Posts tagged ‘Labour’


Back, on the new box

28.03.2022

There are a few experiments going on here now that this blog is on the new server. Massive thanks to my friend who has been working tirelessly to get us on to the new box and into the 2020s.

First, there’s a post counter, though as it’s freshly installed, it doesn’t show a true count. There is a way to get the data out of Yuzo Related Posts into the counter—even though that’s not entirely accurate, either, it would be nice to show the record counts I had back in 2016 on the two posts revealing Facebook’s highly questionable “malware scanner”.
 

 

Secondly, we haven’t found a good related post plug-in to replace Yuzo. You’ll see two sets of related posts here. The second is by another company who claims their software will pick up the first image in each post in the event that I have not set up a featured image or thumbnail; as you can see, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

Some of you will have seen a bunch of links from this blog sent out via social media as the new installation became live, and I apologize for those.

Please bear with us while we work through it all. The related post plug-in issue has been the big one: there are many, but they either don’t do as they claimed, or they have terrible design. Even Wordpress’s native one cannot do the simple task of taking the first image from a post, which Yuzo does with ease.
 
Recently a friend recommended a Google service to me, and of course I responded that I would never touch anything of theirs, at least not willingly. The following isn’t addressed to him, but the many who have taken exception to my justified concerns about the company, and about Facebook, and their regular privacy breaches and apparent lack of ethics.

In short: I don’t get you.

And I try to have empathy.

When I make my arguments, they aren’t pulled out of the ether. I try to back up what I’ve said. When I make an attack in social media, or even in media, there’s a wealth of reasons, many of which have been detailed on this blog.

Of course there are always opposing viewpoints, so it’s fine if you state your case. And of course it’s fine if you point out faults in my argument.

But to point the “tut tut” finger at me and imply that I either shouldn’t or I’m mistaken, without backing yourselves up?

So where are you coming from?

In the absence of any supporting argument, there are only a handful of potential conclusions.

1. You’re corrupt or you like corruption. You don’t mind that these companies work outside the law, never do as they claim, invade people’s privacy, and place society in jeopardy.

2. You love the establishment and you don’t like people rocking the boat. It doesn’t matter what they do, they’re the establishment. They’re above us, and that’s fine.

3. You don’t accept others’ viewpoints, or you’re unable to grasp them due to your own limitations.

4. You’re blind to what’s been happening or you choose to turn a blind eye.

I’ve heard this bullshit my entire life.

When I did my first case at 22, representing myself, suing someone over an unpaid bill, I heard similar things.

‘Maybe there’s a reason he hasn’t paid you.’

‘They never signed a contract, so no contract exists.’

As far as I can tell, they were a variant of those four, since one of the defendants was the president of a political party.

I won the case since I was in the right, and a bunch of con artists didn’t get away with their grift.

The tightwad paid on the last possible day. I was at the District Court with a warrant of arrest for the registrar to sign when he advised me that the money had been paid in that morning.

I did this case in the wake of my mother’s passing.

It amazed me that there were people who assumed I was in the wrong in the setting of a law student versus an establishment white guy.

Their defence was full of contradictions because they never had any truth backing it up.

I also learned just because Simpson Grierson represented them that no one should be scared of big-name law firms. Later on, as I served as an expert witness in many cases, that belief became more cemented.

Equally, no one should put any weight on what Mark Zuckerberg says since history keeps showing that he never means it; and we should believe Google will try one on, trying to snoop wherever they can, because history shows that they will.
 
Ancient history with Google? Here’s what its CEO said, as quoted in CNBC, in February. People lap this up without question (apart from the likes of Bob Hoffman, who has his eyes open, and a few others). How many people on this planet again? It wasn’t even this populated in Soylent Green (which supposedly takes place in 2022, if you’re looking at the cinematic version).
 


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Targets painted, opposition misses again

03.12.2021

Our government’s response to COVID-19 has been better than many nations’, but it is far from perfect, as Ian Powell points out in a well reasoned blog post, and in his article for Business Desk. It’s backed up by a piece by Marc Daalder for Newsroom. To me, Powell’s piece makes a great deal of sense, and for those who feel the new system feels, instinctively, politically driven, then they are right. He says, inter alia:

At the time I thought that the traffic lights system had been initiated by the Ministry of Health (experts outside the Ministry were not supportive). Subsequently, however, according to senior Health Ministry officials privately, it came from the Prime Minister’s department.
   This helps explain the working it out as you go along approach that is causing confusion among many. Jacinda Ardern’s claim of the system being world leading is overcooked.

   He cites Daalder, who writes:

While the outbreak was expected to have a long tail, the Government fully intended to return to zero cases and even to maintain an elimination status after reopening the borders in 2022.
   Just two weeks later, Cabinet threw in the towel on elimination.

   We know that the government is working on overdrive through this whole pandemic, but it seems there are areas where the experts are being overridden.
   But what does our opposition do? Instead of firing at the targets that Powell and Daalder have helpfully revealed, new leader Christopher Luxon repeats the ad nauseam cries of his predecessors to open up, to put Auckland into the “green”. Any expectation that National had found pragmatism with its new leadership vanished in smoke mere days after Luxon took the helm.
   This is the identical complaint I have over Sir Phony Blair over in the UK with not only missing the targets painted on the Tories by themselves, but turning 180 degrees and firing the other way.
   We need an opposition that holds a government to account but it seems Luxon, who bafflingly refers to Simon Bridges as having ‘intellectual heft’, might be yet another ideologue, importing more of the same but in more hidden, calm language than his predecessor.
   Are there any pragmatists left in politics, or is everyone following ideology these days?


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The British media are telling you they want you to vote Conservative

03.12.2019


George Hodan

Those who remember Visual Arts Trends, a publication created and edited by my friend Julia Dudnik-Stern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, might recall that I didn’t have kind words about the Rt Hon Tony Blair and his government. In those pre-Iraq war days, one reader was so upset they wrote to Julia, who, to her credit, defended my freedom to express a political view.
   It was actually quite rare to attack Blair, Mandy, the Blairites and Labour then—the fawning interviews given to Blair by the likes of Sir David Frost, and so many of the British media establishment made their 1997 campaign relatively easy. They shrewdly pitched themselves, light on substance and heavy on rhetoric, and that may have been what I was calling out. For once, I don’t recall too clearly, but I can tell you that I do sweat, and did so even when the Falklands were on.
   How times have changed. In 2019, an independent study has shown that Labour largely gets negative press coverage in British newspapers, while Conservative gets positive. As covered in The Independent, Loughborough University researchers assigned negative scores to negative articles and positive scores to positive ones, to arrive at an index.
   In the period from November 7 to 27, 2019, coverage on Labour scored –71·17 in the first week, –71·96 in the second, and –75·79 in the third.
   By contrast, the Tories received +29·98, +17·86 and +15·87.
   Tonight, Colin Millar’s thread made for an interesting read, where the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.

   Now, I’m sure I’ve shifted my position on things, but generally not in the same year. And yes, Labour itself hasn’t had the best comms in the world.
   However, the UK population, and, for that matter, we here in New Zealand, look at the state of news in the US and think we somehow are above the phenomenon of “fake news”. But it’s very clear that we aren’t, and I have insisted for years that we aren’t. This may be uncomfortable for some, but the truth often is. I can only imagine some are all right with being lied to, just as they are all right with being surveilled by Big Tech.
   There seems to be little outrage in a week when an article by the UK PM saying that his country’s poor are made up of chavs, burglars, drug addicts and losers emerges, and that poverty is caused by low IQ. In a separate story of his, admittedly older than mine for Julia, he says that children of single mothers are ‘ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate’. One wonders what our former PM, Sir John Key, raised by his mother, makes of that.
   Just like 1997, one side is being given a free pass by the British media, whether you like them or not. Are ‘we British’ smart enough to see through it? History suggests we are not.


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TPPA-11: same thing, different face

22.02.2018


Neil Ballantyne/Wikimedia Commons

How much has TPPA changed? Not a lot, according to this petition. The full content is below, and if you agree, click through to dontdoit.nz and add your signature. Point (e) is the one that most of us understand, and according to the petition, it’s still there.
   While all trade agreements have some form of investor–state dispute settlement process, what has leaked out (since the process remains secret) about TPPA, and TPPA-11, is that the process remains unfair. ISDSs have morphed into something where corporations can get far more than a fair go against governments that might, for example, nationalize their assets, which were their original intent, one that I think is fair. But here are some examples of where things can go terribly wrong, and there’s nothing in TPPA-11 that (apparently) prevents these sorts of things happening.

We, the undersigned, express our grave concern that:
(a) The Labour Party, New Zealand First and the Green Party all said in the Select Committee report on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) that they would not support its ratification;

(b) The text agreed by eleven countries after the US pulled out, the TPPA-11, remains the same as the original TPPA, with a small number of items in the original text being suspended, not removed;

(c) The government has promised a new inclusive and progressive approach to trade and investment agreements, but there is nothing new and progressive to justify the renaming of the TPPA-11 as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership;

(d) There are many provisions in the TPPA-11 that restrict the regulatory sovereignty of the current and future Parliaments;

(e) The Government has instructed officials not to include investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in future agreements, yet the TPPA-11 still contains the core investor protection rules that can be enforced through ISDS;

(f) The secrecy that the governing parties criticised in the original negotiations continues and that the text will apparently not be released until after the agreement is signed;

(g) There has been no analysis of the economic costs and benefits of the TPPA-11, including the impact on employment and income distribution, as the governing parties called for in the select committee report;

(h) There has been no health impact assessment of the revised agreement as called for by the current Government in the select committee report, nor any assessment of environmental impact or constraints on climate action;

(i) The Crown has not discussed ways to improve the Treaty of Waitangi exception and strengthen protections for Māori as the Waitangi Tribunal advised;

(j) Despite these facts, the Government has announced its intention to sign the TPPA-11 on 8 March 2018;

and urge the House to call upon the Government:

(k) not to sign the TPPA or the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership;

(l) to conduct a principles-based review of New Zealand’s approach to free trade, investment and economic integration agreements that involves broad-based consultation;

(m) to engage with Māori to reach agreement on effective protection of their rights and interests consistent with te Tiriti o Waitangi and suspend negotiations for similar agreements until that review is concluded;

and further, urge the House to pass new legislation that

(n) establishes the principles and protections identified through the principles-based review under paragraph (l) as the standing general mandate for New Zealand’s future negotiations, including;

i. excluding ISDS from all agreements New Zealand enters into, and renegotiating existing agreements with ISDS;

ii. a requirement for the government to commission and release in advance of signing an agreement independent analyses of the net costs and benefits of any proposed agreement for the economy, including jobs and distribution, and of the impact on health, other human rights, the environment and the ability to take climate action;

iii. a legislative requirement to refer the agreement to the Waitangi Tribunal for review prior to any decision to sign the treaty; and

(o) makes the signing of any agreement conditional on a majority vote of the Parliament following the tabling in the House of the reports referred to in paragraph (n) (ii) and (iii);

and for the House to amend its Standing Orders to

(p) establish a specialist parliamentary select committee on treaties with membership that has the necessary expertise to scrutinise free trade, investment and economic integration agreements;

(q) require the tabling of the government’s full mandate for any negotiation prior to the commencement of negotiations, and any amendment to that mandate, as well as periodic reports to the standing committee on treaties on compliance with that mandate;

(r) require the tabling of any final text of any free trade, investment and economic integration agreement at least 90 days prior to it being signed;

(s) require the standing committee on treaties call for and hear submissions on the mandate, the periodic reports, and pre-signing version of the text and the final text and report on those hearings to Parliament;

(t) require a two-third majority support for the adoption of any free trade, investment or economic integration agreement that constrains the sovereignty of future Parliaments that is binding and enforceable through external dispute settlement processes.

   Given New Zealand First’s vehement opposition to it while outside of government, it’s hard to believe that the minor changes would have satisfied the party so easily.
   If you have the same concerns as the petition writers, and believe our government should do (k) through (t), then the petition’s at dontdoit.nz.


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Does TPPA redux protect Big Tech?

25.01.2018


SumOfUs/Creative Commons

Prof Jane Kelsey, in her critique of the still-secret Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership (formerly the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement [TPPA]) notes in The Spinoff:

The most crucial area of the TPPA that has not received enough attention is the novel chapter on electronic commerce—basically, a set of rules that will cement the oligopoly of Big Tech for the indefinite future, allowing them to hold data offshore subject to the privacy and security laws of the country hosting the server, or not to disclose source codes, preventing effective scrutiny of anti-competitive or discriminatory practices. Other rules say offshore service providers don’t need to have a presence inside the country, thus undermining tax, consumer protection and labour laws, and governments can’t require locally established firms to use local content or services.

   If this new government is as digitally illiterate as the previous one, then we are in some serious trouble.
   I’m all for free trade but not at the expense of my own country’s interests, or at the expense of real competition, and the Green Party’s position (I assume in part operating out of caution due to the opaqueness of the negotiations) is understandable.
   Protecting a partly corrupt oligopoly is dangerous territory in a century that will rely more heavily on digital commerce.
   While there may be some valid IP reasons to protect source code, these need to be revealed in legal proceedings if it came to that—and one hopes there are provisions for dispute settlement that can lift the veil. But we don’t really know just how revised those dispute settlement procedures are. Let’s hope that Labour’s earlier stated position on this will hold.
   Google has already found itself in trouble for anticompetitive and discriminatory practices in Europe, and if observations over the last decade count for anything, it’s that they’ll stop at nothing to try it on. Are we giving them a free ride now?
   Despite Prof Kelsey’s concerns, I can accept that parties need not have a presence within a nation or be compelled to use local content or services. But the level of tax avoidance exhibited by Google, Facebook, Apple et al is staggering, and one hopes that our new government won’t bend over quite as easily. (While I realize the US isn’t part of this agreement, remember that big firms have subsidiaries in signatory countries through which they operate, and earlier trade agreements have shown just how they have taken on governments.)
   She claims that the technology minister, the Hon Clare Curran, has no information on the ecommerce chapter’s analysis—and if she doesn’t have it, then what are we signing up to?
   However, Labour’s inability to be transparent—something they criticized the previous government on—is a weak point after a generally favourable start to 2018. The Leader of the Opposition is right to call the government out on this when his comment was sought: basically, they were tough on us when we were in government, so we hope they’ll live up to their own standards. Right now, it doesn’t look like it. I suspect Kelsey is now the National Party fan’s best friend after being vilified for years. Bit like when Nicky Hager (whom one very respected MP in the last Labour government called a right-wing conspiracy theorist) wrote Seeds of Distrust.
   And the solutions that Kelsey proposes are so simple and elegant that it’s daft they weren’t followed, since they are consistent with the Labour brand. I know, trade agreements can stay confidential at this stage and this isn’t unprecedented. But that’s not what Labour said it wanted. At least these suggestions would have shown some consistency with Labour’s previous positions, and given some assurance that it’s in charge.

What should a Labour-led government have done differently? First, it should have commissioned the revised independent economic assessment and health impact analyses it called for in opposition. Second, it should have shown a political backbone, like the Canadian government that also inherited the deal. Canada played hardball and successful demanded side-letters to alter its obligations relating to investment and auto-parts. Not great, but something. New Zealand should have demanded similar side-letters excluding it from ISDS as a pre-requisite for continued participation. Third, it should have sought the suspension of the UPOV 1991 obligation, which has serious Treaty implications, and engaged with Māori to strengthen the Treaty of Waitangi exception, as the Waitangi Tribunal advised. Fourth, it should have withdrawn its agreement to the secrecy pact.

   I once joked that National and Labour were basically the same, plus or minus 10 per cent. On days like this, I wonder if I was right.


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All I really know is who I won’t vote for

29.08.2017

One thing I love about New Zealand is that we’re not mired in an election cycle years before the event. We’re three weeks or so out from our General Election, and only now am I feeling things are heating up.
   It’s not that we haven’t had drama. Weeks ago, Metiria Turei was co-leader of the Greens, Andrew Little led Labour, and Peter Dunne was aiming for another term as MP for Ìhāriu and leader of United Future. None of these hold true in late August.
   What is unusual is that I’m undecided because of all these late changes, and we’re still learning about policies in some cases—I remember getting my manifesto out six months before an election, and the uncertainty here isn’t helping. The billboards have done nothing to sway me one way or another. Policy-wise, I have some things in common with each of the parties, excepting ACT, though probably like most New Zealanders, I haven’t had a chance to visit all the parties’ websites yet, though I will in the next few weeks. Various websites helping people decide based on stated policy actually give very different answers: On the Fence suggests I am both a National and Labour supporter (I often kid and say the parties are the same, just plus or minus 10 per cent); yet taken earlier, it said United Future and Māori Party were the top two with the most in common with me. Vote Compass gives Green and Mana. The websites, then, are no help, because they base their answers on selected issues, and apparently I’m both right- and left-wing.
   Twitter is comparatively quiet in 2017, giving fewer clues about how candidates are thinking, and I hardly look at my Facebook (for obvious reasons). I have spied some of the TVCs, where Labour has done an excellent job, and (last I looked) National has uploaded only one to its YouTube channel, so I can’t even see the first one that has been on telly. A lack of coordination between online and traditional media worries me.
   It’s an odd mix, none of whom really stand out.
   The incumbent National Party currently has an unimaginative TVC that is an adaptation of the rowers of 2014, and it only serves to highlight that, after three terms, they are out of touch. Say what you will about the former PM, the Rt Hon John Key, he had a pretty keen sense of the electorate. Not so this National Party, where the Deputy PM gave this quote:

   I see my friend Andy Boreham suggests ‘Minster’ is a misspelling of ‘Monster’, but such a point makes a mockery of New Zealanders’ belief (even if it does not hold true with growing inequality) that being Deputy PM is no greater a duty or more important a job than being a union leader. Some might have voted for National before on the premise that John Key is rich (I’m sure that worked for Trump, too), but, as we know, they aren’t going to return the favour of a vote by giving up a share of their wealth with you. PM Bill English, whom I first met while he was Treasurer in 1999, is an intelligent man with a sense of humour that doesn’t come across on television, and that won’t hold him in good stead this time out. Pity: there are many National MPs I like (e.g. Paul Foster-Bell, Simon O’Connor). The Nats’ 2002 campaign with Bill as leader was a disaster: I saw no outdoor advertising when I came back from Europe. This time there’s a lot of outdoor, but none of it says anything to me, other than National has spent some money licensing new fonts. I should note that no one has won an election for a long, long time in this country using a typeface that has a single-storey lowercase a.
   Labour has staged a turnaround like no other, one where leader Jacinda Ardern is neck in neck with the PM on one preferred prime minister poll. I had dismissed Labour earlier on as a party with unhealable divisions, but the speed at which Ardern and her party have pulled together an overhauled campaign is to be commended. I’ve never voted Labour before, and I’m still not convinced that the divisions are gone, but I will say this of Ardern, just as I once did of myself when I stood for office in my 30s: if we screw it up, we have a lot, lot longer to live with the consequences. She will take this seriously. She has had more parliamentary experience at this point than Key when he first got to the PM’s office, and former PM Helen Clark has endorsed her. Rose-coloured glasses about the Clark administration will help, even if I was critical of certain aspects of it back then. Post-Little, Labour could get more Chinese New Zealanders voting for them, too, after an earlier screw-up with a real estate agent’s list that was handled horribly. Chinese NZers have long memories, and some labelled the gaffe racist. Ardern is a departure from Little and the message here is ‘Don’t hinder Jacinda.’
   Peter Dunne’s decision not to stand in Ìhāriu means that the United Future party is at an end. It’s a shame, because I have always got on with Peter, and he has been generous to me with his time, more so than my own MP. Similarly, the Greens’ James Shaw I count as a friend of over seven years, but the Turei scandal has left the party hurt, even if its policies remain on track. The signage has been appallingly dull, bereft of imagination, even if James’s performance in a recent Nation debate clearly marks him out as the intellectual, aware of global trends. If we want a globalist (or at least a globally aware MP) in Parliament, then we could do far worse than ensuring the Greens get in above the 5 per cent threshold. Strategically, a party that has its origins in the environment (even if that message hasn’t been hammered home of late) makes sense, as I believe we need to protect ours desperately. Vote Compass says I’ve most in common with the Greens this time out, and Toby Morris makes a good point with his latest cartoon.
   The Opportunities Party has some good points—I’m in favour of closing tax loopholes for foreign companies operating on our shores—and its leader, Gareth Morgan, who normally comes across as lacking the common touch, did well in the debate, at least when he had something to say. I’ve followed Morgan on Twitter for some time, long before this political foray, and often liked what he had to say. However, at either website TOP and I don’t have that much in common.
   The Māori Party, as my supposed second choice based on On the Fence (at least the first time out a few weeks ago), could have received my vote after Peter decided not to stand, but Marama Fox’s performance in the above debate didn’t impress me, even if she impressed all the talking heads in the studio. It goes to show how different things are in person. Fox has passion and fire, but didn’t have the figures to back up her policies—and I know from having been on the podium with my opponents that you should have them, and your researchers should have at least come up with an estimate. I don’t know where Mana sits; I had a far better idea when Kim Dotcom was involved.
   New Zealand First, helmed by the Rt Hon Winston Peters, the most establishment of all the politicians who successfully carries on an antiestablishment message, has signage up with Peters’ face and the words ‘Had enough?’ On that note I find accord with New Zealand First’s message. I have had enough of Winston Peters, and I answer their advertisement in the affirmative. But I shan’t be voting for them.


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The political caricatures of old have taken human form, but they’re still nothing like us

09.05.2015

That’s another British General Election done and dusted. I haven’t followed one this closely since the 1997 campaign, where I was backing John Major.
   Shock, horror! Hang on, Jack. Haven’t the media all said you are a leftie? Didn’t you stand for a left-wing party?
   Therein lies a fallacy about left- and right wings. I’ve never completely understood the need to pigeonhole someone into a particular camp, when I would say most people on this planet hold a mix of views from both sides. Now that politicians are not unlike caricatures—there has been a “rightward” shift where the policies being adopted by some are so outside economic orthodoxy that they look like what their Spitting Image counterparts would have uttered back in the day—this holds more true than ever. We know what subscribing to certain parties’ views fully and completely is like: we risk looking loony, and, if taken too far, we risk becoming loony.
   But the spin doctors and advisers aren’t in to transparency. They are into their talking heads conveying what they feel the public responds to, hence Mitt Romney, once an advocate of universal health care in his own state, becoming an opponent of it when he ran for president; or, for that matter, Ed Miliband’s insistence on the ‘budget responsibility lock’, to demonstrate that he had a handle on the economy, when Economics 101 told us that austerity isn’t a good way to help the economy along and Miliband began sounding like Cameron lite.
   My support of Major in the 1997 General Election, which went against the prevailing view at the time, was down to several reasons. Unlike Cameron, Major didn’t practise austerity, but he did practise conventional economics with the government going more into deficit through increasing spending during the early 1990s’ recession, knowing the stimulus to be affordable, and knowing it had to be paid back once the economy was healthy again. It is interesting to note Sir John’s own goal while campaigning for the Tories in this General Election, when he said at the Tory Reform Group annual dinner, ‘We need to acknowledge the fact we have a pretty substantial underclass and there are parts of our country where we have people who have not worked for two generations and whose children do not expect to work.
   â€˜How can it be that in a nation that is the fifth richest nation in the world, that in the United Kingdom we have four of the poorest areas in Europe? I include eastern Europe in that question.’
   How indeed. The John Major who was prime minister will have answered that easily, and his own record illustrates just why he avoided such consequences in the 1990s that Cameron was unable to.
   The second reason was that I really believed the ‘classless society’ speech, and if you have read his memoirs, or even biographies written about him, then there was a real personal experience woven into that. Critics will point at the fact the speech was written by Antony Jay (Yes, Minister) or the fact that Britain invented To the Manor Born and such sitcoms, but, generally, why should only certain classes have the ability to excel and do their best? Everyone should have that opportunity, and the measures implemented under the Major premiership, while not as far to the left as traditional socialists would have wanted, struck a good balance in my view in an immediate post-Thatcher period. We should always be wary of sudden shifts, whether they’re swings from the left to the right, or vice versa. A pragmatic approach seemed sensible.
   Third, it was precisely that Major was not a Thatcherite, even if Margaret Thatcher might have believed him to be when she made him Chancellor of the Exchequer, a job that he wanted most of his political life. But what we had in his very shrewd opponent in 1997 was Thatcherism, or at least monetarism. As we know from Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s early move in allowing the Bank of England to be free of political control, their belief that this would avoid boom-and-bust cycles was not realized. However, the evidence does show that the freedom has coincided with a period of low interest rates and stable inflation, but equally one can credit the work of the Tories in handing New Labour a booming economy in May of that year. As Major noted at the time, it was rare for a government to lose while the economy was improving, but the Labour campaign, ably assisted by biased media at the time, and the easy pass Blair got from the British establishment despite being very, very vague about his policies, was hard to beat. All he had to do was utter ‘Change’ and ‘It’s about New Labour, new Britain.’ It hid, to those of us watching the General Election and the year before it, New Labour’s Thatcherite aims. I am not even that sure what Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson were doing in the party to begin with.
   This might be contrasted with a Tory party weakened through allegations of sleaze (and we know now that no party is any less sleazy than the other, but it depends on when you are caught out) leading Major to fight a campaign largely alone with the occasional publicity boost from the Spice Girls. No matter how specific the PM got, it didn’t matter. (Or, as I had told many of my design classes at the time when I was teaching, the Conservatives’ Arial was no match for Labour’s Franklin Gothic, a typeface family that, incidentally, was used by Thatcher in her 1983 election campaign, and by Labour in New Zealand in 1999 and 2002.) It was frustrating to try to discern what Labour’s specific policies were from Down Under, watching the General Election campaign with keen interest. And those lack of specifics worried me from the start, which explains why when I ran for office, I issued a manifesto early in the game. I liked being first, even if the electorate didn’t put me there.
   Whether you agreed with Labour or not, and many would argue that the Blair and Brown years were not stellar, the divisions in their party—which I imagine we will see reemerge in the next few days—indicate that even within there is a great deal of polarization. The Thatcherites are in there, except they are called Blairites. And while Sir John put his weight behind his party out of loyalty, and from his earlier political years witnessing how ‘Labour isn’t working’ (the Wilson–Callaghan years must have been formative for him given his age), his comments at the dinner are telling on just where modern Conservative economic policies under George Osborne differed to his own and those of Norman Lamont. If people are suffering, if they aren’t getting their shot at the ‘classless society’, then is the place any good? If the class divide has grown, contrary to Sir John’s own views, and weakened Britain as a result of the contraction of economic players in it, then even the “right” can’t support that. To me, I thought conservatism was letting everyone have a shot, and about solid, national enterprise, and this century hasn’t given me much faith that that applies very widely.
   Labour might have campaigned on that and on preserving the NHS although having listened to Miliband, I was never totally convinced. Perhaps, I, too, had concerns about Labour vagueness, and until this General Election I had not followed the Shadow Cabinet closely enough to know the thinking and histories behind the players. That area, I will leave to others to comment. In some respects, the caricature comment I made above applies to Labour, too.

Contrasting the Tories this time with the party I knew a bit better through observation—the two terms of John Major—I feel they are very different. And, sadly, I draw parallels with the National Party here at home, where people attempt to compare incumbent John Key with Sir Robert Muldoon (1975–84), and I simply cannot see the parallels other than the colour of the branding.
   Sir Robert resolutely believed in full employment, the rights of the unemployed, the state ownership of assets, energy independence, and his ability to fight his own battles. Had attack blogs been around then, he wouldn’t have needed them. I do not agree with everything about his premiership, and his miscalculation of public opinion over the Gleneagles Agreement and the environment is now part of history. However, his terms are still being misjudged today, with an entire generation happily brainwashed by both the monetarist orthodoxy of the 1980s and a prime-time documentary (The Grim Face of Power) aired after his death (probably to avoid a defamation suit) to belittle his legacy. (The contrasting documentary made many years later, Someone Else’s Country, was buried on a weekend afternoon.) We did not have to wait months for a telephone, nor did we not have cars to buy; yet the belief that the electorate has a collective memory of only five years means we haven’t a hope of comprehending fully what happened thirty years ago. But to those of us who pride ourselves on a decent memory, and I believe if we seek public office we must have one, then things were never as bleak as people believe. He was sexist, yet I do not believe him to want to preside over a divided New Zealand, and his own books reveal a desire for unity. Unfortunately, looking at a man born in 1921 through the prism of 2015, plenty of his sayings look anachronistic and passĂ©, but once context is added, the New Zealand we look at today looks more divided.
   We, too, have an underclass that has emerged (those begging for change weren’t there two decades ago, nor were so many food banks), through economic policies that have weakened our businesses. Both major parties deserve criticism over this. For a country where experts have said we must head toward technology to end our reliance on primary products, other than software patents, we have had a strange record over intellectual property with a prime minister who was against certain copyright amendments before he was for them (and voted accordingly). A New Zealand resident who adopted the same rules over copyrighted materials as Google and Dropbox has been indicted by the US Government—that’s right, I am talking about Kim Dotcom. It’s a reminder that we haven’t done enough for our tech sector, the one which governments have said we should aid, which can help our overall economy.
   We are hopelessly behind in how much technology contributes to our economy, and we have done little to support the small- to medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of our economy. Instead, we have been selling them short, welcoming ever-larger multinationals (who usually pay tax in their home country, not ours) and giving them more advantages than our own. Since when has allegiance to these foreign players ever been part of politics on the left or on the right? If we are to support businesses, for instance, we should be negotiating for our own milliard-dollar enterprises to make headway into new markets. Xero et al will thank us for it. Globalization is as much about getting our lot out there so they can pay tax back here. Politicians should be patriotic, but toward our own interests, not someone else’s.

Therein lie my many posts about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on my Facebook. It is precisely because I support business that I am against a good part of what has been leaked so far. (I am aware that many trade agreements are negotiated in secret, so there is nothing new there.) It is precisely because I believe in a level playing field for Kiwis that we should be careful at how we liberalize and in what sectors and at what pace we should do it. The curious thing there is that the substantial arguments (obviously against it) have come from the “left”, or friends who identify as being left-wing, while some who have identified as being right-wing have bid me an indignant exit from the discussion by attacking the players and not their utterances, and yet somehow the lefties are branded the woolly, emotional wrecks?
   As I wrote last year, ‘All I want are facts, not emotional, ideological arguments. On the evidence for me, things are leaning toward the anti side. I come from the standpoint of the market being a man-made construct and people are not numbers.
   â€˜â€Š [T]here are cases going on with tobacco companies where they are using IP to argue that plain packs are contrary to trade agreements. So where do you draw the line with public health versus a foreign enterprise profiting? I’d like to see healthy people not taxing the system, and plain packs were a foreseeable development IMO for a tobacco manufacturer. [I know this is an argument that is typically trotted out, but I use it since there is at least one case out there.] A wise tobacco company would have acquired businesses in other fields (as some have done), just as Coca-Cola, seeing the tide turn against sodas, have bought up water, energy drink and juice businesses. It’s wise investing, and it’s progress.
   â€˜There is nothing wrong with the notion of a trade tribunal but what has been emerging from the leaks are ones where corporations can be compensated for loss of profits based on, say, plain packaging. If a government is democratically elected to implement such a policy, and corporations have always understood investments to be subject to the laws of the land (including the risk of divestment in some), then should their rights trump that of the citizens? This is the danger here, and this is the heart of the sovereignty argument.
   â€˜Another example is with software patents, which our country has voted to do away with. It’s been shown that that would spur innovation.
   â€˜The tendency is that TPPA is against these moves, although given the secrecy we do not know for sure. But reading other IP provisions it does not take a big leap of the imagination.
   â€˜â€Š Do I believe in global free trade? Absolutely. But I also believe in making sure that people have the means the buy the stuff I sell, and to me this treaty (based on what has been leaked) does not ensure that. I also believe in social responsibility and that citizens have their basics looked after so they can participate in commerce. I am pro-innovation, especially in smaller enterprises where some great stuff is taking place, and we have reasonably robust IP laws already and conventions that govern them. I’m not saying I have a complete alternative that replaces it, but some of the work we have done at the Medinge Group touches on these issues.’
   One argument in favour is: if we are not party to this, then does this mean we will get shut out of it? I’m not entirely sure we will in that we are already one of the freest markets in the world, although I welcome arguments and past examples. In the areas I know well, the absence of a free-trade agreement with the US, for instance, have never hampered our firm exporting there, but I realize for our primary producers there have been obstacles. But do such agreements mean unimpeded access when it’s so easy, even under WTO, to erect non-tariff barriers? And why should corporations’ rights trump citizens’, as opponents are quick to point out?
   â€˜At the end of the day,’ to borrow a phrase, all human systems are imperfect. And the market is just as human as any other. My belief is that your own citizens, and their welfare, must be placed first, and we should support our own people and our own businesses. The political caricatures that certain parties have now rendered into human form don’t necessarily appear to understand this, certainly not by their actions. This is at the crux of the arguments that I saw from Labour supporters in the UK General Election, and to some extent from those who opposed National and ACT in our one last year. Labour’s loss here, too, in my view, can be placed on a leader who himself came across as unsubstantial on TV as his opponents; and his refusal to resign can be contrasted to the behaviour of Miliband and Nick Clegg yesterday. He could have always pulled a Nigel Farage.
   The sooner we get away from notions of “left” and “right” and work out for ourselves where we’d like our country and our world to head, we will start working together without these false divisions. I might add that “being Asian” in this country is yet another false division. No wonder most people are sick of politics, politicians and “politics as usual”, because most of us cannot be bothered pigeonholing ourselves. We just want to do what’s decent and honourable and have the chance to get on with it.


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Little Big Man was antiestablishment, as is big man Little: straight talk is what Labour needs

28.11.2014

The Hon Andrew Little MP has had a good first week as Leader of the Opposition. Some are saying what a breath of fresh air this straight-shooter is.
   He’s been an MP for three years. And in the context of Labour, which has factions within, that’s a good thing. A guy who isn’t tainted by the system, of favouring one lot over another, or of having got into the role by playing games.
   He’s also learned not to pick fights that are a waste of time. While some on the left would have attempted to drag on the PM’s latest gaffes over Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn’s findings, Little is looking like a leader by saying: ‘It’s time to say game over, John. Front up, admit the truth, tell New Zealanders. Say sorry and we’ll all move on.’
   He even acknowledges that once upon a time, the Prime Minister ‘was once a reasonably straight shooter but no longer.’
   That outsider’s perspective that Mr Little has is going to stand Labour well, and already New Zealanders are seeing that it won’t be “politics as usual”.
   Same-again politicians, as both left and right have seen, can be very dangerous to our system, with their tendency to be more and more disconnected from everyday voters.
   Labour might have its first pragmatic leader in years. That dĂ©but address made good watching, and this is a guy who claims public speaking is his weak suit.


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About Labour, I was nearly on the money in May

20.09.2014

In May, I wrote (in the wake of the Oravida scandal):

The problem with all of this is: where’s Labour, in the midst of the greatest gift an opposition has been given for years?
   One friend of a friend noted that maybe Labour shouldn’t be attacking, because we Kiwis don’t like whingers. It is the charge I hear from friends on the right. Labour should, instead, be coming up with solid policies and leave the attacks to the Greens (which is doing a marvellous job) and Winston Peters (need I say more? He remains a great political wordsmith).
   For me, I’d like them to do both if they are to stand a chance. The job of the Opposition is to oppose.
   And failure to oppose strongly may suggest to the electorate that the same thing could happen under Labour.
   Six months out from the election I contested, I had my policies published—which one blog noted was unusual but welcome. That meant my policies were out for twice as long as my opponents’.
   We’re talking about a party that has been in opposition for a long time, long enough to know what it wishes to do should it be handed the reins of government.
   And yet, apart from a few policy announcements here and there, it has been silent. You’d think the names of the Shadow Cabinet would be in our consciousness by now. Embarrassingly, I even forgot David Cunliffe’s name recently in a conversation. I could only call him ‘not-Robertson’. (It is better than the PM calling Grant Robertson ‘Perry Mason’ today, I hasten to add.)
   It makes me wonder if Labour isn’t working and whether the anti-National vote will, indeed, head even more to the Greens this year.

My last paragraph was off about where the anti-National votes went, but the old Saatchi & Saatchi headline held true in the 2014 General Election: Labour isn’t working. I don’t think I need to restate what I wrote four months ago—and what I had been saying even before that.


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I thought political division got you nowhere in New Zealand

23.08.2014

A week and a half ago, I appeared on Back Benches to talk about Winston Peters MP’s “two Wongs” joke, and confined my comments to that.
   My response, ‘There are still people who enjoy watching Rolf Harris, just as there are still people out there who enjoy listening to Winston Peters.’ And, ‘We have a politician here who says he does not believe in race-based laws, and yet everything he utters is race-based 
 Can’t he walk the talk?’ His is a passĂ© joke, and of course there’s no way Mr Peters would have heard it in Beijing—since the Wong surname does not exist in Mandarin.
   It’s a shame he resorts to this old technique because I find myself agreeing with a number of his statements when it came to the Dirty Politics revelations. And had I more time on Back Benches, I would have explored this further.
   There were three MPs on the show, Annette King (Labour), Scott Simpson (National) and Russel Norman (Greens). Ms King and Dr Norman were up front enough to call the joke racist, while Dr Norman went so far as to call it ‘unacceptable’ and ‘disgraceful’, while Mr Simpson merely passed it off as ‘Winston being Winston.’
   Mr Simpson’s dismissal is in line with his Prime Minister’s, who called it ‘a stunt’. And it brought back the PM’s unflinching reaction to Paul Henry implying back in 2010 that the then-Governor-General, Sir Anand Satyanand, did not ‘look or sound like a New Zealander’.
   That has been covered here before, but I read comments at the time that John Key’s predecessor, Helen Clark, would have taken Henry to task over the comment.
   I plainly don’t notice someone’s colour and I suspect most people do not, but I do notice accents, and Sir Anand sounds exactly like what you would expect from an Auckland Grammar alumnus: if linguists were to pin down just where he was from, I’m fairly confident they would find it was Auckland.
   Once I can forgive. The PM was in the heat of an interview in 2010, he had his points to make, and it’s very, very easy not to answer the question put before you. In the YouTube clip, I didn’t directly answer one of Damian Christie’s questions.
   But twice? This is not ‘a stunt’, this is something that goes to the heart of the casual racism that occasionally gets spouted in this country. It has no place in Aotearoa, and in election year, you would think that the Prime Minister, wanting to capture votes from Kiwis of all stripes, would take a rival to task over it. Politicians in the past aimed to paint an inclusive New Zealand, not one where people are cast out by race or, as we have seen post-Dirty Politics, by whether they are on the left or on the right.
   Author Nicky Hager is now, according to the PM, ‘a screaming left-wing conspiracy theorist’ for writing his book, one where the allegations have been carefully written to avoid legal action, and one where there are no emails to refute what he claims. Watching the fallout has been instructive: the ACT Party has completely defused the allegations over the Rodney Hide “blackmail” stance thanks to early, measured, and direct statements from Mr Hide and from lawyer Jordan Williams, and the burden has been lifted. It didn’t take much. David Farrar, who admittedly is not a central figure in the book, comes across as an intelligent and genuine National Party member and supporter. But National has played a divisive game once again, and that has been disappointing, especially for those quality MPs the party has outside of the Cabinet.
   You can say that its poll numbers are comfortable enough for National not to attempt to get voters on “the left”, but if I were running right now, I honestly wouldn’t care what your political leanings were. I’d want your vote. I’d know there were swing voters out there, and I’d also know that most New Zealanders, who tend toward centrist politics, have policies on the left and the right that they favour. Why isolate them by insulting some of their beliefs, or pigeonholing them as belonging to one group or another?
   Or, why, for that matter, associate with blogger Cameron Slater if he is a ‘force of nature unto himself’ (if I have quoted the PM correctly).
   And he is. I actually have little problem about the man having an opinion and expressing it on the internet. I’ll even go so far as to defend his right to hold an opinion and to express it freely even if I do not agree with it.
   I might not agree with Mr Slater’s venomous ‘I have come to the conclusion that Maori are thick. Dumber than your average bear. Stupid. Dumb and Dumber rolled in one. Dumber than a sack of hammers,’ and ‘My patience with Maori is at an end. They are venal, corrupt, lying, lazy useless fuckers,’ but he has a right to say it.
   It’s like “two Wongs”.
   Those who don’t like it can say so, too.
   The PM’s defence so far of his and his party’s association with Mr Slater (which suddenly has become less tight than it was portrayed earlier this year) is effectively “this is OK, because Labour contacts left-wing bloggers”. Sorry, John. If there is a blog out there that spews this kind of hatred, the normal thing for any right-thinking New Zealander to do is to isolate its writer. To make sure that his brand of venom is as far away from you as possible. You just don’t risk it for the sake of votes. You do not cozy up to him, even minutely—which is now the image you wish to portray. To have your government and your party willingly associate with him is precisely the sort of divisive politics that has no place in this country.
   The tactics have been compared to the Muldoon days. I disagree: if Rob Muldoon thought you were a knob, he would come out and call you a knob.
   I don’t think he would recognize his party.
   As Muldoon himself put it (in Muldoon):

A great deal of New Zealand’s history has in fact been recorded in detail and it as [sic] at least as interesting as that of older countries. To read it is to understand why so much damage is being done by a small group of stirrers who have fomented the hateful cry of “racism” in recent years. New Zealand does not have a colour bar, it has a behaviour bar, and throughout the length and breadth of this country we have always been prepared to accept each other on the basis of behaviour and regardless of colour, creed, origin or wealth. That is the most valuable feature of New Zealand society and the reason why I have time and again stuck my neck out to challenge those who would try to destroy this harmony and set people against people inside our country.

   And I can’t see decent National Party people like Paul Foster-Bell or Simon O’Connor ever engaging in these sorts of tactics. At the local level, Kerry Prendergast never did when I ran against her in 2010.
   Despite these efforts from our politicians, I still believe in inclusiveness, and that when you stand for public office, you are prepared to represent everyone in your constituency, even those you might not like or hold different beliefs to you. I said of a racist who wrote on my wall in 2013, ‘If elected, I’m happy to represent you, too.’ I don’t think that’s an idealism found in the Coca-Cola Hilltop commercial, but the reality of someone who wants the job of public office. Maybe it’s naĂŻvetĂ©, but I can’t see what division and negative campaigning get you in New Zealand.


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