I have a child. She's four. Cool kid. Four is a fun age. She's got her own little personality and views of the world. She tries to make jokes. They're terrible. We laugh along together anyway.
One of the big tropes of this age is "why?". She keeps asking why things are, and I don't have good enough answers. Because if you ask why enough times you start arriving at some pretty uncomfortable places.
For example, why do some children not have enough to eat? This isn't one she's asked. This is not one of those posts where I make up some precocious shit my child has said to make a point. She asks things like "why does Tigger jump?".
But why do some children not get enough to eat?
I guess it's because their parents don't feed them enough.
But why?
Because they can't afford to.
Why not?
Because they don't earn enough money to cover the price that we have arbitrarily set to live.
Why not?
Because they don't have a high paying job.
Why don't they?
At this point you'll probably get an ideological turning point.
Maybe they don't have a high paying job because they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn't work hard enough at school. They didn't do the right course at university. They are just lazy.
But why all of those things?
Even right wingers might struggle here. Unless they go full mask off and start getting racist.
And even if those things are true and fair answers (they're not), then why do children go hungry because of the sins of the parent?
Because we let them. We choose to have children go hungry. The government makes an active choice not to ensure that children are all fed.
There's more than enough food to go round, but we choose to allocate it badly. Really badly.
And I don't mean this government only. Though this government has made that choice. But every government makes this choice.
And when you stop thinking of things being left to chance and start ascribing responsibility to those why questions, shit gets grim.
Why do people commit crime?
They don't have enough money. We choose to have a subset of society exist outside the mainstream who go without. Then we punish them if they try to force their way into getting stuff.
Why are Māori over represented in negative outcomes? Because we chose racism. Because colonisation hasn't ended but we like to pretend it has so we can absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.
Why is our health system collapsing?
Because governments have chosen not to fund it properly.
Why is the climate changing?
Because we chose capitalism over environmentalism. Because governments chose - and continue to choose - to prioritise the profits of private companies over a habitable earth.
We need to stop pretending that things are occurring by happenstance and recognise that they are more often than not the outcomes of deliberate choices. And we must demand better. Because if we don't we'll have another question to ask.
National eh. They bloody love to privatise. Their latest brain fart is to privatise a form of social welfare.
Nicola Willis, National's Deputy Leader and finance spokesperson, gave a speech where she talked about National's "new" idea of a social investment fund. It's not really new because Bill English kept trying to make fetch happen, and he failed. I'm not sure why Nicola Willis thinks this iteration of National will succeed where a considerably more talented version of National failed.
The high point (low point?) of the speech was this bit:
"My hope is that the Social Investment Fund would become so effective at delivering results that ultimately New Zealanders seeking positive social change for the disadvantaged might choose to invest their funds with it."
Hey rich folk! The Government is now abdicating responsbility for social welfare, so we'd really like it if you'd volunteer to chuck some money in to do the job that they're supposed to do.
Frequently I'm told that if I think there should be more tax paid then I could volunteer to pay more than I need to (sidebar: I actually do); but then, folks get all smug and say that nobody volunteers to pay more tax than they need to. In fact a lot of right wing folk believe that tax is theft. It's truly baffling that they now suddenly think rich folk will want to "invest" in social welfare.
And these are the same rich folk that National wants to give tax cuts to, and then they have the chutzpah to ask for some of it back.
This is all coming in the midst of inflation getting increasingly out of control. Central banks have been biffing up interest rates, but inflation just seems to be going up. So central banks will continue to increase interest rates. Except do you know who that hurts the most? The people who are already doing it pretty tough. People with big mortages are now getting spitroasted by high interest rates and the price of cheese.
Central banks seem hell bent on driving up unemployment to "cool down" the economy to get inflation under control.
There are other things that have been done in the past to try and bring inflation under control. One of those is increase taxes. Especially at the top end. Those people are the ones who can afford to pay more, rather than those already struggling. And you'd likely see fewer jobs lost if you did it that way. What's one fewer Porsche this year? Way better than a hungry family having to choose which parent isn't eating tonight.
And yet we don't have a government with the courage to do this.
The happy bonus of increased taxation is that we can then afford to do the things that National wants to privatise without having to rely on the generosity of the rich (which doesn't really exist btw).
We could pay doctors, nurses and teachers what they really deserve. We could invest in infrastructure. Do you know what else we could do? We could ensure that people have enough money in their pockets to feed themselves, and their families, and put shoes on their children's feet.
Give people enough to live with dignity and you'll also see a major crime drop off too. All round the country people are having meltdowns about ramraids. Fucking no surprise that this is going on when people are doing it hard. Making it legal for police to take photos of Māori youth and threatening to put ankle bracelets on our rangatahi isn't a solution to this problem. It's an escalation.
Crime isn't the illness, it's a symptom of the illness. The illness is people struggling. The illness is poverty. The illness is hardship.
Imagine 200 years ago some folks just showed up and told your ancestors they were taking part in a running race. They weren't super keen but these folks would not take no for an answer. So your ancestor thought fuck it, ok then. How bad could it be.
Everyone lined up at the starting line. And bang! Everyone was off.
Out of nowhere, at lap 2 they changed the rules. Everyone was allowed to keep running as before except for your ancestor; a sandbag was tied to their ankle. Your ancestor struggled on with the race but very quickly started falling behind the others.
And then to make it worse, every time your ancestor got lapped they had another sandbag tied to them. Each lap getting further and further behind as the leaders kept tying more sand.
Fast forward to today and that race has been ongoing, with each new generation picking up from where the last left off. You're about to join the race. Your family is way way way behind.
So you say "hey, this seems a bit shit. Could I lose the sandbags and skip a few laps so I'm closer to everyone else?"
The race marshall says it has been a bit unfair, so you are allowed to skip a few laps. And then everyone else in the race starts complaining that you're getting an unfair advantage over them. And they're sick of your family bludging advantages like this. It was fucking years ago! Get over it mate!
One of the race leaders even says "You being so far back isn't my fault. That was the decisions made by my ancestors. Look! We've stopped tying extra bags of sand to your family's ankles. You're fine."
You try to run the race and take the sandbags off at the same time. But then another person in the race says they're going to try and become race marshall, and if they succeed you'll have to keep some sandbags on your ankles and you won't be able to skip any more laps to bring you closer to everyone else.
That's tough shit. It's got to be equal rules for everyone. One race for all they say.
That person starts rarking up everyone else in the race, saying "look at the advantages they're getting! They can't be allowed to skip laps. Nobody else got to skip laps! How on earth would it be fair for them to skip laps?" and you notice that more people are nodding along with them, and it seems like despite the fact it's really obvious to you and a handful of others how unfair the whole system has been for so long, that the majority of people now think you'd be getting an advantage to skip a few laps just to bring you more even with everyone else. And everyone seems to want you to keep the sandbags on because they've gotten used to you and your family having sandbags tied to them.
"Look", they say, "we'll make this fair, and we'll put it to a vote. Surely you can't deny democracy? That's the fairest system of all". And you're just not sure about that because it seems that the majority of people are going to want to keep you held back and they'll be voting on something that doesn't actually impact them but it really fucks you. You don't know what to do.
I'm a fairly staunch advocate of the environment. I was the Green Party's head of communications and policy (for like five minutes, but still...). I have written several times about the plight of the climate and how successive governments from all around the world have willingly chose immediate-economic-benefit over leaving-behind-a-world-our-children-can-live-on.
Jacinda Ardern said that climate change was our generation's nuclear free moment. Famously. Except she's gone on to turn down several opportunities to take true action.
Yes the oil and gas ban was good. Yes the plastic bag ban was good. But these happened at the behest of the Green Party.
Another thing Jacinda Ardern said in her speech from the throne in 2017 was a promise of no new mines on conservation land.
Labour has done absolutely nothing on that front. Oh no that's not quite true. They've begun the slowest process imaginable of asking DOC to reclassify some land so that it ends up that we won't allow mines on it.
Except that has moved at a glacial pace.
Recently Eugenie Sage from the Green Party had a member's bill pulled that would put a halt to any new mines on conservation land. It would also ban any new coal mines from 2025.
Both of these things are objectively good because they are good for the environment.
Except Labour has decided not to support Eugenie's bill. Not even at first reading, which would allow it go to Select Committee and have NZers submit their reckons. Labour doesn't want to hear people's reckons on this.
Declaration time: My PR firm is working (pro-bono) with an anti-mines group: Ours Not Mines. It's a group made up of musicians, comedians, artists and others. It's singular focus is preventing a new mine being opened in Coromandel by OceanaGold.
OceanaGold is an Australian company with mining interests all over the world. OceanaGold love sending in police to violently disburse indigenous people protesting their mine (like they did in the Phillipines). If OceanaGold don't get their way in a country, they like to sue the Government of that country for lost profits (like they did in El Salvador).
OceanaGold has engaged a PR firm to greenwash their activities in NZ. The new mine that OceanaGold wants to open will involve a tunnel being dug under Wharekirauponga which is in Conservation Land. OceanaGold argue that because their digging a tunnel, they aren't actually mining on conservation land. Cool and good.
The part of New Zealand that OceanaGold wants to mine in is home to one of the world's rarest frogs - the Archeys Frog. This little bugger is deaf. It uses sense and vibrations to figure out how to get around. How do you reckon mining going on right underneath its feet is going to jive with this wee fella figuring itself out?
At the moment, Ours Not Mines is fundraising. We're trying to raise money to wage a campaign against the evil overseas mining company. We want to do a billboard campaign, take ads out in the paper, and pay for lawyers to fight this. We're doing this because Labour doesn't seem to care.
If you want to contribute, we're selling some Stanley Palmer prints that are hand signed by the man himself! You can go here: https://www.oursnotmines.nz/shop
Artist's impression of the billboards we want to run:
We genuinely don't understand why Labour don't seem to care about conservation. We are baffled.
We know there are people in the party who do care. But they seem to be in the minority, particularly around the cabinet table.
We'd love to see them pivot now and suddenly become the environmentalists that we think the left should be, but we're not holding our breath.
So if you want to see real climate action, if you want to see real conservation action, then it looks like we're going to have to do it ourselves fam.
It's October 2011. Kim and I are house hunting. We had an upper ceiling of $450,000 to buy a house. We had a combined income of about $130k. Fortunately we had a friend who said that lifting our ceiling by $50K would get us a much nicer house and not materially increase our mortgage repayments at a monthly level.
We find a house in Ngaio that costs $480,000. Three bedrooms, 900 square metres of land (most of which is near vertical), needs nothing done to it. Now to be fair, this was a good deal back then. But now it's an unheard of steal. Now that house value has nearly tripled. Fast forward to today. Try finding me a couple in their late 20s earning a combined income of $390K so the equivalent story can play out.
I really like Ngaio. It's a lovely suburb. It's got reasonable public transport, a petrol station, pharmacy, vet, a really good butcher. Its even got its very own racist cafe owner who likes to display his bigotry on a blackboard.
It's one of those suburbs that people say is great for families. Except increasingly it's not. Because young families can't really afford to buy here. There are some flow-on effects to this. All the local primary schools are suffering low rolls. Without young families buying here there aren't new 5 year olds to repopulate. We're getting flyers in the letterbox advertising schools. Ten years ago and there were waiting lists.
So what's my point in all this? Well I'd dearly love future generations to experience living in the western suburbs. I'd love my area to be a bustling suburb, full of young families taking advantage of the newly renovated Cummings Park playground. For this to happen then there need to be some changes.
The march of progress should stop for nobody. Except there are some councillors who would dearly love to stop it. In the whitebread suburbs of Khandallah and Ngaio at least.
Diane Calvert is not a councillor with any eye on the future. She's got her eyes firmly fixed on what the boomer villa owning classes want. And by golly a lot of them don't want progress. They want to keep Ngaio and Khandallah as they are now. Impenetrably expensive. Locked. Gated.
In the Wellington long term plan, Diane managed to get the villa suburbs of Ngaio and Khandallah excused from intense densification. This densification is what will allow Ngaio and Khandallah to be affordable again, so that younger families can move in.
In fact if you look at voting records, Diane Calvert has pretty much voted against every single progressive thing you could imagine. She voted against a lot, including cycleways, the Pōneke Promise, funding for youth hubs/better youth engagement, increased arts funding and town centre upgrades for Berhampore and Island Bay.
At the other end of the spectrum is Rebecca Matthews. Rebecca has been the lone voice of progressivism in my ward. She is a renter so knows first-hand what it's like to not be able to own a house here in the area. She consistently votes in a way that doesn't benefit the currently-well-off, but for the next generation.
There are a swathe of progressive candidates running in my ward this year. Lachlan Patterson from the Greens is the next cab off the rank for me. But if we manage to sneak in two progressives then we've come a long way.
All of this is to say that voting in local body elections matters. Were it not for Diane Calvert and Andy Foster then Ngaio and Khandallah would also be seeing the same densification that much of the rest of the city will hopefully get. So get your papers out and vote for the candidates who want to leave something great behind. Not those who want to leave people behind.
This is true all over the country. Does Auckland really want Wayne Brown to continue fucking over the less well off? Does Wellington really want Paul Eagle to hamper progress when Tory Whanau is an option? Aaron Hawkins in Dunedin. There are progressive options. Find them, support them, vote for them, and encourage others to do the same.
Because I'm sick of being embarrassed by councillors with my initials. I want better councillors so I can leave behind a better city.
With about twelve months to go until an election, polls stop being hypothetical and we can start making proper assessments.
At the moment it's pretty damn close. In the most recent Talbot Mills corporate poll* the "right" block of National and ACT was at 48%, and the "left" block of Labour, Greens, and Te Paati Māori, was on 47%.
Basically it's a coin toss.
But really it shouldn't be. If you look at the fundamentals of the electorate the opposition should be miles ahead. Twelve months out from the 2008 election and National alone was about 10 points ahead of Labour.
At the moment everything sucks. Inflation is shit. The weather has been shit. Climate emergencies are getting worse. Covid has been fucking our shit. Interest rates are high and going to get much higher. We keep being told unemployment is about to explode.
All these sorts of things would usually have us wanting to change. And yet, National can't put clear distance between it and Labour.
I think Luxon is a major contributor to this. He's been in the gig for over 9 months now and he's a lot worse than anyone expected. This John Key protégé has none of Key's charisma or political instincts. Instead he's an interchangeable bald head on a walking LinkedIn post.
This is magnified all the more by how strong Nicola Willis has been as a performer. One can't help but think that if the leadership was round the other way, National would likely be firmly in charge.
Labour still has strong chance of forming a government after the next election, but one thing it needs to get clear on is how it plans to help me. The voter. Cos right now I hear a lot of policies and solutions but I'm not being told or shown what the outcomes of those policies will be. How will my life look every morning when I wake up?
National is likely to start asking the electorate if they are better or worse off than 2020, and if you're worse you should vote National. Except while we all may be worse off, this is a global problem. And the question should be would you have been better or worse off with National in charge.
Way worse with National in my view.
Yes this Labour Government has failed to deliver on numerous key promises, but you know what, at least they're trying. Because National has promised to cut taxes at a time we've just had a pandemic that has fucked our health system. The well off will be even more well off, and will still likely use private health care, while us plebs might have about $2 more a week, but the public services we rely on will starve again.
The health infrastructure will decay. We'll struggle to get doctors and nurses because the job will just look so awful that people won't want to do it.
Same with teaching.
Same with emergency services.
But we'll probably get some fucking good roads.
But you know the one factor that means I could never vote National, it's their decision that climate change isn't worth doing anything about. That we should just let other countries who emit more do something. Why risk the economy when the US, China, and India continue to belch out pollution?
Because the economy isn't necessarily polluting. The economy is people. The economy is our environment. The economy is us. And so National is willing to sacrifice the future of my child for some CEO's P&L spreadsheet.
So come on Labour. This election is there to win, just show us why you deserve it. Otherwise it's generic Pākehā businessman again.
*Talbot Mills used to be UMR, it's Labour's pollsters. But this poll is done for its corporate clients, not Labour.
I've been waiting a while to write this. I wanted to get a sense of where it all landed. But it's been a schmozzle.
Ahead of the Green Party AGM there were murmurings that people were going to roll James Shaw as co-leader. But those murmurings happen every year. So nobody paid them much mind. Turns out they should have.
Salient had the scoop. Some of the Green Left and Young Greens had coordinated to get enough people in positions of power to be able to launch a coup.
In short, and this has been well traversed, there are 150 voting delegates. They are supposed to represent the branches they come from. Sometimes they don't though.
Every year at the Green Party AGM the co-leaders are re-voted on. Because the Green Party decision making is done by consensus, it means that 75% of the voters have to agree if you can't convince 100%.
This means that it just takes a quarter of votes for something to not pass. And that's what happened.
When I worked at the Greens I took part in a lot of caucus meetings and I was always both was baffled, and admired this rule. It could be a handbrake, but it also meant that broadly everyone would leave a vote feeling the same amount of dissatisfaction.
When Julie-Anne Genter squared off against Marama Davidson, the Green Left ran a phenomenally well coordinated campaign to get Marama elected. They stacked branch meetings to get higher numbers for Marama, and if the majority of a branch voted for JAG then someone would convince the branch delegates to split the vote since true consensus hadn't been reached. Or if Marama won, they would get the delegates to give all branch votes to Marama.
This time they turned their attention to James. They've spent the last few years getting themselves into key delegate roles, and good on them. That's how this works.
So then when the vote happened, and there were only 107 delegates present to vote, getting to 25% was suddenly a lot easier.
In the immediate aftermath, I'm told that James had to do some serious thinking about whether he wanted to re-contest. In the end he decided he needed to because he had unfinished business as co-leader.
In terms of MPs who could seriously threaten him, it seemed that Chlöe was the major, but when she ruled herself out this meant it was unlikely any other MP would. This after a fairly fractious MPs call on the Sunday evening.
So now we're in a situation that's potentially worse for James, where he's likely to face nobody. Which means that it will only take 25% to put us back to square one and re-open the nominations. I hope that James spends the next few weeks reaching out to those who are disaffected within the party to talk with them, to present his vision and how he wants to achieve it, and that they give constructive feedback.
The Greens are heading into an election in potentially the strongest shape they've ever been. If Labour is to form a Government then they will definitely need the Greens, meaning that there is the chance for real concessions. Faster, more aggressive action on climate change, implementation of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group's changes, drug reform, all of these things are suddenly on the table. James or Marama could end up Deputy PM. The Greens have never been in a formal coalition before, and this is their chance.
So on the one hand I can see why the Green Left and Young Greens did what they did. I don't agree with James' politics on the whole. But also I think he's the best chance for the Greens to play a major role in the next Government and make major reform.
The other thing that I know was terrifying Labour was that if anyone except James got in, then Labour could lose votes from its right. Soft Labour voters might be terrified of a more activisty coalition partner so go back to National. Numbers of Labour folk reached out to me asking what the fuck was going down and wanted me to assure them everything would be alright. Obviously I'm not really involved with the Greens so couldn't do that. But it was interesting to hear the stress.
One final note: Green members this century have usually voted for the right wing option when a co-leader vote is held.
When Rod Donald passed away, Nándor Tánczos stood against Russel Norman and Russel won. Then when Jeanette Fitzsimons stood down, it was Metiria vs Sue Bradford - don't forget that Meyt had been a corporate lawyer at Simpson Grierson! And then there was James vs Kevin Hague. Every time there, the party went right. This streak was broken with Marama and JAG, showing the rise of the Green Left.
All this is to say that James needs to better engage with the Green Left, and recognise that it's not just his way. That he is the co-leader of a party with a lot of differing views, and it's his job to lead them all. Not just the ones who agree with him.
Donations. Political donations. Gross. Not a fan. I think we should ban them to be honest. Or make them compulsory. Give every New Zealander $500 or some amount and they have to spend it on a donation to an MP. This would completely level the playing field so that parties who might have policies that benefit the rich (coughNationalActcough) would not be able to cream it like they currently do.
My mind turned to donations lately because it's been in the media.
I saw this headline, which is just not a headline you want to be part of. Bad luck Luxo.
If you're opposed to something that increases transparency, that's usually because you want something to stay hidden. Why would National want donations to stay murky? One could only speculate.
I did some research (no, not into covid vaccines, though I am just recovering from covid hence why I've been very slack at writing, sorry). I went through and looked at every single Labour and National MP's donation returns from the 2020 elections. I found some weird shit.
In Part A of the donations form, every donation from an individual or group that adds up to more than $1,500 must be individually recorded.
Where it gets peculiar is in the masking of some of these.
Twenty-five of the 65 Labour MPs recorded donations from their Electorate Committees or the Labour Party. These might be fundraisers by the electorate committees. Or they might be a way of hiding bigger donors who may have given to the party and then the party dishes it out to MPs. We don't know because it's masked.
In 2020, Labour MPs received $425,549.32 in money that is labelled as coming from either the Labour Party or an electorate committee. It's money we don't know the provenance of. That's a lot of money.
Thirty one of the 33 MPs that National has did exactly the same. In 2020, those National MPs received $695,969.09 in this dark money. That's a shit tonne.
It also becomes slightly weirder. You see the majority of those 25 Labour MPs recorded donations from others too, not just Labour. Of those 25 MPs, only 5 recorded the Labour Party or an LEC as the only donor. This totaled $128,724.44.
But for National it's a very different story. Of the 31 who recorded dark money donations, 23 only received money from either the National Party or their National Party electorate. This totaled $543,308.75.
One can only speculate about why National MPs seems to have received so much more money from National that we can't find the provenance of. It could be completely legitimate. It also might not. We just don't know because it's not transparent. It's just so baffling that only 8 National MPs were able to get donations from people that aren't the National Party isn't it?
Edit: Why would parties do it this way? $1500 is the anonymous donation limit for a candidate, but for a party it’s $15,000. So someone who wants to anonymously donate $15K to a candidate could just be funnelling the cash via a party.
Some weird highlights:
Labour's Anna Lorck was by far and away the highest recipient of dark money for Labour with $77,000! Anna was in fact the highest recipient of dark money across all parties. Anna had no other donors.
Christopher Luxon was National's highest recipient of dark money. He got $73,050.43.
National MPs who got donations from places other than the National Party:
Nicola Willis
Stuart Smith
Maureen Pugh*
Melissa Lee
Harete Hipango
Nicola Grigg
Matt Doocey
Judith Collins
What's my point with all this? Dunno. I'm not accusing anyone of anything in particular, but that's only because donations are so goddamn murky. It's gross. This sort of dark money needs to be taken out of politics so we can see who is trying to influence policy with their chequebooks.
*Maureen Pugh's return has one hilarious inclusion. A donation of $1,501 from Chris Finlayson. Finlayson doesn't strike me as a man who doesn't do things deliberately, so I think his donation was made specifically so it would be recorded ($1,500 being the threshold); and given his animosity towards Simon Bridges I think that was the reason. I'm just speculating though.
National announced it would be getting tough on gangs. Because National is tough on crime you see. TOUGH. ON. CRIME. And when you're tough on crime, well then you're a good government. Because crime is bad, so we should be tough on it right?
It's this sort of basic thought that is endemic among, not just National, but most of our politicians.
But at the moment, National is winning hands-down on cynicism. It first became super apparent in a speech given at a regional National Party conference by Luxon. He said that the cost of living crisis would sweep National to power. He didn't actually have a plan to address it, and he was almost gleeful that it was here because, hey, whatever it takes to get power eh?
But this cynicism pales in comparison to National's gangs announcement from the weekend. Their plan to get tough on gangs? Ban patches, ban gangs from being able to gather in public, and ban gang members from fraternising with anyone. Also make it harder for gang members to get guns.
Scorn for the policies have poured in from everywhere. A gang leader was quick out of the blocks to say this was dumbassery. But you'd think that was an advertisement for the policies. Harry Tam is a life member of the mongrel mob, but he's also in charge of an agency that sets out to engage with hard to reach communities to make it better for them. Gangs are one such group.
But then a former National MP, Chester Borrows, spoke out against the policies. He said they were nothing but headline grabbers that achieved precisely jack shit. Chester was an associate Minister of Justice and Social Development. He's also a former cop. And currently sits on the parole board. Dude might know one or two things. Certainly more than say a guy who used to be CE of an airline.
There has not been a single person with credibility on the issue come out in favour of the policies. It's nothing but red meat. It sounds good in theory but actually achieves nothing.
And this is where National has got itself. It isn't coming up with new ideas, or imaginative solutions for contemporary problems, it's just falling back on the same old bullshit. Tax cuts and harsh on gangs. And this might be popular, but that doesn't mean it's right.
All over the world, tough on crime policies have been found to fail. So they're not actually tough on crime at all. They're tough on individuals and that then actually makes it worse for crime. National knows this too, by the way. Sir Peter Gluckman, the Key-led-National-Government appointed former science adviser wrote that "successive governments of different political orientations have supported a progressively retributive rather than a restorative approach to crime".
If you really want to address crime, you don't create Strike Force Fashion Police to arrest people for wearing gang insignia, no you address the drivers of crime. Poeple usually commit crime to satisfy a want or a need. That is sometimes money, food, drink, drug, whatever. In order to lower crime you stop people going without. You give them money, food, shelter, mental health treatment, whatever. Do that and you'll find that crime rates plummet.
But not if you're National. No if you're National you'll pretend to be tough on crime. But you're not. We don't need anyone to be tough on crime. We need people to be smart on crime. And National ain't it. And instead of being tough on crime, what National really is, is soft on poverty.
It's been a charmed run. The media has been gagging for National to be actually competitive. Since Covid they've not been. Then when Collins tried to knife Bridges in the dark of night and found herself cast adrift, National went to the chosen one, Christopher (not Chris) Luxon.
And National has gone up in the polls by heaps. Most of it at the expense of ACT but enough has come from Labour that National is now ahead of Labour by about 1% in nearly every poll. A great performance from the freshman MP who has only been an MP 18 months!
Lots of Labour-aligned folk online have been fretting about the National resurgence. And I'll admit, I was a bit worried. But man, he's actually super shit. And look it's probably because he's only been an MP for such a short period of time, but wow.
And now I think the media has decided it's given him enough of a go and it's rightly applying scrutiny to a man who could very well end up Prime Minister next year.
The first signs that things were taking a turn was Luxon's use of "bottom-feeders" in an interview with Kerre Woodham. Usually nobody would pay much attention to a throwaway comment made on NewstalkZB but people pounced.
But things got worse.
He said that public transport shouldn't be subsidised and should stand on its own. This despite the fact that he was CEO of a major form of public transport that fails to stand on its own regularly. To be fair, Luxo has probably not seen the inside of a train or bus since he was in Moscow fighting the communists, but the whole point of publicly owned transport is because it's not profitable. It's a public good. And not every public good needs to make money Luxo. It may come as a surprise but good can exist outside of profitability.
So he had to walk that comment back.
Then he said that if the Government was going to make Matariki (matarangi) a public holiday, it should take one away; and it should be Labour Day.
I'm pretty sure this started as a bit, but then it got out of hand and Luxo kept running with it. He told Morning Report that he would remove Labour Day. And that played pretty terribly.
And not only was it covered negatively, but lines were now being drawn from that fuck-up to the public transport one. The media was now starting to draw patterns for people to see for themselves.
This week just past was manna from heaven for him. The inflation rate came out and it was pretty shit. He also was getting a lot of media. He had the main interview lined up on Q&A. I don't usually watch political media, but I thought I'd give this a hoon to see how he was holding. I'd heard he'd received media training earlier that week and wanted to know if he was able to put it into practice.
Spoiler: he was not.
As far as interviews go, it wasn't the worst I've ever seen, but it wasn't flash. Jack Tame is an absolute beast of an interviewer, I think his sexy appearance masks this. Tame got him on where Luxon wanted to cut spending, Tame got him on the fact that his proposed tax cuts would be inflationary at a time when Luxo is calling on the Government to rein in spending to try and lower inflation. Tame got him on the fact that the proposed tax cuts would give Luxo an annual income boost of $18,000, while the vast majority of the country would get nowhere near that.
Most interestingly to me, Tame got him on his inability to communicate ideas. And that's the pattern that's starting to emerge. A bumbling Mr McGoo type who, in the fact of being asked a question he doesn't know the answer to, just falls back on corporate buzz words that aren't super understandable.
This opens up a very clear line of attack for Labour given that in Jacinda Ardern they have one of the most gifted political communicators we've seen in a long time.
I also think the National caucus - which has been remarkably well disciplined until now - sniffs this. Already I've been told by National MPs that they think Luxo got the role too early. That there's too much time until the election and he's going to be found out.
"John Key Home Brand" is how one Nat MP described him. Others in caucus have suggested he's smart enough to pass an exam but has no general knowledge of anything.
The reverse of this is of course true, he could spend the next 18 months improving and come the election he's a well-oiled machine. The other thing is it also may not matter how shit he is, because if inflation gets out of hand and Labour don't give off a vibe of at least trying to do something about it then National will likely hose in anyway.
Either way, National winning the election won't be because of Luxon. But he might be the reason they lose it.
I have a recurring bit. I'll do a gag on twitter and then self-grade it. I've had a few misses, probably more misses than hits if I'm honest. But occasionally I'll smash it out of the park and give myself a 10/10.
As far as I can tell it's only happened six times in the past few years, so at the behest of a colleague here is a list of the six tweets I've done where I have hit my peak and given myself 10/10 for them.
Warning, I'm a puerile, immature man; and I know my mum is a subscriber so I'm sorry in advance (though not that sorry because I also know you pay the cheapest subscription):
This tweet is what inspired me to write this column. Plunket's original tweet was so fucking dumb that I had to ridicule it. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to ridicule it but I got there in the end. Pretty happy.
Going all the way back to 2018 for the next one. It was a weird time. National was looking for reasons to attack the Government and decided that they'd become weirdly obsessed with the Tahr cull that occurs annually to protect our native forests. This is a level of word-play that I have never managed to repeat.
The next one was just silly, and made me laugh and laugh and laugh. It was during the 2020 election campaign, when National was right at its depths. I think this was like iteration 3 of its billboard?
I also got a message from Judith Collins saying that she objected to being called a potato. Fucking lol.
This next tweet didn't do the numbers that I felt it deserved. To be fair you do need to be privy to background info on me and Kim to get it. For context, Kim has a condition called didelphic uterus, which means she has two uteri. We've written publicly about this when we wrote about our infertility journey. Kim and I like to call it double cunt.
As an added bonus, Kim crushed it in the responses. DairyMan (Kreg), followed along our story so he was well versed on the term "double cunt".
This tweet is one of my favourites. Hamish Rutherford was tweeting out his disappointment that the Government was issuing a bunch of documents late on a Friday afternoon; a time when journalists have the least amount of time to go through them all.
And finally, I think this is my favourite tweet I've ever done. It's not puerile, it's not mean, it's just fucking funny. I still laugh every time I see this photo.
So those are my 10 out of 10 tweets. You may not agree. But that's ok, because I believe in me. I think I'm funny. And self-belief is really the most important belief.
About 18 months ago the Guardian interviewed me. It was running a story on how New Zealand seemed to have avoided the worst excesses of political polarisation that much of the western world was suffering through.
I told the person interviewing me that I thought it was because we didn't have Murdoch-owned press:
“A huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold.”
I'm aware that we did have Murdoch-owned press. In fact the first overseas newspaper the little Aussie gremlin owned was a Wellington one. But Murdoch-owned press really took off in influence in the UK in the 90s; It's the Sun wot won it happened in 1992, patting itself on the back for Major defeating Kinnock. And then when the Sun swung in behind Tony Blair's Labour in 1997 that was considered game over.
The influence of Murdoch in the US happened a wee bit later. Fox News launched in 1996 but it wasn't until the early part of the Iraq invasion of 2003 that it saw its viewership skyrocket. 2003 was also the year that Murdoch divested the fuck out of New Zealand, selling its 45% shareholding in Independent Newspapers to Fairfax.
My point was that we don't have the toxic misinformation that Murdoch-media vomits all over its viewers that the US, UK, and Australia does, and that because of this our media operates in a smaller overton window.
At the time, that quote went gangbusters all around the world. That quote was tweeted by people with huge followings. AOC talked about it on a twitch-stream with Jagmeet Singh of the NDP in Canada. Sarah Silverman tweeted it, some NBA coach tweeted it, it was a big deal. Then it eventually stopped being a big deal.
Until yesterday.
Someone DM'd me because this random little account with a tick over 2000 followers tweeted out the quote again, except this time it was paraphrased and misattributed.
In his telling, it was the Prime Minister who said it, and she wasn't just saying we no longer had Murdoch media here, but that it was never allowed. And that wasn't why we didn't have political polarisation, but rather why we didn't suffer the "rage of older white men".
I have no idea how this guy came to create this fantasy. Nor do I know why it took off. But take off it did. I saw that Judd Apatow retweeted it, and just look at those numbers? Mother fucker went viral.
It got so out of hand that CNN actually looked into it and made poor old Andrew Campbell deny that the PM had ever said anything of the sort. Sorry Andrew.
CNN's Daniel Dale at least found the correct quote, and provided that for his followers to see:
But neither of his tweets have done anywhere near the numbers of the original tale of bullshit.
It's funny, I think when something sounds plausible, and when it confirms a pre-existing narrative we believe then it's really easy to buy.
So for those in the US/UK/Aus who have to put up with Murdoch shit, this sounds wonderful! Of course Murdoch is the cause of all the angry white men! How easily explainable! And Ardern is held up in such high regard overseas that of course she'd say something so obvious and clever, and of course New Zealand, that bastion of freedom and liberality, would never allow Murdoch media to happen there. It's too nice a place.
None of which is true. And also, since I said that, we have seen worse polarisation. Especially over our Covid response. But I maintain that we have been spared a worse situation because we don't have media that just heaps fuel upon a fire of lies. So I'm sticking to my guns, New Zealand's political landscape is definitely the better for the lack of Murdoch*, and I hope that the attention my words have got (both correct and paraphrased) don't cause Murdoch to suddenly decide there's a market to exploit here.
* I believe that Newscorp may have bought about 15% of APN (now NZME) in 2015, but it sold that the following year/
ACT had been the wunderkind party. Its polling had gone from like 0.5% to around 16%. The party thought it had a chance of becoming the main opposition. But then oh no, National got its shit together, became viable, and most of ACT's gains went right on back.
This has been the source of much frustration within ACT ranks.
ACT thinks that National just steals its ideas a week or two later and rolls them out. This is a wee bit true but is also tough shit. That's politics.
So with ACT's polling on a very slippery slide, I've been surprised to see David Seymour hit the panic button so quickly.
Yesterday we saw this headline:
And I mean come on. That's like pulling all the lunatic right-wing levers at once. Except for one, racism, which I'll come to in a second.
ACT pledging to decrease sick leave entitlements while we are still going through a pandemicis absolutely bonkers. It's actually bad for business. My firm operates on an unlimited sick leave policy, because if you're unwell we don't want you coming into the office and infecting people. We want you at home, resting and recuperating. ACT wants people to work even when sick. Idiots.
The minimum wage hikes and public holiday repeal will be defended by saying they're saving businesses' costs, but it's just bullshit far right dog whistles.
But the stuff I'm most excised about is the racism. Seymour has pulled the racism card.
I did a tweet yesterday with the above headline in it. I said:
Got a lot of reply guys, as I always do. Most of the opposition to my tweet came from people bristling at the accusation of Seymour being a racist. Nobody likes to think they're a racist, so as soon as they're accused of being a racist, they shit the bed.
Most people would say something along the lines of "what's racist about wanting equal treatment for everyone?". Which is a fair point, if everyone is starting from the same place.
So here's a concept explanation for why Seymour's criticisms of the Government's "race-based policies" is actually racist.
For the past 180 odd years, Māori have been treated like shit. Deliberately. By government after government. Nobody denies this. Well nobody sane. This has seen Māori over-represented in negative statistics, anything to do with social deprivation, crime stats, etc Māori feature high. Now the racist will go "this is because of something to do with Māori", the progressive will ask why they are overrepresented, and the conclusion that's easy to come to is that it's due to being in a lower socio-economic class that leads to all these negative outcomes.
And Māori are over-represented there because of colonialism and all the subsequent racist treatment that some after.
If you come to today, and you were to assign a starting point you might say that Māori are on -100, while Pākehā are on 0. So if you start from now treating those two parties equally you are doing nothing to address the gap in outcomes between them. Pākehā will remain on 0, and Māori on -100.
But it's actually even more insidious. Because Government interventions are used to, not just leave people at the status quo, but are effectively investments so that people make returns to get ahead.
So to further stretch my analogy, if you invest in Pākehā say +5, given where they currently are in their own privilege, they might be able to turn that +5 into +10. If you give Māori +5, because they're already at a disadvantage they might not be able to increase that benefit, or if they do, it's by a smaller margin. So they end up on -93.
This is a mess I know. But the upshot is that with Govt investment, Pākehā have gone from 0 to 10, while Māori have gone from -100 to - 93. And so inequality actually gets worse. You are further entrenching racist outcomes.
Seymour is not a dumb dude, he knows this. He knows he's wilfully being racist. And he's doing it because his poll numbers are sliding and he's desperately casting around for attention and something to boost him. Ironically, this is the Winston Peters' playbook, and Seymour and Peters loathe one another. They just both love a bit of populism.
I don't think many of my reply guys are likely to be subscribed to my patreon, but that's why your "one law for all" bullshit is racist.
This hasn't even touched upon the fact that whenever Seymour starts down this path it emboldens truly racist individuals to harass Māori - Te Paati Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has said that she gets an increased amount of racist abuse whenever Seymour gets back on his bullshit.
There's no ending to this. Because there doesn't seem to be an ending to racist bullshit. Our politicians will use it as a device to get attention all the time. Chinese Sounding Names? Orewa? Two wongs don't make a white? New Zealand politicians have a revolting history of racism, and that's just in the 21st century.
I'll close on an anecdote I've told a lot. I was on a plane, flying from New Orleans to San Diego. I was in my seat next to some dude who heard me talking to Kim.
"Funny accent you got there, was this your first time in N'Orlins?" he asked me.
"Yes" I said. "I absolutely loved it".
"Did you go up Bourbon Street?"
"Oh absolutely" I told him.
"I hope you didn't go too far up Bourbon Street" he said conspiratorially. "That's the fag end of town."
I said nothing. I buried my face in a book I was reading and just allowed his bigotry to wash over me.
I am now ashamed of myself for that. And so I vowed that I will always speak out when I hear racism, or bigotry of any kind. So that's what this is.
The moment had arrived. Christopher Luxon was giving his first major speech (apart from that major speech where he appeared to side with protesters). We've imported that horrendous Americanism "State of the Nation" to describe these speeches. But they're not.
Luxon had apparently wanted to introduce himself to New Zealand, so we'd get to know him as more than just the former Chief Executive of Air New Zealand. But when he had to move the speech, he pivoted to try make the speech a presentation of ideas to show that National was no longer focused on itself, but focused on New Zealand.
So what were those ideas?
Social investment, as developed by Bill English
Tax indexation as developed by Simon Bridges
Undoing some of Labour's ideas
Pretty shit at new ideas if I'm honest.
And his big takeaway from the speech? Tax cuts. It's always tax cuts. Tax cuts and roads. That's all National seem to offer. In the year 2022 Anno Domini, National's big idea is the same fucking idea it's had since forever.
At a time when just about every public sector is being stretched due to a lack of funds, when our health system teeters on the brink of collapse, when our public transport network is dire at a time when it needs to be great, when our housing stock needs constant replenishment, when teachers, nurses, and just about every other member of the public sector is underpaid, National wants to defund the government.
Absolute clownery.
But the thing I'm interested in is actually what Luxon wanted to talk about. Who is Christopher Luxon?
In an interview on Newshub Nation the day before his speech, Luxon said he was a feminist. That he wanted his daughter to have the same opportunities as his son. The ol' classic "as the father of a daughter" feminism. Not because it's the right thing to do. But because it directly impacts his progeny. And also he is on record as saying that abortion is tantamount to murder. So not sure he's that much of a feminist.
Onto the speech, and there was a weird little reference to Russia that I found the most illuminating.
I remember sitting in a modest Moscow flat with a couple in their late 40s on a dark and snowy afternoon. It couldn’t have been clearer that socialism – in terms of Government control of everyday life and lack of rewards for hard work – had abjectly failed and actually created misery.
There is quite a bit to unpack here.
First off, Luxon didn't leave university until 1993. That's two years after Boris Yeltsin banned communist activity from taking part in Russia. And that's being charitable with the timeline. He said that he travelled when he was a manager at Unilever. So probably not straight out of university.
I checked his LinkedIn page, he became a "Brand manager" in 1994, based here in Wellington. It'd be weird for a brand manager based in Wellington to fly to Russia for work. Then he was "Brand manager, Australia and New Zealand" in 1995. This was based in Sydney. So it's possible this was when he took the trip, but still unlikely. In 1999 he became "Group Brand Manager/Asia Innovation Centre Manager, Australia, New Zealand, Asia "
That seems the most likely.
1999.
Eight years after communism was banned.
Even at our most charitable, Luxon was in Russia four years after the fall of communism, during which time Russia experienced intense capitalism and free market ideology. So Luxon's depiction of the ruins of socialism actually happened under capitalism.
But also what the fuck? His description of the bleakness of socialism is that the weather was shit? He's putting a lot of stock into centralisation controlling the weather.
And then finally does he know what New Zealand's housing is like for people struggling? How many folks live in cars, or garages? Because it ain't good here either mate. And we're definitely not a socialist country.
That one portion of his speech was illuminating for me on a number of levels. He's used a massive misrepresentation to try and drum up terror of an ideology that isn't in play in New Zealand, and fails to even make it look bad.
It's dishonest, clumsy, and just a bit shit. Now one could argue that those three words could be used for every government ever and I wouldn't disagree. But it shouldn't be the case for leaders of parties. They should be the first among equals.
On top of all this, he was also just really fucking boring.
And if National truly appreciated what was important then maybe he would have given more than a glance to the brewing European war, to Covid, and to climate change.
I do media training. One of the first things I do when I'm doing media training is to ask the person "do you fuck dogs?".
100% of the time the answer has been "no".
"Cool" I'll say. "That means the headline in the paper tomorrow will be
So and so denies fucking dogs
and people will read that and think to themselves "well I didn't think they fucked dogs, but if they have to deny fucking dogs, maybe they do fuck dogs".
The lesson here is that a denial is often as good as an admission when it comes to media coverage.
Which brings me to this:
It was a weird speech.
If you read it, Luxon's speech was perfectly fine. Yes there are rifts that have been exposed in NZ (I don't think they've been created by Labour at all, just made more obvious in the current pandemic-y settings). Yes Luxon's best bet is to be all statesmanlike and give off the vibe he can bring the country together. But man the timing was off.
The protesters were not there to be sided with. They were there to be used as an emblem. A symptom of this Government's weakness on crime, and its tendencies to stoke division.
I'd earlier tweeted that the police were making National's campaign for 2023 easy. Run a law and order campaign and show clips of the protesters. Labour's too soft for NZ! They'll let your grandmothers get murdered! Look how they allowed protesters to take over Thorndon.
Don't fucking side with them.
And sure, you can argue that Luxon has explained that he wasn't siding with the protesters, that National is a party that's pro-vax, blah blah blah, but the vibe that people have come away with is that Luxon was looking to cash in on the protest and he's taken their side.
And that's dumb on so many levels. Because most New Zealanders will look at the protesters and sure, they may have some sympathies for them, but for the most part they'll see them as a rabble who are below them. And if Luxon is asking us to take a side - protesters or not protesters - not protesters is going to win. And the not protester side is also Jacinda Ardern's Government.
Luxon also made the insightful suggestion that we should be reducing our public health response (mandates etc), after the Omicron peak. And look mate, fucking duh. Not long after Luxon made his speech, the PM came out and did her usual post-cabinet press conference. She addressed all the points Luxon had made, indicating that the Omicron peak was about 6 weeks away and after that we'd see a reduction in restrictions. Like had always been the plan.
Luxon would have been better shutting up. Every National person I've spoken to thinks he should have shut up. Labour was in trouble. It was bad news piling up on top of bad news. The protest was starting to really make them look bad.
In the Herald, Audrey Young absolutely nailed it in this piece (paywalled).
She opens with:
Christopher Luxon's latest contribution to the occupation of Parliament grounds and surrounding streets reeks of opportunism.
She goes on to pick apart all of the ridiculous comments in his speech, the ill-timing of it, how he's misread the room. She then closes with this banger:
Protesters throwing human excrement during police manoeuvres this morning reinforces the distance between us and them. They are not us, and not even close.
I've spoken to senior National strategists who tell me that he's weirdly following the Bridges' template. Always trying to inject himself into the conversation because he runs the risk of becoming irrelevant. There was a conviction that he needed to push on from what's viewed as a good start. The concern internally is that he's actually really boring and he may very well become irrelevant in 6-12 months time.
Luxon is probably saved by the fact that it's only really political hard-outs that will have noticed the speech. And those hard-outs will know who they're voting for anyway. But if he's to have a chance of leading National to Government in 2023 he better learn from his mistakes.
There's a legend that in 2005, Key defeated Michael Cullen in the finance spokesperson's debate. He didn't. He was smashed. And the day after the debate he got on the phone and admitted that he might need some media training after all. The rest is history.
But Key knew he had flaws. Luxon seems to think he's god's gift. He was an airline CEO don't you know? But Luxon would pay to listen to the advice of one National person who text me "it's probably hard not knowing when to shut up, but when in doubt, shut up."
<figure> </figure>
2022-02-23 04:11:19 +0000 UTCView Post
Sounds nice. Needs work. That's my takeaway from the social insurance policy announced by Labour.
It's a policy that's been worked on for a while now, and it essentially amounts to middle class welfare.
The fear of losing your job and having your income go to zero is very real, and a very valid fear. The Social Insurance scheme will definitely alleviate that terror. That's good. It also means that if there are large scale redundancies due to companies going under or whatever, it won't decimate that area.
But looking at the proposed scheme, I can't help but feel it's a welfare net for middle class people and their middle class mortgages.
Welfare should be a needs based thing. If anyone needs money to get through tough times then they should get it. It shouldn't be based on circumstance.
Now instead of getting put on the jobseeker benefit with the disgusting poors, you'll be on your nice social insurance scheme. This is a two tiered welfare system, further stigmatising those on the jobseeker benefit.
It also does absolutely nothing to help solve the inequities of unpaid labour, like parenting or caring for someone. These are roles usually taken by women and are part of the systemic sexist policies woven into the fabric of our society.
That's not to say this is a bad policy, it has potential. It just needs to come with some more things.
One thing I haven't seen talked about is what this will mean for the money used for those on the jobseeker benefit. Presumably a fair chunk of this will now be covered by the social insurance pot. This means there should be enough to substantially raise benefits, bringing the jobseeker benefit to a level above poverty and providing more dignity to those in need.
It also does bring us a step closer to a UBI, but also a step away. The UBI replaces all welfare, and this introduces a new welfare net. It perhaps takes us closer to Milton Friedman's negative income tax system, which is supposed to be the great inequality fixer, but only works for those in work and ends up subsidising shitty paying jobs, disincentivisng business from paying a fair wage (think of Working For Families on a grander scale).
National coming out immediately opposed and committing to repealing it just continues their dumb assery in opposition. Businesses love certainty. They can plan for it and accommodate increased costs, so long as they aren't surprised. National plans on leaving organisations unable to plan long term if this could potentially be scrapped.
I'm not opposed to this policy, not by a long way, but I do want to see major welfare reforms come with it. Otherwise we've just made a bougie dole.
It's Wellington Anniversary day today. This means I'm not at work. Instead I have woken up to Omicron vs NZ round 1.
It's been nearly two years now. Covid has owned our lives. Whether we openly acknowledge it or try to live our lives like it's not there, it remains. Tucked away in the corner of our mind like a little nugget of anxiety.
Had Omicron not emerged, NZ would justifiably feel pretty good about its Covid response. We had a pretty good summer, our Delta community cases, hospitalisations, and deaths stayed low. We did good. But the Global South was denied access to vaccines and so variants were able to emerge while smug developed countries attempted to vaccinate with gay abandon.
So now we're faced with what seems an unstoppable variant. We haven't had a big wave of covid. As far as I know we're one of the few countries that hasn't. This means that we don't know exactly what's coming. And that unknown, that's the scariest thing.
I have a 3 year old I can't vaccinate. I have older parents and in-laws with some comorbidities that put them at high risk if they catch Covid. I'm not thrilled that this cloud of risk is just hanging over us.
I've been a critic of this Government for not being left enough, and that holds, but I'm bloody pleased they're overseeing the covid response compared to National/ACT. Those two wanted MIQ abolished late last year. But Labour took a cautious approach and in doing so bought us more time to a) enjoy some kind of summer and b) get boosters and child vaccines begun.
Luxon already seems to be following the same weirdly critical path as his predecessors. He told the Herald that Labour wasn't doing enough.
Every day at 4pm, I would be calling the chairs of the DHBs saying, ‘How many extra staffed ICU beds do you have today? Have we got treatment drugs approved, what’s holding them up?
This is a CEO's view of Government. If we unpick it, it's depressingly naive. Chairs don't manage operational things like ICU beds. Also, we know the number of ICU beds used. Those numbers don't change dramatically. DHBs also don't approve treatments. That's Pharmac and Medsafe. And there have been several announcements in the past few months about new treatments.
I know all this, and I'm a humble PR Rat. Luxon should know all this as he wants to be Prime Minister. He's just saying words that make it sound like he'd do stuff. I think we've all worked for people like that. Usually middle managers who rely on others to do their work then spout off with jargony nonsense.
So if you're feeling scared that's ok. Perfectly valid response to an unknown. If you're not scared then that's great! But try and be mindful that this is a stressful time for a lot of people. We'll all work together I expect. We'll do our best.
One piece of comfort that I took into our delta outbreak was that no country was as well prepared for a new outbreak as us. Vaccines, treatments, they've all been developed and rolled out. And because of our good fortune and management at delaying delta/omicron's arrival, we've been able to learn a lot. So happy anniversary, and good luck.
I'm sick of it. As I've continued the inexorable march of aging I expected to become more conservative. That's what we're told. It's that axiom "If you are not a liberal when you are 20 you have no heart, if you are not a conservative when you are 40 you have no brain."
I'm nearing 40 now. Just a couple of years away. I am in no way a conservative. I've become more left wing as I've aged in fact.
I think the idea of becoming conservative as you got older was when aging and increasing wealth had a correlation. You hit your 30s and 40s and you'd have an established middle management job. You'd own a house. You'd be financially secure. So you don't want anything to change.
But that hasn't played out for my generation, and it certainly isn't playing out for the justifiably angry Gen-Z kids. Increasingly fewer people are attaining home ownership, steady careers are dying and being replaced by "gig economy" jobs, or "side hustles", where people need multiple income streams just to afford their rent in a cold, drafty flat that isn't allowed pets. It's utter bullshit is what it is.
The other night, I was reading an academic study into how tax cuts affected economies. Unsurprisingly it found that tax cuts almost always increased inequality, while not providing any meaningful economic boost.
This goes alongside other policy studies, like the decades of research that's been done that show the worst place to rehabilitate a criminal is prison. So tougher sentences don't do shit, other than to serve some primal desire for revenge.
There are drug studies galore that show that prohibition is a failed idea. Studies show that some kind of decriminalisation/legalisation is the best path to help reduce drug harm.
Climate change, which shouldn't have been politicised down left/right lines but inexplicably has is not even up for debate. It's happening. We're fucking it up.
Abortion, minority rights, hell even the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine has become a left/right issue. And on every side the science supports the left.
I'm tired of pretending there's even a skerrick of legitimacy to right wing policies. Every study and every real-world example, supports left wing policies over right wing ones, pretty much 100% of the time.
I've always entertained the idea that I could be wrong about a lot of the things I believe in, because I'm usually emotionally attached to these ideas, rather than rationally. But the older I get, the more it seems like there is just no justification for any right-of-centre policies.
Ben Shapiro said that "facts don't care about your feelings", and he's right. Except it's in the exact opposite perspective to the one he offered. Those on the right are not operating by science, or fact-based rigour. They are operating under a feeling that their worldview is right. And in order to win people over we cannot use facts. We're badly wired. If we're presented with stone-cold facts to counter someone, then that person will often further entrench themselves in their wrong views. It's called the backfire effect and it's fucking dumb.
So we need to win with emotional argument. That's what drives people. We need to talk about the outcomes of our policies and how they'll effect people's day to day lives. We need to make them feel like this is the best way.
I don't have fully formed emotion-led arguments for all the positions I need, but I'm going to spend some time working on them. Because frankly, I'm sick of pretending you rightwing folk have any guiding principle beyond being selfish assholes.
Summer Holidays! Bliss. Fucking round. Not needing to find out. Just roasting in our climate changed scorchers all round the country. Haven't even had to think about politics.
The Government is going to beef up the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act which is when cops seize assets/money etc from known/suspected gangs.
This new beefed version switches the burden of proof from the police - the ones y'know, making the accusation - to the gangs being accused. Now individuals will have to prove that the money they have wasn't from illegal means. What the fuck. We don't expect people to prove a negative. We don't make people prove their innocence. That's not how natural justice works.
From the article:
Under the current law, police do not need a conviction. They only have to show that someone profited from criminal offending to the lower standard of proof applied in civil cases — "on the balance of probabilities" — rather than surpassing the more difficult "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold for criminal cases.
Under the proposed change to the law, the police would be able to ask the High Court to restrain - and later forfeit - the assets of anyone "associated" with an organised criminal group, if their declared income was insufficient to pay for them.
...
Instead of proving someone benefited directly from a specific crime, the law change would mean police would simply have to prove a lack of income and an "association" to an organised criminal group.
What in the everloving fuck. The article then goes on to say that this law may not actually be within the Bill of Rights:
The briefings reveal the proposal could conflict with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, in particular the right to freedom of association and from unreasonable search and seizure, as well as natural justice - although the public interest may justify those limitations.
What this law will do is give police more tools to harass Māori who are over-represented in gang numbers due to over a century of mistreatment from foreign and domestic governments. Colonisation echoes yo.
We don't make rich folk prove that their income wasn't illegally gained (or you know, properly taxed), we have to prove malfeasance. The SFO takes a million years before deciding whether it will take someone to court for the white collar crimes it oversees.
In the United States, asset seizure laws are a disgrace with police routinely using them to beef up their own coffers. Over there, the police have far more freedom to just seize money/assets, oftentimes not even charging the person they've robbed. Anything that brings us closer to that shitshow needs to be resisted at all costs.
Here the money seized is put into a contestable fund which has criteria and a limited number of groups that can apply for it. But those groups include the fucking police. So talk about a creating a motivation to use and abuse this law.
These laws also disproportionately fuck the poor. And also the children of those who have their assets seized get really badly hurt. Is that the sort of government we want?
And what is this sort of bullshittery supposed to achieve? It's not a deterrent. We need to stop buying into the lie that police prevent crime. They do not. They respond to it. High wages, food security, housing, health care, good education and addiction treatment prevent crime.
So I've got something right here you can seize police, and it ain't an asset.
There are plenty of political columns citing people's politicians of the year.
Hot tip: it ain't David Seymour. He disqualifies himself for a whole host of reasons, not least because he actively tried to hamper targeted Māori vaccination when he tweeted out the code for Māori to use. Also the main reason columnists think it's him is because for a lot of the year ACT was polling in the mid-late teens. Except now they're not. Seymour sucks for so many reasons.
I'm not going to do that. Instead I wanted to take a look at the state of the left at a global level.
Following the insane neoliberal reforms much of the Global North went through in the late 70s, and early 80s, right up until Covid, the left had kind of become irrelevant. Successful left parties around the world got in on the strength of being mealy mouthed centrists. Tinkering around the edges without doing anything radical.
In New Zealand we had right of centre governments for 24 out of 33 years from 1984-2017. Helen Clark's Government was very very slightly left of centre, but mainly centrist liberalism. An absolute plague on progress.
Jacinda Ardern's Governments have been more left, but still with a lot of work to do.
But globally we have to admit we've struggled with coherency. We didn't know what we were fighting for. Working class folk were getting left behind by "left" parties, in favour of educated intellectual pseudo-socialists. Right wing parties were able to tap into the growing resentment experienced by the less well-off by blaming immigrants, indigenous peoples, Jews, trans people, whatever. Instead of holding a system responsible that is specifically designed to keep making some people poor and others richer. Unless you have capital, and lots of it, you get fucked.
Covid has come along and magnified so many problems that suddenly the left is in the ascendancy, at a population level anyway, political parties still have a way to go. In the United States, people are finally realising that they don't have to be treated like shit by their employers. The US is experiencing the "great resignation". It's being reported as a labour shortage, but it's not. It's a shitty employer glut. If you browse reddit, you should take a look at the subreddit antiwork, it's a great insight into what's going on (this subreddit helped screw over Kellogs when it tried to hire a bunch of scabs to get around a striking workforce).
"Essential workers" have realised that what comes with being essential is a degree of leverage. When the only thing you have to sell is your labour, you should extract as much from the buyer as you can. It's what the market would want.
The crazy levels of money printing that went on around the world opened people's eyes, that with a collective will we can actually solve problems we'd been told were in the too hard basket. That we can just pay for things. Stimulus could be here to stay.
This view will become entrenched if inflation doesn't take off and stay high. The capitalist classes would prefer inflation did go sky high, it will reinforce neoliberal ideals, punish everyone who doesn't own capital, and line their pockets even further.
Covid has also shown the left a path out of being trapped in identity ideological warfare. As more and more cis het white folk realise that they aren't capital owners and so have been screwed for decades, they also see that non-white, non-cis, queer folk are getting fucked too. We're all getting fucked. And we aren't getting fucked by immigrants, or queer folk, or indigenous folk, we're getting fucked by people who look just like us, they just have more stuff.
This is not to minimise the experiences of people who look differently to me, who sleep with different types of people to me, who are differently-abled to me, those people still require a huge amount of support. Intersectionality is still a very real thing. But class consciousness seems to be a path we're headed down. And so long as that is an inclusive class consciousness, I welcome it.
Despite this, it's unlikely we'll see a surge of left-wing governments sweep the world, Chile aside. That's because "left" wing political parties are still very corporatist. Here in NZ, the most dramatic law reform is likely to be the fair pay agreements that Michael Wood is shepherding through. Big fan of those. But this Government has been pretty shit on homelessness, funding our health system, social welfare, drug law reform, and a bunch of other lefty things too.
Over in Australia, Labor is still pretty bad on climate change. Anthony Albanese is not inspiring, and they still have a fucked political system. The Democrats in the US are bad man. Real bad. They'll likely get wiped out in the mid-terms next year and then we'll have two years of shitty gridlock, as a Democrat President contends with Republicans running both houses of Congress.
The Tories may have finally fucked the dog in the UK, and despite the fact that Sir Keir Starmer is a hideous corporatist himself, there is still enough of Corbyn's Labour left that we might see some proper change come, though there isn't supposed to be an election until 2024.
So overall the left is perhaps in as good a shape as it's been in my lifetime. There are opportunities there, from grass-roots to federal government. We just have to find the right people, the right parties, and we can take them.
So happy new year friends. I hope that you've managed to scramble something positive out of 2021. And I hope that 2022 sees this fucking pandemic get better, holy shit I crave a social interaction that doesn't inevitably end up in talking about Covid.
He's been leader for two weeks. Suddenly National has a spring in his step. But is he really the messiah? Or is he just a naughty little boy?
The first disgruntled call came in just before the caucus voted Luxon in as leader. A National MP was displeased at how things had shaken out. Subsequent messages that have been sent to me suggest all is not well in the House of Lux.
Many MPs are confident, they're happy, they think they've turned a corner. But they need to remember that they're still the same 33 losers who were there throughout the last year and a bit. Fucking up every opportunity that came there way.
Labour was able to Jacinda its way to a decent election result in 2017 because the country had no time to get used to Jacinda and the Labour Party. We just saw Jacinda. We forgot that behind here were the same group that had dicked around with Goff, Shearer, Cunliffe, and Little. Luxon has to navigate two years until an election.
After the first couple of days the verdict came in from a Nat "Look for a new guy guy he did pretty good". So far, so positive. The media narrative initially was brutal. The first story was how he took a rented Mercedes the 100m distance to get to parliament. Then numerous pieces highlighted the fact he owned 7 seven houses, when for a huge number of Kiwis they can't even get one. When quizzed on this by Morning Report he couldn't see why this would be an issue.
Jenna Lynch from Newshub got him to admit on camera that he viewed abortion as tantamount to murder. Which is ...ummmm... not a good position to take. I'm not a woman. I'm not going to pretend to speak on behalf of them. But I am someone who believes that women should have bodily autonomy. They're not someone who Luxon should dictate how they get to treat their bodies. I think this is going to become problematic. Andrea Vance nailed it in a piece yesterday; I recommend you go read it.
He's also been quizzed on his faith and said he hasn't been in his lunatic church for like 6 years. Which I'm told is just straight up bullshit. I've been told he was seen in the Upper Room in 2019.
Other than this, my own take is that he's had a pretty good start. He's seem confident, assured, on point, charming etc. He's like a slightly shitty John Key. He's got all Key's smarts and business acument, but none of Key's likeability or charisma. His strategy of taking on the PM on Covid seems dumb. It's the one area that this Government has done really well in.
However there are two things that drive voters to you. A talismanic leader, and actually good policies. Covid has completely upended the rule book when it comes to politics. After spending the better part of three decades not knowing its place, the left is suddenly in the ascendancy again. Workers have recognised that they got fucked during the pandemic, while the capital owning classes made bank. The great resignation that's occurring throughout much of the Global North is a sign of worker solidarity. In the US, we're seeing unionisation occur for companies like Starbucks, and Kellog is in the middle of a very nasty strike.
Over in NZ we've got the Fair Pay Agreement legislation winding its way through the house, something that I think, if explained properly, will be very popular with the populace [I'm working on a more fulsome piece in response to some of that bullshit that's been floating around about the Brahmin Left].
All this is to say that it's all well and good having a shiny new toy as leader of the National Party, but unless they come up with some new and innovate policies that are appealing to workers then they're going to be relegated to opposition for a long time.
Despite leaving an awful lot to be desired for the middle class and below, Labour is still a better shout than National.
So over the summer I expect National's whizz-bang backroom that is being put together (and scouted by Wayne Eagleson who was a fucking good Chief of Staff), will be rebuilding Christopher Luxon and National.
This is what they did to Key. A few key players got together and decided that NZ could tolerate someone worth $50M but no more, and so it was leaked to the NBR that this was what Key was worth, despite the fact he was worth four or five times that. This figure never budged. It was always assumed that Key was worth $50M. They didn't quite get the planning time for Luxo, but they'll be busy on that this summer.
The ACT Party is clearly worried. I'm already being sent things to attack Luxo with from them. They want to hold on to their gains from National. Labour is a little bit worried, they're expecting National to come back next year better than it was - which isn't hard - but they're not shitting their daks just yet.
Ultimately though, aside from a few political losers like me, most people don't actually give a fuck about politics. So long as Jacinda and Labour makes people feel like they're ok, they'll be comfortable come 2023.
Luxon with Willis, Bridges will be ranked #3 and take finance, Bishop at 4.
National is a shitshow. Even after the insansity of last week's vote of no confidence in Collins, the shitshow continued. Yesterday a couple of outlets reported that John Key was making phonecalls to MPs to help support Luxon.
Then a few hours later those same outlets reported that Key had in fact not been proactively calling, he'd returned the call of some MPs. He had made one proactive call but this wasn't to push Luxon's cause. Apparently.
All of this playing out in public is just embarassing. As a huge political nerd even I'm sick of National's laundry airing in everyone's back yard.
So of course I went looking for the more private laundry.
One National MP told me that Luxon had the numbers, "comfortably more than half" they said. When there's 33 MPs, that means somewhere in the realm of 20-24 maybe?
This same MP said that Nicola Willis was looking the odds-on for Deputy. There was speculation that this is Key's wet-dream ticket. Luxon was annointed as a Future Key, as was Willis. Key was likely in Luxon's ear pushing Willis. That said, there still remains some bitterness in caucus towards Willis for the way the Muller coup played out. And the joint Labour/National announcement on housing has seen many National MPs cop it from their base. This is also being sheeted at Willis' doorstep.
Both are also taking a risk taking it on at this point. Regardless of who the leadership is, you'd have to say Labour were fairly strong favourites to lead after the 2023 election and what then? Has Luxon's political aspirations been cut off before he could even get his shiny head properly in the game? And for Willis, being Deputy on a losing ticket after being instrumental in an utterly disastrous coup could spell the end of what was a promising career.
This leaves the unaswered questions of Bridges and Collins. Bridges has apparently not been keen on any kind of deal with Luxon and wants to take the leadership on, but with the chances of him winning rapidly diminishing he'll have to have a long think about his career.
And Collins? The National MP I spoke to said that if the new leader was Luxon, Collins would likely fall back into being a senior MP and wouldn't undermine him. Whereas if it was Bridges she would spend every day trying to hurt his leadership.
Labour under Andrew Little slowly turned it around to become much better disciplined, before he handed it on to Ardern. National hasn't reached their disciplined stage yet. So if that's going to be Luxon, who will be the Ardern?
That said, we don't necesarily expect National to perfectly match Labour's struggles. I don't think Labour ever got as nasty and vicious as what we saw over the last week.
Luxon has a huge task ahead of him. He's very new at politics. There's some baggage from his time as CEO of Air NZ, and his religious views may put him at odds with that cherished "middle New Zealand".
But he's more a National leader-clone than we've seen in a while. Corporate high flyer, middle aged, and maybe most importantly of all, a Pākehā male.
Will these be enough to overcome what looks like a complete charisma defiency and the appearance of a roll-on deodorant stick? I guess we'll find out.
Last night's poll on TV1 was both boring and fascinating. It was boring because fuck all had really changed since the last poll, but that was what made it so fascinating.
Everyone admits it's been a messy few weeks for the Government. Confusion over covid status, Auckland's malaise of this lockdown going on forever, the anxiety of watching covid numbers climb...these things all should have hurt. And yet Labour dropped 2%, what gets called "noise" by statisticians.
People inside Labour are relieved. They feared it would have been much worse.
Meanwhile, folks inside National are confused by it. On the one hand they're pleased they didn't go down (which they never should have), but also a drop would have given them cause to do the leadership coup that everyone knows is coming. And yet they find themself in this weird stasis* of being incompetently miles back, but not so uncomfortable that they want to do anything about it.
This is so baffling to me. The dominant state of NZ politics is Labour and National battling it out, both around the 42%, and then the minors all between 5% and 10%. But the situation now is that Labour has the 42%ish, and is sitting pretty, miles clear of anyone else. The fact that Labour can be holding onto its vote at the same time that the Greens are at 9% is remarkable. Between the two of them they'd mop up 56% of parliamentary seats on those votes. That's a huge gulf between Government and opposition.
Then there's ACT, who seem to have hit a ceiling of 14%. They didn't move up, suggesting that this is as high as people are prepared to let them go. It's frankly too high anyway (you can read about my ACT outrage here). Even Collins is now having a crack at ACT which is not surprising given that I got told that if ACT closed the gap any further on National then the coup-that-shall-be would have to become imminent.
As I write this, both major parties are in their caucus meetings. I'm sure the National one is tense. I'm also sure the Labour one is tense as there are a lot of MPs who came in on Labour's majority election night vote who would lose their jobs if last night's numbers were repeated. So the whips will be in overtime, hoping to calm and soothe their respective caucuses.
Maybe the one person feeling the heat more than any from last night's poll is Simon Bridges. Everyone (except himself)(and Judith Collins) has been talking him up as the heir apparent to the coup-that-shall-be. Problem for Simon is that Christopher Luxon is now showing up in those preferred PM polls. In fact last night he was just 1 point behind Judith. Bridges, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen.
Simon will need to move quickly while he still has the support of caucus; otherwise Luxon will start looking more appealing and caucus might drift to him.
Either way, I've managed to eke out a lot of words from a poll with little movement. But sometimes the most exciting thing is when there is no change.
*I wanted to include an anecdote. For a long time I thought stasis was a word rooted in French etymology and so the final S was silent. One time in a meeting I loudly proclaimed that the Government was in a state of Sta-zee.
There was an awkward silence, before the very German client said to me "I think you mean stay-sis".
He's a real piece of shit. I have spent a long time ignoring David Seymour because he'd been an irrelevancy and I didn't want to give his toxic views an airing, but now he's less irrelevant thanks to the ongoing shit storm that is the National Party.
Over the weekend he tweeted:
Which I guess fine, if that's the position you want to take. But it's such naked opportunism. He suddenly found this position the day before mandates were to take effect after seeing large-ish protests about them.
How do I know it's opportunism? Aside from the timing, it also came just one month after this piece of coverage:
You can also tell that ACT isn't as "pro-vaccination as anybody", because in the last sentence of the tweet he says we should allow testing as an alternative to vaccine. Don't think those who are the most pro-vaccine are pro-testing as a substitute.
The hypocrisy I can deal with. But what you've got with Seymour is a politician so devoid of actual ideology beyond "winning votes"; and his strategy is to win votes from the fringes of society. And the more he does this, the more he erodes credibility in politicians as a whole. People will be able to say they're all a pack of lying bastards which just detaches us from democracy. And disenfranchisement is hard to come back from.
A wonderful example of Seymour's lack of ideology is the gun law changes that were shoved through parliament following the Christchurch terrorist attack. ACT's "principled" stance in support of gun owners was why we saw gun-fan Nicole McKee at #3 for the election.
Act did not take a principled stance against the gun laws at all. Act took a stance against the gun laws being rushed through under urgency. In fact during the debates laws, Seymour said that when he rose to speak in opposition to the laws he was opposing the bill as it was being put through, "not to the idea that firearm laws must become more restrictive."
And when National received huge backlash for supporting the law changes, Seymour quickly pivoted to being not just against the process, but against restrictive gun laws as a whole.
Seymour needs to be called out for the opportunist that he is.
When National and Labour did a joint proposal on dergulation of zonal laws to help get more houses built, Seymour said was a "hollow stunt", and shouldn't go ahead. The party that is supposed to be for property rights and deregulation came out against both. Why? Because as noted above, he's a piece of shit. A number of rich people in Epsom don't like the idea of densification and so Seymour opposed it.
Don't forget he tweeted out the code that was to be used by Māori getting the vaccine so they could up their vaccine rates. Then when he was invited on the Hui to justify his asshole move, he declined, causing Hui host Mihingarangi Forbes to call him out:
This isn't new behaviour. Seymour called Golriz Ghahraman a "menace to freedom in this country" because she wanted to expand those protected by hate speech laws. This saw a massive uptick in threats to Golriz causing her to need a security detail.
The previous ACT leader, Jamie Whyte, may have foolishly said he was OK with incest, but at least he was ideologically consistent. Seymour isn't. He's not a libertarian, he's not a hard-line conservative, he's just a piece of shit who goes anyway he can smell votes. And because he's a "minor" party, he doesn't have to kowtow to the majority, meaning that fringe votes are all he needs.
So we can expect more bullshit from Seymour and we can expect to see more breathless coverage of it because he's the only one putting up any kind of meaningful opposition to the Government.
So for the good of the country, and the sake of my mental health, can National please sort its shit out so this pathetic little man can disappear from my consciousness.
This trope has to die. Every now and again someone writes a piece bemoaning the Green Party for not just focusing on environmental issues.
The most recent addition to the genre said that the Greens had gone too far left and were viewed as being anti-capitalism. A) while James Shaw is leader and Chlöe Swarbrick is expected to become leader they won't ever be an anti-capitalist party; and B) I just don't think you can decouple meaningful climate change action from anti-capitalism.
The economic model of capitalism actually provides incentives to pollute, which means not much is going to change. Over 70 per cent of all harmful emissions worldwide come from just 100 fossil fuel companies.
The 2016 Paris Agreement committed most of the world's countries to enacting policies that would reduce emissions and keep the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees - 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial revolution temperature. In the following two years, C02 emissions actually increased for the first time since 2014. Nailed it guys.
Under capitalism, the private sector own the means of production and it is very much driven by profit. Economists say that cost is a great incentive for all sorts of behaviours, however it seems that fear of a destroyed earth is not.
Those 100 fossil fuel companies that are responsible for nearly three quarters of all harmful emissions became aware of the risks of human induced climate change all the way back in the 1950s. They chose to do nothing.
Actually that's not true, they did do something. They organised strategic disinformation campaigns that delayed any effective policy response or decarbonisation for at least three decades. They set out to actively mislead so they could continue to pollute knowing they were inflicting massive harm onto the planet. Nice work big corporate. You guys are tops!
And not only that, but fossil fuels enjoy some serious subsidies. An IMF paper in 2015 estimated that these subsidies amounted to US$4.9 trillion - just a casual 6.5 per cent of global GDP.
On the flipside, 3.5 billion people worldwide have contributed just 10% of the emissions due to individual consumption. That's nearly half the world's population responsible for a tenth of the problem.
When your primary driver is money - which for these huge multinational fossil fuel companies it is - there is a stronger incentive to pollute and get bigger profits than not pollute and have reduced profits. We've chosen money over existence. They've chosen shareholder value over a planet for my fucking child to grow up on.
The immediate solution is to make it incredibly expensive for these polluters to pollute - there's a growing world-wide movement in support of a carbon tax, which was actually proposed by Helen Clark's Labour Government in 2005, however its coalition partners, New Zealand First and United Future, nixed it. Cool.
But of course a Carbon Tax would just get passed onto the consumer via higher costs, making it a regressive tax disproportionately hurting lower-income people. You know, like making them spend money on shopping bags, or putting up the tax on petrol. So instead we'll make the people think it's their fault, all the while big business gets away with it. We are Nero. We fiddle as the world literally burns.
If we really truly realised that capitalism sits at the heart of climate change, we'd thank it for lifting the standard of living for some, put it in the bin of ideas and find something that puts equity at our core.
Shit that was good. What a vibe eh? People were excited and engaged and we smashed the target. It felt like the whole country was swinging in behind it; there was a feeling of hope in the air. It was helped by the [relatively] low number of positive Covid cases that day. I had been spitballing with friends who terrible it would be if there was 120 cases announced at 1pm and how that might suck the fun out of it all.
Kudos to the people who pulled it together. I was cynical about it. But by the end of the day I was a huge cheerleader.
Except...
I noticed that very few, if any, opposition MPs were involved. And while you could say they haven't been terribly supportive of the Government's Covid response, they have been supportive of the vaccination effort. And I would have thought that something like the vaxathon should span the political divide.
I know that Seymour's office tried numerous times to get David involved. They were ignored until the night before the event when they were told they could pre-record something.
Now David might not be speaking to many of the people we're still trying to reach with the vaccine thing, but the day should have been about bringing everyone together.
Hipkins, Peeni Henare, the PM and Chlöe Swarbrick were on it. But no Nats, and no ACT. I was told Rawiri Waititi got on, so at least one party not involved in the Government was there.
Judith recorded a video from her apartment where she is self isolating. I commend her for the fact she has a National party banner in her apartment.
Anyway, that gripe aside, it was a massive effort and hopefully it has tapped into a community spirit that we can carry forward.
---
The Herald went out of its way to be a dick though eh? First off on the day of the Vaxathon it was running scare headlines ahead of the 1pm: Will we see the first day of triple digits?! That sort of thing. And then the day after ran a ridiculous story about the PM canceling the use of a venue for her upcoming wedding. It then emerged that Cameron Slater had been shopping the story around and had found a willing buyer in the Herald. Pretttttty shit that that guy is back.
But I think the most concerning thing the Herald has run from the past few days is a column by Bill Ralston. In a column headlined "It's time for the Government to get hard on vaccines" there are some wild lines:
For the financial and physical health of the country, the next step should be to apply an element of force.
...
Can I also suggest it is time to lock up the epidemiologists, microbiologists and Covid modellers who continually sound like prophets of doom? It just creates a pointless climate of fear and depression that exacerbates the state of crisis.
...
It is time for the Government to get tougher, and I genuinely have sympathy for Ardern in this situation, because acting tough is not in her nature. But, Prime Minister, it is time to be hard.
These are some wild calls for fascism in a column. They go further than even Matthew Hooton would. It's also concerning how New Zealand's opinion columnist scene is becoming dominated by households.
There's Mike and Kate Hosking, Barry Soper and Heather du Plessis-Allan, and now Bill Ralston and Janet Wilson (who has a fortnightly column on Stuff). That's six columnists from 3 house holds. All Pākehā and all from the upper-middle class slice of society.
---
A final note on Simon Bridge's slow-motion coup. He's now doing interviews talking about himself as a "strange rooster", and embracing his happy clappy-ness. It's all painfully awkward as he drifts towards becoming leader again. A month ago I would have said he's a shoo in, but he's taking far too long and allowing others (CoughLuxonCough) to get more battled hardened and put their hand up.
It's time to shit or get off the pot Bridges, you're running it very close to National being relegated to third most popular party in Parliament, and that may be hard to come back from.
The nature of my work means I need to know what's going on in media land, but the Covid alerts are ruinous!
They seem to love coming through right about when I'm thinking about going to bed which makes sleep so much harder.
I'm just watching the news of the cases pop up around Waikato at the moment and at least it's not the horror of the late night news alert.
It's nearly time to watch the 1pm press conference which seems to soothe my angst. The big announcement on Monday didn't, it sent me into a panic but after digesting the plan, I felt better. Particularly after reading what Michael Baker had to say about the plan. That man has been frighteningly accurate.
That said, Monday's announcement was such a weird botch up communications wise. Which is unusual for the PM. She's been so on point and so clear it's been amazing. Monday just brought confusion and fear. I wonder what changed?
I'm still optimistic, but we're relying on people to do the right thing, and we mustn't lose sight that on the whole we are doing the right thing. Unfortunately a small minority is still a heck of a lot of people.
---
National is beating the gang drum again. The public health team has engaged with Mongrel Mob leaders to try and get to those "hard to reach communities" (what a wypipo euphemism that's become); National has said we must do whatever we can to reach the hard to reach. So we did. But now the Government is soft on gangs. And maybe they are? But in this instance I think there's a greater good at play.
---
This continued delta outbreak has been a saviour of Judith Collins' leadership. But it may end up killing it. There's a theory going round that as soon as National looks like they might be a chance at the next election that the party will roll her. And Labour hasn't looked so vulnerable as they do now. Next poll will be interesting eh?
Patreon stresses me out. Every week I sit down to write something and every week I freeze and can't come up with something good enough.
So I'm trying a new approach, I'm going to jot down ideas as they come to me. This will be like extended tweets. I'll still write longer posts, but I'm hoping I'll produce more content by doing it this way too.
Today's thought is that lots of people are saying the Government has ended its elimination strategy. Many are saying it hasn't.
I say, what does it matter? Either way they will try to stomp out any covid outbreaks. The ambition will be to get to zero.
The government still views a good health response as the best overall response. Nothing changes.
I'm anxious as hell where we're at. There keeps being bad news happening about the time I'm thinking of going to bed. I need to turn news alerts off.
I know someone who thinks we should let it rip and tough on those not vaccinated. Except what scares me is if our hospitals overflow then our people working in health are so stressed and overburdened.
I'm really scared that the health system will overflow and my dad, who is double vaxxed, will have something unrelated occur and he won't be able to get the help he needs.
I'm sick of being anxious about this goddamn virus.
There's a battle of framing. It's usually split between left and right wing divides and it's frustrating.
Because framing is just the way you talk about something in order to make your argument more persuasive. It doesn't actually improve the merits of your argument.
The way in which we talk about the "economy" is a biggy.
Lefties like to frame the economy as something that people have a direct impact on. It's why you'll often hear left wing political folk talk about their opposition as having their "hand off the wheel" of the economy. This is supposed to implant in our brains the idea that we can intervene in the economy, and it's when we don't that shit goes bad.
On the other side, they like to frame the economy as this amorphous thing that is beyond the realm of mere mortals, and not something we should - or could - interfere with. This is a nod to the idea of the invisible hand, dictating the market-based economy. This is where things like boom-bust cycles come in, and unavoidable recessions every 10 years. These are just normal functions of the economy according to neoliberal framing.
The latter framing has won out over the years and it's a bastard to be on the other side of.
To be honest, both frames are a bit fucked. And I think it's down to the use of the word "economy".
I was talking about this with a friend last week (way to humble-brag that I have friends...) and he said to me that we should replace "economy" with "ecosystem". And I haven't been able to dislodge that thought since.
His view was that the economy was something supercomplicated and made up of myriad things and that the singular word "economy" didn't do it justice. He said if we used ecosystem instead, it would remind us just how messy and complex it is.
I agree with that and then some. Ecosystem suggests things in delicate balance, many things in fact. And that if we screw around with one part it will have a ripple effect on so many other things.
It also frames it in a way that has environmental concerns front and centre.
And it also attaches human beings rightfully into it. We are a major part of the ecosystem, and in fact we have the most impact on it. This framing gets away from right wing "invisible hand" framing and so we on the left should embrace it.
This means that in the context of Covid, we don't damage the "economy" by doing lockdowns or other health responses, but rather we are looking after the total ecosystem because we recognise that a healthy populace is key to a healthy ecosystem.
This would defang any number of right wing talking points that are used (cough John Key cough).
I'm not sure quite how to get this to take hold, but I'm going to be making the effort to say "ecosystem" instead of "economy", and if you see merit in this idea, then I encourage you to do it also; together we'll save the ecosystem.
