It’s pretty disappointing that a committee  made up mostly of Auckland-based MPs wouldn’t grant me leave. The decision  continues the ‘blame someone else, but look like you are taking action’ approach adopted by the Government.

Auckland Council released their report on what happened yesterday, however this was far from an independent report. Essentially, the investigation was self-conducted and unsurprisingly reported back the problems, but not who was responsible.

The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, made up of members from National, Labour and the Greens, is the appropriate place for a cross-party inquiry and could have looked at what role Government played in the embarrassment. I think it’s vital we ask: was the transport debacle caused by systematic bias against trains and buses in Government transport planning and decades of underinvestment? The committee has had a very light work load for quite a long period of time so had the capacity to conduct it – just not the will.

Friday night’s fiasco was unacceptable and risks undermining confidence in public transport for future games and risks Auckland’s reputation to host major international events. It is important to transparently and independently get to the bottom of what happened so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

I think the fear was an inquiry would show we need smarter transport investments like the CBD Rail Link to get our rail and public transport up to scratch, which isn’t a message the motorway-mad Government wants to hear.

These concerns, unfortunately, were never raised during the submission stage of the bill, when they can be examined in depth. Nor were any submissions sent in from any food groups raising these concerns.

The best way to raise concerns such as these about legislation before Parliament is through the submission process, not afterwards when the bill has been through select committee.

Since the hearings on the bill had been completed before anyone raised these concerns, the only way to inquire about them was to write directly to the Minister for Food Safety.

After taking some time to examine the issues, the Minister has confirmed that it was never the intention of the bill to cover seed saving, the barter or selling of food seeds or seedlings, or the provision of food and accommodation in exchange for labour.

She has confirmed that she will be amending the bill to make it explicit that it wont include seed or food exchanges, or related issues.

Here is the letter that Kate Wilkinson sent to me [PDF].

The problem with urgency is that it often means that laws don’t receive the kind of scrutiny they should. So it means you get laws with mistakes and laws that do bad things without ever giving the people a chance to influence them.

To be fair, sometimes urgency is just extending the sitting time of parliament just to get through a backlog but using normal processes. Nonetheless, the amount of time parliament spends in urgency can give some indication of how much the governing parties are trying to subvert the usual checks and balances of parliament.

It is great to see Russel’s concerns now being echoed by others in the political arena and the media.  Here’s Labour MP Grant Robertson, last week:

1. By-passing the select committee process should be something that is done in only the most exceptional circumstances. It may be that a different kind of urgency motion should be required for that, with perhaps 75% of the House having to agree.

2. We should investigate whether there is a way of extending the sitting hours of the House in a way that does not compromise the integrity or quality of the legislative process. One suggestion that has been floating around is to allow for the Committee of the Whole House to sit on Wednesday and Thursday mornings when the relevant Select Committee is not sitting. I am sure there will be other suggestions.

And National aligned blogger David Farrar:

1. That standing orders be changed so that a bill can bypass select committee stage only with approval of the Speaker (as is needed for extraordinary urgency).
2. That standing orders be changed so that question time automatically carries on, even if the House is in urgency
3. That the number of sitting weeks be increased, hence reducing the need for so much urgency, from 31 to 33 by reducing the number of two week recesses from five to three.
4. That standing orders be amended to distinguish between “extended sitting hours” which would merely extend the sitting hours on Wednesday and/or Thursday and full urgency (where you specify particular bills, and the House keeps going until they are disposed of)

Today, the NZ Herald joins in:

The copyright law is an especially curious case. It was set aside after being reported back from a select committee last November, and did not seem a pressing matter. All the Government’s rush has done is spread apprehension. A more considered approach would have avoided this. Likewise, there seemed little reason for urgency for the latest Christchurch legislation, other than to establish the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority. The Government had already granted itself wide-ranging emergency powers under law passed after the first earthquake.

Legislation rushed though in this manner has a much reduced chance of being good law. When the select committee stage is bypassed, a valuable chance to iron out problems is removed and opposing viewpoints are denied due consideration. A glaring example of this was the law change introducing national standards in schools.

Well done, Russel, for getting this discussion started.  All we need now is for National to take notice of your concerns. Maybe that will happen now some of their supporters are beginning to share them.

ACC fronted with Chair, John Judge, by videoconference and CEO Jan White fronting most questions, assisted by Denise Cosgrove, who seems to mostly front the reduction in ACC coverage we have seen.

I started by drawing attention to ACC’s claim that they have had to make the “hard decision” to “stick more closely to the legislation” on who gets covered. Were they, I asked, meaning that previously, when more New Zealanders had cover, they got that illegally? No, not at all, said Dr, White. What ACC means is that there is a range of ways in which the legislation can be interpreted (“shades of grey”) and they have just shifted from a less restrictive interpretation to a more restrictive one.

So I asked what the process had been to guide this change of interpretation, thinking about the Woodhouse principles and their spirit of genuine compensation. Ah well, what had happened was that ACC now had more evidence to guide the decisions, in contrast to the old days, when apparently claims were just approved without scrutiny. Well I was surprised by that answer, all the more so because it seemed totally incompatible with the earlier claim that the change was one of interpretation. I started in on the line of which of these explanations was actually correct, when, of course, a Government member stepped in for a reprieve.

When I got my next chance I asked about the sensitive claims process. How had that gone so disastrously wrong? We were told that there had been no change to coverage there, but that ACC had underestimated the amount of time that was needed for some process steps, and this had caused all the problems. Another surprise for me. Because back at the time this disaster started to unfold ACC’s explanation was that the previous interpretation of the law had not been restrictive enough, necessitating a more restrictive interpretation of “mental injury”. So that was the second major inconsistency in the evidence we heard. Again, rescue by Government members before I could press further.

And then sadly we ran out of time (and kind of mysteriously, since we had an extra hour before the scheduled end time). Which meant that I couldn’t ask my last question: given that the sensitive claims changes were such an unmitigated disaster, and that was only finally acknowledged after an independent review, what on earth would give the public confidence that the reductions to cover in many other areas were not also catastrophic, except a full, independent and public review? I get to put that one in writing? Expect another post when we hear the answer.

They both called for the Minister to slow down and have a proper dialogue with teachers about the issues, but it wasn’t just teachers who signed the petition. Many of us signed it because we are getting alarming feedback from parents and teachers about the roll out of the National Standards. When a six-year-old feels like a failure after receiving their school report, it’s obvious that reporting isn’t necessarily being improved by the standards.

The Ministry of Education contributed some interesting rhetoric about flexible ways of reporting against the standards, but conceded that both the training for teachers and the advice to parents on how to talk to their children about the new school reports is in need of more work.

I asked the Ministry what proportion of the 20% of students they say are underachieving in literacy and numeracy are ESOL students or students with learning disabilities. They couldn’t tell me, which I think is disturbing.

Just what is the evidence base behind the National Standards? Ideology is driving these changes and the Government should just admit it. As the NZEI and others have pointed out, the ideology of National Standards and league tables has failed to lift achievement in other countries but here in New Zealand we keep flogging the dead horse.

The Select Committee should have been engaged with the issues from day one, and some of us are going to fight to keep Nationals Standards on the agenda. I salute the petitioners because I know they are driven by a commitment to assessment that helps students and I am sick of their arguments being treated as patch protection. The most disturbing comment of the day was “sympathy won’t lift standards”. But what will labelling achieve?

The responses the Minister gave on the cuts to Early Childhood Education fit into the “black is really white” category.

She said that the cuts to the centres were an opportunity for those businesses and that it was all about choices.

Labour MP Sue Moroney and I pressed her on whose choices and Sue exposed the real cost of the cuts which will increase fees and will be passed on to the parents. But the Minister blithely talked about how the child care centres won’t have to pass on the costs to parents and how they have nine months to think up some other way to survive without hurting poorer families.

It is already apparent that families will be paying up to $60.00 more per child per week and that some will have to withdraw their children. The Minister said that was about people prioritising. She really believes poor people have the same economic choices as richer people.

She talked a lot about the targeting of Maori and Pacific Island families who have low participation rates and need quality childcare which is all good until you see that quality childcare training cuts are a core part of the Budget impact.

Our ‘Mind the Gap‘ proposal and many social commentators since the Budget have identified that we have one of the fastest growing gaps between the rich and poor in the OECD.

There is absolutely no dispute that early childhood is a crucial time for learning but the Government makes no apology for these cuts. They have three lines of argument when challenging on virtually anything including ECE: “It’s a recession, the business model will work, and everyone has a choice.”

Tell that to the kids who miss out!

It would have been nice to try to reach agreement on more, and if we had really debated the issues we might possibly have done so. However, after many weeks of hearing submissions, most of them the same as the ones we heard last year when considering the legislation, we then didn’t sit for weeks until the government was ready to proceed, then crammed consideration into a few short meetings. The day we met to vote on the report we had still not discussed about half of its text.

This is not surprising. The special committee review was never about forming policy on the ETS. It was always a smokescreen to cover the gap while the government made up its mind what it wanted to do. It was allowed to conclude only when the government had done this, and then it had to conclude hurriedly without too much discussion. The problem for the Government is that it has not been able to keep either of its coalition partners with it.

At least the report sidelines the climate deniers and agrees the science is soundly based and there is a need for action. (Everyone except Act.) There is universal agreement that we must both mitigate and adapt to climate change, they are not alternatives. There is wide agreement on proceeding with an ETS (except Act and the Maori party, who prefer a carbon tax.).

The biggest sticking point is over who should bear the cost. Labour’s ETS, which is the current law, is overly generous in allocating the biggest polluters 90% of their 2005 pollution for free until 2019. This will be paid for by the rest of us. But National and Peter Dunne see this as too hard on heavy industry and propose the allocation of free credits on an output, or intensity, basis. That means no-one pays the full cost of carbon at the margin of their activities, and the more they grow and pollute, the more free credits they get at the expense of the rest of us. It also means NZ’s emissions continue to grow as fast as the economy grows. There is absolutely no transition to a low carbon economy. It is much, much worse than no ETS at all.

As if this wasn’t enough, the main report (which a majority voted for but only a minority supports) speaks very favourably of a price cap on carbon at least for a while. This would make it easier to align our ETS with the scheme the Australian government wants but can’t get the votes for in the senate, so it may never happen anyway. In order to align with a non-existent Australian ETS the NZ government (or some of it) wants to artificially reduce the price on carbon below the world price. This is a massive wealth transfer from households and small business and taxpayers to the big industrials and intensive farmers.

The winners would be the Rio Tinto Aluminium smelter, NZ Steel, Holcim cement, big MDF and other wood processing plants – all large corporates which are owned overseas. So that’s a large flow of funds out of the NZ economy. Nothing could illustrate so well what an economic colony we have become. The coal industry and intensive farmers would benefit too. Everyone contributing to accelerating climate change would get a subsidy, and everyone contributing to solving the climate change problem would pay more for the privilege.

Households would end up paying higher electricity and transport fuel prices to cover their own emissions, and higher taxes to cover the emissions of the big polluters.

I had to ask three times what the practical effect would be of the statement in National’s confidence and supply agreement with Act, that the Government would pass “an amendment to the ETS delaying its implementation”.

First time he avoided the question and told us – again – about the select committee review.

The second time, he told us “no element” will be currently affected because the legislation will not begin until 2010 when energy comes in.

Only when I asked him directly about the effects on forestry, which came in almost a year ago and is expecting to claim credits in January for its 2008 carbon capture, did he say that the current rules about deforestation stay in place, pending the outcome of the select committee.

He didn’t actually say that foresters will retain their legal right to credits in January; however he can’t legally confiscate those without legislation, which he clearly isn’t planning before the those credits become due.

What was clear is that he had not thought at all about the effects of his statement on the forestry sector, who have been as puzzled as I have, and he confirmed that he has not talked to them.

So it seems we have established that foresters will be able to apply under the existing Act, which will not be “on hold” in any way at all, for credits to be transferred to their account in the NZ inventory, some time in January. But this is only step one.

There will be no market for those credits, at least for a year and maybe much longer, as he intends to amend the legislation before the end of 2009, and if obligations are removed the market for those credits will also be removed.

Let’s not be surprised if no-one plants anything more.

This version of the video is from eco-tube.com.

We all know now that a carbon tax would have been the simplest, least wasteful means of pricing the carbon externalities into the market. The only difficult part, particularly for politicians, would have been setting the price.

But the ideologues both here and abroad could not abide the thought of a market intervention as simple and elegant as a tax. No, we needed a much more expensive, intrusive, new market in our lives and the carbon tax was killed off.

Now the reality of an international carbon market is hitting home, while some players, including New Zealand, prevaricate, pointing to some of the waste and corruption in the market they insisted was created.

We have had 16 years of debate on this issue and almost no action. I am personally agnostic about which kind of market intervention is the best in the long run. What I care about is results, sooner rather than later. The massive paradigm shift required to avert the worst that anthropogenic global warming is threatening is going to create winners and losers regardless of how it is done. There will be spilled milk, and tears.

I was amused by Peter Dunne’s comments yesterday regarding the climate change select committee. It seems he got a somewhat different brief from John Key than Rodney Hide did. Let the fireworks begin!

The price of the most-traded carbon contract, for forward delivery of EUAs in December 2008, closed at €23.82 on the European Climate Exchange on Monday April 7. This is up €3.15 from a low point on March 4 and continues a recovery after a downturn to below €19 early in the year driven by global financial market instability. EUA contracts further forward have risen around €2, Dec 09s closing at €24.48, Dec 10s at €25.15 and Dec 12s at €26.85

Forecasts for price levels in coming years of €30 to €35 have certainly contributed to bullish trade of late.

That forward Euro 23.82 price at current exchange rates is a whopping NZD 47.50 !! It seems that $50 per tonne carbon prices may come sooner than Treasury wants to admit. They still calculate on a $15 per tonne basis while most punters have been doing their analysis base on a $25 per tonne price. Fun times lie ahead for those willing to play in our budding carbon market! I suspect some bright sparks are about to make a packet of cash in the coming 18 months.

This will no doubt put pressure on the Select Committee hearing submissions to water down the bill. I reckon it would be a waste of time if the world’s marginal carbon price got legislated out of the NZ ETS Bill. Well, we called for a carbon tax to give business certainty, but they wouldn’t have a bar of it and insisted on a cap and trade. Now they are going to have to dig deep and pay the piper for their carbon loving ways. (This means we will have to dig deeper too.)