liberation

The Green Party decade

Today the Green Party is celebrating a landmark that is well worth reflecting upon: ten years in Parliament. In our fluctuating MMP environment, that's quite an achievement. In this regard, various media are reporting some of my brief comments on the party’s achievements, current standing, and future. See the news articles on the TVNZ and NewstalkZB websites. I’m reported as saying that ‘the Green Party is sporting a “bland” new image and its biggest achievement is that it has survived’. This blog post expands on some of these comments, and draws attention to a new academic textbook chapter written about the Greens. [Read more below]

The changing nature of ideological conflict in New Zealand electoral politics (1996-2008): The rush to the centre & the rise of post-materialist issues

To what extent does the left-right political dimension still structure political party competition in New Zealand politics? Where do the parties sit on that spectrum? What other political dimensions now underpin our electoral politics? This extensive blog post presents the findings of a regular survey of New Zealand political scientists about party ideological conflict that has been carried out for the three MMP general elections of 1996, 2002, and 2008. Explaining the results, and drawing on some previous blog posts, it argues that the left-right spectrum is of declining importance in New Zealand politics, and that ideological conflict is cohered to a greater degree by post-materialist issues. The major political parties in New Zealand now all agree on the basic post-Keynesian economic framework that dominates discourse and policy formation. No party fundamentally challenges the paradigm shift that occurred with the neoliberal revolution that occurred from 1984 onwards. All parties now agree, explicitly or implicitly, that the market is the best mechanism for generating wealth and distributing good and services. Within this ‘new policy consensus’ there is, of course, room for some limited discussion of when and where the state should intervene to correct market failure, but because there is essentially no debate of any substance around material/economic issues, what might be called ‘postmaterial issues’ now represent the arena for ideological and political conflict in parliamentary politics. Furthermore, within this post-reform era political conflict is underpinned by a strong pragmatism rather than principle. Some explanations are proposed for the rise of the new consensus, the decline of left-right conflict, and the increasing salience of societal issues in electoral competition. [Read more below]    

Greens revealed as the biggest spender in Mt Albert by-election

The Green Party candidate in the recent Mt Albert by-election ran the most expensive campaign, spending an incredible $39,071, or about $15 per vote. Figures just released by the Electoral Commission show that Russel Norman outspent all other candidates in order to come a distant third in the race, with only 2,567 votes. Once again, this shows the Greens to be one of the rich parties, and that it continues to believe its own mistaken mantra that ‘money buys elections’. [Read more below]

Sue Bradford: The Green Party has lost its radical edge and differentiation

Sue Bradford says that she is departing the Green Party in Parliament after her more leftwing political vision for the party was dismissed by the wider party when it chose Metiria Turei over her for the leadership. Following on from John Moore’s controversial post about on this entitled A bad marriage leads to divorce – the splintering of the Greens, I listened to a recent interview of Sue Bradford about her resignation and about the state of the Greens, and found that much of what Bradford said in this Radio New Zealand National Focus on Politics interview by Julian Robbins, actually backs up John Moore’s argument. Bradford is explicit that she is leaving Parliament because of the Greens rejecting her, and she states clearly that the party has lost its radical nature, is chasing middle voters, and that some in the Green Party will be happy about her departure because it allows the party to shift further to the right. [Read more below]

A bad marriage leads to divorce – the splintering of the Greens

Sue Bradford's resignation from Parliament has been met by dismay or sadness from much of the New Zealand left. Although the Green Party has been shifting rightwards for a number of years, the extent of this shift has become much more apparent now, and it will continue to do so because Bradford’s departure will be followed by further resignations from what remains of a leftwing in the Greens. Guest blogger John Moore argues that one positive outcome of Bradford’s resignation would be a complete leftwing break with the Greens – this would allow the Greens’ intrinsic political nature as a centre-right force to be exposed. In the meantime, Moore argues, any left-progressives that choose to stay in the party will inevitably only damage themselves by acting as a cover for what is in reality a pro-capitalist party of the Establishment. [Read more below]

The Greens’ 2008 election campaign

In 2008 the Green Party was set to become the third largest party in Parliament. To get there the party attempted to take a qualitatively different approach to the past – adopting a highly professsionalised and market-oriented strategy. Taking the ‘Americanisation’ of politics towards its logical conclusion the Green also embraced a very celebrity-focused method of campaigning, while still relying on some traditional minor party media stunts. The party also attempted to break out of its ‘left ghetto’ but with mixed success. These are some of the issues that I focus on in the section on the Green Party within my chapter entitled ‘Party Strategy and the 2008 Election’ which is part of the recently published book Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig). This blog post is the ninth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book, and it constitutes the original draft section about the Greens that I wrote for my chapter. Subsequently this draft was substantially reworked, edited, and condensed for the final book, so please see the published book for the final and ‘authoritative’ version. [Read more below]

Political advertising in the 2008 NZ election

Which political parties had the best advertising in the last year’s general election? How come the Greens’ had such good advertising but did relatively poorly? What was wrong with Labour’s advertising? What was right about National’s advertising strategy? Did New Zealand First lose representation because of, or despite of, its election advertising and strategy? Did the Electoral Finance Act properly define and understand what a political advertisement is? Claire Robinson answers these questions in her chapter entitled ‘”Vote for me”’: Political Advertising’, published in Informing Voters? Politics, Media and the New Zealand Election 2008 (edited by Chris Rudd, Janine Hayward and Geoff Craig of the University of Otago Politics department). This blog post is the fifth of a series of explorations of the chapters from the new book (which I also have a chapter in). [Read more below]

A critique of the Greens’ political finance disclosure

The Green Party has long posed as the ‘party of political honesty’ and of political finance transparency. Green politicians love to repeat the metaphor that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’ for political finance corruption. Yet although they have often demanded somewhat draconian transparency when it comes to the private finances of other parties, when it comes to their own sources of public finance – particularly their reliance on backdoor parliamentary state funding – the Greens prefer opaqueness and obfuscation. It should not be surprising therefore that the Green Party response to increasing public concern about the use by politicians of taxpayer resources and expenses has been worse than useless. Rather than helping ‘open the books’ as the party promised, the Greens have disingenuously attempted to limit public knowledge of MP expenses and parliamentary budgets. Not only has the party only provided very limited information about its use of parliamentary funding, but the model that the Greens have put forward for disclosure actually attempts to quell the growing public concern about political corruption while also confusing the issue and robbing the public of their right to know how politicians spend public money on themselves. The following critique of the Green Party’s recent political finance disclosure argues that there should be maximum transparency for the use of parliamentary funding and that the reason the Greens are doing their best to limit the books being opened is because that party has the most to lose from parliamentary transparency. [Read more below]

Sue Bradford - the Greens' futile left option

The Green Party contest for its next female co-leader is essentially an ideological decision between two candidates from the left and right factions of the party. Sue Bradford is undoubtedly the left option in the contest – which is partly why she won't be elected. As pointing out in the blog post on Meteria Turei, Sue Bradford is incredibly unlikely to win the contest for the Green Party female co-leader – mostly due to the fact that she is - for better or worse - very strongly associated with the so-called anti-smacking bill, an elitist style of process for pushing forward this social change, and has been typecast as a radical ‘extremist’. In fact, the decision of who to select to replace Jeanette Fitzsimons will effectively decide the ideological trajectory of the party over the foreseeable future. Bradford is the choice of those that are uncomfortable with the party's very deliberate shift towards the centre of the political spectrum under Fitzsimons and Russel Norman. This blog post takes a look at Sue Bradford's past, suggests that the left option in the Greens will lose and the party will hasten its shift not only towards greater independence from the Labour Party, but also towards the right. It also tries to unpack the history and politics of Bradford, attempting to get beyond some of the simplicities and myths projected about this unique but also rather ordinary politician [Read more below]

[NewLabour Party history] 17: Formation of the Alliance

The formation of the Alliance in 1991 was a watershed in the NewLabour Party’s (NLP) development, especially in that all four of the party’s Alliance partners were considerably to the right of the NLP on most economic issues, and largely unsympathetic to the NLP’s strong ideological emphasis on working class interests. Thus the NLP’s semi-merger with the Greens, Democrats, Liberals and Mana Motuhake contributed to the NLP leadership’s rightward movement. Politically, this project led to a watering-down of the policy and principles that the NLP has worked for. Organisationally it led to the NLP, especially its branches, being subsumed into the larger Alliance structure. [Read more below]

Review of New Zealand politics in 2008

Every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a political date yearbook which gives a review of politics in a number of western countries. I contribute the section on New Zealand to the journal – last year’s publication on New Zealand politics in 2007 can be read here. Below is the first draft of my review of New Zealand politics in 2008. It still requires a bit of abridging and editing, and as always I’m interested in feedback and suggestions, which you can leave in the comments section or email me (edwards.bryceATgmail.com). [Read more below]

Greens spent $1.7m in 2008 election campaign

The Green Party spent a record $1,706,633 fighting the 2008 election, which amounts to $10.83 per vote! Put another way, it cost the Greens $189,626 for each of their nine seats in Parliament. The official party election expenses are out today, and they show that the party that was once a humble grassroots, resource-poor party is now heavily professionalized and is the third highest spending party – once again outspending the Act Party. Its expenditure of $1,706,633 in 2008 was made up of $1,457,744 in private expenditure and $248,889 in state broadcast funding. Compared to previous elections, the Greens’ spending has skyrocketed:

• 1990: virtually nothing
• 1999: $279,168
• 2002: $765,035
• 2005: $792,842
• 2008: $1,706,633

It seems that regardless of the amount the party spends on its campaign – virtually nothing in 1990, or close to two million in 2008 – the party always gets around 6% of the vote. What is interesting is that in 1999 the Greens were receiving a respectable cost per vote of $2.62, but because they have dramatically increased their wealth without increasing their support, in 2008 their cost per vote was $10.83 (which is based on the fact the party received 157,613 party votes). Therefore the Green Party’s 2008 billboard and television advertising campaign – which was one of the most vacuous and professional we’ve seen in New Zealand politics – actually didn’t do the party much good. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain.

Note: Somewhat disingenuously the Green Party has included a tiny portion ($187,000) of their Parliamentary Service funding in their declaration. While this is explicit admission of their continued use of parliamentary funding for party political electioneering and therefore probably needs to be repaid to Parliamentary Service, it fudges the fact that most of the Green Party’s parliamentary funding is probably spent on party political activity. Just one part of Green annual parliamentary funding, ‘Party & Members Support’ budget is about $864,000.

For more on all these issues, see:
Does political advertising work?
The finances of the Green Party
Have the Greens sold their soul?

Drinking liberally or problematically?

While it might sometimes appear that the Drinking Liberally political project has been hijacked in New Zealand by the Labour and Green parties for their own partisan purposes, it doesn’t have to be that way. In Dunedin we’re lucky enough to be starting our branch of the project (Tuesday 7pm, Velvet Underground), and hopefully we can be sure not to let its potential be siphoned off by politicians for their blatant permanent electioneering. If the project is to survive as a credible and useful project for the left, it needs to be protected from such partisan abuse and top down elitist speech making from MPs and party hacks. After all the Drinking Liberally project imported from the US is a potentially exciting development for politics in New Zealand – or at least for the small politerrati involved in activism, blogging, etc – as well as also for the search for new ways of ‘doing politics’. Yet there are a number of significant problems with the project – many relating to the highly contested definition of the term ‘liberal’. [Read more below]

Metiria Turei – the next Green Party co-leader

Metira Turei has quickly become the front-runner for the job of replacing Jeanette Fitzsimons as the Green Party’s female co-leader. This blog post details the three main reasons for why Metira Turei is likely to win:

1. Turei has the attributes of being perceived as extremely ‘nice’ and non-threatening, which will be seen as the necessary characteristics of anyone replacing Fitzsimons.
2. Turei’s youthful and Maori identity will win many votes amongst party delegates because ‘identity politics’ is very important within the Green Party.
3. She will win because Turei better represents the Greens’ ongoing evolution towards the centre of the political spectrum.

So although ex-parliamentary spin-doctor for the Greens, Gordon Campbell, has written a blog post on the succession struggle – see: Who May Succeed Jeanette Fitzsimons – saying that he hopes that ‘the contest will not be dominated by the fact that (a) Turei is Maori and (b) Bradford sponsored the Section 59 Bill’, this will in fact be entirely what will happen. [Read more below]

Axing the electoral & political finance review

Alongside axing the awful Electoral Finance Act (EFA), the new National Government has also axed the supposedly more credible electoral and political finance review, which included a so-called Expert Panel and Citizens’ Forum. This blog post examines what was behind the review, and why the exercise was always going to be more about window dressing than democracy. Although expert panels and citizens’ forums are not without merit, when compared to similar exercises carried out elsewhere, the planned Labour-Green model for New Zealand was designed to be incredibly weak and undemocratic. What’s more the process by which it was brought about was just as poor as the one that produced the EFA. The National Party campaigned on axing both of these, and is now well within its right to do that. [Read more below]

NZ 2008 election review: Jack Vowles

Prof Jack Vowles used to be New Zealand’s preeminent political sociologist, but has recently left the University of Auckland for the UK’s University of Exeter. He’s still analyzing New Zealand politics, however, and has written a review of ‘The 2008 General Election in New Zealand’ (to be published in an upcoming edition of Electoral Studies). You can download a PDF of the paper from his website. Vowles’ paper is a good solid descriptive account of last year’s election, but it also contains the following more analytical points. [Read more below].

Does political advertising work?

Does political advertising work? Governments and political parties spend millions of dollars on paid advertising, but the results are often of dubious effect. As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how much a political party spends on advertising and how many votes they obtain (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here). The 2008 mega-professional and expensive Green Party campaign was yet another example of this in action. The party’s taxpayer-funded Buy Kiwi Made advertising campaign has also been a significant failure. [Read more below]

Have the Greens sold their soul?

Political advertising, according to Simon Carr, ‘combines all the things voters most dislike about politics and about advertising – slick, costly, boastful and almost certainly untrue’. This is possibly the case with the Green Party’s 2008 billboard and television advertising campaign, which is one of the most vacuous we’ve seen in New Zealand politics, and a sign that in this year’s campaign the Greens have given up all pretence of being anything other than an empty electoral-professional party of office-seeking politicians. The party used to abhor the commodification of politics, and its MPs used to criticise other parties for their use of marketers to sell party votes as if they are just another product like a box of soap powder on the supermarket shelf. But the new business-like marketing management-driven advertising campaign of the Greens suggests that the party has not merely lost its soul, but is actively selling off its soul. This professionalisation is indicative of a Green Party that is itself become more populist, pragmatic and vacuous. While this market-oriented professionalisation is perhaps most evident in the campaign of the Green Party, it is actually a trend that is strongly present throughout all the parliamentary parties fighting the 2008 general election campaign. Therefore rather than cover the whole election campaign, this in-depth blog post seeks to draw out the nature of the 2008 election using the Greens as a case study of modern hollow politics. [Read more below]

The minor parties are killing MMP

The minor parliamentary parties are killing support for MMP - that’s the impression I came away with after watching the TVNZ minor party leaders debate on Monday night. They’re killing us with boredom, consensus and sameness. Yet this should be the general election whereby the minor parties in Parliament get to shine by showing how different they are to the incredibly centrist and ‘me-too’ Labour and National parties. Surely there are millions of disaffected and unimpressed voters that are turned off the claustrophobic centrist new political consensus set up by Labour and National? But the tragedy is that all the minor parliamentary parties are infected by the same disease – they are falling over themselves to agree with one another and show how cooperative and clean they are. This isn’t useful in an election where the New Zealand public need a real choice between different political programmes rather than mere tinkering with the status quo. Part of the problem is that the current minor parties are atrophied leftovers from the 1990s.  We therefore need a shake up of the New Zealand party system and the introduction of some parties that offer real change. [Read more below]

[political finance] The finances of the Green Party

Recently disclosed donations to the Greens totaling $180,000 illustrate that the party now has some significant financial backers. In fact although the Green Party had rather humble early years, it is increasingly well-funded and has even received some surprisingly large donations – including some in the past from controversial British millionaire and conservative environmentalist Edward Goldsmith. Not only is the party becoming more respectable, trimming many of its remaining leftish policies, it’s also becoming more professionalised and generally more representative of its wealthier voters. Yet, more than anything, the party is still totally reliant on its backdoor parliamentary funding to stay afloat. [Read more below]

Issues in New Zealand politics in 2007

It might seem a bit odd to have a blog post about issues in NZ politics in 2007. But every year the European Journal of Political Research publishes a yearbook looking at what’s happened in the previous year in politics of 20+ western democracies. For the past decade or so, this has been written by Jack Vowles, but this year I’ve given it a go because Prof Vowles is no longer in the country. And the latest Political Data Yearbook (Volume 47, Issue 7-8, 2008) has just been published. You can read this in university libraries, and some universities will have online access to it here. But for those that can’t, below is the text that I submitted to the yearbook.  Although it pertains to last year, hopefully what I’ve written is actually a useful context for understanding the current election campaign. The extensive analysis includes discussion of all the major issues from an action-packed policy year involving the ‘anti-smacking’ law, the Electoral Finance Act, extensions and enhancements to KiwiSaver and Working for Families, the terrorism raids, scandals about Air NZ in the middle east, employment and politicisation in the public service, and the charging of Labour MP Phillip Field with corruption and bribery. There was also the rise of John Key and the attempted revitalization of Labour. I argue that although it appears contradictory, political consensus and conflict increased in tandem during 2007. [Read more below]

Green Party celebrity politics

New Zealand doesn’t have a tradition of celebrity involvement in parliamentary politics, but this is changing. Perhaps surprisingly, the party at the forefront of this ‘Americanisation of New Zealand politics’ is the Greens. Recently the party has made an effort to sell itself on the basis of celebrity endorsements, by including cultural and sports stars on its billboards, using an actor to launch its 2008 election campaign, and even having an actor running for Parliament. Such a shift, according to some political scientists, is part of ‘a despicable trend that epitomizes the banal and the mindless in public life, empowering image over substance and producing pseudo-charismatic leadership’. [Read more below]

The Greens and their leftwing friends

An increasing array of socialists, anarchists and anti-capitalists are turning to the Green Party as the choice in the coming general election. Guest blogger John Moore argues that these leftists are either being naive or acting to deceive. He suggests that the old New Left ‘tripod’ approach of trying to combine the issues of class, race and gender have now been extended to a ‘quadpod’ approach that includes environmentalism as also having equal status in the broader leftwing struggle. [Read more below]

[party membership] 10: Green Party

Although the Green Party has always aspired to be a mass participatory party it has done little to bring this about. The Greens have a relatively democratic party structure, but in practice involve few activist members in steering the direction of the party. Currently the party claim to have a few thousand members. [Read more below]

[political party social bases] 14: Age

Differences between age groups have become relatively more important in New Zealand electoral behaviour. There is now a discernable political fracture between young and old, and for many commentators this age axis has become a significant factor in explaining modern New Zealand politics.  [Read more below]

Trotter says the Greens are fading to grey

There is a myth that the Green Party is full of ‘youthful exuberance, reckless idealism and what might almost be called political gaiety’ says Chris Trotter in his latest Independent Financial Review column. This he states has always been a ‘mirage’, but that the situation is getting worse now that ‘the Greens have taken on a distinctly middle-aged appearance’. He points to the fact that the average age of those at the top of the party new list is 52 years. Shining a light on the newcomers to the list, Trotter shows the Greens to be angling for a more middle-class respectability. Apart from the normal Green candidate backgrounds of ‘Small business and teaching’, the apparent new stars come from ‘the not-for-profit and public sectors of the economy’. Ex-student politician (and supposedly ex-young Nat) Kevin Hague and Kennedy Graham (brother of former National Party attorney-general, Sir Douglas Graham) are ‘unlikely to attract a very big chunk of the youth vote’ but ‘will bring an aura of upper- middle-class respectability to the Greens’. Trotter says this could all be ‘fatal’ and laments the departure of Nandor Tanczos (to whom Russel Norman is no real match), which could mean that in the coming election ‘the party will struggle to cross the 5% MMP threshold’.

[political party social bases] 7: Green Party

The Green Party is one of the more elusive parties when it comes to clarifying its social base, but in general the Greens are a party of middle class politicians and supporters. [Read more below]

[Third parties] 4: The Greens’ links

As would be expected, the Green Party has relationships with a number of ‘third party’ environmental groups such as the Royal New Zealand Forest and Bird Society, and Greenpeace. [Read more below]

National tries to be squeaky clean; the Greens want to believe otherwise

The National Party has announced that it will not be endorsing any third party anti-Government advertising campaigns. Their announcement is mainly in response to the appearance of a marginal campaign group entitled 'Give NZ a Fair Go'. National’s statement is somewhat of a damp squid in the sense that National is simply announcing that they will be doing what they always do – which is not to endorse other interest groups or campaigns. Political parties generally don’t. But what the statement does point to is just how ultra careful and open the National Party are attempting to be. National’s campaign course is clearly all about safety. This year’s general election is their election to lose. So they won’t be taking any risks at all, and they’ll be doing everything they can to appear squeaky clean. No party – especially National – will want to be seen as being involved in anything untoward or covert. They’ll play the game by the book. And they’ll do their best to disassociate themselves from anyone seen as extremist. Instead of a bitter campaign – I think the parties will be falling over each other to be seen as nice. Negative advertising may actually play a more limited role than in other recent elections. I was briefly interviewed about this on Radio NZ National this morning. You can listen to the MP3 podcast of that here – I’m about half way through the item. For an alternative view read the Greens’ Russel Norman’s attempt to make logic fit his view that National will indeed be associating themselves with religious extremists. The post suggests that the Greens are stuck in 2005 and have failed to actually comprehend the huge damage that the Exclusive Brethren campaign had for National.

The Green-Labour-National carbon trading con

The Labour Government has just unveiled its market-driven Emissions Trading Scheme, which has the support of other political parties such as National and the Greens. Increasingly it seems that all the parliamentary parties are ‘blue-green’ parties – combining concern for the environment with trivial market-based ‘non-solutions’ to the problems of climate change. [Read more below]

Parliament's bible-basher

Which political figure reads a chapter of the Bible every day, opens all his speeches by blessing people with the word of his god, supports a feudal tyrant and voted for hard labour and longer sentences for offenders? Sound like Graham Capill, leader of the Christian Heritage? Actually it’s the politician described in the Listener as “Graham Capill with dreadlocks” – the Green Party’s Rasta MP, Nandor Tanczos. [Below is a article I wrote about Nandor Tanczos in early 2000 – I’ll try and update sometime in the future]

Green Party compromise and contradiction

The Greens' market-based climate 'solutions' have received very little critique or analysis. Yet the party's policy is far from being principled or even terribly coherent. For example, the Greens often trumpet their sound-bite that 'polluters should pay', but the party's finer print shows that they are quite soft (by their own standards) on business and farmers (who actually make a fair portion of their voter base). In terms of farmers, they say 'we are not proposing that farming should cover the cost of all its emissions' - they single out sheep and beef farmers for a total exemption and suggest that dairy farmers should only pay for about 20% of their emissions. Furthermore, the party's greener-than-thou 'Climate Change Score Card' which ranked the parties in February, even contains false claims about their own policies. It suggested that the Greens are better than other parties because it would not let protectionism influence climate policy. The score card tested the parties on the measure that: 'NZ must pull its weight, even if trading partners don't'. However, in their 'Kicking the Carbon Habit' brochure, the Greens claim that 'industries who compete with companies in countries with no price on carbon, and whose survival would be at risk from higher energy prices, should be largely protected from this carbon price until their competitors also face a carbon price'. Is this sort of forked-tongue double-speak why the Greens are only on 4% in the latest poll?

Responses to Budget: from left to right

Responses to the Labour Government’s 2007 Budget mostly fall into a left-right continuum – with critics voicing leftwing or pro-poor concerns, while its supporters use rightwing or pro-business arguments in its favour. Essentially, the left critics are Laila Harre, Matt McCarten, Susan St John, and Chris Trotter. The Budget supporters aren’t necessary all rightwing, but Jim Anderton, the CTU, EPMU, Jordan Carter, the NZ Institute, and Colin James have used rightwing, pro-business or economically-orthodox arguments in its support . [Read more detail below]

The eco-business Green Party

The Green Party is fast shifting to the right, advocating market-based environment policies, and signalling its desire to consider going into a National-led coalition government. In this article republished from the Spark newspaper, I investigate this change. [Read more below]

Labour’s housing disaster

More evidence has just come out of the housing crisis under Labour. Two reports - both partially funded by The Centre for Housing Research - quantify the size and scale of the housing and rental issues facing Auckland. And if you think that my continued use of the term ‘crisis’ is an exaggeration, then note that the Herard now describe it as ‘a housing crisis of massive proportions’.  The Centre for Housing Research reports says that housing unafforability ‘was likely to increase the gap between socioeconomic groups, and had implications for community stability and wealth accumulation’. In general, they say that ‘Home ownership is assuming a more polarised social character’ under Labour. [Read more below]

Power profits and prices soar as NZers shiver

Labour came to power promising to fix the electricity market, yet since 2000 power prices have gone up 40% in real terms. And over the last year, electricity prices have risen by 7% for consumers, and fallen by 6.5% for businesses. On top of this, it's recently been announced that Transpower are putting up their prices by 15%, and other energy retailers like Contact are about to raise their prices significantly. At the same time, power company profits are rising fast. The Dominion Post has reported that 'State-owned power company profits topped $300 million in six months, up $37.6 million on the previous half year'. [Read more below]

Chris Trotter: Withdraw the anti-smacking bill

Anti-smacking advocates in New Zealand have adopted an elite, lobbying-style of politics that has effectively killed any chance of successfully changing society's orientation to smacking kids. To this effect, Chris Trotter has written a very interesting opinion piece in the Sunday-Star Times arguing that the 'anti-smacking' private members bill should not be rammed through Parliament in the context of such widespread opposition in society. [The article does not currently appear to be online.] Trotter says that when something like 80% of New Zealanders oppose the bill, it's bad politics and bad law to push legislation through just because you have assembled a slight parliamentary majority in favour.

Trotter is probably right. The proponents of the bill have failed to convince New Zealanders. This is because the Greens and their allies never really attempted to focus their campaigns on ordinary people. Instead they have taken an elite political approach that epitomises modern activist politics - that of lobbying those in power rather than the public. Trotter suggests that previous agents of social change were about more participatory and democratic means: 'the anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-nuclear movement and gay-rights movement. As their names suggest, they were all exercises in mass democratic action - and took years.'

NZ politics now takes place in an elite way, in which single-issue campaigns are increasingly carried out in a disengaged way from society. It's a hierarchical and anti-democratic way of trying to push for social change. As Trotter, reminds proponents of the bill, 'You cannot legislate people into virtue... they can only be persuaded. And you have not persuaded them.' Of course, there are always exceptions - where there is an overwhelming and urgent case for a government to act against majority wishes to protect the rights of some citizens, but I don't believe this case falls anywhere near that.

Green Party to save capitalism

The Green Party sees its role not just in terms of 'saving the planet' but also to save the capitalist system. In an insightful and perceptive blog posting, Green co-leader Russel Norman - who previously saw himself as some sort of anti-capitalist - now sees the Greens as playing the same role that earlier left parties - such as the First Labour Government in NZ - had in rescuing capitalism from decline and possible death. As with the first time round, when capitalism was under threat in the 1930s, Norman believes that the more natural defenders of capitalism - business and its political parties - are out of touch with what capitalism actually needs to survive. His posting is worth quoting at length. It gives a good indication of where the Greens are going, especially in terms of their wholehearted adoption of market solutions to environmental challenges:

It’s a funny position we find ourselves in. Just as the social democrats (Europe), labourists (UK, Oz, NZ) and new dealers (US) of the 1930s and 1940s had to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies by introducing a range of modifications and interventions on the market system, so now the Green Parties of the world find ourselves in possibly a similar position.  The best of the old social democrats like Michael Cullen are too locked in the old paradigm to understand it, and the sectional interests like the business roundtable and employers federation are too narrow to see it, but we have to intervene on the market system to place a price on resource use and pollution so that we can save the planet. And in the process we will quite possibly save the market system from its natural tendency to destroy or consume all resources leading to its own demise as well as the demise of the planet and all of us living on it.

The eco-Business Party

The Greens have made their most explicit statements that they could go into a coalition government with the National Party. While no such deals are being considered, according to the Sunday Star-Times, Jeanette Fitzsimons says they want to 'leave the door open' for a blue-green coalition. Co-leader Russel Norman was equally enthusiastic about a shift in coalition policy:

Norman said any decision "will be based on policy and principle, we will look at policies and compare Labour and National... and see which one is less bad". If National had better sustainability policies than Labour "it would be unprincipled not to consider them", he said.

Norman justifies the new approach to National by saying that there is little to differentiate the parties' environmental policies - which is quite correct. The problem for the Greens is that having committed to playing the parliamentary game and wanting to be in a government, they're becoming hostage to that slippery slope. The thinking is that 'if Labour aren't actually so bad, and National aren't that different from Labour, then maybe National aren't so bad after all'. It all just shows that the Greens aren't really a leftwing party at all. Ultimately their future lies in the centre of the political spectrum, being left on some things, and right on others.

Interestingly, the party's other news items this week included Fitzsimons admitting that Helen Clark's policy of a carbon-neutral NZ was actually more radical than the Greens had ever proposed (which shows just how moderate and timid the Greens really are, even on their own raison d'etre), and the Greens now supporting tax cuts, and wanting a $1 billion to go to business, to encourage those businesses that are reducing their carbon emissions or doing other eco-friends things. They really are becoming the "eco-business party".

Greens condemn foreign investment

The Greens continue their vote chasing strategy of appealing to populist nationalism - most recently in condemning foreign investment in New Zealand. They are seemingly unhappy about foreign businesspeople making profits, when it could be (nicer?) New Zealand businesspeople making the profits.

UPDATE: The foreign investment figure used by the Greens ($16b) appears to hugely exaggerate the level of investment. According to Michael Cullen, this double counts foreign-owned assets sold to other foreign investors, and the figures is more like $4b. The same article points out that the Government has in many ways already tightened the rules on the sale of land to foreigners.

Another green weekend (but turning blue)

Over the weekend there’s been a number of stories about environmentalism and politics in New Zealand. Read more below about how the environmentalists are the new socialists, New Zealand’s environment is going downhill under present management, the Greens can see themselves working with National, and market solutions are still the favoured response to climate change.

The emerging conservative consensus on climate change

With the Stern report being published in the UK and Al Gore’s documentary screening everywhere, there’s been mass media coverage of climate change and a strong political consensus developing about how to tackle global warming. Every newspaper I open has something about it. And some of it is a bit irritating – especially the constant ethical and glib lecturing on what 'we have to give up to save the planet'.  It seems that the near universal agreement is that the answer all lies in rationing consumption. In contrast, I’m more inclined to see the need for massive investment in efficient and clean energy supplies as a solution.

Yet despite the big issues concerned, there has been an effort to close down discussion and protect the developing (and suffocating) new consensus. This is disappointing, as the issue could open opportunities to make the world a better place regardless of global warming. But I’m watching out for any progressive intelligent discussions that dissent from the emerging consensus on tackling climate change – and you can read about these below:

Rightwing parties are going green and the Greens are going rightwing

Labour announced their new environmental vision at their annual conference in the weekend, which was heralded as ambitious but lacked substance. As the Dominion Post’s Tracey Watkins correctly pointed out, this was ‘clearly a bid to head off National’s own attempts to “green” itself’. National has continued to develop its internal and influential Bluegreens group, especially as MP Nick Smith believes that Green voters are easiest to win from their competitors. In line with this, Ruth Berry has written a good feature on National’s move to the centre, which as with their British Conservative counterparts, involves a significant emphasis on environmentalism. It seems that everyone wants to be green, and environmental politics is probably where the consensus amongst NZ parties is strongest.

Not coincidentally, the Green Party has been moving to the right in recent times, and according to Watkins, they are currently in the process of giving away their leftwing tag and rebranding themselves as a potential ally to either of the main parties.

Greens climb aboard anti-Asian immigration bandwagon

Have the Green Party joined NZ First in their anti-Asian immigration bandwagon? The new Green co-leader, Russel Norman - although an immigrant himself - has warned against further immigration, in this case saying that Chinese labour 'threatens wages'. This nationalist stance, couched in concern for 'working conditions', naively and perhaps unthinkingly pushes the Greens once more further to the right.

Green Party parochialism

The Green Party's parochialist "Buy NZ Made" campaign might now be extended to a "Buy NZ Owned" campaign - whereby overseas made products would be promoted if the company is owned by a New Zealand businessperson. Although the Dominion Post think this might have the late Rod Donald turning in his grave, such a move is actually the logic of the Greens' nationalism. It's a short shift from the Greens' belief in trying to keep out products made by foreign workers to trying to protect NZ capitalists wherever they make their products. As David Farrar points out, 'Yes, you can get your products made in an overseas sweatshop, but so long as the company selling them is NZ owned, this may now qualify.'

Lost in the Green wilderness

Green Party members sneer at New Zealanders who don't "get" tino rangatiratanga, which makes them feel virtuous and superior. So says Chris Trotter on his Dominion Post column this week. And he's probably right. Trotter says the Greens have a strategy of competing with the Maori Party for the "honour the Treaty" constituency, which is a mere tiny fraction of society. They have an elitist orientation to politics which means that don't understand Jim Anderton's 1980s advice to Trotter, to 'Always build your footpaths where the people walk.' Obviously there's always a tension for political parties between leading and following, but if, as Trotter suggests, your party has contempt for a public that just doesn't 'get' your separatist ethnic politics, then you'll never really build anything significant. The problem for the Greens is that they lurch between populism and elitism.

Former Green MP joins National

I will be no huge surprise that Ian Ewen-Street, the ex-Green MP has jumped ship to the National Party. This move shows once again that there are many in the Greens that are politically not so distant from National. Ewen-Street doesn't apparently have any significant disagreements with the Greens, but has just moved out of total pragmatism, believing that environmentalism can be furthered faster with National. Never a particularly talented MP, the conservative Ewen-Street was chosen by the party to appeal to farmers and middle-class voters that would appreciate a less radical-looking and sounding candidate.

Meanwhile the Greens have launched their latest attempt to win over business support, with The Real Bottom Line - a newsletter 'for businesses and people interested in a sustainable economy'.