Selling off the bases

Who would sell off their house and then rent it back from the new owner? Well maybe if you can't pay the mortgage, but what sensible person would liquidate an asset to take on a bill?

That is what the Government is proposing to do with our military bases. Announcing the first defence review since 1997, Minister Wayne Mapp and ACT's associate Minister Heather Roy said both parties support 'public-private partnerships'. PPP's are usually about getting the private sector to help build things, like the Orewa toll road. This is more like flicking off public assets to your mates.

It kind of reminds me of the Big Sell-Off of the 1980's and 90's. That, of course, is part of ACT's raison d'etre, but I didn't think Wayne Mapp was that kind of guy. He's too cuddly, like Mole from 'Wind in the Willows'. Still, while Wayne Mapp was not an MP when National took office in 1990, much of National's front bench were key players in the liquidation sale. Whether or not Mapp is an ideologue of the same ilk, he is certainly a compliant team member. His willingness to be appointed 'Political Correctness Eradicator' by Don Brash clearly demonstrated that.

Is it just a coincidence that the review panel includes the chair of the Business Roundtable? Rob McLeod is an strong advocate for more private sector involvement in those things usually provided by democratically accountable bodies, such as town planning, education, health and roading. The review of taxation that he led in 2001 notably called for special low tax rates for foreign firms and capping taxes for the super rich. It also let corporations off the hook for their environmental costs, by ignoring ecological taxation issues. His appointment is a pretty clear indication of what the Government wants out of the review.

Now maybe I'm just not economically savvy enough to understand why selling off capital assets is a good thing. I don't understood the wisdom of currency speculation and futures trading independent of the needs of actual production either. Bundling up sub prime mortgages and selling them as securities never made sense to me, even when they were making money rather than knocking holes in banks. I guess I'm unsophisticated.

Certainly too unsophisticated for the influx of Aucklanders into Hamilton last weekend. Like many of my friends I had to flee the city to escape the V8's. I realise that watching car racing is popular, I just can't figure out why.

Much more interesting to me are the attempts by Hamilton City Council to green the V8's. As an MP when Hamilton was first proposed to host the race, I met with then Mayor Redman to talk about how we could make the V8's less damaging. The council had been working on a number of ideas already and we were able to come up with some good proposals.

Last year, the council spent most of its efforts 'baselining' the event, to understand what the full environmental impacts were. It wasn't so much the races themselves as the travel of spectators, the rubbish, water runoff, energy uses etc. This year I look forward to seeing the council publicly report on what it did to actually reduce those impacts.

I'm a simple small businessman, but it seems pretty obvious to me – liquidating capital, whether built or environmental, is a recipe for failure.

Deep ecology workshop

I spent the weekend at Solscape in Raglan, an awesome eco retreat run by two really lovely people, Phil and Bernadette. They were the hosts for a deep ecology workshop run by Daniel Nepia and Finn Mackesy. For those who have not heard of it, it is a process developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed to address the despair and burnout among environmental activists, but it has application to anyone who wishes to have an experiential emotional reconnection with the natural world and who seeks to reconnect with their inner wisdom and power. Hence it is also called "the work that reconnects'.

As a participant, I found it to be a very powerful series of processes that took participants out of their ego seperateness, deep into their inner world to experience and express their authentic emotional reaction to the state of the world we live in. The facilitators used various tools to empower people with their own wisdom and reconnect them with nature, culminating in a 'council of all beings'.

Daniel and Finn have been the only people running deep ecology workshops in the North Islnd for a number of years but now they are seeking to train new facilitors. That means that opportunities to participate will increase over the next few years. If you get a change, I totally recommend you go.

House bus - exterior

Thought I'd post some photos of my house, because it's road legal (got a COF) and the roof line is about to change drastically.

Housebus interior

We bought it as a school bus, removed the seats, stripped it to the frame and rust proofed it. We removed and resealed the winows, insulated it, relined with ply and built it from scratch - of course all the walls are non square and have curves in them!

A greenwing response to private prison debate

Most people probably don't care who runs the prisons – as long as it includes flogging - yet few issues highlight the political divide so well.

The Right believes that any business can be run more efficiently by the private sector and prisons are no exception. The Left believes that some things are not like any other business, and jails are one of them. Only the State should be allowed to lock people in cages.

The problem with the second argument is that the public prison system is a shambles. The problem with the first is that corporations have proven just as good at messing things up as any Government.

Having said that, I think the best run prison the country has seen was the Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP) when it was run by Australasian Correctional Management (now Geotech) - a private prison operator. OK, it was a brand new (Government built) facility. It didn't take sentenced prisoners, so the dynamics were quite different, and its contractual obligations were different from those of public prisons.

What impressed me, though, was the needs assessments on new inmates, at a time when the infamous Integrated Offender Management System was barely functioning in the public system. What also impressed was the leadership of its outstanding General Manager Dom Karauria.

As an aside it is interesting that a number of experienced Maori managers have done well with Australian private prison operators. They don't seem to face the same institutional barriers, or maybe Australian prison companies just value a Maori perspective.

Even so, it is hard to escape the suspicion that ACRP was a kind of loss leader for Geotech. The usual experience of private prisons internationally is somewhat different. It is a huge international industry, dominated by a small number of very large players. Few of them are free from allegations of abuse and mistreatment of inmates in at least some of their facilities.

In addition there is the corrupting influence of the private prison sector on public policy. The huge money to be made from locking people up ensures a powerful lobby aimed at expanding the size of the teat. Media debate around law and order issues is already sensationalist and shallow – imagine the effect of adding big money to the mix.

There is a third, Green, option between big money and big state. In this context, it means going back to 1989, to the most comprehensive assessment ever done on the NZ prison system. The Roper Report made a number of important findings and recommendations, and it has been ignored by Governments both Right and Left ever since.

Criminals could not be rehabilitated, it said, if they had never been habilitated in the first place. It recommended small scale habilitation centres, with intensive, often confrontational, therapy to address the causes of offending. Sentenced prisoners would be assessed for suitability and people not suitable, or trying to play the system, would stay in a general prison.

The Public Prison Service is not well suited to running these kinds of operations. Neither is the multinational prison industry. They are both better at running sausage factories. Habilitation centres are suited to relatively small commercial and community operations, and they offer enormous scope for effective and innovative programs. They allow Tangata Whenua, Pasific Island or other groups to address particular cultural or religious needs. The tragedy of the public vs private prison debate is that this kind of solution gets lost in the fray.

(reprinted from my Waikato Times column)

Where to now for the Greens?

The political press has come a long way since 2005. When Rod Donald passed away it seemed that, for the media at least, the only good Green was a dead one. Overnight he went from being naive and dangerous to an astute political strategist, without whom the Green Party was finished. The inconvenient healthiness of the party has been a warning to tea leaf readers ever since.

So it was good to see a more circumspect reaction to the resignation of Jeanette Fitzsimons as Green co-leader. Speculation has turned, not to the demise of the party, but to its next steps. In choosing between Sue Bradford and Metiria Turei the party has an important strategic decision to make. Members know that the party's fortunes do not rest on one person alone, but that the wrong choice of successor would be most unfortunate.

It is a good time to be choosing. Jeanette's announcement may have been hastened by an inconvenient leak to the Sunday Star Times, but it's clear that she had been planning for some time to announce her resignation around now. It leaves plenty of room for a good leadership contest, with time to mop up any fall-out before the next election.

The challenges before the new co-leader will be considerable. The contest itself will be long and hard. Green leaders are chosen by the membership rather than, as in most parties, by just the MP's, but it is a delegated vote. This means that the sympathies of branch office holders, as well as the broader membership, are crucial in a tight contest.

The challenges once they become leader will be greater. Jeanette is widely respected and highly regarded, with a strong appeal among both fiery militants and cautious reformers. She brought intellectual weight to the Greens, with solid hard work along with the ability to be quick on her feet.

But the Greens don't need just more of the same. Jeanette and Rod Donald were in many ways a perfect match. Rod: the brilliant tactician and media fiend,, the team builder, the warm and charismatic attractor. Jeanette: the strategist, the intellectual steel, colder and more formidable. Since Rods death that balance has not been found. The question is not so much who can fill Jeanette's shoes, as who can do the best three legged race with the smart but brash Russel Norman. Someone strategic rather than tactical, but warm and charismatic, an attractor and uniter.

There are two things that the Greens need to do to become powerful rather than just necessary. The first is to build a team. The Green MP's have proven to be effective campaigners in their separate areas, but struggle for a coherent message. Ask anyone what they stand for, and the reply (once you get beyond “the environment”) is liable to be a grab bag of discrete issues rather than a clear philosophical position. A co-leader who can pull the threads together rather than just fight their corner could unlock enormous synergy.

The second thing needed is to describe a distinctly Green political space to attract a new generation of environmentally minded unaligned voters. Until the Greens redefine the main political divide, away from 'Capital / Labour' to 'Sustainable / Unsustainable', they will always be fighting on someone else's ground. There are few votes to be found left of Labour, as the Alliance found out, and even those will mostly disappear when Labour in opposition seeks to claim them back.

The strategic direction of the Greens over the next decade will determine whether the last election result was a spring tide or a symptom of their sea level rising. In that sense, this co-leadership contest is crucial.

(printed Waikato Times 27/2/09)

Tsvangirai sworn in as ZImbabwean PM

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been sworn in as Zimbabwe's PM by Robert Mugabe. According to Al Jazeera the stalemate over control of ministries and the security forces was settled by an agreement which saw Mugabe and Tsvangirai name co-ministers to the Home Affairs ministry and the creation of a new National Security Council.

It seems to me that whoever is the nominal co-head of the Home Affairs ministry, factional loyalties will determine how effective Tsvangirai and his colleagues will be. Mugabe was kept in power by the loyalty of the security forces and the war of independence veterans. Tsvangirai's demand that all political detainees be freed before Wednesday's ceremony was ignored by Mugabe's government and it's hard to think that this is not an indication of how things will run.

On the other hand, some recent reports indicate that even among the security personnel, the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy and the subsequent food crisis (and now the health crisis following the outbreak of cholera) is having a toll. That loyalty may be fragmenting.

Here's hoping that Mugabe's support is splintering enough to allow Tsvangirai the space to get some things done but I'm not holding my breath.