liberation

Inequality in NZ: [5] David Bromell on the economy of ideas

What if we solved economic inequality by passing a law that ‘the ratio of the top income to the bottom income in New Zealand ought not to exceed six to one’? Apparently this would mean ‘that no New Zealander should have a gross weekly income of less than $270 ($14,000 per annum) or more than $1600’. On face value this sounds fair to me. It’s one of the ideas raised by Ministry of Social Development Principal Advisor David Bromell in a thoughtful article entitled ‘Income inequality and the economy of ideas’ (Download David Bromell) which is published in the latest Policy Quarterly journal, and is based on his presentation to the recent University of Otago symposium entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’. The overall argument of Bromell is that turning a ‘big idea’ like economic equality into public policy comes at a cognitive, economic and political price. For instance, one of the cognitive prices we would need to pay in New Zealand is to move away from the ‘politics of identity’ towards ‘a politics of social stratification, social mobility and economic equality’. [Read more below]

Inequality in NZ: [4] The resurgence of issues of economic inequality

The previous blog posts in this series on inequality in New Zealand have sought to show and explain why economic inequality unfortunately does not matter in New Zealand politics and society – drawing attention to the decline of the political forces that would normally foster the idea that it matters. Yet although this trend has been strong for a decade or two, there are very real signs that it is being reversed in some significant but uneven ways. Throughout the western world there appears to be a resurgence of interest in, and concern about, economic inequality. This is examined in this fourth blog post (and final one derived from the draft paper (Download Why inequality doesn't matter) that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’. Future blog posts in this series will expand on some of the issues raised. [Read more below].

Crime and punishment in the Public Square

“For over a decade now, the Labour and National parties have been using law and order as an electoral weapon – both have been trying to outbid each other to be the most reactionary in terms of crime and punishment. This has meant that under the Clark Labour Government the prison population virtually doubled, and now National seem to want to keep it escalating. So in the 2011 general election, what are you going to do – and what can we do – to stop law and order policy being a cynical electoral weapon of the political parties?” – That’s the question that I asked last week at a ‘Public Square’ forum on Crime and Punishment at the University of Otago. The issues of crime and punishment have become central drivers in electoral politics, so the topic is worth considerable examination. [Read more below]

National to entrench backdoor state funding of parties

The illegitimate use of taxpayer funds by parliamentary political parties is set to be legalized and entrenched by the National Government’s proposed – but not widely debated – Parliamentary Services Amendment Bill 2010. This is quite a big deal. After all, the misuse of parliamentary funds by political parties has become the most controversial political finance problem in New Zealand. From the explosive Auditor General’s report on the 2005 general election spending on pledge cards etc, through to the controversy over ministerial credit card expenditure, the use of taxpayer funds by politicians has become one of the key issues in New Zealand politics. Although in the past the National party has been highly critical of the misuse of parliamentary funding by its opponents, it’s now keen to make this misuse worse. On surface appearances the proposed legislation appears to do the opposite – it appears to be clamping down on the use of parliamentary resources for partisan political purposes, but a closer reading of it shows that the key part of the legislation is that it only prohibits such expenditure for the three months prior to an election, leaving the parliamentary parties free to misuse taxpayer funds for approximately 2 years and 9 months of every parliamentary term. The implications of this indirect form of state funding are quite considerable – having the parliamentary parties generously funded by the state is not good for the party system and it’s not good for democracy. By making political parties reliant on parliamentary resources, the corollary is that they are less dependent on civil society; they don’t need to have deep and real connections with different organisations and movement in society; they don’t need to have large or active memberships. The parties increasingly become professionalized and removed from voters. What’s more the lesson from elsewhere is that this leads to – or increases – ideological convergence whereby political are increasingly all the same, and thus voters don’t have a meaningful choice at election time. This is why I put a submission into the Electoral Legislation Select Committee to oppose the bill. My oral submission (via telephone) yesterday was reported by NZPA – see: Bill could allow illegitimate use of taxpayer money: academic. My submission is reproduced below. [Read more below]

The Act Party loses its soul

Whenever a political party ceases to be relevant and loses its core reason to exist – effectively losing its ‘political soul’ – all manner of bizarre and dysfunctional personal behaviour arises and dominates the internal life of that organization. That’s what we’re currently seeing with the meltdown of the Act Party. For some time now within Act the focus on the ‘political’ has been replaced with that of the ‘personal’; what once was an intellectual powerhouse of the right with a coherent political goal and idealism has been transformed into a petty, personality-driven, feudal-like competition between ambitious and narcissistic individual egos. Instead of ideology, vision, and cohesion structuring such a party, we now see Act driven by desperation, bitter rivalries, free-flowing allegations, infighting and dirty tricks. Without a political soul, talented individuals in Act have been transformed into heavily flawed and unlikeable politicians. Without the dynamic of a higher-vision, the now extremely pragmatic Act has become an empty shell of a party, and what we’re seeing is the remnants bouncing around inside it. [Read more below]

Inequality in NZ: [3] The eclipse of economic inequality by ‘social inequality’

There are obviously different types of inequality that pervade contemporary New Zealand society. Traditionally the political left – and those concerned with equality –have been most concerned with socio-economic inequality, but this changed in last few decades of the twentieth century. This third blog post on ‘Inequality in NZ’ explains how the left shifted its concern from issues of economic inequality to that of social inequality, or as one academic book title put it, ‘How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality’ (Benn Michaels, 2007). The material in this blog post is taken from a draft paper that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’, and it also draws heavily on previous blog posts about ‘Identity politics vs class politics’.  [Read more below]

Inequality in NZ: [2] The role of the left in making economic inequality matter

The political left has traditionally been defined by, more than anything else, its agenda for increasing economic equality. In all its different forms – social democracy, socialism, communism, Marxism, anarchism, trade unionism – the left has pursued a fight against economic inequality and in favour of systems whereby the wealth and income can be more fairly distributed. The different elements of the left might have had many differences over means and goals, but their one uniting factor has been this orientation towards basic economic inequality. This used to ensure that politics in democracies like New Zealand was intrinsically concerned with issues of economic inequality and distribution. Voters had a choice between parties, movements, ideologies that represented two different approaches to the distribution of material, and this kept issues of economic inequality on the political agenda in some form or another. The left-right dimension thus structured New Zealand parliamentary electoral politics. For fifty years New Zealand politics orientated to the basic socioeconomic cleavage in which Labour and National were in dynamic competition. This has obviously changed significantly, as this blog post will argue. The material in it is taken from a draft paper that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’, and it also draws on some previous blog posts.  [Read more below]

 

 

The 2010 Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture: Annette Sykes

Helen Clark labeled her as one of New Zealand’s ‘haters and wreckers’; she’s friends with Hone Harawira; in 2008 the Listener declared her to be the third most powerful New Zealander in the law field; she’s represented Tame Iti against police charges such as terrorism; she’s the darling of many leftists, anarchist and liberals; she’s a strong critic of Labour’s Foreshore and Seabed legislation, and this year she will be presenting the prestigious Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture at the University of Auckland. Annette Sykes' lecture topic will be ‘The Politics of the Brown Table’. This sounds like a very appropriate topic for analysis in 2010, especially with the Treaty Settlements supposedly coming towards an end, the foreshore and seabed issue being ‘fixed’, and the Maori Party’s internal contradictions being resolved in favour of a Maori elite. Unfortunately, Sykes is actually more of a nationalist than a leftist, and so her analysis will not be a progressive one, but a Maori Nationalist one, which has little real connection with anything leftwing, and certainly nothing that Bruce Jesson would have had anything in common with. [Read more below]

 

Inequality in NZ: [1] Why economic inequality doesn’t matter

Issues of economic inequality have been absent from the parliamentary political system in recent years. Few political actors now raise questions about the distribution of material wealth. Quite simply, economic inequality does not matter in New Zealand politics. This reflects the general decline of the political left, and the defeat of ideologies and movements that are most associated with combating economic inequality. Class politics has been at a very low ebb in recent years, and the ideas of socialism, Marxism, egalitarianism, anti-capitalism have been largely discredited and out of fashion in both New Zealand politics and academia. The left itself – whose traditional raison d’être has been the struggle for greater economic equality – has been both marginalized and transformed into something other. In general the left in New Zealand – and elsewhere – has become less concerned with issues of economic inequality, and more concerned with other forms of social inequality and struggle, leaving a substantial lacunae in politics. The ‘old politics of equality’ has been superseded by ‘the new politics of equality’ which rejects the previous goal of economic egalitarianism in favour of an emphasis on anti-discrimination legislation and rights for identity groups. This might be termed the victory of ‘identity politics’ over class politics. Yet this situation is now changing in some key, albeit tentative, ways. A combination of factors, including the arrival of the worst economic recession since the 1930s and the unraveling of the identity politics project, has produced a small but significant revival of interest in issues of economic inequality in the last few years. Class politics is not yet re-emerged to structure or characterize New Zealand politics like it used to, but we can see the signs that it is at least partially alive, and therefore economic inequality may yet come to matter again in New Zealand politics. The blog post below is the first in the series of posts on inequality in New Zealand. The first four posts in this series are taken from a draft paper that I delivered to a interdisciplinary Workshop on Inequality at the University of Otago in June entitled ‘Why Economic Inequality Matters’. [Read more below].