I'd seen a few of these floating around the net; and, given our new 21st century inclinations, indulging in a little meme-warfare seemed only right. So, without further ado, I give you NZF Youth - What We Actually Do.
8 months ago
Sunday, February 19, 2012
neat infographics
One of our ardent campaigners from Tauranga made a few infographics for the 2011 campaign.
We think you'll agree they're pretty neat!
We think you'll agree they're pretty neat!
PHARMAC
WHAT ARE WE REALLY SELLING?
ECONOMIC LAW REFORM
LAW REFORM
REGULATORY REFORM
Whale Oil Beef Thugged
It's no secret I don't like FailOil.
And, given that he's tried to tar me with everything from fascism to misogyny, one strongly suspects the feeling is mutual.
I've had the ... dubious pleasure of having to engage with everyone's favourite beneficiary bludger on several occasions, during which he's done his darndest to prove the ancient maxim: "Never fight with a fool. He'll try and drag you down to his level and then win by virtue of experience." Or possibly boxing and-or a cycle-race when the verbal and intellectual gymnastics required for actual debate get beyond him.
Anyway, the point of this post isn't to bitch about him. I've got far larger targets to worry about (which is saying something); the Government for one.
Rather, I'm writing to draw your attention to what I hope will be The People's Liberation Front of Aotearoa's answer to the Mendicant Menace ... a new blog creatively entitled Whale Oil Beef Thugged.
Happy Harpooning ;)
And, given that he's tried to tar me with everything from fascism to misogyny, one strongly suspects the feeling is mutual.
I've had the ... dubious pleasure of having to engage with everyone's favourite beneficiary bludger on several occasions, during which he's done his darndest to prove the ancient maxim: "Never fight with a fool. He'll try and drag you down to his level and then win by virtue of experience." Or possibly boxing and-or a cycle-race when the verbal and intellectual gymnastics required for actual debate get beyond him.
Anyway, the point of this post isn't to bitch about him. I've got far larger targets to worry about (which is saying something); the Government for one.
Rather, I'm writing to draw your attention to what I hope will be The People's Liberation Front of Aotearoa's answer to the Mendicant Menace ... a new blog creatively entitled Whale Oil Beef Thugged.
Happy Harpooning ;)
Saturday, February 18, 2012
A Man Whose Economic Forecasting Makes Astrology Look Respectable
I see Bill English has just admitted he made up some of the figures on asset sales.
He's also said that the fiscal impact of the sales will be "roughly neutral" and will leave us with "less debt".
Well that sounds familiar. Where have we heard Bill English talking about "fiscally neutral" "debt-reducing" economic programs before.
Oh that's right, it was those "fiscally neutral tax cuts" that put a $1.1billion hole in the books.
Surely that's a one-off. Highly trained economics professionals and an experienced finance minister aren't in the business of putting out fallacious figures and then sheepishly revising them when they're caught out ... are they?
Unfortunately, yes they are.
Note what happened there. Before the election, our competent economic managers were talking about 3.4% growth for the next year. Post-election, it's 2.8%. That might not sound like much, but by my amateur calculations, that indicates Treasury was out by something like 17%. Hardly reassuring.
But don't despair! We may have screwed up and over-estimated how well the recovery'd be going by now by nearly a fifth ... but there is good news! We're actually going to grow by 3.8% the year after that! Not 3.3% like we previously claimed!
Again, these are figures out by an amount of less than twenty per cent, although this time in the government's favour. This might ordinarily sound plausible, but consider why Treasury revised its figures for growth till March '13 downward. It reckoned it had overestimated the economic benefits of the Christchurch rebuild and underestimated the severity of the ongoing Eurozone crisis.
This would be the already-much-vaunted Christchurch rebuild that's apparently going to account for 1.25% of GDP growth over the next five years, and the Eurozone crisis every man and his dog (although apparently not every minister and his lapdogs) has been witnessing deteriorate for months now.
But wait ... it gets worse.
Pandering to National's base, pre-election English's ministry was claiming it'd be able to deliver a $1.45 billion surplus for 2014-15. Post-election it's claiming it will be able to deliver a $370 million surplus.
Wow. The Nats have somehow managed to lose more than a billion imaginary dollars out of their "Brighter Future." Presumably that's even after the well-above-valuation revenue they're expecting to reap from those well-mandated asset sales we keep hearing about.
Anyway, my point is simple. Governor Mario Cuomo pithily stated that "you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose". Or, put another way, from the perspective of a Minister of Finance wishing to maintain his ministerial salary, it's fiscally prudent to over-state how well he's doing before the election ... but the closer one's forecasts come to fruition, the more prudent it becomes to revise them downward toward reality.
Not that GDP growth forecasts from the boy who cried fiscal stimulus package actually have much worth anyway.
Of course, it's one thing to fudge one's economic forecasting; in that case Treasury's economic sooth-sayers can, as they have done, plead ignorance of changing circumstances in a "dynamic environment" as explanation (even though this looks these days more like a case of the Austrian economists burying their collective head in the sand).
It's quite another thing to simply make up numbers.
Or, being charitable to English, merely repeat made-up numbers from the year before in the hope nobody's noticed the continuing falsehood.
However, in fairness, these numbers tend to come from Treasury - a department which, as Harold Wilson observed "could not, with any marked success, run a fish and chip shop." We have thus come to expect a certain level of incompetence in the numbers department from the people we presumably pay to be reasonably accurate about the economy. With this in mind, the standard gNat line of defence when called on the frequently wild inaccuracy of a Treasury entrail reading is to pass the buck and point out that the Minister did not come up with the projection and that it's therefore someone else's fault.
Witness English's response above. When Guyon Espiner calls him on the credibility of the 170,000 jobs figure, English retreats and insists Treasury forecasting is "done independent of the government"; despite the fact he shares a "sense of confidence" in those forecasts.
With respect, the Minister should not be able to have it both ways. He can't put forward a made-up number as evidence the economic policy contained in his Budget is working (and, presumably, has been working for some years given the figure's repetition), then when called on the question as to whether it's predicting job growth for this or some other, more successful economy state that Treasury, not him, did the portent-reading. He especially can't do it when it turns out that his own government is patently unaware of any hard evidence for the number in question. Either he has confidence in his forecasting or he doesn't, and taking the above statements at face value, he patently does.
Thus, whichever way you look at it, this is a government whose economic forecasting makes astrology look respectable, which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that a Maori economic axiom from the 1860s still holds true today. Namely, NEVER TRUST THE ENGLISH.
He's also said that the fiscal impact of the sales will be "roughly neutral" and will leave us with "less debt".
Well that sounds familiar. Where have we heard Bill English talking about "fiscally neutral" "debt-reducing" economic programs before.
Oh that's right, it was those "fiscally neutral tax cuts" that put a $1.1billion hole in the books.
Surely that's a one-off. Highly trained economics professionals and an experienced finance minister aren't in the business of putting out fallacious figures and then sheepishly revising them when they're caught out ... are they?
Unfortunately, yes they are.
Note what happened there. Before the election, our competent economic managers were talking about 3.4% growth for the next year. Post-election, it's 2.8%. That might not sound like much, but by my amateur calculations, that indicates Treasury was out by something like 17%. Hardly reassuring.
But don't despair! We may have screwed up and over-estimated how well the recovery'd be going by now by nearly a fifth ... but there is good news! We're actually going to grow by 3.8% the year after that! Not 3.3% like we previously claimed!
Again, these are figures out by an amount of less than twenty per cent, although this time in the government's favour. This might ordinarily sound plausible, but consider why Treasury revised its figures for growth till March '13 downward. It reckoned it had overestimated the economic benefits of the Christchurch rebuild and underestimated the severity of the ongoing Eurozone crisis.
This would be the already-much-vaunted Christchurch rebuild that's apparently going to account for 1.25% of GDP growth over the next five years, and the Eurozone crisis every man and his dog (although apparently not every minister and his lapdogs) has been witnessing deteriorate for months now.
But wait ... it gets worse.
Pandering to National's base, pre-election English's ministry was claiming it'd be able to deliver a $1.45 billion surplus for 2014-15. Post-election it's claiming it will be able to deliver a $370 million surplus.
Wow. The Nats have somehow managed to lose more than a billion imaginary dollars out of their "Brighter Future." Presumably that's even after the well-above-valuation revenue they're expecting to reap from those well-mandated asset sales we keep hearing about.
Anyway, my point is simple. Governor Mario Cuomo pithily stated that "you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose". Or, put another way, from the perspective of a Minister of Finance wishing to maintain his ministerial salary, it's fiscally prudent to over-state how well he's doing before the election ... but the closer one's forecasts come to fruition, the more prudent it becomes to revise them downward toward reality.
Not that GDP growth forecasts from the boy who cried fiscal stimulus package actually have much worth anyway.
Of course, it's one thing to fudge one's economic forecasting; in that case Treasury's economic sooth-sayers can, as they have done, plead ignorance of changing circumstances in a "dynamic environment" as explanation (even though this looks these days more like a case of the Austrian economists burying their collective head in the sand).
It's quite another thing to simply make up numbers.
Or, being charitable to English, merely repeat made-up numbers from the year before in the hope nobody's noticed the continuing falsehood.
However, in fairness, these numbers tend to come from Treasury - a department which, as Harold Wilson observed "could not, with any marked success, run a fish and chip shop." We have thus come to expect a certain level of incompetence in the numbers department from the people we presumably pay to be reasonably accurate about the economy. With this in mind, the standard gNat line of defence when called on the frequently wild inaccuracy of a Treasury entrail reading is to pass the buck and point out that the Minister did not come up with the projection and that it's therefore someone else's fault.
Witness English's response above. When Guyon Espiner calls him on the credibility of the 170,000 jobs figure, English retreats and insists Treasury forecasting is "done independent of the government"; despite the fact he shares a "sense of confidence" in those forecasts.
With respect, the Minister should not be able to have it both ways. He can't put forward a made-up number as evidence the economic policy contained in his Budget is working (and, presumably, has been working for some years given the figure's repetition), then when called on the question as to whether it's predicting job growth for this or some other, more successful economy state that Treasury, not him, did the portent-reading. He especially can't do it when it turns out that his own government is patently unaware of any hard evidence for the number in question. Either he has confidence in his forecasting or he doesn't, and taking the above statements at face value, he patently does.
Thus, whichever way you look at it, this is a government whose economic forecasting makes astrology look respectable, which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that a Maori economic axiom from the 1860s still holds true today. Namely, NEVER TRUST THE ENGLISH.
Don't fix what isn't broken. FFS.
In New Zealand politics the phrase "the more things change, the more some things stay the same" is perhaps nowhere more relevant than people wanting to try and 'fix' New Zealand's national treasure that isn't broken: ACC. You only really have to have a quick look at the last three years to see this in action, while those who've been alive longer and paying attention for longer have had to watch it since the 90's.
In the news today the government announced it is considering raising ACC levies just months after it lowered it them. And evidence gathered by a Hazel Armstrong indicates that this is being done by Nick Smith purely to 'level the playing field' with insurance companies who are getting some entry into the work account starting in October.
So basically ACC levies are low and cheap but apparently we need to make them more expensive so we can make room for some private insurance competition. Awesome for those insurance companies I guess but annoying for everyone else who seems pretty happy with ACC. PriceWaterhouseCooper, the nearest thing to an independent body we can get I suppose, was pretty happy to call it the best system of its kind in the world as recently as 2008.
A quick cycle back in time to 2009 makes this talk about levy cuts and levy rises to make room for competition seem rather strange. Two years ago according to the government ACC was in a horrible deficit and insolvent.
ACC, which has consistently performed among the world's best in health outcomes and ensuring comprehensive coverage for all New Zealanders since 1974, was apparently in such dire straits in 2009 that one young ACTer proclaiming to fight for less government and against monopolies had a solution to fix the whole thing!
"Liberty Scott" boldly proclaimed: "The monopoly has failed miserably, once again. The measures National are announcing are patching up a system that is breaking". The young libertard’s solution was pretty elegant and simple: bust up the whole thing, or as he put it "move fast ... to individualize the whole system". Free the markets! (and also some horrendously complex stuff in practice about grandfathering in existing claimants. Or even worse tendering them out because of course we need free market competition to take up a work burden that doesn't currently exist).
So yeah. What do we make of this? Well Liberty Scott does look like a muppet 3 years later doesn't he. But what 'Liberty Scott' represents isn't just some phenomenon that looks stupid recently, nor is it constrained to sub-par blogs. Neo-liberalism has a storied tradition of this type of stuff and it has broken more than a few things since the 80’s to get a quick fix for a few people.
Unfortunately the tradition of trying to break stuff so a few rich mates can get their fix seems to be continuing from Nick Smith to Judith Collins in 2011 - although admittedly not as drastic as Liberty Scott’s proposed 2009 solution.
But also since 2009 then there have been some fantastic changes. Those changes of course being that ACT got individualized down to one MP and NZFirst is back in action working hard to not fix things which aren't broken. I'm glad to say to Liberty Scott that NZFirst has a monopoly on really understanding the value behind our public healthcare system and his bullshit is laughable.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Return of the NZF Party Party
In case you missed NZF's election night party, TVNZ has recently put footage of it back up on their OnDemand service. Kicks in around the 9:20 minute mark immediately after the ACT Party finishes embarrassing itself (I say "finishes", but it's going to be a long three years waiting for that to happen, unfortunately).
Solid appearances from Ryan, Anya & Mattias; as well as the Curwen-Montage.
In my own words, "We'll change the slogan from 'Bring Back Winston' to 'Keeping The Bastards Honest!'"
Solid appearances from Ryan, Anya & Mattias; as well as the Curwen-Montage.
In my own words, "We'll change the slogan from 'Bring Back Winston' to 'Keeping The Bastards Honest!'"
The Sir Robert Muldoon Center For Time-Warp Research
Every so often here in NZF Youth, something momentously cool happens.
Last week, for instance, several of us were privileged to be sitting in The House watching our MPs giving their Maiden Speeches.
To commemorate the moment I whipped out my copy of Sir Robert Muldoon's "The New Zealand Economy, A Personal View", and got our entire caucus (with the unfortunate exception of Denis O'Rourke) to sign it.
I'd been reading it on the plane down, and had been struck once again by the book's qualities as a repository for what "Old New Zealand" and a National Party better described as "Nationalist" rather than "InterNational" meant.
Where else would you find a National leader proclaiming the strong enthusiasm of the Kiwi people for trade unions; or expressing his distaste for letting theoretical economists run rampant and wild with the direction of our economy.
So many lessons, so many reflections on what we used to be and what we could have been.
It called to mind a quotation of Reagan's; who, upon being asked why he'd left the Democrats and joined the Republicans (not many of you knew he began political life as a Democrat, did you :P ) stated, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left me."
So too, New Zealand First and the Muldoonist party of old; with National leaving behind our ambition to Think Big and to Dream Even Bigger in order to trust in the abacus-tweaking, ivory-tower-endorsing, grand-economic-revolutionizing 'promises' of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia (with the end result, might I add, of "OurYouthInAsia").
Where else would you find a National leader proclaiming the strong enthusiasm of the Kiwi people for trade unions; or expressing his distaste for letting theoretical economists run rampant and wild with the direction of our economy.
So many lessons, so many reflections on what we used to be and what we could have been.
It called to mind a quotation of Reagan's; who, upon being asked why he'd left the Democrats and joined the Republicans (not many of you knew he began political life as a Democrat, did you :P ) stated, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left me."
So too, New Zealand First and the Muldoonist party of old; with National leaving behind our ambition to Think Big and to Dream Even Bigger in order to trust in the abacus-tweaking, ivory-tower-endorsing, grand-economic-revolutionizing 'promises' of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia (with the end result, might I add, of "OurYouthInAsia").
With this in mind, this book and these signatures symbolize for me not so much a return for New Zealand to the values of the 1970s - how could we, and why should we. Rather, it symbolizes a return to Parliament of some of the Muldoonist values. A hard-headed pragmatism, a fiercely combative style that calls fools to account from across the political spectrum; a compassionate Nationalism; a recognition that "the whole concept of Government is based on Intervention"; and most important of all, a driving conviction that "economic management is not a matter of textbooks and algebraic equations. It is people".
I should thus like to end on that sage economic advice coded into Sir Rob's role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show; "It's just a jump to the left ... and then a step to the right", and with the indelible hope that we can indeed do the time-warp again.
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