Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to ,
The seabed and foreshore bill was passed into law. When the Greens a support partner to the Labor led government.
I don't think the Greens were a support partner. Labour was with Progressives and UF, IIRC. The Greens would not support Labour because of the GE flap. I think people felt they were support for Labour far more than was actually formally the case, on account of a widespread sense of their compatibility.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Hebe,
Not really because Labour is going to be the dominant partner this decade. Policy concessions rather than merging will be the price of Greens’ support.
OK, but that's essentially what I'm saying: Piecemeal policy concessions don't work very well in the favour of the Greens at all, makes them just look like a big cost, and makes the coalition itself an easy target. Conveying something more complex than that does actually require coordinated strategizing.
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FWIW, I think such Green initiatives as have been widely adopted so far for jobs have actually been both popular and sucessful. I don't know anyone who isn't grateful for making better insulation in their house affordable. That kind of thing is gold for votes, IMHO, in the same kind of way the Winston Card is. I'd like to see a lot more of that. In terms of energy efficiency they should probably tackle it in biggest bites first - solar panels aren't at the top of that list. Better subsidization for heat pumps is probably next, and I can bet a whole lot of people feeling warmer from getting an excellent device like that would translate into a sense of a party of the future rather than a party of the past telling us to put a hand-spun woolen jersey on and turn the lights off. Solar water heating is probably above solar panels in terms of ROI. Also, the effectiveness of solar panels as an option is very contigent upon a push for increasing the ease by which a fair system of reversible metering is pushed forward, which is technologically and politically complex, in a way that installing a decent climate control system isn't.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Emma Hart,
I’m not saying I entirely agree, or that I think it’s enough, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the Greens don’t care if people can’t get work.
No, it's not fair, but it is fair to ask how they propose to decrease unemployment levels. Certainly it's very fair to ask them if that is even one of their goals. I actually wouldn't hold it against them if it wasn't, so long as they had some alternative plan regarding the social ills of unemployment, of which there are so many possibilities.
Their official policy is mostly things I agree with, btw. I have voted for them twice now. Ironically, I'm more interested in their generally socialist economics than I am in the environmentalism. Such has been the movement of Labour toward neoliberalism that this seems the only way for me to actually vote for the kind of socialism I believe in. IF Labour were to move toward that, I might vote for them again. Not that I think they should treat pinching votes from the Greens as a good reason in itself to make an economic U-turn. They should do it because it's the right thing to do. Pinching votes is a rather pointless course in an inevitable coalition government. It might, however, bring back un-voters, who (unlike me) can't really stomach environmentalism. Tactically, THAT would be worth doing. But I can also acknowledge that pinching votes off National is quite possibly even more worth it, where they can, if they can do it without losing their entire identity and soul.
While I can understand that there are such things as Green jobs, there is also very strong antagonism towards some of our biggest employers, and biggest earners. To say that we shouldn't be so much in dairy, when dairy is what NZ does best, is very close to talking up contracting the economy and making a lot of people unemployed, well in excess of any substantiated Green jobs proposals I've ever seen.
I know that's a big oversimplification of their actual policy, which is directed toward polluting practices. But in a practical world where negotiations lead to such simplifications, where parties are expected to prioritize what is really important to them, the Green are far more likely to put "taxing the pollution" ahead of "dropping other taxes", even though I know that their overall vision is predicated around both happening together. But "dropping other taxes" is such a massive issue, so central to economic management generally, and so at general variance to the more traditional socialist left, that it's very much underemphasized. Labour usually raises tax. They're not going to drop the income tax of "rich prick" farmers, even though raising their pollution tax might actually fill the gap, because that looks like something ACT might think of.
These are conundrums for a Green/Labour coalition, and they should get a plan together.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Just saying.
And not for the first time! But that doesn't make it less of a valid point. It's certainly my most central question to the Greens at every turn "what is your actual plan regarding employment?". It may be the wrong question, I think the answer is likely to be that they actually don't see the need for employment in the same way, or at least to the same degree, but I do really want to hear them say that, if so.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Paul Williams,
you could consider the way you respond to new and alternative voices
OK, noted.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I like to think that people might be able to learn from history. If Tasmania has a lesson to teach, maybe it can also be learned from.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Phil Wallington,
Come, come, there's no need for theater. Most people are supporting you.
This is a bit of a distraction to the main issue?
Totally. Ozzie's experience might be relevant but surely that can be challenged without generating flounces.
The point leading to this discussion was that in Australia, the Greens and Labor aren’t best mates and the examples given were of State politics. They could’ve been federal, although there’s only one lower house Green.
Indeed, whereas NZ has had significant numbers of them for over a decade. We do actually have our own experiences to go on.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to NBH,
Fine, I'll drop using wonk. But point still stands, just because the head of News is really interested in the state politics doesn't make the average person interested.
Paul, I'm not seeing where you're pointing out any factual errors in what I've said, except for perhaps the relative level of interest (and I'd like to hear some evidence on that if this is going to be a point of contention - so far I haven't). I did not at any point say that Tasmanians aren't subject to Tasmanian laws. But NZers are not subject to laws from any higher source than our own Parliament and that is a major point of difference to a state government. The buck stops with Parliament, here.
you’re not correct on the relative powers of states and the feds or on their respective budget responsibilities
Do you want to be specific about what claims I made that you're disputing? The Commonwealth government collects more than 5 times as much tax as the State government. This is what I meant by it's comparative importance to people. This cascades down to far more massive influence over all aspects of major government expenditure. The health budget alone is more than all of the taxation collected by all of the states for all purposes. Education is also massive. Social security/welfare is 3 times the size of all state expenditures together.
Furthermore, Auckland holds a third of the population of NZ. As an administrative proportion of NZ, it is bigger than any state of Australia. It administers a gigantic chunk of NZ's infrastructure. But collective interest in the politics is way lower. I don't know why exactly, but it is. It seemed much the same to me in Australia, but by all means give me some evidence beyond the voter turnout (which tells us nothing, since it's compulsory in Australia) that they care about their state politics more than we care about the Auckland City Council. What evidence is there? Column inches?
My point was anecdotal. I didn't really want to make a big deal out of it, other than to say that comparing the behaviour of a national political organization to regional one is suspect, because people don't think about them in the same way at all. They aren't held accountable in the same way, they're not in the public consciousness in the same way, they don't have anywhere near as much power when they are in government. It's even MORE suspect when the comparison is across different countries, and involves the Greens in a country where MINING, the absolute anathema to environmentalists, is such an enormous part of the economy. I'm not surprised that a state government Green Party would find working with Labour extremely difficult. But NZ is not like that.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to izogi,
I think I may have composed a mail in EMacs. Once. The Linux nuts loved going on about how user friendly it was, and I could only scratch my head when comparing it with a GUI mail client. They were speaking from a world where access to a mainframe was a big deal, a really cool thing to have, to someone moving into a world where desktops were more than powerful enough to do anything I wanted to do, and running everything from a command line just to keep the client thin was becoming irrelevant. There's still a place for it, but shooting off an email didn't seem to be that place.
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