THOMAS CRANMER: Government ducks Bill of Rights assessment on Three Waters bill

While politicians and commentators raise concerns about the race-based nature of the Three (or Five) Waters reforms, the government has produced its Bill of Rights analysis which is superficial and slapdash at best.  THOMAS CRANMER writes –

It may come as a surprise to some that the government has already obtained legal advice from the Ministry of Justice and the Crown Law Office to scrutinize whether the Water Services Entities Bill is consistent with the Bill of Rights Act. In fact the advice was considered by Cabinet at the end of May, and was then quietly published on the Ministry of Justice’s website.

Given the racial component to the proposed co-governance structure of Three Waters and to the Te Mana o te Wai statements, which confer broad rights exclusively on mana whenua, that advice would seem to be highly relevant to the current public debate regarding the suitability of the reforms.

Clark enlightens us about open banking while Sio throws light (through a Maori world lens) on what once was blind justice

Buzz from the Beehive

It’s the announcement we saw coming when Newshub revealed the Government was poised to announce a major change to banking, “which experts say will slash their profits”.

This news was broadcast as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was adding her voice to the populist chorus of disapproval about those profits.

It so happened the government was working on a concept called “open banking”, whereby customers can move their bank accounts, direct debits and what-have-you between banks.

Simplicity CEO Sam Stubbs said this data sharing is common overseas, encourages competition and brings bank profits down. Whether crimping bank profits should be encouraged is open to question, but hey – the  government has been taking a battering in political polls and most people reckon bankers are bastards.

If keeping baddies banged up is the objective, Corrections data suggest prisons work well

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis – we learned this morning – hadn’t seen fresh prison population forecasts when plans to build a mega-prison at Waikeria were scrapped in May.

Never mind that he later issued a clarifying statement.  The key point is that instead of proceeding to build the biggest prison in the country, he announced a small prison to replace the deteriorating jail at Waikeria. It will be a 500-bed high-security facility with a 100-bed specialised unit for prisoners suffering significant mental health issues.

The new forecasts are unlikely to have tempered his thinking. He says mega-prisons don’t work.

The forecasts are contained in a Ministry of Justice report.  They point to New Zealand’s prison population rising to more than 4000 over the next decade.  This would lift the number of inmates to 14,400 by the year 2027.