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Enemies of democracy

Posted by Clayton Cosgrove on May 24th, 2012

Yesterday marked the end of hearings on the government’s disgraceful Mixed Ownership Model Bill.

Astoundingly we were told that Treasury officials had already written their report, before all submissions were heard. It proves that the deal has been preordained and that the government doesn’t give a damn what people think. This is totally reprehensible.

National have treated submitters with contempt, in most cases only giving people a few minutes to submit and one question from the committee. Maybe it’s because they have only heard one submission in favour of their main plan for the economy.

Bereft of any principled ideas or integrity, its members like Maggie Barry have taken to bullying and intimidating submitters – even trying to force submitters to disclose who they voted for at the last election.

Everyone has the right to submit to Parliament and MPs irrespective of who they voted for. They don’t need to be bullied by Maggie Barry. That’s democracy.

The mask hiding the National Party’s typical disdain for democracy has once again slipped. They’ve made a mockery of the select committee process, the submitters and the issue that close to 80% of people oppose. The government should be ashamed.

It never had any intention of listening. Because they know that people resolutely oppose the sale. Instead they’ve had to resort to bullying members of the public who dare to speak out.

Radio New Zealand covered it very well this morning. Have a listen…

Filed under: asset sales, select committee
10 Comments

Allan Peachey … a man who put kids first

Posted by David Shearer on November 7th, 2011

It was both very sad and a surprise to hear about Allan Peachey’s death today. I worked on the Education and Science Select Committee with him, some of my family taught at Rangitoto College under his reign.

He impressed me with his deep understanding of education and real commitment to getting the best for kids. Ultimately for him that was the test. He was no friend of National Standards. For his passion and understanding alone, he should’ve been the Minister.

He chaired the Select Committee in a true spirit of bipartisanship and was unfailingly polite to those who came before us. We differed in our politcal views – sometimes quite a bit – but that’s politics. We are poorer for his parting.

Our condolences go out to his family.

Filed under: Teachers, education, select committee, students
17 Comments

Democracy denied by smug Nats

Posted by Chris Hipkins on August 12th, 2011

Earlier this year Phil Goff and I accepted a petition signed by almost 6,000 Kiwis concerned about the government’s cuts to compensation to those suffering from work-related hearing loss. Thanks to National, people with hearing impairment are the only group of New Zealanders required by law to demonstrate a particular percentage of disability before rehabilitation will be offered under the ACC scheme.

At yesterday’s Transport and Industrial Relations Select Committee meeting National members voted en-bloc to report back the petition of Louse Carroll and 5857 others to the House without hearing a single piece of evidence. That’s undemocratic and a slap in the face to all those who sought to have their concerns heard by their House of Representatives.

Having actively discriminated against those with hearing loss, the National government is now turning a deaf ear to their concerns. They aren’t even willing to allow them to come to Parliament and have their say. That’s frankly disgraceful. If almost 6,000 people were willing to take the time to sign a petition to Parliament, the least their elected representatives can do is allow them the courtesy of a hearing.

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Filed under: ACC, democracy, parliament, petition, select committee
30 Comments

Of troughs and trotters……

Posted by Maryan Street on June 24th, 2011

On Wednesday evening, the night before examining Murray McCully over the MFAT estimates at select committee, I received the answers to my raft of questions. There is one Annex of which people should avail themselves. It is the spreadsheet of consultants and contractors and is accessible here. Have a look and see for yourself. Page 39 for starters, but there is plenty of interesting reading there.

One name stood out for me – Charles Finny, formerly of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce, now of Saunders Unsworth. Paid $54,135 for work done between 1 November and 24 December 2010. Nice pay rate for 2 months’ work! I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any sick days – oh, that’s right, he’s a bloke. No uterus, no sick days.

Charles Finny’s contract was not put out for tender. Why not? At a rate of $27,000 a month, you’d think that might be tendered. McCully wasn’t aware of the details, he said, but knew Finny had the requisite skills.  There are lots more questions to ask here – like, at what threshold does a requirement to tender kick in, etc., etc. McCully had given another gift to one of his mates.

Add that to: $75k contract to former Nat MP, Mark Blumsky for development work in Niue (requisite skills – the man used to be a shoe salesman?); current Nat MP Allan Peachey being made  Special Envoy with the permission of the PM no less, to go round the Pacific and talk about education (is that what he was elected by the good people of Tamaki to do?); current Nat MP John Hayes, appointed to chair a committee which disburses money to aid NGOs (a committee he might have to interrogate as Chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee?).

These men might all be good blokes, but how would anyone know? They haven’t been subjected to any form of competition. I thought the Nats liked competition. Nope? They just like extra perks and income. This is taxpayers’ money, not McCully’s personal slush fund.

Filed under: Foreign Affairs, education, overseas aid, parliament, perks, select committee
9 Comments

Old dog lost his shine but hasn’t forgotten all his tricks

Posted by Phil Twyford on June 23rd, 2011

We had Rodney Hide at select committee this morning to take questions on local government estimates. His fur seems to have lost some of its shine since the Brash coup. But he was in good form this morning: typically unrepentant on the Auckland super city IT cost blow out.

When he wrote in the Herald last June the super city’s new computer system would cost only $126 million, did he know then that it would cost another $450 million to complete over the next few years?  No, apparently not.

Continuing a discussion we had at last year’s estimates hearing, did he accept now that the Auckland ratepayer considered the whole cost of the new IT system to be a cost of the establishment of the super city, as opposed to just the initial pre-amalgamation costs?  No, again.

We got on to his new review of the system of local government which a Cabinet paper had promised would begin with stakeholder consultations open to the public, but now appears to be a series of invitation-only closed-door meetings with participants asked not to discuss the proceedings outside the meeting.

He wasn’t bothered by the secretive nature of the meetings: at least officials were consulting stakeholders, they could have just gone ahead and developed the reform proposals without talking to anyone.  I guess that shouldn’t surprise anyone. This is the Minister who handed 75% of Auckland local government over to hand-picked corporate boards who now do most of their business behind closed doors.

Would he guarantee there would be no forced council amalgamations following his review of the system of local government? His bemused expression seemed to acknowledge that barring some political miracle he won’t be around to guarantee anything after November. I think he is probably mentally moving on to other things already: his answer, no he could not give that guarantee. He didn’t know what a future Labour local government minister might do.

P.S. Nikki Kaye asked some wonderful patsy questions about how successful the super city has been. I wonder if she will be campaigning in Auckland Central on its success with Rodney at her side?

Filed under: local government, select committee
9 Comments

On torture

Posted by Maryan Street on May 15th, 2011

Last week the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade select committee considered a resolution from Keith Locke (Greens) calling for an inquiry by the committee into the allegations raised in the recent Metro article, that NZ Defence Forces in Afghanistan had handed detainees over to other forces (US and Afghani) who were known to torture prisoners for information. This would be in breach of the Geneva Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, human rights in general and make a mockery of our current participation at an international level on the UN Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture.

The Nats on the committee decided to block this inquiry. Labour and the Greens voted in favour of it and the Nats rolled us with their majority.

At the end of last year, I asked for the NZ Defence Force to come to the FADT committee and explain how the “rules of engagement” in war worked and how we maintained our commitment to our well known anti-torture position, especially in Afghanistan. This was long before there was a whiff of a story from Jon Stephenson (Metro).  Kevin Riordan (NZDF’s head legal man) came and gave us a full briefing in public session (although noone from the public was there!), explaining that when detainees are held by NZDF soldiers, the decision on who to hand them over to, particularly if we knew they were likely to be tortured, went right back to the head of our NZDF. This isn’t a decision made by anybody in the field – it goes right to the top – in this case, GG-designate, Gerry Mataparae.

Why wouldn’t we have an inquiry into this? Our international reputation is being impugned by this journo. Are there any grounds for that? Even if it happened on Labour’s watch, wouldn’t we want to know so that it didn’t happen again? Labour is happy for an inquiry to occur. Why did the Nats vote it down?

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Filed under: Foreign Affairs, human rights, select committee
12 Comments

A government with its ears tight shut

Posted by Darien Fenton on November 3rd, 2010

Surprise, surprise, the Government has completely ignored the submissions and protests of those opposing changes to the Employment Relations and Holidays Acts.

The Select Committee has reported back on the two bills and have recommended almost no changes. In the Employment Relations Bill No 2, the extension of the 90 day no rights trial periods to all workplaces, the restricting of workers to their unions at work and the weakening of personal grievance provisions remain.

In the Holidays Amendment Bill, employers will still be able to demand a medical certificate for a single day’s absence (one of the more silly provisions that I really thought the government might ditch) and the sale of the fourth week’s annual leave and the weakening of rights around alternative statutory holidays will go ahead.

What’s annoying is while the government’s is prepared to rush through bad employment law under urgency to please an international corporation, they are not prepared to listen to the 8,000 people who took the trouble to make submissions opposing these two bills, or to the 22,000 workers who rallied across New Zealand a couple of weeks ago.

There’s nothing about these changes that will improve productivity or enhance workplace relationships. There’s nothing here that will help our wages keep pace with, let alone catch up with Australia.  This is a feeble attempt to please employers and business at the expense of some pretty fundamental rights. 

The only possible message for Kiwi workers from this is that the government has its ears tight shut when it comes to their issues – unless they want their ideas and help to get through a recession.

Filed under: 90 day trial period, Employers, Holidays, parliament, select committee, sick leave, workers rights
16 Comments

The H word

Posted by Darien Fenton on October 20th, 2010

Today is an important day for wage and salary earners in New Zealand as they come out in rallies across the country protesting against the government’s determination to drive through unnecessary and unfair changes to industrial and holiday laws.

Update : By lunchtime today, 15,000 workers had attended rallies across NZ in the biggest protests against a government’s attacks on workers rights in more than a decade.  Thousands more are expected to come out during the afternoon. 

But while we’re waiting for reports on their action, here’s an ironical story (or some might use the word we are not allowed to use in parliament, the “h” word) about government members on the Select Committee in charge of the bills that workers are protesting about today.

Yesterday, National MP Tau Henare was publicly refusing to apologise for calling a teenage select committee submitter “a liar”, after he attacked James Sleep, 18, in his submission to the Transport & Industrial Relations Select Committee on the 90 day no rights bill.

James didn’t lie. I know, because I was there. He got one detail in his oral and written submissions a little bit mixed up. All Tau had to do was clarify, but instead, he called James a liar, and a bullshitter. And he’s gone further in the media saying :

Why would I apologise for a little turkey who got found out lying? He was reading out a submission and I was following it and in two parts … it was a completely different story.

He’ll get over it and if he doesn’t, well, then, too bad … He’ll learn from his experience.”

But then there is the NDU member, who had her first ever written submission to the committee sent back to her because, according to the Government members on the Select Committee, she made an “offensive comment”, which was :

Can we put John Key on a 90 day trial and sack him after the 89th day?

What?  It sounds like an absolutely fair point to me – whereas Tau Henare has used his power as a government member of a Select Committee to harass a  young person who had the gumption to show up and make a submission.

It’  s probably lucky the NDU member ddidn’t have to front the committee, because goodness only knows what would have happened to her.

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Filed under: 90 day trial period, Holidays, select committee, workers rights, youth
27 Comments

more, More, MORE

Posted by Darien Fenton on September 30th, 2010

While Red Alerters have been debating tax and GST this week, Carol Beaumont and I have been wading through the submissions to the Select Committee on the Employment Relations Amendment Bill and Holidays Bill.

Yesterday and today were long days with submissions from a mix of employers, unions and individual workers.  What’s disappointing is how employers seem to go onto autopilot – not only supporting National Party legislation, but wanting more still.

After weeks of the Minister of Labour claiming that the 90 day trial period is “voluntary” and that “employees don’t need to have a trial period if they don’t want one” her business supporters are saying that’s not enough.

Business New Zealand, EMA, the Hospitality Association, Air NZ, the Meat Industry Association, Ports of Auckland and a whole raft of other employers are saying the 90 day trial period should be the default provision for every worker in New Zealand.

What that means is your job will be subject to the 90 day trial automatically.

Depressing.  I often wonder if employers actually think, because if they did, they would know that this is not the way to productive workplaces and closing the wage gap with Australia.

However, there’s been some lighter moments.  Our Chair, David Bennett is struggling with the notion of unions and their role, even although the whole basis of the Employment Relations Act is around building productive employment relationships through good faith, trust and confidence and the promotion of collective bargaining.

His boss, John Key is quite happy to recognise unions as “social partners,” to engage with them to tap into the ideas of workers to get the economy through a recession.  The Government (along with Business NZ) confidently fronts up to the ILO every year and boast about NZ’s tripartite relationships – yet Mr Bennett thinks that unions are like lawyers – offering a service – and as such, should have no “special” rights.

Clearly, such old thinking is still alive and well in the National Party.

The consequence of the radical change in the early 1990s and the low levels of unionisation and collective bargaining is that New Zealand now has a thriving employment law industry with literally thousands of lawyers – all of them making good money out of employment relations.

We’ve heard from some of them on the select committee and while I have respect for their profession, quite frankly, few of them have a clue about the day to day relationships that are needed in the workplace to make it operate productively.

The Employment Relations Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Holidays Amendment Bill are a lawyer’s gold chest. I predict we’re going to see quite a few more of them in the Employment Authority and Employment Court in the coming years if these bills go ahead.

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Filed under: 90 day trial period, Holidays, productivity, select committee, workers rights
42 Comments

I knew Kiwis believed in fairness

Posted by Darien Fenton on September 19th, 2010

A UMR survey released today by the CTU shows that 80 per cent of New Zealanders oppose the Government’s planned changes to dismissal law.  Previous polls had asked the question about whether respondents supported a 90 day trial and unsurprisingly, the majority said yes – because after all these were already allowed under previous law.

But the government’s proposed changes in the Employment Relations Bill (No. 2) remove the right of all workers to be told why they have been sacked and to challenge that reason (among other things).  As the Human Rights Commission told  the Select Committee last  Thursday  :

It is unusual for Parliament to take away rights, particularly such a fundamental right as the right of access to a hearing. Denial of redress in this manner in something as basic as employment has profound human rights implications.

The UMR Research telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 750 New Zealanders asked the following question:

“Do you think that all employees should have the right to appeal if they think they have been unfairly dismissed, even if their dismissal was during the first 90 days of their employment?

The response was:

Yes                             80%

No                               18%

Unsure                          2%

Submissions have already begun on this Bill and will continue day and night over the next few weeks to allow the large number of submitters to be heard.  Even then, thousands of what the government calls “form” submissions and those who have gone to the trouble to add comments will be ignored.

I agree with the CTU that the government needs to rethink this policy.  People from across the spectrum of incomes, ages, regions and occupations strongly oppose what the Government is doing and that’s not surprising.  This law offends against the basic Kiwi value of fairness and access to justice.

ACT rolled the Minister of Labour’s recommendation that the  90 day no rights trial period be limited to workplaces of 50 or less and won an extension of it to all workplaces.  Surely, now ACT is so discredited, the government can afford to be brave enough to revisit this policy and do the right thing by Kiwis?

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Filed under: 90 day trial period, act party, poll, select committee, workers rights
37 Comments

Abuse of the parliamentary process

Posted by Chris Hipkins on September 16th, 2010

An important part of our legislative process is the select committee. Almost all of the laws that come before the House are referred to a select committee for detailed consideration. The public are normally given an opportunity to make submissions, and membership of the committees is shared amongst all of the parties in the House.

Under the Standing Orders, a select committee can’t normally meet while the House is sitting. This ensures that MPs can fully participate in parliamentary debate. It also ensures that when select committees are meeting, members aren’t distracted by the need to follow what is happening in the debating chamber.

Unfortunately, the National government have taken to routinely using their majority in the House to short-circuit the process by moving referral motions to select committees such as this one:

“I move that the State Sector Management Bill be considered by the Education and Science Committee, that the committee report finally to the House on or before 24 November 2010, and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting (except during oral questions), and during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 187 and 190(1)(b) and (c).”

Why should we care? We should care because they’re watering down the strength of our democratic institutions. We should care because having select committees meeting at the same time as the House sits will prevent small parties from fully participating in the select committee process (perhaps that’s why the Maori Party regularly let National MPs take their place?). We should care because it will prevent MPs being able to give select committee (or House) work the attention that it deserves.

Where a piece of legislation requires a tight timeframe, an abridged process might be justified. But the born-to-rule tories are now using this referral motion for every piece of legislation that comes before the House. It’s an abuse of parliament and it should stop.

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Filed under: democracy, parliament, select committee
35 Comments

Effective select committee submissions

Posted by Chris Hipkins on August 19th, 2010

Today I’m in Auckland all day with the Local Government and Environment Select Committee. We’re hearing submissions on Rodney Hide’s latest attack on local democracy. We’ve got a bit of a marathon session today, running pretty much non-stop from 9am to 9pm. Even then each submitter only gets 15 minutes to highlight their key points and engage with MPs on the committee.

Reading through the papers last night it struck me how some people or groups are far better than others at getting their points across in a conscise manner. There are literally thousands of pages of submissions for us to work through. I’ve made an effort to look through all of them and I have to say I read some 2 page submissions that were far more comprehensive and valuable than others that were 40 odd pages or more.

I also appreciate those submitters who come well prepared, highlight the 2-3 points that are most important to them and then spend the rest of their allotted time discussing issues with the committee. I’ll never understand why people feel the need to spend their whole 15 minutes reading their submissions aloud leaving no time for real discussion.

I now sit on several select committees and I find the work involved really satisfying and interesting. I admire people and groups who take time to submit and appear before select committees, but I do wonder how we can encourage them to be more effective in the way they do it?

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Filed under: democracy, parliament, select committee
10 Comments

Farrar on #OpenLabourNZ

Posted by Clare Curran on May 14th, 2010

David Farrar on Kiwiblog has some initial ideas on open and transparent govt. It’s taken me a wee while to get round to commenting on them. Which is no reflection on his ideas. I hope he’ll have more.

Here they are (in Farrar’s words):

So what are my initial ideas for an open and transparent government policy.

  1. My previous suggestion that all Cabinet level documents be automatically placed on the Internet by DPMC within six months of creation.
  2. Expanding Parliament TV to include select committees
  3. Requiring all payments (above a modest threshold) from a Govt agency to be listed on a central website

All worthy of discussion. I think making broadcasting the public sections of select committees  would be a huge step forward. Obviously not everyone’s cup of tea but would certainly make the process of government much more  visible.

Funny that I agree more with Farrar than with Trotter so far!

What do you think?

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Filed under: #OpenLabourNZ, Labour Party, Red Alert, blogs, comms & IT, democracy, internet, policy, select committee
16 Comments

Tax and the Budget Policy Statement

Posted by David Cunliffe on March 4th, 2010

Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee has just released its report on the half-yearly Budget Policy Statement.  This  politely worded document contains some useful nuggets of information that arose from Bill English’s testimony to the committee, and summarises FEC members’ views of what they heard.  Some of it was reported at the time, but it is worth reiterating in the context of the broader tax reform debate.

  1. English reiterated that the tax pacakge will be fiscally neutral.
  2. Raising GST to 15% is the government’s intention.
  3. This was not presented as a “revenue raiser on its own” but was needed to help pay for cuts to tax rates.
  4. The main rate change would be at the top end, with likely alignment with the Trust rate at 33%.
  5. Although there was talk that middle and lower income earners would be “no worse off”, committee members pointed out the huge inequity of top rate reductions for the few, versus standstill at best for the many.  There is no disguising the relative shift of the tax burden.

FEC members pushed on how the government would achieve fiscal neutrality given its stated intentions to compensate for GST – the numbers did not appear to add up.    Mr English first disputed the Tax Working Group’s estimates (funny how when he agrees he quotes them) that show full compensation costs almost all the extra revenue increased GST raises; then said rate cuts woul be largely funded from taxes on property.

Having excluded a comprehensive CGT, Land Tax and RFRM, the amount able to be raised from changing building depreciation rules is insufficient (only $0.3 to $1 bn compared to a revenue requirement of $1.2-$1.5bn ).  So if the government cuts the top rate as much as they’d like, it doesn’t leave a lot left over for the great majority of taxpayers.

Mr English then wriggled around on what a partial CGT might look like – discussing a bright line test to change the “intent” rules around property speculation.  English has also proposed “ring fencing”, a measure that he has ridiculed in the past as a ‘disastrous’ proposal.(http://www.hansard.parliament.govt.nz/Documents/20070621.htm )

It is very debateable whether that would fix the tax inequity between investment classes.  It is even more dubious to suggest that the additional property taxes would all be borne by top tax rate individuals – what about retirees and middle income earners with one or two investment proprties who may need to sell up? It looks like the intervention into the property market will really be a revenue gathering exercise to pay for tax cuts to the top rate, rather than a principled approach to addressing distortions as English claims.

And nowhere in the MOF’s presentation was there any talk about closing down the other tax planning rorts.  Funny that.

More broadly, the government cannot escape the contradiction that:

  1. It says it has enough revenue to deliver big top rate tax reductions for the few (but not the many).
  2. But it will drastically reduce new spending to $1.1 bn in Budget 2010 and onwards - inevitably resulting in real front line service cuts to Health and Education.
  3. There was no discussion of restoring superannuation pre-funding, Kiwisaver incentives,  restoring contributions to the SuperFund, or R and D tax credits, even though Treasury has previously advised all are prudent and necessary.

My impression of Bill English’s presentation was that no matter how it is dressed up, the government’s intentions are stark and predictable: raise taxes for the many and cut them for the few, and cut services for the many to pay for it.

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Filed under: Budget, Cost of Living, GST, Tax, Tax Working Group, Uncategorized, economic, economy, public services, select committee
12 Comments

The proper role of an MP

Posted by Phil Twyford on March 3rd, 2010

I think Key, Hide & Co are beginning to feel the heat. After a week and a half of submissions on the third super city bill it is clear Aucklanders are as opposed to this assault on democracy as they were when the Nats did their last impression of listening to the public halfway through last year.

But when the Herald gets stuck into them. And all the mayors. And the Employers and Manufacturers Association. And the Chamber of Commerce. Surely it gets a little harder to write off the critics as rent-a-mob? Perhaps not. Rodney Hide was on the radio this morning criticising yesterday’s rally outside the select committee hearings which was attended by Labour and Green MPs, and calling the 150 Aucklanders who protested ’sad’.

They are sad alright but not in the sense Hide means. They are really sad about what this Government is doing to our democracy.

Hide accused me of politicising the select committee process by organising the rally. He is joined by ACT supporter Michael Bassett, himself a former Minister of Local Government, who has written about all this, kindly sending me a copy, in which he says it is a constitutional outrage that an MP on the select committee should be taking part in a public protest outside the committee’s hearings. He is also unhappy with the Herald’s coverage.

My first response is that it is rich beyond belief for Hide to accuse anyone else of politicising the super city process. Hello Rodney? Aren’t you the guy who denied Aucklanders a referendum on the super city? Who invited them to make submissions on Maori representation when your threat to resign had already convinced John Key to drop Maori seats as an option? Who rammed the first two bills through under urgency? Who gets the power under this third bill to hand pick the directors of the powerful commercial structures who will run 90% of Council operations?

Secondly, I have always considered it an MP’s job to fight for what the people want. The select committee is not a court, and I am not a judge. When a Government blocks its ears to the public, I think it is perfectly in order for MPs and citizens to take up the right to peaceful protest.

What do you think?

Click this next link to see Michael Bassett’s comments in full.

(more…)

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Filed under: Auckland, democracy, local government, select committee
67 Comments

The future of our ports

Posted by Phil Twyford on March 1st, 2010

Today at the select committee hearing public submissions on the third super city bill, we had the mayors and ARC chairman Mike Lee in. There were some great submissions and useful debate. In amongst it all I took the opportunity to ask several of them their view of the provision in the bill which repeals the requirement for a binding ballot of Aucklanders before the Ports of Auckland can be sold off.

Mike Lee, Bob Harvey, Andrew Williams and Len Brown all gave unambiguous answers that the binding ballot requirement should stay.

I didn’t however get a straight answer out of John Banks after three attempts. In reply to my first two attempts he said how opposed he was to asset sales but steadfastly avoided my specific question. On my third attempt he just looked away.

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Filed under: Auckland, democracy, local government, select committee
10 Comments

Coleman’s call : $107k to find a minder

Posted by Darien Fenton on January 29th, 2010

In June 2009, Minister of Immigration, Jonathan Coleman told the Transport & Industrial Relations Select Committee that he was going to employ an “external adviser” in the Immigration Service. Someone who was independent who would “operate in the same way that a management consultant would in a business situation, reporting to him”. If he felt like it, he would pass on any key messages to the Chief Executive, but would not guarantee that information would be shown to him. The report from the Select Committee to Parliament says :

“Some of us are concerned that the appointment of an external adviser, in a parallel reporting arrangement alongside the chief executive, may conflict with the requirements of the State Sector Act 1988, which makes departmental chief executives responsible for employees in their departments, and the Public Finance Act 1989, which makes them responsible for expenditure. The Minister, however, maintains that the State Services Commissioner is comfortable with the arrangement and would not have advised the Minister to proceed with the appointment if it breached the technical provisions of either piece of legislation.”

Not so, it seemed. On 1 July, there was an advertisment in the Dominion for a Deputy Chief Executive, reporting to the Chief Executive of the Department of Labour (as Labour said he should) and not Jonathan Coleman. We think he got biffed by the State Services Commission and had to back down.

An announcement of the appointment was made on the 12 November, not by Minister Coleman, but by the Chief Executive of the Department of Labour, Christopher Blake.

And then, at the recent financial review of the Department of Labour, we got the whole story. It cost more than $107,000 to recruit Jonathan’s minder, who after all, isn’t a minder. They searched around the world and came up with Nigel Bickle, currently Deputy Chief Executive, Sector Capability with the Department of Building and Housing, who will take up the new role early this year.

The costs of filling the position of Deputy Chief Executive (Immigration) as given in response to Labour’s questions at the recent financial review were :

Advertising (in NZ and offshore) $23,559.24
Interview Costs $4,314.50
Testing Process (five candidates) $31,000.00
Executive Appointments Fee & Disbursements $48,401.20
Total $107,274.94

These are only the recruitment costs – I have no idea what the salary is.

Minister Coleman isn’t the first in the National Act government to try to politicise the public service.  But this one not only backfired, but has cost taxpayers a lot of money.

Filed under: public services, select committee
12 Comments

Company Registration – the Fastest System in the West

Posted by Lianne Dalziel on January 13th, 2010

On the World Bank Ease of Doing Business Survey New Zealand finds itself in the number one position when it comes to company registration – within hours a company can be registered on-line and a tax number issued by IRD.  It was that last feature that truly made our Companies Office the fastest register in the west.

The question is now being asked whether we want to hold on to that status in the face of an apparent loophole, (a loophole that knows no geographic boundaries I might add and which does not solely reside in New Zealand), which enables multiple layers of shelf companies to disguise the identity of the individuals who lie behind transactions that would otherwise be the subject of a high level of scrutiny from international intelligence and law enforcement agencies. 

There is no question that this requires the attention of the government.  In the paper I was indirectly quoted as saying that I thought our current company laws were lax.  In fact I said they were relaxed, which in my view is appropriate.  My husband had to apply for a new driver licence recently because he had lost his old one and he needed to front with two forms of ID – his passport and an official letter showing his address.  We could not possibly want to require that degree of verification of every director of every company in New Zealand.  That’s why I said we needed to apply balance in assessing what risks the current system posed and what the cost-benefit analysis would look like if we were thinking of changing it.

I also made the point that this must be an international issue, because New Zealand is not the only developed nation with a self-certification requirement for registering as directors. 

Now that the world has responded to the threat of money laundering and the financing of terrorism through imposing reporting requirements on financial institutions, then perhaps it is time that the World Bank turns its attention to the company registration systems that may be the next target to hide such activities.

But there are other reasons why I think our government should place this on its agenda now.  Having heard a number of submitters on the Commerce Committee’s Inquiry into Finance Company Failures I am convinced that there are sufficient issues around directors – including ‘celebrity directors’ offering reassurance to unsophisticated investors, directors with a troubled past not known to unsuspecting investors and examples of the use of the corporate veil to disguise related-party transactions – to warrant some strengthening of our laws. 

At the same time I want us to hold on to that World Bank ranking – because it is important that we don’t impose unjustifiable compliance costs on those who know that limited liability is a privilege not a right and who use it to advance their interests in an ethical manner, because they make up the vast majority of NZ businesses and are the lifeblood of our nation’s economic interests.

Filed under: economic, economy, finance, legislation, policy, regulation, select committee
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Food for thought#3

Posted by Brendon Burns on January 3rd, 2010

How safe  is the food we eat? I’ve related my Dad’s story of twigging 50 years ago to why his Canadian-resident mate’s sex drive had shrivelled; it was due to the estrogen being pumped into battery-raised chickens. Until last year,  I would have thought that such practices were a thing of the distant past. But as a member of the Primary Production Committee, I got to ask some questions mid-year of the  NZ Food Safety Authority.

Information provided to the committee told us that NZFSA was doing some studies about the use of antibiotics in factory-raised chickens. (Large amounts of antibiotics are required when chickens are stacked three and four a time into cages with an A4 size of space.) The NZFSA officials said that the studies they had done were not “conclusive” about whether the antibiotics used have any impact on human health. So what,  I asked, where they doing to provide some assurance to us as New Zealanders who eat dozens of kgs of chicken per capita every year. The NZFSA’s anwer was that it was doing some more studies!

Forgive the pun, but isn’t this rather putting the egg before the chicken? Should we be eating chicken  fed antibiotics if it is inconclusive that this will not do us any harm? I didn’t ask the question of NZFSA about whether estrogen is still fed to chickens here. Others might know? 

 I plan to follow it up, most especially since my good buddy Moana Mackey’s post about the guy in Louisiana who developed breasts and lost facial hair because he was eating chicken necks. The supposition is that because these include thyroid glands, this might be where estrogen is concentrated. I know from reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma that estrogen is fed to beef cattle in the US. This and the use of corn on feedlots has seen the average age of cattle at slaughter in the US reduce from perhaps 4 years a century ago to 14-16 months.  Chickens, be they US or NZ, are raised in a matter of weeks. Yes, it does provide cheap food but it seems to me that animial welfare and human welfare are both short of what they deserve.

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Filed under: Consumer Affairs, agriculture, environment, science, select committee
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Finance company inquiry

Posted by Lianne Dalziel on November 22nd, 2009

The Commerce Committee has held its first day of hearings on the Inquiry into Finance Company Failures. I have been criticised for chairing the inquiry as I was Minister of Commerce during the period that the finance company collapses occured – 2005-2008. They ignore that an incoming Labour government inherited what I’ve described as a regulatory wasteland and it took a considerable amount of time to bring our regulation up to international standards – starting from ensuring the Takeovers Panel had a code to enforce – through to providing appropriate regulatory oversight for registered exchanges (including rules around continuous disclosure, and much stricter rules around insider trading and market manipulation) – through to the Taskforce on Financial Intermediaries which I inherited as Minister after the 2005 election and the Review of Financial Products and Providers – which involved the release of 9 discussion documents in 2006 and the passing of 3 major pieces of legislation before the 2008 election. The current government has carried on this work and more regulation will be introduced as they work through the remaining elements of the reform package. The finance company failures have also highlighted deficiencies that were not apparent prior to the last government announcing decisions in 2007 about a fortnight before Bridgecorp collapsed.

This current inquiry is not designed to duplicate the work the previous government has done and the work the current government is doing. However I believe that my role as a former Minister of Commerce has given me some insights into the ‘what’s missing’ from the government’s current workplan. If anyone thinks that I am immune to the suffering of people who had no idea they were exposing their hard-earned money to the level of risk they were, then they don’t know me very well. Lessons must be learned about what attracted people to certain investments in the first place and whether we need tighter rules around what people are told about the nature of the risk they are taking.  We have been accused of being populist by looking at tracing the money post failure and sheeting home responsibility to directors – but tell Mum & Dad investors that these things don’t matter when directors maintain their high life protected by family trusts and limited liability.

The role of the media has been interesting and will continue to be so. Read this story about the first day of hearings. In light of recent comments about the media being afraid to take on high profile individuals for fear of legal action I found it fascinating that not one media outlet reported the high profile politician who was mentioned in Professor Adams’ damning case study; nor the name of the high profile financial adviser the Crone’s referred to – even though such reporting would be covered by Parliamentary Privilege. More to come as the hearings continue!

This is going to be a very interesting inquiry.

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Filed under: Labour Party, economic, finance, regulation, select committee
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