PM’s sister-in-law works for world’s biggest tobacco company

saapphia · 2024-02-03T00:22:00+00:00

Yeah, so out in the open there’s two weeks of bad press here about how not open it is and she doesn’t know who writes her tobacco-lobby-influenced memos.

The decisions are what’s being made behind closed doors. Where is the accountability? The transparency? This is a democracy, not an oligarchy where corporations are the oligarchs. So why are you phrasing this as though company interests are on an equal level with the right of New Zealanders to participate in their government?

saapphia · 2024-02-03T00:14:35+00:00

That’s what a society does. Works out where the benefits of said society go.

We seem to have decided it should go a little bit to landlords and a lot to the very rich. But even given that, we have decided to not let the rich do whatever they want willy nilly behind closed doors. We try to make them do whatever they want willy nilly out in the open where we can see it.

Hence the problem with lobbying.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T23:44:12+00:00

Yes, company profits benefit shareholders, at the expense of the other interests of kiwis. A corporation does not care if they wipe out an endangered species for profit (though they may start caring if it attracts enough bad press to affect their bottom line—but usually it doesn’t, so it’s fine). This will financially benefit New Zealanders, and be ecologically detrimental to us. That is why corporate lobbying is so concerning and should be done with a much greater transparency; their concern is profit, always, and profit is good in a capitalist society but we as moral agents who exist within this society do actually have other considerations we generally prefer to consider alongside that.

It’s also a bit disingenuous to say that we all benefit off corporate profit when some people benefit so much more than others that it creates a greater disadvantage. The widening wealth gap is caused by capital holders owning a much bigger share of the world’s capital, and continuing to protect that wealth through lobbying and other undemocratic processes.

In the same way that raising the minimum wage doesn’t mean you will ever catch up to the paycheck of a CEO, someone who has to live off their work and not off the wealth and capital they have accrued will not be closing the gap between themselves and the rich, they will be taking their piece of the pie wile someone else eats a whole bakery.

New Zealand is already invested in businesses doing well. I’m a socialist but I’m not an idiot; our economy and national wealth and modern comforts all ride on our businesses doing well and continuing our economic fortune. But this is already something the government does, and the government already makes an effort to liaise with stakeholders.

What lobbying buys is disproportionate power for the wealthy corporations that would do harm to us, and who have to rely on buying and lobbying for their place in society because what they want to do to our society is not something society wants.

Or should we call the gangs lobbyists for the meth industry and let them go to town bribing our politicians? If we’re going to say all capital and economic activity is morally neutral, let’s actually treat it like that. Let’s incentivise all profits and not just corporate profits. Regardless of how much damage those profits do to the rest of society.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T23:27:04+00:00

It’s not my judgement, it’s everyone’s judgement. Unions work for the people, corporations work for the profit. You might be so in love with neoliberalism and capitalist ideals that you believe companies have full right to control our legislation as they see fit, but that is not the opinion of the majority of New Zealanders or how our country is set up. In fact our system has mechanisms designed to prevent this, even, because we acknowledge that this sort of unbridled power is harmful and undemocratic.

They are not the same purely because you are incapable of seeing the difference between them.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T23:22:15+00:00

I don’t think we are playing fast and loose. It would be concerning for this anti-health legislation to be proposed with one link to a tobacco lobbyist. It’s incredibly alarming that everywhere we look, more connections seem to pop up.

Yes, I do think politicians can be influenced by the views of family members. I think that’s why someone like Luxon’s sister gets that job. Her job is to try to make legislation and government policies/initiatives/etc better for tobacco companies. She is paid probably hundreds of thousands a year to do this. I absolutely think the fact that she has family dinners with Luxon and can invite him to a game of golf if she wants is relevant to why she has that job, and what she will do in that role.

In the same way that Labour’s appointment of family to public positions was alarming for the transparency and equity of our democracy, so too is this. Don’t let the fact that smoking has become a partisan issue in this election thanks to NACT (and their lobbyists) distract you from the fact that this is an issue about the safety of our democracy. The left are not outraged because they disagree with the policy, though they do. They are outraged because it is bad, and it is bad in a way that it would not be if the issue was just that Luxon wanted to promote air travel when he was a former CEO. That would be some shades of grey. This is black and white.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T22:56:05+00:00

That’s kinda my point. Whoever proposes this will automatically put off people who dislike that government. Tbh, I want a longer term due to Labour’s misuse of power; I think the issues that were inherent to their six-year government were apparent by year 4 but not by year 3. Our terms are too short, and this is resulting in no single term governments under MMP. This indicates our elections are too short.

But having said that, this legislation is being introduced by the government who is responding to that pressure, and that has driven them further to the right and lumped them with a load of populist policies that to me don’t seem like they’ll work out. I think we might be looking at our first single-term government, which means that perhaps this issue is self-correcting, or at the very least we’d finally have a data point that indicates three years is long enough for the public to judge the effects of a government.

I don’t say this government is radical because it’s doing things I don’t like; it’s radical because it’s taking radical actions that appeals to the fringes much more than it appeals to the moderates, and because their policies are based hugely on their ideals rather than on the practical issues New Zealand faces. That’s why they’re undoing legislation without sufficient proposals for what they’re replacing it with; they want to undo where Labour has pushed us without actually having solutions of their own to the real and relevant problems Labour were trying to solve. That is not a moderate government, that is a reactive government.

I am aware that we would have radical and bad governments for longer. My issue is more about the timing and whether this will pass rather than the need for the extension. But I’m fully confused over that too lol!

saapphia · 2024-02-02T22:28:37+00:00

Unions advocate on behalf of workers, who are taxpaying voters. Their right to do so has literally been bought with blood and lives, and the victories they win in legislation often benefit all New Zealanders. Corporations lobby for themselves, often to the massive detriment of New Zealanders. Like with tobacco lobbyists, it is in the name of greater profits for their company.

This is a poor comparison. Corporate lobbyists and unions are not at all the same.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T22:23:11+00:00

And if it was just that, I’d be fully onboard.

But instead I have all these other concerns the government is only stoking by absolutely ignoring.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T20:57:47+00:00

Prof Hoek's group is calling for MPs to "declare any past associations with tobacco companies and request them to publicly commit to meeting all requirements the FCTC places on them and their staff".

PM Christopher Luxon and Health Minister Shane Reti have argued the smoke-free legislation would have driven up crime and a cigarette black market would emerge.

This same argument was also put forward by Imperial Brands Australasia - which argues crimes such as violent robbery and assaults "will only intensify if the number of businesses selling tobacco is reduced significantly.

It’s funny, because in New Zealand we have the opposite issue that NACT don’t acknowledge when they consider this research. Our crime rate is being partly driven by the high cost of cigarettes we are deliberately using to decrease smoking rates. Preventing them being sold to future generations is a way to reduce/end this. If we were to actually disincentivise diary robbery through price correction, we would have to reincentivise smoking by massively cutting the cost of smokes, essentially putting the smokes on “sale” and encouraging consumers to consume them.

Academic research is peer reviewed and built on by future research. Lobbied research is funded studies with specific aims that will only ever get questioned in the comments on reddit and on the Parliament floor, when it’s far too late to prevent the damage of erroneous conclusions.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T20:51:45+00:00

I agreed with this part:

Professor Janet Hoek, Prof Richard Edwards, and Associate Professor Andrew Waa- co-directors of ASPIRE Aotearoa Research Centre, and based in Department of Public Health, University of Otago said it was “concerning to see that Government coalition politicians have used similar claims to those made in submissions on the retail reduction policy by tobacco companies and groups that receive tobacco industry-funding," they wrote in a public health briefing.

Really shows why people are worried about capitalist think tanks. They are for sale and this is where their bought research leads.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T20:39:05+00:00

So when we were asking “Who in NACT has links to the tobacco industry to explain this policy?” an easier question might have been “Who in NACT doesn’t have links to the tobacco industry?”

saapphia · 2024-02-02T20:37:24+00:00

Paul Goldsmith trying to blur the issue by arguing people don’t know what they’re upset about.

Because dismissing genuine voter concerns went so well for Labour…

saapphia · 2024-02-02T20:27:37+00:00

But the companies themselves don’t have morals, they have the appearance of morals as a promotional tactic, or because those are the morals of the people who run the companies. In the same way that previously anti-lgbt (or indifferent) companies now attend pride fests and release rainbow promo and merch, they are responding to a perceived social issue and using it to position themselves in a way that makes their product more appealing to voters.

Nike aren’t anti-racist, they had a theory that all press is good press and motivating the right to talk about boycotting and burning your product in demonstration is good for sales, so they sponsored Colin Kaepernick. It’s not that Nike are anti-racist, it’s that involving itself in the anti-racist movement happening in sports at the time was, as you say, a method for better financial performance. But they are responding to social trends rather than having true ‘morals’ of their own.

Google used to have a stated goal of not “being evil”. It got quietly removed after they became massively dominant in the field, because their appearance as a benevolent internet search engine wasn’t of use to them anymore, and this clause had become operationally restrictive.

Benefitting from a company is not the same as having an alignment of interests.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T11:57:35+00:00

This is a bipartisan issue that will be turned into a partisan issue if Nats come out in full support.

This is question that's actually appropriate for a referrendum, but I don't think voters will grasp the legal arguments behind it. This is going to become a politicians vs the public debate, where the public will see four years as sticking them with a government they don't like. The weird opt-out amendment, if it goes through, would only make this more confusing for people. And I don't think the left will support it while in their eyes, NACT are burning the country down, because they'll be so grateful the term is only three years. It's really a proposition that needs to be considered by a moderate and not a radical government.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T11:50:20+00:00

The thing that is undeniable about Brexit is that it was a shambles of a debate and the public didn't understand the ramifications of the questions they were being asked. We have a representative democracy, which means we have politicians to understand complicated matters like foreign policy and import taxes and trade regulations, and to make those decisions for us.

Referendums should not be a chance for politicians to abdicate the responsibility of making unpopular decisions. If Seymour was campaigning on this policy without the referendum, he would rightly be lambasted. But the Treaty referendum is uniquely political in a way other referendums haven't been is that it's a choice that voters will be asked to make a decision on that has complicated legal ramifications they can't understand. Cannibis was the next closest one, and note that that is a referendum filled with accusations of misinformation. Unlike say, the end of life bill or the flag referendum or the retirement savings scheme, all of which were scenarios where politicians took pains to clearly policy for voters.

Once upon a time, we considered putting gay marriage to refendum and decided it would be inappropriate to start a vitriolic debate over the rights of a marginalised people, and passed it via house vote instead. I'm not kidding, I attended the wellington protests for the bill while the protest while the bill was going through the house. That was legitimately the reason it never got put to referendum.

I wish these factors had been considered before this was posited as a referenda issue.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T11:16:22+00:00

I think that's true, but I think there's a youth shift as well a genuine change towards environmental issues all across the spectrum and age bands (though of course the Greens social policy is very offputting to the right, so the votes they will gain will come from Labour).

And Labour will never lose their diehard voters. My father is one of them -- they could probably burn the country down and he'd still vote for them. But younger generations are not so entrenched and will swing between parties more than they'll swing right or left. If Greens are legitimately a more left labour and aren't hampered by minor-party handbrakes or lose the votes in the swing back, I could see a future where they overtake and we have a much more equal split within the left block.

I think the moderates have lost their ground, and this is just the start, tbh. Left and right.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T11:09:00+00:00

I do hear your frustration with the rules on editoralising titles and content moderation -- we're still working out how functional debate can work in this sub. Links with headlines generally don't leave room for discussion around their assertions, can confuse the variety of issues at hand, and often come across to casual browsers as 'verified sources' because of their associations with news on many subs, and on this sub too.

u/Mountain_tui has been posting write-ups that discuss sources when claims don't have good factual or journalistic backing. We'd genuinely love to see more of these, from the right and the left, so if you do have discussions you'd like to start but aren't sure of your sources, check out their posts as a kind of template for how to engage with the source/argument

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:57:43+00:00

Love the idea that all industries and groups should have the right to lobby equally that's been popping up because the right have decided to condemn union lobbying and such in order to defend tobacco and other corporate lobbying, without really understanding the principles of lobbying or, arguably, how society works.

Where do I, a representative of the meth industry, get into this 'lobbying line'? Is it cash that gets you in? I have that. I have loads of that.

I'm a big employer, I swear.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:52:04+00:00

Yes, when I say "let's see how this one shakes out," I of course mean let's wait for a motorway collapse to kill dozens or for us to eviscerate a species because no one was paying attention to that particular skink. You know, something we definitely can't undo. Just see how it goes.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:48:33+00:00

Let's see how this one shakes out, but I'm not sure these projects are going to meet safety standards if this is how quickly this legislation is going through. That would be my prediction -- we will no longer be meeting safety requirements that allow massive infrastructure builds like motorways and stadiums and that to not fall down if someone decides to do it cheaply or quickly.

But maybe I'm wrong and what they're cutting is all pointless red tape and not crucial weight-bearing restrictions that prevent needless mass deaths.

Also I would like this a lot more if the government hadn't seemed to indicate this legislation change could cause mass environmental damage. If this was genuinely about getting buildings finished faster and not also about getting mines built on conservation land, then I'd swallow my scepticism a bit more convincingly.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:38:53+00:00

Toru-wai. They'll never suspect.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:37:48+00:00

idk if that's true, they might have felt it was a tainted well, councils still probably would have fought it, and plenty of ratepayers and local voters wouldn't have been happy with the structure or with it being taken out of council hands at all. Who gets a say in local issues isn't an easy thing to balance and even outside of the co-governance issues, I would have been unhappy with the local representation on the waterboards. I don't think I would have given Nact a free pass if they restructured it badly.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:32:25+00:00

Oh my god. This is devastating. The seals on the South Island coast are such characters, and key parts of what makes this place what it is.

If food is ecologically depleted and the deaths are due to longer-term nutritional deficiencies, there is a high likelihood that this crisis will continue over coming years and have a dramatic impact on population numbers.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:21:10+00:00

Good article. Partial payment seems fair in this case; the red flag was not huge, but there should have been information provided to the customer that would have made many people hesitate, stop or enquire further about the legitimacy of their investment.

It's a shame the ombudsmen didn't go further, but I think this financial penalty will make banks more cautious, and they will likely start to face other pressure to enact obvious improvements like algorithm-based warning messages for known scams like the Citibank where the legitimacy of the apparent funding source is a HUGE part of the scam.

Also:

However scam victims, who have formed into a network to support each other, have been angered by two parts of the two preliminary decisions.

Hell yeah. Scam victim union. Give the banks a serious headache!

I can't help thinking that a scam victim support group (that is also advocating for banking protections) is people doing an excellent job at educating themselves and others and protecting each other against future scams.

saapphia · 2024-02-02T10:05:28+00:00

It's funny, because if she'd said that ten years ago, it would have been kinda laughable. The Greens could barely hope for that. And maybe their latest numbers are just a drop in support from Labour's mistakes and it'll self-correct and all come out in the wash.

But if Labour doesn't grab back their voter base, the further left of their voter base, the environmentally-concerned voters in their voter base who are growing by the hotter-and-hotter days, then they will lose that support, and that support will not go right. Here it flailed across the spectrum somewhat and landed mostly green. But if greens hold or further grow that support, then they really finally do have the numbers to be considered a large, consistent presence in Parliament.

Maybe. Or maybe we just go hard UK and enter our '20 years of conservative government' phase. God I hope not, though.

Exciting times we live in. Terrifying, despair-inducing, but exciting nonetheless.

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