A Monstrous Government for Women

The biggest event in politics this week just gone has surely been the emerging National scandal surrounding the government's handling of the recent imbroglio surrounding a certain Malaysian diplomatic staffer.

In it, we saw the reprehensible spectacle of a gaggle of greying politicians and senior bureaucrats initially falling over themselves to avoid culpability for the string of events that had lead to a Kiwi victim's right to efficient, local justice being abjured due to either "miscommunication" or more sinister diplomatic considerations involving our eighth largest trading partner.

This was a failing that was only compounded when the relevant Minister responsible's apparent first apology was not to the victim - and McCully's own countryman and paymaster ... y'know, the person he's supposed to be serving as a Minister - but rather to the Prime Minister, assumedly for the cardinal sin of creating a political sideshow in an election year.

I am certainly not alone amidst commentators casting aspersions in the direction of the government for this; but would suggest that this government's issues with failing to properly support Kiwi women go far further and deeper than one sorry diplomatic and legal snafu.

Its handling of this one attempted rape case has quite rightly raised questions in the last week; but vital services like Rape Crisis and the Women's Refuge have been underfunded and closing their doors or heading to central government replete with begging bowls and lodging appeals through the media for funding for months now.

Let's be clear about this. Thanks to National, back in 2012, we literally had a situation wherein an absolutely essential service for Wellington women (in the form of Rape Crisis) was being kept alive and afloat by donations from a pizza company trying desperately to fix its PR after using an incident of sexual assault as a marketing ploy. (Just in case there's any ambiguity here, for the purposes of this piece, I'm slightly more interested in castigating National for creating a situation wherein Hell's intervention was necessary, than I am in vituperating *their* egregious lapse) And yet the Young Nats have the audacity and the gall to try and claim "women's rights" as a National Party cause.

If anything, I'd say that this government's attitude toward victims of abuse and sexual assault is far more strongly evinced by its callous series of decisions to underfund vital services like those above and stop collecting stats on domestic violence, rather than its sudden decision to look like it's attempting to move mountains when all eyes are upon it over this latest scandal.

We can but hope that the logical connection between attempting to bring one alleged attempted rapist to trial here in NZ; and the rightness of supporting other survivors whose personal cases *haven't* made the leap to being election year news circuses is not too long a bow for National's Cabinet to draw.

Of course, given the prominence and salience of women within the National Party's own Caucus and Cabinet, it is perhaps not surprising that the government has not always done the best job of keeping issues most strongly relevant to women at the front of the political (and Budget) agenda. While crude quantitative rubrics for female representation are ultimately an inferior measurement for how female-friendly a party is as compared to, say, its policy and legislative record; the number of females a party puts forward to represent it also tells us a few things about that party's organizational culture and values.

At present, of National's 59 MPs, 15 are female (just over 25%). Of their Ministers in Cabinet, it's six out of twenty (30%); and eight out of twenty five Ministers all up (32%). (And including the government's 3 support party ministers, it comes to nine out of 28 and also about 32%) It's also interesting to note that gender balance within National's Caucus has actually gone slightly *backwards* from where it was under the "chauvinist" Don Brash in 2005. It's certainly interesting to speculate about the nature of a party's interior culture if it's habitually producing gender disparities in its representation such as these.

Of course, it's not like the government's problem is exclusively a National one. If you look at the National Party's support partners, the problem only gets worse. Of the five seats held by the government's support parties, only one is actually occupied by a female ... outgoing Maori Party MP, Tariana Turia.

Now, for those of you in the audience who may think that the single female MP of a party theoretically dedicated to representing and supporting a marginalized people such as our first nations might be a friend and ally of the feminist movement ... well just check out what she had to say on abortion. The easy availability of pregnancy-termination for young Maori is "an excessive focus on controlling our fertility" (I'm assuming by the state); while a teen pregnancy rate for the same demographic five times that of non-Maori is something that apparently cannot be construed as a potentially negative issue; and a woman's fertility is described as a "precious gift" that is "not meant to be the responsibility of one person, alone".

If she got any more overtly pro-life, she'd be able to hand out a latter-day Cross of German Motherhood.

Looking ahead to September 21st later this year, I'm not entirely sure that the problem's going to resolve itself, either. National hasn't released its List yet, so there's very little point playing female fantasy football with its Caucus arrangements - but in terms of support partners, the Maori Party looks likely to either shrink down to a port-a-loo sized Caucus of one (male), or possibly be wiped out entirely depending upon how Waiariki goes. ACT remains the Party of Rich White Men by both policy and politician; while possibly the greatest political bogey-man faced by the cause of Kiwi women is probably the specter-cum-spectacle of Colin Craig entering into Parliament.

If his many and various pronouncements about female promiscuity, how he'd resign as an electorate MP rather than vote in favour of on-demand abortion; or the word of Russel Norman about what Craig thinks the place of women is, aren't enough evidence for you ...

... then perhaps consider the fact that Colin Craig is apparently his party's Spokesman for Women's Affairs (a distinction he shares with Australian Minister for Women's Affairs, Tony Abbott); and his stated belief that "gender equality is one of those concepts that's mostly on paper. I'm not sure that this is something that's a government thing". I suppose it takes a certain sort of person to immediately ask the question "where are the blokes?" when questions as to how we move to secure greater gender equality and egalitarianism are raised.

So what can we do about it?

Well, on September 20th, as you're no doubt almost tired of being reminded by now, you've got a choice.

You can support one of the parties or candidates who've contributed to a government which apparently views $80 million dollars for a coinage-revamp as apparently being a greater spending priority than $30,000 to keep Christchurch's SafeCare rape crisis service open; and which evidently doesn't see anything particularly wrong or hypocritical in showing off Paula Bennett as an example of the sort of transformative support for women which the welfare system can deliver ... while simultaneously cutting and rolling back for the *next* generation of women who need them exactly the same support mechanisms she herself relied upon.

Or, you can do something different.

You can support parties and candidates which have proven track-records of fostering pro-female policies; and inclusive, egalitarian organizational cultures.

If you're not quite sure where to start, this graphic and accompanying BFM interview might be helpful.

In terms of the key non-government players of this election, each of Labour, The Greens, NZ First, and Internet-MANA can make a strong appeal for your vote. Labour's Caucus has always played host to strong female and female-friendly MPs and was prepared to undertake controversial measures to attempt to ensure greater gender equity therein, while Young Labour additionally deserves recognition for trying to get their parent party to take a stronger stance on abortion.

The Greens' commitment to gender equity hardly requires elaboration, and if you like the idea of achieving parity in representation via internal party rules that can be invoked to secure a 1:1 gender balance in Caucus and a gender-split co-leader position ... then I guess you'll like The Greens. There's certainly much to appreciate in the records of their eight female MPs (from a Caucus of 14, so 57%). Personally, I'm somewhat more wildly excited about their absolutely awesome policy of FINALLY decriminalizing abortion.

As applies my own beloved New Zealand First, I can genuinely state that I'm proud to belong to a Party with near-parity within our Caucus (3/7 MPs, or 43%; and it would be a 50-50 4/8 split if Brendan Horan had resigned his seat upon leaving the Party, allowing next-on-the-List Helen Mulford to come in), and with an active culture of supporting women within positions of power and influence within the Party (at last count including the Deputy Leader, Party President, something like half the Party executive, and numerous Chairpersons and other officeholders). I'm particularly proud of this, because unlike either Labour or the Greens (who use targets and quotas), we've managed to achieve this purely through organizational culture and promoting from our own recognized female talent pool.

Meanwhile, MANA has its whole "Wahine Toa" thing going on (and will likely acquire some gender diversity in its Caucus with the likely election of Annette Sykes later this year); while as for the Internet Party ... well, I think I'll let Miriam speak for herself.

In any case, while this article has focused upon how our MPs represent and legislate for Kiwi women; that doesn't mean its relevance is only *for* Kiwi women. We all have a vote and a say on the 20th of September, and regardless of what gender or orientation you identify with, your vote counts equally when it comes to producing progressive change.

So, whether male, female, intersex, transgender, or just plain pissed off ... please use it wisely to support parties and candidates that are going to help make the situation for women in this country better. Not worse.

Or you might wind up being represented by a government replete with MPs who eschew feminism as unnecessary in favour of instead "[working] with people in a sort of a relational, discussion way."

This piece is dedicated to Pareen; for making a Feminist of me, by changing the way I viewed the world.

The Campaign To Elect Paul Goldsmith

As regular readers will know by now, I got into politics to destroy ACT. I therefore take my sacrosanct responsibility as an Epsom voter very, very seriously; as one day (hopefully very soon) my vote could well help to beat ACT's candidate and ouster them from Parliament. I'll do this, by voting for our man in Epsom, local MP Paul Goldsmith.

I first met Paul Goldsmith back in 2011 when he was out campaigning in Newmarket. I know this might sound hard to believe, given that for much of the election, sightings of him in that vicinity appeared to be the man out shopping rather than campaigning ... but there he was, on the corner of Broadway and Morrow street, standing with a National party minder presumably there to make sure Goldsmith didn't get too overtly enthusiastic with proceedings.

I went up to him, shook him by the hand, and jubilantly declared that I was shaking the hand of a National hero; for he was the man who was going to prevent Banks from entering Parliament, and finally destroy ACT. I then told him that myself, my friends and family, as well as the local NZF crew were all intending to vote for him and were out actively campaigning to help him take the seat.

The man looked positively terrified.

My uncle had a similar experience with Goldsmith in 2011, also in Newmarket. He walked up wearing a Warriors cap, and surprised the man by striking up a conversation. "Oh, I didn't think you'd be wanting to talk to *me*. You're a warriors fan, so I assumed you'd be a Labour voter" or words to that effect were intoned. My uncle assertively clarified that he is in fact an NZ First voter for party vote, but would be giving his electorate vote squarely to Mr Goldsmith. "So you're wrong. I'm not a Labour voter."

So far, you've seen two people state their intent to engage in tactical voting. But check out Goldsmith's reaction in the second one. This is more than non-campaigning ... this is actual anti-campaigning. Stereotyping people as voting for your major opposition party straight from the get go on the basis of a classist assumption about League fans, and clarifying that they shouldn't actually want to talk to you is *not* how you win votes. It's how you actively alienate and get voters off side in dialogue so they don't *want* to engage further or entrust you with their vote. It's also a telling example of the candidate's classist "us and them" mentality blurted out in public, and used to justify why you shouldn't vote for him. You'd almost think the leader of the ACT party had come out and explicitly said that a vote for Paul Goldsmith was a vote for Winston Peters.

Despite some obvious shortcomings, I, like thousands (and hopefully tens of thousands) of my fellow Epsomites will be voting for this man come September 20th. Not because he is some great and bold reformer in the House, or a black-belt in Tae Kwon Do ... but merely because with our help this man stands a very much better than even chance of flipping the table on ACT, cleaning up our rotten borough, and taking the seat. He was a mere two thousand, two hundred and sixty one votes behind John Banks last time - a very high profile former Minister and two-term Mayor of Auckland campaigning in his very own well-heeled backyard. If Goldsmith could (involuntarily) pull off that, then against a 30 year old policy man (who, unlike Banks wasn't noteworthy enough for Goldsmith to write a biography of) I am entirely confident of Goldsmith pulling home a victory later this year.

But only if we actually actively get out there and help him to achieve it!

Unfortunately for the nation's collective anti-ACTivist proclivities, Paul Goldsmith is an example of that narrative trope known as "The Reluctant Hero". He's capable of an immensely mighty deed (possibly accidentally); but, like many protagonists deeply afraid of their own power, he recoils from this noble responsibility and attempts to relegate himself to obscurity. Last election, this manifested itself in the curious phenomenon of Goldsmith removing his own lawn signs some time before polling day, to limit the chances of favourable exposure. This time around, we already have Paul Goldsmith dodging a slew of interviews and media appearances this week alone; even finding himself involuntarily represented on TV3's The Nation, by a bag of flour.

Fortunately for the nation, however, this is also going to be an example of the narrative trope known as The Call To Adventure Knows Where You Live. Because between now and polling day on the 20th of September, I and many others like me will be getting out there and doing our bit to ensure Paul Goldsmith is elected. We feel that with your help, and with the assistance and votes of every friend, family member, casual acquaintance, and guy-on-the-street that you and I can round up and extol the virtues of a man as pure as the driven flour to ... well, with that, we're certain of victory.

Oh, and if you're one of the two thousand one hundred and sixty Epsomites who vote for The Green Party's David Hay, or the three thousand seven hundred and fifty one who voted for Labour's David Parker ... don't feel too bad. Sure, your inability to grasp how tactical voting works may have effectively doomed the nation to another three years worth of single-seat-majority National-ACT-Maori Party misrule ... but on election day 2014 you get a chance to prove you've learned from your mistakes by helping to fix the future and voting for Goldsmith.

Goldsmith needs every right-thinking elector in Epsom to give him their vote. Of course, to quote US Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, "That's not enough, Madam! We need a majority!" But it's a start.

So whether on social media or while you're socializing, please do your bit and join us in actively campaigning to elect Paul Goldsmith for Epsom in 2014.

Because once again - he's the lesser of two evils!

Why I'm Not Celebrating John Banks Being Found Guilty

I've been asked by a number of people why I'm not jubilantly throwing my hands up in the air about John Banks being found guilty of a pretty serious electoral offence earlier this week. 

The reason is simple: Anyone who knows me will be aware that I first got into politics with the stated objective of DESTROYING THE ACT PARTY. 

I then concluded, after a chain of events that included surely the most cap-handed backfire-prone coup since Untung in Indonesia ... that in the mission of doing fundamental harm to ACT, the ACT Party did not need any help. Particularly when they were left with John Banks as their sole MP, leaving a party of nominal "classical liberals" represented by a man so conservative he /prayed/ in Parliament against the passage of the Homosexuality Reform Act in 1986.

[Ironically, given Jamie Whyte's apparent leanings, Banks specifically cited "legalization of incest" as grounds for his furious opposition to the decriminalization of homosexuality]

A friend of mine put it this way: "When I was in Belfast in the early 90's I asked a friend of mine who was a member of the Provos why the IRA hadn't shot Ian Paisley to which he replied aghast "Shoot Ian Paisley?!! He's one of the best propoganda weapons we have."" For reasons that shall soon become apparent, I feel pretty much the same way about Banks. 

Without even getting into the recent court case, it has become readily apparent that John Archibald Banks was one of the single greatest threats to ACT's ongoing viability.

I mean, seriously. John Banks as 100% of the Caucus of ACT produced such wonderful gems as ACT on Campus declaring they wouldn't campaign for him dependent upon a vote in the House. Where else could you pay to see the spectacle of a party's youth wing in open rebellion against its parliamentary Caucus? Particularly when the cassus belli was apparently widespread doubt amidst the more zealous and principled of the ACToid breed that Banks could actually be trusted to give effect to their principles.

Banks' curiously stringent ideas about drug use (particularly by animals) also made a contribution. First, he single-handedly cost ACT a 2nd MP by shooting down in flames Don Brash's absolutely inspired off-the-cuff comment-slash-policy-suggestion that ACT would favour the decriminalization of marijuana. There are tens of thousands of "stoner voters" in New Zealand (yes, contrary to the stereotype, stoners are actually a /very/ involved political class - something like thirty four thousand of them turned out to vote for the Aotearoa Legalize Cannabis Party back in our first MMP election in '96, for instance), as well as many, many more disenfranchised youth who were looking for a place to go.

Given the more than eight hundred thousand electors who didn't vote last time around, as well ... we can really only imagine how much ACT's share of the party vote would have swollen had Brash been allowed to go ahead with Operation: Electorate of the Long White Cloud. From where I'm sitting, it would have almost unquestionably been enough to revitalize their campaign amidst youth, and grow their vote just enough for Brash to become "relevant" again. (shudder)

The second intersection of John Banks' "morals" and ACT drug policy concerns the recent Psychoactive Substances Act. For those of you playing at home, this was a piece of legislation designed to create a world first *legal* market in mind-altering substances. On the face of it, voting for this legislation would be /everything ACT is about/. It's got free-market capitalism! Dubious (and ineffectual) intervention by the state in the marketplace that's best described as "hands-off"! Kiwi entrepreneurs making cold hard cash by slanging products that rational consumers were making informed decisions to put into their own bodies! Selling out our young people for a quick economic boost!

And yet, Banks somehow managed to earn his place in history by being the only MP principled enough to actually vote against the legislation. Admittedly, he did so out of a concern for animals rather than a concern for Kiwis (there's just something about him thundering on about "sacrificing Beagle puppies at the altar of recreational drug use") ... but that's only added to the legend. The Green Party tabled an amendment to the PSA to try and protect animals (then voted for the legislation anyway when said amendment failed). Banks actually had the balls to vote against the legislation. Alone.

For that, I guess we have to salute him.

It was kinda sad, though, that the same iron inflexibility of principle wasn't demonstrated by Banks over the convention-center-for-pokies deal. It took him just over a decade to go from declaring that casino operators were "wideboys, they're flashboys, they're big boys and they can take it", on grounds that "the little people of this country have been sucked, hung, drawn, quartered, bled by these people in these casinos” through to accepting generous donations from SkyCity to his mayoral campaign ... and then voting to allow said casino operators 230 additional pokie machines for the assumed purpose of further sucking dry, bleeding hanging, drawing and quartering those same "little people".

We also had the absolutely awesome spectacle of John Banks' speech during the Debate on the Prime Minister's Statement earlier this year. Not content with telling Hone Harawira that he knows nothing of child poverty, Banks then set out "unconditional love" and charter schools as a surefire path out of poverty apparently more effective at poverty eradication than "welfare" or "big government".

"There's no votes in representing people with no hope", indeed.

And when you put that together with Banks' previously announced views about the criminal tendancies of Maori and Pasifika youth ... well, it really displays why we loved John Banks so much in the first place.

Every time we wanted an emblem, an avatar or a symbol for the pernicious, corrupt and dehumanizing impacts, mechanism and effects of neoliberalism ... there he was. If we wanted an example of how ACT and National treat our poor as a political inconvenience ... there's that quote. If we needed a way to demonstrate the casual and implicit racism that drives some on the right-wing of our policy elite ... here he is. If we desired a handy-dandy put-it-on-a-postit-note quote that demonstrated just how limp-wristed, hand-wringing and vapid the neoliberal effort to understand poverty and criminality as moral, rather than economic failures ... surf's up. 

It was an absolutely delicious long-running farce, with the most serious criticism I'm able to mount of the enterprise being that the whole tottering edifice was, appropriately enough, a fulsome waste of taxpayer money to keep operational.

Oh, and also that Banks is, if anything, too easy an ACT to follow. (apologies)

The two guys who're coming in to replace him (Whyte and Seymour) are in some ways different to their illustrious predecessor, and in some ways the same.

They're all three of them figures who seem to just axiomatically lend themselves to ridicule while presenting as so incredibly straight-faced that one almost thinks them a parody. Who could forget David Seymour saying "Hi" ("...Hi; Hi; Hi; Hi") to "Wemwera" in his absurdly awful campaign video (now a viral hit). Or Jamie Whyte proving decisively that he's an anti-politician by loudly and repeatedly declaring his personal views in favour of doing something positive for incest, then having the insane political temerity to "stand by" his comments rather than immediately retract them.

The trouble is, neither is either larger-than-life enough, nor prone to being frankly absurd enough, to actually properly step into Banks' shoes. When we find ourselves casting about for political stereotypes and archetypes to affix Seymour and Whyte to, the best we're able to come up with is fresh-faced young careerist (with stupid campaign video) and complete-political-novice mad-libertarian philosophy professor. That's it. Useful on a tactical level, perhaps; but nothing as epic or epigrammatic as a full-blown Banks tirade about fundamentally misunderstanding the causation of child poverty; ascribing crime on a racial basis to transparently try and scaremonger votes out of the "good people of Epsom"; or the man's many and various pronouncements in denigration of homosexuals (the remark about six inches of barbed wire being inserted into the anus of a gay man being a "waste of barbed wire" particularly stand out here for outrage points).

Attempts at denigrating ACT post-Banks, therefore, simply don't have the effectiveness and jocularity associated with the excellent sport of Banks-bashing. At best, we're left bemoaning hollow men with extreme philosophical positions, and that's not nearly as fun as grappling with the existential sense of buffoonish political evil that seemed to drape Banks like a cloak.

So why am I not celebrating John Banks being found guilty?

Because there is still an ACT Party. They are still running a candidate in Epsom. They've apparently door-knocked thousands of houses already, and are doing their level best to try and rebuild and restore ACT's (by now surely necromantic) credibility.

And because our problems with the ACT Party did not begin with Banks, nor shall they end with his passing.

There's now a new "dynamic" duo fronting for ACT, and while I can't bring myself to type "and we must take them seriously" with anything approaching a straight face ... it does seem a little premature to be jumping for joy when there are still ACT candidates in the field - one of whom looks pretty likely to be another ACT MP come September 21st.

Let's sort that out before we break out the victory champagne. 

Neoliberal Chickens Come Home to Roost in a Coup

Spurred on by Mr Chris Finlayson's diatribe about the relative backstabbyness of Labour ... (which seemed rather curious coming from a member of the party in possession of the 2nd-most-pockmarked-set-of-collective-shoulder-blades in Kiwi politics after ACT) ... it occurred that there seems to be a pretty axiomatic correlation between how right-wing/neoliberal a party is and its relative level of internal disunity/coup-preponderance/outright civil war.

So, ACT is clearly at the extreme neoliberal/unstable end of this spectrum - both politically/economically and in terms of internal turmoil (the precise details of this clusterfuck from about 2002 onward being pretty well known, but memorably featuring the Nat-backed ouster of Hide by Brash, the earlier Roy-attempt at Hide, the full-blown civil war which accompanied that, ongoing (and very public) criticism from Roger Douglas of Hide's vibe, various rumblings against Richard Prebble ... and so on and so forth), these guys really are the apex and eminent case-study of the linkage between neoliberal vibes and flawed/tumultuous internal structures.

Then there's the Nats. Won't go into the details (there's seven decades' worth to countenance, with it getting particularly bad following the end of Muldoon), but it seems like the Born to Rule party is in an almost perpetual state of squabble about who, exactly, was born to rule whom. Memorable examples include attempted uprisings against Muldoon, the neoliberal plot against Jim Bolger which produced Shipley, the ouster of first Shipley and then her successor, English; and then in a fit of revenge, English leaking a whole lot of emails in order to torpedo Brash, thus leading to Key. And from Key unto either Collins or Joyce but they haven't finished duking that out yet.
What the National Party's vicissitudinal internal fortunes betray is that the more neoliberal a party gets, the more volatile its internal situation becomes.

Following on from this is the Maori Party. A Caucus of 3 MPs of which 2 are Leaders doesn't leave much scope for leadership squabbles I would ahve thought ... but apparently not. Again. They furthered a neoliberal agenda in concert with the Nats, and found themselves with first a Hone- and then a more generalized leadership problem.

Somewhere in the middle, we have the Labour Party. Mr Finlayson is correct to note that there do seem to be quite a few white ants in amidst the red ones, with specific dishonourable mentions including everybody subsequent to David Lange (seriously - how many leaders did they have between Lange and Clark, and for how long?), and a humourous side-note for Phil Goff's attempted "Chicken-Coup" of Helen Clark in the mid-1990s. Once again, there is a clear pattern. As teh party found itself becoming one of the underpinnings of our neoliberal paradigmatic consensus, its internal volatility increased. Up till the Clark years, at any rate. Quasi-social-democracy and winning elections is apparently something of a salve in this regard 

Now at the complete opposite anti-Neoliberal/relatively stable end of the spectrum, we have The Greens and NZ First.

I'm going to chuck the Greens down first, for two main reasons: Mike Ward (former Co-Leader of the forerunner Values Party) and Nandor Tanczos. Admittedly it wasn't a traditional sort of leadership squabble, as the previous incumbent had quite literally died in office, but either way there was a contest, somebody wound up having to stand aside, and in addition to losing two well-recognized Parliamentarians, Mr Ward had to be lent on in order to be made to give up his entitlement to enter Parliament as next on their List. Clearly, "sustainable" economics is not negatively correlated with a sustainable interior position.

Anyway. I know I'm frenetically biased as all hell, but I'm chucking down NZ First last. As both the most stable (for the last decade and a half, at least) and arguably the most anti-neoliberal of the main parties. The only time we've had a leadership coup ... it was back in 1998, and was an arguable result of getting *much too close* to the whole neoliberalist vibe. And never was Tau Henare to darken our doorstep again. (The resultant Mauri-Pacific party failed even harder than the present Maori Party combined with Taito Philip Field's NZ Pacific party) Ever since then, we've been remarkably stable. *quickly runs to check history of Yugoslavia*

So yeah. There's my response to Chris Finalyson's "Unauthorized History of the Labour Party". All six main parties ranked on a spectrum from most-volatile/neoliberalist down to least-volatile/neoliberalist. It's pretty telling that it's the same spectrum, don'tchathink?

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.

ACTresses & Air-Heads

It is alleged that Napoleon once advised never to ascribe to malice that which could adequately be explained by incompetence.

In the case of the ACT Party, the distinction appears to be meaningless.

Take, for example, John Banks announcing that he's "much more interested in the penguins at Antarctica than I am in some of the social problems that we have in New Zealand".

I'm honestly not sure whether that counts as incompetence or malice.

On one level, it's clearly rank stupidity. Successful politicians don't usually go out of their way to make themselves appear out of touch with the concerns of their constituents, even if they've been smart enough to be vague about which of those concerns they don't care about.

On another level, it's malice. If you're anti-gay rights or anti-abortion, then you're quite welcome to read into Banks' comments that he's just as apathetic about these issues as you are. And, as an added bonus, Banks cares about the welfare of endangered animals and a pristine Antarctic wilderness.

For a certain sort of (socially conservative) right-wing voter, this message ticks all the subconscious boxes.
It's also just vague enough for anything unsavoury to be plausibly deniable if he's confronted about it.
Full marks for figuring out how to pander to the base without alienating the swing voters *too* terribly much.

I'm not going to touch Banks' various and sundry comments about South Auckland as they've already been done to death elsewhere, except to note the vanishingly small line between incompetence and malice in ACT's parliamentary caucus that these evidence.

It's incompetent to galvanize a large swathe of the Auckland electorate against you by referring to their part of the city as a "social disaster"; and it's malicious to subsequently characterize the browner denizens of that area as subsisting on benefits in order to "sit in front of TV, smoke marijuana, watch pornography, and plan more drug offending, more burglaries" with the ultimate objective of "coming through our windows if we live in Epsom".

My inner cynic wonders why Banks wasn't so quick to condemn the white-collar (and mostly white) criminals who are disproportionately concentrated in his (and my) Epsom electorate.

Oh that's right, it's because it'd mean condemning guys like Banks' business partner, Peter Huljich.

Then again, Banks does occasionally say things that prove Napoleon's maxim.

His recent assertion that Onehunga College was a charter school was presumably just incompetence, rather than a devious soundbite designed to make it seem like ACT's new and unmandated shakeup of the education sector wasn't nearly as untried, unfamiliar, or foreign as it actually was.

Unfortunately, his incompetence here doesn't reflect very well on his ability comprehend, much less implement the wide-ranging "reforms" he's seeking for our kids.

With comments like these, I'd respectfully suggest that Deborah Coddington dubbed the wrong inept white male the Mr Magoo of Kiwi politics.

In any case, lest we think this curious combination of odiousness and incompetence is something new in ACT's leadership, let's cast our minds back to a man who was apparently unaware of that other political maxim ... "when you're already in the hole, stop mining the conservation estate".

It's odious to suggest that we must open an open-cast mine at Pike River in order to respect the men who died there; it's barely conceivable incompetence to suggest ruining our pristine conservation estate with strip-mining to create a tourist attraction.

It was, however, karmically appropriate for him to suggest there was a "silly old man leading [my] party" in light of Hide's eventual fate as leader of ACT.

Fortunately, there's a new generation of ACTress unburdened by the rank bigotry and frank incompetence of their predecessors ready to take the helm and steer the party back to being one of high-minded principle.

Oh wait...

It's one thing to call Labour out for alleged breaches of the Electoral Finance Act (weird, considering ACT was so dead set against said act that they were prepared to take then-Attorney General Michael Cullen to court over it) ... but it's quite another to try and compare Labour with the Nazi Party based around their shared use of the colour red and the fact they've both got youth wings.

ACT on Campus' persistent use of rape, whether to intimidate opponents or just to make really weird and unfounded comparisons also does nothing to endear them in my eyes.

Maybe Rick Giles wasn't so bad after all. 

ACTing Out The Past

This is a screenshot of ACT's website taken on the morning of the 6th of February.

There are two points of interest which I've emphasised in red for the benefit of the reader. 

First, ACT obviously hasn't gotten over its crushing defeat in last year's election and is still claiming to have 5 MPs.

It's been two months, guys! Time to let go and get over it!

Ordinarily I'd have put that kind of fossilized display down to neglect for a poorly used asset; but seeing as somebody's seen fit to update the site with Banks' Address in Reply (a fossilized display of a different kind), it would appear there's some wilful obfuscation going on.

I'd tell ACT to stop living in the past, but that seems rather harsh on a party which doesn't have a future.
It would also be rather hard given their choice of Caucus Member, and the fact that Banks' speech seems substantively to be a pining ode to an imaginary 1990s.

Yes, you read that correctly. Somebody has actually developed fond nostalgia for the 90s.

The second point of interest is that it's finally dawned on John Banks why the House empties whenever he gets up to speak.

As the man himself puts it, "there is a belief that not every Member of Parliament has something worthwhile to say."





Hat-tip to Frankly Speaking. 

An Issue that should get every Kiwi steaming mad

Rodney Hide's privatisation agenda is well known, and to be fair he has never denied he wants to hock off New Zealand's family silver, or what is left of it anyway.

But if National in any way leans towards Hide's plans to privatise water services it will be their second term that goes gurgling down the drain.

Water is the single most important resource in life and there should be no commercial incentives surrounding its supply. Both from the point of view of the consumer, who wants to know that the water they are drinking and using around the house and business is clean and safe, and from the environmental standpoint as our water resources need to be carefully managed, taking into account their long term viability and the relationship kiwis have with rivers and lakes. Making the responsibility for managing this precious resouce yet one more step removed from the voters is a ridiculous idea.