liberation

Get ready for a greener cuddlier Act party

Apparently Act leader Rodney Hide has had a political epiphany due to his experiences in Dancing with the Stars, and claims he’s ‘saying goodbye to the finger-wagging and perk-busting that had characterised his career since he bowled into parliament’. According to the Sunday Star-Times he now wants to ‘seek strategic alliances with all-comers, even Labour’, and the party is moving away from a focus on economic rationalism. Like every other party, it seems that Act is moderating heavily and going green. But it’s hard to see what the point of Act will be. At least the old (and much larger) Rodney Hide’ used to provide a bit of humour and spark in Parliament, and it’d be disappointing to see that go. But in the SST article he still has barbs for some Labour politicians, such as Jonathan Hunt’s professed concern for the “working man”: ‘He wouldn't know a working man if he fell over one. I've watched Jonathan around working people ... he looks down on them."

Milton Friedman – The Supply-sider moves into deficit

There’s been a lot of tributes to the departed intellectual godfather of the “free market”, Milton Friedman. But as the Guardian’s chief economist points out, while ‘policy makers pay lip service to Friedman's ideas, they behave like Keynesians’ because Friedmanite policies were tried and failed. Read more below:

[political finance] British loans to parties - and the payoff

In the wake of the 'cash-for-honours' scandal in the UK, the Electoral Commission has revealed that the Labour Party has loans of £23.4m and the Tories of £35.3m. These revelations come after the scandal forced the Government to amend the electoral laws so that all loans above £5000 to party head offices and loans of £1000 to local offices, have to be declared. The police are also about to end their investigation into the scandal. Apparently, in 1993 - when the Tories were in power - research showed that 'although only 6.2% of British companies gave money to the Tories between 1979 and 1992, 50% of peerages and knighthoods for "services to industry" went to the executives of Conservative donors". Now with Labour in power, '58.54% of all donors giving more than £50,000 to the Labour party receive an honour.' Yet again it seems that parties in power are able to use the levers of honours and peerages to gain financial favour for themselves.

[political finance] Electoral law is 'victor's justice', not fairness

Rather than being about fairness, electoral law is often nothing more than "Victor's Laws" - written and implemented in the interests of the ruling political parties. A good example of this can be seen in today's news that the British Labour Government is intending to 'push through legislation which will put strict caps on the amount parties can spend on national and local election campaigns' because the Labour Party 'is ridden with debt' and fears 'that the Tories are preparing to outspend Labour', according to the Guardian report, Labour plan to ambush Tories on funding.  According to one Labour source, 'We have to act. The Tories already have their candidates in place in the marginals.... So far as the Tories are concerned, the election campaign is already under way. We cannot afford to leave things as they are.' Such examples make it obvious that parties in government use their access to the levers of electoral law to benefit themselves and disadvantage their opponents.

The Machinations and Pragmatism in ‘The Hollow Men’

Forget the new details of National’s relationship with the Exclusive Brethrens and allegations of the party’s dodgy financial links with business – the most interesting story in Nicky Hagar’s new book is the picture it paints of the internal machinations and cynicism of National’s leadership inner circle. Below is a synopsis of what Hagar found to occur in the parliamentary wing – based partly on Raymond Miller’s review of the book. As Miller notes, Hagar’s book conveys ‘an impression of cynicism towards the voting public bordering on contempt’. It would be naïve to assume that what goes on in the National Party is dramatically different to the other parliamentary parties.

Labour’s broken promise of free childcare

One of the Labour Party’s key election promises was to make 20 hours of free childcare available each week to three and four-year-olds – but in Parliament Parekura Horomia has finally admitted that the promise hasn’t been kept. 92,000 kids were supposed to receive the entitlement, but due to insufficient government funding for the scheme, childcare centres can't participate. For example, in Auckland and Wellington nearly 75% of childcare centres cannot provide the service, and the even amongst the centres throughout the country that are participating, some are charging ‘optional charges’ in addition. Labour is backtracking, saying now that ‘up to’ 92,000 kids will benefit.

National's weasel repayment scheme denies 'One law for all'

National is doing it's best to show it can weasel as good as any other party in it's latest attempt to avoid prosecution for its gst breach of the Electoral Act. To pay back the $112,000 it owes to broadcasters without incurring Electoral Commission action, National plan to pay the broadcasters the money to provide free advertising for charity groups. This benevolent-appearing action means that National have spent over the legal limit on broadcasting and don't get penalised for it. Amazingly, the Electoral Commission already appears to have OKed the plan. And broadcasters such as CanWest have indicated they'll take the money but provide no more charity broadcasting than already attended. Other broadcasters who do provide extra charity broadcasting, will essentially be doing it out of their own pocket. It seems clear that National should be avoiding such weasel schemes and just pay the money back - as countless commentators and editorials have recommended - see here and here. National passed the law pertaining to broadcast spending limits and penalties - and now treats these with disdain. Once again, it's clearly not 'one law for all'.

UK Conservatives tilt left; voters get cynical

The Conservative Party in the UK continue their attempts to outflank New Labour in the political centre by updating their social policy. Greg Clark, a shadow minister and confidant of David Cameron, is calling on the Tories to make poverty and inequality central issues and ditch the party's 'out of date' ideas about welfare. He wants the party to be less influenced by the old ideas of Winston Churchill and listen more to the liberal Guardian newspaper's leader social commentator. Meanwhile, former Tory Chairman and marketing guru, Lord Saatchi, has published a pamphlet entitled In Praise of Ideology, in which he says people are losing faith in politics because there is so little difference between the parties: 'The pragmatism of the centre ground turns politics into a commodity market - because pragmatism leads to opportunism, which leads to cynicism.' He says that the failure of young people to vote is a rational reaction, and we now have a 'super-cynical electorate' precisely because of the search for the centre ground.

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.

NZ health system diagnosed as sick

A recent health check on New Zealand's health system shows it to be rather sick compared to other OECD countries. The Commonwealth Fund survey put New Zealand near the bottom for several key indicators of health. For instance:

Public Heath funding (per person):
NZ = $1600;     OECD= $1900

Pharmaceutical spending (per person):
NZ= $174          OECD= $377

Hospital beds (per 1000 people):
NZ=3.2                OECD= 3.6

Physician numbers (per 1000):
NZ= 2.2              OECD= 3.2

Years of lost life due to diabetes (per 1000 people):
NZ=72                 OECD= 39

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.

Whither the architects of war?

The fall of Donald Rumsfeld is merely the latest in a long list of Iraqi-invading leaders that have been deposed or sidelined in recent times. Check out this very good Belfast Telegraph list detailing the whithering of the architects of the invasion of Iraq.

2.6 billion people suffer from inadequate sewage

The latest annual UN Human Development report says that 1.1 billion people do not have safe water and 2.6 billion suffer from inadequate sewage. And dirty water kills 5000 children a day. This is not an environmental issue so much as due to poverty and inequality. See the Guardian report on this.

Neo-dem lame ducks

The Democrats may be victorious in the US, but according to spiked-online they are lame ducks like the President. The party has expressed few principles during the campaign, and the mid-terms in general have 'confirmed the peculiar situation in which American society appears deeply polarized yet without experiencing any discernable political divide'. Meanwhile the Guardian points out that the new intake of Democrats include a large proportion of 'neo-Dems' who are pro-gun, anti-abortion and fiscally conservative.

UPDATE: See also, the NY Times article Incoming Democrats put Populism before Ideology.

Public policy - analysis and personal background

Following on from the article on Elizabeth Rata in the weekend, the Herald has run a counter to this by one of Rata's colleagues, Alison Jones, who points out that Rata is in fact pakeha and because Rata avoids talking about her background in relation to her views on ethnicity and public policy this means the reader can't properly evaluate her arguments. See the opinion piece below.

I too often like to know who is making an argument and what their background is. But I think Jones' argument is yet again an attempt to say 'You aren't from the group that you are analysing, and therefore you aren't fully entitled to speak about such things'. The fact that Jones states that 'outsider interpretations rarely provide genuinely useful insight' backs this up. And while she acknowledges that Rata is entitled to her point of view, you get the impression that Jones simply wants to close down debate. More than all this, I think Jones is simply politically opposed to Rata's viewpoint and is looking for an easy way to negate it. It's hard to see what Jones thinks someone critically-minded like Rata should do if she's interested in seriously analysing Maori inequality, other than ignore her conclusions.

Das Kapital: the play

A German theatre group has brought Karl Marx's lengthy classic treatise on the division of labour and capitalist modes of production to the stage. And it's popular! Every lucky theatre goer walks away with a copy of Volume 23 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels.

Social liberals win drinking vote

It's good to see the Raise the Drinking Age bill defeated - you can see how individual MPs voted here. As mentioned in an earlier post, this issue provided a fairly good measure of the social liberal or conservativeness of the parliamentary parties, with some split along these lines. Below is a characterisation of the parties based on how their MPs voted on this 'conscience' issue:

Greens 100% liberal
ACT 100% liberal
Labour 70% liberal vs 30% conservative
National 58% liberal vs 42% conservative
United 33% liberal vs 67% conservative
NZ First 100% conservative
Maori 100% conservative
Progressive 100% conservative

Not much to cheer about in Nicaragua

The Sandinistas are back in power in Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega's victory in the presidential poll. Much of the international left will be joyous, but unfortunately there's not all that much to cheer about. Ortega's shift from radical/revolutionary to opportunist populist was complete when he signed up for new anti-abortion laws, courted the Catholic church, and opted for renowned Contra supporter Jaime Morales as his vice presidential running mate. Ex-coffee picking brigadier, Andrew Anthony, has had a couple of good pieces on Ortega in the Observer and the Guardian, showing how founding Sandinistas have abandoned their party and the presidential campaign, which essentially represents a new coalition between the old oligarchy and the new Sandinista oligarchy that in power will continue to manage poverty in Nicaragua.

UPDATE: here's the WSWS analysis of Ortega's Victory and the Dead-end of Sandinismo

'We're all green now' - the Economist

Even that bastion of rightwing economics, the Economist, has celebrated the Stern report in the UK, and urged action. And the magazine has been typically perceptive in noting the significant consensus developing across the political spectrum:

Rarely can what passes for the British establishment have been so united. The leaders of the three main parties, the serious newspapers (bar one), the BBC and company chairmen greeted Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate change with such a chorus of gratitude that one might have thought the distinguished economist had single-handedly rescued the planet from certain destruction.

In contrast, and for some anti-capitalist class analysis on the issue, check out the following articles:

The limits of green politics
Development needed
Change and climate inseparable
Climate change and the necessity of communism

Ethnicity and public policy

Elizabeth Rata is an outspoken academic critic of the rise of neo-tribalism and its capitalist characteristics. She has a new book out called Public Policy and Ethnicity, the Politics of Ethnic Boundary Making, which makes the argument that public policy that is informed by racial lines rather than social inequality is undemocratic and dangerous, and that we need a new public policy informed by egalitarianism (which none of the parliamentary parties are offering).

A feature on Rata in the NZ Herald, tells of how in the 1980s she promoted the first kura kaupapa while a secondary school teacher, and she originally supported Maori retribalism and treaty policies because it was seen as a means to much greater social justice, yet she now sees such policies resulting in the formation of powerful and wealthy elites and enduring poverty. Although the Herald article reiterates Rata’s image as ‘the female Don Brash’, her arguments are solidly from the left, and much of what she has to say is very similar to what revolution magazine was publishing in the late 1990s.

The good ol' conservatives

Chris Trotter’s latest column sings the praises of good ol’ conservatives like Jim Bolger. But instead of recalling the Bolger days of the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act, benefit cuts, and engineered mass unemployment, Trotter only seems to remember National joining Labour’s bicultural consensus and negotiating the treaty settlements. He seems to be asking ‘Where have all those kind, compassionate National Party members gone?’ Read more below:

Legal lynching avoids punishing US crimes

By all intelligent accounts, the verdict and penalty against Saddam Hussein is the outcome of a show trial that should trouble not just anti-imperialists but liberal-minded people everywhere. While there’s no doubt that Saddam should have been tried, this event has been a farce, and it should have had nothing to do with the US administration. In fact, the USA (and UK) should also be on trial for unprovoked act of aggression that was the invasion of Iraq. The most credible study suggests that this has led to the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis. And of course the prior UN sanctions killed a million. A good critique of the show trial and context can be read here. And an excellent Robert Fisk comment on the hypocrisy of it all can be read in his article This was a guilty verdict on America as well.

UPDATE: John Pilger's latest column, Now let's charge Saddam's accomplices, brilliantly asks why Saddam should be alone in the dock. Surely, those who aided and abetted his crimes, and were accomplices in other great crimes committed against the Iraqi people, should be prosecuted, too.

The politics of John Lennon

I've always been fascinated by the intersection between music and politics. And because I'm a fan of John Lennon, I look forward to the new documentary The US versus John Lennon. Although I'm a bit embarrassed to say that the first time I started to listen to Lennon seriously, was after I misheard my older sister when she had just started university say that 'the only person who truly understood Marxism was Lenin'. Anyhow, the new film will be interesting, and there's a review of it in the New Statesman which says that although Lennon saw himself as a radical, was anti-authority, and he loved to stir things up, he was no political animal. But they provide some good Lennon quotes - such as: 'Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives' - which I tend to agree with. And pondering Lennon's supposed influence on getting the US out of Vietnam, the review asks a good question: 'now we have another hated president and a pointless war, and it certainly makes one wonder: which living pop stars with radical leanings or strong spiritual values will lead us out of Iraq? Billy Bragg? Sting? Cliff Richard?'

Vast majority of Brits fear Bush and oppose Iraq war

75% of British voters think George Bush is a great or moderate danger to world peace, according to a new Guardian poll. It's interesting that Bush is more feared than either Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And 69% believe US policy has made the world less safe since 2001. In terms of Iraq, 71% now say the invasion was unjustified. Similar opinions were also found amongst Canadians and Mexicans.

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:

Abortion rights eroding

Abortion is a big issue at the moment globally. I’m surprised to see the ‘pro-life’ movement seems to be in the ascendancy. Most notably, Nicaragua has passed a law completely banning all abortion (sadly with the support of Sandinista presidential candidate Daniel Ortega). The US state of South Dakota is about to have a referendum on banning abortion. And Poland is currently debating a ban on rape victims ending pregnancies. A Guardian summary of all this can be found here. Also, there was recently a very good article in the Guardian on the cultural silence surrounding abortion.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, abortion law is still rather backward, and I’m ready to be corrected, but abortion is only allowed up to the 12th week of pregnancy which is very restrictive. And now a NZ study of ‘Abortion in young women and subsequent mental health’ is playing an international role in helping the ‘pro-life’ campaign. A critique of this can be read in spiked-online article abort these lazy anti-choice arguments.

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.

Helen Clark on Iraq

I see that in Helen Clark's speech to the Labour Party conference in the weekend she again rejoiced about how 'hardly a day goes by' when she does not reflect on how correct she was not to send troops to Iraq. History is being rewritten to suggest that Clark and the Labour Party were against the war on terror. This conveniently forgets a few things:

• Labour fully participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (which isn't actually going a whole lot better than in Iraq).
• Labour sent a frigate to the gulf to help the US in the war
• Clark was quite ambivilent about sending troops to Iraq, professing a strong preference for a UN-mandated invasion, but an invasion nonetheless
• She fully believed that Iraq possessed 'weapons of mass destruction' and spoke numerous times in the lead up to the invasion about the need to disarm Sadam Hussein.
• Clark refused to have any criticism of the invasion of Iraq (until many months into the invasion when it was obviously a disaster)

For a fair opinion on this, see Nicky Hagar's argument that Clark and co put pragmatism before principle on the whole issue.

[political finance] State funding proposals

Details are emerging of the Labour Party’s proposal for a new regime of state funding for political parties. Parties would receive funding based on formula that gave a base figure supplemented by an amount per vote won (with a figure of $2 a vote suggested). According to a Dominion Post article, this would net Labour about £2m a year. There are a few significant problems particular to Labour's proposals:

1. This funding would not clean up current parliamentary funding, but would be in addition to the millions already taken annually by the parliamentary parties.
2. In receiving the funding, parties would be obliged to meet certain statutory requirements (who controls it, what it is spent on etc), allowing the state to further shape the nature and activities of parties.
3. Some parties would be excluded from funding, such as those not meeting a ‘threshold party vote’ – an undemocratic device similar to the 5% threshold under MMP, which would serve to keep more radical and small parties from developing.

[political finance] Labour Party finances

According to Labour Party financial accounts made public, the party’s large 2005 election campaign expenditure pushed the party significantly into deficit, which is now running at $600,000. The party probably hasn’t been in such poor financial state since 1988, following its huge 1987 re-election campaign spending.

Apart from calling for more state subsidies, the party’s response has been to impose a 10% increase on electorate levies, launch a new Century Fund campaign (hoping to raise $1m a year), and ask MPs to contribute more. On top of this, the party is hoping to pay back its additional $825,000 in unlawful spending with its ‘big whip round’. This is not a party in a healthy organisational state.