Frankly Speaking with Curwen Rolinson

Frank over at Frankly Speaking interviewed me for his blog recently. 

I'm obviously biased, but I think it went pretty well!

Tracey Martin MP on Chinese Migration

"I note another article this morning about many of our Asian citizens or visitors being particularly prone to abuse and racial discrimination. As I said in my Maiden Speech, the New Zealand Chinese community has been one of the major contributors since the 1800's to the building of this nation but because they were not signatories to the Treaty we hardly hear about it. 

I believe we need a concerted campaign to education our population on their contributions to our country and their absolute right to be here. Secondly, we need to start playing the ball not the man. New Zealand First has always had a policy of an Immigration Plan, but it is not acceptable to blame the individual who met the criteria laid down by the government to come and settle in this nation for being here. They have met the criteria, they have the right to be here and be treated with respect. 

New Zealand First's position is that as a nation we must have a long term plan around this issue. How many people are enough for New Zealand? What can our country sustain if we wish to keep a certain percentage of our rural environments pristine? I mean, is it really good for Auckland to bring in another 1 million people in the next 30 years? Why not incentivise settlement around the nation? I asked Jonathan Coleman that question last year and he replied that immigrants were more productive when clumped together. I personally find that answer shocking - production unit talk as opposted to people responsive solutions."

Is it any wonder she's my favourite MP? 

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. 

Tenants, but in whose own country?

Mark Twain once wrote that while History might not repeat, it certainly does rhyme. 

Image is courtesy of Frank Macskasy's excellent blog Frankly Speaking and reposted with kind permission. 

For a few blankets more...

There's a common theme in films involving time-travel of eerie warnings sent back to the present from the future.

This has always struck me as doing things exactly the wrong way round.

So, without further ado, I give you ... a Warning from History about selling land to foreigners courtesy of my ancestors.

Let's not make the same mistake they did.

Tragedy. Farce. Stupidity. And a few blankets for land.

This morning's announcement that National had approved the sale of the Crafar Farms to Chinese owned Shanghai Pengxin brought to mind Marx's dictum that when History repeats, it does so the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. He might well have added that it third repeats as stupidity.

This isn't the first time a minority have sold off something that belongs to all of us to foreigners.

A century and a half ago, the problem was endemic in Maori society.
One guy would flog off tribal land to a British-owned company for some trinkets and quickly squandered personal wealth.

You'd think we'd have learnt not to trade our land, heritage and birthright for blankets and glass beads!

I am, of course, aware that the Crafar Farms were privately owned and thus not strictly something we held collective title over ... but we could have.

Landcorp has been administering the farms for some time now, and will apparently be required to still do so under Chinese ownership. It will pay $18 million a year for the privilege.

Eighteen Million.

To do what it's been doing to this point for no charge.

And the Prime Minister has the nerve to say we're not being made tenants in our own country!

What strikes me as even more odious is the fact that Landcorp was set up and endowed by previous governments to buy up and run farmland.

Farmland precisely like the Crafar Farms.

The difference between the Fay-led bid and the Shanghai Pengxin bid was around $30 million.

That's a little under two years worth of the rent we'll be paying to the Chinese.

And under Landcorp, the profits wouldn't be going overseas, they'd be being reinvested here.

So the questions almost ask themselves ... Why aren't we doing that?
Why are we not allowing the state organisation we've set up to buy and manage farmland ... to buy and manage Kiwi farmland?  Why are we allowing the profits to go offshore and why are we allowing the Chinese to buy our productive assets when we're not allowed to buy theirs?

For that matter, why are we allowing some foreigners to buy land in the name of investment and fostering growth ... but not allowing others like Kim DotCom (a resident and an entrepreneur) the same privilege?

Apart from some $100,000 in donations to the National Party and the fact the Chinese had rather more weight at the negotiating table, what's the difference?

We forced DotCom to rent rather than buy. Why should we not get the Chinese to do the same?

Interestingly, this is exactly the Chinese position on foreign land ownership - and with good reason. The Chinese have learnt from their own history. They know what it's like to be economically colonized by a foreign superpower (in this case, the British) and they've never forgotten it.

I only wish we could do the same.

Think about it. On asset sales, on ACC privatization; on John Banks in government and on a race-relations policy that can quite literally be described as "Separate But Equal" ... we haven't learnt.

And that brings me to another cliche I'll use to close.

Santayana.
"Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them!"