Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Spending "Cap" is Fiscal Anorexia, in reply to bulbul,
Was this one from Tom the kind of thing you mean?
A touch of ageism towards baby boomers you say? A hint of resentment towards the most selfish, greedy and egocentric generation ever born in any civilization anywhere you opine?
I'd agree, there's some of that. The predominant demographic here is middle-aged, sitting in the spot that missed out on quite a lot of the things that made the baby boomers wealthy, and continues to do so. Tax free profit on asset growth, for instance. I think your warning not to hate on them outright is sensible - it won't help anything.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Russell Brown,
Um, no they haven't.
Fair call. At 3am, the "Labour led coalition with formal and informal (yet mostly loyal) support from the Greens, and a sometimes backed by various other groups with similarly complex terms of agreement" blurred into "Greens supported and influenced Labour in Government, even to the point of getting extremely controversial legislation of their own writing passed" and thus into "Greens were in government". Yeah, it's more complex than that.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Keir Leslie,
This is roughly akin to comparing the Labour party policy platforms to those of the church, and being shocked that while the church preaches eternal verities the party changes tune every so often.
I'm curious why you think anyone would think comparing the tribulations of being Labour with the tribulations of being a religious church should inspire any sympathy for Labour's plight. The endless hypocrisies of organized religion have been barriers to human progress for many millenia, and still are. Is there something good about that?
The Labour party changes policy often because the world often changes.
In what way did the world change that made CGT and compulsory savings, and raising the retirement age *after* the boomer bulge retires, suddenly become reasonable? The Greens have had policies for many years for these things because the demographic bulge and the tax avoidance factors have been obvious for at least 20 years.
In case you didn't notice, the Greens have been in government several times, too. They were a big part of the reason Labour got 9 years.
In many ways the Green policy platform is a facade. What is actually Green policy is the negotiating posture, and that changes.
You'll need to flesh this point out before I have any clue what you're on about. Policy is policy, and the Greens make it clear. Then they negotiate with whoever gets the votes, just like everyone does in our democracy. It's not a facade that they want their policies implemented.
It is also interesting to observe that many people here seem to have this belief that somehow, it isn't fair for the Labour party to go after Green votes, to try and be the biggest possible party. I find that very odd.
I don't think it's unfair. I think it's stupid, because it harms Labour's chances. What on earth is the point of trying to take votes that would naturally align with you anyway? It's like conquering a friendly town when you're at war with a real enemy. You end up with a war on two fronts. I'm really not picking Labour to win that war. You could find the two fronts making an alliance, and taking more from you than they lose, nibbling away the softest parts, the demographics that have been successively friended and then unfriended over the years and have just got sick of it.
I know it's hard to believe that times, they are a changing. But times do change. Nothing breeds uncertainty like too much certainty - that's why the housing bubble got so bad - because you can't lose, investing in property, right?
I'm not suggesting that the Greens are going to overtake Labour any time soon. But I do think Labour would get a lot more out of working out what happened to the 10% of voters who dropped off the voting game altogether, and making some kind of assault on the high party vote that National got, many of whom must have come from Labour. Taking those votes counts twice, because it's a vote off the opposition. Taking votes off the Greens counts zero when it comes time to put a coalition together.
Is there something difficult about this maths?
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Bart Janssen,
China does not have extremely rich soil. It suffers from being part of a huge continent and much of its land is nutrient poor and particularly water poor. That said it still has vastly more arable land than New Zealand.
Yes, I guess I should be specific about the parts of China I'm talking about. The Gobi desert isn't it. The parts where there has been human agriculture for a long time are pretty rich, though. That's how they've got such a massive population. The place feeds 22% of the world's population with 10% of the world's arable land. They're doing something right. So far as milk production goes, the country has 266 million hectares of grassland. If they decided to dedicate even a tiny fraction of that to milk*, NZ is sunk.
Their water problems are the more serious issue. They are, however, the kind of country that can engage in the kind of massive public works that can deal with such problems. I understand that there are plans for a massive canal from South to North. To supplement the numerous such canals they have already built.
*ETA NZ has about 2 million hectares for dairy, for comparison.
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my main influence is, I think, being a warm body here nearly all the time
Way more than that. You created a tone, and kept working at it for years. You trusted some good people to grow it. Most of the contributors here would be pretty stoked with this outcome - there is a real sense that this forum leads opinion on many things. Nice to have numbers. Great to be a part of it.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If it involves reducing the competitiveness of the only industry that stands between us are the third world or imperils the tens of thousands of real, today jobs in the dairy industry how long do you think those dairy workers will place the environment ahead of their jobs?
Hard to say. I agree that the Greens need to make a far more concerted effort to show how industrialized farming can possibly benefit from being more green. Considering just how dedicated such infrastructure is to completely using up natural resources, we may have to wait until that actually happens before they'd ever be convinced. Or, it could be that the Chinese learn how to make milk far more efficiently than us, and our economy is completely destroyed. I think that's the most likely. They're only just scratching the surface of what they're capable of in that arena. They have massive land and extremely rich soil, and most of the factories demanding most of the milk powder, and a desperately poor rural population to work it. I can't see the milk business in NZ lasting. Unless our agrarian economy is extremely forward thinking, it's got quite a short life span. Then we're just a bunch of farms with the absolute worst food-miles profile on the planet.
Maybe making a national and believable green brand might actually work, enabling us to make high margin products, in sustainable way. Eventually, everyone's going to have to do this - it wouldn't hurt us to be one of the first ones.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I don’t think Labour has much to fear from the Greens, largely because I am yet to be convinced the Greens know themselves what they stand for.
Tom, I'm yet to be convinced that you know what either the Greens or Labour stand for. The Green Party's policy is extremely clearly laid out on their website, as it has been for many years now. It has changed a remarkably small amount. What Labour stands for changes every year.
Furthermore, do you have any ideas on the economic future of NZ? What do you honestly think is going to give us the best chances of weathering the total erosion of the industrial base upon which the working class even exists, as capital and skilled labor alike flee the country for cheaper labour and better jobs?
I seriously want an answer to this. You might actually have an idea. Let's hear it.
The Greens do have an idea. They see that our entire civilization has stood upon something unsustainable, and continues to stand on it. They are thinking a very long way ahead. They might be wrong, perhaps a fossil fueled world can be held onto using massive scale violence, as has supported the glorious working classes in the powerful nations of the world since the 1930s and before.
Perhaps cooperation of international movements towards controlling and fairly distributing the planet's resources isn't the only future our species actually has, and instead the built in inequity of the traditional Labour movement, which ignored everyone who wasn't working like a machine, and soon to be replaced by one, or quite likely die in one, will save this country. I don't know - I'd like to hear your vision.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Peter Cox,
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. But I think National have proven that you can be extremely popular without the former, as long as you have the latter.
They're not mutually exclusive, but I think they're negatively correlated. Why else is this whole leadership selection debacle devoid of policy discussion? It's suddenly all about demographics - how to appeal to this cliche or that. Which cliche am I again?
Why else was RNZ unable to get a single answer from National's extremely popular leader (so popular that not quite half of the 67% of people who voted picked his party! 32% support? Wow!) about their policy positions?
And why, oh why, did 33% of the people enrolled to vote not even show up? Perhaps they wanted a clearer reason to do so than seeing two old rich white guys locking horns over the false binary of who gets to rule?
I guess we can probably agree to disagree, but I think the talk of collectives is nice and all in theory, but evidence suggests you're gonna need a strong leadership for people to unite behind.
There are occasionally times in history, where the future does not resemble the past. This, in my opinion, is one of those times. This could be the time when strong leadership is seen for the hollow abdication of thought that it has always been, and clear policy wins the hearts and minds.
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Or even 'Te Atatu man'
Or "stupid cliche". The wild West is my digs, at least half of the people I associate with on a regular basis come from the surrounding hills. More than half of my extended family are in the lower foothills. The cliches don't really work. They're a complex brew. Every extreme. Every business, every race, every class, every sexuality. People engaged, and totally disengaged. Hard honest workers and criminals. Students, the unemployed, hobby farmers. Gangsters. Cops. Artists, poets, dancers, writers. Stoners and meth-heads, and party pill poppers. Extreme sports lovers. Factory workers, office workers, tradespeople, professionals, technicians, businesspeople. And thousands more sub groups.
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Labour have got two ways to combat that: their own leader with a strong competing mythology, or go negative and try to convince everyone JK is a rich prick. The last three years have been the latter, and it’s not working.
Or, wild thought, they could take a stand on what it is they're about, and sell that, and not make it about personalities at all. They could do something that they have always pretended was what they were about, rule as a collective. But they don't - the party is organized top down like a corporation. Like a corporation, we're supposed to care about the Shakespearean power struggles, and wonder how it might affect our lot. I won't play. It won't make a lick of difference to me who rules Labour, what matters is what Labour would do if they got enough votes to rule. If they're going to do something fucked up, we'll bitterly rue whatever leader we anointed, as so many rued the helmsmanship of David Lange, when last our economy was neoliberalized by Labour.
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