NZ News - 06/03/2015

Dotcom, co-accused get interim reprieve from asset seizure

NZ Herald,

3 June, 2015

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom and his fellow Megaupload co-accused Bram van der Kolk have won an interim reprieve from having their assets seized by the Crown and passed on to US authorities.

In March, a US Federal District Court ruled assets belonging to Dotcom and van der Kolk should be forfeited to the Crown, meaning the Official Assignee would take control and custody.

The deputy solicitor general then went ahead with registering the US order, allowing the Crown to seize the assets but Dotcom and van der Kolk subsequently sought a judicial review, via a hearing in the Auckland High Court last month.

In an interim judgment, Justice Rebecca Ellis determined that the police and deputy solicitor general take no further action on the US civil forfeiture until further order of the court.

"It is, I think, self evident from the above discussion that the plaintiffs have a substantial position to preserve and there will be very real consequences if it is not protected, pending final determination of the claim for review," Justice Ellis said.

"If the provisional view I have formed about the unavailability of post-registration relief is correct, authorising the registration application to proceed now might deprive the plaintiffs of any ability to defend the extradition or to pursue their appeals against the forfeiture order in the United States."

The internet entrepreneur and his co-accused have a series of long-running court battles with the Crown and US federal government, which has been seeking to extradite them where they face charges of conspiracy to operate websites used to illegally distribute copyrighted material via Megaupload

_{McCully accused of lying, bribery}

Photo: Getty Images

Newstalk ZB,

29 May, 2015

Foreign Minister Murray McCully is being accused of lying and bribery after admitting a threat of legal action by a Saudi businessman was withdrawn a year before he was delivered a multi-million dollar payout.

Hmood Al Khalaf, a prominent Saudi Arabian businessman, received $11.5m in taxpayer dollars for his demonstration farm in the Saudi desert. The opposition claim he got the cash in compensation for New Zealand banning live sheep exports in 2003 and not dropping the ban when National returned to power.

It's also alleged that Al Khalaf ensured a free trade deal between the two countries failed.

A legal threat was made by the businessman, with the help of lawyer Mai Chen, rumoured to be worth $30m. Yesterday, McCully admitted that the threat had been dropped by the time the payment was made.

McCully had previously used the potential legal threat to justify the payout.

Labour Party trade spokesperson David Parker claims the Foreign Minister has mishandled the whole incident.

"He's misleading, he's misleading his cabinet, he's wasted millions of dollars of government money and he has paid a facilitation payment in order to advance the Saudi free trade agreement which in other countries is called a bribe," he said.

Parker believes the government being sued was never a real possibility, as it was outside the time limits on when legal action could be taken.

"This deal was done in 2013 therefore any course of action had to arise from 2007 and later. I've gone back to 2005, these excuses from mister McCully are utterly baseless."

McCully told parliament yesterday that officials had confirmed the payments were legal and within the scope of his ministry's appropriation - but he declined to make public any legal advice that backs this position.

"Governments never release legal advice on these matters for the same reason I was careful to redact from the paper some of the matters that were prejudicial to New Zealand legal interests," he said.

Green MP James Shaw wants the office of the Auditor General to look into the procurement process, and McCully claims he's completely happy for that to happen.

"All the steps that government departments take are open to scrutiny but the Audit Office every day of the week, every step that's been taken in relation to the transaction that we've been talking about in the house has been taken knowing that everything is open to scrutiny," he said.

_{Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee makes secret trip to Kiwi troops in Iraq}

NZ Herald,

3 June, 2015

Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has just paid a secret trip to Camp Taji near Baghdad, Iraq, to visit New Zealand Defence Force personnel stationed there to train Iraqi soldiers to fight Islamic State.

"Our soldiers are in very high spirits," he said in a statement released after he left Iraq.

"Early indications are Iraqi trainees are responding and relating well to our trainers."

New Zealand has deployed 143 Defence Force personnel to run a joint training programme of Iraqi forces with the Australian Defence Force.

Mr Brownlee also met Iraq Defence Minister Khaled al-Obedi in Baghdad and said the Iraqi Government and Commanders recognised New Zealand's contribution.

But during Mr Brownlee's visit, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was at a conference in Paris lamenting the lack of support in the wake of several Isis victories.

"This is a failure on the part of the world," he told journalists there. "There is a lot of talk of support for Iraq. There is very little on the ground."

New Zealand to open embassy in Baghdad

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/defence/news/article.cfm?c_id=32&objectid=11456286

New Zealand will open its embassy in Baghdad, which will be located within the Australian embassy, says Foreign Minister Murray McCully.

The new ambassador will be James Munro, an Arabic speaker and former military officer who has had previous postings in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

"Our resident Ambassador will be charged with supporting New Zealand's non-combat training mission to Iraq and assessing how we can better support and build relations with the Iraqi government," Mr McCully said.

The embassy would also be responsible for maintaining relations with the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.

New Zealand has deployed just over 100 Defence Force personnel to Camp Taji just north of Baghdad in a non-combat training mission with the Australian Defence Force.

Iraq does not have an embassy in Wellington but its ambassador in Canberra is also ambassador to New Zealand.

_{SAUDI LAWSUIT THREAT EXACTLY WHY TPPA WORRYING}

NZ First Party,

28 May, 2015

The threat of a lawsuit after New Zealand stopped the live sheep trade is a warning on what we can expect under a TPPA deal, says New Zealand First.

“Instead of fighting a legal case over the live sheep decision, National submitted to blackmail and handed over $11.5 million of farm livestock and equipment as compensation to a Saudi Arabian businessman,” says Spokesperson on Trade Fletcher Tabuteau.

“Yet, as Foreign Minister Murray McCully confirmed in Parliament today, the government never had a trade agreement or formal contractual agreement of any kind with the businessman.

“How on earth could the government have been forced to pay compensation?

“But, be warned, under the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) we will be signing up to allow foreign corporates to sue us if they are unhappy with our laws.

“In the case of the Saudi threat the government was blackmailed over taking a stand on the treatment of animals.”

New Zealand First’s member’s bill, Fighting Foreign Corporate Control, is expected to have a first reading in Parliament soon. The bill would protect the public interest by preventing any future government signing an international agreement with a clause allowing foreign corporates to sue the New Zealand government.

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/member/2015/0014/latest/DLM6415502.h...

Govt accused of cutting Maori out of land sales

The Government is being accused of cutting Auckland Maori out of the opportunity to have first dibs on land being sold for development.

The Coefficients Of Despair: The MSD’s plan to rescue the poor from themselves

Chris Trotter

The Daily Blog,

3 June, 2015

HOW LONG WILL IT BE, I wonder, before the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is accused of racial profiling? Given the statistical techniques currently being developed by the Ministry to identify “vulnerable” clients, such an accusation is practically inevitable.

In collaboration with the University of Auckland, the MSD is perfecting a technique for filtering out all but the worst offenders when it comes to deficient education, poor health, inadequate housing, a history of family violence and/or criminal offending. What the Ministry has yet to confront, however, is what colour it be will left with when all the data’s run. Will it be white or brown? In terms of raw numbers, Pakeha may still predominate, but, in terms of being disproportionately represented, Maori and Pasifika will, almost certainly, be streets ahead.

The MSD’s problem is that they can’t NOT use this new technique for identifying vulnerable clients. Downside political risks notwithstanding, it is fundamental to the National Government’s whole new approach to managing New Zealand’s welfare system. Expressed in its simplest terms, this new approach is about identifying the individuals and families most likely to become a long-term drain of the state’s resources – and make sure they don’t.

Serious criminal offending, for example, imposes colossal costs upon the state. A person convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, child abuse, aggravated robbery and/or serious assault can expect to serve anything from 5 to 20 years in prison – at a minimum cost to the taxpayer of $100,000 per year. And that figure does not include the cost of repairing and then supporting the victims of criminal offending. The enormous expense of hospitalisation. The loss of productivity associated with the victims’ pain and suffering. All these social costs could be dramatically reduced if the people most likely to impose them could be rescued, early, from themselves.

The answer, according to the MSD, may lie in the statistical technique known as “predictive risk modelling”. According to the Ministry’s own website, a ground-breaking piece of research undertaken by a project team, led by Professor Rhema Vaithianathan of the University of Auckland, has:

“[D]eveloped a predictive risk model for children in a cohort who had contact with the benefit system before age two. These children accounted for 83% of all children for whom findings of substantiated maltreatment were recorded by age 5.”

The Ministry reported that “predictive risk modelling had a fair, approaching good, power in predicting which of the young children having contact with the benefit system would be the subject of substantiated maltreatment by age five. This is similar to the predictive strength of mammograms for detecting breast cancer in the general population.”

Given the well-attested link between childhood abuse and serious criminal offending in later life, the possibilities arising out of Professor Vaithianathan’s and her team’s research are obvious. If predictive risk modelling (PRM) could identify with relative precision which children, in which families, were most likely to suffer abuse, appropriate intervention by the MSD and its agencies – supported by the Police, Child Youth and Family, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Courts – could ensure that the predicted abuse (and everything likely to flow from it in the future) never happened.

The popular culture reference you’re looking for here is the film Minority Report. Based on the novella by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the movie is set in a futuristic Washington DC, where a special “precrime” squad of police officers use “psychic technology” to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime.

Now, it would be quite unfair to suggest that PRM is in any way analogous to “psychic technology”, but it’s undeniable that the former’s widespread use in our social welfare system would give rise to just as many ethical questions as Philip K. Dick’s “precrime” law enforcers.

In the section of the University of Auckland study relating to PRMs ethical ramifications, the Project Team drew the MSD’s attention to the dangers of the data arising from its application being misinterpreted:

“It must be acknowledged that some of the data and predictor variables used by the proposed model are highly likely to be misinterpreted by at least some audiences. The decision not to report coefficients in this report, for instance, was based in part upon the belief that the insignificant contribution those factors make to the power of the tool was outweighed by the likelihood of crude and misleading interpretations of that information given existing social prejudices and stereotypes.”

Which brings us back to our original question concerning racial profiling. It would be most surprising if the unwillingness of the Auckland academics to identify all the coefficients used in their predictive algorithms was not, at least in part, related to race as a predictive factor in the maltreatment of children. It would, however, be equally surprising if the prospect of Maori and Pasifika families being targeted for special “precrime” intervention on behalf of their infant offspring was not met with loud, sustained, and entirely justifiable protest.

There is something profoundly disturbing in the very notion that science possesses the power to predict who will – and who will not – inflict harm upon their fellow human-beings. That, somehow, a computer programme can winnow out from tens-of-thousands, the one family in which violence will be done to a child.

Because, even if we could be sure that the child identified through PRM was bound, in every case, to suffer abuse if some sort of welfare agency did not intervene, there is another, deeper, problem that must be confronted. Being able to prevent individual cases of abuse would, surely, make it that much harder to persuade people to address the systemic causes of human tragedy.

If Maori and Pasifika appear more often than they should among the perpetrators of child abuse it is only because they appear more often than they should among all the other “coefficients” of dysfunction: illiteracy; the diseases of poverty and overcrowding; the psychological deterioration caused by long periods of unemployment; the mental disintegration associated with drug addiction. These are the pathologies of class as well as racial oppression. Capitalism and colonialism are “coefficients” too.

Let us leave the final word to another artefact of popular culture. Perhaps the most surprising of all Elvis Presley’s hits is his extraordinary rendition of Mac Davis’s song, In The Ghetto. To those who seek to transform our social welfare system into something resembling science-fiction, I would strongly recommend that they take the time to listen to Elvis’s poignant retelling of the tragic story of a boy condemned: not by the choices that he or his mamma made, but by a system that that left them with so few:

And as her young man dies

On a cold and grey Chicago morning,

Another little baby child is born

In the Ghetto.