Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Yes, the only way they could have made it absolutely minimal in cost for remote voters would be to send SSAEs on demand, addressed to the most local consulate. I think that there is an argument that if you're miles out in some remote country far from NZ, that it's not on the NZ taxpayer to seek you out personally, and that if you have to go to the trouble to work out the postal service there, that's fair enough.
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Hard News: Grokking things by being places, in reply to Rich Lock,
I managed to get to the Grey Lynn festival, too. It was quite special to be able to dance only about 20m from the stage holding my 2 year old. He couldn't take his eyes off Che Fu, and put his hands in the air like most of the crowd were doing.
@ Rich. Compelling bass! I also spent most of the weekend plugging away at home improvement, mostly in the garden. My youngest has developed an interest in it, following me around and mimicking the activities, watering, digging, planting out, mowing, mulching, laying irrigation. The elder boy has to be enticed with promises that he can play with the garden hose.
It's very soothing work, if done in a way that pays a lot of attention to one's own body, and the people around you, and not to a rigid timetable. I know this was hardly possible given you needed to get stuff done for photos, though.
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Picking a question out of the sustained sneer
I actually only asked one question, and yes, it was about whether they would choose to have an early election, rather than about whether they would be forced out of government by a no-confidence vote (an interesting question in its own right).
Not so sure about a sustained sneer. Is there something that's not actually true about their plans to cut massive numbers of jobs out of the public sector, their plans to sell off state-owned assets, and their justification all being around waiting for a global economic recovery to create jobs? From what I can tell, they're making no secret of any of this.
Certainly, I oppose all of those ideas. But I can accept that many don't, and National could end up in a position as a minority government. So the question is: Would they compromise, or go for broke and have another election? I think compromise, personally.
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Joe Wylie,
You're suggesting that there won't be a minority government? I'm asking the what-if question here. Given that no majority coalition manages to form, would National really go back to the polls, or would they opt to run the country sans majority? I'm inclined to think they would, hoping that obstruction of their agenda might increase antipathy to the left by the end of three years.
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Hard News: The Solemnity of the Day, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
"I saw red all day"
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Anyone have an opinion on whether National really would go to the polls again if they have to serve as a minority government, and are blocked from their neoliberal agenda? I think it might do them more harm than good, they've been bleeding poll support since the election campaigns started. Wouldn't they prefer another 3 years of "steady as she goes" stealth gutting, and the chance of global economic recovery over a chance of being ousted completely?
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Sacha,
It doesn't mean we stop growing food, processing it, unblocking drains or managing basic information. It does however mean there's more of a future in marketing, analysis, service/relationship and innovation activities than on the factory shop floor or the farm.
I don't think we should stop any economic activity at all, but I do think that managing information is commoditizing really fast, because there is no real barrier to it any more. Which means it's no more lucrative a sector than others, indeed is more likely to be highly efficient, which is always going to load heavily towards lower economies. If the value of skills turnover is shortening as things change so rapidly, there's very, very little competitive advantage that can be maintained.
There is an information revolution, that is true, but that doesn't mean it can necessarily be tapped for profit. There is an open source revolution too, and that as a concept is very much geared towards being very difficult to exploit for profit. It's just a massive cost saver, a democratizer of intellectual property, which benefits mostly those who invest in it least, just taking what they want from it for profit here and there and saving cost themselves.
Furthermore, I'm not prepared to rail against anything so damned righteous. These things should be for everyone, they are self-revolutionizing the world without any need for agreement from elites. Indeed elites hate them desperately.
I frankly don't know what can be done to keep our relative wealth above the developing world, indeed I think that if the world were a fairer place, that would be very difficult indeed, which suggests that it is becoming a fairer place, at least in a regional sense. What we should be focusing on for our own country is making it a fairer place within the region we influence ie NZ. And that is entirely a matter of social organization with no reference to any factors of what we import or export or do for ourselves.
I'll have to think on this more, but the above do seem to me at least partially true.
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So, given that neither party, nor any party in the First World, has an answer to global capitalist redistribution towards the Third World (and I'm not even entirely sure I think it's such a bad thing in a global sense), the question doesn't become "how can we outcompete the rest of the world to grow our economy fastest, to stay on the mouse wheel of capitalist growth?". It is "Given that we can't outcompete, and it is a given, how can we organize our society fairly so that a far lesser level of growth will not destroy everything that is good about NZ's formerly egalitarian way of life?". The answer to that one is obvious, it's the same answer it has always been - society needs to aim to be strongly progressive, levying wealth and capital heavily to keep the bottom rising. To that end Labour does indeed have a much better plan than National. They also seem to have support for that plan from practically every other party than National and ACT.
So I think if you want to gut NZ, either vote National, or don't vote. If you think this can remain a fair society, while the world works out how the future of capitalism (however long that might take), vote pretty much anything else (other than ACT, who are quite open about gutting, and would like to accelerate it).
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Islander,
It is not the blandness that worries me - my concern is that neither Labour nor National have a plan that even attempts to address the issues we are facing or about to face as a nation.
@Dexter (not Islander, soz K)
Actually they both have plans, and they're quite different. It really is quite clear, because both parties are saying it, that this is about whether to follow a neoliberal agenda of selling off state assets to balance books, and dropping wages, and gutting the public services, OR to keep the assets, change the tax regime, and ride it out.
However, I agree with you that neither of those is going to fix the major thing that is wrong with the NZ economy, that it is agragrian export based, in a time of world recession. I don't know what could fix that within my lifetime, frankly. We've pretty much missed the industrial revolution, with one exception - our farming is industrial, which is why it's so unsustainable.
The knowledge economy is a flop. I think the reasons for that are actually pretty obvious - knowledge can't provide any sustainable advantage, because it can be ripped off at a moment's notice. You could build up a massive knowledge economy, and find it all flies out to Australia, or is simply copied by whoever can do it cheaper. This is actually what's happening to our middle classes, who were heavily encouraged to build up this economy, and tertiary education skyrocketed. But the dividends of it are mostly not reaped locally.
This is an international phenomenon, practically the entire wealthy industrialized world fell prey to this fallacy, and it became a Ponzi scheme - we thought we were so fucking clever that it must be the source of our continual wealth, and those with a lot of wealth were certainly able to build it up massively during this period, but they very much did so by taking all the knowledge generated and moving it offshore. Wealth continued to flow towards the technical ownership of all this knowledge, giant corporations, and that wealth trickled down into the pockets of the technocracy that supported it, but mostly that had the effect of concentrating the wealth upwards, until it ended up mostly in the hands of organization which do nothing more than own ie financial organizations. Then, of course, the Ponzi scheme collapses, as the swollen sense of First World wealth became too great and people truly began to believe that a shitty old house in a posh Auckland suburb really is as valuable as the gigantic fuck-off mansion you'd be able to buy in any part of the Third World and live like a king for the rest of your life, for that amount of money. When things get that out of whack, they always crunch back eventually. It's funny to think that practically the whole First World has spent 40 odd years as a cargo cult, imitating the forms of industrial capitalism, but actually destroying it's industrial capital base.
Ironically, that meant that businesses that were based on concepts of a mixture of not-particularly-scarce-but-still-highly-skilled labour, the trades, have done extremely well, because they do still make something that can't just be taken away from them at a moment's notice. You do still need to have a working toilet, and a functioning electrical system. You can't outsource fixing that to China. You can hire a Chinese person to fix it, but they're someone who has to live in NZ, pay NZ prices and taxes, so they're not any more competitive than anyone else here. It ends up mostly being fair pay for fair work.
Conclusion in next post (word limit reached):
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Yes, I had an interesting chat with a non-voting friend recently, someone who is mostly disengaged from the details of NZ politics, having felt that no party represents him for a long time. His take was that Winston Peters and the teapot fallout represented at least one good thing about our version of democracy - that at least one function of small parties in MMP had to be "calling out powerful secretive wankers on their hypocrisy". Nearly everyone can see that there's something a bit fucked about a media too scared of the government to publish some extremely minor stuff that virtually everyone knows is precisely how these guys roll. At least Peters is not scared, and in Parliament he will be able to do this with impunity, as he always used to. To that end he doesn't necessarily have to hold the balance of power at all, he can indeed stay outside of any coalition, and probably should.
I don't like much about Peters myself, but I can see that he serves a function very much like a court jester, as practically the only person in the room who can say what many are thinking. It's a very humanizing thing, rather like the stray comments of children and the elderly often can be, a reminder that it takes a lot of training to play the courtly game of politics, with its neverending rules and courtesies, and sometimes laughter is a powerful force for change.
Ironically, jesters always wore baubles IIRC.
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