Tanya, the marine biologist from Massey, explained how it worked to clean the rocks in a single application and was an organic peat product. The company that makes the product (Spillsorb) was offering it at wholesale price to Maketü locals. I was thinking that Maritime NZ and the Government need to assess it and if anybody was paying it should be the Crown, not a small marae in a small community dedicated to cleaning up the coast.

We struggled into the white overalls, plastic bag feet and gloves and followed Tanya down to the nearest rocky shore. At first sight the place looked relatively untouched. Then we looked closer, large and small splashes of jet black oil were everywhere in the rocks and seaweed. The sea was slimy with oil sheen. We placed the sawdust like peat moss on the splashes of oil and waited for about two minutes per rock. Then we scraped the moss and oil into dough and bagged it. The peat moss worked brilliantly but there was no end to the amount of work to be done. It was hard to know whether to do every rock perfectly or whether to focus on the big patches. Rain came and went and the locals just kept going. For these Te Arawa people the coast is the kitchen and there is no question they will keep cleaning it up.

After a few hours we headed back to Papamoa to hear John Key speak. Nothing new was learned but people were muttering about any number of issues associated with delays and costs and rules of navigation. We met Kevin Hague on his way to the Marine Wildlife Centre where the dead outnumber the living birds. The locals at Maketu were very worried about their shag colony. Greenpeace were parked on the side of the road organising for a weekend of volunteer beach cleaning.

I also ran into the Minsiter for the Environment and asked him to look at the Spillsorb option and if they are going to use it to make sure the Crown pays, not the community. On our way back to a mining meeting in Waihi we called in to Waihi Beach. All looked untouched although locals said an oily penguin had been rescued. The currents are threatening the southern communities. Te Arawa and Ngati Awa are preparing for the worst.

We are all praying they can get the oil off that ship before she breaks, enough damage has been done.

Being in Hamilton reminds me of how it felt to be a young man realising my difference for the first time. Although Hamilton is now actually a pretty cool place, I remember the fear, isolation and desperation of the mid-1970s. You may well have seen the video clip I shot for the “It Gets Better” project. But why can’t we make it better right now?

That’s the genesis for Murray’s report (or at least for my role in sponsoring it). As an adult gay man, my life is immeasurably better than the one I would have led in 1970s, as a result of the hard-won gains like Homosexual Law reform, legal protection from discrimination and civil unions. But the teenage gay boy growing up today is still surrounded by a family, friends, school, church and pretty well every other element of his environment that assumes he is heterosexual. What he is most aware of is his difference from his peers and from the expectations of others. And most likely his role models are that guy in Glee, Ellen de Generes and an occasional character on Shortland Street. Sure it’s better than it was for some, but it’s still much worse than it should be, leading to many negative health, educational and other social outcomes.

So Murray’s report sets out to write the agenda for making it better for those young people right now, rather than having to hang on in quiet desperation until their fabulous adult lives kick in. The specific issues raised include bullying, isolation, invisibility of queer people, a lack of knowledge amongst professionals who work with youth, inconsistency in how school support queer students, the struggle to embrace the diversity within the queer community, a lack of public awareness of queer issues, poor policies for transgender health provision, and growing complacency towards queer activism and rights. This is the agenda around which we want to unite the adult LGBT communities and the wider community in working to implement. These were the key actions:

Schools

• Develop policies that would ensure all schools create safe and empowering environments for queer students.
• Make sexuality and gender diversity education part of the core curriculum.
• Weave diversity awareness into all aspects of the curriculum.
• Make queer issues and diversity training a central part of teacher training and professional development.
• Ensure that teaching staff diversity, in terms of culture, gender and sexual identities, has administrative and institutional support.

Support Groups

• Promote the establishment of both community and school based support groups.
• Develop a national network where support groups can collaborate and support one another.
• Develop a national QSA network to promote the establishment of QSA groups throughout the country.
• Ensure collaboration between QSA and community based groups and networks.

Visibility

• Hold the media accountable for negative or narrow representations of queer people.
• Develop the capabilities of media spokespeople throughout our community.
• Develop a database of media spokespeople throughout the country.
• Engage with and educate journalist and reporters.
• Encourage celebratory events that raise the visibility of the queer community.
• Seek government support for a national visibility/public education campaign.
• Work alongside sporting and cultural institutions to encourage more out role models in different public domains.

Nurturing Internal Diversity

• Ensure queer events and spaces cater for all queer people, not just the hegemonic groups.
• Cross-Sectoral Professional Development:
• Make diversity training and queer issues a central part of the training and professional development of all professionals who work with youth – i.e.Counsellors, Nurses, Teachers, Social Workers.

Policy

• Establish a policy group or network dedicated to promoting policy initiatives that will empower queer youth and seek to have the queer youth perspective heard in any policy development.
• Work with schools and other institutions to see existing policy implemented or enforced.
• Develop policies that make it easier for transgender youth to navigate the health system and access the appropriate services.
• Specific research into the health needs of transgender youth and the implications of existing policies is needed.

Immediately prior to going to Hamilton for the Pride Festival I had a day in which two situations were raised with me, with requests for my help. Coincidentally both were of 17 year old young men who had come out to their parents and been thrown out of their homes. It was a sobering reminder of just how important Murray’s report may prove to be.

The families of the Pike 29 have been there from day 1 of the Royal Commission, some there all day, every day, others dipping in and out as their other commitments and personal strength allow. I remember one event from Phase 1 that I found utterly heart-wrenching. Peter Whittall was giving a very long account of the types of machine being used in the mine. I was sitting out in the waiting room with a handful of family members, getting a break from the intensity of the courtroom itself, but still able to watch the evidence on closed circuit TV. At one point Mr. Whittall brought up a slide of the coal face to illustrate the pattern of scouring on the rock left by a continuous mining machine. It was an unremarkable image. Yet two of the women in the waiting area with me suddenly became very animated and rushed to the wall where the screen hangs. “That’s where they are” one of them said to the other.

For the families, who wait through agonising months, now almost a year, for the remains of their loved ones to be brought out of the mine so they can have some sense of closure, the Royal Commission gives them the opportunity to understand how this disaster occurred and, perhaps, to hold someone accountable.

In this phase of the inquiry we are going to hear a lot more about how the families have been communicated with, but already we have heard some damning revelations. Some readers may have seen on television  earlier this year some of the images taken in the so-called ‘fresh air base’ in the mine, showing an opened box that contained self-rescuers (which allow a person roughly 50 minutes of Oxygen when worn correctly). We don’t know exactly how that box was opened, but it very clearly establishes that at least one strong possibility is that one or more people survived the initial blast and were able to access the self-rescuers.

What has been revealed publicly for the first time this week is that this image did not just become available this year. In fact it was recorded on November 24th, just days after the first explosion and before the second explosion. The Mine Manager gave evidence that it was clear to him as soon as he saw the image at that time that it showed an opened self-rescue box.

You probably won’t remember, but the second explosion corresponded roughly with the time that all the authorities started assuring us that everybody died in the first explosion, but all the time they said this they KNEW that there was at least a strong possibility this was not the case, but elected not to tell the families or the public. In fact I know how this image eventually came to light publicly, and it was not through official action. If that hadn’t happened, would it ever have been released?

Two obvious explanations present themselves for covering up this evidence; one charitable, one not. The charitable explanation is that authorities believed it would be of some comfort to families to believe that their loved ones had died instantly. The uncharitable explanation is that authorities wished to divert attention from the obvious questions about whether or not it had actually been possible to mount a rescue.

There’s a political dimension to this too. You may remember that at the time of the disaster, Mr. Brownlee and Mr. Key were apparently very closely involved. It is inconceivable that they were not told about the opened self-rescuer box, which means that they were almost certainly party to covering this up, and deceiving the families and the public.

The questions for Mr. Key don’t stop there though. Mr White indicated that as far back as December he was instructed to refer to a ‘stabilisation’ operation at the mine and not to use the word ‘recovery’. Talking about recovery of the human remains was “politically unacceptable” he had been told. It would raise expectations and cost too much. He had budgeted that recovery could occur with a budget of $10 million. He had been given a budget of $5 million. When this evidence was given the talk both inside the Courtoom and then outside during the break was of the many occasions on which Mr. Key gave the families a sweeping assurance that no effort would be spared to recover the dead men. Apparently a disconnect between the public assurance and the behind closed doors instruction.

I was going to say that I think I am now the only person from the official party at the Pike River Memorial still following the Royal Commission. That wouldn’t be fair though. I can’t make it every day, and no doubt there are some people there when I’m not, and others are watching online. But the person who really doesn’t seem to be involved right now, who really needs to be is John Key. He needs to give some answers. And he needs to follow through on his promises.

I got to part of Phase 1 as well, and the routine is much the same. Half the public space is taken up by members of the Pike families, the other half by witnesses, people from helping agencies and affected parties, and a couple of strays like me. I hope nobody else needs legal representation in New Zealand at the moment, because there’s a small army of barristers, including at least 4 QCs. A couple of journalists sit in the Court room, but most are in a separate room watching proceedings on the closed circuit TV, and are strangely insulated from what is going on.

The Commissioners don’t have much to say, but their questions, hearteningly, usually indicate a strong focus on the most important issues. This week the most significant witnesses have been Daniel Rockhouse, one of the two survivors and a genuine hero; Doug White, who was the Mine Manager at the time of the disaster, and enormously experienced, especially in Australia; and Neville Rockhouse, the Safety and Training Manager for Pike River Coal, and father of both Daniel, and Ben, who died in the disaster.

Commissioner Bell, an Australian mining expert, has asked, for me, the two most telling questions of the week. At the end of almost two days of evidence from Doug White, he asked him whether, in his extensive experience of mining around the world and especially in Australia, he had ever encountered a situation where a mine operates for 7-8 years without receiving at least some kind of corrective instruction from the regulator. The answer was no. That happened at Pike.

Then today when Neville Rockhouse finished his evidence Commissioner Bell asked him how often the Department of Labour Inspectors had audited the safety procedures and policies he had developed. The answer was never.

I think these exchanges carried such a powerful impact because we have sat in the Court day after day hearing damning evidence of safety problems. Some of these we already knew about because I had tabled the evidence in parliament or from the miners’ accounts, but they included:

• The disastrous “second exit” up the ventilation shaft, that would have required a sheer vertical climb (actually overhanging for a period) up a 55m ladder, which Mines Rescue characterised as “extremely difficult to use in normal circumstances; impossible in a fire”. Oh, and the ladder could only support 8 people on it at one time, just supposing they actually could climb it (contrast with up to 60 who could be in the mine at a change of shift)
• The emergency phone line that went to answerphone
• Nobody to meet the two survivors when they struggled to the surface
• Broken ‘smoke lines’ that miners use to find their way out of the mine when there is limited visibility because of smoke
• Sensors disabled on safety equipment
• Very infrequent disaster training exercises
• Wholly inadequate gas drainage plans
• Drilling occurring immediately adjacent to cavities filled with pressurised flammable gas. If these cavities were actually breached they were ‘capped’. There was an incident where one of these caps didn’t hold and was forced out at speed, knocking out a man nearby
• Reports of multiple ignitions
• Telephone and air supply to a decommissioned “fresh air base” part way along the ‘drift’ which is the tunnel leading from the portal to the working area, was disconnected without the knowledge of the Mine Manager, the Safety Manager or the miners
• The area in the working area of the mine called a “fresh air base” was not actually sealable from the atmosphere in the mine, meaning that it was not, in fact, a fresh air base and, indeed there was not one in the mine. This is especially important because Peter Whittall in his evidence said that, because of the difficulty of using the so-called second exit, miners were instead encouraged to go to the fresh air base in the event of an incident.

In some ways the most telling illustration of the safety culture that prevailed was the tag board. Each miner or contractor has a personal ID tag. When they go underground this must be put on a hook on a board, and when they leave underground they collect the tag. It’s obviously of fundamental importance to know who is underground at any one time. Yet on November 19th two people had left the mine without removing their tags, and one person was undergound without his tag being on the board – an error rate of about 10%.

Clearly there was something fundamentally wrong in Pike River Coal. It was clear from the evidence that the Safety Manager had a relatively low status, and very limited influence or authority (his delegated authority to spend had a maximum level of $5,000 for example). He had only one staff member, who focused on training. The answer to virtually every question about safety problems has  been that a plan was being developed to deal with it, but I have heard almost nothing about safety improvements actually being implemented. Both Doug White and Neville Rockhouse have said, when confronted with the inadequacy of systems to deal with what actually occurred, that nobody ever expected the mine to blow up.

And that’s just it really: the company was under financial and production pressure, creating strong incentives for it to cut corners and to wave away the risks of unlikely disasters. In this they were aided and abetted by regulations that only require them to do what is “practicable” and an inspectorate within the Department of Labour with the even weaker requirement to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that employers do what is “practicable”, and where inspectors were over-stretched, under-resourced and insufficiently experienced.

It’s great that the Government has been forced to back down and create a dedicated High Hazard Unit, with significantly more personnel and resource for inspections. But if all they can do is police against the morass of weasel words that is the current OSH regulatory approach then yet another disaster will be inevitable. Government must move to make mine safety regulations mandatory and universal. Not after the election. Not when the Royal Commission reports. Now.

The weekend had a bit of everything: gorgeous scenery, local hospitality, wide-eyed children, even local political drama.

The ride follows the Forgotten World Highway and is framed by Mt Ruapehu at the start and Mt Taranaki in the end. You cross several great passes and ride through the deeply forested Tangarakau River gorge. You’re pedalling along one of New Zealand’s quietest state highways, so you often feel like you have the whole place to yourself. It’s certainly a very safe route for cycle touring.

And that’s where things got interesting. The local head of Federated Farmers wrote a strongly worded letter to the Ruapehu Press labeling the route too dangerous for “pushbikes” and was offended at the thought of cyclists pooping in farmers’ fields along the way. Many believe the letter led to the local mayor to cancel at short notice her appearance at the launch.

The letter was obviously unfair and reminded me of how we can sometimes be our own worst enemies. The Forgotten World Highway Cycle Trail offers Taumaranui the opportunity to diversify and strengthen its economy. It’s one of the safest routes in New Zealand for cycling and any toileting issues, should they arise, can be solved quite simply.

The weekend’s ride gave a handful of New Zealanders their first glimpse of what our Cycle Trail network will eventually look like, with outstanding backcountry road rides joining our network of Great Rides off road and urban cycling infrastructure in places like New Plymouth.

It’s exciting time to be a cyclist in New Zealand.

This weekend people will be able to get more of a sense of what that network might eventually look like. The first phase of Nga Haerenga has focused on creating ‘Great Rides’. These are mostly purpose-built and off-road, and mostly oriented to recreation and tourism, showing off some of  our country’s most visually impressive natural features.These tracks are mostly finished or close to finishing, and I have several more to open before the election. In the meantime the team has moved to start identifying great cycle touring routes. These will both link the Great Rides and provide recommended ways to cycle longer distances. The routes are mostly on quiet back-country roads, which will be prioritised for safety improvements and signed so that all road users know to expect cyclists. There are three routes being launched this weekend, all linking to Taumarunui (which is, after all, on the Main Trunk Line. As if there were branches). One goes to Ongarue, which is one of the launching points for the amazing new track through Pureora Forest, while another heads to Whakahoro, connecting to the tracks linking Ruapehu District with Whanganui (some of which I’ve previously ridden, and know they’re going to be great).

The third route takes the “Forgotten Highway” through Whangamomona (which, as I recall, is a separate country, unless it’s been re-annexed) and then branches off to New Plymouth. New Plymouth is already well-known for its fantastic coastal pathway for walking and cycling (which now extends as far as Bell Block and looks like going further) but was also selected, along with Hastings, to be a ‘model community’ for walking and cycling. In this scheme NZTA has put up some funding that will assist the City Council to implement and pilot best practice in encouraging walking and cycling with a view to rolling these ideas out in other areas.. Ive been speaking to the team from the Council and am pretty excited by what they have achieved already and what they have coming up.

So this weekend people will see three distinct but integrated components of the eventual national network: the Great Rides, on-road great cycle touring routes, and urban cycling infrastructure. We start with some speeches in Taumarunui tomorrow morning and then a bunch of us will ride the new route to Whangamomona on Saturday night and then on to New Plymouth. Local riders strongly encouraged to come and join us, or at least roll up for my compelling and insightful speeches in both locations!

The original bill was already doing some daft things — significantly expanding offences relating hardware that could be drug-taking utensils, and making medicines containing pseudoephedrine ‘prescription only’ in the name of the war against P.

Now Dunne has abused the parliamentary process to introduce an amendment that has no real relationship with the original Bill, except that it too is connected with drugs. If we had tried doing this it would’ve been ruled out of order, because people who submitted on the Bill could not have anticipated that this might become part of it and so won’t have commented about it.

I maintain that if the Government wanted to add in this whole new set of provisions, they should have used the recent two week recess to give the public the opportunity to have a say about the plans. I challenged them to do this three weeks ago, but to no avail. There has been enough time to run an acceptable process, but Government has simply chosen not to do so.

Along with this poor process, the amendment itself is rather bad.

Under the proposed law, the minister could gazette pretty much any substance that could result in harm — salt, caffeine, icing sugar — therefore making it a class C substance. There would be no public scrutiny or medical/scientific advice.

The “herbal high” industry has done a very poor job since the issue of synthetic cannabis turned into a public debate. There have been problems with the quality of their product and they have acted irresponsibly when criticised.

We do want regulation of synthetic cannabis, but the move to outright ban it is not the right direction.
The Law Commission issued a report last year which recommends that we move away from the ineffective and dangerous criminalisation of drugs to a model that minimises harm.

The best lifestyle is a drug free lifestyle, but banning synthetic cannabis and criminalising users is not the answer. Regulating the industry and providing addiction support services is a better option.

Peter Dunne has circumvented the democratic process by not letting this issue that — judging from the media coverage — is of great public interest, go to select committee.

Readers may well have heard me talk previously about the Adoption Act. It dates back to 1955, and effectively fossilises the attitudes and values of that time. Greens started looking at this because the Act only permits couples to adopt if they are married, excluding de facto couples (though that has been reversed in Court) and same sex couples from adopting. First Metiria and then I had Members’ Bills in the ballot to change this. However we were persuaded that a lot more was wrong with the 1955 Act, and that total overhaul or replacement was necessary.  Most crucially, the 1955 Act treats children as, effectively, chattels and adoption like a property transaction. The law needs to reflect the primacy of the child’s interests and welfare.

Ten years ago the Law Commission produced a comprehensive report on the care of children. The Labour Government of the time passed the Care of Children Act, which implemented the Law Commission’s proposed changes to limited term guardianship arrangements, but did nothing with the recommended replacement of the Adoption Act. Probably this was because Labour was scared of debate around the issue of same sex couples, and maybe couldn’t muster the numbers within its own caucus – six Labour MPs (including three current ones) even voted against Civil Unions, for goodness’ sake.

Because of Labour filibustering on the VSM bill there is no real prospect that Jacinda’s bill will even go into the ballot, let alone be drawn from it, and anyway National’s approach to all bills from Opposition members has been to vote them down at First Reading. Jacinda argues that the purpose of her bill is to put pressure on Simon Power to instruct the Law Commission to do more work, but I can’t see how her idea of a bill could even remotely do this. Instead the real reason for her announcement is its rhetorical value. On the positive side I guess it indicates to the public that Labour does now support adoption law reform and maybe helps to raise awareness of the issue. Jacinda will also be hoping that gay, lesbian and other progressive voters in Auckland Central will also read into her move that she is doing something about adoption by same sex couples. Unfortunately for Jacinda, while I’m sure she is personally progressive on the issue, she doesn’t get to speak for her Party on it, and Phil Goff, along with opposing gay marriage, has also been at best cagey on adoption.

But while it’s useful for the public to know that Labour now supports some sort of adoption law reform, Labour’s unilateral action with the proposed bill will also damage the work that has been occurring to overhaul adoption law. When I withdrew my previous bill I instead set out to achieve the broader reform of law that was needed, and first developed support for and then convened a multilateral, cross-party group to work on the issues. The progress of the group has been slow but, as I have tried to point out to the less patient advocates for change, the best chance of success is a careful process that builds support and keeps everybody on board. Rushing makes reform less likely, by returning the issue to the traditional arm wrestle for political advantage between National and Labour.

What remains to be seen is whether Jacinda’s move represents an abandonment by Labour of the multilateral approach, and whether National will be willing to stay at the table in the face of Labour’s attempt to gain political advantage from the issue. I will be working to try to keep the cross-party approach alive. Otherwise adoption law reform will be off the table for another decade.

Green Party Active Transport spokesperson and champion of all people who ride bikes, Kevin Hague, recently discovered that Police do very little with the information they receive when cyclists report unsafe road behaviour to a dedicated police hotline.

At a time when so many people have died in bike accidents that the Coroner has launched a special inquest, this lax attitude to bike safety is not ok. In this podcast, Kevin talks about what he found out, and what he thinks we could do better to ensure that people who ride bikes are safe on our roads.

If you’ve got issues you’d like Kevin to raise when he meets with the Police about bike safety, email or call his Parliamentary office on 04 817 8253.

Click the arrow thing to play…

Click to play

Thought you might like the video of my questions in the House about mine safety. You might like to consider whether you think the Minister is answering the questions or evading their main points!

It’s effectively the companion to our release today.

Essentially what I am saying is that while National was dismantling the structure and regulations that maximised underground safety during the 1990s, they were being repeatedly warned by experts that this would cost lives, yet paid those warnings no heed. In 1992 they did away with the check inspectors – effectively one leg of a 3-legged stool, and in 1998 they sawed off more than half of one of the other legs by closing down the Mines Inspectorate.

This was coupled with a change to regulations. The Health and Safety in Employment Act in 1992 repealed the strict and mandatory safety rules for underground mining in the Coal Mines Act 1979 and replaced them with nothing, leaving underground mining largely unregulated. No new regulations were introduced until 1999, but the new rules incorporated a fundamentally different approach. Instead of being mandatory and universal, the new regulations generally contained a qualifier “where practicable”. The idea of practicability has embedded within it the idea of “affordability”, which is highly specific to an individual mining company and mine. Thus a safety measure that may be practicable for a substantial and well-founded mining company like Solid Energy, may be impracticable for a smaller and cash-strapped company, perhaps like Pike River Coal. I believe that the Terms of Reference for the Royal Commission may well not be broad enough to capture this.

I make the point that Labour had nine years in which to restore the ‘triangle of safety’ inspectorate structure and the universal, mandatory regulations that had previously ensured safety, but did not. Now this Government has had repeated opportunities to do something but has turned them all down. Now they say they will wait for the findings of the Royal Commission before doing anything – 2013 at the earliest. Could it be they would prefer to not have their inaction on mine safety connected with the Pike 29 before the General Election?

And in the meantime, every day, workers go underground into mines that we know operate in a regulatory framework that does not do all that it could to maximise safety. That seems to me to be fundamentally unacceptable.

You might wonder why I tabled the 1995 submission of Mr. Brazil, a Mines Inspector and underground mining expert, at the end of my questions. Here’s a quote from his submission:

“Furthermore the Health and Safety in Employment Act is being used as a manipulative device to eliminate management structures and many historically formed mining codes of practice that were firmly established in the heart of previous legislation, much of which has proved successful over 100 years. Should this situation be allowed to continue without intervention the end result can only be the escalation of potential for further disaster”

How many more?

This clip from New York shows how one cyclist is fighting back, with humour:

I have, and when I used the Official Information Act to find out if my experience as a cyclist was shared by others, the Police couldn’t tell me — they don’t keep any meaningful records about who’s reporting what.

Cyclists’ complaints are getting lost in the system and bad driving is going uninvestigated and unprosecuted as a result. Their negligence is compromising the way they prioritise the policing of roads.

People who ride bikes deserve the same protection from the Police as other road users, but it seems they are being badly let down.

Take a look at the following examples of driver behaviour around cyclist Ian Wilde and comment whether you think the Police should be taking action. Despite the video evidence, the Police are still to act on either incident!

.

To see more examples of bad driver behaviour around cyclists that Police are yet to act on, click here.

Kevin

The interview is 27 minutes long, but it’s well worth a watch to see Kevin and Amelia expose the Government’s economy with the truth in manufacturing a “crisis” in ACC in order to justify enriching overseas-owned insurance companies to the detriment of ordinary New Zealanders who have the misfortune to suffer a work accident.

The theme of International Nurses Day 2011 is increasing access and equity, and it is particularly timely. Next week’s budget will see cuts across a range of social services and income support such as Working for Families, and it is reasonable to assume these cuts will have a flow on impact on access to health care. This is on the back of cuts to primary health funding in last year’s budget. Less income and a lack of funding make health choices harder.

25% of New Zealand kids live in poverty and there is a direct correlation between their economic status and their poor health outcomes.  Last year Dr Nikki Turner, from Child Poverty Action Group, put together a presentation called Poverty Leads to Poor Health that shows overall a child from a low-income household has a 1.4 times higher risk of dying than a child from a wealthy household. She also shows that after hour emergency costs for kids can be over $50 depending on where you live. That is a lot of money if you are on a low income.    

Nurses are on the frontline dealing with these issue day to day. So it is great to see their union,  the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO), again leading the charge for a better health system. Their 2011 election manifesto sets out a series of recommendations that would make our system better and improve access and equity.  Universal access to primary health care, greater investments in the nursing workforce and addressing the drivers of poor health outcomes are essential to building a happy and healthy New Zealand.

Nurses’ historic pay equity campaign showed that they and their union are capable of winning the changes they want. Let’s all get behind their campaign Vote Well for a Healthy Future to win the health system we need.

Blackball speech – Time for a Green Change

30^th April 2011

(speech as delivered was slightly different)

E nga mana, e nga reo, e nga iwi o te motu, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.

It’s great to be in Blackball again this year to be part of this great Mayday mix of food, entertainment and politics. Thanks to everyone involved in the organisation.

I very much appreciated being part of this afternoon’s opening of the memorial wheel for the Pike 29.  I couldn’t be here on Thursday, having earlier promised to attend the Service and Food Workers Union event in Nelson for Workers Remembrance Day, but I want to add my voice to those mourning the guys who were lost to our community in the mine. No reira, e nga mate, haere, haere, haere ki Hawaiki Nui, Ki Hawaiki Roa, Ki Hawaiki Pamamao. Apiti hono, tatai hono. Te hunga mate ki te hunga mate.

It is a national disgrace that these guys will now only be brought from the mine as an inadvertent consequence of some future decision based on commercial grounds.

I know on Thursday Helen Kelly spoke about the responsibility of employers to provide a healthy and safe workplace. I am certainly going to be monitoring the Royal Commission of Inquiry to see that it fulfils its responsibility to determine whether Pike River Coal did all it could to meet that responsibility but also that successive governments did all they could to create and maintain a framework for mining to occur that would achieve maximum workplace health and safety. I guess it’s no secret that I believe shortcomings will be found on both of those grounds.

And that’s not a surprise. I spoke last year about the central idea in capitalist economic theory in which big capital extracts as much profit as it possibly from people’s labour and from the environment, which it regards as “raw materials”. It’s an amoral process, in which if costs can be reduced, they will be. This National Government sees its fundamental role as allowing this process to occur with as few obstacles as possible, and at the same time dismantling the role of the State, to create fresh opportunities for profit maximisation.

Since I spoke last year, the Government has kindly provided me with yet more examples:

• The new law allowing workers to be sacked for no reason at all within their first 90 days of work
• The new law denying trade unions right of access to their members’ workplaces
• Wave after wave of attacks on beneficiaries
• Effectively nothing to create new jobs, thus maintaining high demand for jobs and keeping wages low
• No new state houses (despite the waiting list of 10,000)
• Tax changes that greatly benefited the rich while leaving the poor worse off
• Ongoing dismantling of our ACC scheme and preparation for its privatisation
• Significant cuts to DOC’s budget, with nearly 3,000 species on the endangered list and in the International Year of Biodiversity
• The Minister’s refusal to agree to new marine reserves

There’s also been progress towards the TPP, the free-trade agreement being developed with the United States and others. We have mostly been attacking it because it will involve compromising on important NZ laws, allowing tobacco companies, for example, to sue the NZ Government for smokefree initiatives, and requiring changes to our patent laws to allow big pharmaceutical giants to maximise their profits at our expense. But some of you may recall that last year I also made a critique of free trade agreements and globalisation in general: fundamentally these are about lowering national boundaries so that big capital has access to the cheapest labour and cheapest natural resources wherever they are in the world.

In that light you may want to note a couple of other developments:

• The Government changing well-established employment law because Warner Brothers didn’t like it
• The Government issuing an oil exploration permit (which requires drilling) to the Brazilian company, Petrobras, which has a poor safety record, without it having to submit any plan to deal with an oil spill, and without there being any realistic way at all of dealing with an oil spill.

In both cases, you may observe that these companies take all the profit. All we get is the wages, in return for all the risk.

Last year I outlined the Green Party’s overall approach to turning things around. We say that the relationships between economy, environment and people need to be reversed. Rather than people and the environment serving the economy, we need to re-engineer a smart economy as a set of tools for achieving our goals of environmental protection and a fair, just society.

Over the past week or so we have fired off an opening salvo in this election campaign with a leaflet with the theme ‘Looking Forward’. In part that reflects that long-term thinking that the Greens are well known for. But it’s also meant in the sense of “what are you looking forward to?” We are asking everybody to engage in thinking about what they most want to see – effectively setting those environmental and social goals we want to achieve. There’s been an extraordinary diversity so far, but also some really consistent themes.

Closer to the election the Greens will issue a number of concrete and robust commitments that we will advance in the next Parliament if you give us your party vote (and remember that’s what we campaign for, not the electorate). In the meantime, here’s some of the things we would do if we led the next Government:

• Increase the minimum wage (and index it to the median wage, along with MP salaries)
• Compulsory quality standards for all freshwater streams, rivers and lakes
• Recovery plans for all threatened species in NZ and realistic support to help DOC achieve that in partnership with communities
• Building resilience in rural areas by relocalising economies (encouraging local food and energy production,  local goods and services and Government services)
• Plan for energy independence from oil
• Return to a planned system for making electricity generation decisions in which all the alternatives are considered and the ones that are best for the public are chosen
• Reprioritise Government spending (less on roads and more on “nice to haves” like education and health)
• Repeal the anti-worker laws
• Cancel the plans to sell SOEs and privatise government services
• Retain our economic sovereignty by much tighter restrictions on foreign ownership of NZ land and assets
• Incentivise research and development to help build a clean tech economy that delivers higher wages by making higher value products, at no net cost to the environment
• Help make the 100% Pure brand real, by reducing taxes on people’s work and replacing the revenue with new taxes on waste (including Carbon emissions) and resource rentals
• Create green collar jobs by directing both public and private investment into areas that are job-rich and help protect and restore the environment
• Build 6,000 new state houses
• Legislation to require rental properties to be healthy and warm
• Extend our home insulation scheme to schools and other public buildings
• Introduce a capital gains tax to redirect investment into productive activity rather than housing speculation and fund other policies like first $10,000 of income tax free, progressive electricity pricing, extending the WFF in-work tax credit to beneficiaries, reinstating the training incentive allowance
• Incentives for new and more diverse forestry
• Encourage businesses whose profits are retained in the communities where they were obtained
• Encourage community- and cooperative-owned businesses
• Sharing the cost of rebuilding fairly by a temporary levy on those with higher incomes rather than making the poor pay by service cuts or are kids pay through more borrowing

That’s a programme that would provide immediate benefit in the places and for the people who need it most, but maybe more importantly would put in place the correct relationships between economy, environment and society and establish a virtuous cycle whereby the whole system would continue to improve. And it’s all practical, and achievable by reprioritising spending and tax reform. Big business would hate it!

The fact is that NZ faces big challenges. National is steering the ship with blinkers on and without using the radar. If it is re-elected, its programme – whether through ignorance or malice – will be an acceleration of these policies that have done so much to unravel NZ’s social fabric and benefit a few to the cost of so many. The Greens have chosen to focus on hope for a better society and on a programme of practical, achievable and fiscally responsible steps that will be good for you, for me and our planet. Party vote Green!

Corporation staff, I was told, had become fed up with clients who were seen to be “ripping off the system”. These people were therefore referred to a specialist who I was told, was unafraid of examining factors aside from the injury. I was told quite clearly that this was where Dr [Laurie] Gluckman’s usefulness lay, as he was a qualified physician, and a psychiatrist, and he had been used over a number of years as the Corporation’s “hit man”.

The NZ Herald today reports on orthopaedic surgeon Brian Otto who featured in an ACC appeal judgment from the District Court recently:

Liangfang Lu, 48, was awarded about $5000 after Auckland District Court Judge Martin Beattie found ACC wrongly suspended payments to him on the basis that his back pain was caused by degeneration.

The judge noted that the first two of orthopaedic surgeon Brian Otto’s three reports on Mr Lu had diagnosed degeneration without the surgeon seeing the relevant MRI scan.

“I find that Mr Otto has not correctly identified the state of affairs when he had the opportunity of examining the MRI scan [in his third report],” the judge said. “He has stuck to his tried and true assertion that degeneration is the cause.”

It appears Mr Otto has a bit of a reputation among ACC claimants.  Go to the ACCforum site run by ACC claimants and search on “Brian Otto” and you’ll find plenty of commentary there on him, none of it complimentary.  There are a number of other medical practitioners who appear to attract a disproportionate amount of unfavourable comment at ACCForum.

Green ACC Spokesperson Kevin Hague has consistently called for an inquiry into ACC’s claims management practices.  This issue needs to be a part of it.

Here are a couple of suggestions. ACC should give claimants a choice of assessor within a particular medical specialty, rather than choose the assessor themselves.  That would help dispel the perception that ACC are deliberately choosing assessors who are favourable to disentitling claimants.  And fund some effective claimant advocacy, so there are expert advisors whom claimants can consult about which assessor to choose.

I posted on it last year, when only I (and possibly Jonathan Coleman; it was hard to tell) did the pink shirt thing in Parliament. What has amazed me is the astonishing buzz that has taken hold this year.

Amongst the many blog posts I was particularly struck by Philip Patston’s comments. In particular I thought he makes an important point that we need to focus on the behaviour of bullying, rather than labelling people as ‘bullies’ or ‘bullying victims’.

Pink Shirt Day is about standing up against all bullying, and rightly so, but I know people will understand that my strongest concern is with bullying of young Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual and Intersex people. I know all too well how the experience of being discriminated against or subjected to belittling or violent behaviour leads to the psychosocial risk factors that underpin many negative health and other social outcomes.

The LGBTI youth groups have a campaign this year in association with Pink Shirt Day to get people to write letters to John Key, calling for effective action against bullying behaviour. That’s a campaign everyone can be involved in, of course, and will have broad benefits. Here’s a short video clip from Blake Skellerup, New Zealand’s speed skating Olympian, promoting the idea. Blake’s positive message is strongly in synch with the “It Gets Better” campaign that I was proud to take part in this year. Please write a letter yourself.

Finally I wanted to share with you a fantastic Irish campaign. It’s targeted at homophobic bullying, but its core message is actually for all of us.

There are some great initiatives to counter homophobia, like the Gay and Straight alliances that started out in the early 1990s and now exist in many schools, most recently in Nelson Boys’ College, (we think) the first boys school to have such a group. Congratulations guys!

Experience rating will result in an individual employer’s ACC levies being adjusted up or down on the basis of their work injury record.  The idea is supposedly that individual employers will respond to the prospect of increased or reduced levies by improving workplace safety.

On the face of it, that doesn’t sound like the craziest of ideas, until we look at how experience rating operated when ACC were last required to use it.  When experience rating was in place in the 1990s it created perverse incentives both for employers and for ACC.  The 1990s experience revealed:

• Experience rating had a negative financial impact on the financial performance of the ACC scheme – more funds were paid out in levy rebates resulting from positive experience ratings than received in loadings on levies due to negative experience ratings.
• The formula for experience rating changed each year in an attempt to address the above problem – resulting in year to year uncertainty for employers.
• Experience rating placed pressure on ACC staff to remove costs by moving claims from the work account to other accounts and increased the likelihood of employers contesting that an injury was a work injury, with resultant uncertainty and delays in cover and rehabilitation for the injured person.
• ACC were required to spend significantly more time and money in defending cost allocation through the dispute resolution process rather than focusing on rehabilitation of claimants.

Helen Kelly from the NZ Council of Trade Unions hits the nail on the head when she says:

Rewarding employers for a lower claims rate doesn’t reduce accidents but provides incentives for accidents to be covered up – either not reported, or misrepresented as having happened out of work, or bullying employees not to seek treatment. This will weaken health and safety practice by distorting the incidence of and reasons for accidents.

It will also lead to the end of industry-wide approaches on health and safety issues as employers focus on their own enterprise, reducing innovation and the sharing of learning across employers in a sector. Workers will suffer because their industry as a whole will not learn from the experiences of others.

And as the author of the ACC scheme, Sir Owen Woodhouse, has himself pointed out, experience rating runs counter to the community responsibility principle upon which ACC was founded.

This isn’t about reducing workplace injuries at all.  It is about forcing ACC to behave more like an insurance company in preparation for its privatisation.

Folding bikes reduce the pressure on limited bike parking facilities at train stations, as well as limited space for cycles on trains. They also enable cycle/train commuters to become integrated with most other public transport services.

The really interesting aspect of their new policy is their plan to promote the uptake of folding bikes by offering a 25-30%-off discount voucher for one of these bicycles. The discount will reduce the cost of a folding bike to around $500.

If it goes ahead, the offer will be limited to Wellington residents and will expire on the 31st December 2011.

Let’s review:

I started being active on gay rights issues in 1978 (in a minor way – wore jeans to University on ‘Blue Jeans Day’ – quite daring at the time). I was active on Homosexual Law Reform into the 1980s, did some minor community organising around a more supportive social environment for people with HIV in the mid 80s, and spent 5 years in the late 80s/early 90s working for the NZ AIDS Foundation on human rights issues, and advocating for reform of the Human Rights Act (we succeeded in 1993). I wasn’t really involved in the Civil Unions campaign but came back to the AIDS Foundation in 1998 as Executive Director for another 5 years. I was one of the people who organised the HERO Party in 1991, the event which started the HERO Festival, and I was the Executive Director of the Foundation when the Big Gay Out started, substantially organised by the Foundation. There’s lots more besides, like lots of gay youth support work, organising, chairing and speaking for the National Gay and Lesbian Conference in 1989, organising the campaign that destroyed the Auckland Star (as a result of Frank Haden’s homophobic editorials) etc etc. So I have a personal track record.

Oh, and here I am at the Big Gay out, being gay!

And the Green Party is the only Party in the NZ Parliament that has a policy of complete equality in the law for GLBTI people. All Green Party politicians have voted in favour of measures to better recognise GLBTI rights. It is the Green Party that had a bill in the ballot in the last Parliament to legislate for same sex couples’ adoption rights, and we have continued to try to make progress on this issue in the current Parliament. We are also campaigning to create an action plan to achieve a more supportive social environment for young lesbians and gay men, I was the only NZ politician to film a video as part of the international “It Gets Better” campaign, and Greens have generally led initiatives on GLBTI rights.

In contrast we saw massive coverage of the Prime Minister. He eventually remembered that he was in favour of the 1981 Springbok Tour, of course, and although I haven’t seen him have to remember what he thought about Homosexual Law Reform, I wouldn’t mind betting that he opposed it. We know he opposed Civil Unions, and he refuses to answer questions about whether he still does. His speech to the BGO invited the GLBTI communities to be thankful to his Government for not repealing the partial recognition of our human rights that we have so far achieved. He then virtually decreed that we would have our own ‘Mardi Gras’ in Auckland (apparently it would be good for the economy). Forgive me if I’m wrong here, but it seems to me a bit off for such an idea to come from the PM rather than our communities themselves. And despite the excited reporting by mainstream media of Key’s intentions, and the fact that the HERO Parade is missed by many, there is widespread cynicism in the GLBTI communities (here’s community leader Michael Stephens’ blog) about the sense of being exploited for National’s political gain.

Phil Goff also got a lot of coverage. Well okay Fran Wilde was a Labour MP, it was Labour that passed Civil Union legislation, Labour has brought into Parliament gay, lesbian and transsexual MPs, and under the Labour Government there were lots of ways in which the administration of government resulted in better lives for our communities. Credit where it’s due. And many of Labour’s current MPs are absolutely great, and good friends of mine. So perhaps it was the intense heat in Auckland on Sunday that made my blood boil when I heard Phil Goff make the claim that Labour was THE party for our communities. To put that in context, we actually secured human rights protection under a National Government, with Labour failing to implement its policy despite years in office; Labour only went as far as Civil Unions (rather than marriage), 6 Labour MPs voted against Civil Unions, including 3 current MPs (Cosgrove, O’Connor and Ross Robertson), and despite having the opportunity while in Government, Labour declined to do anything for same sex adoption rights. Full legal equality is not Labour policy. I could go on. The point is that despite Labour having been pretty good, Goff’s claim is out of step with the actual record of Labour often playing both sides of the fence.

For what it’s worth, my actual speech expressed the Green Party’s support for GLBTI communities and the BGO (said “fabulous” a few times), asked for support for my campaign to make a better world for young people coming out, and pointed out that voting to keep MMP in this year’s referendum is fundamentally important for retaining representation of our diversity and our perspectives in the Parliament. People seemed to like it. Shame that John and Phil got all the attention.