[MCDP] Mashed Calculus and Differential Potatoes

Thursday, 24 August 2017

A Policy A Day: Immigration: A Personal Retrospective

In the lead-up to the election, we are examining a policy a day. We're exploring a variety of policy areas, explaining the background and analysing some of the policy options, with a mixture of technocracy and values-based approaches. Inevitably, some opinion will make its way in and we make no apology for that - after all, we're voters too. A list of all the articles is available here. Enjoy!

Today's post is by Pasan Jayasinghe and Sahanika Ratnayake

There is a deeply entrenched tendency in New Zealand political discourse, both amongst those who make policy and those who comment on it, to discuss policies from a neutral standpoint, as if they were not themselves individuals who have been and continue to be affected by the introduction of particular policies. Personal perspectives, such as that of Metiria Turei recently, are notable for their striking rarity. We offer the following, on immigration policy, as a counterpoint to the sort of analysis that puts aside the impact of politics on the lives of individuals and consequently presents voting as a simple calculation – a mere tabulation of the pros and cons of policies rather than a decision informed by one's values and life history. The recent history of immigration policy in New Zealand, particularly what has been spearheaded by the Labour Party, and the trajectory of our lives, are inextricably bound together. Consequently, we have watched the recent debate on immigration, driven by Labour, with disappointment and sadness, not just as immigrants but as voters identifying as progressive.

Our parents moved to New Zealand during the immigration boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The boom was a direct result of the Immigration Act 1987, passed by the fourth Labour government, which ended preference for migrants from Britain, Europe and Northern America. It initiated instead an immigration system which assessed immigrants according to their potential contribution to New Zealand’s economy and society. The 1987 Act was buttressed by the ensuing National government's introduction of a point based immigration system in 1991 which ranks the qualities sought in migrants and gives them a priority based on the assigned points. This opened the gate for increased immigration from other parts of the globe, particularly from Asia. Much of the migration during the boom consisted of skilled workers required to fill job shortages in New Zealand. This is in line with our personal histories: both our fathers are civil engineers. Having worked various short term contracts in the Middle East while we were infants, they were looking for a more permanent place to settle as their children grew older.

These policy changes resulted in massive social changes within a very short period of time. In just the early 1990s for instance, the numbers of those given approval for residency rose rapidly from 26,000 in 1992 to over 50,000 in 1995. By 2001, a fifth of New Zealand’s population was overseas-born. More importantly, immigrant flows that had largely been homogenous until the late 1980s suddenly became far more diversified. What we recall of our childhoods reflects the diversity that the origin-neutral immigration system brought about. Sahanika's childhood best friends in Melville, Hamilton were Chinese, Iraqi and Pākehā, a fact that did not strike any of them as even remotely odd as all three of them were far too busy trying to read all the Babysitter's Club books. Across town in Hillcrest, Pasan was just one of many brown candidates to play Scary Spice in frenzied re-enactments of Spice Girls videos.

We do not wish to paint a rosy picture of the success of multiculturalism in New Zealand. Whilst we grew up relatively unscathed, our parents faced discrimination and microaggressions in various forms. Like most skilled migrants, they found it difficult initially to find the work they were trained for as they were often overlooked in favour of local employees or immigrants from European backgrounds. Nor did we all acclimate easily to our new home as the mythology surrounding diversity suggests; the disapproval on her mother's face, when Sahanika bought her Pākehā boyfriend home for the first time, suggested otherwise.

Nor do we wish to claim that the motivation for the New Zealand immigration system was altruism or a desire to foster multiculturalism. Rather, the system used and continues to use migrants as human capital for economic advancement. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus on immigration from the late 1980s to the early 2000s positioned New Zealand as a player in a “race” to secure skilled and talented human resources in a competitive global environment. Immigrants are essentially treated as economic units and their worth determined almost purely by the economic value they can contribute. In spite of being such units, however, it is difficult for us to discount the impact the immigration system, and the wider fact of growing up in New Zealand, has had on us.

Whilst the scaffolding for the immigration boom was a bipartisan effort, it is Labour that we – and we suspect many other migrants who arrived during the immigration boom – associate with the burgeoning diversity of New Zealand. This may have been due to the timing of our arrivals, coinciding as they did with the onset of the fifth Labour government. It may also have been due to Labour embracing multiculturalism more readily and consistently, which continued to be the case even as National turned away from it in the mid-2000s (under Don Brash’s leadership in particular, the party began echoing the ‘flood of immigrants’ rhetoric so doggedly issued by Winston Peters). This support was material: from 2003 onwards, the Labour government set up the Office of Ethnic Affairs; developed a Settlement Strategy for new migrants which resulted in a number of Migrant Resource Centres nationwide; and established the Language Line to offer telephone interpretation assistance to speakers of numerous other languages to access important government services. Labour’s only major concession during this time was increasing the English language requirement for migrants.

But Labour’s commitment also went beyond this. It is the local Labour MPs that we recall being awkwardly yet persistently present at each Sri Lankan New Year’s celebration, dance troupe performance, and cultural food fair we were reluctantly dragged to (even though baiting them with “kiwi hot” curries which were actually decidedly spicy was a favourite pastime of Pasan). There was indeed a time when the presence of the entire political spectrum at various cultural events was not so ubiquitous. Our parents diligently voted Labour with a particular enthusiasm for Helen Clark they reserved only for the Sri Lankan politicians from their youth. Even if multiculturalism was attractive wrapping paper for the cold economics of immigration policy, we find it hard to deny its emotional resonance. There was something in the bare fact of recognition, by the state and its representatives onwards, which we sensed was a comfort and reassurance to our parents who had already navigated numerous migrations.

We do not wish to venerate Labour’s policies and politics of race relations, or suggest that its relatively permissive multiculturalism absolves itself of its racist policies and actions during this period. The fifth Labour government’s passage of the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004 and its orchestration of the Urewera raids in 2007 stand out as just two examples of the party’s reactionary streak. Such interventions complicate the politics of a party very much in conflict with itself over how to engage with New Zealand’s non-Pākehā peoples.

This would be proved once again with the debate on immigration that the party has opened up recently; with it, Labour strayed very far from the original picture we held of the party as an inclusive one in support of diversity and immigration. In June this year, Labour announced a raft of policies to reduce annual net migration by 20,000-30,000 through a combination of limiting student visas for “low value” courses of study; removing work visas without a job offer for applicants graduating with less than a Bachelor-level degree; regionalising the occupation list and implementing a “Kiwis first” hiring policy for employers. These policies have been justified by the party on the basis that record numbers of migrant arrivals are contributing to the country’s housing crisis, putting pressure on hospitals and schools, and increasing road congestion.

The reasoning behind such policies crumbles upon any close scrutiny. The record annual net migration figure of 70,000 the party frequently cites actually comprises of some 37,000 New Zealanders returning home or not leaving as in previous years; 21,000 on working holiday visas; 7,000 international student arrivals and 3,000 Australians moving here. In effect, Labour’s policies are aimed at the remaining 10-15,000 migrants at the margins of current net migration. It is difficult to believe that such a number is the main cause of the country's housing crisis, health and education pressures and congestion, particularly given that most new migrants, and especially migrant students, are not in a position to afford houses or cars.

If the issue was simply faulty logic or ineffective policies, it would be politics as usual. However, Labour’s immigration policies and accompanying discourse slid into a dangerous form of scapegoating and xenophobia, all the more shocking given the source. Following the blatant race profiling of the Chinese-sounding last names debacle in 2015, the party has been at pains to emphasise that its policies “aren’t about race” and are in fact “race neutral”. This is, however, at odds with the party’s constant references (at least under the previous leadership) to property investors from China, Chinese home buyers, and Chinese and Indian restaurants. Notably, the party has never made reference to Canadian, American, Australian or European property investors and land purchasers, who account for a majority of foreign direct investment and land acquisition in the country.

Apart from pointing fingers at immigrants from particular locales, Labour's constant use of phrasing such as “low skilled people” and students of “low-level education courses” paints a picture of nefarious migrants who use work and study visas as 'backdoor' paths to residency and citizenship. This implies that there are legitimate reasons to leave one's country and that reasons of economic and social advancement are not amongst them. The inconsistency between the reactionary immigration policy and relatively progressive refugee quota that the party (amongst a number of others) has committed to could be viewed as further evidence of this; it implies that it is only permissible to settle elsewhere if one is forced to, not voluntarily for mere reasons of personal gain.

Our parents are prime examples of the 'bad' kind of migrant under this construct: recently, when Sahanika asked her father if the civil war in Sri Lanka was a factor in their decision to immigrate, he offhandedly replied that that had never entered into their calculations. They had resigned themselves to the threat of political instability and violence since that had comprised most of their lives; their motivating reasons were elsewhere. Ironically, these reasons are the same ones we find New Zealanders migrating to Australia appealing to: higher wages, home ownership, better education, and opportunities for their children – in short, economic and social advancement. It is strange then that the public discourse is so censorious of those desiring to settle in New Zealand for the increased opportunities it offers. We do not subscribe to this distinction at all; coming as a refugee or as an immigrant to New Zealand, or anywhere else for that matter, are both perfectly legitimate.

For us then, Labour’s policy reversal regarding immigration is fundamentally a betrayal. We do not exaggerate when we say that such a move could not remotely have been imagined when we were growing up here. Processing the party’s turn has been deeply unsettling, not simply because we desire a change of government but because it has required us to interrogate our identities as New Zealanders and immigrants in acutely discomforting ways. It has also given us keener insight the apparent drift by ethnic minority communities which once voted for Labour en masse in favour of the now openly inclusive National, which under John Key rapidly backed away from Brash’s stance. This voter abandonment must be seen as a natural consequence, not simply of the failure to offer a clear socio-political narrative for such communities (which has been especially pronounced in the post-Clark years), but also of the subtle and blatant racism that has stemmed from the party in recent years. Winning back such voters would require more than the usual tokenistic representation but, at the very least, an unequivocal acknowledgement of the harm caused by the party’s rhetoric.

More broadly, Labour’s positioning on immigration is significant because one of the country’s dominant parties, which for a long period was pro-immigration, endorsing anti-immigration policies on such a scale has legitimated anti-immigrant xenophobia to a wide degree. The impact of this legitimisation is already clear. Parliamentary parties across nearly the entire political spectrum – barring United Future (which fairly unequivocally favours immigration both policy and rhetoric-wise) and the ACT Party (which declares itself “pro-immigration” conditional on migrants accepting “New Zealand values”) – now all endorse anti-immigration policies in some form or the other. The National government has already implemented restrictions on certain temporary visa categories. These changes are reflective of a particular intensification of the points system as a tool for selecting optimal migrants under the government’s watch, including through the increase of points requirements and the introduction of remuneration bands for skilled migrants. Such escalation sits particularly uncomfortably alongside the government’s preferential expedition of citizenship for ultra-wealthy individuals such as Peter Thiel. It takes a model of choosing and privileging of migrants based on nothing more than economic gain to a perverse degree.

Meanwhile, New Zealand First, the party that has consistently opposed immigration, has now been emboldened to further advocate even more stringent restrictions on immigration, including endorsing a Register of Foreign Land Ownership. It has also been empowered to double down on its racist rhetoric by going so far as to make ethnicity-based attacks on reporters whose reporting did not align with the party’s narrative.

Even the Greens, who signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Labour for closer political cooperation, proposed a policy last year of a cap on migration at one per cent of the population. Whilst they have commendably apologised for their rhetoric and policy proposals, it remains to be seen what their revised immigration policies would be. Moreover, given the Greens’ agreement with Labour; their strong reluctance to criticise Labour on the issue; and their refusal to disavow New Zealand First as a coalition partner, it is unclear what material effect the party’s change in positioning would have.

Other parties on the ostensible left who we would expect to subscribe to anti-xenophobic values have also been silent in challenging Labour’s stance. Whilst the Māori Party has warned against blaming immigrants for social pressures, its policy slate still features “Kiwis first” employment policies, making hiring from overseas difficult, and restricting temporary work visas. The Māori Party entered into an electoral cooperation pact for the upcoming election with the Mana Party, whose leader Hone Harawira has recently been advocating for the death penalty for “Chinese” drug dealers.

Though its policy changes, and the party’s intensified anti-immigration tack, were directed by Labour’s previous leadership, they have been duly carried over by the current leadership. The use of softer language and the apparent prioritisation of other issues over immigration do not disguise the fact that the immigration policies remain intact in substance. In fact, the party’s new front on immigration may be even more dangerous than previously as it may make the policies seem palatable or somehow acceptable on balance.

Labour’s position on these issues matters hugely given that they will be the lead party in a potential centre-left government, and its demonstrated ability to pull the political spectrum towards its position on immigration. Consequently, we feel thoroughly trapped by the options available. Even voting for the relatively clean handed Greens seems ineffectual as their voice on immigration is likely to be immaterial in potential post-election negotiation scenarios and coalition governing arrangements. Worse yet, the possibility that immigration policy would be a bargaining chip for an opportunistically xenophobic Labour during such scenarios remains very real. What Labour may do once in government, especially alongside a partner like New Zealand First, is alarming to contemplate.

We do not want to refrain from voting like every cliché of apathetic youth that is bemoaned (but whose concerns are never taken seriously) each election. Yet, at a time when global politics is reflecting the same xenophobia that New Zealand politics seems so pleased to indulge in, we feel it would be morally abhorrent to just make the best of it and vote, as we have done so many times in the past for "the lesser of two evils". This time, it is unclear if anyone could be said to hold that title.

Pasan Jayasinghe is a policy researcher who has worked as a Burger King crew member, university tutor and policy advisor, and completed a MA in Politics. For the first time in his adult life, he’ll be watching the election returns come in six and a half hours from the past, from Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Sahanika Ratnayake is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Australian National University, though she is currently taking a leave of absence in order to do her part during election season across various leafy Auckland suburbs. Sadly, she no longer feels able to distribute leaflets for any party at the present time.

Wednesday, 23 August 2017

A Policy A Day: Humanising Criminal Justice

Academics broadly agree that punishment is meant to achieve five purposes. It denounces and deters wrongdoing, seeks retribution against people who offend and removes them from society, and (finally) rehabilitates them into society. Punishment is therefore meant to operate on several levels. Victims should feel like those who have offended against them have been disciplined. At the same time, people who are convicted - and society at large -should be warned off similar offending behaviour in the future.

Or at least that’s how it’s meant to work in theory. People with experience in and around the criminal justice system will tell you that whether punishment ever manages to achieve the ideal balance of these objectives is debatable.

For decades, the success of our criminal justice system has been measured in rates of offending and reoffending. How many people commit a crime, and how many people, after they have been charged and convicted and punished, end up committing further crime? The problem with relying on crime rates is that they don’t reflect trends in the wider justice system. The Department of Corrections says the “crime rate is a relatively weak driver of the prison muster.” They know that rather than increases in crime, it is legislative changes that have caused the growth in our prison population since 2000.

There is a clear disconnect between crime and punishment in New Zealand: less crime has not meant fewer people starting prison sentences. And yet, when asked at a JustSpeak forum in Wellington several weeks ago, representatives from all political parties said they were committed to reducing the prison population - and the Māori prison population in particular.

The only problem is how we’re going to get there. It’s clear our current approach isn’t working. These figures are 15 years old but they show that within four years of release from prison, half of all released prisoners end up back in prison. Recent figures for Māori prisoners are grimmer: more than 60% are back in prison within two years of release (page 11).

Corrections’ figures from 15 years ago probably still hold true. If half of all prisoners return to prison within a few years, you could say that imprisonment as a policy to deter crime only has a 50% success rate over the short to medium-term. This wouldn’t be considered good enough in most other areas of human existence and wellbeing, especially when you factor in how much it costs to run prisons and the other consequences of imprisonment.

The policy success of imprisonment becomes more questionable when you look at who the system tends to punish most severely. 87% of prisoners were either unemployed or in very low-paid work right before they went to prison. 91% of prisoners have a lifetime diagnosis of mental health or substance abuse issues.

It is the people living the most precarious lives who find themselves experiencing the sharp end of justice in our country. This would also go some way in explaining our crime trends. While crime rates may not have been going up, we have seen increasing inequality and poverty over the last few decades. Instead of being a product of crime rates, our prison population might instead be a barometer of whānau ora and societal wellbeing.

Reversing the trend of a growing prison population requires going back to basics. Our imported notions of justice and fairness are no longer fit-for-purpose. We need to ask what we want our criminal justice system to do, and what its core functions should be. It’s become inadequate to say our justice system only needs to uphold laws and punish those who transgress. A 21st century criminal justice system in Aotearoa New Zealand will only succeed if it improves the lives of people who come into contact with it.

The hard part is figuring out how to achieve this. Some parties have policies that seem like a step in the right direction. Others appear determined to do the opposite. None go as far as suggesting a fundamental rethink of the purpose and modus operandi of our criminal justice system. This is probably because saying this out loud is a recipe for political disaster. It is embedded in our cultural DNA that institutions as hallowed and entrenched as the criminal justice system are not to be lightly tinkered with.

Yet tinkering is all we’ve been able to do in the last couple of decades. The most promising innovations in criminal justice have happened on the fringes. The one Matariki Court in Kaikohe, two Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts in Auckland, and three Iwi Justice Panels across the country are some examples of this tinkering. The Matariki Court and Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Courts take advantage of a provision in our Sentencing Act, which allows courts to adjourn sentencing so that a restorative or rehabilitative programme can take place. The Alcohol and Other Drug Treatment Court aims to break the cycles of substance abuse which cause or fuel offending. The Matariki Court involves the creation of culturally-appropriate rehabilitation programmes, which are provided by Ngāpuhi and other community organisations. Iwi Justice Panels are a pre-charge alternative resolution pathway, where community panels work with people who have committed low-level offences. The aim is to ensure they do not offend again by addressing any factors in their lives which may have contributed to the offending, and also rebuild relationships between people who offend and their victims.

These pilots all have one thing in common. They're not about being judged solely based on your crime. Instead, they involve people facing up to and taking responsibility for their actions, while also being assisted by their whānau and communities to prevent future offending. They are examples of the justice system and local communities carving out space to help people address a wide range of issues in their lives in a respectful and collaborative manner. They involve treating people as individuals, and giving whānau a meaningful role to play.

Early indications from all of these pilots are positive. But instead of being adopted in the mainstream criminal justice system, these approaches remain a fringe element. They are seen as nice-to-haves rather than must-haves. While the solution may not lie entirely with these three pilots, they're a good starting point. They represent a fundamentally different way for the criminal justice system to interact with the people within it.

The problem is that we fear change in this area, and assume it would destabilise or undermine justice itself. This fear both in government and within society is holding us back from embracing new approaches on a large scale. This isn’t the sort of situation where refusing to try means you can’t fail. Every day that we don’t try means continued failure for the people who experience a criminal justice system that doesn’t comprehend their needs, whether they have committed a crime or been victimised (or both).

Come September 24, it is hard to imagine any government proactively taking a long, hard look at our criminal justice system. To do so requires courage: the courage to admit our current system isn’t working; to undo counter-productive legislative changes; and to say that people like prisoners are worthy recipients of our collective compassion and respect. Perhaps we can help our next government by demonstrating these are conversations we’re ready to have.

Today's contributor works in the public sector and has chosen to remain anonymous. The views expressed are their own.

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

A Policy A Day: Fiscal Drag

Through the process of fiscal drag (sometimes called bracket creep), governments use inflation to slowly and subtly raise taxes on the population, particularly the nation’s poor. Fiscal drag happens when inflation pushes peoples income into a higher tax bracket than it was previously, causing people to be taxed more for functionally the same income. To understand its operation, its crucial to understand how the personal income tax system works to determine how much tax you pay to the government every year.

The personal income tax system is made up of three core parts. Firstly is Income, which is pretty straight forward: this is the amount of money that you earn from your job (or other sources) and isn’t controlled by the government [1]. Secondly is the Marginal Tax Rate, which is the percentage of tax you pay on a marginal dollar earned. The third component is the Tax Bracket, which is the focus of fiscal drag. The Tax Bracket is the income range that the marginal tax rate applies to; the rates for 2017 are shown below.

So no matter how much you earn, your first $14,000 will be taxed at 10.5%, then your $14,001st dollar will be taxed at 17.5%. This nuance exists to stop someone being better off earning $14,000 than $14,001 and thus being able to game the tax system. The way the brackets operate mean that there is a difference between the marginal tax rate, and your Effective Tax Rate. The effective tax rate is the percentage of tax you actually pay on your income. It can be best explained through an example of someone earning $55,000 a year, who despite having a marginal rate of 30%, pays an effective tax rate of 17.3%.

Fiscal drag becomes a problem when the tax brackets aren’t updated regularly enough, and inflation pushes people into higher tax brackets than they probably should be. The last time our tax brackets were changed was 2008 and are changed, on average, once every 10 years. However, since 2008, median income from wages has risen from $729 a week to $924 a week in 2016. This is annualised to $37,900 income per year in 2008 and $48,048 income per year in 2016. The effects of fiscal drag on these incomes are shown below.

What this shows is that the median wage earner in NZ is being taxed $1,750.80 more in 2017 than in 2008, or an extra $34.24 a week. That’s more than three whole blocks of cheese a week! The government is treating median income earners as if they are richer than they actually are.

Poor people are affected most by fiscal drag, as they are the ones that are pushed into higher tax brackets than they probably should be. We can see this when we show the tax receipt of a minimum wage earner in 2008 and today. A full-time minimum wage earner in 2008 earned $24,950, and $32,760 under the 2017 rate.

So the government is taxing a minimum wage earner $1,365.00 extra a year - two and a half blocks of cheese a week. 29% of the tax a minimum wage earner currently pays is attributed to fiscal drag over the last nine years. This tax increase can be felt fairly acutely by a low-income family.

Fiscal drag also undermines the progressivity of the tax system as the push of people into higher tax brackets slowly flattens out the system. If we assume the tax brackets aren’t updated for another 50 years, and the average wage has grown through inflation to $400,000, then everyone is going to be on the top rate of 33% meaning we functionally have a flat tax system.

Policy

The simple solution is to make sure that our tax brackets are updated fairly frequently, but that has political consequences, as updating brackets for inflation appears as a tax cut when it’s really reverting taxation levels back to the status quo. Updating tax brackets also appears at first glance to benefit the wealthy as they get more dollars back in their pockets (though this happens because the wealthy pay more tax, as a proportion of tax paid it’s actually less). These results often make it politically unpalatable to update brackets regularly, so we need some automatic mechanism.

The cleanest mechanism is to automatically adjust the tax thresholds based on the average wage growth for the previous year. For example, if wages in 2016 grew by 1.5%, then all the tax brackets would be increased by 1.5% in 2017 to apply to the tax year ending April 2018. While there is a slight bracket lag, it is much less than the average of 10 years to update our brackets. This small lag is necessary to gather the required data, and to make sure the tax brackets are available in advance of the year they apply.

The advantage of this mechanism is that it sits outside the traditional value judgements about the tax system, and can accommodate any number of brackets or any adjustment to the marginal tax rates. Should the Green Party get elected and pass their tax plan to add a new bracket and introduce more progressivity to the tax system, then a fiscal drag mechanism is still ideologically palatable. Similarly, if Act gets elected and massively reduce tax rates and flatten the system, a fiscal drag mechanism is unaffected.

At the moment, some of the parties have proposed adjustments to the brackets, such as the Greens adding a new bracket above $150k and National changing all of the tax brackets as part of their tax cut. However, none of the major parties have any policy on an automatic mechanism that takes the politics out of ensuring that the tax brackets keep up with inflation.

Overall, without correcting fiscal drag the government will slowly and invisibly continue taxing people more and more over time. Governments both right and left like fiscal drag as it sneakily pushes significant amounts of money into the government budget, and can indeed be the difference between a deficit and a surplus, such as when the Treasury’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update 2014 predicted (wrongly) that the government would not be in surplus. Policymakers need to create some automatic mechanism to prevent the erosion of the progressivity of the tax system.

Jason Armishaw is a graduate in Law and Economics from the University of Auckland, he has worked across the public and private sector at a number of institutions including the New Zealand Treasury and Deloitte. He currently works at a management consulting firm in Australia.

[1] Yes, the government controls the economic settings that affect wage and non-wage income, but for the purposes of simplifying this description all of that has been ignored.

Monday, 21 August 2017

A Policy A Day: Freshwater Pricing

A Policy A Day: An Introduction

A Policy A Day: An Introduction

In the lead-up to the election, we’re publishing A Policy A Day – a look at some of the issues that face New Zealand and how we think they could be addressed (or even solved). This time it really is going to be every day, including the weekends, so we’ve lined up over 30 young writers from a diverse range of backgrounds to write about topics that they’re really passionate about. We’ll be looking at a combination of existing policies from the political parties, as well as policies that we think deserve a lot more attention and really should be talked about more.

But before we can get too deeply into the policies, we need to answer a question:

What does policy actually mean?

There’s a lot of political science theory out there on this topic, but I’ll try to keep this simple with my interpretation. Given that a particular issue has been identified, policy is a statement of intent about the actions that a government takes to address that issue. Policies should be action or solution-oriented, but at the end of the day, it’s just a statement of intent or a plan. The actual implementation is still left up to the government and, as happens all too often, can still be stuffed up in any one of a million ways. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a bad policy (although sometimes that contributes), so it’s important to separate the policy ideas from the implementation. We can divide this flow into three parts:

Issue -> Policy -> Implementation

Of course, the reason we have politics is that at every stage of this process we can have differences in opinion. We may disagree on what is actually an issue or what the most important issues are, we often don’t know what the “best” policy solution is (or what best even means), and different implementations of the same policy can lead to very different end outcomes for the public. Policy cannot be entirely divorced from politics, so we always have to keep political realities in the back of our minds when we discuss policy.

Governments actually have a lot of different options for how to address particular issues – even if we have found a “good” policy option, chances are there are other good policy options also available. There are many issues to solve and many good solutions, but we are also fundamentally limited by budgetary and logistical constraints. Decision makers in government and cabinet have to make choices about where to allocate funding (and humans) based on their priorities, so we can’t solve all issues or implement all policy solutions.

One way of thinking about the different policy options is by taking a loose interpretation of Lawrence Lessig’s pathetic dot theory, so called because the user (in this case, the general public) is often treated as a passive object that regulation (or incentivisation) happens to. The theory suggests that everyone’s behaviour is constrained by four types of regulation: legal, social norms, market, and architectural. For example, we might identify that smoking is harmful to people’s health with wider social and economic harms, so the government wants to do something about it. We could say that the government has designated that smoking is an issue that needs to be addressed (and we should consider that even at this fundamental level people may disagree with this assertion). To address this issue, the government might have several options:

Legal: The government could pass laws that regulate smoking based on age (e.g. you must be at least 18), where you can smoke (e.g. you cannot smoke public indoor spaces), or with other restrictions.
Social norms: Through public education campaigns, the government can influence behaviour by discouraging people from smoking from a young age, thus moulding the social norms around smoking. You’ve probably seen plenty of anti-smoking advertisements as billboards or on TV, funded by government agencies.
Market: The government can levy tobacco taxes that make cigarettes less affordable, interfering with the supply and demand equation to modify the public’s ability to choose to smoke or not smoke.
Architectural: The government can change the process or product itself, such as by limiting the amount of nicotine allowed in cigarettes or encouraging the adoption of e-cigarettes that are less harmful.

As evidenced by this example, the government doesn’t have to just choose one option – while sometimes the options are mutually exclusive (pick one or the other), often they are complementary and reflect a desire to move in a particular direction (in this case, towards reducing smoking). For each policy option, we have to consider the pros and cons, who it helps and who it harms, and how much it costs and what we won’t be able to do instead if we do this.

Let’s look a different example where we want to move in the opposite direction, where the government thinks that renewable energy is a good thing and wants to encourage the adoption of solar panels. We could say that the government has identified the lack of solar panel adoption as an issue, and so we have many different policy solution options:

Legal: The government could pass laws that require the use of solar panels on all new buildings above a certain size, with a certain percentage of each new building’s energy needs met by solar.
Social norms: The government could launch an advertising campaign to tell people fighting climate change and being environmentally friendly is important and so they should put solar panels on their houses.
Market: The government could provide subsidies for solar panels, encouraging adoption by paying for a certain percentage of the solar panels to make them cheaper for the end user.
Architectural: The government could fund research and development towards making solar panels more useful in harsh environments such as in colder parts of the South Island, or introduce standards that require solar panels to meet minimum efficiency requirements so that fewer sub-standard low-quality solar panels are installed.

As suggested before, this isn’t the only way to think about public policy. Something missing from this model is the element of consultation with the public and participation of the public through submissions, petitions, protests, and more. That element lifts the “dot” (i.e. us) from being passive to being more active participants in policy development. Working with experts outside government, other government agencies, and with the public generally is an important element of policy development in the public sector. Some theorists describe policymaking as a “dynamic, complex, and interactive” process, and we should also consider policy responses at different levels of government (local, national, and international). Considering the implementation from an early stage is also really important – policies that cannot be effectively implemented should be thrown out pretty quickly. Verification and program evaluation are also needed so that we can keep tabs on implementation and check that things have actually been done properly once policies have been adopted.

Hopefully, this serves as a brief introduction to how we might think about the different options that a government has, how we might consider if they’re good or bad, and why people might agree or disagree about different issues, policy solutions, and implementations. It’s intended to help you think about why politics is difficult, and why different people with good intentions can come up with wildly different positions. Throughout the next month, we’re going to hear (read) from a lot of different perspectives on a range of issues that need government responses – knowing what our policy options are (and what they entail) is key to picking the best option(s) for implementation so that we can achieve good outcomes for New Zealand.

We’re organising this series of posts because we want to inform as many people as possible about the range and scope of the issues that the government has to deal with, and to encourage readers to think about their own policy ideas for addressing those issues. Maybe it’ll help you decide who you want to vote for, but voting is actually only one way to influence government. We hope to inspire readers to actively participate in democratic processes more long-term, to get the issues that matter to them in front of their elected representatives, and to not just find problems but to propose workable, tenable policy solutions.

Thursday, 27 April 2017

If you debate immigration and Winston doesn’t comment, did you have a debate about immigration at all?

The New Zealand Herald released an analysis and visualisation of immigration data from Statistics New Zealand this week. Most of the recent debate about immigration between National and Labour has centred on work visas, and whether too many migrant workers were coming into the country to take jobs away from hard working kiwis. Contrary to the belief of many, it turned out that “Chinese and Indian chefs” were not representative of the majority of work visas. The article reported that “despite China and India being among the biggest source countries for permanent residents, they are not among the top five for direct migrant workers.” The top five ended up being the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, South Africa, and the United States, and so racists who claim that Asians are coming and stealing all the jobs might be, well, wrong.

Harkanwal Singh and Lincoln Tan put a lot of work into this piece. They both clearly explained the data in the article and presented the data through interactive visualisations to communicate clearly with different audiences. They interviewed diversity expert Paul Spoonley from Massey University to provide additional context to the data. They interviewed an immigrant health worker to humanise the data and show the tangible effects of recent policy changes. They did a good enough job that the editor decided to make it the front page headline.

Then Winston Peters heard about it. You can imagine him making his best impression of White Island, with hot smoke coming out his nose and ears, furious that the media was reporting that immigrant workers might not be all Asian. Obviously, this was unacceptable, and a press release had to be written and published! His criticism came in two parts:

“Asian immigrant reporters”

Harkanwal Singh is from India and has been here for 9 years. He has probably single-handedly made the largest impact on data journalism in New Zealand, ever. He’s the data editor at the Herald and runs the Insights section, and supports the broader statistics and data visualisation communities. (Disclaimer: I know Harkanwal and have done some work with him before). Lincoln Tan is from Singapore and has been here for more than 20 years. He’s been a journalist for the Herald for over 10 of those years and written hundreds of articles, leading to a Canon Media Award in 2016 for Best General Reporting.

So sure, Winston is right in his press release that Harkanwal and Lincoln are “Asian immigrant reporters”. Even though he doesn’t say anything explicit beyond this, it’s obvious that he is attacking their credibility by implying that they have some bias or vested interest when they report that the “top five source nations for migrant workers [are] not Asian”. He makes it a bit clearer later in a phone call with Newshub saying “you have two immigrants themselves as reporters for the Herald writing what is clearly misleading information [and] headlining it on the front page”.

What Winston is doing here is actually undermining immigrants so that they can’t discuss or argue about the issues that affect them. He’s trying to disqualify the immigrants from the debate, and that’s not going to be good for our democracy if smart and well-intentioned people who try to provide facts and analysis are marginalised for their ethnicity or migrant status. This is further confirmed when he says in the Newshub call “they’re like the New Zealand Initiative, who are majorly immigrants themselves, and they are heavy into being pro mass immigration” in reference to their immigration report released in late January this year.

The fact that these two particular migrant reporters have contributed massively to New Zealand journalism doesn’t matter to Winston. The fact that they have been in New Zealand for a long time and are productive members of society doesn’t matter to Winston. The fact that they are reporting on verifiable data that come from a government agency doesn’t matter to Winston. They’re migrants, and that’s sufficient to call the reporting “propaganda”. That’s just lazy racism, and we have to expect better if we want the immigration debate to go anywhere.

“Completely wrong and based on flawed analysis”

The primary substantive complaint from Winston is that the Herald article is based on Statistics New Zealand data for Permanent and Long Term (PLT) arrivals and departures. It turns out that this data is derived from “arrival cards” at (air)ports, rather than the actual number of visas granted. Apparently, the Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) has this data, so the Herald article is therefore “rubbish” according to Winston.

As much as it pains me to admit, Winston does have a point here that is tarnished by his personal attack on the journalists. The MBIE data may be a better indicator of where migrants are coming from than the Statistics NZ data since it’s based on the actual visa numbers. To call the Herald analysis “defective” is harsh though; the analysis is accurate and still informative based on the official Statistics NZ data available. It’s also unfair when we consider that politicians regularly quote the Statistics NZ data when braying on about “record immigration”. In fact, Winston has used the same source himself for net migration statistics. He used that Statistics NZ data on the same day he criticised the Herald for “creating confusion and spreading misinformation” for not using the MBIE data.

Just as an aside, Winston’s arguments seem suspiciously similar to the ones made by Michael Reddell (published on his blog and in the NBR). In that article, Reddell closes with a plea for MBIE to “markedly improve” access to this data, saying that “good timely data just aren’t made easily available”. This data is only published once a year, while Statistics New Zealand publishes data monthly. It certainly helps explain why no one else has been using this data.

This particular Herald article was based on PLT data, and maybe more articles can be written based on better data. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the Herald article still represents an improvement in analysis and data visualisation for the immigration debate beyond what we had before. The immigration debate is hungry for better data beyond anecdotes, for better analysis beyond preconceived assumptions, for better discussion beyond “record net migration”. Politics only exists when we cannot agree on what the correct answer is, when we are in the face of uncertainty and imperfect information, when the decision maker has to make a judgement call. Perhaps if we can find it, better data can be used to inform policy too.

Tuesday, 13 December 2016

Hateful Language

Last Monday, Gareth Morgan decided to release his new tax policy that would introduce a tax on "productive assets". This short post isn’t about the details of that policy and whether it would work or not. It’s about the rhetoric used in the discussion of that policy.

It started with the Paul Henry interview on Thursday. Morgan called Henry a “tax loophole cowboy” and Henry responded by calling Morgan a “wowery socialist”. At one point Morgan dismissed Henry with a casual “Don’t tell the economist what a reverse mortgage is mate,” and Henry accused Morgan of wanting a “socialist state”.

Then Jamie Whyte got into the mix to criticise Morgan with “Perhaps Victoria University did not cover the difference between consumption and income when Morgan was studying for his PhD.” Later, Gareth Morgan responded with “He's a moron like all libertarians” and also “Whyte is an economics ignoramus, as is Henry.” He later said that Whyte was an “Economic illiterate as is most of Far Right.”

To other people who have disagreed with his proposal, Morgan has said things like “Try Econ 101 b4 u blab” and “do your homework dickhead.” It’s only funny in the context that Morgan also said “abuse is lowest form of intellect. Try counselling.”

This is the stuff of Stuff comment threads. Name calling and abusive rhetoric gets in the way of having proper policy discussion. Morgan’s straight-talking vibe is something that probably makes him an attractive candidate for some, but it also makes him a divisive candidate who seems to refuse engagement and just dismisses opponents instead. It doesn’t help people have a meaningful discussion about his policy, and it certainly doesn’t help make the policy any better.

I wish we could elect politicians purely on their policies, but how they act and behave is just as important. They have to be role models for our society, and the more that they act like petulant children, the more our country sees that this behaviour is okay and emulates it. That's not how I want our society to turn out. We can do better.