Dotcom,
co-accused get interim reprieve from asset seizure
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
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withdrawn a year before he was delivered a multi-million dollar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
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
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
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
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.
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