The Washington Post reports:

Before “sequestration” took effect, the Obama administration issued specific — and alarming — predictions about what it would bring. There would be one-hour waits at airport security. Four-hour waits at border crossings. Prison guards would be furloughed for 12 days. FBI agents, up to 14.

At the Pentagon, the military health program would be unable to pay its bills for service members. The mayhem would extend even into the pantries of the neediest Americans: Around the country, 600,000 low-income women and children would be denied federal food aid.

But none of those things happened.

Sequestration did hit, on March 1. And since then, the $85 billion budget cut has caused real reductions in many federal programs that people depend on. But it has not produced what the Obama administration predicted: widespread breakdowns in crucial government services.

The Washington Post recently checked 48 of those dire predictions about sequestration’s impact. Just 11 have come true, and some effects are worse than forecast. But 24 predictions have not come to pass. In 13 cases, agencies said it is too soon to know.

The good thing about this, is no one will believe those who resist spending cuts (or in fact cuts in the rate of increase) much in future, as their claims of impending doom have been found to be Chicken Little doomsdaying.

At the U.S. Geological Survey, for instance, officials had said they would have to shut off 350 gauges that provide crucial predictions of impending floods. They didn’t. The real number is less than 90. What was cut instead?

For one thing, $2.7 million in conference expenses have been chopped since February.

And that would never have been cut, without the sequester.

Targeted spending cuts wee definitely preferable, but as the US Government could not agree on them, then the sequester is a worthwhile backup tool which has started to force even a minimal level of fiscal discipline on the USG.

Last time, it sent 469 scientists. The attendance for this fall’s conference has not been set, but Bales guessed it would be more like 350, for a cost of $350,000. “We are not investing in the future,” Bales said.

I think the future will manage with only 350 people at the conference!

But sequestration has not become a daily hassle for most Americans, and its effects on the economy have been softened by a stronger job market and low interest rates.

“It was more the unquantified predictions of calamity by politicians that were wrong,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics, a research firm.

But now, the Obama administration will seek to make the threat reappear. In October, when the new fiscal year begins, so will another round of sequestration. The administration expects a $109 billion cut.

But no one will listen this time, and the small steps towards fiscal sanity will get bigger.

Stuff reports:

Sharples is poised to stand down today as party leader though he will remain an MP until the next election.

The Maori Party confirmed last night Sharples would be holding a press conference this morning to announce his decision about the leadership, but would not say more.

Sharples has been under pressure for months to stand down after co-leader Tariana Turia made it clear she considered it was time for a change.

He reportedly plans to remain an MP until the next election and to retain his ministerial portfolios.

Key this morning said he was “totally comfortable” with Sharples remaining a minister, though he was waiting to hear from the Maori Party about what decisions they had made.

This is the right decision (if reported correctly) for the Maori Party, as it solves the leadership issue – at least for the male co-leader. Ikaroa-Rawhiti showed voters will not support a party with uncertain leadership.

As Sharples is retiring from Parliament also, his seat of Tamaki Makarau will become more vulnerable to Labour at the election. However Flavell becoming co-leader will help secure his seat and I expect Turia’s sucessor to retain her seat – at least in 2014 anyway.

Thomas Lumley at Stats Chat blogs a quote from Professor Doug Sellman:

The ethanol in alcohol is a group one carcinogen, like asbestos

Now I have to say I had no idea what a group one carcinogen is, but Prof Sellman makes it sound like something very very nasty and fatal.

Prof Lumley explains:

Many of the readers of this story won’t know what a “group one carcinogen” is.  Given the context, a reader might well assume that “group one carcinogens” are those that carry the largest risks of cancer, or cause the most serious cancers. In fact, all it means is that an additional hazard of cancer, whether high or low, has been definitely established, because that’s all the IARC review process tries to do.

So it is a fancy name for some risk, not high risk.

Some group 1 carcinogens, such as tobacco and hepatitis B, are responsible for large numbers of cancer deaths worldwide. Others, such as plutonium and diethylstilbestrol, are responsible only for small numbers of deaths. Some group 1 carcinogens cause aggressive, untreatable tumours; for others, such as human papillomavirus, disease is largely preventable by screening; still others, such as sunlight, sometimes cause serious disease but mostly cause relatively minor tumours.

The phrase “group one carcinogen” is only relevant in an argument over whether the risk is zero or non-zero. Its use in other contexts suggests that someone doesn’t know what it means, or perhaps hopes that you don’t.

I am sure Prof Sellman knows exactly what it means.

Telecom has announced:

Telecom today announced that from Monday 1 July it will extend the $10 flat daily rate for mobile data roaming to four new markets – Japan, Singapore, Korea and France – and confirmed that it will keep the $6 daily rate for data roaming in Australia in place, after an overwhelmingly positive response from Telecom roaming customers to the deals.

Excellent. This has really shaken up the market, and made roaming far less painful.

In the five months since the flat daily rates were introduced, Telecom customers travelling overseas used three times as much roaming data as they did in the same period in 2012, and Telecom has received very strong feedback on the simplicity and the value of the offer – particularly from business customers.

When I go to the US, I’ll be keeping my Telecom sim card in my phone – something I would have never done if facing per MB data rates.

When the Kitteridge report was first leaked, Green co-leader Russel Norman was outraged by the leak. He suspected it was a deliberate leak by the PMs Office or similar, and demanded the Govt take action.

On 9 April he said:

Dr Russel Norman: In light of the fact that the cover note on the report says that the appendices are legally privileged and highly classified, does he believe that the leaking of the full Kitteridge report is a serious offence? 

So he is calling it a serious offence, if the full report was leaked.

Dr Russel Norman: If it does turn out that the full report has been leaked by someone in his Government, what consequences should face the person who leaked this information, which the Government Communications Security Bureau describes as legally privileged and highly classified? What consequences should that person face? 

And he calls for serious consequences.

Dr Russel Norman: Given that so far the only member of his Government who, he has told us, has had access to this report is the office of the Prime Minister, did he or a member of his staff leak the report?

Which was a stupid allegation to make, as the leaking of it undermined the PM’s trip to China.

Dr Russel Norman: If he does not know who leaked the report, will he launch an inquiry to get to the bottom of it, given his previous support for an inquiry into a leak at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade over documents that were probably quite considerably less sensitive?

So he explicitly called for a leak inquiry. He said the leak may be a serious offence, and called for serious consequences.

But now today, he has changed tune and decided that the leak inquiry was draconian, and went too far.

The Prime Minister’s inquiry into the leaking of the Kitteridge report appears to have acted beyond the law by accessing Peter Dunne’s email account log without his permission, and the Green Party has lodged a complaint with the Ombudsmen on this issue, Green Party Co-leader Dr Russel Norman said today.

Norman seems to be arguing that the Henry inquiry should have merely asked every Minister if they leaked the report, and when they said “no, it wasn’t me”, should have left it there.

If the Henry inquiry had done that, Norman would no doubt have been calling it a cover up.

The Press reports:

The Christchurch City Council has been stripped of its accreditation to issue building consents.

In a huge blow to the organisation International Accreditation New Zealand (Ianz) has followed through on its threat to revoke the council’s accreditation.

Christchurch City Council will be stripped of its right to issue consents from Monday.

Council’s general manager regulation and democracy services Peter Mitchell said in the last 14 days the council issued 632 consents with a combined value of $160 million.

Of the original backlog of 500 consents, 25 remained and these were expected to be cleared today.

He said the council could still lawfully receive, process and grant building consents and would continue with other aspects of the building consent process, including inspections and processing code compliance certificates.

Mitchell said he was confident the city council would regain its accreditation.

He explained the Ianz letter indicated that while the agency was satisfied progress was being made, it did not yet have confidence the council was operating in full compliance with its standards.

It had raised a number of issues that it had not raised in the May 30 letter which it now wanted more information on. …

Ianz chief executive Dr Llew Richards said stripping a council of its consenting powers was a “hugely unprecedented” move.

He said the organisation told the Christchurch City Council of its decision about 9am today.  “They have not been able to satisfy us,” Richards said.

He was unable to comment specifically on the problems but outlined the process for when issues arose.

”A core responsibility of a BCAs (Building Consent Authorities) is to ensure a sound audit process is in place and to provide Ianz with records of such technical reviews. Without such evidence, Ianz could not continue accreditation,” Richards said.

”A lot of publicity is given to the statutory deadline for issuing consents. Ianz uses this information as only one of the indicators of adequate resourcing.

“An improvement in the rate of consents issued still requires an assurance they comply with the Code and Act requirements.”

Note that IANZ is independent of the Government.

I’d say this delivers the mayoral election to Lianne Dalziel. Who wants to vote for incumbency, when the status quo is that you fail at your core functions?

Not that this is the fault of Bob Parker. The CEO Tony Maryatt needs to be held responsible for this outcome. Parker hasn’t helped though by denying there is a problem, and comparing the letter from IANZ to a parking ticket.

A spokesman for Brownlee said the council’s consenting crisis was scheduled to be discussed by Cabinet today. The Minister would make a comment after that.

City council planning committee chairwoman Cr Sue Wells said staff were gutted by the decision.

A consenting authority had never been stripped off its accreditation before so the council was now in uncharted waters, she said.

“We’re going to take a deep breath and sort this out,” she said.

Last November Ianz identified 17 areas of concern with the council’s processes and in May gave it formal notice of its intention to remove its consenting ability.

It is worth remembering that Lianne has spent three years claiming that the major problem in Christchurch was that the Government took away too much power from the Council. Considering the CCC has proven incompetent at even a core function such as consenting, imagine how much chaos there would have been if Labour had been in charge, and had CERA powers mainly resting with the Council?

The Herald reports:

A nephew of Hone Harawira has been jailed for chasing a boy into his home and beating him in his bedroom before stealing a whale bone necklace.

Mau Harawira – a son of anti-violence campaigner Hinewhare Harawira – was sentenced to three years and two months in jail when he appeared at the Auckland District Court today.

That’s a decent sentence.

The court heard how the 30-year-old had been drinking with a friend at an Auckland beach when the pair believed they had been offended by a 12-year-old playing nearby.

They chased him to his house and went inside, where they knocked him to the ground and kicked him.

They then dragged him onto a balcony and the beating stopped only when a passerby noticed the violence. …

Judge Harvey described Harawira as a “gutless cowardly thug”.

He said the boy was a small 12-year-old while Harawira and his friend were large, drunk men.

All violence is bad, but large men beating up a 12 year old boy is indeed gutless and cowardly.

Luke Malpass writes in the Dom Post:

To understand why Julia Gillard failed so miserably as prime minister, one must understand the shortcomings of Mr Rudd.

When he was elected prime minister in 2007, hubris quickly became apparent.

He considered himself a philosopher king, penning trite essays such as how Protestant theologian and Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have voted Labor, and a 7000-word tome on how it was his sacred duty to save capitalism from itself.

Only social democrats, he opined, could navigate Australia through the global financial crisis.

Sadly, philosopher kings are often difficult human beings, and so it was with Mr Rudd. It is well documented that members of his own party were waiting for the day when “the public hates Kevin as much as we do”.

He was poll-driven, prone to tantrums, horrendous to work for and with. Last year fellow Labor MP Steve Gibbons called him a “psychopath with a giant ego”, and his own treasurer, Wayne Swan, said he had a “deeply demeaning attitude towards other people including our caucus colleagues”.

In 2010, many were pleased to be rid of him.

However, it’s often overlooked that Mr Rudd was dumped in large part because many of his policies were either poor quality or unpopular and his administration inept.

Rudd is a deeply flawed human being, but as Luke Malpass writes, that is not why the public went off him. They didn’t know about this other stuff.

Climate change topped the list of Rudd policy failures. Despite bloviating that it was “the greatest economic, moral and social challenge of our time”, Mr Rudd quickly abandoned doing anything when it became unpopular.

An ineffective fiscal stimulus was still being spent in school halls years after the global financial crisis had passed, while a home-insulation disaster came complete with house fires, deaths, and a ruined industry.

He presided over an abandoned laptops-in-schools programme. He introduced an unworkable and punitive mining-super-profits tax.

He legislated the Fair Work Act, taking industrial relations back to the 1970s. He dismantled the “Pacific solution” for asylum seekers, helping restart the odious people-smuggling trade, and 100 boat people are now arriving daily.

Arguably, his biggest failure.

For this reason Mr Rudd’s elevation will probably make little difference. The policies are the same, and are still unpopular.

The basic conceit, under which Labor has operated since 2009, is that it is no good at “selling its message” – the notion that people might just not like the policies is never countenanced.

A lesson for more than Australian Labor.

A reader e-mails:

Not in the Chrustchurch Plan

By 1879, serving the population (13.500) of Christchurch were 60 grocer’s shops. 41 hotels, 14 churchs, 6 banks, five chemist shops, six breweries.30 priests and ministers of religion, 24 barristers and solicitors, 18 architects, 18 doctors and 5 dentists.

Christchurch needs to restore the balance between breweries/hotels and the general population and definitly the balance between breweries/hotels and the legal profession

A sentiment many would agree with!

This graphic from the BBC shows the spending cuts for the next financial year in the UK. This is what happens when you let the debt get out of control. Eventually, there is a reckoning.

Mind you, not sure why the only area getting more funding is international aid!

The Press editorial:

Shearer’s concerns are the more immediate. An opinion poll last week delivering a dismal ranking for both the party and Shearer personally was devastating to Labour. With National halfway into a less than easy second term, Labour was hoping that by now it would be shaping up much better. Shearer is not helped by his backers saying that if the poll results were converted to seats the party would be doing a little better than it had at the last election, because, as the critics point out, that election was a catastrophe for Labour.

Inspired by the brutal rolling of Julia Gillard across the Tasman, and keenly aware that the procedure here for Labour to remove its leader is much more drawn out and cumbersome, some in the party are saying that Shearer must start to do better by spring or be replaced.

We know this because one or more Labour MPs has spoken to both the One News and 3 News political editors. In fact it looks like more than one MP according to Q+A:

JESSICA Some of the MPs that we’ve been talking to behind the scenes this week have said two months is-

DAVID Well, nobody’s spoken to me about it, and I can tell you, I’d like to know who the MP is.

Not a good look to have to ask a reporter who is briefing against you!

JESSICA Is it hard not having the support completely of your caucus?

DAVID Look, I have the support of my caucus. I mean, the fact that you’ve spoken to one anonymous person, and I haven’t heard of any-

JESSICA I’ve actually spoken to several people.

That should ring some alarm bells. However I think Shearer will remain safe, so long as the ABC faction thinks there is a chance Cunliffe could win a ballot in case of a vacancy.

The Herald had a story about how opposition to the Sky City deal has increased since last year from 40% to 62%. But the print version includes this graphic which shows very different questions asked, in terms of options provided.

What would have been the results if the Herald asked the same question as last year, giving an option of approving if the number of machines across the city drops? I guess we’ll never know – which is a pity.

The EU has set up a myth busting page, which is a very good idea. While I think the EU has some fundamental flaws (lack of democracy, involved in two many areas) it is fair to say they get blamed for some stuff unfairly. So far they have blogged:

•  EU laws do not prevent churches from taking steps to deal with bat infestations
  
• The EU does not “blacklist” beaches: EU laws do not prevent anyone from swimming anywhere, but who wants to swim in poo?
• Lack of UK action not EU rules responsible for UK Jam manufacturer being in a sticky situation

Poor Owen Glenn. He made his fortune overseas, and in recent years has spent a significant portion of it trying to improve New Zealand. His biggest desire was to spent $80 million on reducing child abuse. But of course, he must be dragged down because he has not led a life of perfection. The SST reports:

Millionaire businessman Sir Owen Glenn’s inquiry into domestic violence and child abuse is under further pressure with revelations he was accused of physically abusing a young woman in Hawaii in 2002.

Court documents seen by Fairfax Media show Glenn offered a plea of no contest when the case came before the courts in Hawaii in 2003. That plea means the charge was not contested or admitted. Glenn was put on probation, and the charge was dismissed in 2004 when the probationary period ended.

Court documents show Glenn was arrested in a Honolulu hotel in the early hours of September 10, 2002, and was charged with “abuse of family or household members”. …

Glenn yesterday said in a statement that there was no truth to the allegation.

“My regret now is that I didn’t take the matter to court, however after two years of dispute in the American court system and at the strong advice of my American lawyer I resolved the case in Hawaii to avoid further horrendous court costs, and to bring the matter to an end on an agreed basis which resulted in an order of dismissal.

“It saddens me that yet again it appears the New Zealand media is delving into my personal life to fill their pages while New Zealand is ranked the third highest country in the world for rape and this issue goes virtually unreported.”

Sadly I think this now kills off his inquiry. Sir Owen should focus his efforts in an area where he won’t be turned on and pilloried.

The HoS report:

Police fatally shot burglar Adam Morehu in the back, before hitting him over the head with a torch, his family says.

Details on the two bullet wounds have emerged after the Taranaki man’s body was returned to his family for burial, along with a preliminary pathologist’s report.

“I don’t know that I would grieve any less if he was shot in the front, but being shot in the back – that’s just wrong,” said Diane Richardson, the mother of his partner Kaly.

Even if the family are correct, surely the key issue is why were the Police shooting Morehu?

Police say Adam Te Rata Charles Morehu, 33, was first Tasered, then shot twice in the torso with a police-issue Glock handgun after he acted aggressively towards the officers, twice threatening to kill them and firing a shot from a rifle.

He not only threatened to kill the Police, but he fired his rifle. At that point he was doing suicide by cop. He refused to surrender to armed police, he threatened to kill them, and he fired his rifle.

But they have refused to confirm to the Herald on Sunday that he was shot in the back, saying only that the officer believed he heard Morehu reloading his rifle in the darkness.

I don’t care what the angle is. This is not some Western duel or gunfight. He fired his gun, and refused to surrender. You don’t give him a sporting chance to kill you. You fire.

Kaly had been angry at Morehu for going on the alleged burglary, Richardson said, but more angry still to discover that he need not have died.

Indeed. All he had to do was drop his gun and surrender. Her anger should all by at Morehu, and not at the poor cops who had to risk their lives being shot by him.

All 111 booths in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti by-election have reported in and Labour’s Meka Whaitiri has won by 1,761 votes.

Turnout was very low. Just 10,570 ordinary votes cast plus 1,620 special votes which equals 12,190 total votes. This compares to 18,732 votes in 2011, and as a turnout of people on the roll is around 35% only.

The main four candidates’ (with change from 2011 electorate vote in brackets) results are:

1. Meka Whaitiri (Labour) 41.5% (-19.2%)
2. Te Hāmua Nikora (Mana) 24.8% (+10.5%)
3. Na Rongowhakaata Raihania (Maori) 20.0% (-3.1%)
4. Marama Davidson (Green) 11.3% (no cand in 2011)

It’s a good victory for Labour, with a 16.7% margin (was 37.6%) over Mana, being 1,761 votes. Mana were obviously lying over their claims that Labour polling had them only 5% behind. Should help David Shearer’s leadership (which will make the Nats happy), but can’t be too complacent. The total vote share of 42% is less than Maori and Mana combined.

Mana did well to come second, and reports were they had a good activist base at work, plus an attractive candidate to youth.

The Maori Party lost votes from 2011. This should be a wake up call to them that they need to sort their leadership out, or they will struggle to retain support.

Davidson for the Greens did pretty well, with her vote being slightly above the Greens party vote in 2011. Sounds like she will get a reasonable list placing in 2014.

Meka is now an MP. On paper she looks like she could be one of the better Labour MPs. Congratulations to her on her election.

John Armstrong writes in the NZ Herald:

National’s decision – very much John Key’s decision – to bite the bullet and set a 2020 start for building the $2.9 billion Auckland City Rail Link is a political masterstroke.

Once again. Key has trumped National’s opponents and neutralised the political advantage they had held by jumping across the political divide and setting up camp in their territory.

He first did it with nuclear ship visits when he became National’s leader in 2006. He simply used his honeymoon in the job to declare the anti-nuclear law would remain intact under his leadership. And that was that. It may not have greatly impressed the Americans. But in an instant, a political millstone had been removed from National’s neck.

On numerous occasions since, Key has likewise swallowed hard and taken positions which do not sit that comfortably with National ideology but which spike the guns of the party’s enemies and leave them with nowhere to go.

Regardless of the merits of the City Rail Link (and I actually think it does have merits), one can look at this in a very calculating way.

The Government has said it will fund it by 2020. It is unlikely this Government will actually be in power in 2020, so the actual funding for it will be an issue for the future. The announcement though gives certainity.

If they had not announced future funding for it, well what is the probability that there will not be a change of Government before 2020? Very very low. Even Labour can’t get stuffing up for that long. And if a change of Government means it would then be getting built anyway, well what is the point in holding out?

But there are other advantages. By agreeing to it now, it removes the ability of Labour and Greens to sabotage the Puhoi to Wellsford motorway extension which they were promising to scrap to fund the CRL. Are they now going to keep campaigning on scraping what they call the holiday highway? I doubt it.

So yes, a masterstroke – and one that doesn’t really impact the books long-term as it was inevitable it would be built anyway when there was a change of Government. Instead, it now happens on a more affordable time-frame.

With yesterday’s confirmation of a tunnel as the second harbour crossing plus sundry motorway extensions and developments, Key has mapped out National’s vision for Auckland transport and, perhaps more importantly, laid out the stages by which that vision will be achieved.

In one swoop, he has taken the steam out of what, after housing affordability, is the thorniest issue in the country’s biggest city – traffic congestion – and one on which, according to opinion polls, National’s management has less than impressed the public.

In particular, Key has now marginalised Labour and the Greens in the one aspect of public policy where those parties thought they safely had it all over National – public transport.

Armstrong also points out:

Apart from shoring up National’s support in Auckland, the go-ahead is intended to remind the rest of New Zealand that National – unlike its opponents – looks at the big picture and gets things done whereas they are consumed by the relatively trivial, such as the fate of Peter Dunne and his parliamentary allowances.

And their obsession with the GCSB. Don’t get me wrong – the GCSB is of importance, but it seems the opposition have talked about nothing else for the last few weeks or months. The average family really does not care that much about the GCSB. They care about having a job, a growing economy, better schools and better healthcare.

Fran O’Sullivan also writes:

John Key’s lip-smacking munificence has been writ large as he moves into agenda-setting mode in Auckland and Christchurch, the two cities that will decide next year’s election.

Key’s spreading plenty of pixie dust about, promising multi-billion-dollar transport projects in Auckland – including the City Rail Link which his transport ministers have seriously dissed – and big-ticket projects in earthquake-savaged Christchurch, like a new convention centre.

I joked on Twitter that John Key has spent more in one week than Rob Muldoon spent in nine years on Think Big!

But the comparison, even joking, is unfair. The transport projects are not (generally) being funded by taxpayers. They tend to get funded out of the national land transport fund which is basically user pays funding through petrol tax and road user charges.

Labour’s Auckland issues spokesman, Phil Twyford, was yesterday reduced to carping about the cost of the city’s transport projects and complaining that the timing for some of the construction was still vague.

Which they are, but they allow the planning to begin such as route protection for the harbour crossing.

But he later confined himself to telling journalists it could come from various sources, including (take that, Labour!) the Future Investment Fund, into which his Government is tucking the proceeds of its partial privatisation programme; the Land Transport Fund, which holds the proceeds of petrol excise tax and road-user charges; taxpayers through the Consolidated Fund and even the private sector through some nifty public/private sector partnerships (PPPs).

I think using the proceeds of asset sales to help fund the CRL would be wonderful! Labour then has to argue that shares in a power company are more valuable than the CRL!

And Christchurch mayoral challenger and Labour MP Lianne Dalziel was reduced to complaining from the sidelines as Key and Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Minister Gerry Brownlee cosied up publicly with Parker to announce agreement had been reached on $4.8 billion of investment in Christchurch – $2.9 billion of it coming from the Crown and $1.9 billion committed by the Christchurch City Council – so that projects like the new stadium and a convention centre can proceed.

Key couldn’t resist having a flick at Labour during yesterday’s stand-up, telling reporters he could understand why the public wasn’t warming to Labour because it was “too negative”.

Labour need to learn that endless negativity is not appealing.

The big question is how much further the PM will drive the knife in; particularly as speculation has now been sewn that Labour leader David Shearer has been given two months to turn his party’s dismal poll showing around or face questions over his leadership.

The parallels with Australian Labor leader Julia Gillard are obvious. Their respective publics warmed to neither of them.

The posturing was obvious at the US Embassy’s Independence Day festivities (celebrated early) in Wellington on Wednesday night.

Shearer and two potential leadership pretenders – Grant Robertson and David Cunliffe – maintained a studious distance from each other.

Tick tock, tick tock …

Now 65 days until the September deadline a Labour MP told TV3 Shearer had to improve his performance.

Hamish Rutherford at Stuff reports:

Yesterday Shearer dismissed the talk of a leadership battle.

“There is going to be me leading Labour into the election in 2014,” he said.

“I can absolutely and utterly assure you of that. It’s a very united caucus.”

Really? You look desperate when you say such nonsense. When Charles Chauvel departed in February he pleaded for an end to internal witchhunts, called for a purge of those responsible for the last campaign failure, and asked for those in the wrong faction to stop being shut out of the shadow Cabinet. How is that a united caucus?

This morning iPredict, the forecasting website owned by Victoria University of Wellington, pointed to a 40 per cent chance that Shearer would depart as Labour leader in 2013, with the possibility climbing in recent weeks.

I think Shearer has problems, but they are not yet terminal. In fact I have a bit of money on iPredict that he won’t be rolled in 2013. However I may change my position as events unfold in the next few weeks.

Former Green MP Sue Kedgley wrote an article about MPs in the UK taking money to ask questions on behalf of various groups. She said that this could happen here.

I was going to fisk her article, but Andrew Geddis has helpfully done it for us. He points out that while there is not a document called a code of ethics, such an action would probably be a contempt of Parliament under standing  orders, and also corruption under the Crimes Act.

Geddis concludes:

So I’m not necessary saying that Sue Kedgley is wrong to call for greater regulation of lobbying activities in New Zealand. But any concern that there is nothing in place to stop New Zealand’s parliamentarians replicating the worst excesses of their British counterparts is misplaced. 

Kedgley wrote the bill that Holly Walker introduced last year about regulation of lobbyists. It was so incompetently drafted that its impact on free speech would be monumental. If I responded to a tweet fron an MP on a copyright issue, then I could face a large fine if I didn’t notify the Auditor-General of that tweet!

I think there would be benefits in having a register of lobbyists and clients. This can of course be done without legislation, either voluntarily or through Standing Orders.

Kedgley’s bill is so over-reaching that for it to proceed, it would need such drastic surgery as to effectively be a new bill.

Tracy Watkins at Stuff reports:

The journalist who was leaked a sensitive report on the nation’s foreign spy network had her movements tracked by a government inquiry.

The MP forced to resign over the leak, Peter Dunne, said inquiry head David Henry detailed to him the movements of Fairfax journalist Andrea Vance in and out of the parliamentary precinct.

The conversation related to Vance’s movements the day before the leaked report was published and appeared to be based on Henry having access to records of when she entered and left the building using her security swipe card.

Parliamentary Service confirmed last night it released ”metadata” and other security records to Henry for his inquiry but said only after it was satisfied ”that ministers had agreed to cooperate with the investigation”.

It said it would be expected that all swipe cards were reviewed ”if there is a security incident”.

Fairfax can confirm that Vance did not give her permission to hand over her records to the inquiry.

Group executive editor Paul Thompson said last night it would be worrying if the movements of journalists and MPs were being tracked through a security system that was supposed to protect people working within the building, not be used to watch over them.

I think this was the wrong decision by The Parliamentary Service.

Actual employees of a parliamentary agency have no expectation of privacy in their swipe card use. But MPs and journalists are not employees. They are part of the democratic process, and their swipe card data should not be released externally, unless it is under warrant or judicial demand.

Parliamentary Service has said it is expected to review swipe cards if there is a security incident. To look at this claim, we need to differentiate between two types of security incidents.

If the security incident is related to Parliament itself in a physical way, then yes Parliamentary Service should look at swipe cards records. Examples might be if something is stolen from an office, or if there is vandalism to a painting.

But this was about the leaking of government information. It was just an inquiry under the authority of the SSC and DPMC – not a fully empowered ministerial inquiry or commission of inquiry which has the powers to demand evidence.

The Henry inquiry had no power to get that data. It was entirely appropriate for David Henry to ask for it, as it would help his investgation. Parliamentary Service asked Peter Dunne if they could release his swipe card details. He agreed, so they did. They should have also asked Andrea Vance, and only done so if she agreed.

If that wasn’t acceptable to the Henry inquiry, then they would have the option of seeking more powers to demand the data. but Parliamentary Service should not have just handed it over without the permission of the journalist.