Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
You're going to have to take my word on that, because I'm not going to decide to break confidentiality I agreed to respect at the time.
Your word is fine. But I was asking you about the process by which candidates are currently selected. That's not a sworn secret now, is it? Can you shed some light?
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to NBH,
Cheers for that link NBH, you're a real goldmine. That study is only up to 2005, though. If nothing's changed since then, it's a pretty undemocratic process all right. A "Candidates Club" (yes, they do actually call it that) is formed, from which people can be arbitrarily excluded. These people are then trained into their candidacy, and the most promising ones selected by a small board formed from the current party leadership. The names of the people in the Candidates Club were kept secret.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Foofy tosh.
What is the process, Craig?
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Steve Parks,
You don’t seriously think Labour have any chance of governing in three years without the Greens, do you?
Of course they do, they just have to eat up the entirety of Mana, the Greens, NZF, the Maori Party, United Future, and then bite a small piece out of National, and they're in with a grin.
In reality land, a swing of 5% from National to Labour would give a leftist coalition including NZF and Maori a strong position. That's more than doable in 3 years, now that Key's honeymoon is over, and it's policy o'clock. For all the fine rhetoric about reconnecting Labour to the people by selecting the right old white guy, they don't really need that much. If they carefully target the right segments, the unvotes, and the swing votes, it's business as usual.
Then we find out if social democracy really has any answers to the logic of globalization. I'm not optimistic, but they will be more likely to have a plan that doesn't involve deepening the rich-poor divide.
I'm mindful that Labour's glorious past under the reforms of Savage did help alleviate the Depression for a lot of people and that was a great thing. But only 4 years after they took power, WW2 broke out. It is very difficult to separate the economic effects of the welfare state from that kind of upheaval.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
They have their own party in Australia, why not New Zealand?
Pretty sure there have been contenders for this outside of National, but none have done well. National has rewarded that demographic well, or at least they feel it has. More likely is that Labour has simply never appealed - it's whole mentality has always been about industrial work, because the labour can organize in a way it simply can't in rural areas. More likely, the labour pisses off to the city, if it's had enough of being exploited in an orchard or whatever. Working the land is something that runs in families. I'd never thought about it like this, but the dairy farming business has similar barriers to entry to the corner dairy business. ie who would do it that wasn't born into it?
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Mana isn't (just) a Maori party - neither Sue Bradford or John Minto are Maori AFAIK.
I expect that will cause a lot of confusion.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
I'm sure someone who'd spent more time around the National Party than me could identify other schools of thought that might be better served by their own parties.
I haven't spent much time, but the glaring missing constituency there is the rural vote. They may be socially conservative, but I think the economics matters more to them, and their idea of "economic liberalism" is as jaded as that idea has ever been amongst any of it's support groups - they want it for everyone else except themselves. For their interests, they want infrastructure investment, key costs (like fuel and water) to be kept low. Transport infrastructure aimed at goods rather than people. Good tradespeople to be available and cheap to keep their farming complexes ticking along. Access to telco services without having to personally pay for miles of cabling. Cheap land.
It's a complex mix National are trying to hold onto there, as you'd expect when you've got 48% of the party vote.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Which NZers already think. Anti asset sales, no drilling , caring about our conservation land and the rest of the targets, using alternatives in many fields. lots smoking dope and not scared of it, or the people who do. It is pretty mainstream now.
There's a long way to go before we're really ready to fully account for our costs, though. Not just farmers. The urban do have to come to terms with the extent to which our economy rests on farming, which means ultimately our own jobs are built around the same externalizations.
I don't think this is great, personally. I've never had much affinity with farming, myself, particularly not the NZ kind which involves massive numbers of farting, shitting, possibly sentient animals, which we have to buy at the same price as people everywhere else in the world. But I don't especially want an industrial revolution here either. I had hoped the technological revolution might be a new wave, but I'm not convinced it is - it's the most globalized mobile kind of business there is, not something we can really hold onto, nor compete in on a grand scale. The most money to be made out of technology in NZ is ripping of NZers by scoring the telco monopoly. There's little fortunes here and there in niche products, but nearly without fail, these things are bought out from abroad, the organization gutted, and eventually the last people standing ship themselves off to wherever the money came from. It's really a big fat fail from a national outlook (although it has enriched quite a few people and shipped out considerably more who had little trouble slipping into a new country).
So I don't have the killer ideas for economic rejuvenation. For me the focus is on making sure what's left is fairly distributed. I like the idea of more infrastructure projects - these are things that are hard to just up and leave. Even if the money leaves due to opportunism under neoliberal governments, at least the good itself remains, and we get some of it. Practically every large piece of infrastructure in this country owes itself to the taxpayer.
But these are old socialist ideas. I feel a shameful lack of imagination in being unable to produce any others.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
If Labour get a higher party vote than the Greens at the 2014 election I stand to gain one, possibly two, bottles of malt whisky
I'd say the biggest danger to your whiskey is a renege. The Greens are on a long slow build. Unless they really do target Labour's basic constituency, by unveiling their amazing plan to create massive numbers of jobs (and I don't write this off as a possibility), their main constituency will continue to be people who can basically afford to worry about big picture problems like global warming, international injustice, peak oil, etc. As their picture gets fleshed out, which it slowly is, it will broaden appeal, when more and more people finally get that the resources of the world are finite, the resources of the country are finite, and unaccounted-for cost will always catch up with you in the long run. Perhaps these ideas will become mainstream and the Greens will have served their purpose. Hard to know.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to NBH,
Internecine fighting - whichever side starts it - doesn't do any good
Yes, the side that it hurt the most this time was the right. National's huge party vote cost the right dearly.
I wouldn't be surprised if National, who do have some canny strategic advisers, don't opt to build up a party to the right of them. It could be ACT, but I think it won't be. ACT's own leader is already talking about rebranding the party. They really need a party that is socially conservative and economically radical in the free market direction - basically like themselves, but a bit more hard core. Flirting around with social liberalism just didn't work, created a party that fell apart under its own contradictions.
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