Posts by Lew Stoddart
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Jackie, the bit where I get lost is where you blame the swing voters for this state of affairs, rather than the party who failed to lay out these reasonably simple facts & details such that said swing voters would vote for them.
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Craig, I've found myself using the phrase "who should know better" with regard to Dr Edwards so many times in the past year that I'm now beginning to think he can't be expected to.
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Thanks for the bounce, Russell.
The only thing I’ll quibble with is whether Goff can be blamed for Tizard’s conduct. I think he (and Little) carry the can for this as well.
For one thing, if Goff had told those who needed telling about the Hughes allegations at the time they needed telling, this could all have been resolved behind closed doors, there now being the illusion of an organised, functional party apparatus (even if one which still prefers to cover up than to open up). What I’m saying, I suppose, is that the bad decision to cover up should have been put to some good use. That it wasn’t is down to Phil Goff.
Second, as I argued at the time of the Chris Carter debacle last year, Labour needs to improve the informal processes which make any operation run, rather than relying blindly on stuffy, legalistic constitutional party procedure. For Carter, they needed to engage an Winston Wolfe/Malcolm Tucker-like fixer who’d turn up with a magnum of Bollinger, a bouquet of flowers, a letter of resignation needing only a signature, and an authoritative explanation of what the party needed (much better than the Herald’s bottle of whisky and handgun; after all, this is still Labour we’re talking about). They need the same now. The lack is more due to Andrew Little than it is to Goff, except inasmuch as Little has been caught on the hop by his own party leader.
Lively, dynamic organisations – political and otherwise – don’t rely only on the letter of due process. In lively and dynamic organisations, each participant has an ingrained understanding of how their actions affect the wider group, and lively, dynamic organisations have ways of weeding out and excluding those whose motivations do not serve that wider whole. These events illustrate that Labour is neither lively nor dynamic, that it lacks firm and competent leadership, and that it still embodies all those perceptions – of disconnected, indulgent entitlement, venality and factional impunity – which caused the demise of the Clark government.
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Since he's now gone and written it, yous should probably consider reading Eric's response, in which he makes his case with considerably more nuance.
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Speaking of welfare, another gouging-apologist red-herring is that people won't go without because there are emergency payments being made by WINZ, and so on. But apologia for price-gouging correlates strongly with end-all-welfare-now rhetoric, so ...
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Emma Hart,
So in the long term, by not price-gouging, they have benefitted economically.
This is one of Eric's points: society punishes vendors much more harshly for gouging in order to maintain supply than for running out. I see this as a beneficial reflection of social cohesion; pro-gougers sees this as inefficient.
One suggestion that Eric made to overcome this in the case in point was for vendors to donate the excess charge to the Red Cross, so no argument of profiteering could be made against the vendors. In this way it would be more like an involuntary surcharge, and the situation would (in principle) be the best of both worlds: price signals, no profiteering, and the bonus of a windfall for disaster provision.
The trouble, however, is that those who can't afford to buy at the inflated price still get left out. And there's no practical way of verifying that the price excess has been transmitted up the chain. And then there's the general confusion and increase of irrationality and panic caused by a sharp jump in pricing. I mean, look at the conniptions a 15% holiday surcharge gives people...
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Damned right.
One thing to add: Eric, in the aftermath of the last quake argued for price gouging on goods other than petrol; specifically, water. He blogged on the topic and published effectively the same argument as an op-ed in one of the daily papers (I forget which); and then we rehashed it in discussion at my blog after the Queensland floods, after I wrote about how local political leaders had explicitly placed the sort of social cohesion you write about ahead of notional ‘efficiency’. So he’s on the hook for both your objections, not just the first.
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Nah. Reputation for staunchness pretty well intact, given that you can still write in complete, coherent sentences.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Russell Brown,
A competent Labour response would absolutely hammer that suggestion and the people who have made it.
… and the people who appointed the people who made it.
This is fundamentally the point about bait-and-switch: the govt has no input into the WWG’s findings, so it didn’t issue an instruction to Rebstock to issue a recommendation to set the bar at 14 weeks and dingoes take the hindmost. That would be stupid. Instead, the government appointed people whom it knew would make recommendations somewhat crazier than the eventual policy track. The extremity of the recommendations, and the likelihood that they will render the WWG a laughing-stock -- much like the Brash taskforce – reflects that this is a strategy not without risk. They overcooked it, and might have done better appointing a less ideological panel.
Nevertheless, I think it’ll still work as a bait-and-switch. To backfire would require considerable opposition intervention to tie the moral and ethical character of the WWG to the moral and ethical character of the government. The fact is we haven’t seen a coordinated response to anything from Labour this year, and given the opportunities they’ve squandered I seen no reason to expect they won’t squander this one. You know the Nats, ACT and every crazy from Lindsay Mitchell to Trevor Loudon would be screaming ideological conspiracy if a Labour government had dared appoint people like Kim Workman and Susan St John to such a panel as this.
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