#policynz — Public Fediverse posts

The first topic Jack Tame asks Wong about is regulating lobbying;

"[Opportunity] want a stand-down period, a lobbyist's register, and a code of conduct. Poor lobbyists."

He doesn't sound very sympathetic ; ) But so far so good. Tame goes on to summarise TOP's definition of 'lobbyist';

"Someone who is paid by clients to influence decision-makers, or who spends a substantial part of their time lobbying."

What this means, in practice, depends on how they define 'lobbying'.

(3/?)

#PolicyNZ

@kev
> most jobs/company don't provide annual pay rises, especially inline with inflation

Annual rises in line with inflation ought to be written into employment law. Otherwise, employers are free to offer you a given level of buying power for a given job of work, and effectively cut that down every year.

#PolicyNZ

@mike @TTFKA_Tay0

Maybe we need a law forbidding public agencies - as a whole - from procuring more than a third of any 1 product or service, from a single supplier?

Where there isn't sufficient competition to throw up even 3 adequate vendors, this is smoking gun evidence of market failure. Something even the most rabidly pro-market government ought to aggressively fix. Not just tolerate, while monopolists exploit that lack of competition by bleeding the public purse, and perhaps worse.

(4/4)

#PolicyNZ

Perhaps we need a public service team whose job is to fully audit these systems?

To map out all their dependencies, and what's being spent at each stage of outsourcing. To identity areas where public entities are effectively funding proprietary technology and data pools. Or paying through the nose to have skilled snake oil salespeople resell them software and data that's freely available for anyone to use.

(9/?)

#PolicyNZ

I'm not against local bodies contracting out elements of their online platforms. They're not tech companies, and sometimes a contractor - whether commercial or community-run - can do a better job.

But, contracts ought to set high standards, and enforce them. To ensure this, contractors ought to be obliged to supply source code for any software required by the service. So councils have the option to bring it in-house, or choose another contractor to run the service.

(1/?)

#GovtIT #PolicyNZ

This absurdly anti-competitive practice seems to be completely legal in NZ, and I notice fewer third-party products in supermarkets year on year. At least in the products I browse.

To prevent this, and give other food businesses a fair chance to compete, a government could force a structural separation of retail and supply, as they did with electricity. You can own companies doing 1 or the other, but not both.

(2/?)

#PolicyNZ

A bold, evidence-based recreational drug policy in 2026 could include;

* removing criminal penalties for all noncommercial aspects of drug use; including possession, paraphernalia, and social dealing (eg passing a joint, buying in bulk and selling to friends at cost), and putting the onus on prosecutors to prove commercial dealing

* creating a regulated, taxed market for any recreational drug that experts agree is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. Not just cannabis.

(23/?)

#PolicyNZ

Another thing a sensible datacentre policy would cover is energy. Specifically, obliging datacentre builds to include renewable generation sufficient for their foreseeable needs.

Also, storage sufficient to provide at least a few days of operation in the case of a grid failure. Datacentre operators have a strong incentive to include UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) capacity anyway. But the policy could oblige them to make it available to boost the grid at peak times.

(3/?)

#PolicyNZ

What would the Strypey party do differently?

For a start, extend the moratorium to 3 years - a full Parliamentary term - and call a Citizens' Assembly. To examine all the evidence for the pros and cons of generative models and datacentres, and come up with a robust regulatory framework.

Hopefully one informed by what the EU is doing to systematically project their digital sovereignty. But that would be up to the citizens who participate.

(3/?)

#PolicyNZ

But seriously, when will NZ governments stop giving offshore extractors free public money, rewarding them for asset stripping our essential infrastructure and running it into the ground? Both blue and red governments have done it for the aluminum smelter, and there are plenty of other examples.

Why isn't the public getting an ownership stake every time we bail out these corporate welfare recipients? So if they screw up enough, they become (or return to being) public assets?

(2/2)

#PolicyNZ

"In a 2010 book that he edited, 'Longer Lasting Products', [Tim] Cooper suggests possible ways to accomplish this: Minimum standards of durability, repairability, and upgradeability. A decrease in taxes on labor and an increase on energy and raw materials, to help make it cheaper to repair or recondition things and more expensive to make new ones. Sales-tax rates based on product lifetimes. Longer consumer guarantees and warranties."

#JBMacKinnon, 2016

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quandary-why-theres-no-such-thing-as-built-to-last

(1/?)

#PolicyNZ

Once again, what the EU is doing with their Tech Sovereignty package is exactly what Oz and Aotearoa governments need to get together and do. A plan to unhitch their digital wagons from US technofascism, and corporate vendors with their proprietary solutions and lock-in, and develop locally appropriate solutions using shared, Free Code building blocks.

Ideally we could also support smaller Pacific nations to do the same. With a focus on asserting *their* digital sovereignty.

(3/?)

#PolicyNZ

Neither WINZ or ACC, nor their overseeing ministries or ministers, ought to be allowed to choose the medical reviewers who assess applications for disability-related benefits. Instead they ought to be chosen by Whaikaha (Ministry of Disabled People) and Te Whatu Ora (Ministry of Health).

(1/2)

#PolicyNZ #WNZ #ACC #MedicalReviewers #Whaikaha #TeWhatuOra

(3/3)

I'd also recommended that first set of rules include indexing their pay to the average wage. The *mode* average, not the mean, which is skewed upwards by the incomes of the 1% and their lackeys.

Maybe a backbencher could get the average, ministers a bonus on top of that, and the PM a bit more again. But if MP salaries goes up or down when the mode average goes up or down, they have a tangible incentive to lift workers' incomes across the board, not serve the 1%.

#PolicyNZ

(2/?)

Some of the rules for MP conduct need to defined by a rule set they can't change without a supermajority in a binding referendum. Others need to be decided by independent bodies, like the one that sets MP renumeration, but which similarly can't sack or otherwise interfere with, without a referendum in their favour.

#PolicyNZ

Also, the benefit WINZ gives single, childless, unemployed people like me is less than $500 a week. The latest Living Wage is $29.90 an hour.

So, let's say you funded more paid positions for people with lived experience to work with disability NGOs. The employers best positioned to provide us a sustainable working environment (in theory). You'd only need to fund 20 hours a week at LW to give us about $100 a week more than you do now, and we'd be employed.

Just saying ...

(3/3)

#PolicyNZ

Doing anything under urgency ought to require a supermajority in Parliament of at least 70-75%. So it's only used in situations of genuine urgency, and not as a way for the government of the day to ram through unpopular legislation without the proper democratic process.

(2/2)

#PolicyNZ

Third, and perhaps most ambitious, we need to involve young people in co-designing online regulation policy. *And* anything we might want to pitch as replacements for DataFarming platforms.

They need to feel that any independent online services they move to belong to them, so they feel like they belong there. While also feeling supported by older people, who they trust to manage and modify their DIY social network services as the need arises.

(5/?)

#PolicyNZ #TechRegulation #SocialMedia

Seems to me we need a constitutional structure that explicitly protects local democracy from Parliamentary shitfuckery. Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga do that, if you understand enough Te Reo Māori to read the versions agreed to and signed by rangatira. But it's got to be clear to everyone now that they are too vulnerable to motivated misinterpretation to do it alone.

(4/?)

#PolicyNZ #NZPolitics

(2/?)

The solution to this kind of antidemocratic shitfuckery is a written constitution that Parliament can't amend by simple majority (or ideally, at all). One that obliges Parliament to respect;

1) fundamental human rights, encoded in a constitutional document, including the rights encoded in He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi

#PolicyNZ

So what would the Strypey party propose? I think our food regulations offer some policy models we could apply, in 3 ways.

First, food products have to list their ingredients. Maybe media services ought to as well?

If media entities present themselves as news outlets (or even news-like), maybe they should be held to basic journalistic standards? If necessary, by a regulator who can use the power of law to make media outlets label themselves accurately based on what they carry.

(4/?)

#PolicyNZ

Maybe Aotearoa needs a written constitution that recognises the right of natural born citizens to vote in general elections, regardless of where in the world we go, and for how long?

Maybe citizens in general, but in that case the constitution would also need to set a high bar for obtaining citizenships. To prevent votes being handed out to billionaires like Peter Thief who don't even live here and have no interest in the wellbeing of the people or environment of Aotearoa.

(10/10)

#PolicyNZ

Or maybe we look at which professions and trades are chronically short of workers, and fully fund a certain number of places in the courses that train them?

The obvious counterargument is, what if they go overseas when they qualify, and never come back? The fees-free policy could include a quid-pro-quo, say, 1 year of fees-free study for every 5 years worked in Aotearoa. Or 3 years worked in a rural area that struggles to attract sufficient professionals and tradespeople.

(7/?)

#PolicyNZ

Fees-free tertiary study is a bandaid on a system that needs a full body cast. But if we're going to go back to fees-free, maybe it needs to be more targeted?

Say, a certain number of fully-funded tertiary places for each high school that serves a working class community. Which students at each school compete for, if there are more candidates than places. Either with academic performance, or some other demonstration of aptitude that society would benefit from nourishing.

(6/?)

#PolicyNZ

So if there is a media regulator empowered by the state, it needs to be very carefully designed. Its power constrained and tightly focused. Its purpose, structure and operations regularly reviewed. Ideally by a review board including representatives from media entities and civil society orgs (eg Better Public Media, InternetNZ), as well as Parliamentarians.

We need to pressure the government to put this new body in place as part of abolishing the #BSA. Not after, maybe never.

(7/7)

#PolicyNZ

All of this talk about pushing the age up further is ludicrous. If anything the retirement age ought to be brought back to 60. Why?

1) Gen X is a significantly smaller cohort than our parents

2) We haven't benefited from the cradle to the grave welfare system Boomers' parents bequeathed them, and which political leaders have spent decades burning in the engines of wealth concentration

3) As a result we probably won't live as long on average as Boomers. Particularly Māori

(2/2)

#PolicyNZ

An ambitious government would step in and fix this failing market too. Breaking up the 2 companies that hold both cell network infrastructure and retail operations (Spark and One NZ).

If they merged the 2 cell networks into 1 (operating like Chorus), other mobile carriers wouldn't have to lease network access from their direct competitors (as ISPs used to in the Telecom days). Plus a customer of any carrier could connect to any cell tower in the country.

(4/?)

#PolicyNZ

Why does our Parliament not have a Technology Commissioner? Someone whose job is to spend their days gaining a solid understanding of how new tech works. Then to sit politicians down for a chat, 'explain like I'm 5' style, to make sure they grasp the bare bones basics of bleeding edge tech they want to introduce into the public service. *Especially* the health system.

(13/13)

#PolicyNZ #TechnologyCommissioner

Sensible consumer protection law would forbid companies from enacting any system that requires a digital device to use their services. Even more so requiring a one with a particular OS (or set thereof).

The law definitely ought to forbid companies from switching to such a system without consent from existing customers.

(2/2)

#PolicyNZ #ConsumerProtection

I have an elderly uncle who lived on a farm and never got into using the net, and the most advanced tech uncle knows how to use is a prepay dumbphone.

My uncle has a storage locker with a local business that's just been bought out by a multinational. Who are replacing the existing cardkey entry with "smart entry" system requiring an app, which requires customers to own and know how to use either an iThing or an Android/Linux device;

https://noke.app/

FTS.

(1/2)

#PolicyNZ #ElderCare