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Lefter 60 ~ Great Track Record

February 12, 2013 by emweb

So, have you been looking back at National’s triumphs over the last term? It’s a pretty impressive record. New Zealanders voted for a party with money sense, you see, to get them through tough times.

Shame it hasn’t paid off. One iota. Unless you’re in the wealthy minority.

First of all, you get countries out of recessions by boosting employment. National has resoundingly failed to do this while simultaneously widening the gap between the haves and have nots by giving the better-off a tax break they didn’t need.

Is this a government that cares about all its people? Demonstrably not.

Luckily it has partners. OK, maybe not for much longer. Under National’s embrace, ACT and Maori have almost ceased to be viable parties, because National gambolled on the undeserved electoral love it maintained through the first term to be big enough to govern without them in the third.

Woops.

What do you do when things look bad? Well, you can fix things, like Labour has always done. Labour got New Zealand through the Napier earthquake, the Great Depression and World War Two. Labour, in the early Noughties, left us with a much maligned ‘Nanny State’ that had employment at a record high and money in the bank. But people didn’t like that, even though it was being clearly forecast that a major recession was on its way.

Or you can go the other way and get people to focus on an external threat, real or imagined, to take attention away from internal dissatisfaction. Germany’s Hitler chose the Jews. England’s Thatcher chose some miserable islands no one had heard of and the under-gunned, and safely outclassed, Argentinians. Australia chose the terrifying bogeyman of the starving and destitute refugee.

John Key recently went this way too, demonstrating the incredible depth of his imagination. That being no depth, and no imagination. John Howard in Australia picked on lowly, impoverished and desperate people in leaky boats heading, purportedly, for Australia, playing on White Australia’s fears to such an extent they actually believed a human tidal wave was going to overwhelm them. Australia can’t afford to help people, you see. Unfortunately, it worked.

It worked so well, Julia Gillard, even though she’s Labor (sic), carried on the policy, widely condemned by humanitarian agencies the world over, to maintain her own support. So Australia has been rounding up the tiny numbers of refugees who actually get that far and putting them in inhospitable and distant camps where they commit suicide, go on hunger strike and sew their mouths shut. Welcome to the free world.

Now John Key has seemingly joined in. He reckons New Zealand could take 150 a year from Australia’s concentration camps, thereby condoning what White Australia is doing, and worse, might even send some refugees there himself. Stunning. Way to go, Key. (His own mother was a refugee. Doesn’t seem to matter. Luckily she arrived when there were still state houses and a fully functioning state education system. If she tried that now, she’d be in a sweltering camp on Nauru.)

On that note, National has totally sorted out the teacher’s pay, right? National introduced a scheme that has been a ‘rolling maul’. Of utter disaster. The twit who presided over this is still there (Hekia Parata – she might be incompetent but at least she’s Maori and a woman, two things National needs). She now has Stephen (re)Joyce as her titular boss. So far, nothing’s happened. Check this guy out, he’s your next National Prime Minister. What has NovaPay actually cost the country? We don’t really know. Yet. Perhaps we never will. It certainly has galvanised a typically anti-National bloc (teachers) against National. Good work.

Meanwhile, joining the catalogue of dodgy National MPs in office (a group that includes Nick Smith) is Maurice Williamson, who has dealings, as a director, with a company contracted to Mainzeal. Which just collapsed like a house of cards in an earthquake.

Prime Minister Key approved Construction Minister Maurice Williamson’s directorship of a company involved with failed building company Mainzeal. Mainzeal’s collapse is already costing jobs up and down the country. This is an incredible conflict of interest: a Minister of Construction on the board of a construction company!

Doesn’t matter. Need I remind you that former National Prime Minister Jenny Shipley was on Mainzeal’s board of directors? Funny, that.

Then new Speaker, National’s ‘I need to try and be non-partisan’ David Carter refused permission for three MPs to host a parliamentary function for Benny Wenda, a United Kingdom-exiled West Papuan leader agitating against Indonesia’s iron-fisted control of his country, which it invaded several decades ago. Wenda has never been refused a parliamentary function anywhere else in the world; then he came to good ol’ liberal ‘integrated’ New Zealand.

Just to add to New Zealand’s socially enterprising liberal image on the world stage, Prime Minister John Key said on 11th February that providing New Zealanders with a living wage is not high on the Government’s agenda.

Well, who’d have thought? I’m shocked. OK, hardly. The wellbeing of New Zealanders, if they’re not rich white men, has never been on Key’s agenda.

Mainzeal was just the type of company that should be rebuilding Christchurch, right? Two years on, and how’s Christchurch doing?

Napier was rebuilt in two years. In the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, house prices keep going up. Unemployment is high, poverty increases, housing is short. Yet there are no houses to buy, state housing is being shut down and the land turned over to developers so they can profit from it, including at Hobsonville in John Key’s electorate which was supposed to have had social housing as a component. Doesn’t matter. All while the wealthy keep speculating their property prices up and borrowing more off the back of it, living the life of Riley.

Building houses employs people, as well as … creating homes for New Zealanders to live in. Hardly rocket surgery.

But the beneficiary figures dropped – why? Because people are leaving for Australia, where they no longer have basic rights despite their taxes going into Australian government coffers. Or they’re here, but in certain programs that don’t figure in the figures.

But Key does listen to some people. Rich people. Here, he’s equal opportunity – it doesn’t matter if you’re rich New Zealander or a rich American from New Line Cinema getting a deal from a banana republic to make even more money from a union-busting movie maker (Peter Jackson). Why, you could be a rich German with a dodgy track record that includes trading convictions, peddling material you don’t have the copyright for, or a rich Chinese wheeler dealer. Doesn’t matter. You’ll have his ear, and he’ll bend over backwards to proffer New Zealand at you.

How does Key take criticism about any of this? Yes, in public he’s increasingly nasty, mean and short tempered. He’s feeling the pressure. He can’t work out why people don’t love him anymore.

I can.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 59 ~ The promise of 2013

January 24, 2013 by emweb

What do you think National will do this year? Let me lay a few predictions on you, cynical as they might first seem.

Strangely, New Zealand’s unemployment figures keep going up but there are less people on the benefit. This has actually been delivered as some kind of government success, but apply logic. With unemployment rising, there are more people in need, for sure.

So where are they? Some gave up and moved to Australia, where they now have diminished civil rights and no access to social welfare or medical treatment. Even though their taxes go into Australian government coffers. There’s a National Party success right there. And there are other ways of fudging the benefit figures.

But you haven’t seen anything yet – wait till they get to work on the sickness benefit. Our ‘government’ (is that what you call it?) reckons the sickness benefit is some kind of rort in order to get a more money. In some cases this may well be true – the majority, though, of people on sickness are victims in genuine need, getting a little more while they cope with illness, medication and all sorts of other stresses.

Meanwhile, far flung schools are getting teachers who have only had six weeks training. Six weeks training!

To this government, people in far flung communities mean little. They’re marginal already, so why not marginalise them further? Who cares? (We all should. This is utterly unconscionable in a modern society.) Rich people live in cities and send they’re children to private schools. The wealthy land owners and farmers in the country use boarding schools, as they always have done. Every one else … well, they simply don’t matter.

Key will continue to dismantle state housing. Labour may have set out on this path a couple of decades ago (with Helen Clark as Minister of Housing), but getting National in on the coat tails has been a disaster. The main bugbear seems to be that poor people have been housed on prime real estate, or at least real estate that has become prime, thanks to spiralling out-of-control and inequitable house prices that … rich people profit from. Poor people are supposed to be hidden in South and West Auckland, Porirua, Wainuiomata etc. Michael Joseph Savage should be spinning in his grave. He’s probably generating untapped power in his mausoleum right now.

Meanwhile, our houses continue to get more expensive thanks to the failure to introduce – or even entertain – a Capitol Gains Tax. Why? Capitol Gains Tax is an equitable measure. It would mitigate the greed of the class that … supports and votes National. So it doesn’t have a chance. But you knew that, right?

The gap between rich and poor is being widened on purpose. If you’re not rich, National has no reason to care about you. If that wasn’t obvious to you before, it sure will be soon. And those with money and power can buy the votes of the poor either quite directly, or simply by hiring PR gurus who specialise in wool-over-eyes.

Key will make way for Joyce, who will be next National Prime Minister, since Key is getting bored even though it’s harder work than he thought. Mr Fixit is sure as hell going to fix you, soon, if you are poor and marginalised already or heading that way. Joyce has more leverage than ever, in the latest cabinet reshuffle. He’s dangerous because he’s been the power behind the grinning Key’s throne – and Key’s election campaigns – for a while already. He’s most likely the person responsible for the gentle, slow destruction of the Maori Party, which Flavell must have figured out, unlike the patsies currently running that doomed show.

By the way, do you think Joyce will fix Nova Pay for teachers? That’s not really what he’s there for. Nova Pay can’t go belly up as then we’ll find out what it’s actually cost us. Mark my words – Joyce will make it work so we don’t find out too soon what an actual expensive mess it’s been, so as not to spoil National’s election chances. That’s why Hekia Parata has been kept on – she knows too much. Can you think of any other reason she’s still there? She’s a walking disaster. Meanwhile, virtually off-the-radar ministers have been summarily dismissed. But at least Joyce might make it work. If National wins the next election, Joyce will be our fuhrer.

Meanwhile, the economy won’t grow. No jobs are are being – or have been – created. More middle class people will be forced into the margins.

But for the lower class, things are, and will continue to be, so much worse.

Have a great year.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: Maori | No Comments
Lefter 58 ~ The Wrong Turn versus the Perfect Car

November 19, 2012 by emweb

I don’t necessarily believe in constant growth, economically. Is there any reason for a growth fixation other than pure profit?

The current model means success is usually measured by percentage of year-on-year growth, as well as by financial returns. On the small scale, you’re not supposed to be focused on setting up a successful small business – you’re supposed to be fixated on the long term success via more branches, heightened recognition, potential franchising opportunities or the possibility of a hefty sale price for your brand once you reach a certain critical mass. Why isn’t it acceptable, or even desirable, to want to be really good at running your small business on one site? NZ has a huge number of small businesses, but these expectations add to the high number of small business and startup failures.

While we celebrate, or at least discuss, sustainability, the economic fixation with growth is anything but. It leads to results like monopolies, slash and burn expenditure lowering, weakening of control and, eventually, collapse. The centre doesn’t hold.

One area where economics and industrialisation coalesce and have done for over a century is the automobile industry. With manufacturing in general, we long ago departed from the axe analogy which goes like this: once upon a time, you bought an axe, and when you splintered the handle, you replaced it, and when the head broke or became impossible to sharpen, you replaced that. Ad infinitum. Perhaps you upgraded that axe haft to a better wood, or that head to better steel. And this is possibly still true, at least for a few axes, but if the axe maker has also since followed the pattern for most other goods, the handle is irreplaceable for some reason to do with materials and manufacture, or the head is attached by a proprietary device, or integral even, or you simply can’t find a replacement, or it can’t be added on outside the factory, or the cost of shipping an axe head to you is the same or more than just buying a new axe, since the composite parts are not stocked. So most people these days do just buy a new axe, since even if it is possible to replace the shaft and/or head.

Back on that original axe model: 100 years ago, a good axe (a bad axe being highly undesirable, not to mention dangerous) was a major expense. Part of that cost, if you like, can be predicated towards the longevity of that product through the possibility of continuous and sustained replacement.

Now we just buy cheap stuff.

With cars, in Japan the government had a policy of no warrant of fitness for seven years. You blithely drove your new car for seven years. Then the test was so unbelievably strict, most cars failed even on cosmetic damage like scratches, so most got rid of the car and bought a new one. This was done expressly so Japanese people bought new Japanese cars every seven years, as a terrific boost to the local industry and a considerable barrier against entering the car market in the first place.

Ironically, as a consequence, the canny Japanese manufacturers built their cars to last about that long – why engineer cars to last longer when they are just going to be crushed? Trouble is, New Zealand started rescuing these vehicles from the Japanese crushers and importing them as ‘used imports’. A seven-year-old Japanese car that’s been sold in the Japanese home market is rubbish. But that’s another story. (But with so many on our roads, I do think there’s at least some merit to keeping NZ’s strict every-six-months WoF regime.)

By the way, a Japanese car designed for sale, new, in New Zealand is an excellent car with much longer life and all round reliability built in than a seven year span. That’s why the phrase ‘NZ new’ – even on a used vehicle – fetches a higher price. It really does mean a better car.

Thing is, cars are just consumables now. A car manufacturer wants you to love their brand, and replace your car with another from their brand. Some car companies do have loyal customers, so this does work to some extent. That’s also why individual models evolve, becoming bigger and more luxurious, as both expectations and (hopefully) bank accounts expand. Compare a 20-year-old and ten-year-old Corolla or Civic with the current models and you’ll see what I mean.

For New Zealand, by the way, the two largest groups of new car buyers are fleet followed by retirees. It’s hardly a massive market.

But why do we have cars like these? Apart from the oil and petrol they burn and the heating and pollution they add to the atmosphere, a short-life car is full of hard-to-recycle and replace parts that all ends up as very highly developed, manufactured, assembled, maintained, marketed and delivered across the seas … land fill.

This is absolutely crazy.

Somewhere along the line, when manufacturing first became a big factor in the world, we diverged. At first, industrialisation’s promise was to deliver good products mass manufactured for economy of scale, delivering uniformly good products at an achievable price to a new range of consumers. For a while, industrialisation delivered on that promise.

This was revolutionary, but what has tit become? Now a car is essentially manufactured as a revenue gathering commodity on an ever shorter journey to landfill, with various people clipping the ticket on the journey.

Cars did not need to become like this, but it’s partly because of that growth fixation. The Ford Model T, for example, was seen as a starting point when it left a Ford factory. Even Henry Ford declared it so.

My mother used to say “Why aren’t cars made of bouncy rubber? They’d be safer to travel in and would hardly be damaged in scrapes and collisions.”

She had a point. But that would put panelbeaters, third-party manufacturers and parts suppliers out of work. But so what? Because … why hasn’t a car manufacturer developed an extremely sturdy, mass-manufacturable chassis that can be adapted endlessly? Axles go on, wheels, drive-train, transmission, one of four body shapes, and includes some kind of economical standard engine.

‘Bolted in’ are be the operative words. Although I don’t think standard bolts, I think some sort of special, super strong bolts that need a certain tool to undo, but that can’t come undone by themselves. You buy the bog standard car and you get the tool with it. The car is warrantable straight out of the factory in any country it’s sold.

From then on, buyers can buy better or different bits and change them themselves. Want to swap the carburettor for fuel injection? Bolt off, bolt on, fire it up. Axles? Wheels? Body panels? No problem.

Don’t trust yourself? Go to a mechanic.

As this all fosters, rather than displaces, third party specialists and bespoke parts makers. Even body makers. Also, your entry into your first new car would have a much lower price point, but you could end up years down the track with the original chassis, but having evolved it through three distinct body styles and many other modifications. You could go to four-wheel-drive, a hybrid or diesel engine, automatic transmission, more power, leather seats, tinted windows … all easily, rather than at great expense.

To me, this makes absolute and perfect sense.

Yet it’s the polar opposite of what we have.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought, Uncategorized | Tags: | 1 Comment
Lefter 57 ~ Bloody farmers

October 15, 2012 by emweb

I’ve always found farmers strange, probably in common with many city dwellers. Their professed love of animals, like giving cutesy names to various calves and lambs for example, counterpointed by their casual attitude to slaughter. Their professed love of the land which they then strew with rusting farm junk while letting their run-off pollute the nation’s rivers. Their professed importance as ‘backbone of the economy’ while being first in line for government subsidies.

Planes are full of NZ farmers in our winter, heading off to Europe for their annual holidays. Privileged? Never.

In the last few years, more things have been added to my list of things to dislike about bloody farmers. For example, every winter turns out to be too wet or too cold, every summer too warm and too dry. I know I’m just an ignorant townie, but I honestly thought that’s what differentiated those seasons. Apparently not. Also, I assumed farmers would have at least some little experience of dealing with these conditions but no: every few months it’s yet another surprise at what the season once again delivers.

Europe has been a revelation. For one thing, the Dutch are very proud of their intensively farmed green spaces. They are surprisingly attractive, despite centuries of farming. And there are legions of wind turbines supplanting the national grid – sustainably and with no pollution. They are mesmerisingly attractive, actually, to anybody with any sensibility.

In New Zealand, our farmers feel free to pollute the land and the food they produce on it with pesticides, and with their cast-off junk, illegal landfills and their redneck attitudes, yet set up a most unseemly braying at the prospect of wind turbines as being ‘destructive to the landscapes’. This is nothing but *asinine (*good agrarian word, there).

But there’s worse. I lived on the Continent for three years in the 1980s. European fruit and vegetables often looked perfect but were mostly pretty devoid of flavour. At least they were cheap.

Not any more – they are still cheap, but bursting with flavour. I realised with a shock how tasteless and poor New Zealand produce has become. (I can’t talk about meat – I don’t eat it.)

Remember that perfect peach you had when you were a child, full of taste, the juice rich and laden with fragrance? I haven’t had one in 20 years – until Rotterdam, of all places (it’s a huge industrial port town) and again in London last month. Crispy apples sharp and sweet, piles of aubergines, delicious beans and lots more.

Kiwis, we pay too much for vastly inferior food. The fruit is often still cold from the freezers when you buy it, and it’s second grade at best. Everyone knows what refrigeration does to flavour. Is it really necessary inside New Zealand? It didn’t used to be.

The worst thing is, food production is pretty much all we have to distinguish ourselves in the world. New Zealand has an incredibly enviable geographic position, with a surfeit of arable land and water. Yet this appears to be squandered on … what, exactly? We produce huge quantities of produce which is then difficult to afford. What’s going on?

Why are farmers holding us and the government to ransom, peddling us their inferior products on the home market at inflated prices?

Oh yes: because they are the backbone of the country and firm New Zealand patriots. Like seasons to farmers, patently, I just don’t get it.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 56 ~ The New World, or the New World Order

July 12, 2012 by emweb

The Right is dead, the Left is dead. Well, not exactly, they’re just boring to the people who want a new political landscape, and this group is expanding. Definitely, Nazism gave the Right about as bad a name as you could get, and Stalin and Mao worked hard to foist a very similar repute upon the left. Certainly, doctrinaire positions from the Old Left and the Old Right look increasingly redundant, and even many with some doctrinaire beliefs nowadays shy away from being tarred with those old Left/Right brushes.

I’ve never been a doctrinaire lefty myself – even when I was a teenager it was pretty clear to me Communism was far from a good system, as reliant was it was on controlling every body and every thing, and as subject to the same kind of right-wing opportunistic narcissism as any other system that became thoroughly imposed over a population.

Systems resembling Socialism are more what I’ve ended up voting for over the years, but even there I find the positions of moribund unions within their structures annoying, along with the insistence of following party lines. So I’ve not joined these parties. Unions have been sadly crippled in New Zealand, yes – so why do they still have so much power in Labour? It’s redundant. And generally, I’ve always maintained that I have enough thought process to choose my own pathways, thank you very much, and I insist on my freedom to do so.

So where to from here? It’s not difficult, actually. You can distill what’s good about the left fairly easy, just as you can distill what’s still attractive (albeit not to me) about the right. The new poles are:

Humanitarianism verses Authoritarianism.

Humanitarianism takes the place of the left and keeps all that’s good about it, and authoritarianism is essentially what any Tory regime you can think of boils down to. And as alien as it seems to me, some people actually hanker for a society that controls them and tells them what to do – it makes them feel ‘safe’, even though it’s at the expense of any claims to actual human intelligence. Right thinking invariably embraces punishment over rehabilitation, promotes more and more rules and laws and even proposes strictures on how people should look (banning the burkha springs to mind) and act (learn our language if you want to live here, buddy).

Left wing social agendas promote difference, acceptance, education, cultural awareness and rehabilitation.

The actual shade of each position … well, that’s up to the parties and cultures. But it does give us easy platforms to develop.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: | 3 Comments
Lefter 55 ~ No Man’s Land

June 3, 2012 by emweb

Despite National continuing to pass the ammunition across No Mans’ Land to its opposition, those recipients are still failing to fully capitalise on the unexpected bounty. Meanwhile, the landscape continues to shift as Labour deals with internal problems (I’m guessing here – but if not, what is Labour doing?) while the Greens gradually raise their silhouette. Meanwhile, Mana … actually, haven’t heard much from Mana. Have you?

Auckland students may have seized the initiative, but they seem a lonely group.

I said years ago on this blog that National is effectively fighting a class war. Everybody else might think that’s old and irrelevant politics and truthfully, it should be – but National seemingly hasn’t absorbed that message.

There’s no other explanation for National’s policies: effectively taking money from the poorer with a GST hike, while passing on tax breaks to the wealthy was the first major step and every little move after that has been to recreate, then cement that division. The latest policy of stopping student allowances beyond four years effectively prevents those without independent incomes from getting advanced tertiary qualifications. In other words, only those who can pay their way – the wealthy and privileged – can benefit from what our once free-access university system offers. Only those already in the privileged classes can stay there, happily boosted into high income territory to earn high wages, simultaneously paying lower taxes.

When you consider that there’s a substantial shortage of work, a lot of young people have turned to tertiary education since they can’t find low-skilled low-wage jobs to start saving anyway. If they can’t get jobs they should be lauded for attempting to up-skill. But no, National chooses to punish this instead.

But why can’t we face the real issue here? Which is: how does this policy create jobs? Actually, how have any of National’s policies created jobs?

There’s one certified and genuine way to get through a recession and one way only, once you discount unlikely and/or environmentally damaging windfalls like discovering mineral wealth or oil, or borrowing more which has lately proved so disastrous. And that’s to create jobs.

On this score alone, look at National’s record.

Good luck with that. There isn’t one.

But on this score I had high hopes that the Greens would promote policies that also created jobs. However, the Greens seem to want to simply raise taxes across the board, in many new ways.

No! The country is hurting. Nobody wants that – OK, that’s not strictly true: please raise the taxes of the wealthy, at least back to where they were. That would immediately redress some monetary and societal imbalances and most of the country would applaud.

On the tax question, I wish a party would seriously look at a more radical approach like Gareth Morgan’s. I might note here that I don’t really trust the guy as 1/ he’s made himself wealthy, which to me spells that he must operate under at least a level of greed, and 2/ I find the whole idea of independent benefactors worrying, as to me that should be the domain of good government: judicious spending of the revenue gathered from us, for our benefit.

But my personal misgivings don’t mean Morgan doesn’t have good ideas, and you could imagine he would have the trust of at least some like-minded (ie business and entrepreneurial) people. But in these trying times, all parties seem afraid of radical ideas no matter how sensible, and National in particular won’t touch anything that doesn’t reward its class of inhumane and self congratulatory cronies.

Inhumane? State schools will get less teachers per student; nurses remain underpaid and understaffed, with some so under-resourced that they are even expected to supply their own equipment; most aged care workers are paid minimum wage; National carries on stigmatising beneficiaries to the point where it has entered the beginnings of a eugenics program to sterilise them, which totally beggars belief.

Before the last election, I recommended to some Labour people that they anonymously placed ‘National hates you’ stickers in bus stops in lower decile areas for people to stick where they would.

It was considered too risky, controversial, confrontational and potentially dangerous to the party.

But oh dear Lord, it was – and is – so true.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: | 1 Comment
Lefter 54 ~ John’s Struggle in National’s war on (the) poverty (stricken)

May 16, 2012 by emweb

National is steadily increasing pressure on the poor. National doesn’t like the poor, although there’s nothing like a bit of desperation to drive wages down. National likes that well enough, with instant dismissal at the drop of a hat and the unions ruined. You get far more money out of people by exploiting them than working with them. Paying peanuts to make more profit out of the workforce is considered ‘good economics’ when society is considered just a primary resource for greed enablement by the sort of people who support parties like National and worse.

But beneficiaries have got to an embarrassingly high ratio, even for this government. You can recategorise some of them so the figure looks lower, but it doesn’t really deal with the numbers of sufferers I mean ingrates.

There are two approaches to this problem, essentially. A humanist government takes the approach of job creation, but that’s challenging and requires investments of time, energy, intellect, compassion and money.

Of those, this government only has time, being mid-term and all. Besides, a right-leaning regime would rather the problem just disappeared – and if that requires punitive action, so be it.

Announcing a board to create ‘welfare reform’ is bad enough in itself, since we already have a ministry in place for that full of highly trained and well paid people who specialise, and have experience in, the New Zealand welfare situation. But no. National has decided to create a demonstrably right-wing board run by paladin Paula Rebstock to do it. That’s verging on monstrous.

Apart from the waste of dropping NZ$1.1 million on this when we are supposed to be minding our pennies and already have budgeted-for experts in place, it’s clearly a way of pushing through unpalatable reforms that the government wants initiated while keeping the impetus at arm’s length. Nothing like a well paid scapegoat when it all turns to shit.

Rebstock is the idiot who advocated getting women back to work once their babies were 14 weeks old! Clearly, this is not a person with an ounce of empathy. Perfect to do Paula Bennett’s dirty work.

This board, apart from the seriously questionable (if she actually answered questions) Rebstock is composed of insurance and business types so it can focus on projecting risk and any long-term potential deficit for this government.

Rrrright … now I can see where we are headed. OK.

I know I normally dispense advice on left-style social change and policy, but I can offer my services to National here, as there are very clear precedents to draw from and besides, it’s obvious National likes hiring outsiders to do its dirty work.

OK, so here’s my advice. The first step is always to stigmatise beneficiaries a lot more. Muldoon did this with solo mums, so there’s already precedent even here in good ole New Zealand, but we can draw on international precedents too. New Zealand has a long history of implementing other people’s mistakes, after all.

So I suggest requiring anyone on a benefit to wear a black triangle in public so every one can see who they are. You know, you’re in a café having lunch I mean a work meeting and one of these blemishes on society is spending your grudgingly-paid tax dollars on a coffee. The gall! How dare they? With their black triangle on, everyone can see who they are, and you can enjoy the support of your peers when you tell them off.

That’s if they get served at all, of course.

It’s been done before, also as a way out of a financial crisis – so you can give the concept a foreign name, too. We can use ‘Arbeitsschue’. It’s a German word with a nice, sophisticated historical ring to it, although it just means ‘work shy’.

Because work makes you free.

And there’s lots more advice John Key would clearly endorse, so he doesn’t actually need to hire me at all.

It’s all in Mein Kampf, John. If you can actually read words that aren’t on spreadsheets or stock tickers, of course.

Maybe get Paula to read it out to you. She’d enjoy that.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: Maori | No Comments
Lefter 53 ~ Law. Not ethics

May 1, 2012 by emweb

Doesn’t that say it all, about the right? I have made this point before: there are fundamental differences between left and right, and it’s not just about the money. Actually, maybe it is just about the money:

People of the right tend to be more scared of other people and obsessed with their own security, more into punishment of those who threaten it, and generally their ethics are questionable, since money is the primary motivator with personal greed overriding morals pretty consistently.

Am I mad? No.

Our very own Prime Minister is a righty of the first order. He cannot understand why people get upset when the distinction, for him, is so clear: money trumps everything.

John Key told TV3 that he sees no reason to stand down ACT Party MP John Banks in the midst of a political donations scandal, if the information Mr Banks has given him is ‘accurate’. Forget ‘correct’, ‘ethical’, ‘honest’ or any words like that.

The Most Dishonourable John Banks accepted $50,000 in ‘anonymous’ donations from Kim Dotcom, contentious millionaire founder of the MegaUpload website. Accept he knew all too well where the money came from. Dotcom made his millions selling other people’s stuff, basically, and the US is trying to extradite him for his most rewarding endeavours.

But Dotcom had friends here. Well, he thought he did. They were fair weather friends, into the money and the parties, the fireworks and the helicopter rides, but not into being seen propping up (or being propped up by) someone in trouble with the law. Oh, no.

Banks gave Dotcom the cold shoulder once he was in prison, and now The Big Man has spat the dummy all the way out and dobbed Banks in for receiving. Banks is still pretending he doesn’t know where it came from, but there’s a lot of evidence, and it’s building up all the time, that Banks has been cynical, grasping and disingenuous in the extreme.
None of which should surprise anybody, least of all those fools in Epsom and Remuera who voted for him. They got exactly what they wanted.

Which all rather begs the question: who else was on Dotcom’s overly large and flabby teat? I can hardly wait to find out. The paper shredders will be busy.

Labour Party MP Trevor Mallard also claims Banks knowingly accepted a $15,000 donation from Sky City, also listed as anonymous, but I suspect this practise is typical and widespread. But Key says it’s not about morals or ethics, but the law, telling TV3 “He wasn’t a member of Parliament, he wasn’t a member of the Crown, he wasn’t Auckland mayor.”

No, he was just corrupt and malodorous, but that’s more than acceptable to the current government, since Key pretty much put Banks there in the first place with his infamous Tea Party.

Key: “There’s nothing wrong with people lobbying, people lobby all the time.”

Right.

Meanwhile, is Labour reinventing itself as a humanist party? One of principle, honesty, integrity and social conscience? Maybe it’s starting to, and it should be, since the Greens are steadily taking over the traditional territory of the left.

It’s about time Labour rid itself of old school socialism and all its baggage anyway. Reforge an identity with the unions and, best of all, Labour should differentiate itself more clearly from this vulgar and avaricious New Zealand conservatism, which is taking pains to excoriate itself in the public conscience as never before.

Right?

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 52 ~ Steam gives way to Sail

March 23, 2012 by emweb

In the old days when steamships started to prevail, a simple rule was made: steam gives way to sail. With (often) greater weight, speed and manoeuvrability, it was far easier and safer for a steamship, with a turn of the wheel and a change in engine speed, to give way to sail, which might have to trim sales and more to effect even a simple course change.

This went through my head this morning when an incident happened while I was biking.

I don’t do this for fun or transport – it’s exercise, pure and simple. But I often have to bike during Auckland’s rush hour.

I have several times noticed the antipathy some people in cars have for those on bikes. What I find absurd – and scary – about this is the huge imbalance in power the two modes of carriage represent. A massive car, heavy with steel, with the power of dozens of horses, against a spindly bike motivated by the power of one person.

Sometimes the way bikes act is inevitable. For example, if you reach the bottom of a hill, you have to brake, and modern bikes are almost universally braked by hand levers.

Firmly braking as you go, it can be virtually impossible to hand-signal your intention to turn, but if it’s a left turn, this hardly matters to traffic. So it’s either hand-signal and be going too fast to actually turn, or brake and turn left at a safe speed, without impeding or influencing traffic … but without signalling.

The fact you can only do one or the other doesn’t stop some people shouting angrily and/or tooting, though, despite the complete non-impact on their commute such a manoeuvre represents.

Today, though, I transgressed. The traffic lights ahead of me turned red, and I needed to turn left on my bike. I did so, on a wide road and with the traffic just beginning to advance from the right, with their green.

I didn’t impede anyone’s travel, as the road was wide, but hey, I did run a red light. But all was fine, as it was of no impact, except the fourth car chose to slow down so the driver could remonstrate with me through his window.

Which did actually impede the flow of traffic, as cars behind him had to slow in turn.

“Hey,” he yelled, “You shouldn’t have gone through a red light.”

“Why?” I replied.

“It’s not cool.”

“I didn’t impede the flow of traffic,” I yelled back, not adding that he was, by slowing down to shout at me. “Get over it.”

OK, and then I added “Dickhead!” which I regret. Sorry about that, self righteous traffic-concerned chap of Auckland.

He motored off. Probably I upset his day a bit.

But what the hell? OK, I broke a rule, that in this instance was of no consequence. I have always chosen which rules I break and which I choose not to. I consider that my right.

But once again, somebody in a vehicle, with huge potential power over me, decided that somehow I, on my little bike, messed with his day.

Jesus Christ, get over yourself.

But it did make me think about power, again.

Also, I recall that the day after the election, Green co-leader Metiria Turei no less waved me through a traffic chicane – more often than not, drivers will take the initiative and sweep through these towards you rather than give way, leaving you to brake no matter your speed.

Now, I didn’t start out for this to be an allegory about political power and what party to follow, but sail is so much more elegant than steam. Isn’t it? And so much better for the planet.

In the power stakes of New Zealand, though, where is the power that opposes the National Government? It doesn’t appear to lie with Labour. David Shearer still hasn’t made an impact. He’s either holding himself back, or asleep at the wheel. I imagine he’s still dealing with internal party issues or something. The Greens and Winston Peters seem to be grabbing all the initiative, and honestly, National has been a soft target of late.

I reckon if Shearer sorted things out, and made an imprint on his party, the rest of the country would take notice too … but so far, nothing.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about after I wondered why a man in a car felt he had to tell me off about running a light that didn’t impact anything or anyone.

Apart from his sense of self-righteousness.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | 2 Comments

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