TheyWorkForYou.co.nz blog

National, please agree to televised debates with other parties

Copy of an email I have sent to the National Party:

Dear John Key and National Party,

I respectfully ask you to reverse your agreement with Labour on televised debates by agreeing to be in a televised debate with the leaders of other parties. Your agreement with Labour is not in the spirit of our electoral system. The people of New Zealand each have a party vote. In order to make an informed decision, we must see all broadly-supported parties debate on a level playing field. Instead we see you and Helen Clark refusing to share the televised stage with other party leaders.

National, Labour and the television media are entering an arrangement designed to leave people uninformed of their full range of choice. You are presenting New Zealanders with a false dichotomy. You have started New Zealand on a journey to becoming a media-supported two-party plutocracy like the USA.

In 2004, two US presidential candidates were arrested trying to enter a presidential debate. These arrests barely got reported by the corporate media, if at all. As one presidential candidate stated, “I was arrested but the real crime is the corporate hijacking of our democracy”.

The National Party’s decision to stifle debate will be remembered. You lose goodwill and votes with such actions. Your decision damages the integrity of your party’s commitment to participate in a democracy.

Regards

If you’d like to send them a similar message, here are the addresses I used: john.key at national.org.nz, hq at national.org.nz, and judy.kirk at national.org.nz (party president).

You can read more about Labour and National’s agreement here:
Clark, Key hog TV debate — NZ Herald
MMP attacked by Clark and Key’s refusal to front — Green Party

Vote text missing from parliament.nz’s Hansard

With disturbing frequency I discover small discrepancies between parliament.nz’s PDF and HTML versions of Hansard. Fortunately, the software code for TheyWorkForYou.co.nz raises a warning when it’s obvious that something is wrong.

Below is an example from Hansard for 23rd September. We can see some text is missing from the vote question in parliament.nz’s HTML version:

A party vote was called for on the question, That the following words be added: “That the member, Mr Peters, be requested to apologise to the

Ayes 2
ACT New Zealand 2.

Noes 117
New Zealand Labour 49; New Zealand National 47; New Zealand First 7; Green Party 6; Māori Party 3; United Future 2; Progressive 1; Independents: Copeland, Field.

Amendment not agreed to.

The vote question text has been cut-off. To correct this, I have to manually download the PDF version from the parliament site, find the correct text, and patch my local copy of the HTML. Then I re-run the software that loads this data into my database. Here is the correct vote question text from the PDF for our example:

A party vote was called for on the question, That the following words be added:

“That the member, Mr Peters, be requested to apologise to the New Zealand Herald’s editor, Tim Murphy, and political editor, Audrey Young, for calling them liars and demanding their resignations, and that the member be suspended for the remainder of the day.”

Unfortunately my software might not be catching all the ommissions and errors in parliament.nz’s HTML - but at least it catches some.

They’ve had performance problems to deal with recently at parliament.nz, I suspect that’s because they are not caching pages of their site for quick delivery. They may have exhausted their budget on paying vendors to hack work-arounds to the Mircosoft Content Management Server 2002 system they’ve built their site on. Possibly there’s no budget left after this to pay for fixes to their software to ensure accurate translation of source information into an HTML format.

Since I’m volunteering the hours of my time spent each week maintaining TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, I’m not subject to budget constraints and management prioritization. Part of the benefit of using a Free Software stack to run TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is that there are no licensing fees to pay. Another benefit is the freedom to choose tools that stay out of your way, to allow you to get on with fulfilling business requirements.

Political Donations Exposed

You can now view organisations’ political party donations from 1996-2007 at TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. The donation information was extracted out of the Electoral Commission’s spreadsheet of party donation returns.

Not sure whether to display personal party donations on the site. Possibly I could aggregate the personal donations into a single amount for each party? Another piece of information that would be interesting to show is the $1,000,000+ of electoral advertising spending by members of the Exclusive Brethren church in 2005. Despite their stated “sole goal of Getting Party Votes” for a particular party, their spending didn’t match the definition of a party donation - hence doesn’t appear in the Electoral Commissions donation list.

‟most of the media here are foreign-owned”

In the reply to a comment on his new blog, Winston Peters highlights that media corporations have aims that conflict with informing the public:

Winston says: “You raise some interesting points. One of the problems is that most of the media here are foreign-owned. That means their profits are sent overseas and they cut costs to achieve maximum returns. Informing the people is not a high priority. … Media accountability is non-existent in this country. …”

The news media have a powerful voice in society. Presently that voice is too often manipulated to promote political agendas at the detriment of informing the public. For example, the news media propagated a pejorative re-naming of the Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Bill. By labelling it the “Anti-Smacking” bill, the news media favoured the position of those in opposition to the bill. Imagine how the emphasis of the debate would have changed if they had labelled it something like the “Prevention of Violence to Children” bill.

Last year, the New Zealand Herald ran a vigorous campaign against the passing of the Electoral Finance Bill. To achieve their aims the NZ Herald mis-stated facts in order to promote public opposition to the bill. In April this year, the Press Council ruled the Herald’s front-page editorial last year contained a “mis-statement of fact”, which the paper should have promptly corrected. Ironically, despite all its rabble-rousing of opposition to the bill, the Herald itself failed to make a submission on the bill to the Justice and Electoral Committee.

A top priority of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz is to inform the people of New Zealand. At present I’m brainstorming new ideas for how to do that in a better way leading up to the election. If you have ideas you’d like to share, please drop me a line:

Richard Stallman: Freedom | Radio NZ Interview

Richard Stallman was interviewed on Radio NZ by Kim Hill on Saturday morning. As stated on the Radio NZ website, Richard Stallman is a “software freedom activist visiting New Zealand to help promote the use, dissemination and ideals of Free Software”.

The interview contains a good primer on the concept of Free Software and motivations of the movement. Stallman emphasises that we must discuss copyright law, patent law and trademark law as separate issues. These are three separate areas of law, there is no such thing as “intellectual property” as a single issue.

You can listen to the Stallman interview (32 minutes) here:
RNZ SAT: Richard Stallman: Freedom [mp3 format]
RNZ SAT: Richard Stallman: Freedom [ogg vorbis format]

Free Software leader slams NZ Copyright Act

“The leader of the Free Software movement, Richard Stallman, is calling New Zealand’s copyright laws unjust and plans to use an upcoming tour of the country to rouse opposition to them.” - from a Computerworld article about Stallman’s NZ visit.

Richard Stallman, will be visiting NZ between August 6th and 21st in 2008 to help promote the use, dissemination and ideals of Free Software.

If you have the opportunity, it’s worth attending or listening to one of Stallman’s New Zealand speaking engagements.

UK Government Unlocking a Better Way

The networked democracy arena is moving at a fast pace in the UK, with the UK Cabinet Office recently setting up a Power of Information Taskforce to oversee and direct the possibilities provided by opening up access to government data. Richard Allen from the taskforce has met with people behind OpenAustralia (a.k.a. Australia’s TheyWorkForYou), on a recent trip to Australia.

During the Taskforce’s presentation at OpenTech 2008 on Saturday, the UK Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) launched a Public Sector Information Unlocking Service. The service allows those in the UK to lodge complaints if they have problems getting hold of the information they need in the formats they want. If the problem relates to an issue specifically covered by re-use regulations, they’ll treat it accordingly. I’m not sure if we have a similar service in New Zealand.

Last week, the Power of Information Taskforce launched Show us a Better Way, a competition to suggest ideas for how unlocked public data can be mashed in to services for the public. The winner will get £20,000 to fund an implementation.

A recent article in the Guardian mentioning an NHS £6.5 million project failure got me thinking.

Here’s an idea: record the cost of all IT failures across the UK government in a year, and put up an equivalent amount to fund digital pioneers as they do in the Netherlands. An amount of £6.5 million would fund 325 projects at £20,000 a pop. While we’re at it, the New Zealand government could do the same. Who can help me get the data on IT project failures?

NZ Government delays ACTA information response

Being a democracy geek seems a minority sport most of the time. However at OpenTech 2008 in London on Saturday it didn’t feel that way. During the UK’s Open Rights Group (ORG) session, I asked what would make a good submission to the NZ government’s public ACTA consultation.

ACTA is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which BoingBoing describes as:

a draft treaty that does away with those pesky public trade-negotiations at the United Nations (with participation from citizens’ groups and public interest groups) in favor of secret, closed-door meetings where entertainment industry giants get to give marching orders to governments in private.

Despite its title, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is not about currency counterfeiting. ACTA will specify additional international agreement on laws to detect and criminalize breaches of copyrights, patents and trademarks (so called intellectual property - but in effect copyrights, patents and trademarks are government granted monolopies on creative works, innovations, and branding, respectively).

After the ORG session, Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told me that NZ was one of the few of the countries involved in the aggreement to have a public consultation on the issue. Danny referred me to their website for EFF information about ACTA.

We have until 14 July to reply to the government consultation.

The problem is that we don’t have the text of the agreement. An Official Information Act request to gain information held by the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) was launched on 8 June. MED should have yielded information within 20 working days of the request, which would have been Monday 7 July.

However the MED are delaying their response, stating that: “Pursuant to section 15A(1)(b) of the Official Information Act 1982 I am extending the time limit for my reply to your request by 10 working days. I will reply to your request by 21 July 2008.”

In consumer terms, anti-counterfeiting laws are there to protect consumers from unsuspectingly being sold fraudulent goods. Laws in this area should not be extended to the point that unsuspecting consumers are punished.

The MED is frustrating the ability of the public to make an informed submission on this issue by delaying their delivery of information under the OIA request.

Maybe we can prevail on the MED to extend the submission period to 28 July.

In contempt of court?

Opps, might have been in contempt of a court suppression order. An MP broke a name suppression order during Questions for Oral Answer on Thursday 26 June 2008. The name appears in the Hansard published on the Parliament’s website and for a period it also appeared on the TheyWorkForYou.co.nz website.

The software running TheyWorkForYou.co.nz republishes the Hansard as found on the parliament.nz website. While there is no copyright preventing republishing of the New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, members in the House are not bound by a court order, but the rest of us are.

As soon as I was notified of the issue, I manually altered the content of the text in question to hopefully prevent any allegations that it may be in contempt of the court order.

Now all that’s left to ponder is whether Google’s search results are in contempt.