Kiwiblog

The Press reports:

A key moment in Nazi Germany history is the inspiration for the “hatchet job” on Environment Canterbury (ECan), says regional councillor Rik Tindall. …

In a letter to the editors of The Press and the Timaru Herald, he says there is no “dysfunctionality” at ECan.

I can’t believe he said that with a straight face.

“The report attempts to inflagrate a Canterbury version of the 1933 Reichstag fire incident, to justify curtailment of democracy. New Zealanders should be very, very concerned as to the direction their country is taking,” he said.

“The unconscionably severe attack upon local democracy is simply a smokescreen to cover for … an asset and power grab by the most threatening of New Zealand forces.”

You expect comparing the Government to the Nazis from deranged anonymous trolls, not from elected Councillors. Anyone that hysterical should never have been elected in the first place, so I did a google on Mr Rik Tindall.

Turns out he is a senior Green Party activist:

A dedicated multiculturalist, I work to bring together the Greens and the Maori Party for leading New Zealand to the complete and spiritual sustainability we all seek, with social justice and economic wellbeing in ecological harmony.

Someone want to tell me what spiritual sustainability is? Is there some finite number of souls that we may use up?

Rik spent time in left and peace movements in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In New Zealand he has been involved with Greenpeace; the Gulf Crisis Peace Committee of Otautahi/Christchurch; Health Service & Benefit Cut protest groups and an Education Action Group fighting fees in the early 1990’s; Paakaitore / Moutoa Gardens occupant in 1995; the Christchurch Polytechnic Students Association Executive and a fee protest bus tour to Parliament.

I love it that he includes travelling on a bus, in his CV.

Also remember how Rik claimed Ecan is not at all dysfunctional, well read this story:

Kane complained in August about “threatening” emails sent by Tindall.

Tindall’s email attack on his colleagues followed his unsuccessful bid to be elected as ECan’s representative on a Christchurch City Council climate change and sustainability working party.

Tindall then made a complaint about Kane, accusing her of leaking emails to The Press.

Details of his hysterical e-mails are here.

Emails forwarded to The Press show that as a result of not being elected to the working group, Tindall wrote to his colleagues saying he would “absolve myself of all and any responsibility for any loss of life in Canterbury that should happen to occur through deficiencies in civil defence and emergency management (CDEM) preparedness”.

So get this. He did not get elected to a CCC working party on cimate change, and his response is to declare this will somehow lead to people dying through lack of civil defence preparedness and he “absolves” himself of responsibility for the loss of life.

I can now understand why he made the Nazi comparisons – he is obviously prone to bouts of hysteria.

The Herald Political Diary notes:

Nothing’s simple in Green-land. Witness the divvying up of caucus portfolios following the departure from Parliament of Jeanette Fitzsimons. The party now has no fewer than four spokespeople on environmental matters – Russel Norman, Sue Kedgley, Catherine Delahunty and Dave Clendon. Their responsibilities respectively cover water; toxics; mining, toxics; and the Resource Management Act and waste. Three MPs – Norman, Kennedy Graham and new MP Gareth Hughes – look after the different aspects of climate change. No fewer than five MPs have some kind of responsibility for transport matters. Keith Locke and Clendon handle transport in Auckland, Kedgley covers what is going on in the capital. Kevin Hague handles “cycling and active transport”, while Hughes is just plain “transport”. And, for good measure, the caucus has two spokespeople on the Treaty – Delahunty and Clendon, the latter being responsible for presenting the Maori viewpoint.

They should take this principle further.

How about two Finance spokepersons – one for taxpayers and one for tax receipients?

And two Defence spokespersons – one for allies and one for enemies.

Also two Education spokespersons – one for the NZEI and one for the PPTA

Every Green MP can then be a spokesperson on everything

At 11.14 am the Greens put out a press release saying:

This was going to lifting mining protection from half a billion hectares of land with high conservation value, but would now only propose lifting protection from around 7,000 hectares.

Radio NZ made the initial error between 7 am and 8 am. NZPA picked it at 8.24 but made a correction within around half an hour. I blogged on it at 9.24 a.m. Yes despite that the Greens don’t even stop to think that half a billion hectares is around 20 times larger than the total land area of New Zealand.

Does no one at the Greens know how big a hectare is and that there is no way we have half a billion of them?

I’m somewhat staggered to see Frog has blogged against the Government’s fibre to the home programme, and hope that his view is not that of the Green Party.

I’m rather dismayed to see a Green blog repeating moronic nonsense such as fibre will only be used for faster porn.

There are many areas of policy I disagree with the Green Party, but generally I have found myself in agreement with much of their Comms/IT policies – they voted against the original S92A on copyright, they promote open source software, they have been against Internet filtering and censorship, and they supported the operational separation of Telecom.I’ve gone out of my way to praise them in the comms/IT areas I agree with them on – which have been many.

But I can’t believe Frog doesn’t see one obvious benefit (putting aside all the others) from fibre connected homes, and that is the massive impact this may have in having people work from home – this means less fuel consumption, less congestion and less greenhouse gas emissions.

There are two things that would enable people to work from home much more, both which fibre will help enable.

The first is being able to access your work files as quickly and easily as if you are in the office. Sure you can do remote access at the moment, but it is often painfully slow, and nothing like actually being in the office.

The second is near instant high quality video conferencing with multiple people. I don’t mean waiting five minutes as you start the program up, and everyone else does the same. I mean you go to your TV set, push three buttons, and hey two seconds later you have a four way video conference.

Once we have fast enough Internet to do the above, I predict that the number of staff who work at least half the week from home will grow exponentially. Obviously not in some areas such as retail, but some companies may end up with just a meeting room and server as their office, and all their staff working from home. In fact I know of a couple of firms already doing this.

It is inevitable that a future Labour Government will include the Greens, as they no longer have Jim or Winston to rely on. So with that in mind, let us look at what the Greens say their health priorities are:

1. In retrospect I have to confess that our decision to fund 12 months’ treatment with Herceptin was sheer irrational populism, and today I’m announcing that we will never do it again. In the same spirit, our repeal of the healthy school food guidelines and cutting funding to Healthy Eating Healthy Action projects were entirely about ideology rather than health, so we’re reintroducing them because we are quite concerned about chronic illness.

So their number one health priority is to provide a shorter period of treatment to women with breast cancer. I can’t wait for No 2.

2. Rather than making the grand gesture of a massive programme to build new operating theatres and contracting out surgery to the private sector, Government has today announced a programme of regionally (rather than locally) planning the best and most efficient use of our existing theatres, specialists and resources.

And their number two health priority is to have fewer operating theatres. This just gets better and better. Vote Green and we promise less treatment for women with breast cancer and fewer operating theatres.

3. I think we’ve had enough of committees, reports and endless restructuring, so rather than commission yet more I am going to require DHBs to work together and help each other whenever this is in the interests of most New Zealanders.

Their third health priority is that they are going to send a memo out to DHBs telling them to work together better.  Such vision.

4. It is inadequate and unacceptable for us to set lower health targets for Maori and to continue to tolerate health inequalities. The performance measures I am setting for DHBs will focus on raising Maori health status to the same level other New Zealanders enjoy, and DHBs will perform to this standard (or they’re all fired!)

This one is so crazy, it has me laughing. The Greens are going to sack every District Health Board in New Zealand unless they can get Maori health status to the same level as non-Maori. Are they going to supply pixie dust to help them do the job?

It is an interesting insight into the mind of those on the hard left. They really believe that the reasons for the disparity between Maori and European has nothing to do with culture, genetics, environment, family and personal decisions – but is all the fault of the DHBs, who will be sacked if they can’t fix it.

5. In order to improve the position of those people with the poorest health, Government will be requiring all Government departments and crown entities to work together at a local level to identify people in need and to proactively offer services to improve their lives, and will be funding PHOs to take a lead role in this process.

So number five health priority is to send out a memo to Government Departments asking them to work better at helping people with poor health.

6. There is not enough money now to provide all of the health services that New Zealanders expect, and this will be worse in the future. Consequently Government is reorienting our health sector spending to focus resources in the areas proven to have the greatest impact on population health status, public health programmes and primary care, and as Minister I will also personally lead a national conversation with New Zealanders about how we best make decisions about how we should allocate limited resources in secondary and tertiary care.

And their final health priority is to have a conversation about umm health priorities, with an eye towards reducing secondary and tertiary care.

So in summary these are the Green’s six priorities for health:

1. Reduce the amount of treatment for women with breast cancer
2. Reduce the number of operating theatres
3. Send out a memo to DHBs saying work better together
4. Sack every DHB in New Zealand if they can not magically bring Maori health status up to the level of non-Maori
5. Send out a memo to Government Departments to say be nicer to people with poor health
6. Try and convince NZers to have less money spent on surgery and hospitals.

Oh I am looking forward to a future Labour/Green Government. It will be such fun.

Jeanette Fitzsimons has announced she will resign from Parliament in February.

Jeanette has almost been the iconic face of the Greens, and their brand will suffer without her. Gareth Hughes has some large shoes to fill.

Jeanette’s politics are not my own, but MPs from both National and Labour will say she was a very good person to work with, and I doubt she has any enemies in the House.

Like Sue Bradford, Jeanette would have loved to have become a Minister, but Helen kept rejecting her in favour of Peter Dunne and Winston Peters!

As the Copenhagen summit looks like ending with no agreement, around the only substantial achievement (to date) was the launch of the Global Research Alliance on agriculture greenhouse gases.

This is hugely important both for NZ and internationally.

The importance for NZ is it could help find a way to reduce methane emissions from livestock, which would save the country billions in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

The importance for the world is to avoid what happened with biofuels – that food producing land is converted into other uses, leading to global food shortages.

So it is one of those rare initiatives that almost everyone from business lobby groups to the most hardened Greenie supports. And kudos to Tim Groser and others for getting 20 countries to all pledge funding to it – from Australia to Vietnam to the US. Much better than NZ funding all the research,

Back in NZ, it won support from the Wgtn Chamber of Commerce (no fan of an ETS):

“The reality is that rather than the current proliferation of poorly designed cap and trade systems, science and technology are the real keys to solving the greenhouse gas emissions challenge, and this initiative plays to New Zealand’s research strengths,” said Chamber CEO Charles Finny. …

“This is a good example of trans-national cooperation with a number of countries pooling their expertise to solve a global problem. New Zealand going it alone would be less likely to produce results and it runs against the grain of what this global issue is all about.

“It is increasingly likely that this will be one of the few concrete initiatives to come from Copenhagen and so John Key and Tim Groser deserve full congratulations for the leadership they have shown in delivering this outcome,” Mr Finny concluded.

So business likes it. And what about the Greens. Well this is Kennedy Graham:

Minister Tim Groser advised that, on Day 1, some US$150 m. had been pledged, and it was hoped that this would leverage private funding as well.  But he stressed that it was not just a question of finance – the essence was coordination, of research already underway and new research yet to be funded.  France, for example, already has some 500 researchers in agriculture and climate change who would form part of the Alliance.  India’s contribution would be immense as well.  Once the political momentum was underway, it was important to turn it over to the scientists.

Denmark gave the most impressive example of the potential of the Alliance. Since 1990 it had increased agricultural production by 16% yet agricultural emissions had dropped by 23%.   This had been achieved through optimisation of the nutrient chain and improving water management. …

We should take a positive view of this initiative.

And Jeanette Fitzsimons said:

The Green Party today welcomed the announcement that New Zealand will lead a Global Research Alliance for reducing climate change emissions from agriculture, adding that it is crucial to pursue science and ideas that enhance our clean green reputation.

“I am delighted that New Zealand is finally doing something serious about fighting climate change and reducing agricultural emissions,” said Green Party Climate Change and Agriculture spokesperson Jeanette Fitzsimons. …

So New Zealand has achieved around the only positive announcement from Copenhagen, with an initiative that pleases both ETS sceptical businesses and the Greens. So who does that leave?

Labour’s Charles Chauvel. In a bizarre press release (one which Clark would have called treasonous if she was still PM) he has attacked the Global Alliance claiming NZ should have gone it alone:

“The multinational nature of the Global Agriculture Fund will inevitably mean that New Zealand won’t own the results of any research paid for by it.

“So, as well as there being substantially less money for investment in the reduction of emissions from agriculture, New Zealand will be poorer because we lose the opportunity to sell or share emissions reduction technology in our singular area of expertise on our own terms.

“Despite the self-generated fanfare and bright lights, National’s approach represents a failure. It totally lacks ambition and is a huge missed opportunity for New Zealand,” Charles Chauvel said.

Yes Chauvel thinks NZ could have solved the problem all by itself. He also misrepresents intellectual property laws (being pat of a multilateral alliance does not mean individual institutions abandon intellectual property rights over their inventions). It is a shockingly stupid stance.

In Opposition, there are times when mindless opposition just for the sake of a press release is a bad idea. As the Greens show, there are times you can say this is a good initiative – even if we don;t like the other things you are doing.

I wonder what Phil Goff, a respected former foreign and trade minister, thinks of his MPs claim NZ should not have helped set up the global research alliance, and gone it alone? I can’t imagine he possibly agrees.

Claire Browning at Pundit has what appears to be an exclusive scoop:

Last month, here on Pundit, I speculated that all was not well between the Greens and the government. Former co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons did not wish to comment then, but now she’s speaking out. The Greens have concluded that the energy efficiency and conservation part of the relationship is unsustainable, she and Gerry Brownlee cannot work together, and energy efficiency and conservation should, therefore, be deleted from the National-Greens memorandum of understanding (MOU).

I’m not sure who to blame (Browning points strongly to process failures within National but yet to hear if they have a different view on it) but regard it as unfortunate that the formalised co-operation won’t continue in this area. I thought the MOU was a well intentioned initiative, saying we disagree on most things but will work together on some areas we do agree.

As far as I can tell Claire’s exclusive has yet to be reported in the traditional media, so people are seeing it online first.

Matt Nippert from the HoS profiles retiring Green MP Sue Bradford. A long article – here are some extracts:

Greg Fleming, founder and head of the arch-conservative Maxim Institute, has clashed repeatedly with the Green MP in recent years. On smacking and prostitution reform Bradford describes the organisation as a “deadly enemy”, but Fleming says he’s sad to see a fellow ideologue go.

“The thing that’s been delightful about our friendship – and we’ve disagreed over almost everything – is that she’s actually very clear about why she believes what she believes,” says Fleming.

A nice compliment.

She says she had high hopes that Jim Anderton’s breakaway party could shatter the male-led old boys’ club of national politics. “But of course in New Labour I was right back into an old patriarchal model – with bells on.”

Bradford quit in 1990, barely a year after she had joined, and refused to take part in the Alliance because of bad blood with Anderton. She joined the Greens in 1998 only after they split from the Alliance.

(Asked about his brief political liaison with Bradford, Jim Anderton declined to comment.)

Sue just got out early. Jim made very clear later on that he would leave unless complete control of the party was ceded to him. McCarten and Harre refused, so he bailed.

While Bradford was able to eventually recruit both John Key and Helen Clark into her drive to remove the Section 59 defence, resulting in a resounding 113-7 victory when the third reading was passed, her inability to connect with the public has been labelled a “catastrophic failure of propaganda” by a source who previously worked for the Greens.

“It ended up being labelled a bill against smacking, which it never was,” says the source.

It did not start off like that. The original bill merely removed S59. But the final bill was a bill against smacking. It basically said you can use reasonable force in numerous situations except correction.

Turei defends the change, saying it has been a conscious process.

She does not openly criticise Bradford, but it’s impossible to hide Turei’s differences with the MP who unsuccessfully battled her for the leadership.

Turei explains the evolution in Green thinking: “I don’t want to
exclude people who don’t hold that old left-wing culture, that can’t relate to that old 1970s hard-core working-class struggle.”

While Turei insists that Green policy remains unchanged, she supports moving the party away from under Labour’s wing and into a position where they could – conceivably – work with National in the future.

Says Bradford: “I’ve always been clear that if we wanted to be a party that would enter coalition with National, I would leave it.

As I have said numerous time. The Greens will never choose a National-led Govt over a Labour-led Govt. But they need to be able to hold open that possibility to stop Labour treating the like a doormat.

The most I would ever expect to see between the Greens and National is an agreement to abstain on supply and confidence.

THERE’S ALSO the possibility of a return to politics – albeit not in Wellington. Auckland Supercity mayoral candidate and Manukau Mayor Len Brown has expressed an interest in having her around the council table.

“I do support Len Brown for mayor and think he’s a great guy, and I live in Manukau at the moment,” she says, non-committally.

“Standing for council would be a big job and I think the process of forming tickets and who will be on those tickets will be tense. I don’t want to cut off the option, I’m quite open to it, but that does not a campaign or ticket make.”

Not yet, but Deputy Mayor of Auckland must be a tempting prize for a woman who quit national politics partly because she never got to be a Minister. I can’t imagine Sue would want to just be a Councillor, so if she is on the ticket, it will be fair to assume she has been promised the Deputy spot.

The Greens often go on about how they are a party of principle and policy and veer away from personal attacks, and smears. They seem to have forgotten to tell on of their senior office holders.

For some reason someone at The Standard posted a photo of MPs Bakshi Singh, Melissa Lee, Bill English and John Key – asking which one is not like the other.

Toad responded:

Nah, it is that the three on the left have substantive allegations of corruption against them personally. The allegations against the one on the right are “only” of covering up the allegations against the others.

A bit like a line-up of Brad Shipton, Bob Schollum, Clint Rickards, and John Dewar.

Well done Toad, you score bottom of the barrel this week.

Liberation has some extracts from a radio interview with Sue Bradford on the Greens:

Sue Bradford: That tension is always there in our Green Party, as it is in green parties around the world… I think that some of the people on the more blue-green, or conservative side of the Green Party will be feeling probably quite relieved that I won’t be a Green MP anymore.

Yet Green party supporters on this blog attacked me when I suggested Sue’s departure pointed to some splits in the party. They insisted it was just about her not winning the co-leadership.

Julian Robbins: Is the Green Party losing its radical edge?…. Is it coming into a sort of comfortable middle age, a professional phase where it tries to be less risk-taking?

Sue Bradford: I think that’s absolutely true…. We did have a real radical cutting edge [in 1999]… I think that we have, to some extent we have begun to lose a little bit of that differentiation with the other parties in Parliament – in terms of being a little less willing to take risks; a little less willing to be radical and “out there”; and the sense that too many political parties – including perhaps our own – are focused on winning the middle ground voters and not seeing the voters out to the sides – in our case, out to the left, and to the environmental left, as being as important as the voters that are in the middle and to the right.

Not exactly a vote of confidence in the leadership.

Julian Robbins: Is the party really ‘fine’? I would have thought that at a time when the Labour Party is at a lower ebb and climate change as an issue as an item is at the top of the agenda, that the Green Party should perhaps be doing much better than it is. Why isn’t it doing much better?
Sue Bradford: …I’ve just given some of the ideas that I have about that. I think that part of the reason for that [lack of political success is] is that we’ve lost the radical edge and we’ve lost some of the points of differentiation with the other parties…

Bradford’s valedictory speech could be interesting.

I don’t agree with a huge amount of what the Greens do, but one thing they do that deserves praise is their constant willingness to invite and host in New Zealand dissidents from countries who try and pressure us to lower our own standards of freedom of speech, to meet their own.

The Herald reports:

Exiled Chinese Muslim leader Rebiya Kadeer says she wants to “meet with the enemy” during her New Zealand visit.

“Change can only happen when you change the hearts and minds of those who oppose you,” she said as she arrived in Auckland yesterday for a four-day visit. …

China tried to stop Maori TV from screening a Kadeer biopic last month, and despite talks among some Chinese students about staging a protest at the airport yesterday, no one turned up.

“If the Chinese here learn that it is okay to protest peacefully, then they would have learned a valuable lesson about living in a democracy,” Ms Kadeer said.

Meanwhile, following “internal messages of protest” by university staff on the administration’s stopping Ms Kadeer from holding a public meeting on campus, law professor David Williams has invited her to speak at the law faculty at midday instead.

“I hope that university security personnel will not be called upon to prevent the exercise of free speech,” Professor Williams said. “Rebiya Kadeer is the sort of person whose voice needs to be listened to. Her voice should not be silenced in a university.”

Ms Kadeer was once a successful businesswoman in the northwest Xinjiang region but spent six years in jail after speaking out against Beijing.

China regards her as a criminal who orchestrated the ethnic violence in Xinjiang in July that left nearly 200 dead.

It is opposed to countries providing her with a platform to engage in anti-China separatist activities, a charge she rejects.

Her visit, as a guest of the Green Party, will include meetings with human rights groups, a visit to Parliament and meetings with MPs.

I hope that over time, China will realise it should just accept dissidents will criticise them, and stop trying to pressure other countries to silence them. It just results in their message getting more attention – not less.

Danyl blogs:

Labour’s determination never to form a government with the Greens put the party in a terrible situation. If you want to have an effect on environmental issues you really have to have a place in the government and Clark made it pretty clear that the Green Party would never occupy such a position. This wasn’t a problem for Bradford who doesn’t seem to have any interest in environmental issues and was able to advance her social justice causes through private members bills that she could negotiate on a case by case basis, but a policy of permanent opposition wasn’t viable for the party as a whole.

And this is partly why Fitzsimons and Bradford are retiring. They don’t see a change of Government in 2011 as likely and even if Labour wins in 2014, they might spurn the Greens again. This is somewhat less likely now, considering their preferred partner of NZ First has disappeared from Parliament.

The Greens are always more likely to form a government with Labour but they need to be in a position to realistically threaten to form a government with National before Labour will take them seriously in post-election negotiations.

This is what Bradford doesn’t understand. I have said 100 times over that given a choice between a National-led Government and a Labour-led Government, they will go for a Labour-led Government pretty much everytime.

But they need to keep open the possibility of supporting National, so they can get a better deal from Labour. This is not advice designed to help National – it is advice about how the Greens can stop getting screwed over by Labour.

Anthony Hubbard has a nice exclusive in the SST:

MP SUE Bradford threatened to resign from the Greens if they became a swing party which could go with either National or Labour, party sources have revealed.

Bradford’s resignation last month was not just because she was disappointed at her defeat by Metiria Turei for the job of woman co-leader, as Bradford claimed.

It also reflected her disillusionment with what she saw as greater readiness by co-leaders Turei and Russel Norman to deal with National. Bradford, said a party source, “wanted to stay staunch”, and wanted the Green Party to remain left-wing.

I don’t think Sue had much to worry about there. Of course her definition of left-wing may be very different to most.

When Sue resigned, I said it indicated that things were not too harmonious in the Greens, and certain supporters howled at me for daring to suggest this.

Bradford’s resignation follows a serious disagreement with the party over strategy and ideology. During the campaign for co-leadership, according to party sources, Bradford was accused of attempting to blackmail the Greens with her threat of resignation.

Blackmail is a strong word. Was that another MP who used it?

It is understood she told the caucus in either late 2007 or early 2008 that she would quit the party if it went further down the track as a swing party, ready to go with either of the two big parties. Her resignation was simply following through on that threat, a source said.

But they never mentioned this at the press conference.

The list MP was originally a Marxist radical and spent many years in militant activity for the unemployed. Although she abandoned Marxism, she never quit being a radical.

I thought she was more Maoist than Marxist. One has to keep the different communist sects distinct. Locke and Norman are also former Marxists.

She and a minority in the party fought the trend to widen the appeal of the Greens to include a broad cross-section of voters, including National supporters.

If the Greens only take votes off Labour, it doesn’t help the left a lot.

Anyway maybe Sue will elaborate in her valedictory speech to Parliament.

A commenter spotted this on RNZ:

The Green Party is about to announce it will stop taxpayer-funded accommodation allowances being channelled into its superannuation fund. …

The party’s superannuation owns two properties in Wellington, in which three of its MPs live, and the taxpayer picks up the rent. …

It’s understood Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei will shortly announce plans to sell both properties, ending the practice of funnelling the accommodation allowance into the fund.

Radio New Zealand’s political staff say the arrangement is within the rules but has increasingly become a political embarrassment for the Greens, a party which has tried to take the moral high ground over MPs allowances.

The fund itself, which has other assets including shares, will continue to operate.

A sensible decision from the Greens and all credit to them for it. Now there are other MPs who probably have an indirect ownership of the apartment they rent. It has all been within the rules, but as I have said many times before I think that there should be a transition to a system where no MP can be paid for renting as Wellington accommodation a house they own either directly or indirectly. My suggestion would be to put in place new rules to start after the next election.

Electorate offices are a somewhat different issue as they come out of a limited budget for the MP, and there can be legitimate non-financial reasons an MP wants to own their electorate office. However even in that case I would advocate setting a maximum rent at 66% to 75% of market.

Vernon Small writes:

The Green Party needed a mini-scandal about its accommodation allowances like it needed to lose a senior MP with thwarted ambitions or have its kuia head for the hills before the next election.

Challenging times indeed. Despite that I think the Greens are fairly well positioned to grow their vote at the next election. They can point to successfully advocating the home insulation scheme to both Labour and National, and make a case that while they are a left wing party, they can “green” the Government, regardless of who it is.

As the party making all the noise about reviewing parliamentary perks, it has exposed itself badly with the revelation that two of its MPs were essentially – if accidentally – double-dipping on rent for the Thorndon house owned by the party’s superannuation fund.

At this stage, just how the information came to light is unclear.

The Greens are sure they spotted it when they did an annual market rent review on the property in May or June and were preparing their disclosure of expenditure before the general release of MPs’ spending by Speaker Lockwood Smith in July. That was an attempt at a public relations coup that now looks hollow.

This is easy to resolve. The Greens simply need provide the e-mail or correspondence to The Parliamentary Service advising them of the “error” they discovered.

Ms Turei does concede that if they had provided a rent review of the house in February, as Parliamentary Service requested, the mistake would probably have been avoided.

So why was it not done?

But the failure to pay back the extra $6000 when it was discovered in June – even if that required a special meeting of the superannuation fund trustees – ceded a lot of the moral high ground. (More so, because when asked about it weeks ago by The Dominion Post after a tip-off from within Parliament, the Greens said there had been only a minor adjustment – not, as it turned out, an overcharging of $500 a week – and implied it was at the Greens’ own initiative.)

This is the part that spells very bad judgement to me. If I was advising the Greens, I would have insisted that it be paid back within days, and then do a press release advising of the error. That would have been a minor minor story.

From Parliamentary Service’s perspective, general manager Geoff Thorn could not be clearer.

“The double payment was identified when the service was reviewing processes for dealing with claims for Wellington accommodation in May of this year.

This is quite contradictory to what the Greens say. Now again, there is an easy way to resolve this. The Greens merely need provide the e-mail or correspondence where they alerted The Parliamentary Service to the error.

It is an important distinction. The party that found a mistake, corrected it and paid back the difference? Or the party that was caught out and reluctantly handed over the cash three months later?

Indeed, and in fact there is a lot of murkiness now. We have:

1. How did the error occur in the first place?
2. Who decided the level of rent to charge for Delahnuty after she moved in with Fitzsimons?
3. Why was a market valuation not done in February, when the Parliamentary Service asked for it?
4. Is there any proof of the assertion by the Greens they spotted the error, rather than the Parliamentary Service tell them about it?
5. If not, why did they assert they found the error?
6. Why did they tell the Dominion Post it was a minor adjustment, when it was almost $500 a week?
7. Why did they not reveal the error, at the time they were trumpeting their commitment to transparency?
8. Why did they wait three months to pay the money back – in fact only paying it back when TVNZ started asking about it?

Now I am not suggesting foul motives for the above, but it does suggest incredibly poor and sloppy management – both political, but also administratively.

Either way, the news has turned the spotlight back on the Green MPs’ pension scheme which buys houses and flats for its MPs and charges Parliamentary Service for their rent.

It is within the rules, and Mr Donald made sure of that when he set it up in 1998. (Ever aware of perceptions, he went around the press gallery to tell reporters what he had done, so there could be no accusations of underhand dealings.)

Rod was a very smart man.

But the scheme was always a ticking time bomb of bad perceptions, especially when, in the wake of the Bill English accommodation furore, the public is attuned to MPs using the perks of office to build up their own nest eggs.

It is a nest egg for the Greens that has already been depleted from four houses to two, as retiring MPs have withdrawn their entitlement.

It will take another big hit when MP Sue Bradford leaves later this month and an even bigger one when former party co- leader Jeanette Fitzsimons quits before the 2011 election.

Not necessarily. The new MPs may move into the houses used by the retiring MPs.

The Dom Post reports:

The Greens have paid back $6000 wrongly claimed for accommodation allowances after discovering they had been double-dipping for two MPs sharing a house.

Co-leader Metiria Turei said the error was uncovered in June during an annual assessment of the property’s market rent after MP Catherine Delahunty moved into the house with Jeanette Fitzsimons.

“She and Jeanette each continued to claim the rent that Jeanette had claimed alone from February till May.”

The money was paid back last week, though Ms Turei conceded it should have been handed over in June when the overcharging was discovered.

Why on earth did it take until late September to pay it back, when the error was discovered in late June? Did the Greens notify the Parliamentary Service in June of the double dipping or did they just start charging less?

If the Greens had paid the money back in June, and in June put out a press release saying they had accidentally over-charged, then this would have been a very minor story. But by not paying the money back until TVNZ started asking questions some months later, and not living up to their self-proclaimed transparency standards, they have scored a real own goal.

The fund was set up in 1998 by former co-leader Rod Donald to take advantage of Parliament’s rules.

These allow an out-of-Wellington MP to qualify for an allowance, even if they own or have an interest in the property. They can claim for rent or interest costs (but not principal) on a mortgage to a maximum of $24,000 a year.

Opponents have criticised the Greens’ arrangement, saying while it is within the rules it allows them to claim full market rent, even if the mortgage interest is much less.

Yes. It is a legal rort. Now the Greens will not be alone doing it that way. I am sure other MPs have. But the rules should be changed so MPs do not have a direct or indirect interest in any property they rent. You can not be landlord and tenant in my book.

But Ms Turei said the rents were set below market value, and she was confident that in the past the Greens had always charged less than market rent.

But that is not the issue. The issue is that by vesting the property in their super fund, they are maximising the amount they could claim.

And while of course any rental payments are set at what some valuer says is the market rent, it is very advantageous to have a guaranteed tenant for ever, willing to pay whatever the valuer says should be paid (up to $24K a year per person), rather than actually having to find tenants, have periods of vacancy, use a property management company etc etc.

Ms Turei said the Greens’ setup was not a “rort”. But the system should be reviewed, including whether MPs should be able to personally benefit from an allowance, as they had for decades.

A rort is hard to define. But it is a situation where vesting the property in the super fund, has allowed them to claim far more money.

“When I first got into Parliament MPs from other parties told me that is the first thing I should do – buy a flat in Wellington – because the [mortgage] interest would be paid.”

Yes, but the Greens have gone even beyond that – as they get to claim full rental, not just covering the interest on a mortgage.

Delighted to see, after I have been blogging on the issue for some time, that TVNZ started asking questions about the scheme where the Greens vest property in their superannuation fund, so they can claim rent from themselves.

It turns out to be even worse than I suspected. Not only are they doing this, they were charging $1,000 a week for a modest house in Thorndon, and secretly paid the money back.

First the transcript from Q+A:

GUYON Okay in the last section of this interview I want to talk about one of the roles that the Green Party has had in politics this year, which is the greater transparency around MPs’ expenses, and I want to look at the way that you manage your own accommodation.  Now you have the Green Futures super fund, your own super fund, it owns two properties it rents to three MPs in Wellington.  Now they take about $48,000 a year to live in those homes owned by the Green Party, and they plough that money back into your own super fund.  Now do you think that the average worker would think that that was a fair use of taxpayers’ money?

METIRIA Well look there’s four issues that need to be understood here.  First, the super trust has been going now for 12 years, has been approved by Parliamentary Services and by the Speaker, and has been transparent.  Second, MPs have to live somewhere, some MPs buy flats in Wellington and then claim housing allowance for those flats, the super fund, the super trust has been consistently seeking, asking rents that are below market value.

The arrangements were at first within the rules (but as Bill found out that does not count for a lot!), but they were not transparent – we have only found out today what happened secretly.

Secondly Turei is not quite correct when she says an MP can buy a flat and claim a housing allowance for it. If the MP owns the flat directly, they can only claim the cost of interest on a mortgage. But by vesting it in their super fund, they get to claim a much higher market rental.

Finally, as we leant, they were literally double dipping by having two MPs charge close to the maximum for the same place – well above market rental.

GUYON Well let me pick you up on that point about market value.

METIRIA Earlier this year we did – those went out of whack, between February and March of 2009 one of the houses, MPs were claiming over the market value, we fixed that valuation in June to make sure they’re only being asked to pay under market value, and last week we refunded that over claim.  So we made a mistake and we fixed it.

GUYON So you have refunded Parliamentary Services.  So you’ve become a second party to refund.  Let me talk viewers through this because they won’t know about it, and let’s look at this Wellington home where Jeanette Fitzsimons and Catherine Delahunty live, now it’s a fairly modest house, but over a four month period from February to May this year, those two MPs paid a thousand dollars a week in rent out of taxpayers’ money to live there, nearly double the market rate.  Now that’s a rip-off pure and simple isn’t it?

METIRIA We made a mistake, we’re not happy about it, we fixed the rent in June to make sure that they were paying under market value from that point on, and we have refunded the money, I mean I agree mistakes are – you know they’re not a good look…

I would love to know who made the mistake, and who discovered it and put ir right. Surely they knew you can’t have two MPs living at the same place both charging almost $500 a week in rent?

The residence in question is in Thorndon and is valued at around $510,000. It is a three bedroom residence taking up 99 square metres. Hardly the sort of place you could think is worth $1,000 a week.

GUYON Well let’s look at this mistake though because there is a certain degree of cynicism about this.  On June 1st when you took over as leader you said we’re throwing open our expenses to the public, we’re going to be open about this, what you didn’t tell us is that behind the scenes you were doing a market valuation on this property and you found out that you were actually charging the taxpayer double, you didn’t tell us that, then you came out and released  your expenses and it’s only become public because we started asking questions this week, I mean you’re no better than anyone else.

METIRIA I was not aware of the market valuation at the time that we …

GUYON Well why wasn’t a market valuation done in the first place?

METIRIA We did, we do them every year.

GUYON But this is the problem with these cosy arrangement isn’t it because you are your own landlord so no one really cares what the market value, muggings the taxpayer picks up the bill.

This is why I have consistently advocated that MPs should not own directly or indirectly any property they claim rent for as a tenant. You can not be landlord and tenant. It has been legal to do so up until now, but I think the rules should change.

METIRIA That is why we released our expenses before any other party did, don’t forget we did this off our own back, we released those expenses, we’ve got out of whack with the rent, and we’ve refunded.

GUYON How much?

METIRIA It’s about six thousand dollars.  About six thousand dollars we refunded.

GUYON To Parliamentary Services?

METIRIA To Parliamentary Services.

GUYON Where was the press release on that?

METIRIA We made sure – well that’s why I’m telling  you now, on national television so you’ve got the information, and so the whole public have got the information.

You’re telling because Guyon asked the right questions.

GUYON But you wouldn’t have if we hadn’t started asking questions would you, that’s the thing.

METIRIA We made a mistake, we acknowledged that mistake, we fixed it, we fixed the mistake and we’ve refunded the money, and you’re quite right to raise it, and the public quite rightly has a right to know which is why we’re telling you about it today.

GUYON It was cynical though wasn’t it, because you didn’t tell people that behind the scenes you were tidying up your own arrangements before you laundered them, and made sure that they were actually legitimate before you released them, you never told us about that.

METIRIA I can understand that you want this to be kind of you know a big story and I understand why that’s the case…

GUYON No it’s a question because you have been telling other MPs and other political parties that you’re the moral compass of parliament, yet you’ve been ripping the taxpayer off.

METIRIA But the fact is that we made a mistake, we’ve fixed the mistake, and we’ve refunded the money, we made a mistake, we fixed the mistake and we refunded it, in 12 years that’s not too bad.  The public has known about our super trust for all of that time and we’ve made information about it public, and so we’re quite happy to be open about the process that we’ve done, which is we make a mistake, we fixed the mistake, and we’ve refunded the money.

The Greens have been open (and kudos for that) about the existence of the fund, but have never detailed publicly exactly how much money they make from its own MPs living in the property they own.

You see the issue is not just the over-charging of rent. It comes back to them using the super fund as a way to maximise the amount they can claim. Let me demonstrate.

The Super Fund gets $24,000 a year rent (that is the maximum) plus the Fund gets $26,200 as the taxpayer contribution to the super, and $10,480 as the MP contribution. That means they have a total of $60,680. It was somewhat less in 2001when the property was purchased, but the comparison is still valid. I understand the cost was around $300,000.

Not over the last eight years the average interest rate has been 8.5%. This means that in the first year there would be $25,500 of interest on the property and $60,680 of repayments (if all goes into the mortgage) which reduce the principal by $35,000 or so.

This results in the mortgage being paid off after around seven years, so the MP gets left with a mortgage free property (now worth $500,000) and ongoing rental income of $24,000 a year.

If the Greens had not vested the property in their super fund, but registered it under their own MPs names, they could only claim interest on the mortgage.

Now in the first year this is $25,500 so they would claim the same – $24,000 maximum. But in the second year the interest would be just $22,500 and then $19,300 and this is all they would have been able to claim as rent.

Over the eight years they have owned the property they would have only been able to claim rent of $116,000 instead of $192,000.

They have a second property they currently rent to themselves, so that is the potential advantage per property above.

So there are really three issues here:

1. The fact the Greens were charging almost $1,000 a week for a property whose market rental value was $540 or so a week (and we do not yet know how this happened, and who blew the whistle)
2. The secret repayments, despite claiming they were setting the model for transparency
3. The appropriateness of using the super fund to maximise the amount that can be claimed from the taxpayer

Again I don’t think any MP should have an interest in a home they rent out to themselves. Either just pay them all flat allowances (as Ministers will soon get) or require them to have no direct or indirect interest in the property.

Green co-leader was on Q+A this morning, and it was a pretty lamentable performance. While there were a couple of tough topics, she just didn’t cope with the scrutiny, and appeared very flustered and evasive.

I backed Turei as their best choice for co-leader (not that I get a vote!) as she has generally been a strong MP. But today showed up the gap between her and someone like Fitzsimons, who would have handled things much more calmly.

Of course part of the problem was that on the trade issue, Turei had a nonsensical position to defend. Every country on earth supports the move to freer trade, apart from pretty much just North Korea. The Green view on trade is very much a fringe view, and it got exposed today.

From the transcript (not yet online:

GUYON Okay let’s look at an economic idea that you are opposed to, and that is free trade largely.   In your maiden speech in 2002 you said that, and I quote you, ‘the acceptance of free trade agreements threatens our economy, our environment, our people and our sovereignty.’  Do you not believe in any free trade agreements at all?

METIRIA Well our position is that you need to have systems of fair trade, that make sure that New Zealand can retain its economic sovereignty, and free trade deals tend to undermine the economic sovereignty.

GUYON All the free trade deals, I mean the free trade deal that we have with Australia for example that we’ve had for 20 years, has that undermined our sovereignty?

METIRIA It prevents New Zealand from being able to make the economic decisions around our manufacturing, around job retention, all of those issues that are best for New Zealand, and we want New Zealand to be a prosperous and sustainable economy, that means we have to move … we need to be able to make those decisions for ourselves.

GUYON Does that mean all free trade agreements, for example the CER agreement that we’ve had with Australia since 1982, does that cover that?

METIRIA Look the key issue for us…

GUYON No, can I get a straight answer for our viewers on this question please, because it’s all very well to give a speech about free trade.

Yet she still could not state whether or not the Green Party thought CER was a good or a bad thing.

I wonder why the Greens are so inconsistent on the issues of national sovereignty. They correctly point out climate change affects everyone regardless of national borders. They support surrendering sovereignty to the UN on every treaty there is. Yet on economic issues, they cite national sovereignty as a reason to prevent people freely trading with each other.

GUYON Okay with respect, let’s look at one of those countries, China.  Now on Thursday it was the first anniversary of our Free Trade Agreement with China, our exports have climbed 61% over that year to 3.3 billion.  I mean wouldn’t we all be the poorer if we’d listened to you and not gone ahead with that agreement?

METIRIA Oh look Guyon, I mean you can make that kind of accusation and I think it’s just silly, the truth is that so much of New Zealand’s economy at the moment is under serious threat if  you like from the fact that we’re having to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars every week actually in order to just pay the interest on our current borrowing.  We’re having a housing bubble at the moment which is going to also impact seriously on our economy and there are other kinds of tools that we can use to deal with economic issues that are affecting New Zealand, like increasing the ability for banks for example to lend ….

The stupidity of Metiria’s response is the China FTA means we are borrowing less. Exports rose 60% in the middle of a recession!! That is a huge sucess. She just had no answer at all to this.

GUYON Can we return to this agreement though because there are some real Green issues here in this China Free Trade Agreement and I want to talk to you about one of them, because the New Zealand Trade and Enterprise says areas like the health supplements in Manuka Honey are a great area for expansion of our exports, and in fact your own Super Fund has quite a large shareholding on Konvita New Zealand which has 18 branded stores in China and is actually doing very very well out of this China Free Trade Agreement, would you deny them that opportunity, because you opposed that agreement.

You have to love the irony. Their super fund is personally profiting from the China FTA that they battled against.

An interesting blog post from Nandor Tanczos:

Sue Bradford announced last week that she is leaving Parliament, citing disappointment at losing the co-leadership contest. It’s an honest statement and she is to be admired for that. She did not add that she is unhappy at the direction the Green Party is headed, but there is no doubt that she would have steered a very different course from that intended by the current leadership. Perhaps she saw little place for herself in the new, unaligned, Green Party.

Nandor makes clear there must be considerable tension over direction and leadership.

Sue was a sometimes controversial figure, but there is no doubt that she has played a key role in the early development of the Parliamentary Greens. She has also played an important role in Parliament, but that is all about to change. Despite her brave face, life after Parliament will be hard to adjust to. Once gone, she is unlikely to get any support from the Greens during this difficult transition, and I hope that her personal support system is strong. She will need it.

Ouch. To be fair almost all former MPs find it pretty hard after Parliament.

The Old Left element of the party, once so influential, will be scarcely represented once Sue has left. Keith Locke, considered by many to be the archetypical communist, is actually nothing of the sort. While he is the oldest member of the Green caucus, his mental youthfulness and his sense of empathy have prevented him from becoming sufficiently doctrinaire. With this new influx, the Green Party is likely to become a more emphatically ‘green-wing’ party than has been possible in the past.

A point I made.

I was interviewed for TV3 News on Saturday about what Bradford’s departure may mean politically, along with Andrew Little, Chris Trotter and Matt McCarten.

I took the view that it was potentially beneficial to the Greens as replacing Bradford with Clendon strengthens their environmental brand and if they are smart they could get as much as 10% of the vote if they position themselves as “greening” the Government no matter if it is National or Labour.

I stressed that the Greens will always support a Labour-led Government over a National-Led Government if one is possible. But if only National can form a Government, the Greens might be able to go beyond their current co-operation agreement to an abstain on supply and confidence agreement.

I understand Matt McCarten saw the move as potentially beneficial to the Greens also, and their ability to work on both sides of the aisle so to speak.

Andrew Little saw it as good for Labour, as Labour could pick up social justice voters from the Greens. I responded that this doesn’t actually help Labour win office, just as National picking up ACT voters doesn’t. And it can actually backfire if the Greens drop below 5% (as they have done in last night’s TVNZ poll). Also I have some doubts that Goff-led Labour will be more convincing to social justice voters than the Greens.

The real benefit to Labour would be if the Greens pick up some centrist voters who were previously put off by Bradford. For that will grow the left’s vote.

Chris Trotter sees the departure of Bradford as being the death of the left as the Greens go middle class.

He’s done a follow-up post today, which has some interesting observations:

The dangers inherent in the Greens’ educative model are demonstrated in their policy on the Treaty of Waitangi. Though the signing of the Treaty, like all historical events, is the subject of multiple, and often sharply contradictory, interpretations, the Greens have adopted an unequivocal and quite inflexible interpretation of the Treaty’s meaning. So much so that when some of their own members, unconvinced by the official party line, openly questioned it’s accuracy, they were deemed ineligible to stand as Green candidates by the Party leadership.

That the dissidents’ views on the Treaty of Waitangi were actually more in tune with those of the majority of Pakeha New Zealanders was an “inconvenient truth” to be overcome by – yes, you guessed it – a taxpayer-funded traveling road-show which would take the “true” meaning of the Treaty directly to the ignorant Pakeha masses and educate them into full conformity with the Greens’ historical interpretation.

This authoritarian aspect of the Greens’ political style is nowhere more apparent than in their so-called “consensus-based decision-making” constitution. Described as a means of “seeking positions that the maximum number of people can support, rather than a simple majority”, what these rules actually make possible is the ability of a tiny minority to over-rule and/or subvert the will of the majority.

In practical terms, it allows the leadership of the party, either directly or through their surrogates, to prevent the membership from directly challenging the Green Party caucus’s political strategy and tactics. Rather than promoting the open contest of conflicting political options, it fosters the cobbling together of compromises. Also, by imposing enormous emotional pressure on dissenters, it drives opposition below the surface of party affairs – a situation which, once again, privileges those in senior positions, and makes rank-and-file challenges to official party policy extremely difficult.

That is an interesting analysis of how the much vaunted consensus system actually can favour the hierarchy.

The NZ Herald editorial:

Green MP Sue Bradford’s sudden retirement from Parliament yesterday reflects little credit on her party. With typical candour she declares her decision was prompted by the party’s co-leadership election a few months ago, which she lost to a young Maori, Metiria Turei.

Normally this would sound like sour grapes but whatever one thinks of Ms Bradford’s politics, she does not seem to suffer from wounded pride or excessive self-importance. She is remembered for the indignities she was willing to suffer in the years before entering Parliament when she was pictured in every small protest sit-in, usually being carried away by the police.

This is true, but I still regard it as a bad look for an MP to bail out of Parliament just a few months after they got elected.

Being elected to Parliament is a huge privilege, and MPs are elected for a three year term. It is one of the downsides of MMP that List MPs especially are being shuffled into and out of Parliament outside the electoral cycle.

I think no MP should bail out of Parliament early, unless it is for ill health, or to take up an appointment.

When Jeanette Fitzsimons relinquished the female co-leadership this year Ms Bradford was clearly the strongest candidate to replace her, and she knew it. Ms Turei was barely known outside the party and Sue Kedgley, another previous campaigner who has found her feet in Parliament, seemed not to be interested.

I’m not sure I agree. First of all Turei was deemed the favourite to win at a very early stage. Secondly the skills at being a good legislator (which Bradford was) are not necessarily the skills of leadership. Leadership is about taking people with you – and I think Bradford has never shown much in the way of skills there.

So why did Ms Bradford miss out? It is reasonable to conclude the Greens wanted a different face. They are a party sensitive to demographic character, as evidenced by co-leadership from different genders. Ms Turei offered youth and ethnic diversity. In the four months since her election she has not shown much else.

A party that puts appearances before substance is making difficulties for itself.

The Herald overlooks another issue – maybe the biggest issue. Bradford has rarely been involved with environmental issues. Her causes are social justice. In fact some in the Greens had grumbled her fights for so called social justice diminished the Greens branding as an environmental party.

Russel Norman (who like Bradford used to be a communist – Marxist not Maoist though) also has a background more on the social justice side, than the environmental side. Since becoming co-leader his focus has changed – but nevertheless I think a combination of Norman and Bradford would have weakened the Greens brand as an environmental party – and I suspect this was a factor in Turei’s victory.

Sue Bradford has announced she is quitting Parliament on the 30th of October.

It’s basically because she lost the co-leadership election to Metiria Turei. Things are obviously not that happy in the Green camp.

More later.

UPDATE:

Some thoughts on Sue. Before she entered Parliament I thought she would be an atrocious MP – someone like Pam Corkery who was only good at protest and unsuited to actually making a positive (as in positive for their point of view) contribution.

I was wrong. She was in her first two terms a very effective MP. She was named Backbencher of the Year in 2000 by the NZ Herald. On select committee she asked useful and intelligent questions. She didn’t grandstand much. And she actually stood up a bit for small businesses – reasonably sympathetic to not burying them in compliance costs.

She also was a successful backbench legislator, getting three laws passed.

The anti-smacking law was one of those bills. Now I don’t think any worse of Sue because I disagree with the substance of the law. There are many laws I don’t agree with, and I don’t expect Green Party MPs to be promoting that many laws I like.

But where I am highly critical of her, is that she was fundamentally dishonest in her promotion of the law change. I think her rhetoric at times was as disgraceful as some of her opponents. And she basically lied when she said the law change was not about making it illegal to smack, when it was. She has since made quite clear that it was not just about stopping child abuse, but about legislating against correctional smacking.

If Bradford had promoted her law change more honestly, my previously high opinion of her would have remained. But I think she did herself and the country a disservice on that issue – and again I am not talking about the law change itself, but the way she conducted it.

Regardless I hope she has a happy career outside Parliament. Maybe she will stand for Mayor of the Auckland Super City?

This has exposed some unhappiness within the Greens. No matter how much you sugar coat it, an MP bailing out of Parliament with over two years to go is a bad look. Lots of MPs lose leadership contests, do not get selected for Cabinet, are not ranked as high as they want.  Almost all see their term through.

There is a wider issue, which I have alluded to before also. Green voters voted for a Green list with Jeanette as Leader and Bradford as an MP. I am not a fan of having significant changes so soon after an election. It almost stretches to false pretences. If there is to be a managed change of leadership it should be in the final year of the parliamentary terms, not just a few months after an electoral mandate has been granted.

A reader e-mails:

We learned a couple of things about the Greens, yesterday… They don’t support human rights and they don’t care about climate change.

First, they wouldn’t support the Education (Freedom of Association) Amendment Bill – even just as far as select committee.

And secondly, when Parliament ran out of members’ bills to debate, and started debating the various reports on the order paper that they almost never get to, the Greens wouldn’t even take one call to discuss the Select Committee Review of the Emissions Trading Scheme. Every Green MP could have taken a 10-minute speech to lay out the Greens’ vision for combating climate change, they could have controlled Parliament’s agenda and presented a unified and united view on what they think we must do. But I guess they don’t have one. Like everyone else, they preferred to take the evening off. Human rights and climate change just aren’t that important…

Ouch. What does Frog say in defence?

A good editorial from the Wellingtonian:

We have good news for the principals of the Save the Basin trust.

The Basin Reserve, one of Wellington’s premier sports venues, does not need saving. It is as safe as houses.

So why is there a save the basin campaign?

Therefore, it raises the question of the real agenda of the Save the Basin trustees.

The news section of their website deals only marginally with the Basin Reserve.

However, there are mentions of “a huge concrete flyover”, “the roar of trucks and the howl of boy racers from the flyover”, “clouds of pollution and car exhaust”.

It seems possible that the reason for the formation of the Save the Basin trust has more to do with preventing the building of the flyover than protecting “New Zealand’s oldest dedicated cricket pitch”, as the website describes the Basin.

So it is the usual “we like congestion” campaigners.

A Save the Basin protest gathering last week drew about a dozen protesters.

Their banners were focused almost exclusively on preventing the flyover being built. It was hard to find a mention of the Basin.

If Kent Duston, Iona Pannett and company don’t want the proposed flyover, it’s their right to try to stop it being built. If they want to ban cars, get rid of roads and return us to the horse-and-carriage age, it’s their prerogative to so campaign.

Pannett is of course a Green Party City Councillor. Duston was (he was a list candidate for the Green Party last election.

But the way things stand now, some people might feel they are being dishonest about their intentions, tugging at the emotions with their Save the Basin title, while actually running a separate campaign far removed from either the Basin or cricket.

Perhaps Ban the Flyover would not have quite the appeal of Save the Basin.

But at least it might more accurately reflect the trustees’ ambitions.

Indeed. I remember the decade plus campaign of protests against the motorway extension. And now it has happened, you would never go back. I find traffic down that end of town much faster moving now