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!

#Renationalize Your Vote

Alright. So over the last few days, I've seen a slew of "If you want x, then vote y" posts. Mostly along the lines of "If you want to change the government ..." or "If you want to change the government and believe our questionable commitment to doing something about deep sea oil drilling ..." 

Well, I can't promise anything about whether a vote for NZ First is a vote to change the government. But what I can promise is that a vote for NZ First represents a vote for a fundamental change in direction from either National OR Labour.

A #Vote for NZ First is a vote to restore privatized assets to Kiwi state ownership. A vote for NZ First is a vote to ensure *our* generation gets to retire at 65, with a potent sovereign wealth fund a la Norway to ensure sustainability. And a vote for NZ First is a vote to ensure that *all* our people have their needs addressed, particularly as applies economic deprivation, through a universalist framework that renders assistance whatever sort of Kiwi you are.

So this year, think about your vote not just in terms of whether it changes the government or re-arranges the Ministerial deck-chairs ... think about it in terms of whether it changes what the government *does*. And how you can influence it to deliver the change *you* want.

Oh, and I can promise you one other thing. I'll be fighting mad hard to *ensure* those bottom lines get actioned.

#RenationalizeYourVote

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.