Politics | Lefter Politics | Left wing politics & New Zealand

‘Politics’ Category

Lefter 32 ~ The Right, Honourable MP Harawira

January 20, 2011 by emweb

The right honourable Hone Harawira (‘right’ as in ‘correct’, and honourable above and beyond the call, unlike most New Zealand politicians) was 100% right, telling the truth in the Sunday Star Times (January 17th 2011). I agreed with every single word of ‘Crunch time for Maori grumbles’, and I read it with the hope that the Māori Party would take notice.

And the Māori Party did take notice – completely in the wrong way. Instead of taking what Harawira wrote as a perceptive tract written in good faith, the party took umbrage. Instead of accepting a clear manifesto to improve things, the Māori Party had a hissyfit – albeit one cloaked in ‘due process’, legal advice and its constitution, which seems to have been copy-and-pasted from the Pakeha parties.

So congratulations to the The Māori Party – you have become what you set out to counterbalance. A kow-towing minor party that suppresses dissent in its own party and constituency and which lets emotion rule politics in that time-honoured, petty Kiwi way that also infests our business class while the major parties rule. Key – and worse, Brownlee and co – must be capering with glee. In fact, Key has already been on the radio. Crowing, essentially.

Shame on you, Sharples and Turia, for supporting this ‘disciplinary’ motion. You are stifling dissent just like National and Act – and Labour’s the same, for that matter. In these parties, MPs are supposed to toe the party line whether they agree or not, voting with the majority.

What rubbish! I completely disagree with any structure that insists on obedience against personal better judgement and/or beliefs.

Why? Take it to its extreme, and you get the ‘I was just following orders’ excuse.

Which served the Nazis so well.

I’ve said it before and no doubt I will say it again – the Māori Party made a pact with the devil when it went into league with National. It’s losing its way. As Harawira wrote, between 2005-08 the Māori Party voted 30% with National and 70% against. In the period 2008-10, the Māori Party voted 60% with National and 40% against.

What does that tell you?

It’s quite possible the same criticisms would have come to have been levelled if the Māori Party had gone into league with Labour – and I would have been as critical. But the Māori Party and Labour would clearly have been a more natural fit, despite the stupid Foreshore and Seabed legislation.

But pettiness and small-minded stupidity ruled this out, too. (Probably, to be fair, this was on both sides.)

Even so, I am gobsmacked that Pita Sharples has descended to this level. I used to respect him.

Good on you, honourable Mr Harawira. You enjoy strong support in your own electorate and you totally deserve it. If you go out on your own, I hope you continue to enjoy strong support – but this is all helping in the dissolution of current Māori aims.

Shame!

Harawira has exposed his colleagues for what they have become, to the detriment of New Zealand.

Lackeys.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: Maori | 3 Comments
Lefter 31 ~ Stilicho, Vandals & the fall of empire

January 10, 2011 by emweb

As the Roman Empire fell apart, various saviours appeared and failed, were despatched or swept aside.

As Rome’s aspirations solidified and became moribund, its citizens increasingly engaged in faddish cults and idiotic public spectacles – and it became increasingly difficult to make its citizens fight in the legions.

So Rome increasingly engaged non-Roman citizens as soldiers, promising them bounty and, more valuably, citizenship at the end of a term of service.

This was considered worthwhile, even when that term ran to decades.

As things went on and the empire declined even more, and with many ex-soldiers now subjects in turn producing reluctant ‘Roman citizen’ offspring, Rome resorted, in some cases, to employing mercenaries.

Mercenaries may be very professional, but even an excellent pay packet is easier to walk away from than a set of firmly held beliefs once the going gets tough.

Humans can do wondrous things for sets of beliefs; humans also do terrible things for sets of beliefs.

Around 400AD – when Christianity was starting to really gain a hold – some of these offshoots of Rome’s legionary machinations started gaining office in the struggling Empire.

Flavius Stilicho was the son of a Vandal father (albeit one who had served as a cavalry officer for the Romans) and a Roman mother.

His father wasn’t a bloke who tagged walls and broke things for the hell of it – he was a member of a Germanic tribe which famously sacked Rome – hence our modern appropriation.

(There are other Dark Age Germanic tribal names that have survived into modern times – France is named after the Germanic Franks who took over what had been called ‘Gaul’; the French name for Germany, ‘l’Allemagne’, comes from the Allomanni tribe; the Burgundians were a German tribe resettled, after defeat, in a desolate valley area they turned into the famous wine region; England is named after the Angles – Angle-Land – and so on.)

Stilicho considered himself a Roman. It appears he was a Nicene Christian like his patron Theodosius I, who had declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Stilicho joined the Roman army, was sent as an envoy to the court of the Persian king Shapur III to negotiate a peace settlement, and was then promoted to comes stabuli and later to general (magister militum) in the Roman Army.

Theodosius was impressed with the half-Vandal. He married his adopted niece Serena to Stilicho.

By this time, the Roman Empire was assailed from all quarters and was soon to divided into eastern and western halves, with separate emperors, for easier ruling.

Stilicho helped raise the army that Theodosius led to victory at the Battle of the Frigidus.

An ally in that campaign was the Visigothic warlord Alaric, who commanded a substantial number of Gothic auxiliaries. The tribe of the Goths (another modern day appropriation for you) was divided into eastern (Ostro-) and western (Visi-) wings themselves.

Stilicho distinguished himself further, and Theodosius quite wisely saw him as a man worthy of responsibility for the future safety of the Empire. He appointed Stilicho guardian of his own son, Honorius.

Honorius succeeded Theodosius as emperor of the Western Empire after its division. Stilicho ended up de facto commander-in-chief of the Roman armies in the West and proved his abilities energetically.

But political manoeuvrings by agents of both imperial courts hindered him.

I could go on – suffice to say, this mixed-blood general was becoming the great hope of an assailed empire, but he would not be allowed to succeed. Romans resented his power, his intelligence – and his mixed blood.

Eventually, the resistance mounted to such an extent that someone who was perhaps Rome’s best chance at success was captured, tried without resistance – and decapitated.

Stilicho was such a believer in Rome that he followed orders and the will of the people, even against his own better judgement.

Now, if you don’t see the parallels with the US and Obama, I sure as hell do.

The gunning down of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a first shot, if you’ll excuse so crass an allusion, from the kind of collective ignorance and stupidity that is conspiring to bring down Obama in a centuries-apart mirror to what brought down Stilicho.

And the world will be the worse for it.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Religion, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 30 ~ Truth and Deconciliation

December 13, 2010 by emweb

Nelson Mandela did an incredibly brave thing in South Africa, launching the Truth and Reconciliation process after taking power.

The theory was that people would fess up to what they had done, giving the victims and their families some closure.

It’s hard to imagine how that worked: “Sorry, I beat your dad to death in a prison cell.”

The incredible part was that this was supposed to lead to some kind of reconciliation.

The very prospect that the truth – often incredibly unsavoury in that South African context – could be revealed and then lead, after some process, to any kind of reconciliation is quite an ask.

The idea seems worthy of a Jesus, Buddha, or a Ghandhi. Or Mandela.

Actually, it seems superhuman, if not inhuman – the most direct human responses to finding out what tragedy really happened to your family tends to be, immediately anyway, a thirst for vengeance.

Similar impulses – to confess – have been felt by soldiers. I have heard tearful former Dutch soldiers confessing their atrocities in Indonesia back when it first wanted independence from the Netherlands, and recently Israeli soldier veterans have testified against Israeli army abuses they have witnessed, or even taken part in.

The urge for retribution at learning such truths is such a powerful and obvious impulse that here in New Zealand, we are suitably awed by Christchurch woman Emma Woods.

No matter how hard your heart, you have to admire a woman who can spend any time whatsoever with the person she saw kill her son with an out-of-control car. It’s incredibly brave and I can’t begin to claim I would, or could, emulate this.

But boy, do I admire her. If even just ten per cent of humans were like Emma, I’m sure our past would not be so riven by conflict.

But I fear the percentage is under one per cent. Oh wait, Christians believe in forgiveness? Yeah, right.

The Wikileaks phenomenon is something else again. As it turns out (and really, we have been aware of this for a long time), there is much hidden as a matter of course by so-called ‘liberal, enlightened and democratic’ states. Concealed from you and me in the name of so-called ‘public interest’, making it pretty damn clear that we don’t actually live in states democratic enough to let the public make reasonable choices. How can we, with so much wool pulled over our eyes?

But that’s the intention. If we knew what they really did, we wouldn’t so vapidly vote them in.

And it’s clear they don’t trust us.

Which further begs the question – how can we vote a decent government in? They obviously don’t trust us with any real information. They don’t trust us to handle the information. For good reason – the information proves they are amoral and corrupt. We obviously are allowed to know very little about our governments, and/or their actual machinations.

For example, and admitting this is piddling by comparison to revelations from other countries, it has been revealed that New Zealand’s secret services renewed full contacts with US intelligence counterparts last year.

You may be forgiven for the reaction ‘so what?’.

Yet this was facile fact was deemed too sensitive for us to know – even Hilary Clinton was advised not to mention it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the leaks also revealed our prime minister is a big fan of the US. Personally – he has been too careful to allow this (until this embarrassment) fact out into the public domain in case he get tarred with the ‘bend over and let ’em in’ Don Brash brush.

To my mind, Key isn’t that US-centric – he’s just a big fan of any established power and money and would fawn all over them alike.

Oh, that is ‘the Don Brash brush’?

On TVNZ, Key said “Going out there and saying we’ve resumed that level of exchange of information would then invite a whole lot of other questions which we are not in a position to answer.”

Which sounds like a clear invitation, to me. What questions and what answers, John?

This fawning excuse for a government has reaffirmed strong ties with a country which is so habitually and historically secretive, it is baying for the blood of a man who worked to reveal colossally and historically widespread lies and deceptions perpetrated by that government.

Even in the US, where the death penalty still exists in many places, they don’t kill people for burst condoms. Do they? (Perhaps Assange should be suing Durex?)

But Americans have plenty of other reasons, both real and imagined, like a global bunch of ignorant yokels – a Tea Party lynch mob is whipping itself into a frenzy.

Historically? Yes. Here’s just one instance: “Declassified CIA files have revealed that US intelligence officials went to great lengths to protect a Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution after the Second World War and used him to stir up trouble inside the Soviet Union from an office in New York.”

This disgusts me profoundly. And I’m not defending the Soviet Union here – I certainly thing the Soviets were worse than the Americans. But I am still revolted by so much that “The land of the free …” actually stands for.

Behind the scenes, anyway.

So, I ask you: how are we supposed to reconcile to the fact, plain and simple, that John Key’s government does not trust us?

I am dissuaded from doing so.

I am deconciled.

Put that in lights. Merry Christmas.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Religion, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 29 ~ class, with no class

November 15, 2010 by emweb

Class, with no class

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the National Party’s agenda is more about class protection than anything else.

And if you still subscribe to the myth that New Zealand is a classless society, open your eyes. This may have been true on and off over the last few decades, but it’s certainly not true of this decade, with Labour as much to blame as anyone else for making the wel-off wealthier.

But it’s got a lot worse under John Key.

True, we have not reached the stratified and moribund type of class system that England maintained until, say, World War Two, and I sincerely hope this never happens – but it seems National sincerely hopes this will occur.

It’s hard for a left winger to understand the right, as everything that happens seems to be the result of one overriding principle – greed.

OK, tat should be by ‘one overriding lack of principle’.

How right wingers justify this is beyond me. I guess a donation here or there and letting someone in at an intersection occasionally lets them qualify themselves as ‘decent people’.

I don’t know.

Perhaps they are so inculcated with the belief that profit is god, its pursuit is perceived as ‘good’, or at least, as ‘righteous’ and/or justifiable.

But it’s pretty clear where the impacts of National’s policies are falling:

Cuts on preschool – the poor or, increasingly, those we can refer to as ‘the lower classes’.

Raising GST affects the poor. Rich people write it off, or they don’t pay full price anyway because of their connections, or they simply swap merchandise with mates in other industries.

Education cuts – the poor.

Labour invested heavily into early childhood education, introducing 20 hours free ECE. This government has cut hundreds of millions from ECE.

Primary Schools have been landed with an untried and untested scheme – ‘National’ Standards – that means more work for overworked teachers for the same pay, and potentially less teacher time per student. This won’t effect the wealthy schools because they’ll just hire more staff – drawing good but underpaid teachers from the public schools.

Raising the cost of universities closes the door on the poor, not the wealthy. The wealthy will pay for educations for their kids whether their kids are clever or not, and pay for the resources to have them succeed.

Funding for adult and community education was cut last year, and National withdrew of tens of millions from industry training.

Who does this effect? Think about it.

Financial policies that hurt the poor also either don’t effect the rich at all, or give them subtle advantages.

Why? To protect National’s class, to the detriment of the others. It’s the same reason rich people build f__k-off walls and fences around their properties. They’re scared and they protect themselves.

They’re scared because they know what they’re doing is reprehensible, at least subconsciously.

Have you noticed that when times are good, directors and company owners hire padding management from outside the company to keep them even further away from the hoi-polloi? This padding is drawn from their own class – it’s how offspring begin their personal ascensions.

I love the ‘trickle-down’ theory. It goes like this: rich people get breaks so they prosper, and this prosperity trickles down.

It doesn’t. It doesn’t happen anywhere:

1/ A rich person gets a 10% increase in revenue. Do they invest it in the business? Maybe. Maybe not. It most likely pays a debt, buys another boat or another holiday.

If it is invested back into the firm, why? To make even more profit for themselves. Remember, every worker is just a unit of profit to the owner – especially so in the very badly run NZ business model.

2/ Say it does trickle down to employees. They’re all on much lower wages, so 10% is not as much – but do you really think they’ll get 10%? People strike for wage rises of just 1 or 2%.

So … no.

3/ The easiest way for a company owner to raise profits is to fire people, and scare everyone else into working harder for the same money. Or less. And this has been happening a lot over the last few years.

How many of you have had the company director arrive in their flash car to address a staff meeting where they, ashen-faced, tell you ‘times are hard, everyone needs to work harder, forget this year’s bonus and we may need to lay some staff off. “It’s hard on us all …”

And they prove it by only going to Fiji instead of Paris at Christmas.

Anyone who expected National to get New Zealand out of a recession needs their heads examining. There used to be an old joke in National: ‘we’ll get in power, spend lots of money and get Labour back in for a term to sort the government coffers out’.

Hilarious.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 28 ~ New Zealand government: I charge you with crimes against humanity

July 31, 2010 by emweb

Picture this: a woman who has been a voluntary goodwill ambassador Bluecoat at Auckland Airport for ten years, a volunteer English instructor to new immigrants at a local church, a volunteer at the local Citizens’ Advice Bureau, a volunteer at Vincent De Pauls, a donor to hospice and the nearest old people’s home, dies holding the hand of her son, a long-service firefighter.

Why?

Cancer. Lung, breast, brain, gut, adrenal glands … The woman was a sprightly 73-year old who had only retired at 72. She was diagnosed in May 2010 and died a week before the 45th anniversary of arriving in New Zealand as an eager immigrant. This was in late July of 2010, just over two months later.

She died in a hospice, which is supported by voluntary donations alone.

She had worked full-time and paid NZ taxes for at least 42 of the years she lived here as a proud NZ citizen.

Did she know smoking could cause cancer? Of course she did.

She was an addict.

Her addiction was profound. She had smoked since she was 14. You may say she could have suffered directly from smoking a long time before she was 73, and that’s certainly possible.

Her mother, a non-smoker, lived to a week short of her 99th birthday. (Her father died in the London blitz.)

She died incontinent, unable to lift her hand to her mouth. She was hallucinating and delusional for some of the time in the last two weeks of her life with, thankfully for the family, moments of lucidity. Except in those she was also all too aware of what was happening to her.

The week before, her addiction was so strong, she was wheeled outside. A cigarette was lit for her. but she didn’t even have the strength to lift it to her mouth.

This was despite nicotine patches. Thankfully this phase passed as she sank into torpor.

But this is hardly an original story.

It’s all too common. Thousands of people die of smoking-related cancer every year in New Zealand.

Our government actively supports tobacco smoking. It receives huge taxes from actively participating in killing and maiming its own citizens. You can buy cigarettes freely on the open market – in supermarkets, dairies and other New Zealand shops the length and breadth of the country.

You may be thinking I am about to advocate banning smoking outright.

That’s damn right. Cigarettes should not be for sale.

Not a single soul who isn’t already a smoker should be able to take it up.

Confirmed addicts should be on prescription cigarettes and managed withdrawal, supervised by the medical system and their personal physicians.

For the good of the country and the people.

Since the government is not doing this, for God only knows what reason, I therefore charge it with a crime against humanity.

In New Zealand, 4300 to 4600 deaths per year have directly been attributed to smoking. An estimated 350 of are from secondary tobacco smoke inhalation – the rest are directly attributable to personal smoking.

Smoking causes one in four of all cancer deaths in New Zealand.

A solution of one quarter of cancer-related deaths would be hailed as a fundamental medical marvel – yet it’s staring us in the face.

Each year tobacco causes five million premature deaths out there in the world. This is one in ten of all adult deaths worldwide.

Half of the people who smoke today and continue smoking will be killed by it.

Half of those will die in middle age, long before their tax earning potential ceases.

A crime against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, “constitutes a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings.

“They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. Murder; extermination; torture; rape, political, racial, or religious persecution and other inhumane acts reach the threshold of crimes against humanity only if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice. Isolated inhumane acts of this nature may constitute grave infringements of human rights, or depending on the circumstances, war crimes, but may fall short of falling into the category of crimes under discussion.”

This government’s support of tobacco smoking fits the description, particularly in that the tobacco industry is a widespread and systematic practice which adds up to an attack on human dignity; grave humiliation; degradation; and murder (nearly 5000 clearly preventable deaths a year).

New Zealand tobacco availability is “part of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government”.

For this government, along with those preceding since the 1950s, has actively been supporting this systematic and sustained attack on human dignity; grave humiliation of its citizens; degradation; and murder.

It’s clearly a crime against humanity.

And it profoundly disgusts me.

As it should you.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | 1 Comment
Lefter 27 ~ Tax is a moral issue

July 10, 2010 by emweb

I have heard a lot about tax and the economy in the last few months – I guess we all have.

I don’t mind paying tax – in fact, I relish it.

I once worked with a guy who was on a really good wage, but he always insisted on working on an invoice basis rather than going on the payroll. One day, he explained why: every year his accountant bought a failed company. All the invoices were run through this company, and no tax was paid because the company had debts.

This guy effectively got paid exactly what he billed for, despite having a large property and a second property and several cars. He paid not a cent of income tax.

Just to further disgust me, this guy wrote about cars and constantly complained, in print, that NZ’s roads were appalling.

National’s platform is on decreasing tax to ‘empower’ spending. This empowers, in turn, some people to smoke, get drunk, take drugs and gamble. Which in turn infers that some NZ people are stupid, uncontrollable, susceptible to the basest of urges and happy to throw away their money to no good end.

Frankly, and unfortunately, this is true – as it is of every other population.

It’s just as true that the class of Khandallah Remuerarites will happily take any tax ‘incentives’ the National government hands out to have more holidays in a fascist state like Fiji rather than make things better for the workers who keep them propped up. Once again, this class exists all over the world.

There is a very good case that income removed from the general population, and then spent on the welfare of that general population (roads, schools and hospitals spring to mind) is better for that population. New Zealand pioneered this welfare state.

A caring state engenders patriotism, enthusiasm and equality.

The case is obvious, tried, proven and clear.

National’s tax policy would be fair to New Zealanders, said John Key.

Fair?

That means “in accordance with the rules or standards; legitimate: the group has achieved fair and equal representation for all its members.”

Also “just or appropriate in the circumstances”.

As an adverb, it’s defined as “without cheating or trying to achieve unjust advantage.”

Fair?

I know John Key is not the most literate man in New Zealand. In fact, sometimes he can barely talk. Perversely, this seems to have made him more popular with average New Zealanders. God help us.

But surely he knows what ‘fair’ means?

But ‘fair’ is subjective, isn’t it? John Key is being fair to his class, which includes people like Mark Hotchin of Hanover Finance. This is the guy who ran Hanover until it fell over, leaving lots of investors bereft of their savings.

Hotchin, who in my opinion is an arsehole – sorry, that’s really not fair: ‘prize arsehole’ – is currently living in abject luxury in Hawaii. (John Key has a luxurious house in Hawaii.)

Hotchin’s multi-million dollar Auckland mansion is almost finished, and now on the market because he’s worried about coming back here. As he bloody well should be. And he has a pad in Sydney. Plainly he’s hurting. He thinks New Zealanders dislike him … and he is most likely filled with a deep remorse about the suffering he’s caused.

Like hell. He couldn’t care less.

For me, paying tax is a moral issue. I choose to live in New Zealand. It supports me. I support it with my volunteer efforts and my taxes.

Of course, I want a government to spend the tax take wisely on our behalf – something the National government has never excelled at.

Pay your tax and demand accountability from the government.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter #26 ~ The Cook Islands

May 14, 2010 by emweb

Post colonial, or colonial post?

Atutaki is a picture-perfect, beautiful atoll not far from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. It’s part of the Cook Islands Group. The Cook Islands became a British ‘protectorate’ in 1888, at chiefly request out of fear of an armed French takeover (which had happened already to Tahiti) and this was accepted, but in 1900, Britain transferred administrative control to New Zealand.

In 1965, Cooks Islands’ residents chose self-government ‘in free association with New Zealand’.

But what does this mean?

The Cook Islands’ comprises fifteen islands spread over a considerable area of the South Pacific ocean. Somewhat oddly, since it’s not the closest of South Pacific islands to New Zealand, most Cook Islanders speak ‘Cook Islands’ Maori’, a language that sounds a lot like Maori, and in fact the two languages are mutually intelligible. They also speak excellent English.

Most of the Cook Islands are low coral atolls – a couple are either very sparsely inhabited or not inhabited at all – but Rarotonga in the Southern Group is a large, volcanic island and it’s the main administrative centre. It also has by far the largest amount of Cook Islands-based Cook Islanders on it: about 14-15,000.

About 75,000 Cook Islanders live elsewhere, most of them here – Cook Islanders have NZ passports. So apart from plundering their able workforce, New Zealand’s primary responsibility to the Cooks seems to be as a tourist destination and aid recipient.

And we’re supposed to defend the Cook Islands on request.

Rarotonga is bizarre in that it’s a big, hot, tropical, exotic-looking, island populated by people speaking great English. NZ institutions like banks work, and look, just as they do here. Indeed the currency is NZ with some additional, and distinctive, denominations and coins.

There are two public buses on Rarotonga and they just circle the island in different directions. I kid you not, they are actually signed ‘Clockwise’ and ‘Anticlockwise’ just in case you get confused.

It’s also weird in that there are abandoned and semi-collapsed buildings all over the place. Some tumble-down houses are actually still occupied by people who appear to be living in abject poverty (accept that delicious food grows pretty much unbidden, and all over the place). But you also see gracious and even grandiose homes that somehow look, somewhat unfortunately, like plantation owners’ homes – although I have no idea of their actual provenance.

There are other jarring sights – the massive Ministry of Justice, recently completed, is a lavish building that looks entirely out of place in the little (and main) town of Avarua on Rarotonga. It looks even more ridiculous when you find the prison – its fenced with four strands of barbed wire a nine-year-old could get through and indeed, someone told me the prisoners go home on weekends anyway, as the guards like to have the weekends off! (I don’t know if this is true.)

So why the massive, lavish new Ministry of Justice, exactly?

Take a short flight to Aitutaki (population about 2000) and you realise that the paradise that is Rarotonga was just an introduction, although Aututaki is very touristy and resorty. But Aututaki got hit badly by a powerful cyclone earlier in 2010, with gusts of up to 100 knots flattening buildings and trees.

In April, National MP Murray McCully flew to the Cooks ostensibly to inspect Aitutaki. New Zealand had pledged $5.5 million in cyclone recovery aid which was slow to be deployed. The visit coincided with a joint ministerial forum that was supposed to bring the Cooks government and NZ’s closer – the Cooks have been increasingly independent in foreign policy over the last decade or so. However, this forum was postponed or cancelled – for reasons unclear – just before the visit.

Meanwhile, Aitutaki mayor Tai Herman was being criticised in the CI News for releasing ‘aid’ money to people to work on their houses. Great, accept these people were friends and family of Herman’s (or potential voters) whose houses had either not been damaged, or were only lightly damaged, while badly damaged houses were sitting untouched.

Cook Islands officials expressed concern that the aid should be distributed to those who need it, but McCully stated he wasn’t there to meddle in Cook Islands’ politics.

So why was he there? Was his trip funded by part of that aid? How much did it cost?

It can easily look as if the Cooks has been treated as personal fiefdom by proxy for some NZ officials, who don’t seem to take any sort of hand with the Cooks’ notoriously troublesome governance – there have been scandals and crises galore over the last three or four decades, under the watch of several NZ governments in succession, including, of course, Labour.

After his visit to the stricken atoll, McCully was reported in the Cook Islands News as having enjoyed his visit. He said had been to the Cooks several times before. He said “We hope that you feel fortunate to be New Zealand citizens”!

He concluded an article in the Cook Islands News (April 9th, page 7) “This is a fantastic place – I say that officially and unofficially. Unofficially it is spoken for by my frequent personal visits which will only become more frequent as the ungrateful public of New Zealand tire of my services at some future point. I just want to say it’s great to be here.”

Well, better to get the government to pay for your holidays under the guise of official business, hey Murray? As it’s easy to imagine that February is simply too hot for visits – tourists avoid the Cooks in February. April is much nicer.

The Cook Islands are absolutely gorgeous, despite the fatuously cliché ‘Pacific’ resorts that have parasitically invested the nicest beaches.

The Cooks Islanders seem unfailingly polite and knowledgeable. The food is incredible, the swimming is unbelievable … But New Zealand’s official attitude to the Cooks makes me really uncomfortable. I can’t fathom it.

I fear New Zealand is doing Cook Islanders a disservice.

But I may be wrong.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter #25 ~ A New Labour Party

April 6, 2010 by emweb

I was at a Locally Left meeting in Grey Lynn last year when I could contain myself no longer. “What does Labour actually stand for?” I asked Labour list MP Phil Twyford. “I don’t know any more.”

He didn’t appear to either. He couldn’t answer.

It’s not his fault – it’s Labour’s fault.

Back in the 1930s, it was really clear what Labour was and what the party stood for. Now Labour is ‘National Lite’ or ‘Slightly Left National’.

Which do you prefer? Well, I hate both.

We all know Labour is well on track to lose the next election. It seems like Phil Goff and his ill-advisors are the only people who don’t know. As I’ve said before, I know people who know Phil Goff and they say he’s intelligent and a really nice guy. Great. So what? Prove it, Phil, to me and everyone else. Because so far you haven’t even begun to, and this is a huge disappointment.

But I can tell you what Labour needs to do. It’s actually pretty plain.

1/ Stop pretending you’re going to win the next election.

You’re not. National can tighten the screws on society a lot more before New Zealanders cry ‘uncle’. They’re still hoping for that big tax or business break that’s not going to come.

Mr ‘Get Along With Everybody’ hasn’t had any real issues he’s had to publicly deal with yet. He hasn’t even been put to the test. This is partly because the opposition is pathetic, partly because two of the most potentially vociferous opponents are part of the government (yes, that’s ACT and the Maori Party), and partly because Key is adept at playing Mr Nice Guy in public while leaving the dirty work (which will only increase) to MPs like Brownlee and Bennett. So people actually believe he’s doing a good job. Which is incredible to anybody who can see what’s really going on, but that’s not more than a few of the voters. Yet.

2/ Work out what Labour’s vision is for New Zealand. At the moment, Labour doesn’t have one.

If Labour does have a vision, what is it? Why can’t I explain it? Worse, why can’t Labour explain it? Because it doesn’t have a vision. If it does, it doesn’t make sense, for even people inside Labour don’t know what it is or how to put it across.

So go back to the drawing board and create that vision.

Face it: Labour was rubbish in the last term, spending all its energy on turf protection and reactionism instead of creating real policy people could understand they could benefit from. This is what happens when there’s no vision.

3/ Sell the vision. Some people will hate it – at least at first. Accept this is how it will be. This is how it should be. Wear your colours and be proud. Give us something meaningful to fight for.

For example, Scandinavians accept they pay high taxes because they understand the benefits in their societies.

A capitol gains tax will patently solve lots of New Zealand’s export and business investment problems, but many Kiwis will squeal like stuck pigs at the prospect. But because they’re used to the passive and traditional investment in property does not mean it’s good. So harden up.

Be brave, Labour. It really does beat ‘pathetic’. Work on making it clear what Labour’s vision means and how it’s good for me, and for you, and for all the other ordinary New Zealanders.

4/ Win the election after the next one.

Simple, really.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter #24 ~ the New Zealand economy

March 17, 2010 by emweb

Back in ye olde distante past-ey, I had a couple of quite different jobs, one after the other, sticking at each for just over a year. This was in the late ’70s and early ’80s, in Auckland.

I started, and they told me what my wage was, when I’d be reevaluated, and what the wage rise would be at that point. They told be what the promotions available were, and what the wages were if those posts were obtained. I could see my working life stretching out before me, and figure out what I’d be earning. I could plan my life – what I’d buy, and even when I might possibly look at buying a house. (Of course, I quit and went to Europe.)

When I got back to New Zealand, everything had changed. We were supposed to negotiate our own contracts. The unions were pretty much smashed. The bozo sitting beside me picking his nose and faffing about could be earning twice what I earned because he was better at talking to the director, or promoting himself. There were no more regular wage rounds because the boss knew it was best to ignore them.

My immediate department head could be on three times my salary – or the same.

People regularly lost their jobs simply because they had talked their wages up too much to be tenable. In my firm, the useless or timid negotiators stayed the longest. The rest were out there like sharks, getting continuous promotions and spending more time on ‘negotiating’ and self promotion than on working.

Just look at Telecom to see what effect this has had. Because now, many of these people run things.

And now we consider ourselves a ‘low wage economy’, compared to Australia. Australia still has powerful unions. All of New Zealand’s deregulation was supposed to ‘empower’ bosses. It’s empowered them to run bad businesses because greed was allowed to become the driving factor.

Now these bosses have even more of the situation they dreamed of – a National Government.

It’s been disappointing, though, even to them. New Zealand businesses cannot plan for their futures, with the result being a crisis of confidence and worse, either shutting down or moving offshore.

I went to a fascinating discussion the other day, run by the newly resurgent NZ Fabian Society. The talk, which was presented at an obscure if surprisingly plush chiropractic college in Ellerslie (and yes – I don’t know why, for both counts), was presented by Ganesh Nana (Wellington-based economist with BERL Forecasts), Selwyn Pellett (wealthy entrepreneur), John Walley (CEO of the Manufacturers and Exporters Association) and economic commentator Rod Oram.

Pellett and Walley both stated this wasn’t a matter of left and right. I’m not sure Walley would have even bothered to make that statement a year ago (I could be wrong, but I assume it would be accepted he was of the right, back then).

All were terrific speakers, and all had something to say. Considering the political and economic span they represented, I found it notable they all pressed the same four points:

1/ New Zealand needs leadership. It doesn’t have it.

2/ NZ’s currency needs to be regulated.

3/ We need a Capitol Gains Tax (of which, more later) and;

4/ An economic crisis is coming. We can manage our way down through it, but if we ignore it, it will be more calamitous than we seem able to imagine.

Anyway, back to the Capitol Gains Tax. Why should you pay a tax on property transactions? Many reasons:

• NZers borrow money from banks to buy property as we perceive that as being the safest option. This is almost inevitably from Australian banks, as they own most of the ‘NZ’ banks. Tellingly, they’ve all made huge profits in the ‘recession’. Australian banks made a third of their income ‘offshore’ (from Australia, that is). So we’re making Australia richer. And the interest we bank is used for Australian investment, not for NZ investment.

• Banks here therefore lend happily to home buyers, but not to businesses for business development or expansion, or R&D.

• Buying property artificially raises the price of property, making it harder for people to buy homes to live in. A house changes hands four times in a decade, say. It’s sold for $300,000, then $400,000, then $550,000, all for the same house. Crazy. Capitol Gains Tax would put a curb on the market.

• Property transactions do not benefit the NZ governments (and therefore, us), because there’s no tax or other levy on them.

• Worse, unscrupulous Kiwis use property as a sink for tax and GST write-offs. So even less tax arrives in government coffers.

One idea mooted at the presentation was overall tax reform that actually benefits the country and does not tinker with GST. I got the impression these four guys could work out a proper tax reform in a week – how come the government task force did such a bad job of it?

Oh yeah, Don Brash was involved. [Oh, I take that back, seems he wasn’t.]

The Fabian Society is worth a look, by the way. I know there have been some notably bad Fabians but there have also been some notably great ones. The Fabian Society has the opposite of the Anarchist ‘direct action’ ethos. It promotes left wing thought by discussion and dissemination of knowledge. So it can lead to fascinating insights if well managed, as this inaugural event patently was. And if good speakers are presented. Once again, tick.

I look forward to more. Check out the forthcoming presentations by the Fabians in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: economy | 3 Comments

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