Lefter | Left wing politics & New Zealand

Lefter 80 ~ Things fall apart …

February 18, 2016 by emweb

The centre cannot hold … this country (and, OK, many others to be sure) has developed into a fight for the centre over the last few decades in a race to who can be the most mediocre. Awesome, right? Fighting for the centre? I mean, once it was a battle to drag the country, then the rest of the world, into a future in which women were allowed to take an equal role in society, workers had rights as well as their exploiters, in which all people were cared for … we had the 40 hour week, the first real Welfare State, New Zealand mandated and ensured minority representation in parliament, at least for Māori… I do dare say it: all that made New Zealand a great nation was firmly on the left.

And now the hardest fought battle is for the centre.

And yes, John Key has won that battle. Repeatedly.

But the world is changing and the centre is no longer holding. The battle for power in the United States may devolve to Trump on the far, crazy right and Sanders very distinctly on the left. In Britain, avowedly left-wing Corbyn took the top job in the Labour Party, much to the chagrin of the Labour Party’s ‘leadership’. What is the appeal? Both are not scared to say they’re left, for a start. Something both Labour Parties have found difficult for decades.

Neither are centrist.

That’s what you get after years of battling for the centre. Over here, Labour ‘likes’ Sanders but is worried by Corbyn, who has created a groundswell of voter support and who has already been responsible for a massive rise in grass roots Labour Party membership. NZ Labour’s attitude here reflects connections to Labour UK’s leadership more than anything else. We bought Tony Blair’s popularity contest off the back of our own terrible neo-liberal dalliance and we’ve been stuck there since, despite John Key doing it so much better.

Of course, Labour here could actually grow some convictions and come from a similar stance to Sanders and Corbyn. Actually, you don’t even need to grow some – just resuscitate the ones the party was founded on.

Remember those?

Too scary? Then you really don’t deserve votes.

Because National is currently staggering, Labour – what are you going to do? Never before has ennui so dogged this party of the moneyed and the glib. Key catastrophically mishandled Waitangi Day, then got booed at the League. That would have been unthinkable even a few months ago. Meanwhile, up north where the running-scared Key should have been, Stephen Joyce went from looking like an imperturbable manager to just another suited dickhead thanks to a very deftly-pitched toy penis.

The ‘new flag’ looks awful – want proof? Even many National MPs think that. John Key’s personal vanity project to foist his corporate conservative logo onto the nation’s masthead is faltering badly, meaning they have to turn up the heat to bring even their own people in line. Once again, this would have been unthinkable a short time ago, when National’s caucus was as tight as Judith Collins’ pursed lips. Meanwhile people like me, who have long hated the Union Jack being part of ‘our’ flag long after England turned its back on New Zealand (a process which has accelerated recently, with punitive measures against Kiwis who want to work and live there) finds myself about to vote to keep the damn thing, both to spite John Key and because, frankly, the alternative sucks and the process to come to this design sucks more.

Two million dollars was promised to ameliorate emergency housing months ago and … surprise! Not a cent has been spent. Meanwhile, 27 million has been squandered on the ‘new’ flag. How much of that has been spent? How many people made tidy profits from that process while other kids go hungry and while people have to live in cars, garages and on the street?

State house evictions have accelerated. And concurrently, National has cut funding for mental health in Canterbury coz – who cares? Clearly not the National Government, which has failed to rebuild the city, failed the traumatised citizens of quake-ridden Christchurch and clearly couldn’t actually give a shit apart from keeping its insurance cronies sweet and crowing about a little building work – much of which has been mishandled.

As for dairy, are we crying foul yet? We should be – how have all the eggs in that basket actually worked out for this short sighted ‘governance’?

Gareth Hughes absolutely skewered Key in a speech in Parliament in an excoriating and painfully-accurate dissection of our Prime Minister’s current state of affairs … oh for someone like Lange in Labour who could do this so well! Now it’s the Greens we have to turn to for in-depth socio-cultural commentary.

Meanwhile, National has its Trump in waiting, in the form of Judith Collins champing at the bit to muscle in and erect her police state. Her alternative is ‘bite the hand that feeds’ Bennett.

Who has Labour got?

This is your chance. Like never before.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: , Bernie Sanders, conservative, Donald Trump, flag debate, Gareth Hughes, Greens, Jeremy Corbyn, John Key, Labour, Left, Maori, New Zealand, Politics, right, the middle, vote, women | No Comments
Lefter 79 ~ The Left, Green, Right and fright

January 9, 2016 by emweb

Or should that be ‘fight’? I’d certainly prefer that.

The Green Party of New Zealand has a singular advantage over the Labour Party: one unified aim. You might be a left Greeny, a right one or ‘Aqua’, an eco warrior or hell, just a hippy, but no matter where you came from and how you exercise your Green ambitions, you all have the same aim as the other Greenies: you want a more ecologically sustainable New Zealand that protects its current stock of natural attributes.
Of course, lots of left wing voters and even some right wing voters want that too. (Most right-wing voters can’t see beyond pure exploitation of anything in reach). For the left, it’s more a matter of what comes first: a better environment in which to live, or a better way to live within that environment.
National Party and Act supporters also have one aim – self enrichment.

But Labour does not have one aim.
Once upon a time, in the Labour heyday, the aim was more rights and better pay for workers. This is no longer tenable. For one thing, there aren’t many workers left. The wealthy, thanks to neo-liberal might and wiles, crush jobs, robotise, off-shore … anything to avoid giving any kind of quality of life to what workers there are left. If you think your job will never be done by a robot and/or computer, you’re wrong. The wealthy have the money to invest in these things. You may have seen the New Zealand dairy farm that was on TV a few months ago: while the couple who owned it slept-in, their cows were herded automatically into pens, suction cups attached themselves, the milk was taken and the cows robotically compelled back out into the fields. The couple insisted the cows were happier – perhaps they could only think this as they were themselves, with no more early rises to mess with their days, and no more staff to look after.

Meanwhile, there’s the working poor who can’t afford rent, food and childcare anymore, being worked into early graves, and the ever shrinking middle tier of ‘workers’ who are tax-paying paper-shufflers (this category includes academics and teachers these days). They only ever seem to get more paper to shuffle in their increasingly mindless jobs.

I’ve said it before and, wearyingly, I imagine I’m going to be saying it again: the New Zealand Labour Party doesn’t know what it believes in any more. There’s no vision for the future. The people who have stopped voting Labour either vote for National because they think ‘at least I might get some more money’ (ha ha, more fool you); vote Green coz hell, none of us want to die of pollution or tainted food; or they just don’t vote out of disgust.

Which leaves the 24% or whatever it was that voted Labour last time. These are, increasingly, people who vote for nostalgia reasons, or so I cynically surmise. And this category appears to include Andrew Little. Labour was great once … well, so was Rome.

We need a new vision, Labour. We need you to come up with a vision that’s worth voting for. You need to be able to articulate it, sound-bite it and back it. We need something to believe in – and then all the different factions in the left won’t matter.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 78 ~ New Zealand at heart is bitter. And dark

November 22, 2015 by emweb

You may have heard that most right-wingers consider left-wingers to be stupid. Left wingers, on the other hand, consider right-wingers to be evil.
Presumably they think we’re stupid because we don’t channel all our energies into making money. Into ourselves. We – I certainly – think they’re evil because they are so selfish.
I had two experiences lately that made me reconsider the usual established, fluffy view of New Zealand as being an upstanding nation of citizens who share a fairly general belief in equality. Egalitarianism. Fairness.
The first: I went to a hospital pick up a relative who had just had a knee operation. I had to wait with them until the surgeon signed them off. Forty minutes or so. Waiting with them – note this was a public hospital, not private – was a middle-aged bloke who was very chatty. Let’s call him Geoff. He insisted, first, on showing me a picture of one of his cars. He’d hot-rodded a Rolls Royce. I’m not kidding. Now to me, hot-rodding any old car is already an indicator of bad taste, with a few notable exceptions. Notable in their paucity. You’re basically wrecking a classic to fit some kind of petrol-head fantasy.

But to do it to a Roller is entering a whole new level of new-money gauche. Even so, what he’d done to it was bloody ugly in anyone’s book. Well, anyone’s except his.

The nurse came in and he immediately started regaling her with financial advice. She’d just bought a house in Grey Lynn. ‘Sell it!’ he said. ‘Buy another one. Wait two months. Sell it! When the market crashes, live in that last one. I bought some land last year on the outskirts of Auckland for half-a-million, waited two months, sold it for 1.5 million.’ Now at this point, I was thinking he might have been a blow-hard, but even if he was, this was his belief. He said we have to capitalise on the Chinese driving up our house prices. His words.
The nurse replied ‘But I like Grey Lynn. I want to live there.’
‘Have you got a mortgage? Well, sell it then. Within three or four sales, you’ll have paid it off. Soon after that, you’ll be rich.’
Then he told us, unbidden (although we were being polite, considering he’d just had surgery), that he’d found a good woman, although the last one, with whom he’d fallen out, had set fire to his house while he’d been in America. ‘So I moved the two boats off the tennis court immediately so she couldn’t torch those as well.’
Then he said he was rebuilding a Spitfire aeroplane to carry four people. It was a Supermarine, so it could land on water. This was so he could get to his exclusive Nelson property when the apocalypse came. ‘It’s only accessible by water.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Apocalypse?’
‘The anarchists,’ he said. ‘I’ve talked to them. They want to get rid of people like me.’

Which was funny, considering who he was talking to and his lack of recognition of the import of the exclusively black and red clothing I was wearing. I considered his words, whether they constituted contributory negligence, weighed up my pacifism … but all I had on me was a pocket knife and besides, we were in a hospital … anyway, he then went on to tell us he’d hot-rodded the Roller so he could ship it to Hong Kong and drive it to Europe, all the while looking for a new place to live because ‘New Zealand was going to the dogs.’
Driving home, we reflected how he’d just had his knee fixed at tax payers’ expense.
Dogs.

Then, a few weeks later, I visited an elderly man. He was someone I knew, got on with, had decided was a nice guy. He’d worked at a school for years – one which benefited from public money, but was a fairly exclusive boys’ school. Before that he’d been an accountant. He showed me his computer and how he liked to have his stocks and his spreadsheets visible at the same time.
He lived in a large, well-appointed Remuera old people’s home. Blocks of apartments. He went on two big trips a year. He bade me sit at his computer – his web browser was open to Whale Oil Beef Hooked. His emails, also visible, showed he was on the Act Party mailing list. I could not help but see – indeed, had the impression he wanted me to see – his investments. There was a long column, but I only noticed the first two before I looked away: $1.1 million, $760,000 …
‘I like to have them both open at the same time so I can move things around,’ he explained, ‘Because I hate to pay tax.’
Noticing my startled expression, he added ‘Legally not pay tax.’

Both these guys had a strangely aggrieved air about them!

I honestly wish I was making this up.

I’m not.

Category Commentary, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: , bitter, dark, heart, New Zealand | No Comments
Lefter 77 ~ we’re not ready for National’s collapse

June 23, 2015 by emweb

I’ve been thinking and saying for years that Labour needs a full renewal. Over here on the left, we’ve been grasping hopefully at whatever straws National hands us, praying that one after another failure, misstep and gaffe will be the long awaited key to a right collapse. Time after time it has led to nothing as National’s caucus unity and spin machine gloatingly triumphs.

Now we’re in mid 2015, however, National has never seemed so jaded. Key has become so uncaring and arrogant, he can no longer be bothered learning even basic facts for his news appearances, and besides, most of his public appearances these days revolve around making excuses for mistakes by his MPs. Spin supremo the maleficent Steven Joyce completely wrong-footed the entire northland by-election campaign from beginning to end, giving National’s veteran enemy Winston Peters a grand campaign platform while even managing to make Peters come across as a working class hero, as unlikely as that is. (In this entire by -election, Labour was only notable, if at all, by its absence.) Nick Smith increasingly comes across, even to his own supporters, as a blithering twit, and even Bill English appears as if he doesn’t care and isn’t paying attention. Meanwhile the prospect that Judith Collins is seething in the wings salivating over what she considers her inevitable ascent must be shaking even the bluest of loyalists: she’s pure poison. Even her own colleagues and staff are afraid of and unsettled by her.

But so what? There’s no viable alternative. When Labour had the chance to reinvent itself with the leadership process, offer a purpose, decide on its future and image, present a new voice and emerge as a credible, new-left voice for the twenty-teens, instead we ended up with old school Andrew Little, there only by dint of what’s left of the unions voting him in against the wishes of his caucus and members. This is Old Labour at its worst – the union stump is holding back the party, refusing to engage in the future, still jealous and possessive of its loss of decades-old working man’s power, still refusing to believe, against all evidence, that those days are long gone.

I know many in Labour, including people I respect, fought hard to stop Labour collapsing in the last leadership process, and perhaps even to prevent Labour sintering into conservative and progressive factions.

But that’s what I wanted. Because what would have emerged would have been something worth voting for.

The old, scarred party staggers on, unable to let go, unable to capitalise beyond a few cheap shots here and there, its factions still treacherously leaking things to the press, back stabbing, arse covering, unhappy with the leader they didn’t vote for, unable to form a cohesive world view they can sell to the swing voters.

Sad, sad, sad – because now National can fail as much as it wants and still win the next election.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: , Andrew Little, John Key, Labour, Left, National | No Comments
Lefter 76 ~ Artificially-lengthened poppies need no help from me. Or you.

November 1, 2014 by emweb

I don’t really understand why success needs celebrating. When I was little, I was taught to share and not be greedy.

Those lessons stuck, and I passed them on to my own children in turn. Again, they stuck. In the light of that, I am sick to death of being told about New Zealand’s ‘tall poppies’ and how we shouldn’t lop them off. Almost invariably, these are people who have made it in financial terms. To me, that means they have successfully tailored and processed their greed to the extent that they have made loads of money for themselves.

Celebrate that? I don’t think so.

John Key is rich. Is that because he’s clever? No, it’s because he harnessed whatever Public Schoolboy bullying cleverness he did possess towards the singular aim of making himself wealthy. To me, this does not make him a figure worth any admiration, with the caveat that he should perhaps never be underestimated since there was enough cleverness present for him to be very successful at it.

Do something good for your fellow humans, sure.

Make yourself rich? You need some real values, mate.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 75 ~ Labour leader options

October 20, 2014 by emweb

What a mess. OK, this is how I see it: Cunliffe stepped aside, thank the lords, but that actually doesn’t solve much. Cunliffe had union support and he endorsed Little and, sure enough, Little now has that union support. Who else likes Little? He hardly made any impact as Labour Party President. Labour needed reform, and either there were simply no efforts made to undertake reform, or Little was singularly unsuccessful at it. Neither is very good on his CV. So apart from throwing out most of Labour’s policies, many of which were very sound if very not well sold, it’s hardly a platform for a resounding Labour future.

Little now looks like a de facto Cunliffe representative, but he represents the union movement which still holds power in Labour if almost nowhere else (more’s the pity, but that’s just a fact of life). This is a dysfunctional facet of Labour’s leadership process.

Nanaia Mahuta’s candidacy surprised everyone. She’s a Cunliffe supporter too, so this actually could spike the Little campaign a bit, and Mahuta might actually gain some headway amongst Maori voters. Maori supported Labour strongly in the last election. But it would be very presumptuous to assume Mahuta would have the support of Pacifica voters, and both groups are as prone to factionalism as the rest of Labour’s current interest groups and caucus. On the good side, Mahuta is not a white middle class man, but her record is not exactly breathtaking and her running obfuscates Cunliffe’s almost undoubted string-pullings.

But maybe that’s a good thing, as no one expected (or expects) Cunliffe to go quietly – least of all David Cunliffe and his supporters.

Then we have Grant Robertson. I can’t help thinking he’s a very clever bloke with all his heart – and all his brain – in the right place, and he certainly has a fantastic running mate in Jacinda Adern. This combo may appeal to young sophisticated urban voters, but might do little to assuage the somewhat more jaundiced and moribund views of most of the rest of Labour’s electorate. I would love this combo to lead Labour … but I wonder if it’s time yet. It might be for me, it might not be for Labour’s more usual supporters.

Finally we have David Parker. In a way, like Goff, Shearer, Cunliffe et al, Parker also represents ‘Old Labour’. But in Parker’s case, is this a bad thing? He has a clear mind, he speaks and understands economics, which is National’s (perceived, anyway) strong point, and he can be coached to show well in interviews etc (but Parker already proved he’s made great strides by his performance in the TV debate versus Bill English). Parker wrote some very sound policies which would have worked to better New Zealand, and they will work if Labour were to win an election. Parker has a good team behind him, he has few enemies in caucus (apart from Cunliffe, perhaps, and his diminished band of stalwarts) and, perhaps most importantly, Parker doesn’t use dirty tactics. David Parker is morally courageous, and everyone who has met him (including me) knows he’s a nice guy who thinks deeply and genuinely listens.

Since Parker is quite progressive, the line from Old Labour to New Labour would be more of a redefinition than an umbilical cut if he were to win. The first job Parker would have is to reunify the party, which basically means addressing every single faction and demanding – then getting – compromise to progress towards a goal that they – and we – can all believe in. Parker’s mana and charisma would rise with each success in this task.

This all comes back to the clear messaging around a position we can understand easily, as I have been banging on about for years.

But none of this is impossible … for whoever wins. I say good luck to David Parker’s aspirations, and to his toil ahead: and may Grant Robertson and Jacinda Adern somehow fit into all this if it’s Parker who wins!

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: , David Parker, Maori | No Comments
Lefter 74 ~ Ashamed.

September 21, 2014 by emweb

The results are in. Not so much that the left was defeated as the floor was wiped with them.

How does that make me feel?

Ashamed.

Ashamed that so many New Zealanders have so emphatically supported a regime that cares virtually nothing for their New Zealand countrymen with little: low incomes, poor housing, substandard diets and healthcare, little access to education. Cynically, New Zealanders voted in droves – again – for the former currency trader, trusting him despite considerable evidence that he has been deeply involved in misleading New Zealanders (he’d only step down if it was ‘proven’), involved in dirty politicking, involved in character assassination.

Voted in droves for a party that has no plans for the next three years apart from ‘business as usual’. That ‘usual’ business has been the creation of a whole new class: the Working Poor; bolstering the economic reliance on primary industries beyond everything else, and despite the dramatic recent falls in dairy prices; making it easier for the wealthy to gain ever more wealth while further victimising those desperate for work while taking away their rights; further victimising those struggling on diminishing benefits; making it harder for anyone but the rich to benefit from full tertiary educations; selling off our assets in land and farms and selling off our sovereignty by cuddling up to the TPPA; selling State Houses out from under people’s feet so developers can make fortunes off what used to be Government land built and maintained for the benefit of its peoples.

To me, the most telling image of the election was Hone Harawira’s distraught expression in a draughty hall up north. The chairs were white plastic; little kids were running around. Then, National’s election HQ on the Auckland waterfront: well-dressed people, descended on the city from Remuera Heights, holding champagne flutes. Self-congratulatory young men with tailored hair, women wearing Zambezi or worse, happily dining on some flash meat I’d never even heard of, basking in their privilege.

Well done you. How smug you must feel.

However, the blame can’t be laid only at the feet of the voting population …

Labour, what the fuck?! I’ve been saying all this for years in these blogs now. If ever there was a time to redesign your party, philosophy, structure – everything –that time is now.

Actually, that time was a decade ago, but it’s even more needed now.

Because I was shocked that Helen Clark disappeared off to the UN without even starting to set up a decent evolution in her absence, or the beginnings of a succession plan. I had admired her greatly until three years before. That’s when I started thinking more critically of Labour, because Labour only just won that previous election, but didn’t seem to notice how its support had ebbed, didn’t seem to be mindful of it. Labour’s incumbents seemed oblivious to wanting to do anything about it. It was like they weren’t taking it seriously.

Now, after six years in opposition, Labour still hasn’t addressed the fundamental issues of what the party means to New Zealand in the 21st Century. It has pole position to do this:

What is Left?

How can the Left benefit New Zealand?

How can Labour encapsulate those benefits so that people can clearly understand them?

Instead, we get a bellicose Cunliffe yelling that he’s going to lead us into the next election. From where I’m standing, that sounds like the Charge of the Light Brigade – straight down the valley into the fire of the assembled artillery.

I wasn’t the only one on the left who shuddered, I’m sure.

Helen Clark polled just under 35% when she stepped down. Goff went down to just under 28%, and moved aside for David Shearer. And Shearer polled at 35% before stepping aside.

Mr Cunliffe, you said the only poll that mattered was Election Day.

That poll put you and your party at 24.8%, David … 24.8! Even areas that voted Labour candidates in with healthy majorities were giving their Party Votes to National. How in hell do you work out anyone going ‘Shearer – tick. National – tick’?!

The future of Labour, if it’s anywhere, is not with David Cunliffe. It’s with Jacinda Adern, Grant Robertson, Stuart Nash who did so well in Napier, and with Kelvin Davis and with other under-50s. You Labour over -50s owe it to New Zealand decency to help guide these people into dominant roles, and to help guide the party not the future. You have, so far, let us down.

A party I admired would be fostering people like these, not pretending they don’t exist and/or easing them inexorably down the list.

Labour, it’s time to fundamentally sort out your shit: Philosophy – left-wing and progressive, because National has won the Centrist ground – and look where it’s taking us.

Structure.

Messaging.

Media relationships.

I keep using this phrase and it’s boring even me. But it’s still true: none of this is rocket science … so why in hell can’t you do it?

Meanwhile, those of the left need to be talking, engaging, demonstrating and collaborating. This is what I charge us with – or we may as well all just leave now.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Pacific, Politics, Thought | Tags: , election, Labour lost, Maori, New Zealand left politics right Labour National the world | No Comments
73 ~ What is Left? And what is right.

September 9, 2014 by emweb

This is the weirdest New Zealand election I can remember. I have been angsting over it all, along with many others, and often the discussion comes down to what Labour stands for. I’m not sure, any more. But we want the left to win, so that includes the Greens, for the most part, and the Mana part of Internet-Mana at least.

But for that matter, what is ‘left’? What does it mean? And is that term itself redundant?

Well, yes and no. The fundamental principles of the left still stand. Unfortunately the semantic war has been won by the right if the term ‘left’ makes you squirm, and some Americans even use the term ‘socialism’ as a pejorative with the same weight they managed to attach, throughout the Cold War and beyond, to the term ‘communism’. And they knew very little about either. (I’ve always believed ‘know your enemy’, myself.)

But I think calling the left something else is pointless. I’d be more keen to reclaim it from the right-wing ideologues and propagandists. Otherwise the whole concept just gets even more dissipated, and this works to the right’s agenda.

Wikipedia defines it well enough: “left-wing politics are political positions or activities that accept or support social equality, often in opposition to social hierarchy and social inequality. It is typically justified on the basis of concern for those in society who are perceived as disadvantaged relative to others and an assumption that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.”

If you already think any of that’s wrong, we know which side of the divide you’ll be on. For this is how Wikipedia defines right wing politics: “Right-wing politics are political positions or activities that view some forms of social hierarchy or social inequality as either inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically justifying this position on the basis of natural law or tradition.”

Is that really you, right-winger?

People who place themselves on the left typically want equal opportunity, the chance for reconciliation, and rehabilitation (even in the case of societal offenders). Anyone who says that the left is tainted thanks to Mao and Stalin is profoundly ignorant (wilfully or otherwise). What these two (and their many lesser versions) represented was actually right-wing appropriation: Mao and Stalin were ruthless opportunists who cleverly hijacked left wing societal impetus to set up very right-wing regimes.

Stalin and Hitler have far, far more in common than Stalin and Ho Chi Min.

People on the right typically want ‘freedom’, but what they mean is the freedom to make money by whatever means possible. They want freedom from societal constraints because they’re so fixated on personal gain. They dislike taxes and any other checks placed upon them, and conversely seek to punish anyone perceived as transgressing against their personal and familial wealth acquisition. As Judith Collins plainly stated, in agreement with Cameron Slater: ‘punish twice’. That’s why you see groups like Act and the Conservatives crying for harder sentences and less reconciliation. That’s why, rather than fix problems with WINZ and CYFS and trying to deal with desperate people after their benefits have been reduced, John Key’s solution is to post more security guards.

One of the weird things I’ve noticed about New Zealanders overseas is that they’ll brag about New Zealand in left wing terms: ‘we gave women the vote first, pioneered social welfare and housing, we’re the most egalitarian, the most multicultural …’ and then you find out they’re Act voters from Remuera. Darling.

Which just goes to show you they are (justifiably) ashamed of what they truly believe in. Because these are actually all things they’d like to get rid of.

For the fact remains: many New Zealanders are right wing at heart. If the polls are accurate, half of the country that will vote, will vote right. The strange thing in the polling, which Mike Williams pointed out on National Radio, is the larger proportion (compared to previous elections) of people refusing to say who they’ll vote for.

Unfortunately, I think this is because they want to vote National, and they’re ashamed to say so.

As they should be. As that means they want to vote National despite all the revelations about how National really operates.

Despite National having no ideas to fix the mess they’ve made.

Despite the national debt they’ve created.

Despite the inequality that’s spiralled out of control under their watch (but that is policy, actually, as that’s how rich people really make profit and feel elevated).

And despite National not wanting to ‘change’ anything, because they’re doing all the right things already. Does New Zealand look right to you?

Shame.

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments
Lefter 72 ~ Incompetent!

August 21, 2014 by emweb

I have waited a while to comment on the Dirty Politics, or ‘Hager saga’, event as I wanted to see how things would shake down. And boy have they shaken down.

National keeps pointing the finger at Kim Dotcom as if he’s the only person in New Zealand ‘intelligent’ enough to release the hacked emails as cleverly as they’re being released. That just shows you how out-of-touch and stupid National is about IT. I could give you at least 10,000 New Zealanders with the skills to do that – out of the rest of the population, if you want to do something like that, for Christ’s sake just Google it like anyone else. It’s hardly rocket surgery.

Basically, as we all now know, some people in National have been super-complicit in aiding ace arsehole Cameron Slater into attacking opposition figures to the current regime in the most uncompromising terms, to the point of deep and nasty slurs (Christchurch earthquake victims ‘scum’, West Coasters as ‘ferals’ – and we haven’t seen the half of it). Some are opposition figures, some are completely innocent people who somehow got fingered by people who can’t be bothered checking facts to safeguard the innocent.

As even dyed-in-the-wool, suckled on right-wing cow milk National supporters begin to shudder in shame, Brand Key bravely denies, doesn’t recall and smiles weakly through the constant flow of revelations. I’ve said it before – the people standing behind Key have very little to recommend them. He’s it – Key is the Great Hope of National, because for some unfathomable reason (to me) people like him. Do they like the other National MPs? OK, let’s hear it for Nick Smith, Jerry Brownlee and Judith Collins, to name just a few. Didn’t think so …

And now, ‘at the end of the day’, Mr Key, that’s it. All you’ve got is you. The economy is rocketing along like a speedy racing boat? Don’t think so. Dairy prices are falling, farmers up north are already going bust, companies and mines are laying off more staff.

Then there’s the things you don’t care about – child poverty is now on a par with Mexico, equality is more dramatically polarised than ever before, and National invented an entirely new category of New Zealand suffering: the working poor.

Let’s check back on your record: some great work has been done in Christchurch under National’s watch. Except what you’ve done in three years would have been achieved in six months by a competent government. Likewise the disaster would have been used as a boost to the economy much more comprehensively and much sooner by a competent government. One that didn’t think of Christchurch as Labour-voting ‘scum’, anyway.

For shame.

So here’s my prediction of how this will play: National will keep painting Key as the poor victim of a smear, of looney lefties out for blood, of ‘hacking’ (since no one, especially them, seem to understand what this means). He will play the sympathy card: ‘I have some good policies but all this Dirty Politics noise is deflecting attention from them’.

Except National doesn’t. Except that it’s not a ‘smear’ if someone on the left is merely pointing out what National has been up to, which looks to be utterly true and utterly unconscionable in a country we used to consider a leader of civilisation.

And this is what the Left has to do: paint him as what he is – incompetent.

Key has not been in control of his own cabinet; he has failed to get and read briefs, by his own admission, even when they are from the Security Intelligence Service and even when they concern the leader of the opposition; incompetent in preventing the kind of bitchiness that Collins can’t seem to control, not to mention her scandalous misuse of government credibility and her own privilege (Oravida) and incompetent at managing his connections even when they’re with someone as patently out-of-control as that simpering fascist fuckwit Cameron Slater.

Incompetent!

Category Commentary, Government, Left, New Zealand, Politics, Thought | Tags: | No Comments

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