Posts by BenWilson
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I guess everyone already saw Cunliffe has a plan about coalition wrangling. I guess he's keeping his options open when mentioning Winston, doh, NZ First. It's not likely they'll be able to help Labour govern on their lonesome, unless they double their support by September, but there is a very good chance that Winston would be an option for making up the numbers if they're just short.
But Winston will not be able to exclude the Greens, unless he does deliver the entire coalition himself. The opposite is far more likely. I'd see managing the Winston wild card as being a game more in the Green court than the Labour one. They are, at least, both parties strongly opposed to asset sales. But there's little else in common that I can see. On the flipside, I see even less in common between NZF and National. But they could certainly throw him any bone they cared to outside of that sticking point, and they wouldn't have to OK that bone with the Greens.
So if I were the Greens, I'd be talking with Winston quite a lot. They'll never see eye to eye on a number of social issues, but their economics could be the common ground. If it is, they could, between them, force real change on Labour.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Andrew C,
It would be assumed to be from Harvard Business School, and you would make the distinction if it wasn’t (and he didn’t).
I don’t think so. Harvard Business School isn’t the only prestigious part of Harvard.
ETA: If someone didn't specify the school they're from, you'd assume it's the school that pertains to their work. A lawyer who said Harvard would mean Harvard Law School. A mathematician would obviously be referring to the Arts and Science school. A politician could be from anything, but the Government school is a pretty likely choice. If Ban Ki Moon can say he went to Harvard, Jones can too.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
But if Cunliffe would like to grow a spine where Jones is concerned, Gordon Campbell writes a pretty solid reality check on why Shane isn’t helping anyone but himself.
Thanks for that link. GC is reliably good, but infrequent and I forget to check.
But, I guess, whatevs, if Labour’s own leader can’t – or won’t – do more than vaguely wave a moist bus ticket in his general direction.
I wish I'd been able to go to that event to judge the extent of the trolling. It's not like there isn't a serious point to be made about the transformation of tertiary education into a business rather than a basic right and an important social institution, custodian of national intellectual values. But it's ridiculous to sum it up as "too many foreign students", as if that in itself drives the transformation of the way the University operates. Auckland University was considerably higher ranked a few decades ago, making it a much more attractive destination for foreign students. The ideas of it being an important social taonga AND a highly attractive and lucrative thing to export are not incompatible at all. I hope that people in Labour can grasp this.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Phil Wallington,
Voters take keen interest in the politics of their own state… and as voting is compulsory… they pretty well all vote
Sure didn't seem that way when I lived there. State politics were a very distant second in political discussions to national politics. Overall political engagement did seem higher, so OK, perhaps more interest in the Premier than the Mayor of Auckland. But not much more.
The states make their own laws, run the police and emergency services, are responsible for the education system, welfare housing, public health, hospitals and a host of other important functions.
They administer those things, but they don't set the bulk of the budgets for them, as they don't collect the majority of the taxation to be spent on them. So if you want more spent on, say, housing, then there's much more that the Federal government can do about it than the State can. Conversely, they have a a far greater power to screw things down to. So people pay a lot more attention to it, from what I've seen. The number one issue, how much tax people pay, is something the states have only a very small influence over.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Phil Wallington,
Labour and Greens in Australia are always destined for strong conflict, due to the importance of mining in the Australian economy and labour market. This is much less so in agragrian NZ.
ETA: Also it's worth pointing out that the Tasmanian parliament is not a sovereign government, but one step further down. From memory, Australians put as much thought into electing the individual state governments as we do into electing city councilors. So they get the Australian version of Dick Quax holding very high office, and it's small wonder that highly dysfunctional coalitions form.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
If I can get that Labour and the Greens have substantive policy differences, you go into an election campaign to maximize your vote, and you require a majority to pass legislation, anyone can figure it out.
Perhaps so, but that's a weakness National mostly don't have, when their shot at the crown involves ruling outright. You know what you're going to get, or at least what you're aiming to get, when you vote National. The horse trading will happen but will be minimal if they have a commanding bloc, able to pick and choose what minority party support they get.
Labour is not in this position. There will be no choice at all in going with the Greens, if the scenario occurs that National+ACT+UF+MP doesn't make the numbers. No other party will give them enough numbers to make a viable coalition, although other parties might be needed as well.
Which means that National has little to lose by tying Labour to the Greens in the public consciousness. It's not something Labour can shake.
So I say that their strategy at this point should be to own this near-fact. If they try to slither away all the time and speak of policy that the Greens really do not like, National can undermine their credibility as a coalition, point out that Labour will not be able to do what they say.
Which is not to say, of course, that there should be no difference in their policy. It's just that the major points of agreement could easily be made clear early on. Then the horse trading will be around the margins, as it will be with National, rather than on core policy and direction issues.
Where they disagree, there can be healthy debate, but it should be clear that such disagreement will likely hamstring those policies for both sides, if the differences are substantial. And there are also areas where only one side even has a strong opinion - those are points of differentiation, that give the apathetic non-voters a reason to pick one over the other, or indeed to show up at all. Greens might have all sorts of plans for energy efficiency, for instance, that Labour doesn't object to, but doesn't really want to put any effort into either. It would be sound for both of them NOT to nick popular policy of the other team just to take their votes, but to leave something in it for the other party so their total team vote is much increased by there actually being a different bunch of policies for voters to choose from.
TLDR version: Labour needs the Greens. Instead of dodging this fact, they should predicate their campaign on it, to preempt the near certainty that National is going to predicate their attack campaign on exactly the same fact.
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It may be National's to lose, but the margin is really quite small, and National don't have any positive policy left. They're riding on Labour's mistakes now, and that's not a secure place to be. It might only take a couple of really popular policy announcements by Labour, and some shitstorm of their own, and we'll be calling this Labour/Green's race to lose. It was like that only a couple of months ago.
As for how Labour should deal with the Green tainting: They should own it. It's nearly certain that they will need the Greens as a coalition partner. They can sell it as that they will "keep each other honest". Any time the question of the crazy things the Greens want comes up, they just answer "So vote for us - we'll keep them honest". Green voters who despise the neoliberal wing of Labour can be told that the Green party can effectively veto anything excessive.
Of course it would help even more if they can give us insight as to what points they actually agree on. If they actually had mature policy that they'd already largely OKed with the other group, it might sound like a team with a plan.
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Why wouldn’t infill be related to population growth?
Because the immigrant population might be less interested in infill than the non-immigrant? The inner suburban “gentrification” of Auckland did the exact opposite, driving out immigrant populations. Suburbs that had been sneered at due to their density and the cheap shoddiness of the dwellings became popular due to their proximity to the city, and having a 19th century workman’s cottage came to be owning something of character.
(ETA: And of course with a decent budget or a lot of hard work, they can be made very pleasant)
Furthermore, quite obviously infill doesn’t have to happen as population grows. Sprawl is another option, and so is high-rise. But infill did happen because the feedback loop of gentrification and massive profits from property investment led the land owners, primarily older NZers, to double down by subdividing. It wasn’t a solution to provide lodging to poor immigrant labour (although it was in the beginning) but instead it was a trendy choice, and still is now.
Foreign buyers are far less likely to see the value in those suburbs. They can get much nicer property in sprawling outer suburbs, without also being surrounded by an elderly population of rich locals. Or if they are actually living cheaply, as students must, they go into the nasty arse high rise blocks in the city.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I registered taniwha.com back in 1993 so my email address is ~21 years old
Could be a winner. I had email in 1991, they were standard issue in Computer Science. I had to learn Unix commands to access it, and could not, for the life of me at the time, see the point of it. It was a way of sending information around internets, but the only internet I was on at the time was the University one, and I'd rather actually talk to someone in the building than struggle with Emacs in a command line just at the time that nearly everything was switching to GUI. That account is probably still stored somewhere, given University policy on tampering with private data. But my hotmail account is my main email, even now. It's the address I give people.
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Rich Lock,
It’s the mullet of communication. All business in the front, long at the back when it’s time to par-tay.
On my 18 year old address I totally "live in the now".
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