to the Labour Party.

The second-largest donation was $200,000 given by property developer Mark Wyborn to New Zealand First.

National also received a $200,000 donation from Buen Holdings, which is owned by Guemsoon Shim and Lian Seng Buen. However, the records state that this was received on 10 August last year, but it was then returned to the donor on 23 August – the same day that the donors were in the news for a story about the Auckland Council and Tenancy Services investigating alleged unlawful tenancy management in one of their buildings.

The table below lists the biggest donations received.

Large donations

While the above table includes all the donations of $100,000 or more, it’s also worth noting the amount of lesser amounts. Taking an arbitrary threshold of $20,000, the following table shows how many medium-sized donations the parties have received.

It’s also useful to look at how many large donations each party received. If you take an arbitrary threshold such as $20,000, the list below shows how many large donations above this figure were received by each party.

Once again, of these 131 medium-sized donations, most have gone to the parties of the new government (101), and few have gone to the parties in opposition (30).

Medium donations

Donations under $5000

In the past, parties only had to declare donations over a certain threshold (which has been $15,000 in recent years). But now parties also must account for donations under $5000. Rather than detailing each donation and the identities of the donors, the parties simply declare how many such donations they have received and what the aggregated amount of money is. The total number of sub-$5000 donations received by each party is below.

Small donations

The donations below $5000 appear to make up the vast bulk of money received by the parties. As already mentioned, 60 per cent of National’s donation income in 2023 came from these smaller donations, and for some of the other parties, it is even higher. Interestingly, the parties of the opposition, in particular, have received more of the smaller donations (88,253) than those of the government parties (53,397).

Anonymous donations

Political parties’ ability to receive anonymous donations has been clamped down. Parties can now only receive such donations in two highly regulated ways.

Firstly, parties are only allowed to accept anonymous donations of less than $1500. The table below shows how many such donations each party received in 2023 and the total amounts of these donations for each party.

Anonymous donations

Donations can also now be given anonymously to political parties by sending the money to the Electoral Commission, which then passes the money onto the parties without any identities attached. These are called “Protected donations”, and the Electoral Commission is only allowed to distribute a maximum of $373,520 to any one party in a year. Below is the list of protected donations passed onto the parties.

In 2023, there were only eight such donations, six of which went to National, totalling $363,000 (just below the allowable limit). NZ First and Act received one protected donation each. This information can be seen in the table below.

Protected disclosure donations

MP donations

Parties raise much of their income from MPs’ high parliamentary salaries. Some parties, traditional on the left, have a “tithing” rule in which roughly ten per cent of their MP or Ministerial salaries are donated to the party.

Such tithing didn’t always appear in the Electoral Commission records – because, in the past, when the threshold for disclosure was higher, many of the MP tithing amounts were lower than needed to be declared. But in 2023, all the tithes for Labour and Green MPs were published. See the table below for the biggest MP levies in 2023.

MP donations

Donations from election candidates

The records of donations released by the Electoral Commission include some curious donors – the candidates themselves running for Parliament. It’s pretty standard for party organisations to raise money to give to candidates to help their local election campaigns, but in this case, some of the candidates have also been making donations to the head office.

The most prominent example in the table below is the $50,000 given to Te Pati Māori by list candidate John Tamihere, however in his case, he’s also the President of the party. Just as Tamihere didn’t make it into Parliament, National’s Auckland Central candidate Muralidhar Mahesh – who donated $37,199 – also missed out, along with TOP donor-candidate Ben Wylie-van Eerd ($6098). More successful were Jenny Marcroft ($32,000) for NZ First, Vanessa Weenink ($26,357) for National, Tanya Unkovich ($5970), and Karen Chhour ($5200) for Act.

[ Donations from candidates

Donations from former politicians

It’s normal for political parties to seek extra fundraising from former MPs, especially those in retirement who might have accumulated decent fortunes from their time in politics and afterwards. While the example in the table below of Clayton Cosgrove’s consultancy firm giving $6000 to NZ First is the smallest, it’s possibly the most interesting, given that Cosgrove is a retired Labour MP.

[ Ex-MP donations

Loans to political parties

Although donations to parties have been regulated for decades, the loans provided to politicians have often flown under the radar, even though such loans have in the past been written off. Loans can often turn into donations, so they are now required to be disclosed. But in 2023, only two loans were disclosed, and they were both given to the NZ First party from the families of candidates—see the table below.

Loans to parties

Donors giving to multiple parties

Several donors have given to more than one political party. Clearly, some donors wish to support many different parties on the same side of the political spectrum. Hence, New Zealand’s richest man, Graeme Hart and his company The Rank Group, gave $204,000 to Act (in separate donations), $150,000 to National, and $110,000 to NZ First – all totalling $464,000.

Another Richlister, Trevor Farmer, gave $115,000 to Act, $100,000 to National, and another $50,000 to NZ First.

AJR Finance has only given to two of the new Government coalition partners: $55,000 to NZ First and $20,000 to National.

Another company, Christopher & Banks, gave National and Act $100,000 each. The private equity firm is run by Christopher Huljich, who gave National another $10,000.

Property developers Christopher and Michaela Meehan have given $103,260 to National and another $50,000 to Act. Similarly, Wellington’s Chris Parkin gave $24,500 to National and $10,000 to Act.

Wellington businessman Troy Bowker – a previous donor to Labour’s Stuart Nash – gave $15,000 to Act and $10,000 to NZ First.

On the left, gym company boss Phillip Mills gave $50,000 both to Labour and the Greens. Similarly, property developer Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens.

Donating to more than one party

Housing property donations

A large number of donors appear to be involved in the housing and property development industry. These donations have featured particularly strongly in the declarations from the parties now in government.

The largest donation of the year – $500,000 from Warren Lewis – is not directly involved in property but the wider construction industry. Lewis’ business, FMI Building Innovations, is described as a “building systems and materials supplier”.

Various property developers have made some large donations. For example, Mark Wyborn has given $200,000 to NZ First and $24,000 to National. His business partner Trevor Farmer has given $115,000 to Act and $100,000 to National.

Property developer Winton is partly owned by CEO Chris Meehan and his wife Michaela Meehan. Together, they donated $103,260 to the National Party in 2023. In addition, Chris Meehan donated $50,000 to Act. Christchurch property investor Philip Carter donated $59,500 to National.

One of the largest private developers in New Zealand, Manson TCLM, is partly owned by Culum Manson, who gave $70,000 to National. Real estate boss Garth Barfoot, a long-time National donor, gave $20,000. National received a further $22,000 from Auckland commercial landlord Andrew Krukziener, who also donated $19,999 to NZ First.

NZ First also received $145,000 from Wellington property developer Vlad Barbalich.

One of the more interesting property developers, Ockham Residential, appears to have hedged its bets with political donations. Owner Mark Todd gave $50,000 to Labour and $20,000 to the Greens. The company’s Chief Executive, William Deihl, gave a further $20,500 to National.

Housing donations

Mismatch between donations and spending

The $25m declared in donations by the parties in Parliament for 2023 was obviously used for fighting that year’s general election. However, caution must be taken when comparing the donations and expenditures declared to the Electoral Commission.

At first glance, there might appear to be a major discrepancy between the funding and expenditures. For example, National declared $10.4m in donations but only spent about $3.6m. Labour spent more than this ($4.8m) despite declaring a smaller amount of donations.

The two figures aren’t immediately comparable. First, the spending figures only relate to the 12 weeks before polling day, whereas parties generally spend money on campaigning throughout the year.

Secondly, the spending figures only account for money spent on paid advertising. There are plenty of other party and election expenditures that aren’t captured by the legal declarations – such as money spent on staff and opinion polling.

Further columns will dive deeper into this and look at the donations received by individual parties.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Political Analyst in Residence, Director of the Democracy Project, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz)

Many criticisms are being made of the Government’s Fast Track Approvals Bill, including by this writer. But as with everything in politics, every story has two sides, and both deserve attention. It’s important to understand what the Government is trying to achieve and its arguments for such a bold reform. As part of a new series providing scrutiny of the fast-track legislation (#FastTrackWatch), this first column rounds up the commentary and arguments in favour of what the Government is proposing.

Chris Bishop puts the case for getting things done

The architect of the overturn of RMA is Infrastructure and Housing Minister Chris Bishop. He has developed the new regime, with the central purpose of enabling the country to “get things done” – i.e. for development to occur. This goal comes in the context of widespread awareness and consensus that things have been moving too slowly in New Zealand, and major and important infrastructure and housing have been held back by structural and governmental regulation.

Much of this relates to the Resource Management Act 1991, which most politicians want replaced. Bishop’s answer is to essentially deregulate the sector and turbo-charge the ability of developers to get their projects off the ground. And in finding a way to do this, he’s picked up what the last Labour Government had already done with their own Covid-era fast-track processes and expanded that into a more permanent and extensive escalated process.

The new processes mean that three cabinet ministers (those responsible for transport, regional development, and infrastructure) can select a select number of development proposals to essentially get exemptions from normal resource consenting processes. An expert panel is also involved in advising the ministers and suggesting conditions to be placed on developers, but the three ministers have the ultimate say.

Bishop explained all of this in his column in the Herald yesterday, in which he paints a dark picture of the status quo, which justifies a new approach: “It’s too hard to get things done in New Zealand. Too hard to build new renewable energy, too hard to build roads and public transport, too hard to build houses and too hard to develop the sort of sensible economic development projects that provide jobs and growth” – see: Fast Track Approvals Bill – New Zealand has become an obstruction economy (paywalled)

To illustrate how the status quo needs radical change, Bishop is good at using anecdotes about the frustrations of a dysfunctional and bureaupathetic consents system: “I recently met a housing developer who had finally received consent after a three-year process only to have an official turn up on the very day earthworks were to begin and demand a Wildlife Act permit. That process took more than a year to complete. Such ineptitude would be funny if kids weren’t living in cars and a generation were not locked out of home ownership.”

Bishop has cleverly turned the tables on critics who has sought to tar the fast-track process as being about helping construction and mining companies to get their way. Instead, he sells his solution as being about improving housing availability, making roads safer, and decarbonising the economy to fight climate change.

He also puts forward a very clear explanation of how the new fast-track process will work as a streamlined “one-stop-shop” process for developers: “it doesn’t just deal with resource consents, it also deals with all the other things often needed for development, like conservation permits, heritage and so on. It makes sense to do all of that at the same time, rather than strung out over many years and with multiple different government agencies.”

Shane Jones’ populist approach

New Zealand First’s Shane Jones is the second biggest voice selling the fast-track proposal to the public. And although Bishop is the main architect of it, it’s been said that Jones, as Resources Minister, is the schemes’ “godfather”. Crucially, he was responsible for getting the scheme included in the coalition agreement between National and New Zealand First.

Jones’ sales pitch for the fast-track is less subtle than that of Bishop, and more populist, saying it’s about driving a metaphorical bulldozer through all the red- and green-tape to get things done for “the people”, especially in the neglected regions. He promises more jobs and economic growth as a result. It’s all very much in line with his “Make New Zealand Great Again” mode in which leaders need to break rules to get things done.

Jones takes delight in promising more consents for the extractive sector, including mining on conservation land, and appeals to New Zealanders, who he says are sick of environmental protections slowing down progress too much. In debating the new legislation in Parliament, Jones explained the new approach: “Gone are the days of the multicoloured skink, the kiwi, many other species that have been weaponised to deny regional New Zealand communities their right to a livelihood, their entitlement to live peacefully with their environment but derive an income to meet the costs of raising families in regional New Zealand.”

More famously, Jones has also referred to allowing land that is currently protected against mining to protect the Archey’s frog: “In those areas called the Department of Conservation estate, where it’s stewardship land, stewardship land is not DOC land, and if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy.”

Mike Hosking: The Most important thing the Govt is doing

The one person outside of government and industry circles who is almost a lone voice in championing the fast-track regime is Newstalk broadcaster Mike Hosking. He put forward his best defence of it this week, saying the proposal “might well be the most important thing this Government does” given that New Zealand’s has an infrastructure crisis and needs to get on with building and fixing things, which is what this bill is about – see: This Government was elected on change — embrace it

Hosking reminds us that the current Resource Management Act isn’t working, and so it’s important that we innovate to try new ways of getting on with creating economic growth and rebuilding the country. It’s a message that will resonate with a public that is impatient for change and transformation, especially given that this is a widespread feeling that “the country is broken” or in decline.

Hosking’s other key argument is to attack those that are questioning the fast-track proposal – he describes them as “incessant moaners” and “handwringers” who are holding back progress. Here’s his key point: “Submissions on the legislation closed last week and you can imagine who turned up. It’s the same people who believe not doing things is the preferred option. The same people who have held this country to ransom over their individual myopic view of what’s important to save, or treasure, or talk more about.”

The New Zealand Initiative: In favour of centralising power in Wellington

The pro-business lobby group and think tank the New Zealand Initiative has come out firmly in favour of the Fast Track Approvals Bill, saying that it’s “a necessary step to streamline decision-making for projects with significant economic benefits, and it should proceed.”

This group is normally an advocate for “localism”, devolution, and against the ethos of “Wellington knows best” – which means they might have been expected to rail against this concentration of power in the Beehive. But in this case, they support the Government taking back control so that they can push through development without cause for local participation and impediments in the decisions.

The Initiative’s main spokesperson on the issue, Nick Clark, has written a column for the Herald this month about how the bill might not be perfect, but it should be supported because it “represents an improvement on the status quo” – see: Fast-tracking for infrastructure fix is needed now (paywalled)

In talking about the concerning imperfections in the fast-tracking proposal, such as the increased likelihood of corruption, the Initiative concludes that these aren’t important enough to prevent the Bill from being implemented in its current form, especially given the urgency of New Zealand’s infrastructure deficit.

The Initiative therefore takes a highly pragmatic argument in favour of fast-tracking, pointing to, like Bishop, the many economic problems facing the country, which now means that a centralisation of powers is desirable in order to push through developments, even if they are opposed by locals.

Infrastructure Commission

Some fast-track supporters have used material produced by the Government’s Infrastructure Commission to show the need for the new reforms. Although the Commission doesn’t appear to have taken a stance on this major infrastructure issue, it has published a report on the problems with the existing resource management rules.

The report was prepared for the Commission by the Sapere consultancy company, and it shows that the current consenting process costs the economy about $1.3 billion per year. It also pointed out that over the last five years, the average time taken to get consent has doubled.

The Commission is also under pressure to come up with ways to speed up developments. A poll last year showed that 61 per cent of New Zealanders believe that not enough is being done to meet the country’s infrastructure needs. Priorities, according to survey respondents, were flood defences and new housing supply. For more on this, see Andrea Vance’s recent column, Why Nimbyism is the biggest risk to the Government’s fast-track regime (paywalled)

Business interests welcome fast-tracking

“Manna from heaven” is how the fast-track bill is being described by the chief executive of the mining lobby group Straterra, Josie Vidal. She says that “the country is in trouble. We need to get on and do some things”, and suggests that politicians have become too ponderous in their decision-making – see Brent Edwards’ NBR article, Opponents and supporters of fast-track bill want changes (paywalled)

As to the criticisms of the bill, Vidal writes this off: “There is a lot of fearmongering from environmental groups.”

Similarly, Newsroom’s editor Tim Murphy has said: “This Govt is certainly making some people happy. The mining, marine aquaculture, roading, energy and land developer industries must be wondering whether they’ve died and gone to heaven with the new fast-tracking law.”

Certainly, businesses and other lobby groups have reacted very positively to the fast-track bill. Press statements have been put out in its support by Infrastructure New Zealand, Transporting New Zealand, Energy Resources Aotearoa, and Civil Contractors NZ.

Some iwi are also supportive of the fast-track, as many have economic interests in aquaculture and energy industry. For example, Ngāi Tahu has been reported as hoping to use the new fast-track to finally get the greenlight for its previously-blocked proposal for a massive salmon farm off Stewart Island.

The public’s appeal for “getting things done”

The fast-track regime is likely to be very popular with the public. There’s a widespread frustration with how little government gets achieved, and how society is held back by regulations. This is especially the case in terms of building and resource management consents.

….This column continues. To access this, please follow this link to the  Democracy Project (https://democracyproject.nz) and subscribe: Upgrade to paid.

The defection of Labour Minister Meka Whaitiri has been heralded by some as a stunning coup for Te Pāti Māori and a “courageous” step by the rebel MP. But is it really? The whole episode can also be viewed as rather farcical and shabby, reflecting very poorly on the integrity of both Whaitiri and the party welcoming her. This episode also illustrates just how much Te Pāti Maori has changed. The party once claimed to be all about the pursuit of “mana enhancing” relationships, but the contemporary version of the party is looking increasingly opportunistic.

The Māori Party was originally established when another Labour MP and minister, Tariana Turia, defected from Helen Clark’s Labour Government in 2005 over the Foreshore and Seabed legislation. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of that dispute, Turia’s departure was a highly principled one, and carried out honourably.

Turia fought inside Labour to change its stance on the Foreshore and Seabed issue and, when she lost that battle, she took advice from a large array of supporters and resigned from her government. She also resigned from Parliament, as she understood her mandate as an MP came from being elected as a representative of the Labour Party. She soon won her seat back, gaining a mandate to establish the Māori Party – Te Pāti Māori.

In that case, the defecting MP did everything the right way, including giving her colleagues the respect of telling them that she was going and explaining why. She also was entirely upfront with the public.

There have been other notable waka jumpers who left their parties in a similar honourable fashion. Jim Anderton resigned from the Fourth Labour Government in the 1980s, Winston Peters departed from Jim Bolger’s National Government in the 1990s, and Hone Harawira left the Māori Party in 2011.

Of course, there are also examples of less honourable party hopping – from Alamein Kopu’s jump from the Alliance to set up her Wahine Māori party which propped up Jenny Shipley’s National Government, through to Brendan Horan leaving NZ First to set up his Independent Coalition. Such departures were about personal quarrels and vanities. Political philosophy and policy played no real part in their departures.

The Hollowness of Meka Whaitiri’s departure

In announcing her departure from the Labour Government on Wednesday, Meka Whaitiri failed to point to any substantive policy and philosophical differences with the party she had represented in Parliament for nearly ten years.

Likewise, yesterday Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer was unable to point to any particular reason for Whaitiri’s resignation and insisted Whaitiri had no “beef” with Labour.

Without Whaitiri being willing to provide any justification for her departure from Labour, speculation can be fairly drawn that it is simply about her own personal ambitions, gripes and vanities.

In particular, Whaitiri’s switch to Te Pāti Māori appears to be about her thwarted career ambitions. She was sacked by Jacinda Ardern in 2018 after a nasty altercation with one of her staff. Whaitiri never seemed to accept any fault in the dispute, displaying a lack of contrition and unwillingness to explain what happened. Her most notable statement following the dispute was that “In this country, we have a hierarchy; white men, white women, brown men, brown women, and sometimes brown women have to talk extra loud to be heard”.

Whaitiri was disgruntled when she did not make it back into Cabinet after the controversy, and even considered jumping ship to Te Pāti Māori in 2020. Subsequent reshuffles – especially the most recent ones under new prime minister Chris Hipkins – appear to have been the tipping point for Whaitiri, as she is said to have been aggrieved that other younger Māori MPs were promoted over her.

It also looked likely that Whaitiri would lose her ministerial position outside of Cabinet after the next election. If Labour is re-elected, the party will have less share of the vote and will have to divvy up ministerial positions with MPs from other minor parties, possibly including Te Pāti Māori. Other rising stars in Labour would also be likely to make up a refreshed Executive.

So, although Whaitiri has given up a ministerial position – and some have painted this as courageous – this was a case of her reading the writing on the wall. With this move, Whaitiri is now in a position to come back after the election as a more significant political figure, potentially even as a Cabinet Minister representing Te Pāti Māori.

Whaitiri and Te Pāti Māori are letting down the electorate

Whaitiri was elected in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti as a Labour MP, but by deciding she is now a Te Pāti Māori MP she has disregarded that mandate. The principled course of action would have been for Whaitiri to stay with the Labour Party until the election, and then seek re-election for another party. The alternative would be to resign from Parliament and commence her campaign as a candidate for Te Pāti Māori.

The proportionality of Parliament has been distorted – something that the Labour Government previously stated as a reason for bringing in the waka jumping law, which Whaitiri has been able to step around. It is clear that both Te Pāti Māori and Labour have done everything they can to prevent Whaitiri from being ejected from Parliament under the waka jumping law.

Labour wants to avoid souring their relationship with Te Pāti Māori because their path back to power after the election is likely to be predicated on that party’s support. Labour has obviously calculated that to invoke the waka-jumping legislation – which they have every right and ability to do – would not be in their interests, even if it would be the principled thing to do. It also appears that Labour and its Speaker have bent over backwards to prevent Whaitiri from inadvertently triggering the legislation.

The Integrity of Parliament is in question

Much of the public will view Whaitiri’s ability to stay in Parliament as a stitch-up. The decision by the Speaker appears nonsensical in a way that can only be explained by the self-interest of Labour and Te Pāti Māori.

Now the Speaker simply expects the public to trust him on this big issue of public interest, and won’t allow the public to have the details of the negotiations and communications with Whaitiri and Te Pāti Māori. But the lack of transparency means the public has no way of judging whether the Speaker’s decision was correct, or whether he has abused his position.

Although the Speaker and Te Pāti Māori are essentially claiming these issues are internal matters, there is a case to be made that all of the information should be released to the public. As RNZ’s Tim Watkin argues, “These are essentially public matters, not private ones.”

If Meka Whaitiri and Te Pāti Māori want to prove their integrity over what has occurred then they will release the letter that Whaitiri sent to the Speaker. This might quell the doubts about how Whaitiri managed to stay in Parliament despite her account to the media which appeared to trigger the party-hopping legislation.

Unfortunately, Te Pāti Māori and Whaitiri appear to be trying to escape any accountability over the matter by refusing to front up. For example, yesterday Tamihere denied the requests of journalists wanting the details of Whaitiri’s communications to the Speaker, saying: “we are not accountable to U we are accountable to the law”.

What happened to Te Pāti Māori’s “mana-enhancing” approach?

Traditionally Te Pāti Māori has made a lot of their commitment to dealing with others in a “mana-enhancing” way. But this episode has raised questions about whether this commitment has been ditched, given the lack of respect shown by Whaitiri and Te Pāti Māori to Whaitiri’s former colleagues.

RNZ’s Tim Watkin argues that this lack of respect has not just been to Labour, but to Parliament, the public, and to the voters of Ikaroa-Rāwhiti. As with other commentators, he is astounded that “Whaitiri did not have the decency to speak to her boss” before resigning.

Watkin suggests that Whaitiri and Te Pāti Māori have been most disrespectful to the voters: “After a carefully staged announcement she has not seen fit to explain herself to the public she serves. MPs are not just creatures of their electorates, but representatives of the people. And the people, quite frankly, have every right to feel kept in the dark. She is a servant of the public, yet we have so many unanswered questions.”

There is currently a lot of praise for the “masterstroke” of recruiting Whaitiri to Te Pāti Māori. Party president John Tamihere is being painted as a smart and ruthless operator who is making his party much more powerful.

And there might be more to come. Te Pāti Māori appears to be trying to attract other disgruntled and alienated politicians to their cause. Louisa Wall is rumoured to be about to announce she will stand for Te Pāti Māori against Labour in Manurewa. And today there is talk about renegade Green list MP Elizabeth Kerekere also jumping ship over her unhappiness with her party’s investigation into allegations of bullying.

The problem is that in welcoming in an array of politicians who have a personality-based conflict with their respective parties, Te Pāti Māori might become a life raft for mavericks, rather than politicians who share a coherent political philosophical basis. Tamihere himself joined Te Pāti Māori after his requests to re-join the Labour Party were rejected.

Therefore although this latest injection of momentum with Whaitiri’s defection comes at a perfect time for Te Pāti Māori, it all looks rather shabby. Yes, the party looks more powerful, and it will be able to leverage its apparent “king-maker” positioning, it might also find that it gains a reputation for being opportunistic and unprincipled.

Te Pāti Māori’s lack of mana

Whaitiri’s recruitment – possibly to be followed by the likes of Wall and Kerekere – comes during a parliamentary term in which Te Pāti Māori have decidedly raised the temperature in their allegations about the shortcomings of their political opponents. Increasingly, the Te Pāti Māori co-leaders are inclined to level allegations of racism and race to make their point.

This was, once again, very present in the justification for Whaitiri’s waka jumping, with allegations made that Labour had kept their Māori MPs in “shackles” as slaves. Tim Watkin argues that such language is “deeply loaded and insulting”. It’s especially galling to talk about Labour having imposed slavery on her, when she has been on a $250,000 salary, while her constituents “are suffering more directly as slaves to a global cost of living crisis, climate change and more.”

Ironically this is all reminiscent of Whaitiri’s win over then Te Pāti Māori co-leader Marama Fox in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti in 2017, which led Fox to exclaim on election night that Maori had made a big mistake in voting for the Labour candidates: “what I think the whānau have done is that they have gone back to the mother ship, they’ve gone back like a beaten wife to their abuser”.

Fox’s toxic allegations against the likes of Whaitiri are now being repeated by Whaitiri against her former Labour colleagues. Unfortunately, such toxic hyperbole is a sign of where Te Pāti Māori might be going. It’s hard to see how any of this is particularly “mana enhancing”.

Earlier this week, in the wake of a decision by the Supreme Court of Aotearoa New Zealand, the Government announced it would draft a Bill which would extend the franchise in New Zealand to sixteen- and seventeen-year-old citizens and permanent residents. (See this press release on Scoop from the ‘Make it 16’ advocacy group, this on Evening Report from The Conversation, and this from RNZ.)

Indeed, the denial of the franchise to these younger people may contradict the New Zealand Bill of Rights. Yet, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Government explicitly denies Covid19 booster vaccinations to people based on their ethnicity. (See this on Stuff.) Contradicting the Bill of Rights has not even been discussed with respect to vaccination rights.

I have no concern about sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds being less capable of voting wisely than, say, their parents. Nevertheless, whether this is a good idea for 2026 should be seen in the context of the history of democracy. Democracy is not a form of governance which arrived in one hit. Rather, democracy worldwide is a long-running ‘project’ which remains incomplete, more incomplete in some countries than others.

The progress of the democracy project can depend on the sequence of democratic reforms undertaken.

Sequences of Democratic Reforms in United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The first step towards democracy in England was the Magna Carta, in 1215. Further steps were taken in the English (and Scottish) Civil War of the 1640s, when the King was deposed, and then beheaded, by Parliamentarians. These 1640s’ developments were problematic, and largely reversed with the restoration in 1660. But a big step was then taken in 1688, when the Glorious Revolution in England and Scotland replaced the absolute monarch with a constitutional monarchy.

Early steps on the road to democracy were power struggles between King and a Parliament of nobles. The mass of the people were largely unaffected by the gradual gains made by Parliament; in some cases they could be worse off, having less recourse to the King to override abuses perpetrated by the nobility.

In the eighteenth century, important steps to democracy were taken in the United States (1770s and 1780s) and France (from 1789 to 1798); both in the forms of Liberal (or ‘bourgeois’) revolutions. Again, these may not have much brought many people in these countries closer to the levers of power; we may note, for example, the matters of women and of slaves. These revolutions led to a conservative reaction in the United Kingdom, a formal Union from 1801.

Nevertheless, democratic reforms of a progressive nature did take place: namely, the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1918; each of which significantly extended the franchise in the United Kingdom. In addition, ‘plural voting’ (some people being able to vote more than once) was abolished in 1848. This meant the United Kingdom essentially had a system of ‘one man, one vote’ by 1918. While the 1918 reform also gave the vote to some women, it was in 1928 that women and men aged over 21 had the vote on an equal and universal basis. The United Kingdom voting age was lowered to 18 in 1969; and to 16 in Scotland in 2014.

New Zealand essentially inherited the British Law of 1832. All Māori men over 21 gained the right to vote (in special Māori electorates) in 1867. From then, universal male voting was introduced in 1879, and plural voting was eliminated in 1889. Working-class men gained the vote in 1879 (1867 for Māori), and all women in 1893; the only cases where New Zealand reforms preceded equivalent British reforms.

New Zealand of course introduced the critical reform of ‘proportional representation’ in 1996; a reform still awaiting in the United Kingdom. So New Zealand did precede the United Kingdom in the more critical extension to democracy.

Elite versus Non-Elite Voting

The key step changing the class balance-of-power was the ‘universal male franchise’. The female franchise was of course important, although working-class men then were reticent about this, believing that, on balance, women would vote for conservative candidates. That ‘concern’ was probably valid, from the working-class point of view; although, fortunately, the critical universal reform had already taken place.

On this matter of women voting more conservatively, we may note the poem by James K Baxter – The Ballad of Calvary Street – with its famous line “National Mum and Labour Dad”. Baxter wrote this in 1944, when he was 17 years old. (And here’s an academic reference to that line, in Landfall volume 16, 1962.) Many would argue that women this century vote less conservatively than men; but, then, the meaning of ‘conservative’ may have changed; try substituting the words ‘privileged’ or ‘advantaged’ instead. A vote for Labour may now be at least as much a vote for ‘no substantial change’ as a vote for National once was.

Sequence does matter. If, in the nineteenth century, middle-class women had got the vote before working-class men, then there could have been a considerable delay in granting the vote to working-class men.

There may be similar concerns with the proposal to lower the voting age. The push to lower the age appears to be driven by the new elite, or at least the teenage children of the new elite. And, it is almost certainly true that, at present, new-elite young people are significantly more likely to vote than are working-class or underclass youth. So the question is whether this mooted lowering of the voting age will in any way impede more important and more necessary democratic reforms. Certainly, in the past, it has been elite interests which have been the barriers to the eventual achievement of hard-won extensions to non-elites. (Or, maybe lowering the voting age might facilitate further democratic reforms which benefit non-elites?)

Extensions to Democracy unrelated to the extension of the Franchise

The introduction of proportional representation was clearly the most important of these in New Zealand’s history. This reform meant that one person’s vote had the same value as any other person’s vote.

(We see many overseas examples where this is not the case. The most obvious is that voters in California have zero influence in choosing who the President will be, and almost zero influence in determining the balance of power in the senate. There are two issues here. Re the president vote, California always votes Democrat; it is not even close to being a ‘swing state’. Re the Senate vote, the ratio of population to senators is 20,000,000 to 1. In neighbouring Nevada, which is also a swing state, there are 1,600,000 people per senator. Nevada senators have the same weight in the federal Senate as do California senators.)

The discussion around democracy gets more diffuse when it goes beyond ballot-box issues. Here we move into the realm of economic democracy, and the importance of expressing constitutional equality in the area of public property rights. Huge amounts of each country’s productive economic resources are subject to collective ownership – that is, collective stewardship and (ideally sustainable) utilisation. In some cases, collective resources are local, in some cases they are national. And in many cases resource ownership/stewardship is global, meaning that each country has equity with respect to a population-weighted share of global public resources.

Economic democracy means that every ‘person of age’ – currently that age is 18 in most parts of the world – has an equal share of the public property rights associated with collectively owned public resources.

Economic democracy is as conceptually simple as political democracy. Yet the elites muddy the waters, just as they have done through most of human history with respect to the establishment of universal voting rights.

In this case democracy means that economic organisations – ‘firms’, for want of a better word – should be paying a ‘production tax’ (a mix of a rent and a service fee) for their use of collective resources. Firms should be paying that tax in proportion to their size. Thus, if Firm A is twice as big as Firm B, then Firm A – using twice as much public resource – should pay twice as much production tax. (The next thing to be aware of is that, by definition, production taxes are the same as income taxes; just another name. A change of language does, however, facilitate a new way of thinkingabout income tax.)

The second half of the argument for economic democracy is that every person ‘of age’ – as equal shareholders of our collective resources – should receive an equal stipend from production tax revenue.

Economic democracy can be represented by the bumper sticker slogan: ‘flat tax, universal income’.. In conventional language, it’s a built-in rights-based (ie non-targeted, non-bureaucratic) mechanism of ‘progressive taxation’. Depending on the rate of production tax and on the size of the universal stipend, the mechanism may be broadly neutral in its income distribution effect, or may be more ‘redistributive’.

As a simple way of conceiving this, we may think of public finance at the local council level. Imagine two proprietors in a town, and three equal properties in that town. Proprietor A owns two of the properties, and proprietor B owns the other property. Under the principle of economic democracy, A pays twice as much in property rates as B. But the benefits of the revenue raised are shared equally between all persons in that town, meaning that A and B get the same as each other.

Prospects for Economic Democracy

Possibly, in western societies our present position is much like the United Kingdom in the year 1801; meaning that the First Economic Reform Act may be about 30 years hence, say around the year 2050. Economic democracy is needed now, of course, just as political (and economic) democracy was desirable in 1801.

So the question is, would the extension of political democracy to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds impede or enhance our journey towards economic democracy?

My fear is that this extension to the franchise would create a further impediment to the achievement of economic democracy. The first reason, already alluded to, is that this change would slightly entrench the power of the new elites; and that it is the elites who represent the main impediment to the achievement of democracy by lower socio-economic groups.

Part of the sway of the elites is their obsession with ‘sound’ (in practice, ‘miserly’) public finance. Thus, if the age of entitlement to a universal public stipend is 16 instead of 18, then such a provision will be more expensive, because there will be more people entitled to that universal payment.

Second, the discussion around economic democracy – a discussion easily derailed by our old and new elites – is that the matter of paying an adult stipend to school ‘children’ may become a substantial diversion from the main discussion.

Third, there is the problem that advocates of a Universal Basic Income are often their own worst enemy. Many argue for a universal gift (‘grant’, ‘transfer’) without appreciating that the achievement of this payment is a consequence of a production tax regime as outlined above. Economic democracy cannot be the one part without being the other part. Production taxes and universal stipends represent an alternative to graduated income taxes and targeted transfers; not some kind of ‘stick on’ ‘band aid’ to our present conception of income taxes. If advocates don’t get this right, they will be forever on the back foot when challenged on how to pay for what they present as a ‘gift’. (Equity dividends are not ‘gifts’.)

Further, many of the advocates of a Universal Basic Income see the ‘universal gift’ as a payment sufficient to create an alternative to labour, thereby enabling non-elites to choose to not work. This conception of a universal welfare state riles elites, and allows them to use the ‘labour supply’ issue as a ‘straw man argument’ against economic democracy. The important reality is that economic democracy enhances the functioning of the labour market, rather than stifling it. It should be that a universal stipend falls short of a stand-alone wage. The fact that participation in the labour market would not cost a person their stipend means that they are much better incentivised to participate in non-exploitative labour. In other words, a proper implementation of economic democracy creates the labour-supply elasticity – the ‘surge capacity’ if you like – that enables people to establish healthy work-life balances, and also enables people to adjust those balances (in favour of more paid work) in times of labour shortages.

I may be wrong in my concern that the inchoate economic democracy project might be derailed by the granting of full democratic rights to a younger cohort of people. Maybe, an extension to our education (probably in Years 9 and 10, given NCEA requirements for older students) towards “civics’ education” might lead to school students becoming much more aware of the ‘full gamut of democracy’ discourse; civics would need to be well-taught, and not massaged to conform with elite interests. If quality civics’ education is a co-requirement of extending the franchise to senior school pupils, and both teachers (who are not part of the social elite) and genuinely progressive students ‘grasp the nettle’, then a lower voting-age could smooth some of the many bumps in the road to a more complete democracy.

At the end of this essay are two academic references for my work on the theme of economic democracy.

Conclusion

The extension of democracy from political democracy – the right to vote in elections – towards economic democracy is critical if humanity is to have a future. Any proposals to extend democracy in ‘sideways’ directions must be evaluated in terms of whether these proposals inhibit or enhance the achievement of the more important reforms.

Just as if elite women had been given the vote before non-elite men then the achievement of universal suffrage may have been delayed (or otherwise compromised), so also an extension of voting rights which in practice will mainly benefit young elites may also endanger an already fraught path towards universal democracy. (Or it may not, if there can be genuine improvements in ‘democracy education’ as part of the reform.)

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

References:

Public Equity and Tax-Benefit Reform
https://thepolicyobservatory.aut.ac.nz/publications/public-equity-and-tax-benefit-reform
“economic democracy: one economic citizen, one dividend”

Symposium on The Basic Income Guarantee
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4024&context=jssw
Keith Rankin: Prospects for a Universal Basic Income in New Zealand

Political Roundup: Momentum growing to reform lobbying laws

This week global anti-corruption agency Transparency International released a report on lobbying, which described New Zealand’s lack of regulation as “glaring”.

Transparency International New Zealand has developed an international comparison of New Zealand’s lobbying regulations so that MPs here can decide whether to reform this sector. Currently, a group of MPs who are members of the Global Organisation for Parliamentarians Against Corruption, are reportedly weighing up the pros and cons of regulating lobbying in New Zealand.

Transparency International compared New Zealand’s lobbying rules with ten other similar countries, including the US and Canada, and found that New Zealand is at the unregulated end of the spectrum. In contrast, US lobbyists can face prison sentences of up to five years for the activities that are carried out in New Zealand.

The report looked at the seven areas of lobbying regulation that typically occur and found that New Zealand only had two of these: the publishing of Government Ministers’ diaries and MPs’ personal, financial, and business interests. The anti-corruption report says that “the absence of independent oversight of, and personal gains from lobbying in New Zealand is glaring.”

Even lobbyists see that something is wrong

With Transparency International joining the voices highlighting the way that lobbyists have carte blanche ability to assist vested interests and corporates to get their way in New Zealand, will there now be a stronger chance of reform of corporate lobbying?

Revelations that former Cabinet Minister Kris Faafoi recently moved almost straight from the highest levels of government to be a lobbyist highlighted the lack of rules. And Transparency International’s report shows that New Zealand is an outlier in not having any enforced “cooling off” period for politicians before they move into roles with conflicts of interest.

This has become embarrassing even for those working in the lobbying industry. Former journalist Jonathan Hill wrote last month about his own experiences in the area, saying a “stand-down” period for ministers and their staff before they move into lobbying is necessary, and such a rule would help improve public confidence in the industry.

Hill says the industry has been growing very quickly recently, “and there are large sums to be made in it”, but it’s made him feel “uneasy”. Hill writes: “My personal view is that lobbying – or government relations (GR) as it is termed – is a bit of a fraudulent industry.” He goes on to explain how easy it is to lobby politicians in New Zealand.

The fact that political insiders can come into lobbying with no regulation of their conflicts of interests clearly needs attention according to Hill. He points out: “The private sector has restraint of trade, gardening leave and the principle of continuous disclosure to prevent trading on inside information. But our democracy has nothing.”

Hill also suggests that the media is enabling the lucrative lobbying model: “Media should stop using lobbyists as political commentators. This has become common, for no good reason, and serves only to raise the profile of the lobbyist. That’s why they do it.”

Hill isn’t the only one involved in lobbying with doubts about the lack of controls on conflicts of interest. Lobbyist Holly Bennett, who runs the government relations firm Awhi, told RNZ last month that she was able to go straight from working as a ministerial and policy adviser in Parliament to lobbying MPs five years ago. She bluntly states: “I think it’s entirely inappropriate. I shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Bennett is arguing that the lobbying industry should now proactively set the rules for themselves, arguing in favour of “a code of conduct; a register; and the establishment of an industry regulatory body, similar to the Media Council.”

Politicians arguing over lobbying reform

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is under pressure to do something about the lack of lobbying regulation, especially in light of the Faafoi scandal. Last month she faced strong questions from Guyon Espiner on Morning Report about why Faafoi should be allowed to take insider information from his role as a Cabinet Minister to help private businesses.

Ardern’s response to this was that regulation of ministers becoming lobbyists was unnecessary because: “Every New Zealander knows our intentions and policy from our manifesto”. Espiner was incredulous: “Come on. Are you really making a comparison between a member of the public and a cabinet minister?”

Rightwing political commentator David Farrar responded to Ardern’s argument saying: “Is the Prime Minister really suggesting that a member of her Cabinet knows no more about what the Government will do than a member of the public? It’s ludicrous and insulting to our intelligence. The only way this could not be misinformation is if the Cabinet doesn’t actually discuss policies or legislation when they meet.”

Farrar, who claims to know most lobbyists in New Zealand, says that the information that comes to Ministers from sitting around the Cabinet and ministerial tables is invaluable to corporate clients: “Cabinet debates and decides on every major piece of government legislation. They decide on what options to proceed with, and when to backtrack (as with KiwiSaver Funds GST). They debate pros and cons in great detail. At Cabinet Committees they receive detailed advice from officials. And within their own portfolios Minister receive the most valuable info of all – oral briefings. This is the stuff so sensitive that it is never put in writing so it can’t be discovered under the OIA.”

Farrar uses the example of insider information that Ministers get on an array of commercial decisions: “There is also great commercial impact from decisions. They can decide on share sales, on regulatory regimes, on proposed taxes. The criteria for being a default KiwiSaver fund can be worth a billion dollars to a KiwiSaver fund manager.”

Former Cabinet Minister Peter Dunne has joined the chorus of those demanding reform in this area, labelling it “urgent”. He explains that “the adequacy of the rules regarding conflicts of interest for ministers and former ministers” has arisen out of the tradition in Parliament that politicians should be self-regulating: “When it comes to conflicts of interest, MPs have been largely left to manage them themselves.”

Dunne argues that the “time has surely come to formalise general conflict of interest rules for all MPs, and for the Cabinet Manual to address the specific issues raised by the Faafoi case.” He calls for “the Cabinet Office, the Speaker and the Standing Orders Committee to prioritise over the next few months updating the rules and practices regarding managing conflicts of interests for ministers and MPs.”

Perhaps Jacinda Ardern needs to talk to Labour’s last prime minister about lobbying reform. Helen Clark has now entered the debate, tweeting to Justice Minister Kiri Allan to point out that Transparency International “recommends 2 years” of a “cooling off period for political insiders after leaving taxpayer-funded positions before becoming lobbyists”.

An array of voices from across the political spectrum, including a former Labour prime minister, are now calling for reform on how vested interests can trade on inside information and connections. Will the Labour Government rise to the occasion?

Other items of interest and importance today

FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Dave Armstrong (Stuff): Don’t mess with NZ – if that’s OK with everyone
Thomas Manch (Stuff): A day of pomp and pageantry in Vietnam, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shakes communist leaders’ hands
Claire Trevett (Herald): Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s fruitful day talking trade, China and fruit with Vietnam’s highest-ranked leaders
Jo Moir (Newsroom): From elbowing into summits to Hanoi garden tours
Thomas Manch (Stuff): Ardern arrives in Vietnam to sell brand New Zealand
Claire Trevett (Herald): PM Jacinda Ardern arrives in Vietnam for business charm offensive and political meetings
Claire Trevett (Herald): PM Jacinda Ardern at the East Asia Summit: A call to do more in Myanmar, flags concern about China
Amelia Wade (Newshub): Jacinda Ardern, world leaders leave Southeast Asia summit without achieving much resolution
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): New Zealand extends Defence Force deployment in UK training Ukrainian soldiers
RNZ: Government extends Ukraine deployments, aid funding

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ACT
Thomas Couglan (Herald): Resource Management Act replacement coming today
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Everybody hates the RMA, but will we be happy now? (paywalled)
Richard Harman (Politik): Parker’s big RMA changes (paywalled)

PARLIAMENT
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): The Facts don’t always tell the truth
Jonah Franke (Stuff): National candidate’s past support for ’50:50′ co-governance at odds with party line
Will Trafford (Te Ao – Māori News): Te Pāti Māori slams government, opposition MPs for not backing voting reform bill
Duncan Garner (NBR): Is it possible to be all ‘Ruby Tui’ when NZ is going belly up? (paywalled)
Martyn Bradbury (Waatea News): Labour and Te Pāti need to work together this election
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Beehive diaries: Which minister is in trouble for unparliamentary language
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Grappling with Governmental gobbledygook

POWER COMPANY PROFITS
1News: Calls for Govt intervention over excess power dividends
Herald: Big power companies delivering excess dividends in the billions, new study claims
No Right Turn: Privatisation screws the future

ECONOMY, EMPLOYMENT
RNZ: Inflation risks behaviour changes that make it harder to contain – economist
Liam Dann (Herald): Golden age for youth employment is being lost in storm of inflation fear (paywalled)
Jenée Tibshraeny (Herald): House price spikes of 2020/21 should’ve come as a warning (paywalled)
David Hargreaves (Interest): ANZ economists: It will take a ‘concerted effort’ to squash wage-price spiral dynamics ‘that are becoming ever more established’ in NZ
Anna Whyte (Stuff): Wave of sectors preparing for fair pay start date as unions gather momentum to launch bids
George Heagney (Stuff): Workers welcome lift in conditions due to Fair Pay Agreement
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Pay rise winners and losers: The industries where wages are soaring or stalling
Kiwiblog: Number of People On Benefits Over Time
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Hospital technicians fed up with less pay than admin staff
Adam Pearse (Herald): Nurse unions take Te Whatu Ora to court over pay equity settlement
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): House prices expected to drop another 10% by end of 2024, Westpac says
David Hargreaves (Interest): Wholesale interest rate prices may determine size of next RBNZ OCR hike, BNZ economists say
Michael Reddell: Reviewing monetary policy
Will Mace (NBR): Climate coalition or cartel collusion? (paywalled)

HOUSING
Anne Gibson (Herald): Kāinga Ora gets $2.75b extra borrowing capacity for state house building programme
Stephen Ward (Local Democracy Reporting): Housing Minister Megan Woods and Kāinga Ora concerned Hamilton heritage areas could curb intensification
Michael Neilson (Herald): Public housing waitlist drops for only second quarter since June 2015
Greg Ninness (Interest): The number of people on the waiting list for social housing has fallen for two consecutive quarters
Rachel Moore (Stuff): The deflating morning ritual of a school caretaker near emergency housing motels in central Hamilton
Kelly Makiha (Rotorua Daily Post): Fighting for Rotorua: Mayor calls for more police to deal with emergency housing crime
Kelvin McDonald (Te Ao – Māori News): Ngāti Whakaue celebrates new whānau homes

HEALTH
Murray Jones (BusinessDesk): Are we getting what we pay for in the health system?
Cécile Meier and Murray Jones (BusinessDesk): ‘When I got covid, all I got was two text messages’: Little on GPs
Jonty Dine (RNZ): Nearly half of NZers cannot afford dental care – new report
RNZ: Dental care: 40 percent New Zealanders can’t afford it – report
Bridie Witton (Stuff): Hundreds spending 24 hours in busy EDs: ‘Disaster waiting to happen’
Will Trafford (Te Ao – Māori News): Bottle shops harder to open in rich areas – research
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Māori in rural New Zealand further from good healthcare – researcher
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Māori disproportionately impacted by drug overdoses – report
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Health inequities: Rōpū claimants meet on underfunding grievances with Crown
Kelvin McDonald (Te Ao –  Māori News): Wai 2575 claimants move step closer to resolving health underfunding grievances
Herald: ‘They are choosing to go to other places’: Overseas nurses applying for NZ work visas drops by 60 per cent

COVID-19
Herald Editorial: Three years of Covid, new study suggests caution (paywalled)
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Plan to restore MIQ if needed
Nikki Macdonald (Stuff): Covid-19 NZ: How to control a pandemic without a lockdown
RNZ: Cruise ship Covid-19 ‘no cause for alarm’

TRANSPORT
Simon Wilson (Herald): Why is a new harbour crossing back in the news? (paywalled)
Thomas Coughan (Herald): Bridge or tunnel? Government asks Aucklanders what they want for next crossing
Finn Blackwell (RNZ): New Auckland harbour crossing debate rolls on as government asks public for views
David Skipwith (Stuff): Aucklanders to have their say on harbour crossing options, including a tunnel
RNZ: Waka Kotahi’s $8b upgrade programme considers toll charges
1News: NZTA proposes sweeping state highway speed limit decreases
Greg Hurrell (BusinessDesk): MPs and rail activists clash on protest tactics (paywalled)

THREE WATERS
Graham Adams (The Platform): Hey presto… Three Waters becomes Five Waters!
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Explainer: MPs propose fixes to Government’s controversial water reforms (paywalled)
Andrew Dickens (Newstalk ZB): Co-governance should be the least of your worries

LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Craig Ashworth (Local Democracy Reporting): Māori wards did not inspire voters: What next to boost democracy?
The Facts: Alpha-bias- surnames in the top 3 won >50% of elections*
Felix Desmarais (Local Democracy Reporting): Rotorua cycleway to be removed for car parks

EDUCATION
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Covid-19: Students embrace ‘bare minimum’ approach to learning after disrupted years
Alex Penk: Will today’s students still have the opportunity to learn critical thinking?
RNZ: Checkpoint: Nursing students call for paid placements – Shane Reti responds
Ella Henry (Spinoff): Busting the myths about mātauranga Māori

SPY AGENCIES, NATIONAL SECURITY
Chris Trotter: The “Us versus Them” worldview
Tom Peters: New Zealand national security briefing promotes war and censorship
RNZ: Spy agency uses ‘computer network exploitation’ to take digital information

ENVIRONMENT
Thomas Cranmer: ‘We made a National Park disappear’
Jeremy Wilkinson (Open Justice Reporting): Kiribati refugee claims climate change crisis prevents him from returning home
Mildred Armah (Stuff): Climate change a ‘fundamental’ threat to livelihood of Pacific people – report
Will Trafford (Te Ao – Māori News): Māori get climate say after Shaw gaffes
Tom Powell (Stuff): Did the Government get agricultural emissions levy plan right?
Rod Oram (Newsroom): Climate summit clogged by indecision
Rod Oram (Newsroom): NZ absent on COP27 agriculture day
Gillian Blythe (Newsroom): Climate change threatens drinking water, crops, infrastructure – Water NZ
Will Harvie (Stuff): Cabinet to consider proposed refund scheme for bottles, cans before end of year
Will Trafford (Te Ao – Māori News): Protestors pay $400 for bypass whenua; government says not for sale

MEDIA
Duncan Greive (Spinoff): The end of a golden era at TVNZ – and the mystery of what comes next
Gavin Ellis: Back to the future to train the next generation of journalists
Damien Venuto and Isaac Davison (Stuff): Strike action possible as Stuff and union grapple over pay (paywalled)

SPORT
Imogen Wells (Newshub): Newshub-Reid Research poll: Where New Zealanders stand on banning alcohol advertising and sponsorship in sport
Stuff: Acting PM says Black Ferns may not get a parade but ‘an event’ after World Cup win
James Perry (Te Ao – Māori News): Government mulls Black Ferns celebration
Martin Devlin (NBR): Can women’s rugby be financially sustainable? (paywalled)
Damien Venuto (Herald): The Front Page: Has Fifa learned anything from its Qatar fiasco?

OTHER
Gareth Vaughan (Interest): Productivity Commission Chairman Ganesh Nana argues that New Zealand needs a major reset of immigration policy
Sasha Borissenko (Herald): Legal aid pay rise a drop in the ocean (paywalled)
Waatea News: Judges challenged to fix bias in system
Jem Traylen (BusinessDesk): Camera rollout an opportunity lost, says fishing industry (paywalled)
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Police investigate assaults on Auckland prisoners
Samuel Wat (RNZ): Cost of living troubles stretch animal shelters

Sunday’s announcement by Justice Minister Kiri Allan about forthcoming legislation on hate speech has sparked concerns that the country is headed for a second round of culture wars over free speech. As one journalist states today, Allan is “reigniting last year’s political firestorm”.

Some have suggested that Labour are about to make another attempt – after former Justice Minister Kris Faafoi had earlier put the hate speech law proposals on ice – to push through divisive and controversial legislation. Campaigners against hate speech have expressed their gratitude for Allan’s announcement, while free speech campaigners have warned that they are ready for a big fight.

The reality is likely to be much more prosaic – instead of Labour implementing far-reaching and radical reforms on speech regulation, Kiri Allan can be expected to simply make some tweaks to the current laws. Allan and Labour will be hoping a minimal or watered-down approach will satisfy those calling for hate speech to be suppressed more vehemently.

The background to the current hate speech law reform

The Labour Party has long been keen on tightening up laws on hate speech. And advocates for tighter rules on speech, such as the Human Rights Commission, have campaigned for government action.

But it was the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks that resulted in 51 deaths that initiated the current reform programme. The subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry recommended 44 changes, including reform of hate speech laws. The Commission report complained that the current laws do not “provide a workable mechanism to deal with hate speech”.

The Government agreed to implement these, with Minister Andrew Little being responsible for overseeing the response to the Commission report.

There are a number of possible areas that hate speech campaigners want changes on. The most basic reform is to adjust which groups in society should have legal protection from hate speech – i.e. what forms of speech can be criminalised. At the moment, hate speech laws only target discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin. Religion is the most obvious missing category, with others also calling for gender and gender-diverse groups to be specified as needing protection from hate speech.

The Government has previously been keen to go much further than simply adding religion and gender to the groups to be protected from hate speech. There is an argument that the current definition of hate speech in the law makes prosecutions too difficult, because the threshold for the courts to convict is far too high. And as evidence of this, there has been only one prosecution for hate speech in the last three decades. The Royal Commission argued that the current law “does not provide a credible foundation for prosecution”.

The Labour Government therefore attempted last year to implement a thorough reform of hate speech laws, with the notion that the current rules are “not fit for purpose”. But what they proposed was full of serious problems, and produced a backlash.

This was most vividly exposed when both the Prime Minister and Minister of Justice were unable to explain the reforms to the public. Labour politicians couldn’t promise that the reforms wouldn’t lead to prosecutions for examples such as young people blaming the “Boomer” generation for monopolising housing wealth.

The moderate, watered-down fix on hate speech

There really is no chance that Labour wants to spark a culture war on free speech as it’s about to go into election year. It’s quite the opposite – the Government has an interest in getting this issue off the agenda as quickly and quietly as possible. As many commentators have rightly pointed out, a big debate about Government clamp-downs on political speech would not go down well in an election year.

It’s not surprising, and quite telling, that Labour is talking about wanting to obtain National’s support for their legislative changes. It points strongly to the likelihood that Labour has been developing a very moderate, or watered-down, fix for the hate speech problem.

The Prime Minister is reported as wanting to introduce “a slimmed down reform package” that National could support. As Newsroom’s Marc Daalder argues today, “To get National’s support, the reforms would have to be dramatically different from what was proposed last year.”

There are some clear signs that Labour wants to just focus on fixing the omission of religion from the current hate speech laws, with the PM saying: “I would have thought that amongst politicians there should be good support for saying, actually, you should not experience hate speech and incitement based on your religion. It’s a fairly simple concept”.

Ardern also told media this week that the Government is only aiming at minimal change: “Where there were issues last time was because there were other amendments around some of the thresholds in language that caused some concern, but let’s get back to our first principles on this one.”

It seems obvious from such statements that the upcoming reforms will simply add religion and gender to the list of protected groups, but won’t involve more radical changes to definitions of hate speech. We might also expect that the Government could modernise the legislation to take into account digital communication, and this is also likely to be uncontroversial.

The backlash from advocates of strong laws on hate speech

Justice Minister Kiri Allan made her announcement of hate speech reform this week on TVNZ’s Q+A, saying “I can make this promise to you, I will be making announcements on hate speech by the end of this year” and “I guarantee I will be introducing law I intend to have concluded and put into law by the next election”.

Allan had good political reasons for making this statement, and for keeping the details under wraps. The Government is under pressure to fulfill their promises for reform in this area, and this week the Government had to front up to the second He Whenua Taurikura hui on counter-terrorism and violent extremism, where they knew that would be challenged on this issue. Therefore, a pre-emptive announcement was necessary for this audience, as well as for the Labour Party conference this coming weekend.

Andrew Little is also under strong pressure from the Kāpuia advisory group that he has established to consult with the Government over implementing the Royal Commission recommendations. The chair of Kāpuia, Arihia Bennett, has made numerous complaints to Little about the Government’s “lack of clarity, a lack of funding or a lack of observable progress” in dealing with issues like hate speech.

Other voices for reform such as political commentator Morgan Godfery and Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon have been demanding radical changes on speech regulation. Foon has accused the Government of “dragging its heels” on the reforms and saying that this was allowing “hate allowed to fester”.

Advocates of a much more radical clampdown on political speech are likely to be extremely disappointed by what the Government eventually announces. If the National Party is able to sign up to a minimal change to the legislation, the Green Party and others will almost certainly feel aggrieved that the Government isn’t taking a more radical approach, and Labour might well be accused of capitulating to the free speech brigade.

So although some are expecting free speech advocates and maybe even the National and Act parties to come out fighting against Labour’s upcoming reforms, it’s much more likely is that the advocates of radically-tightened laws on speech will have more cause to revolt against Labour’s mild changes.

Further reading on free speech, hate speech and extremism

Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Hate speech debate overshadows Royal Commission progress
Marc Daalder (Newsroom): Disinformation seminar cancelled amid threats, harassment
Ripu Bhatia (Stuff): More action needed to protect vulnerable groups from hate – Amnesty International
Jonty Dine (RNZ): Community groups urge need to combat online hate speech at second counter-terrorism hui
Waatea News: Māori ready to tackle extremism fall-out

Other items of interest and importance today

ECONOMY, BUSINESS, EMPLOYMENT, HOUSE PRICES
Bernard Hickey (Interest): Actually, we’ll almost all be just fine
Richard Harman (Politik): The end of the golden weather (paywalled)
Geraden Cann (Stuff): No money, in negative equity and facing double interest costs a year after buying first home
Morgan Godfery (Stuff): The big banks are making obscene profits. Let’s tax them
Julie Anne Genter (Herald):  Prioritising people over profit with a fairer tax regime (paywalled)
RNZ: Tax cuts not the only tool to help low-income workers – National
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Banks’ big profits ‘mean they have duty to help struggling borrowers’
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Reserve Bank issues warning about rising mortgage rates, falling house prices
David Hargreaves (Interest): RBNZ says house prices still above sustainable levels
David Hargreaves (Interest): Paying our way – how are we managing the mortgage hikes?
Imogen Wells (Newshub): National, Labour back spatting over tax as report paints grim picture for housing market
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Financial stability: Dark cloud over NZ’s economy as interest rates jump
RNZ: Housing downturn grim, but not another financial crisis – economist
Liam Dann (Herald): Can low unemployment and high wage growth really be a bad thing? (paywalled)
Esther Taunton (Stuff): Here’s what a near-record low unemployment rate really means for workers and businesses
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): Unemployment still at near-record low of 3.3%
Herald: Biggest leap ever recorded in wage growth, unemployment flatlining near record lows
RNZ: Unemployment rate holds steady at 3.3%, wages rise strongly – Stats NZ
David Hargreaves (Interest): Private sector wage rise blows all forecasts out of the water – 8.6%
Jenny Ruth (BusinessDesk): NZ unemployment rate steady at 3.3% in third quarter, wage inflation hot
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): Countdown staff agree to 12% pay rise deal

HOUSING CRISIS
Herald Editorial: Getting action on social housing (paywalled)
Denise Piper (Stuff): Government’s $55m funding to help whānau living in tents and cars in Northland
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Govt partnership with Māori aims to fund up to 100 homes in Te Tai Tokerau

PARLIAMENT, HAMILTON WEST BY-ELECTION
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Biggest Budget decision coming next month (paywalled)
Michael Neilson (Herald): National ‘disappointed’ no compromise on Māori electoral roll options
Rachel Maher (Herald): Andrew Little claims Hamilton West Labour candidate was ambushed, not the ambusher
Jonah Franke-Bowell (Stuff): Labour Hamilton West candidate seen at ambush protest against own minister
Richard Prebble: Where Hamilton West goes, goes the country
RNZ: Another step in Hamilton West by-election with issuing of writ
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Convictions quashed for man who was drunk when he emailed PM threatening to kill
Craig Kapitan (Herald): Conviction quashed for Michael Cruikshank, who sent threatening emails to Jacinda Ardern

THREE WATERS
Kate MacNamara (Herald): $70m from Covid fund fuels Three Waters spend up (paywalled)
Te Rina Kowhai (Newshub): Tribal leaders slam mayors’ Three Waters replacement plan
RNZ: Auckland treatment plant that just got $2m upgrade shutdown due to contaminant

LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Todd Niall (Stuff): Less pay for top councillors as Auckland mayor Wayne Brown ‘spreads jam further’
Steven Walton (Stuff): $75,000 by-election sparked by community board member’s resignation
Emily Ireland (Local Democracy Reporting): Wairarapa leaders weigh in on lowering voting age
Caley Callahan (Newshub): Gore officially home to youngest-ever New Zealand mayor after recount application thrown out
RNZ: Gore mayoralty: Tracy Hicks’ bid for recount turned down

HEALTH
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Revealed: The hospital radiology departments at high risk
Stuff: Advocate ‘gutted’ as Pharmac reviews blanket funding of child cancer medicines
RNZ: Pharmac reviewing child cancer funding after patients voice concerns of inconsistencies
RNZ: Covid-19: ‘Variant soup’ set to drive up infections – expert
Jane Nixon (1News): Cure Kids CEO weighs in after Starship rejects $570k donation
Jane Nixon (1News): Starship Foundation fronts amid backlash over $570k rejected donation
Rachel Smalley (Today FM): I am baffled by the decision made by The Starship Foundation
John MacDonald (Herald): Starship shows how beggars can be choosers
Matthew Rosenberg (Local Democracy Reporting): Gisborne falling behind in water fluoridation
Simon Mercep (1News): Families dipped into pockets in bid to save Auckland rest home
Darren Bevan (Newshub): Mike King breaks down discussing latest suicide rates, makes tearful plea to improve Aotearoa’s mental health services

ALCOHOL
Tim Chambers, Joseph Boden, Matthew Hobbs, Nicholas Bowden (The Conversation): Why New Zealand must consider restricting alcohol sponsorship of broadcast sports as part of a wider law reform
Herald Editorial: Finding balance on alcohol outlets (paywalled)
Andrew Bevin (Newsroom): Liquor sale law changes may make licensing trusts redundant

ENVIRONMENT, RMA
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): David Parker Rejects Co-Governance
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): RMA reform bill introduced ‘within weeks’, PM says
RNZ: Leading NGOs sign open letter calling for PM to support mining ban on conservation land
RNZ: Helen Clark: Mining boom could harm environment, communities
Olivia Wannan (Stuff): Climate Minister blames court for inaction on tougher climate pledge
Ian Powell: Should the Prime Minister go to Cop27? ‘Blood, blood, blood’
Matt Skinner (Interest): Department of Internal Affairs report puts a spotlight on NZ communities & councils facing both flood risk and financial hardship
Katie Todd (RNZ): ‘The first thing buyers ask us’ – Flood zones pose hazards for insuring homeowners
Kevin Trenberth (Newsroom): Climate change reparations – who pays?
Oliver Lewis (BusinessDesk): New Zealand gas production about to ‘fall off a cliff’ (paywalled)
Kerry Harvey (Stuff): Documentary series Brave New Zealand World looks at how we can safeguard against global disasters

JUSTICE
Seni Iasona (Newshub): ACT Party, Women’s Refuge disappointed $20 million victim support scheme helps more alleged perpetrators than victims
Frankie Vaughan (Stuff): Being 10 shouldn’t mean being old enough for criminal responsibility
Chris Lynch: What will stop the violent crime wave committed by Children?
Soumya Bhamidipati (RNZ): Bailiffs to wear body cameras in health and safety move
Stuff: European decision boosts case of NZ resident fighting extradition to China

BUY NOW, PAY LATER DEBT
Rob Stock (Stuff): Government to regulate ‘buy now, pay later’ loans by end of year
Gareth Vaughan (Interest): Buy now pay later transactions to be treated as consumer credit contracts as government moves to regulate
Adam Pearse (Herald): Harmful ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ debt traps targeted in new Government checks
Logan Church (1News): New rules on the way for buy now pay later schemes – Govt
Stewart Sowman-Lund (Spinoff): Farewell to the unlimited freedom of buy now, pay later schemes

FARMING
Conor Knell (Stuff): ‘Back farmers like we back All Blacks’: Luxon lends ear to rural frustrations
RNZ: Groundswell aims to distance itself from Voices for Freedom
Gerhard Uys (Stuff): $12,000 fine won’t put Groundswell farmers off agriculture census boycott

FOREIGN AFFAIRS, TRADE
Thomas Manch (Stuff): New Zealand to reopen diplomatic post in junta-ruled Myanmar
Sam Sachdeva and Emanuel Stoakes (Newsroom): ANZ faces further pressure over Myanmar ties
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Latin America trade deal: NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hints at progress
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): UK-NZ trade deal battles on through British turmoil
James Halpin (Stuff): Case against woman raising funds for Russian army could hinge on bank details – expert

TRANSPORT
Bernard Orsman (Herald): Auckland Transport spends $33m to reduce speed limits (paywalled)
RNZ: Cartel behaviour warning for eight freight forwarding companies

EDUCATION
Anna Whyte (Stuff): Critics say Government’s promises to school-leavers fall flat
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Principals expect pandemic’s disruption to learning will take years to make up for
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Test results indicate pandemic set back children’s education by months

CALLAGHAN, INDIGO, MANAAKI
Damien Venuto (Herald): The Front Page: The ‘murky’ controversy embroiling Callaghan Innovation and Manaaki
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Callaghan: no idea about conflicts in We Are Indigo investigation
Peter Griffin (BusinessDesk): What to learn from the We Are Indigo-Callaghan mess (paywalled)

OTHER
Phil Pennington (RNZ): ‘Strong demand’ for identity verification tool despite ministries’ lack of interest
Lucy Thomson (Newshub): Guy Fawkes weekend sparks debate over whether Government should ban sale of fireworks
Lachy Paterson (Newsroom): November 5 fireworks for Parihaka not Westminster
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Marathon visa waits despite dedicated immigration team
Jody O’Callaghan (Stuff): Māori have the solutions to Aotearoa’s ‘dark past’

Political Roundup: No confidence in dire local govt elections

The “No Confidence” vote in local body elections could be as high as 60 per cent by the end of this week. That’s essentially what it is when only 40 per cent of the public choose to vote, which is what is happening at the moment. In fact, voter turnout is trending lower, meaning New Zealand could be headed for a record low voter turnout (and hence a record no confidence vote in politicians).

The reality is clear: the vast majority of the public are not inspired by what’s on offer from candidates across the country and voters aren’t convinced that voting in local elections really matters.

Voter turnout was supposed to increase in 2022

This year’s extremely low voter turnout is occurring despite circumstances that should be driving increased public involvement. Firstly, there are a large number of very competitive mayoral elections taking place – in which the likely outcome is far from decided. In Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Invercargill, for instance, it’s not clear who will win, and a number of new mayors are likely to be elected. This situation normally drives up turnout.

In addition, there are a number of factors that many commentators and authorities believed would drive up participation:

• The new Māori wards in many elections were supposed to provide for better representation of an historically under-represented demographic
• There is increased media coverage of local elections and, in particular, a plethora of voices explaining the need for people to vote
• The Three Waters reforms have provided a contentious public issue for voters to vote for or against as candidates take a pro or anti Three Waters stance
• A much more demographically diverse range of candidates – women, Māori, young people, and so forth – standing was said to help boost turnout amongst sections of the public put off by so-called “pale, stale, and male” incumbents
• Local government authorities have produced huge publicity and advertising campaigns, normally incorporating te reo Māori and an emphasis on diversity, to get people enthused about democracy.

None of these factors appear to have had a significant impact in lifting voting so far. Perhaps some of these dynamics have actually had a counterintuitively negative impact.

Could it be that the low voter turnout reflects contentment?

Of course, there are plenty of explanations for the public choosing not to vote. Some politicians and commentators have been attempting to put a more positive spin on the declining voter turnout. Much of this looks like wishful thinking. They say the declining voter turnout simply reflects public satisfaction with the politicians and their local authorities. Voters are content to just let the politicians continue doing their good work without the scrutiny and evaluation of voting.

But there is absolutely no evidence to support the view that the low voter turnout reflects contentment. In fact, there is strong evidence throughout the country that the public’s unhappiness with councils has reached an all-time high.

Surveys carried out by local authorities show that dissatisfaction with individual councils is very strong this year. For example, in Wellington, when the public were asked this year about satisfaction with council decision-making, the number of those who are “satisfied” dropped to a new low of only 12 per cent, while those who said they are “dissatisfied” jumped to 52 per cent. Similarly, those who believe that the Council makes decisions that are in best interests of the city has plummeted from 50 per cent to just 17 per cent this year.

It seems that throughout the country there is a similar level of anger and disenchantment with local politicians which should dispel any rosy idea that lower voter turnout is in some way positive.

Those pushing the “contentment theory” of low voter turnout also have to grapple with the fact that non-voters are disproportionately made up of the poor and marginalised of society. Evidence shows it’s the wealthier demographics that vote in much larger numbers than others.

For example, suburb comparisons in the 2019 Rotorua Lakes Council elections showed that the higher turnouts were from residents from wealthier housing locations, and vice versa.

Overall in Rotorua the turnout was 45 per cent, but for the affluent suburbs the turnout rates were much higher, and for the lower socio-economic areas the voting rates were about a third of this.

For example, in Rotorua’s flash suburb of Springfield, 59 per cent voted, in leafy Lynmore it was 57 per cent, and wealthy Kaharoa had a turnout rate of 56 per cent.

However, the poorer suburbs had abysmal turnout rates. In disadvantaged Western Heights it was only 27 per cent, and in the poorest area of Fordlands voter turnout was an incredible 18 per cent.

This pattern was borne out by a 2015 Auckland Council study that showed significant variation in voter turnout according to socioeconomic status.

It goes to show just how much participation in elections is a function of socio-economics. And so, a discussion of voter turnout must involve an awareness that elections in New Zealand are primarily determined by wealth.

It seems that local government isn’t working for most people. And this is especially the case for the poor. Increasingly there is a feeling that local government – much like central government – has become dysfunctional and captured by vested interests and elites.

All around the world voter turnout has generally been on the decline over the last few decades, driven by waning trust in authorities and politics. And this is evident in the rise of populist nationalism and the increased peddling of conspiracy theories.

A 17 per cent turnout in amongst poorer communities speaks to something rotten in our democratic processes. Fixing this won’t involve superficial and mechanical changes to voting systems or just more public education. A much bigger examination of the failings of our political system is necessary, and this needs to include looking at wider societal problems.

Without big change, our elections will decline further in legitimacy. As today’s New Zealand Herald points out, the Prime Minister is being “asked this week to speculate on how low the turnout threshold should be for local elections to be considered valid”. She won’t answer this. But someone is going to have to engage very quickly.

What is clear is that blaming voters for being uninspired by the candidates and the system of local government is not the answer. The public – and especially poorer New Zealanders – will just keep essentially voting “No confidence” in larger and larger numbers until it’s impossible for this message to be ignored or misunderstood.

Further reading on Local Government Elections

Bernard Orsman (Herald): Local body elections: Christchurch leads voting turnout among the big cities; Wellington last
Herald Editorial: Who’s to blame when local elections fail to excite voters? (paywalled)
Brad Olsen (Infometrics): Chart of the month: Time for some local democracy
Adam Burns (RNZ): Local body elections: Late voters urged to cast special votes
Bernard Orsman (Herald): Local body elections: Christchurch leads voting turnout among the big cities; Wellington last
Felix Desmarais (Local Democracy Reporting): Rotorua voter turnout steady but voters urged to ‘make their vote count’
The Facts: Only 21% of votes returned with 5 days left + exclusive new polling
Sinead Gill (Stuff): Lorde ‘told off’ after breaking electoral rule
David Farrar: The Labour loyalty pledge
Michael Sergel (Herald): Five issues dividing Auckland election candidates
1News: Ardern throws support behind Collins’ Auckland mayoralty campaign
Tim Murphy (Newsroom): Brown momentum vs Collins machine
No Right Turn: The “endorsement” you give when you want someone to lose
Dita De Boni (NBR): Wayne Brown’s good points flushed away by urinal comments (paywalled)
Katie Townshend (Stuff): Five things you may not realise your local council does
Stewart Sowman-Lund (Spinoff): Race briefing: Can the country’s youngest mayor make it two for two?

Other items of interest and importance today

JAMI-LEE ROSS CLEARED OF FRAUD CHARGES
Sam Hurley (Herald): Labour and National donations trial: Guilty and not guilty verdicts over political money
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Jami-Lee Ross not guilty in political donations case, businessmen found guilty
Tim Murphy (Newsroom): Ex MP Jami-Lee Ross cleared of fraud charges

GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT
George Block (Herald): Former Cabinet minister Kris Faafoi to head new lobbying and PR firm (paywalled)
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Political donations case: Jami-Lee Ross, businessmen set to hear verdict
Stuff: Ex-minister Kris Faafoi is now a lobbyist and PR guy
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): New Roy Morgan Poll – Labour Crash
Annabel Ahuriri-Driscoll (The Conversation): When is being Māori not enough? Why Māori politics are always personal
Tova O’Brien (Today FM): I can’t decide whether four year political terms are really what NZ needs
Duncan Garner (NBR): National has to offer tax cuts – but to who, how and when? (paywalled)
Waatea News: Davis apologises but ACT policy still racist
Matthew Hooton: Act’s terrible dilemma (paywalled)

OFFICIAL INFORMATION ACT
Gavin Ellis: Government media teams that breach the law
Elspeth McLean (ODT): Ombudsman ambitions killed off by lack of respect for OIA

ECONOMY, EMPLOYMENT AND INEQUALITY
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Covid bloodbath expected as Government opens books today
Richard Harman: Another shot into Labour’s re-election chances (paywalled)
RNZ: Tax rates a factor for attracting candidates for top jobs, Luxon says
Brooke van Velden (Herald): What Liz Truss-led economic turmoil in UK can teach NZ (paywalled)
Robert MacCulloch: National and Labour economic policy summed up in a few lines
Tim Hunter (NBR): Council calls in PwC to review Eke Panuku deals (paywalled)

HOUSING
Sam Olley (RNZ): Emergency housing: Government warned of human rights risks years ago, documents reveal
David Farrar: A 421 day waiting list for a state house for the most needy
Dileepa Fonseka (Stuff): Why I’d be happy to see more ghost homes
RNZ: Housing market still firmly in retreat – CoreLogic
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Timing the market: Is now the best time to buy a house or should you wait for prices to drop further? An expert weighs in
Anne Gibson (Herald): ‘One of worst times for NZ house values’: New CoreLogic data shows falls continue

HEALTH
Alexa Cook (Newshub): Government increases GP funding, but sector worries it won’t fix crippling doctor shortage
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Andrew Little announces GP pay bump and push to increase doctor numbers

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
David Fisher (Herald): New book on Five Eyes spying club explains NZ’s role in world’s largest intelligence network (paywalled)
Thomas Manch (Stuff): Solomon Islands foreign minister says his country will not ‘choose sides’
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Solomon Islands unhappy with indirect China references in draft agreement with Washington, insists it would not ‘choose sides’
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Nanaia Mahuta, Solomon Islands’ minister hold talks in ‘Rainbow Room’, despite island nation’s anti-same sex policies

MEDIA
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): No one screams like media dependent on NZ on Air money
Brigitte Morten (NBR): Kiwis’ trust in institutions is being tested (paywalled)
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): Today FM vs ZB – has the experiment worked?
ODT Editorial: TVNZ plumbs the depths

OTHER
David Bromell (Newsroom): How to argue in a free and open society
Thomas Cranmer: Three Waters and the vexed question of ownership
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): Human Rights Commission tries to stuff online hate Genie back into bottle while Jacinda threatens Big Sister
Katarina Williams and Ripu Bhatia (Stuff): Teachers want ‘racist, discriminatory’ streaming system to be abolished in schools from 2030

Political Roundup: Why New Zealand’s shift to a republic will be thwarted

The death of Queen Elizabeth and the ascension to the throne of King Charles has reignited the debate on whether New Zealand should become a republic. But despite strong arguments in favour of shifting to a republic, such a move is unlikely to occur anytime soon.

What will stop the republican movement gaining ground and winning over a majority of New Zealanders to ditch the monarchy? The answer is Treaty politics.

The shift to a republic cannot be separated from this now-dominant aspect of New Zealand politics. To argue for a shift to a republic in 2022 is to enter into a debate about the role of the Treaty of Waitangi and the Māori language version, Te Tiriti O Waitangi in our constitutional framework. These are very fraught debates, which have the potential to divide a nation.

A Republic is possible

Technically, a shift to a republic could be quite straightforward in terms of the Treaty. After all the British Crown no longer actually has Treaty responsibilities – those are now with the New Zealand Government. A move to a republic could, with a simple change of law, shift the formal Treaty partnership to the new head of state.

As Geoffrey Palmer said this week, “The fact that you get a new head of state wouldn’t affect at all the obligations in relation to the treaty… I know some people think it would, but it wouldn’t.”

There has long been a myth that the Treaty of Waitangi would be diminished by the demise of the monarchy in this country. Countless scholars show that this concern is not warranted. And surveys show that Māori are keener on becoming a republic than others.

New constitutional debates will be part of republicanism

However, constitutional debates have evolved significantly in this country, and now centre on the Treaty and indigenous rights. Witness recent governments’ incorporation of the Treaty into governing arrangements. The whole design of the Three Waters reform programme is centrally based on the role of iwi, for example.

The concept of co-governance has become an innovation that politicians are seeking to insert into more institutions. And many other proposals in the Labour Government’s He Puapua document will at some stage need to be discussed in terms of constitutional changes.

So any debate about shifting to a republic will automatically involve important consideration of how the Treaty and indigenous rights will be recognised and elevated in a new constitution. Māori aspirations will therefore reshape the republican movement – because in 2022 and onwards you can no longer deal with constitutional reform such as republicanism without a very serious debate about radical constitutional change involving tangata whenua.

Don McKinnon was reported this week as believing that “Māori would not agree to a republic without seeking concessions from the Government.” He told journalist Richard Harman, “Māori signed the treaty with the British Crown, and I would think there’d be a significant number of Māori who say, well, we’re not prepared to give up being a realm until we see far more equality within New Zealand today.” Similarly, law professor Andrew Geddis is quoted today saying a shift to a republic would require some sort of “reconceptualisation of Te Tiriti”.

The big republican debate will therefore be about placing the Treaty at the centre of the new constitution. And this could involve significant changes to the whole political system, including Parliament.

As political commentator and former MP Liz Gordon writes this week, “Māori will, if the matter arises, be asking for significantly more say in the governance of the nation. The Treaty of Waitangi, itself a kind of balance of powers, will need to be rewritten to provide shared kawanatanga and a new model of tino rangatiratanga.” And she is optimistic that this can be achieved, especially if such a model arises from Te Ao Māori itself: “if Māori can come together and propose a form of leadership that shares esteem and powers and takes us forward, such proposals would be unstoppable.”

For some in the republican movement these discussions about the role of the Treaty and Māori will be seen as a barrier to change, as debates that might once have simply been about whether New Zealand deserves to have a head of state determined by birth in aristocratic family in a far-off country, will instead be about more charged ethnicity and race issues.

Republicanism as a culture war

In this new environment, it might prove more difficult to win over support for a republic. While many New Zealanders, both Māori and pakeha, will be keen on ditching King Charles as our head of state, they might wince at the proposals for who replaces him, and what comes with that republicanism.

Although the current leaders of the Labour and National parties might profess to be republicans, they will run a mile from being associated with culture wars. Both Jacinda Ardern and Christopher Luxon will be keen to distances themselves from the fallout from what could be an ugly and divisive debate on New Zealand’s constitutional future. This isn’t simply about being cowardly and unwilling to front something they believe in, it’s more profound than that – not wanting to see the country descend into acrimonious debate with the potential to divide even their own parties and supporters.

When it comes down to it, there’s probably only a small proportion of New Zealand society who are fervent monarchists or republicans. People generally don’t feel that strongly about who our head of state is. In fact, a recent survey showed that only 18% of the public even know who occupies this position. But a much larger proportion of society cares about issues of racial injustice and radical reforms. It’s no surprise that polls show a large majority of New Zealanders don’t support the Government’s Three Waters reforms – probably largely due to the perception that they are a race-based reform giving large elements of control to unelected iwi.

Should the republican movement pursue “minimalist republicanism” or “Treaty republicanism”?

If New Zealand moves to a republic, there are many elements of a new constitution that might be easily agreed upon. The new head of state might be given a title such as Rangatira or Ariki.

But the constitutional reforms that could go along with the transition might be more radical. Therefore, the New Zealand Republican Movement has something of a dilemma in how it pursues change.

Does it adopt a “minimalist republican” reform movement, in which basic change is advocated – simply making the current office of Governor General the new head of state, with a reformed Parliamentary appointment process? Or does it look to more widespread constitutional reform, especially that which seeks to fulfill the aspirations of those demanding a more Treaty-based political system.

The former strategy might be more successful in terms of achieving a republic. The latter is more in touch with the Zeitgeist and will help get groups such as iwi leaders, Te Pati Māori and the Greens on side. But this option also threatens to open a real can of worms.

The republican debates we had in the 1980s and 1990s are long over. Back then it was about “minimalist republicanism” – just getting rid of the monarchy. It’s now about “Treaty-based republicanism”.

Most commentators haven’t caught up with this new reality. Much of the constitutional debate over the last few days has been about whether our new head of state would be a president, elected or appointed by Parliament, and how to avoid political capture of the new role.

These are all good discussions to have. But in the end, they miss the bigger questions – which will be around the Treaty, and what role a new republic would have for Māori, and how we embody a multi-ethnic society in constitutional arrangements.

There has been a sense in which New Zealand has been sleepwalking towards a republic, or that we are already a “de facto republic”. Many feel that a final shift to make a republic official is just a matter of launching a new campaign, referendum, or piece of legislation. But the recent Māori political and constitutional renaissance changes all of that. Republicans will have to grapple with demands for more than just a change of a law to replace the King with the Governor General.

For a good illustration of this change, it’s worth noting that in 2017 Te Pati Māori strongly opposed New Zealand becoming a republic but, in 2022, they are leading the charge. This year they have a new policy: “Te Pāti Māori are calling to remove the British royal family as head of state, and move Aotearoa to a Te Tiriti o Waitangi based nation.” And as part of this, they want bigger republican changes, including a Māori Parliament which would operate alongside the present one.

Will this version of republicanism be a goer? Probably not for quite a while yet.

Further reading on the monarchy

Tess McClure (Guardian): Apathy in New Zealand – but little desire for change – as King Charles’s reign begins
Michael Neilson (Herald): Queen’s death raises questions over New Zealand’s constitutional future
Henry Cooke (Guardian): Is this when New Zealand breaks up with the monarchy? Don’t count on it
Michael Neilson (Herald): Queen Elizabeth II death: New Zealand MPs give views on republic question
Zarina Hewlett (Today FM): Christopher Luxon rules out Republic referendum in first term if he became PM
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Queen Elizabeth death: Jacinda Ardern, Christopher Luxon aren’t interested in New Zealand republic debate yet
Glenn McConnell (Stuff): Republicanism not on Jacinda Ardern’s agenda – even if it’s inevitable
Andrea Vance (Stuff): How King Charles will capitalise on a tide of sympathy following the Queen’s death
Richard Prebble: Our constitutional monarchy works well
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): The unpublished blueprint to bring home NZ’s head of state
Peter Dunne: Could Charles III push New Zealand to become a republic?
Amelia Wade (Newshub): Queen Elizabeth’s death: Marama Davidson uses tribute to speak of monarchy’s colonialist legacy
Gideon Porter (Waatea News): Republicanism a mirage says Piripi
Tova O’Brien (Today FM): Conversation about republicanism could be most divisive debate in our history
Gordon Campbell: On being co-dependent on the royals
Kirsty Wynn (Herald): Royal visit to NZ on cards as King Charles III, Camilla, Prince William, Princess Catherine and the kids look to tour Australia
Brigitte Morten (NBR): Keep calm, mourn, carry on (paywalled)
Rachel Smalley (Today FM): With grief comes trauma and the potential for healing too
Mike Hosking (Newstalk): There’s no need for the republic debate
Joe Bennett (Stuff): Time to sever the tie to these soap opera characters?

Other items of interest and importance today

GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT
Audrey Young (Herald): Who’s the power broker in Labour’s Māori caucus? (paywalled)
Max Rashbrooke Lisa Marriott (Stuff): Two decades of donation scandals – so where are the prosecutions?
Craig Renney (Stuff): We may have more public servants, but NZ’s public sector isn’t bloated
James Perry (Māori TV): Electoral system review begins – public asked for their views
Jem Traylen (BusinessDesk): Green party says it has nothing to hide over new rules for candidates (paywalled)
Victoria Young (BusinessDesk): Deloitte makes healthcare play (paywalled)

HOUSING
Talia Parker (Herald): Tauranga housing report warns of people living in cars, garages amid shortage
RNZ: Central government will ‘probably’ intervene in Christchurch housing density row, mayor says
Tina Law and Liz McDonald (Stuff): Christchurch seeks bespoke plan after ‘no’ vote on housing density
John MacDonald (Herald): Thumbs up for Christchurch flipping the bird at the Government
Tom Hunt (Stuff): Experts warn of New Zealand’s next construction saga amid building boom
Nona Pelletier (RNZ): Housing market slump turnaround unlikely before mid-2023
Anne Gibson (Herald): House prices dropping $322 a day: Real Estate Institute figures out for August
Anne Gibson (Herald): How economists reacted to house prices falling $322 a day (paywalled)
Stephen Minto (Daily Blog): 6 steps to fix the Labour/Green driven affordable housing crisis

ECONOMY, EMPLOYMENT AND INEQUALITY
Alice Snedden (Spinoff): One easy step to close the wealth gap entirely
Melanie Carroll (Stuff): Locked out Kawerau workers accept higher Essity pay offer with ‘relief’
Susan Edmunds (Stuff): How much higher could food prices in NZ go?
Brooke van Velden (Herald): NZ’s worker shortage is dire – govt and immigration need to move fast

COVID
Luke Malpass (Stuff): It isn’t easy being Green: Most MPs drop masks in Parliament as rule relax
Herald: Editorial – Taking back control as Covid eases (paywalled)
John MacDonald (Herald): The vax rules are going, so should the punishments

TE REO MĀORI
Carl Mika (The Conversation): Tokenism and te reo Māori: why some things just shouldn’t be translated
Melanie Carroll (Stuff): How much reo Māori do people need to do business in NZ?
Dr Awanui Te Huia (Newsroom): Challenges ahead for young speakers of te reo

OTHER
Akula Sharma (Herald): Iwi calls for true founding day recognition in Tamaki Makaurau
Dileepa Fonseka (Stuff): The $15b infrastructure project nobody really wants
Anthony Doesburg (Newsroom): Lee Vandervis: Dunner stunner in waiting
James Halpin (Stuff): Anti-government group tried to get Brian Tamaki to ‘feral’ Parliament protest
Nicholas Boyack (Stuff): Well known union movement giant Ken Douglas dies
Phil Pennington (RNZ): Police must change practices around photo taking – Deputy Privacy Commissioner
Kiri Gillespie (Herald): Better bus network needed for congestion charging to work (paywalled)
Gordon Campbell: On a fun summer, with covid anxiety
Robert McCulloch: Why I’m blogging less: government spin & propaganda to “neutralize” it have left me exasperated

Political Roundup: Public submissions on political donation reform released

Is it ironic that the Government is reforming rules around secret political donations in a very secretive way? There has been overwhelming public demand for more openness about how politicians raise their money, but the Government and officials have been less than transparent and very restrictive over the whole submission process.

The public had a very limited opportunity to give feedback on the Government’s first proposals for political donation reform. The Ministry of Justice called for submissions over the Christmas New Year period, allowing an extremely short timeframe, with submissions closing on January 25. Critics might be forgiven for being cynical about how much public input the Government really wanted.

Further alarm bells have been ringing for those concerned about open government, due to the fact that the Ministry of Justice has been attempting to prevent the public submissions from being released to the public. The Ministry wanted to keep these for Cabinet ministers eyes only.

Battles to obtain public information

As an academic researcher of political finance I have been battling with the Ministry over many months to be provided with copies of the submissions. I first requested the files in early April, but have had various fobbing off communications from the Ministry and attempts to decline my Official Information Act request. One request was ignored because I had failed to cite the “Official Information Act” in my communications (but, no this isn’t a good enough reason).

After attempts to decline my request, and a complaint to the Ombudsman, I finally received the information this month.

Unfortunately some key submissions have been withheld, specifically submissions from three political parties. The Ministry of Justice’s general manager of civil and constitutional policy, Kathy Brightwell, informed me that “The political parties which the ministry received submissions from, provided these on a confidential basis. These parties may not have provided submissions if they knew they were going to be identified, so it would be within the public interest to withhold their submissions, as release of this would likely prejudice the supply of similar information”.

Journalist Andrea Vance has also been declined the public submissions, and yesterday she reported that “The Ministry of Justice struck a deal with political parties to keep secret their submissions on donation law reform.” She also reports the reaction of National’s Justice spokesperson Paul Goldsmith, who said it was “deeply shocking and ironic” that transparency reforms were being blighted by officials keeping submissions secret.

It is unclear which three political parties have asked the Ministry of Justice to keep their submissions secret. National has already publicly released their submission. And according to Andrea Vance, the Greens and Act are happy to publicly release their submissions. She also says that Labour didn’t provide a formal written submission – instead the party’s general secretary gave an oral representation to the Ministry, and it appears the records of that meeting are being withheld.

Until political parties’ consultations and submissions are released, it will continue to raise questions about the Government’s commitment to improve political transparency.

What the public submissions say

The Ministry of Justice received 276 submissions from the public about the Government’s proposed changes to political donation rules. It’s very clear that most submitters felt reform is urgently needed and the proposed reforms do not go far enough.

Below are some of the key themes of the submissions:

1) Almost unanimous support for lowering the threshold for disclosure. Currently, only donations over $15,000 have to be publicly declared. While there is strong support for the proposal to lower this to $1500, many advocate for an even lower threshold, with a significant number arguing for the limit to be $100 or $200.

2) The majority of submissions support an absolute cap on how much an individual can donate to a political party each year. Many suggest that the $1500 disclosure limit proposed by the Government should actually be the cap. Greenpeace recommended a $10,000 per year cap (The Green Party has introduced legislation to cap donations at $30,000).

3) Many submitters explicitly mentioned concern over corporate donations. A significant number advocated that only individuals should be able to donate – i.e. businesses, trusts, unions shouldn’t be allowed to donate to political parties.

4) There was strong support for increasing frequency of reporting. The submissions agree that the current annual reporting of donations is insufficient, with quarterly or monthly reports recommended, especially during election years and campaign periods.

5) Opposition to the Government’s proposal to remove the ten day disclosure requirement for donations greater than $30,000 was almost unanimous, with most viewing that such a significant sum should be required to be immediately disclosed, even if frequency for smaller donations is increased.

6) There was very strong support for more detailed public disclosures of non-cash donations. A number mentioned the use of fundraising auctions, particularly by the Labour Party, as needing much tighter scrutiny and regulation.

7) Most submissions called for the public disclosure of many more donations, even those under $1500 (which the Government is proposing should be exempt from disclosure). There is strong support for the publishing of the volume and total of donations that political parties receive, regardless of the threshold level.

8) There is very clear support for increased transparency and audits of party finances.

9) Submitters support requiring political candidates to disclose loans, with some calling for a complete ban on loans, a practice at the centre of the current trial related to the NZ First Foundation.

10) In terms of anonymous donations, most submitters thought that there should be either a complete ban or they should be much more restricted – typically a $100-$200 limit per year.  There was some concern about the administrative burden of collecting information for very small donations, but a number made the point that modern technology and finance tools have made tracking payments and donors much easier, and that many countries successfully operate much more detailed and frequent disclosure regimes.

There was some very limited opposition for a complete ban on anonymous donations, notably from the Law Society who argued that some anonymity for donations under $1500 is justified. However, the Chartered Accountants association supported a ban, noting how problematic anonymous funding can be, saying that “while political parties are not subject to the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009, there is a reasonable public expectation that political parties have an important role in deterring potential money laundering activities.”

11) A significant number of submissions recognised that greater restrictions and regulation of political donations would lead to a severe reduction in income for political parties, and that this might therefore increase the need for greater state funding of parties.

In general, the submissions are a mixed bag, with varying quality of analysis. That is the nature of public submissions. It can’t be assumed that the submitters are in any way an accurate representation of the public. Nonetheless, it was apparent that there were very few “cut and paste” submissions, which often occurs when some organisations ask their supporters to make submissions repeating a party line. Given that, the near unanimity of views that the proposals needed to go further was striking.

On the other hand, unfortunately, there were also very few submissions from civil society organisations – Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand, the National Māori Authority, Greenpeace, Transparency International New Zealand, the Gama Foundation and the New Zealand Values Alliance. This suggests a need for the Government to find ways to expand their public consultation on this crucial area of democracy.

If you want to see the file of public submissions, this is now available on my Democracy Project website – see: Ministry of Justice OIA release of information on political donations.

Further reading on political donations

Andrea Vance (Stuff): Political party views on donations shake-up kept secret in deal with Ministry of Justice
No Right Turn: A conspiracy against the public
Sam Hurley (Herald): NZ First Foundation case: High Court permanently suppresses identities of accused pair
RNZ: NZ First Foundation case: Donation handlers win permanent name suppression

Other items of interest and importance today

COST OF LIVING AND INFLATION
Daniel Smith (Stuff): Over 40% of workers struggling to meet basic needs, research shows
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Inflation helps firms posting super profits in 2022, but MPs cool on windfall tax
Eric Crampton (Newsroom): Extra half billion dollars in fuel cuts could have gone to critical health shortages
Liam Dann (Herald): Is a housing crash the secret weapon in war on inflation? (paywalled)
Susan St John (Daily Blog): Here is what must happen in child poverty before the end of this year
Steven Cowan: The Winter of discontent
Brent Edwards (NBR): Inflation will have an impact on next year’s election (paywalled)
John McDermott (NBR): The uneven effect when prices rise (paywalled)
David Hargreaves (Interest): It’s crunch time in the inflation battle
Jenée Tibshraeny (Herald): Will higher-than-expected inflation send mortgage rates further north? (paywalled)
Tim Dower (Newstalk): Having our youth living in poverty makes no sense at all
Daniel Smith (Stuff): Three industries hit hardest by inflation
Rodney Dickens (Interest): Calls for more OCR hikes are seriously misplaced
Damien Venuto (Herald): How much longer will the inflation pain last?
Kurt Bayer (Herald): Construction site raids: Builders resort to sleeping on-site to deter brazen thieves (paywalled)
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Why I’m tired of the RBNZ blame game (paywalled)
Clint Smith (Stuff): Who should bear the cost of tackling inflation?
Brianna Mcilraith (Stuff): Petrol prices drop across NZ as Government questions fuel companies
RNZ: Weekly food spend up by 5 percent on last year, survey finds
Seni Iasona (Newshub): Employee Sentiment Index finds 41 percent of Kiwi workers are struggling to meet basic living costs

THREE WATERS AND CO-GOVERNANCE
Richard Harman: Why the Government needs Three Waters (paywalled)
Chris Trotter (BFD): We are all Māori – with a small ‘M’
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): The Danish solution: How repudiating co-governance could be the saving of Labour
Tim Dower (Newstalk): Our water needs attention, but Three Waters is not the way to do it
Richard Prebble (Herald): Three Waters is an attack on democracy (paywalled)
Irra Lee (1News): Three Waters debates need to be based on fact – Ardern
Claire Trevett (Herald): Three Waters: Government to give councils $44m to help set up Three Waters reforms
Bill Cashmore (Herald): Auckland Council’s position on the Three Waters reform has been consistent since announced (paywalled)
Stephen Ward (Stuff): Hamilton councillors unite to say ‘no’ to Three Waters bill – but political ripples remain
RNZ: Lower South Island mayors stake jobs on three waters approach
Imogen Wells (Newshub): Three Waters dominates at Local Government NZ conference, but Jacinda Ardern dogged by mask controversy
Georgina Campbell (Herald): Wellington fluoride failure a scandal in a league of its own (paywalled)

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND ELECTIONS
David Farrar: LGNZ bans dissenting voices from its annual conference
Janine Rankin and Conor Knell (Stuff): ‘It’s tough time to be a public official’ – Prime Minister at LGNZ conference
Giles Dexter (RNZ): ‘The toughest term’: Mayors grapple with pace and scale of reforms
Roman Travers (Newstalk): How do we encourage people to vote in local body elections?
Te Aniwa Hurihanganui (1News): All newly elected Māori councillors to get mentor
Ashleigh McCaull (RNZ): Māori councillors say they face racism in role: ‘Well your people should be alright, they’ve raised the benefit’
RNZ: Councillors experiencing racism, discrimination on the job – survey
Mike Hosking (Herald): Christchurch the Super City – think big, dream big and build it big (paywalled)
Anna Fifield (Stuff): LGWM requires carrots and sticks
Jonathan Milne (Newsroom): Wanted for the All Blacks, but not as NZ citizen – why Inoke Afeaki is running for election
David Williams (Newsroom): Mayoral candidate: I should have disclosed conflict
Georgina Campbell (Herald): Wellington’s mayor playing high-stakes election game (paywalled)
Georgina Campbell (Herald): Wellington ‘out of step’ with only one special voting booth
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Candidates clash as Auckland mayoral race heats up

NATIONAL PARTY
Rebecca Stevenson (Interest): Christopher Luxon is right. NZ business is soft
Ben Thomas (Stuff): Plumbing the depths: the decline and fall of an Opposition
Thomas Coughlan (Herald): Poll: National support with women increases, overtaking Labour, despite abortion controversy
Andrea Vance (The Spinoff): ‘They clashed like f*ckery’: The final straw for Todd Muller
Andrea Vance (Stuff): The inside story of Todd Muller’s tipping point, as told in the book Blue Blood
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Nicola Willis says changing abortion laws would be ‘dealbreaker’, trusts Christopher Luxon’s assurances National won’t
RNZ: National Party conference to go ahead in person despite rising Covid cases

PARLIAMENT, GOVERNMENT AND ELECTIONS
Tova O’Brien (Today FM): It seems the Government is as all over the shop as the rest of us
Peter Dunne: Time for MPs to think for themselves
1News: Shaw: Leadership questions not behind moving Greens AGM online
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): Right or Left? Two scenarios for political violence in NZ 2023 election
Sam Olley (RNZ): Environmentalists, mana whenua criticise PM’s ‘appalling’ gift to US president
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (Herald): NZ’s future leaders ready to be heard right now
Olivia Shivas (Stuff): $1m Election Access Fund gets mixed response from disabled people
Thomas Manch (Stuff): Youth MPs call on Parliament to lower the voting age
Herald: Online survey to see if you want to be on the Māori Electoral Roll or the General Roll
Deena Coster (Stuff): Democracy NZ not just a ‘one-issue party’ – leader

IMMIGRATION CHANGES
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Greens say new investor visa slap in face for nurses, lets super wealthy buy residency while they jump through hoops
Jenée Tibshraeny (Herald): Foreign investors will need to work harder to get NZ residency
Matthew Scott (Newsroom): Partner work visas on the chopping block
Amelia Wade (Newshub): Concern Government’s investor visa change could lead New Zealand to losing billions

HEALTH
Ian Powell: What happens when a health minister loses workforce trust and confidence
Damien Venuto (Herald): What could alleviate massive strain on the health sector?
Janine Rankin (Stuff): Covid-19 exposes deep trouble in primary healthcare
Zarina Hewlett (Today FM): NZNO not “impressed” Andrew Little dismissed their credibility

HOUSING
Andrea Vance (Stuff): ‘Get rich quick scheme’ – $16m paid to an Auckland motel for emergency accommodation
RNZ: New home building costs rising at record 7.7% annual rate
1News: KiwiBuild a ‘totally failed policy’ – Nicola Willis
Katie Bradford (1News): Govt relaxes restrictions around troubled KiwiBuild policy
Herald: Kiwibuild: Income and price caps adjusted for Government housing scheme
Louise Ternouth (RNZ): Renters stuck in cold, damp homes as compliance with law lacking – advocates

COVID
Jamie Ensor (Newshub): Jacinda Ardern snapped maskless may ‘indicate that’s okay behaviour’, photo-ops should model good mask-use, experts say
Amelia Wade (Newshub): Michael Baker ‘quite shocked’ at photo of Jacinda Ardern maskless in crowd
Claire Trevett (Herald): The PM and the maskless photo – fair or foul, and have we got too precious? (paywalled)
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): National Deputy leader Nicola Willis defends PM Jacinda Ardern after maskless photo causes furore
1News: ‘Give her a break’: Willis defends PM’s maskless group photo
Zizi Sparks (Herald): Covid-19 mask wearing shouldn’t fall by the wayside (paywalled)
Lloyd Burr (Today FM): Can we ease up on the mask shaming, please?
Herald: Editorial: Sick days hit the workforce as second wave rises (paywalled)
Hannah Martin (Stuff): What we know about the ‘Centaurus’ BA.2.75 variant in New Zealand

EDUCATION
John Gerritsen (RNZ): Think-tank reveals high failure rate in small trial-run of new literacy, numeracy tests
Gabrielle McCulloch (Stuff): Number of students missing from school has almost doubled in past nine months
Sarah Robson (RNZ): The boom and bust of our polytechs

On 1 December 2021 the CCCFA (Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act) entered Aotearoa New Zealand with more stealth than the Omicron BA2 variant. It resulted in unintended consequences that were (and are) entirely predictable.

There are two sets of ‘unintended but predictable consequences’: those consequences that make anxious and desperate people more anxious, more desperate, and more detached from mainstream law-abiding living; and those consequences which aggravate the systemic problems of our system of primitive capitalism.

Anxious People

A starting point for this topic might be the Swedish novel Anxious People (now condensed into a Netflix series, that should appeal to the same people who enjoyed The Detectorists). Set in a small city not-too-far from Stockholm, the story starts with a man committing suicide. The trigger for his suicide turned out to be the rejection of an application for a bank loan. Then, the main antihero of the story also found herself in an incredibly difficult situation, in part because of the Family Court and social assistance bureaucracies, and in part because of petty ‘rules-based’ rejection by the bank, following her attempt to gain a small personal loan. The story was bittersweet, neither tragedy nor comedy; uplifting because of the way that the community of ‘ordinary people’ (people each with their own issues) resolved their personal issue through what might be called ‘genuine community kindness’.

In New Zealand we have many anxious people, brought to critical states of anxiety for a number of different reasons. (In this RNZ story, The Science behind a Broken Heart 21 Mar 2022, the interviewee states that “scientists are figuring out that when we feel lonely, when we feel abandoned, our immune systems change”. This is an important undisproved hypothesis – that escalating anxiety itself may be the equivalent of a pandemic, in terms of physical health – that needs much more discussion and scientific investigation. We remind ourselves that ‘scientific’ truths are not ‘facts’; rather they are undisproved hypotheses, with some of these truths having been subject to more scrutiny than others.)

One of the most important reasons relates to housing: both getting home loans, and negotiating the rental market. Too many twenty-somethings are too anxious, and/or too poor, to leave the parental home. Many people in Aotearoa need to borrow money in order to forestall immediate problems in their lives. The last thing that they need is to have to confront an intrusive lender bureaucracy; a form of officialdom that can be as stressful to face as the government ‘we are here to help’ bureaucracy.

Banks lend to people who can jump certain hurdles. The government’s ‘here to help’ agencies target people who cannot jump similar hurdles. One day an anxious person may visit a government agency, dressing downbeat, and spinning their answers to emphasise their incapacity. On another day, such an anxious person may go to the bank, dress upbeat; and must re-spin their answers to essentially the same questions, to emphasise their capacity. Always there are lengthy forms to complete, so that the assessors can tick – or not tick – their formulaic boxes. The banks tended to be the lesser evil; that is, until 1 December 2021.

Capitalism works well when the income distribution system is working well. Government-targeted welfare is a part of the income distribution system; albeit a charity band-aid to a market system that fails. Primitive capitalism fails because it emphasises private property rights – including labour rights – while rejecting public property rights. And we note that the word ‘targeted’ is a euphemism for ‘allocation by means of intrusive bureaucracy’.

Lending and borrowing – credit and debt – is capitalism’s number one backstop for when the income distribution system fails to maintain its necessary equity and circulation objectives. Borrowing, while indeed a backstop, is actually much more than a backstop. It’s an integral component of any form of capitalism, primitive or developed.

People with less income than they need to meet their reasonable aspirations have just a few options; options which may help them get by in the present (eg as renters instead of home purchasers), or may give them sufficient means to escape from an income trap. These options are: borrowing, gambling, private charity, disreputable self-employment, and overt crime. If we take away the better of these options, that pushes people towards the worse of these.

Despite (or because of) the failings of the income distribution system, the lending/borrowing system in New Zealand was working surprisingly well. It was getting much money into the bank accounts of those who needed it to meet their aspirations, and the aspirations of the many resilient but stressed businesses who sold goods and services to people spending borrowed as well as earned funds.

The CCCFA was an attempt to fix a problem, which, except at the margins, did not exist. Once again from the government, a solution in search of a problem. And where, at the margins, a problem of exploitation did exist, there were better solutions available than deterrence through bureaucracy.

What happens if we make our financial markets under-accessible to ordinary households and small businesses? It means a circulation problem; see below. And it means that ordinary New Zealanders must increasingly look to these: the bank of mum and dad, gambling, private charity, disreputable self-employment, and overt crime.

Gambling gives people a chance of meeting an aspiration; it makes rational sense when they would otherwise have no chance of meeting that aspiration. Private charity includes various forms of individual and community ‘giving’: foodbanks is an obvious one, as is giving money to street beggars. Less obviously, it includes the many and varied forms of charity that parents may provide to their adult children. Related to this last form of charity is the bank of mum and dad, where loans – usually soft-loans – are made between parents and adult children. The bank of mum and dad tends to reinforce existing privileges in the income distribution landscape.

Overt crime here is theft, which includes running businesses that sell illegal goods or services. Disreputable self-employment is either selling marginally legal services – such as prostitution – or working as a ‘contract employee’ for an illegal or a marginally legal business. These activities represent the ‘black’ and ‘grey’ economies.

The key point here is that, as people’s lives become more precarious, and as relatively good options (such as borrowing money) diminish or close, then people get pushed into the much worse options to either maintain a basic living standard, or to meet aspirations of success.

We note that even bankruptcy represents an important part of the better options. Life for the economically insecure does involve hopeful borrowing that in some cases leads to bankruptcy. In practice, undertaking debt with a risk of bankruptcy is a far better option – for individuals, businesses, and society in general – than is resort to the criminal underworld. One doesn’t have to read or watch too many Dickensian stories to appreciate the need for an alternative to crime and criminalised debt. Indeed, the modern concept of bankruptcy – the decriminalisation of debt default – was one of the most important and socially progressive developments of the Victorian era.

Policies which make personal debt harder to access represent a reversal of post-Dickensian social progress.

Circulation of Money and Wage Goods

The other, and in some ways even more important problem with the bureaucratisation of household and small business finance, is that of impaired circulation of income and spending. Income and spending together make up ‘the circulatory economy’; or, for short, ‘the economy’.

An important concept here is that of ‘wage goods’; a term used a lot by economists in the period from circa 1850 to 1950, but not a lot these days. Wage goods are the goods and services that ordinary people buy; they include ‘necessities’ but go well beyond being necessary goods. They include basic aspirational goods and services. Thus, they represent mass markets. The key to the success of industrial capitalism – an extension of primitive capitalism which arose from the industrial revolution – is the ability of ordinary people to buy goods manufactured at scale, through the ‘factory system’.

During the twentieth century, cars and houses became wage goods. In the more-populated early twenty-first century, we might say an apartment rather than a detached or semi-detached house. The larger wage goods – which include household devices – always have and always will require recourse to borrowed money. This recourse is called ‘personal finance’; and involves a lifecycle mix of borrowing and saving. Further, large wage goods can be either rented or purchased; ideally with the lessors being people and businesses embedded in the circulatory economy.

To these wage goods we can add ‘social wage goods’. Think of education, healthcare, defence, and environmental and public health subsidies. In normal times, these will be funded from public revenue; taxation for the most part. But, and especially when public revenue systems are under strain, it is essential that they be funded by other means, rather than being unprovided or underprovided.

An efficient monetary circulation system has two requirements. The first of those is an income distribution system that maintains a stable (and not excessive) degree of inequality. By ‘stable’, we mean that the distribution of income inequality should be essentially the same in 2022 as it was in 1972; and (assuming that 1972 was a good year) in all years in-between, and all years in the future.

The second requirement is that there is a stabilising financial system (including an international system, which is beyond the scope of this essay). Such a system has three components: personal finance, business finance, and government finance.

Personal finance has already been alluded too. Business finance represents the core of capitalism; in particular, the financing of businesses which supply (create and sell) goods and services. Businesses invest in capital goods, and in inventories. Government finance – the third leg of the financial stool – is a critically important for investment in capital infrastructure, to maintain the income distribution system through what would otherwise be ‘hard times’, and to maintain the supply of social wage goods. As the third leg of the stool, government finance stabilises the stool – the system – compensating for the collective vagaries associated with personal spending and business investment. Of particular importance is the privileged (and necessary) ability of central governments to maintain a ‘balance sheet’ that enables them to be ‘borrowers of last resort’ while undertaking their core roles even in – no, especially in – hard times.

What I have outlined above is what we call ‘the economy’. When functioning well, with due recognition of public as well as private rights, the economy has transitioned from primitive to democratic capitalism.

What happens if we have legislation that hobbles the efficient cycling of money into the production of wage goods (including social wage goods), and capital goods (private and public)? Where does the money go when it doesn’t go where it should go? The short answer is that it flows to a relatively small number of asset-rich people. Part is this is cycled back into the economy through their purchases of luxury goods (those private goods and services which are not wage goods). Part of it just sits in banks and other repositories; it does not circulate at all. And the third part circulates in another place; a place that may be called ‘the casino’.

The casino is a whole suite of secondary markets – real estate, company shares, bonds, financial derivatives, foreign bank deposits, crypto-currencies, gold, artefacts, artworks, football teams, non-fungible-tokens; once upon a time there was even a speculative secondary market in tulip bulbs. Capitalism always has its casino, inhabited in the main by oligarchs and plutocrats. The circulation system is inefficient – and unstable – when ‘the casino’ is too big relative to ‘the economy’; and particularly when the casino grows faster than the economy.

In this last ‘uneven growth’ case, the flow of unspent money into the casino from the economy exceeds the flow of spent money from the casino back to the economy. It is in these times – a net flow of money from the economy to the casino – when most asset prices rise; this may be facilitated by monetary policies which inject new money into the casino rather than into the economy.

The easiest way by far for injecting new money into the national economy is via the government’s balance sheet. The big problem here is when debt-averse governments resist this process, thereby forcing money that should be going into the economy, into the casino instead. When this happens, the casino grows faster than the economy; asset prices increase, creating an illusion of wealth creation, but really only pumping up the prices of tradable assets. Rather than a bottomless money pit, the casino is a gravityless monetary sky.

New Zealand’s present regime of ‘Authoritarian Social Neoliberalism’

Finally, I will present this label that I think fits. Neoliberalism, by the way, means – more than anything else – the centrality of both private property rights (as a basis for the distribution of income) and restrictive public finance (aka government debt-aversion).

The government takes an authoritarian ‘top down’ approach to execute both a social policy agenda and its responses to exogenous events. The alternative is a democratic approach where informed – through discussion, not narrative – populations find their own solutions, and are supported by governments to do so. And the government pursues its debt-averse interpretation of neoliberalism, both with respect to its own balance sheet, and in its supposition that households and businesses also should behave as debt-minimisers.

The result is that both personal savings and new money flow, substantially and excessively, into ‘the casino’; the financial stratosphere inhabited by those with large portfolios of ‘financial wealth’, meaning the tradable assets mentioned above. When subject to this kind of casino-enriching policymaking – albeit policy making that is not understood by the policymakers in this way, due to regime wilful blindness – there are necessarily large net flows of money entering the world of asset trading. That is the consequence of public policy developed in the spirit that underpinned the CCCFA.

If we don’t allow money to flow towards where it can be usefully spent within the economy, then we push people towards more desperate options, such as crime. And we prioritise the casinoisation of the economy, which includes the designation (and resigned acceptance) of land as an appreciating asset, rather than as places to live and grow food. Authoritarian social neoliberal governments don’t understand that this is what they are doing; nevertheless, that’s what they do, though they would rather not know it.

*******

References to CCCFA:

Increase in loan rejections sharpest for people with high 700-plus credit scores, Centrix says, Rob Stock, stuff.co.nz, 3 Mar 2022

Credit Madness Inquiry Must Be Open and Transparent, Act NZ, scoop.co.nz, 14 Jan 2022

David Clark: Govt will move fast on Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance law changes, NZ Herald, 17 Feb 2022

Govt Updates Responsible Lending Rules, NZ Government, scoop.co.nz, 11 Mar 2022

Government’s controversial home lending rules: Minister David Clark announces tweaks less than four months after law change, NZ Herald, 11 Mar 2022

Debtfix supports Common Sense returning to CCCFA but Stands by Protecting New Zealand’s Safe Lending Laws, 11 Mar 2022

Open letter – Backing our safe lending laws will bring financial wellbeing to our communities, Debtfix, 8 Mar 2022

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The government’s latest scheme is a form of government unemployment insurance. Interestingly, both the anti-poverty groups and the neoliberal New Zealand Initiative think tank see this scheme as problematic, very much as a ‘solution looking for a problem’. In other words, its ideology. In this case it’s not capitalist ideology; it’s labourist ideology. Indeed the scheme has been cooked up with the collaboration of the CTU (Council of Trade Unions) and is fully supported by the E tū union.

Some history.

New Zealand and Australia both played key roles in the formation of ‘the twentieth century welfare state’. But different roles. In Australia, with a longer and more entrenched unionised labour movement, and with Labour Governments a generation before New Zealand, the dominant cry was for a workers’ welfare state. In New Zealand, on the other hand, where the debate was more informed by the realities of the Great Depression (1930-35), the call from the electorate in 1935 – and answered by Michael Joseph Savage – was for a citizens’ welfare state (universal ‘social security’). Hence the key phrase associated with Savage: ‘from the cradle to the grave‘. The citizens’ welfare state explicitly included women, all older people, the self-employed (many of whom were unemployed in all but name, in the Depression), and all others who for whatever reason were neither capitalists nor principally attached to the labour market.

Essentially, in the first half of last century, Australia got its workers’ welfare state, and New Zealand got its (universal) citizens’ welfare state. But the Labour Party in Aotearoa New Zealand always struggled with the concept of a universal welfare state, Savage notwithstanding.

In the years in which Robert Muldoon was Minister of Finance, 1967 to 1972, two major – but divergent – welfare reports were published: the Woodhouse Commission on workers’ compensation and the McCarthy Report on social security. The McCarthy Report was in tune with the times, in fully recognising the full citizenship of women; ie independent of their then secondary status in the workforce. In 1972, equal pay laws were passed. And, as a result of the McCarthy Report, the Domestic Purposes Benefit gave dignity to single parents.

The Labour Government (Dec 1972 to Nov 1975) was most interested in the earlier Woodhouse Report; the result was ACC (Accident Compensation) that explicitly provided benefits to workers, with higher-earning workers getting the lions’ share of those benefits. ACC conformed with a worldview full of masculinist assumptions about labour market roles. The major champion of such workers’ welfare was the then junior minister, Roger Douglas. Following in the same vein, Douglas introduced a contributions-based New Zealand Superannuation scheme (became effective, 1975) which fully followed this already outdated masculinist labourist world view, as a government supported workers’ retirement scheme.

Fortunately for the upholders of the citizens’ welfare state – of whom Robert Muldoon was prominent – this legacy project of the Third Labour Government was immediately abandoned in 1976, and replaced by the citizen-welfare-based National Superannuation (now called New Zealand Superannuation). Contributions to the Douglas workers’ scheme were refunded.

The Helen Clark led Labour government of the 2000s continued the labourist line that workers (and capitalists) were superior kinds of citizens to everyone else. This was fulfilled – for workers – in extended the Working for Families targeted income support, which built upon an earlier 1980s’ Labour Government policy (means-tested ‘Family Care’) to replace the universal (ie citizens’) ‘family benefit’. The universally-minded Child Poverty Action Group has always railed against Working for Families as a form of family income support that largely excludes beneficiaries.

The proposed Unemployment Insurance is simply this Labour Government’s tilt at this labourist ideological windmill; the workers’ welfare state.

The Workforce as it Actually Is

For a brief period from the 1950s to the 1980s, the predominant model of work (in New Zealand and in the world) was that of fulltime employment. The feminist solution to this initially masculine reality had been for women to join what they couldn’t beat, and this century a typical salaried worker may indeed be a white collar working woman, a demographic that the CTU and the Labour Party now strongly represents. The workers’ state only became inclusive to women once they took the Hobson’s choice to embrace it.

In Guy Standing’s seminal work on the twentyfirst century labour force, the key distinction is between ‘the salariat’ and ‘the precariat’. The present Labour government makes policy for the salariat, just as the second (late 1950s) and third (early 1970s) Labour governments made policy for a male unionised labour force.

In history – and not according to Marx – labour has always been dominated by either a precariat (not a proletariat), or (as in pre-modern times) a forced-labour workforce (slaves). We still don’t understand the Great Depression of the 1930s, because we still want to know what the ‘unemployment rate’ was; this concept cannot be applied, meaningfully, to the precariat. (In an important sense, and following today’s definition, the unemployment rate in the depression was zero. Many people – especially ‘married women’ – were deemed unavailable for work; other demographics were precariously self-employed in huge numbers.) The middle-middle-class salariat is largely a product of the twentieth century post-war world.

Since the New Zealand Employment Contracts’ Act of 1991 – and similar directional shifts in other countries – the salariat has been progressively dismantled in favour of fixed-term labour contracts, variable-hour contracts, and the ‘gig economy’. Ask any young person.

The reality of the labour force is that it is a spectrum from permanent fulltime salaried (or waged) positions through to ‘free-lance’ self-employment. Various parttime options come within the spectrum – options sometimes favoured by workers, but more generally suited to the flexibility requirements of employers. Generally, those people we use to call workers we now call contractors.

It’s further muddied by the new reality that much of the new salariat – eg managers in larger corporatised organisations, and the smaller ‘nimble’ professional organisations that provide services to these large organisations – are in fact the beneficiaries (in the original sense of the word ‘beneficiary’) of the new capitalism. Labour has become capital.

(Just watch the brilliant Australian satire ‘Utopia’ on Netflix to get a sense of the productivity of the new entitled workforce.)

Nowadays, old-fashioned workers have become the cost-accounted precariat. And the remaining salariat are their bosses and managers.

Unemployment insurance is a new benefit that will mainly be paid to the salariat; that is, the new beneficiary salariat.

It will be largely funded by the precariat. In this respect the new social insurance levy will be like the unemployment tax that all working women and girls paid during the Great Depression, even though they did not quality for the benefits. Another analogy is the taxes paid by New Zealand working denizens in Australia; taxes that fund benefits only payable to Australian citizens. For the new scheme, many precarious levy-paying employees will not qualify for payouts; their work will not be structured in a way that allows them to qualify for benefits. And those low-paid workers who do quality will receive only a small share of the total paid-out benefits.

New Zealanders have to focus – and focus hard – on how to redirect welfare policy to a citizens’ path (with citizenship broadly defined), and away from its present workers’ path (with workership narrowly defined). The new salariat can and should find their own market-based income insurance.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Unemployment Insurance Will Mean More Tax – NZ Initiative Report, 11 November 2021

The Labour Government’s Proposed Social Insurance Scheme Will Entrench a 2-tier Welfare System, Auckland Action Against Poverty, 2 Feb 2022

Next Steps for Social Unemployment Insurance, E tū Union, 2 Feb 2022

Social Insurance Proposal Would Likely Bake-in Existing Inequities And Drive Inequality, Says Anti-poverty Organisation, Child Poverty Action Group, 2 Feb 2022

The Wage Earners’ Welfare State Revisited, by Francis Castles (1994)

A Decade of Confusion: the differing directions of social security and accident compensation 1969 – 1979, by Margaret McClure (2003) [Victoria University of Wellington Law Review]

This Government has a problem with urgency. Critics from both left and right have long complained about their lack of urgency on issues such as climate change, housing, and inequality.

Likewise, in terms of the Covid response, there’s been a chorus of criticism that Labour has been complacent and sluggish on key elements of New Zealand’s pandemic plan. From the very late vaccination rollout – which critics say led to the need for the lockdown, costing $10bn – through to equipping the health system, issues around MIQ, the border, contact tracing, and saliva testing.

Yet on some aspects of governing they have displayed extreme haste – rushing legislation through under parliamentary urgency. Such speed might be seen by the Government’s supporters as partially making up for the lack of action in other areas. But without proper debate, consultation and evaluation, such rushed lawmaking invariably leads to poor policy and democratic deficits that harm us all.

Rushing through the traffic lights

Today in Parliament the Government is railroading its “traffic light” and vaccine mandate bill through the third and final reading. The legislation is officially named “The Covid-19 Response (Vaccinations) Legislation Bill”, and it comes into effect next week. The legislation sets out how businesses and individuals can operate under the new Covid regime that will replace the current alert levels. It will have a huge impact on the rights and lives of the public over summer and potentially further into the future – especially determining who can participate and work in other activities. As such, it deals with some extremely important and fraught aspects of Covid management.

Herald political editor Claire Trevett has explained today what this means: “a law change that is estimated to result in vaccine mandates over 40 per cent of the country’s workforce will be pushed through this week under urgency, without any space for public submissions and without time for select committees to knuckle out any fishhooks or flaws. Even the Ministry of Justice did not get time to vet it properly” – see: Government rams through ‘no jab, no job’ law at its peril (paywalled).

So, is the legislation so straightforward and uncontroversial that urgency can be justified, given that there has been no real chance for public scrutiny of the details?

The Minister pushing it through, Chris Hipkins (who also happens to be the Minister for Open Government) says this about the bill’s process: “It is quite a significant piece of legislation, and it’s quite a technical piece of legislation, and so that takes some time to work through”.

Many commentators have pointed out that Hipkins’ justification is an own goal that actually underlines how much more scrutiny this particular legislation requires. And few seem to believe there wasn’t time for at least a brief select committee process, even if this meant bringing Parliament back into session next week (when a recess is scheduled).

The Government, on the other hand, is claiming that consultation has occurred, especially behind the scenes with iwi, unions, and business.

Condemnation of the Government’s process

Legal academics have been particularly aggrieved by the Government’s seemingly unnecessary haste. Writing for the Spinoff today, Andrew Geddis of the Otago Law School says the legislation is too important to be dealt with like this: “A bill that allows the state to say ‘put this in your body or else largely forgo social interactions’ should be given time for proper scrutiny and debate” – see: In rushing through the ‘traffic light’ legislation, the government has failed us.

Likewise, Victoria University of Wellington law professor Dean Knight has come out swinging, labelling Labour’s latest manoeuvre a “constitutional disgrace”. He has explained that “Legislative change seriously implicating rights like this needs much more time to breathe, to be interrogated and for its legitimacy to be built through dialogue.”

Chief Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt has stated that the process is “highly problematic both constitutionally and in terms of the state’s human rights and Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations”. As a remedy, he wants the Government to agree to set up a retrospective select committee to scrutinise the new law and how it works.

The Government has already rejected this option, and is unlikely to change its mind without significant pressure to do so. The pressure isn’t likely to come from their coalition partner the Greens, who have voted for the rushed legislation. That party have been conspicuously silent on the use of urgency, unlike when the last National Government made frequent use of it. Critics say the Greens are trampling on the memory of former co-leader Rod Donald, who was highly principled on such matters.

Defenders of the Government on social media are doing their best to justify Labour’s actions – pointing to the fact that National carried out similar constitutional outrages when in Government, with the implicit suggestion that Labour should therefore be able to as well.

Information on the bill withheld by the Government

The speed of the passage of the traffic light bill wouldn’t be so bad if the Government had released the background information about the new framework and rules – but this has been deliberately withheld – see Ben Strang’s Government refuses to release policy advice on vaccine passes and certificates.

According to this article, the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties made an Official Information Act request to Chris Hipkins for the relevant documents on 9 October, but the Minister failed to comply within the stated 20 working days, and then eventually denied the request saying that the information would be released proactively next year.

The Council’s chair Thomas Beagle says Hipkins’ response is “a disgraceful affront to open government and Aotearoa New Zealand’s democracy. It is unacceptable that MPs and the public won’t be able to read these crucial policy documents before considering the legislation to impose the vaccination certificate system.”

The whole episode will, once again, have critics querying how this marries with Labour’s promise to be “the most open and transparent government ever”. The problem is that the Government appears to be disingenuously using the OIA and its proactive publication clause as a way of delaying the release of information that is pertinent to public debate and scrutiny of Government decisions.

Consequences of the traffic light rush

Some are arguing that the abuse of Parliamentary Urgency will have important negative consequences – particularly because it will increase distrust in government and might entrench anti-vaccine views. As Beagle says, the Covid response relies on high trust, and this erodes that.

Andrew Geddis also thinks it has the potential to inflame and polarise those already sceptical about the legitimacy of the Government’s health response to Covid: “This is, to put it mildly, simply not good enough. Indeed, if you were trying to construct a lawmaking process to set off the conspiracy minded and undermine the social licence needed for success, it would look something like this. Hide the information that’s informed your legislation, introduce it at the very last moment, whip it through the House overnight, and present it as a fait accompli the next day.”

And Claire Trevett adds: “Public trust in the Government response is already faltering and ramming through such a law change with no public input will do little to help that.” She says: “Such a process gives the perception of human rights being easily trampled over and will do little to quell the concerns of those worried about the mandates. It also invites legal challenges to the law.”

How did the Government get into this situation?

Is it just the case that sometimes governments need to move with extreme speed due to emergencies? This is what Labour and its supporters have suggested. And Hipkins has even justified the urgency by saying that he doesn’t want the public to have to wait weeks more before these important changes are implemented.

However, it appears the Government clearly left the drafting of its legislation too late. Most commentators suggest there shouldn’t have been any rush at all and that the Government has had many months to develop the legislation for this change, but it simply chose not to. Even once the Government announced the new traffic lights system five weeks ago, that would have given officials time to draft the bill, but this obviously didn’t occur.

So, has the Government been tardy due to arrogance, incompetence, or something else? Rightwing commentator Brigitte Morten says today in the NBR that she thinks it’s a case of overwhelm: “The reasons for the wilful delay in introduction are difficult to understand. It cannot be arrogance as this outbreak response could not have increased their confidence. Nor can it be ignorance. Ardern, Hipkins, and Robertson are all former parliamentary staffers and have been around long enough to know better. Simple; it is most likely that this is a government overwhelmed. Which does not bode well for our holiday plans” – see: Speeding through traffic lights dangerous in any context (paywalled).

Andrew Geddis gives another view: “the reasons for the government’s behaviour are far more depressingly mundane. It has a parliamentary majority that allows it to act as it pleases. And, I suspect it thinks that the overwhelming public mood is one of ‘give me my summer and I don’t care how it is done, as long as it is done’. I also suspect that it is suffering from Covid fatigue as much as the rest of us.”

One key minister in the process, Michael Woods, had to defend the manoeuvres today on RNZ saying “I’m really comfortable that there’s a high level of debate and scrutiny over this legislation. There’s certainly no lack of debate about it in the public arena, and we take those comments on board as we develop these things.”

Political commentator Matthew Hooton disagrees, saying “ramming through legislation under urgency stripping employment and other rights from unvaccinated workers” is draconian when done without adequate process, and he suggests that the Government is taking on anti-democratic leanings – see: Ruling by decree (paywalled).

Hooton also thinks it relates to the Government expecting Chris Hipkins to do too much: “Hipkins is visibly exhausted. The lack of talent in the Ardern regime means he also serves as Minister of Education and Leader of the House. He is clearly no longer thinking straight and needs a holiday.”

Finally, this Labour Government – like the National one before it – has actually over-used and abused parliamentary urgency and speed on plenty of other occasions recently. Another particularly important example at the moment is the new bi-partisan law on housing intensification. Nicole Moreham is a professor of law at Victoria University of Wellington, and has written a very good column on this – see: Undue haste on housing bill.