The vaccine programme has been going gangbusters. There is no debate about that.
We love a per capita stat and we are now right up there with any country's vaccination programme in terms of percentage of country vaccined on any given day. Go us!
We're definitely going hard and fast now - and this is not a piece to debate whether we should have ordered our vaccines earlier. That's been canvassed by everyone all of the time.
This is about strategy since we announced how fast we were vaccinating.
I'll admit, when the plan came out and it said we were going to need to vaccinate at 50,000 people per day I was deeply sceptical. And since the Delta outbreak we've been going at ~85,000 per day. Great stuff.
But of course when you're doing that many above forecast, you start running into supply issues. Chris Hipkins was the first to admit this, then the PM did some mealy mouthed messaging about supply not being the problem, but demand was... what?
Anyway as soon as this got announced the correct thing for the opposition to do would have been to issue a statement saying that getting vaccinations into the arms of New Zealanders as fast as possible was the most important thing facing NZers at the moment. National would work with the Government doing whatever was needed to ensure that would happen.
This would have shown them as constructive and wanting what's best for NZ.
Instead they went on the attack saying that this showed how incompetent Labour was. The problem with this line of attack is that the Government has been frantically searching the world to find surplus vaccinations so we can maintain our staggering rates.
Today I see reporting that we'll be announcing some deal that gets us more vaccinations faster. The credit for solving this problem will rightfully go to the Government.
This was always going to be the outcome. And National should have recognised that and wanted in on that shared kudos. Instead they went for the one-off sugar hit of attacking the Government for a problem that would be solved.
All of this is to say that at the moment National is struggling to see beyond one day. It needs someone in the party doing strategy who can see further down the road: how today's actions might be viewed in a week, a fortnight, even a month.
Chris Bishop has a good strategic head on his shoulders, but he's spent the last fortnight being ritualistically humilitated by his leader, so probably isn't feeling that well disposed towards the party. Ignore his insanely negative tweets, the guy knows politicking.
I mean I don't want to see National get too strong, because I prefer a lefter government to what National would offer me. But as a huge politics nerd, I just hate seeing incompetence at every turn.
Saturday's alright for fighting. If you're one of the tragically online folk, like I am.
I talk to a lot of people. From all sides of the political spectrum. I do it because I'm a huge nerd, and because it's part of my job.
On Saturday afternoon I glanced at Twitter and saw Shane Te Pou announcing that the spill was on - someone was aiming to roll Collins.
I knew there'd been a lot of chatter but I hadn't heard anything definite, so I checked in with a few people; from National, from Labour and from the Media.
It came back unanimous; the spill was on.
These were National MPs saying that numbers were being run. Labour MPs saying they'd been told it was happening. And others.
So I stuck my neck out and tweeted that the spill was on.
The only other time I've gone for it with word that a spill was on was when I was told that Muller + Kaye were running numbers, and so Paula Bennett was trying to counter manoeuvre. That one was right, it just took a wee while before it became right. But it sure did gee it into action.
This time I'm still fairly sure it is happening, just in slow motion.
It seems Bridges is running the numbers. You had columns from Fran O'Sullivan and Claire Trevett from the weekend saying that Collins' days as leader were numbered. Those columns don't exist in a vaccuum. Someone was running up the flag.
I wasn't as confident as Te Pou who was tweeting out specifics of deals being done - Reti giving up deputy to hold health, Bish getting finance or some shit. I don't know if that was Shane just bullshitting or if he was privy to more info than me.
Of course you should take what I say with a grain of salt when it comes to predictions. I'm a useful idiot to a lot of people who tell me things in the hopes I'll share them. I've been shown countless polling from parties that would serve them well if it made its way out. I've also been told utter bullshit like there were photos of a particular MP taking drugs.
I don't share much of what I get because I don't like to be used and abused too often. I do share some of it though.
But I will never reveal who told me anything. There were a bunch of people asking me to reveal who told me the spull was on if it didn't come through. And that would just be dumb right? Because then nobody would tell me anything ever again.
So I dunno. I think the spull is still happening, but more slowly than I'd been lead to believe. Perhaps they're waiting for a shitty poll to come out. Perhaps I'm just a dumbass. Perhaps all of these are true?
This piece was pulled for a few days while I tidied it up, I'm now republishing it in the wake of news that Peter Williams, the poor man's Hosking, has left Magic Talk.
"He's a great broadcaster". That's what a lot of journalists tell me about Mike Hosking.
But he's not really, is he? He's utterly contemptible.
Last week he had a Cabinet Minister, Dr Ayesha Verrall on. Dr Verrall is a truly accomplished individual. She was the go-to expert last year before becoming an MP that Labour used to up the contact tracing in New Zealand.
Then when Dr Verrall was elected, she went straight into Cabinet.
Hosking had her on the show yesterday morning, and he didn't like the way she talked. After she'd finished, he then replayed some of the interview and said there'd been a "honk" and a "gabble" and played truck and goose noises over the top of Dr Verrall's comments.
Hosking is no longer a national broadcaster of repute, he's basically the Douche from Parks and Recreation [link for the non-parks and rec fans]. Aside from being a coward who waited until Dr Verrall had left before mocking her, Hosking is also genuinely dangerous for the country. Often when people say shit like that, I think they're using hyperbole.
Te Pūnaha Matatini did some research on Covid-19 disinformation in New Zealand's social media. Except it wasn't just confined to social media.
The only media figure to feature in the research, from every segment of New Zealand's mainstream media, was Mike Hosking.
If you do a search for Hosking, you'll find him a few times. He's there for dog whistling up racist rhetoric against China, he's there for spreading lies about Covid's impact, including the fatality rate, undermining the Government's response, arguing that it's only the elderly who are impacted, arguing that lockdown is ineffective, and arguing that lockdown is an over-response.
Usually I don't like to single out particular members of NZ's media landscape. I work (or have worked) with a lot of them and they are decent humans who do a good job. But Hosking was singled out by the research, so I’m singling him out here.
The Herald has stopped running his pieces as often as they did, but it's still there on the NewstalkZB site. I completely understand the Prime Minister's choice to not go on his show anymore. By the PM going on, she would legitimise him, and he's a disseminator of misinformation. Misinformation that is dangerous and could have terrible consequences for New Zealand.
So it's not just the terrible treatment of a cabinet minister who has achieved more for New Zealand than he ever will, it's not just for the wrong-headed opinions that I disagree with, it's because he is actually a risk to our country.
The sad thing is he rates, and he rates well. I think he's the #1 radio programme in the country at the moment, which means a plurality of radio listeners are potentially getting dangerous information from a man who argues he can lie on air because he is not a journalist.
And he certainly is not.
Yes, Twitter will gnash its collective left-wing teeth at him on a near-daily basis, and yes, a lot of Facebook probably loves him for his “tell it like it is” attitude, but we need more people to understand that he doesn’t just peddle right-wing tropes, or self-contradicting positions, he is literal fake news.
And now with the news that Magic Talk has dropped Peter Williams, to go with John Banks and Sean Plunket, it seems that Mediaworks is doing a better job of cleaning house than NZME.
Recently the US pulled the bulk of its military personnel out of Afghanistan. Things did not go well. Within like ... 2 days I think ... the Taliban, who it seemed have the patience of saints, took control of Kabul and with it the country as a whole.
Pre-pull out, Biden dismissed any claims that the Taliban would take the country in a quick period of time, now he's rightfully being pilloried for that. However he's also made comments subsequent to the pull-out saying that the war in Afghanistan wasn't something he was prepared to pass on to a fifth President.
Fifth. President.
That is nuts to me. The US invaded Afghanistan in October, 2001. Nearly 20 years ago. There have been soldiers from the US who served in Afghanistan, came home, had children and then those children went and fought in Afghanistan.
So yes, it's utterly nuts that the US still had soldiers there. But then at the same time is it incumbent on an invading force to ensure that you improve the country before you leave; at the very least don't let the same "bad guys" take over immediately so that the last 20 years weren't for nothing.
Why did the US even invade Afghanistan in the first place? We were told that it was to find Bin Laden who the Taliban refused to rule out was hiding in the caves of Afghanistan. This was after 9/11.
Bin Laden wasn't found in Afghanistan. He was found and executed in Pakistan in 2011. Ten years ago. That means there have been US soldiers in Afghanistan 10 years after finding and executing the reason for invading, in anothe rcountry.
It's certainly kept the industrial military complex going. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, these are just three of the countries that have made billions out of the Afghanistan invasion. In fact Raytheon has done super well with one of its former directors, Lloyd Austin, now the Secretary of Defence.
Cool country.
If you look back at the United States' history of overthrowing governments, invasions, etc, the trend emerges that it's done to boost, or protect, corporate interests. It's not defence of people, it's defence of capitalism.
The communism scare, and Dulles' domino theory were all about protecting corporatism. All the democratically elected leftist governments overthrown, more corporatism. WWI and II may be the only exceptions to this rule since Teddy Roosevelt was president.
So what should the United States do? Should they stay and help the people - particularly the women and children - of Afghanistan, who are now going to get a much shitter deal under the Taliban? I suppose that depends on your appetite for the US being the world police. Given their history, I'm not a fan of a country being the world police when it only polices corporate interests. But then I don't know what to do about the people now under a repressive regime.
I guess it's true of all repressive regimes. The House of Saud still continues to violate human rights everywhere it turns but the US - and consequently nearly everyone else - turns a blind eye because it's an "ally" of the US. There would be so many countries that fit this definition.
I suppose this is a very roundabout and long way of saying not much. But I wanted to get it down.
National has taken a hard turn straight into culture wars. It's gone hard on both coded and non-coded racism, there was some queer-baiting earlier in the year when Judith said after "Googling" conversion therapy, National would support any ban; then lo-and-behold when the time came to vote on actually ban it, National was the only party not to support the proposed ban.
Chris Bishop did one of the most mealy-mouthed defences of their vote.
If you strongly support banning it, and you just want to make changes to the bill, that's precisely why you'd vote for it at first reading.
The bill then goes to Select Committee where it's the chance to make those changes. Disingenuous sophistry.
The reasons given in the debate to vote against it were spurious. Simon Bridges wanted to make sure we didn't criminalise good parenting, which is unsurprisingly the same argument made against removing "discipline" as an excuse to beat kids.
For years we've seen National MPs turn up at Pride and various other queer events, but then when it's been time to actually vote, and you know, do their job which impacts the queer community, they turn around and stab them in the back.
This comes hot on the heels of National's attempts to start some kind race war with its harping on about He Puapua and the attempt to stealthily 'Māori-fy' New Zealand. Then there was the horseshit about government departments using Aotearoa too much instead of New Zealand.
National is focusing on this shit to try and angry up the electorate. They are all hot-button topics which coincidentally sees National taking the side with the most numbers: Pākehā and straight people.
But those of us who wear the label "woke" with pride must not be divided. We will fight for the rights of ethnic minorities, for Māori, for the queer community, for intersectionality. And we must do so with class consciousness front of mind.
Because it's not surprising that the groups National is attempting to marginalise are also those groups who tend to have the least wealth. National is the party of the asset-rich property-owning class, and so they routinely work to benefit that group.
When there was legislation to try and give renters more stability and certainty of abode, National cried "won't someone think of the poor landlords?". When Labour (ham-fistedly) tried to get a Capital Gains Tax across the line, National very successfully convinced the country that Labour was coming to tax everybody's holiday home and staunchly defended the wealth of the wealthy.
We in the professional classes must not begrudge the hospitality worker's minimum wage getting higher. That's great news. Because what's good for workers is good for all of us who work for our money.
Being a landlord isn't a real job. Being a moneyed investor isn't a real job. Those are not workers. They are people who use their massive money hoardings to make more money.
Recently I tweeted out my support for the Federal Aviation Administration changing the definition of “astronaut” so it didn't include Bezos or Branson; and the number of sad billionaire-simps I got in response was bleak. Billionaires are not going to sleep with you. But they do fuck us.
We are all far closer to homelessness than we ever will be to being a billionaire.
So remember, when you see a minority group being used as a playground for the latest political bullshit, stand up for them. Because we are all stronger together as workers, than we are divided.
We had a family holiday last week. We drove from Wellington to Auckland with a two-night stopover in Rotorua. It was cool. A lot of people were like "why don't you fly?!", but we wanted to drive. Gave us a chance to stop in other places (we also stopped in Taupō on the way home), and it also meant we had a car when we were in Auckland. But that's not the point of this post, to tell you about my holiday. While we were in Auckland, and the main reason we went, we went and saw the stage production of the Lion King. Now the Lion King is one of my favourite movies of all time. It's also one of the most traumatic. It came out in 1994. I was 10. Seeing [spoilers]'s death scene fucked me up some. In fact to this day, if we put the Lion King on for Greta, I try to leave the room during that scene. Don't like it. It's much easier to cope with in the stage form. Anyway, that is also not the point of this post. Rather, what I noticed as I sat there watching the Lion King was the politics of the show. It's a monarchic society with an aristocracy, and an upper class. Mufasa talks to Simba about the "circle of life" and how they eat the antelope, but then the Lions die, and their bodies become the grass that the Antelopes eat. So there's a tier of society who look after one another, with a King up top. Except then there are the hyenas. And the hyenas have been excluded from society for ... reasons? They are forced to be self-sustaining, with no benefits from the kingdom, and are viewed with disdain by everyone in the aristocracy and the upper class. They are definitely the lower-working class of this story. And then you have Scar who wants the throne himself. And so he hatches a plan that involves bringing the hyenas into the fold. This in of itself is a good thing, right? Bringing people together. Letting the lower-working class join the upper classes. Except Scar doesn't introduce democracy or anything like that, he just becomes the monarch, and lets the hyenas run amok. And the consequences of all this is that Pride Rock becomes a barren wasteland. We're supposed to sit there and believe that because a "bad" king took over from a "good" king and invited the "bad" animals into society that everything goes to shit. And sure, the bad king may have made some shit decisions, but we associate the poor state of Pride Rock with the hyenas also being introduced. And I thought what sort of pro-feudalist/monarchist anti-working-class bullshit is this? Because the resolution is not democracy. It's the resumption of the "good" king. Scar is thrown out of the pride and because he tried to blame the hyenas for all the problems, they turned on him and ripped him apart. Again I sat there thinking that the message was that not only do the lower classes ruin a society when let in, but that they'll turn against the ruling class and kill them at the drop of a hat. When the "good" king is back on the throne, suddenly everything is ok again. The upper classes are happy, Pride Rock becomes bountiful, and the hyenas are turfed out of society. What a load of shit. I couldn't believe I had been indoctrinated with this classist rubbish as a child, and that now I was exposing my family to it. And then as I walked out of the show, I thought to myself "get a life David, stop projecting your politics onto everything." But it's hard, eh? Because the personal is the political.
Over the weekend, my social media feeds lit up with images of the goddamn ocean on fire. The fire was from a burst gas pipeline that ran in the Gulf of Mexico.
People were very swift to attribute blame to unfettered capitalism driving large corporates to do things that were against broader human interest, in the drive for profits.
Then some wags thought they'd outsmarted us all by pointing out that the gas pipe was owned by Pemex, a Mexican state-owned petroleum company. So this couldn't be capitalism run amok, as capitalism relies on trade and industry being owned by private individuals.
Except no. Because the motivations of extracting fossil fuels remain the same, regardless of who is doing it. Money. So while strictly speaking using the word "capitalism" in its purest form may be wrong, the ideology is not. The pursuit of money above all else.
In modern 21st century living, we look back at Victorian England and wonder how they justified using child labour and why didn't more people rise up against it. Or in the United States, people frequently battle it out over whether we should judge slave owners by the standards of today and call out some of the Founding Fathers (the answer is very much yes, the existence of just one abolitionist proves that the idea that slaves were the natural order of things is a load of shit, and you should read about John Brown).
Both of the above was done in the pursuit of money. Slavery and child labour are both cheap or free labour and that is what drove people's behaviour. The United States is now the richest country in the world because it built up so much capital off the back of free labour through slavery. The UK was able to fund so much of its imperialism through again, slavery, and serfdom.
And some people spoke up. I mentioned John Brown above. He was a committed abolitionist in the States, and it is claimed by some that John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry was what triggered the US Civil War.
So what are you doing in the fight against ecocide? Because that's what is happening right now. All around the world there are people and corporations who are deliberately destroying the planet. They know what they're doing. They know that what they're doing is causing harm, death, and destruction. But they do it anyway. Because money sure is attractive.
There are governments all around the world who choose to let this happen. They choose to subsidise fossil fuel extraction. They choose to allow environmental crimes go unpunished. They choose to allow further damage done to our planet, just so they can get more money.
Over the weekend, I was with my extended family. A couple of them are in their teens. I asked them if climate change was a common topic of discussion. They said it was; because they knew they'd bear the brunt of it.
Imagine spending your teenage years worrying about the whether you'd have an inhabitable planet because of some shitty decisions made by people in generations before you.
I fully expect that when Greta grows up, she'll want to know what I did to try and stop the wanton destruction of Earth. And what will I tell her? That I did some spicy tweets about it? That I wrote columns in a newspaper and columns for a Patreon bemoaning the state of it all?
They'll wonder why we were obsessed with plastic straws, and stickers on fruit. They'll want to know why we did very little to stop Chevron or ExxonMobil or BP from emitting billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Last week I was on RNZ's the Panel. We talked briefly about a teenager down in Dunedin who was stopping people from using a car park unless they were driving an EV or a hybrid.
While the outcome won't be massive, I fully support direct action. Because all the School Strikes 4 Climate and the other marches and the voting and the crying out have done fuck all. We're still letting these companies (both state owned and private) continue to murder our planet.
The Government has announced its proposed work programme to reform our hate speech laws. There's a lot of people opining about it online. Tova O'Brien did a Tova interview pushing Minister Faafoi to answer whether millennials calling boomers "cunts" would be hate speech (I may be paraphrasing). Faaf prevaricated and didn't really answer. Then the usual suspects burst into anger, Seymour, Jordan Williams, Bomber, etc. All angry about their free speech being curtailed. You could almost distil their moaning into "I want to say the N-word and now I'm afraid you won't let me". I'm paraphrasing again. Free speech "purists" like them say that we should let racists be racist loudly and publicly, and then laugh or ridicule their ideas. Those people who say that are often white and male. Not always, but often. And they have the privilege to laugh and ridicule those ideas because they are usually ideas that don't threaten their existence. However if you're from an often oppressed group - Māori, Muslim, Rainbow, Jewish, hell, even female - those words that we're told to laugh at, and ridicule aren't funny. They're words that make your life uncomfortable and unpleasant to live through. They're words that frighten and degrade you. They are words of hate. This ties in with the fact we don't often hear free speech purists argue that we should abolish defamation laws, or that we allow Isis propaganda to be broadcast. It's weird how they often like their free speech to be speech that is critical of minorities they're not part of. These are often the same people who argue that Terf is a slur and shouldn’t be used. Or that Boomer, or Karen, is also a slur and we shouldn’t say them. They’re often very quick to criticise when we say bad things about white people. But minorities? Fuck ‘em. Yes, we do need to express ideas and debate them and air them. But we also need to protect people and make sure that we can all partake in a life that is worth living. Finding the balance to this is the hard part. Finding the people who should set these rules is the damn near impossible part. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We need to bring in the people who are often on the receiving end of the horrible words to help us make the decisions, as much as we bring in the ruling classes. To do otherwise is to curtail their right to be heard, and we sure don't want to do that, do we? Hate speech laws should be beefed up. The exclusion of protected categories such as sexuality, religion, age etc is discrimination in of itself. I suspect this is going to go the way of the anti-smacking bill. People will gnash their teeth and claim we'll be criminalised for saying "boo", the laws will pass, and not much will change for the overwhelming majority. But maybe those that become protected will feel a little safer, and maybe like they're a valued part of society too.
I’m just imagining what people would be saying if @NZNationalParty was in government and we had the slowest vaccine roll-out in the developed world
It came after Bish has been hot on the attack over the delayed Covid vaccine roll-out. Day after day, Bish and some of the National surrogates on Twitter have been relentless in their criticism of the vaccine roll-out. The above tweet is a very clear sign of frustration that National just can't gain any traction with the issue.
National has struggled to gain traction with any issue. The party has seemed aimless and strategically bereft, firing off random shots at everything. Trying to make Māori separatism an issue. The electric vehicle rebate. They've even had a crack at the Trans community, influenced in no doubt by their anti-trans press sec in the National Leader's Office.
You may have noticed that for a while, Collins was focused heavily on the Māori separatist issue. Banging on and on about the He Puapua report. I'd wondered if this was an issue that was just dreamed up by National, or if they were privy to more information than me and people outside of Wellington really were worried about some kind of imagined racial separatist issue. But then we had a couple of polls come out that showed National had made next to no progress. And just like that, He Puapua has disappeared from National's attack lines.
It's interesting that it took some public polling before National moved. I would have thought that they'd be doing plenty of internal polling, not only on their own numbers, but on issues and focus group testing etc. But I've been recently told that National has found itself without three key external support groups that made the National of John Key such a slick machine.
National's pollster has historically been David Farrar's Curia, however rumour has it National hasn't been doing any internal polling at all so has had no idea what issues resonate with the public until public polling tells them.
They also haven't been using Crosby Textor who had been providing National with strategic assistance; even if only at the beginning of the year, someone would come and help National with the strategic direction of the party and develop communication strategies.
There's also no Topham Guerin to help with their social media (there is still a bloke who works for National who is very, very good at what he does, but he's constantly overlooked for promotion).
And the reason National has been missing these organisations is the root cause, which is the donations have dried up. The wealthy business folk that National has traditionally relied on have bailed. They see 2023 as a lost cause and so aren't spending their money. Without the money, and with a greatly reduced parliamentary presence, National has had to rely on itself, where once it could use experts.
This lack of money, I'm told, is why Peter Goodfellow was able to get re-elected as Party President, despite performing abysmally. Peter said that if he was re-elected as President, he'd underwrite National's 2023 election. With the bank accounts looking so grim this was a very attractive proposition.
This is why National has been barking at every car. Because they don't know what is working and what isn't. They also don't have the resource to properly communicate or strategise, and they can't afford the social media gurus. I knew National was in bad shape, but I didn't realise it was this bad.
At least with Labour, when they were in the darkest days of the Cunliffe era, they could rely on the Unions to chuck them some coin.
And so this is why Bish tweeted what he did. He knows National is dreadfully unpopular, that's why he conceded that people would be lashing out if the vaccine was being rolled out as poorly as it is, under a National Government. But until there's some kind of circuit breaker that jolts them into professionalism, we're going to see them flail and struggle. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving group.
She opened with a quote from Jacinda Ardern in 2017.
“This government will foster a more open and democratic society. It will strengthen transparency around official information.”
Then, in a dramatic counterpoint, Andrea said:
Since then the number of faceless communications specialists has skyrocketed. The Government’s iron grip on the control of information has tightened.
Later on in the piece Andrea complains about the increased number of communications staff hired by Government Departments.
It’s now very difficult for journalists to get to the heart and the truth of a story. We are up against an army of well-paid spin doctors.
Since the current Government took office, the number of communications specialists has ballooned. Each minister has at least two press secretaries. (Ardern has four).
In the year Labour took office, the Ministry for the Environment had 10 PR staff. It now has 18. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade more than doubled its staff – up to 25.
MBIE blew out from 48 staff to 64. None of those five dozen specialists could give me those figures for many weeks – and again I was forced to ask the Ombudsman to intervene.
The super ministry – and its colleagues uptown at the Health Ministry – are notorious for stymieing even the simplest requests. Health’s information gatekeepers are so allergic to journalists they refuse to take phone calls, responding only (and sporadically) to emails.
But it is the New Zealand Transport Agency that take the cake: employing a staggering 72 staff to keep its message, if not its road-building, on track – up from 26 over five years.
There are a few things that don't fly with this piece.
First off, as many people have said, communications staff and "spin doctors" are not the same thing. There are huge numbers of people who focus on internal communications, people that might do outward facing newsletters or other such comms, social media folk, website managers; these are all roles that get caught up by the "communications" word but have nothing to do with media.
Also, Andrea talks about how this year she's made more complaints to the ombudsman about OIAs than in any year. She said that every complaint had been held up; first off, we don't know if these OIA complaints were for OIAs to government departments, or to Ministers. I think that's an important distinction. Because I've worked in OIA response teams before. And I can assure you that we agitated for releasing as much information as possible. And we'd hustle to get them done in the 20 working day timeframe.
But the thing is we were often understaffed. And we were understaffed because the departments were desperate to avoid the perception that they had too many communications staff. Ironic, isn't it? The two main things that media complain about - too many comms staff, and OIAs not being responded to properly - could be helped if we hired more staff.
A journalist took to Twitter to debunk the argument that not every communications person was a "spin doctor", by arguing that every person who was releasing communications on behalf of a government department was engaged in a form of propaganda. Which is rubbish.
Our world leading Covid response was down to amazing communications. Not just from the Prime Minister, but the social media campaign - Unite against Covid! - the dubstep remix of Dr Bloomfield's Covid message was developed by a government department communications team.
I saw information the other day that said trust in our elections was increasing. This is due to the excellent communications work that the Electoral Commission does.
It's a super duper long stretch to claim that either of these are "propaganda". Instead they're communicating for the public good. It's not all about journalists.
That's not to say there isn't a problem with OIAs and the Government's lack of transparency. Andrea cites some quite legitimate gripes in her column with specific Ministers. And I am 100% sure that the Government does try to release information in a way that favours them. This isn't new. It's not good, but it's not new.
Yes, this Government may be worse than others in regard to abusing the release of information. The grandparent of this is Helen Clark's Government introducing a "no surprises" policy, where government departments had to flag with Ministers' offices when potentially embarrassing information was going to be released.
Clark's Government abused this, Key's Government made it worse again, and I'm led to believe that Ardern's Government is worse again. It's the law of diminishing commitments to transparency.
So while Andrea does have some real and viable complaints, she undermines her own argument by having an unnecessary swipe at public servants, and also complains that one of the solutions to her complaints is a bad thing.
I have long argued that Government Department CEOs - and maybe even Minister's - should have their pay tied to OIA compliance. Make it a key KPI of theirs. If the ombudsman finds their offices/departments has been breaching the OIA in bad faith, then punish them in their pocket. Rich people care about losing money a lot.
There's probably an entire rewrite of the OIA that needs to happen, and the ombudsman probably needs some actual teeth to enforce, but until that happens, I expect to see the same column time after time, no matter the government.
With the sudden announcement of Nick Smith's retirement from politics, National welcomes back that powerhouse Harete Hipango.
I'm told that a number of National List MPs are keen on getting the hell out of dodge, but nobody wanted to be the first to go because they would be responsible for ushering Harete back into parliament.
Harete's claims to fame are:
claiming Labour wanted to legalise full-term abortions (including post-birth)
arguing it was hypocritical to be pro-choice while becrying infant mortality
chucking up a quote from the PM on social media that was a complete misrepresentation of what was being said (this did allow for a spectacular exucse though: Harete claimed the quote was "a construction of key words aligned with Jacinda Ardern"
But now that Nick Smith has allowed Harete back in, we might see more retirements; for instance the former member for Ilam may now take this opportunity to leave.
Nick has said that there is an ongoing investigation into a "verbal altercation" that took place in his office.
Someone who would know said that Nick Smith has a history with being an angry bastard and has been known to throw staplers and abuse at staff. So really, good riddance to him.
It will be interesting if National hierarchy is able to convince Harete to step aside and allow Jonathan Young or Tim Macindoe back in. One thing Harete will bring to National is diversity, and goodness knows they need it.
So farewell Nick Smith, welcome back Harete Hipango, and may God have mercy on our souls.
*With apologies to those suffering in these horrendous floods.
As far as I can remember, that was the most left-wing budget in my lifetime.
The bit that most people took out was the increase to the benefit. Up by a max of $55 per week come next year. That's an increase of less than $3,000 per person so it's not mind-blowingly huge but when you're living on the poverty line, every bit counts.
There was a bit of noise from some groups that the budget didn't do anything for the middle class, but I think the middle class have been doing ok. Especially the house-owning middle class who has seen that asset balloon in value.
A lot of the messaging from the Government about the budget was undoing Ruth Richardson's 'Mother of All Budgets' and the uber-neoliberal damage that the 1991 budget begat.
Both the PM and the Finance Minister kept invoking the Mother of all Budgets — before announcing spending increases in benefits, student allowances, Māori health, housing and education, and more money for capital expenditure on hospitals and schools, it was red meat to those of us on the left.
While the increase to the jobseeker benefit is nowhere near enough to allow beneficiaries to live in dignity, and there is still so much more to do, we should applaud Labour for at least taking a step in the left direction.
And the response has been almost a collective shrug and a "well of course", from the electorate. This should encourage Labour.
Hot on the heels of announcing what is actually a very radical fair pay agreement policy, Labour has now dipped its toes into more left politics. And there has been no allergic reaction from the electorate. Both polls in the last month had National still in the 20s and Labour in the high 40s.
While the most recent poll has Labour requiring a coalition partner to govern, I don't think many people are expecting them to have a majority on their own after the next election.
The other thing this budget did was something I'm super stoked with and has had little to no fanfare.
From Budget 2022 onwards, the government will recycle the revenue generated from the auctioning of Emissions Trading Scheme allowances into emissions reductions programmes. This makes reducing emissions an easier sell. It's something James Shaw has been beavering away at for a while now and so getting a commitment from Labour to doing it merits applause for James.
Ka Pai James.
All of this good left stuff was somewhat negated by what sounded like the beginnings of a shit house immigration reset, focusing on "high skills" and "high value" immigrants. These are basically racist terms. In fact our immigration policy is so racist that not even the Republicans would countenance it when it was floated by Trump.
If we want to keep dragging Labour left, we should adopt the toddler principle. Applaud them when they start doing something good, which in my view this budget is.
So to all those Labour MPs who subscribe to me, you done good. I'm proud of you. More please. Just keep going. Let's do this. Be kind.
Last night was the first poll TV3 has done since the election. The timing was a bit weird, coming just ahead of a Budget. Usually TV networks wait until after the Budget to report on how people feel about the Budget. I remember watching the Budget as a kid, and the only thing my old man cared about was the price of cigarettes. Anyway, the poll was not good news for National, and even worse news for Judith Collins. It comes after National has been beating the racial separatism drum pretty hard, with Collins at the forefront of that. To see National move within the margin of error is pleasing, and to see Collins' personal popularity drop nearly two thirds suggests New Zealand has roundly rejected any racist rhetoric. Good. In conversations with people in National, they seem to genuinely believe that there is something in this He Puapua document that should be brought into the sunlight. I raised with them that I'm not sure that people actually give too much of a fuck about this since if you're Pākehā the proposed changes in He Puapua won't actually impact you, whereas if you're Māori the recommendations would go some way towards redressing some godawful grievances that Māori legitimately have. But no, they said, that's just my wonky nerdy Wellington brain talking. People out in the *vague gesture* do care about this stuff. Turns out they don't. And of course the bitter irony is that Collins and National are trying to suggest that Labour is dividing New Zealand whereas it's obviously National that is doing the dividing. And failing. So has New Zealand come a long way since Brash's Orewa Speech? Possibly. Maybe Collins and this version of National are just shitter at beating the racist drum. That said, this Labour Government does need a healthy opposition. It's making a lot of mistakes and weird choices, and needs to be tested on those. Held to account as they say. And I still think Collins is the one to turn National around. She might be the Andrew Little - the one who instills discipline back into the party. And also there isn't really anyone else capable of leading in that party. They're pretty shit.
Last week the Government announced a pay freeze for all public sector workers earning over $100,000. It also said that those earning between $60,000 and $100,000 would only get pay increases under "special circumstances", while those under $60,000 would see business as usual
The blowback was swift and fierce. I idly wondered if the Government had forgotten that public sector workers weren't just policy folk, but also nurses, teachers, and firefighters.
This is not to denigrate the work done by policy folk - who are brilliant and have been amazing over Covid - but rather that it is seldom popular to go after teachers and nurses.
Then a day or so later the Government did a twitter thread about how good at fiscal management they'd been. Well done Government! Glad you're managing the books so well, and as you said in your tweet you've got $5.2 billion more than you expected. Probably could afford to pay our public sector workers a bit more eh?
Pretty sure that was a scheduled tweet that nobody realised would play badly given the earlier announcement. And the earlier announcement seems to have been one that nobody in Labour expected to play badly either.
Then on Friday the Government released its new workplace relations policy and to be honest it's awesome. It puts workers - and especially unions - back into the heart of the workforce. BusinessNZ shat the bed completely about it which means it's good for the majority of people - and I say this as a small business owner.
But the thing that I don't get is how on earth did nobody look at the calendar of announcements, see that the big workplace relations announcement was happening on Friday and go "huh, maybe we shouldn't do a big announcement about us knifing the public sector this week".
Or whoever is running the social media didn't go "hey given we announced we're knifing the public sector, maybe we shouldn't do a tweet about how much more money we have than we expected."
But no, nobody did these things, and so the Government just had a massive communications mare. The public sector wages shouldn't have dominated. The workplace relations should have. And yet on TVNZ this morning - nearly a week after being announced - the Prime Minister was forced into (feebly) defending the wage freeze. Grant Robertson gave a speech this morning that was forced into (feebly) addressing the wage freeze (and calling it "guidance" and various other euphemisms).
Aside from the shit policy, the communications have been ... appalling. And given I work in comms this is the stuff I notice.
Sometimes you have to deliver a shit sandwich, and in that instance, you just bite the bullet and do the best communications you can. Other times you cock something up and end up eating a shit sandwich when that wasn't what you ordered.
But this last week...shit sandwich wasn't even on the menu. Nobody was asking for it. Subsequent Government announcements suggests nobody needs one, ad yet the Government just went and gave it to everyone unprompted.
Thank you friends. Dad is now out of hospital and seems to have made a full recovery. This means normal service will resume and I will be back writing regularly again.
Yesterday the Government, which we need to remember is *just* the Labour Party, announced it's putting a wage freeze on the public sector for three years.
In a coup for its communications team it was largely reported that this would be a wage freeze for those earning over $100,000. Except it's not. For those earning over $60,000 they will only get an increase to their salary in "exceptional circumstances." So it's basically a wage freeze on anyone earning over $60k.
That includes teachers. Nurses. Firefighters. and others.
Pretty shit to be honest.
Working for the public sector is not sexy. It's often not interesting. And you sure don't get perks.
I remember when I worked for a government dept, and we had our staff Christmas party in the basement, which also doubled as the car park. The CEO of the Dept came to give a speech thanking us all, then got in his car and the party had to part like the Red Sea to allow him to drive off. And then because there was a spending limit of like $25 per head, we ran out of booze. People had to go to a supermarket to buy more for themselves. It was pretty fucking grim.
Imagine waking up today knowing that if you stayed at your public sector job, no matter how well you did, no matter how well the overall economy was doing, you would get no pay increase.
Which works out to be an effective pay cut when you take inflation into account.
Imagine waking up with that knowledge when just a few days ago it was reported that the Government had "saved" nearly a billion dollars from its Covid recovery fund and you would still not face a pay increase in three years.
Between this depressing bit of news and the new top tax rate of $180,000 coming in, it seems this government has a hard-on for penalising income. But refuses to do anything about taxing wealth. Which means our asset hoarding classes continue to benefit while the workers get fucked.
What the hell sort of Labour party is this?
This is just further proof that the system is not broken. Our current economic model is designed to benefit a small amount of people in a massive way while disadvantaging the masses by keeping them on a small amount.
This Government has had a crisis unlike any other to stare down. And the health response has been admirable. But they've also had an opportunity from this crisis to redesign how our economy works.
But they really haven't taken that opportunity. They've spent a lot of time trying to appease "business". Business isn't even an actual thing. When we say "business", we mean CEOs and boards who are duty-bound to do as much as possible to get as high a share price as possible. And one of the ways to do that is to pay your workers bugger all.
So you want to keep them happy? Don't do anything for the workers. That gets your business confidence surveys looking rosy.
After the announcement of the new Health NZ system I thought maybe we'd turned a corner and we'd start to see bigger, braver more left-wing policies.
But we haven't. We've just seen more of what National would have given us. It's so bleak.
Hello friends, I must apologise; I haven't been able to get to a column lately. My old man is in hospital so that's taken most of my focus.
I've got a couple of pieces boiling away that I think will be worth the wait. Both involve a particular media outlet and its shitty talent doing shitty things.
Thank you, and I'll be back as soon as dad is out of the woods.
New Zealand now has a minimum wage of $20 per hour.
That's better than it was, by quite some margin. When Labour took control of the treasury in 2017, the minimum wage was $15.75.
That's a 25% increase in 3 1/2 years. Strangely it was a major part of NZFirst's coalition agreement with Labour that has seen it go up so much in such a short period of time. So, thanks Winston?
If you worked 40 hours a week on the minimum wage, your pre-tax income is a tick under $50,000. Putting aside the fact that so many of those on minimum wage are shift workers who can't guarantee 40 hours a week, those who do earn a pretty good amount.
Back in late 1999, I got a job pumping petrol at BP for $4.75 an hour.
However while the minimum wage has gone up at a reasonable clip, the same cannot be said of the "jobseeker" benefit.
As of April 1 this year, that benefit went up so that if you're a single renter on the benefit, you'd get $355.49 per week after tax. That works out to be less than half what someone on the minimum wage earns.
Now if we think that the minimum wage is the absolute bottom that a worker should be earning so they can survive, then surely the benefit should be a lot closer to it than half. Otherwise, what are we saying about those people who aren't working. That they don't deserve to be able to live?
Economists and people that describe themselves as "taxpayers" will argue that there needs to be a gap between benefit and minimum wage, to encourage people to work, and that might be true (I'm not convinced though); but even so. Less than half?
I'm no fancy pants econometrician, but I'm told that increasing the minimum wage quickly also can drive inflation, which makes the benefit even worse, comparatively.
Nice welfare safety net you got there New Zealand.
All these decisions - to increase the minimum wage, to leave the benefit amount well below poverty levels - are conscious decisions being made by politicians. They are choosingto make people destitute.
Report after report in the media has painted a rosier picture than expected. Higher tax takes, lower expense etc. All these things that mean there is more to spend than expected (yes, I'm aware we're just in smaller deficits than expected), we often hear the refrain that we need money left over for a "rainy day", as though people living on the streets, or people not being able to buy enough food for themself is not a rainy day.
I absolutely agree that we need to create an environment where people can get work, it’s why I’m a fan of a Jobs Guarantee over a UBI (my reasons for not being super into a UBI are a post unto itself), but if we don’t do that, we need to at least make sure those who aren’t in work can live.
My guess is the fear of political fall-out is what stymies Labour from doing radical change to our benefits. That if we suddenly started paying people without work a reasonable amount to live then we’d see article after article, column after column, bemoan that New Zealand has become a country of “bludgers”.
And yet, who are the real bludgers?
Are they the people who get miniscule government handouts because they do not have much money? An amount that was designed to be less than what you could afford to live off. An amount that is completely returned into the economy through living hand-to-mouth. Or is it the people who don't seem to understand the transactional nature of society? Who hoard their money in overseas accounts, or spend money on foreign goods and holidays?
These are the people who hide their incomes away or exploit loopholes, so they pay less tax than they should. The corporations who do creative accounting and show that they made zero profit here in New Zealand so effectively pay zero tax.
This group will still quite happily take what the state has to offer, healthcare, infrastructure, roads - big Government bailouts if it comes to it - but to hell with the state when it comes to paying back. Even beneficiaries pay tax on their meagre incomes. Seems like we're calling the wrong people "bludgers". And also focusing advantages on the wrong people.
National is the party of opposition. Just. It's a meaningless title that's given to the largest party not in government. Usually their gig is to "hold the Government to account” or present an alternative vision of what New Zealand would look like under their stewardship. This latter option is a far better one than the former at winning over voters.
In the last couple of weeks the Government has launched its [hopefully] opening salvo in the housing crisis, and instead of National offering up its own solution instead, it's focused its energies on attacking Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard.
Mallard had to pay out a settlement for defamation over accusing a former parliamentary staffer of being a rapist. National - and in particular Chris Bishop and Judith Collins - have gone hard at this, repeatedly stating that Mallard must resign.
In her column, Young notes that she thinks this is a way for National to try and dent the Prime Minister's popularity. She has, after all, spent a bit of time defending Mallard. If National can get Mallard - or at least convince the public he deserves being 'got' - then, the thinking goes, the negative impact will drip down onto Labour's most potent force: Jacinda Ardern.
All of this is fine if your ambition in politics is to hurt the other side, instead of compelling voters to choose you for your better ideas. National seems bereft of ideas at the moment. We've hardly even heard them clamber for more roads!
It's a deeply cynical play that doesn't tell NZ what National would do differently. It doesn't tell Kiwis how we'd be better off under a National-led Government. It's just National going after a politician. Whether or not Mallard should be sacked I dunno, but when your focus as a party is going after one person instead of putting out more policy ideas then you may need to rethink your tactics.
When I was working at the Greens, John Key accused Labour and the Greens of backing murderers and rapists. A number of women MPs stood up the next day and told incredibly brave stories of having been sexually assaulted themselves and that they found Key's comments incredibly offensive and asked him to withdraw and apologise. He didn't. And the Speaker ended up throwing out the women who stood up to tell their stories.
It was incredibly moving.
But the public broadly didn't like it. They didn't like MPs "wasting time" like that. They want to see MPs make "productive" use of their time. So I just can't understand National’s tactics here.
It's not good for New Zealand. It's historically something that doesn't play well with the public and is being done solely to try and take the Prime Minister's popularity down.
For 3 1/2 years people on the left have been crying out for Jacinda Ardern to do something with all the popularity she'd amassed. Labour was rewarded with a near-perfect response to Covid with a majority at the last election, and still it seemed the party was wracked with timidity to do ... anything.
And then yesterday they did something.
I'm no expert on the intricacies of the housing market, not by a long shot, but it seems that they've pissed the right people off. Andrew King especially. Seeing his tears brings me joy. Fuck him.
The best explainer I've seen on the more high-level impacts came from Hamish Rutherford's column in the Herald [link here, but it's paywalled].
The most striking line of Hamish's piece is:
The policy it announced this week runs a strange but significant political and economic risk: it might work better than expected.
Hamish doesn't claim to know exactly what will happen - and truth be told nobody seems sure. There are so many competing views out there as to who the WINNERS and LOSERS are as to make it impossible to properly ascertain.
Nevertheless, people have said that housing is a massive concern. Numbers of people who want to enter the property ladder have been screaming out for something to be done, and now the Government has done something.
And that's a plus, right?
Jacinda Ardern has taken her political capital and spent some of it.
And it's not entirely dissimilar to John Key's GST raise, in that Labour was fairly unequivocal about not increasing the "bright line test" during the election campaign, and now has done exactly that.
That part doesn't bother me personally; I want my politicians to change and move as the situation warrants, but I can see why some people might get all het up about "breaking a promise" made on the election campaign. How can you trust that the party you want to vote for is going to do the things it says it will if breaking promises becomes the norm?
I hope that the $3 Billion poured into freeing up more land actually goes more towards brownfield housing than greenfield, my preference is for housing to be on existing transport lines rather than creating a sprawling mess, but we'll see how it goes.
One part of the Government's plan that I really liked and haven't seen a huge amount of coverage is the expansion of the Apprenticeship Boost initiative. That's longer-term thinking; it's acknowledging that we have a shortage of supply, and a shortage of people/companies to build houses so the Government is expanding that scheme as a longer-term view to increasing stock. I like to see long-term thinking in my Governments. So often we fall victim to short-termism, just to get a quick win or boost in popularity.
Overall what do I think about the housing package? I dunno. We'll find out how successful it's been in ... a few years? But at least Labour has done something. Which is more than National really did when it was in Government, and it's more than this Labour Party has done before today.
Two years ago New Zealand suffered its worst terrorist attack. 51 people died. 40 were injured. It was horrific.
The day after the attack I sat down to write my column for the Herald. I didn't know what to say. I had to write about the terror attack. There was nothing else I could write about. But what could I say? It felt like to me that words didn't matter.
But then as I sat and thought about it, I realised that words mattered. They matter very much. I wrote a column to that effect. That the impact of words can be world changing.
That bad words can very easily lead to bad events. And that it is absolutely incumbent upon us to call out those bad words for what they are.
I gave an example of when I didn't call out bad words.
"When I flew from New Orleans to San Diego many years ago, the man in the seat next to me asked if this was my first time in "N'orlins". "Yes" I said. "It was and I loved it." He smiled. "I hope you had fun up Bourbon Street!" then he leant over and spoke almost conspiratorially. "But I hope you didn't go too far up Bourbon Street, because that's the fag end of town."
I was uncomfortable but I said nothing. I just buried my nose in my book. I should have said something. Because words matter."
My life is littered with other examples like that. The time I went into a suit store and the owner made racist comments about having Thai slaves out the back to make them cheap. Or the friend who made a racist joke on the cricket field.
It's hard to call out words from people. Especially people we know.
I was surprised this morning to read a piece in the news about how gun crime has gone up since the gun law changes came through. The piece - which you can read here - seemed written by the gun lobby. With ACT's gun-supremo Nicole McKee front and centre saying that - and I shit you not - "the unintended consequences of doing that [the gun law legislation] are starting to be realised, and of course the effects that we're seeing are a less safer community."
It's the 2nd anniversary of a terrorist attack in New Zealand. The 9th worst mass shooting in recent history and the gun lobby and ACT are out there arguing that our gun law changes have made us less safe.
I'm surprised that news editors decided that today would be a good day to run those stories. You could have held it a few days surely?
This is all playing out in the background of National (or really Simon Bridges') attempt to start a culture war here in NZ. Criticising "cancel culture” and calling the Police Commissioner a "wokester". It's all just words. Shitty words.
Former National Press Sec Ben Thomas wrote about it better than I could here.
The latest "cancel culture" craze has been around the cessation of printing some Dr Seuss books for questionable racism. National MP Barbara Kuriger thought she was hilarious posting:
"Alas they've come for Dr Seuss, they wish to hang him with a noose"
Aside from using questionably racist imagery herself in that line, if people had bothered to check they would have seen that it was the outfit who publish the Dr Seuss books themselves that had decided to stop printing some. Publisher, cancel thyself!
At the end of my Herald column about words I made a commitment to speak out if I heard bad words.
"As the father of a daughter, the husband of a wife, the child of two parents, as a goddamn human being regardless of who I'm related to, I'm responsible for this too. I do not want to live in a world of hateful words and hateful actions. I will speak out.
"We need to take responsibility for calling out violent and discriminatory language. Our leaders cannot use words that separates the "us" from the "them". There is no "them". There is us. There is people."
I think I've fallen short a few times, so I'm re-making the commitment. Shit words create shit events. I'm coming for you if you say shit words.
A couple of years back, the Labour-led Government announced it was the "year of delivery", then promptly failed to deliver anything of note.
It did have to operate within the confines of NZFirst's whims, but nevertheless that phrase - "year of delivery" - was used as a stick to beat them over and over again.
Despite this, what Labour has managed to do - and in particular Jacinda Ardern - is earn the trust of New Zealanders.
This will largely be down to the crisis response they've shown. The Christchurch terror attacks, Whakaari / White Island eruption, and especially the Covid pandemic have shown that Labour can shepherded the country through a crisis brilliantly.
This was in evidence this week with the tsunami alerts that spread around the north-eastern part of the North Island. Historically, when there have been tsunami alerts you get absolute muppets rushing to the beaches to see what's coming.
And to people's credit, they followed instructions and evacuated lower-lying areas.
This is down to the trust that has been established between citizenry and authority.
The Prime Minister already had trust by the bucket-load, but now Civil Defence Minister Kiritapu Allan has been added to the roster of Ministers who are extremely competent at what they do. And they are trusted by us for it.
What this trust has done is built up even more social capital. It means Labour, as well as having a majority in the house, has the goodwill and trust of the people to make right decisions.
And we keep getting rosier and rosier economic news. Unemployment actually went down on the last count, and just this week it came out that the government deficit was $4.4B, which sounds horrible, except we had forecasted and planned for it to be nearly $3B worse.
We have the money.
Spend it.
There are people sleeping in cars. There are kids walking to school hungry and without shoes on. There are schools with mouldy classrooms. Social housing in disrepair - and a lack of housing in general. A mental health system bursting at the seams. Special education crying out for more funding.
We have the money.
We have the things that the money can be spent on.
We have a Government who has earned an unprecedent amount of trust from the public. If they don't start really going for it then what's the point of even being in government?
Many would argue that too much trust in a government isn't healthy - in fact I'm one, I'm deeply mistrusting of most authority to be honest - but at the moment this group seems more benevolent than fascist and that's good.
A few of my friends that were big-time Labour supporters are starting to go through some disillusionment. They genuinely believed that freed from an NZFirst handbrake, and free from the perceived "nuttiness" of the Greens that maybe Labour would really deliver something left wing.
Except Labour is not a left-wing party. You might charitably call it left-of-centre, but it's definitely not out there being all leftist.
And that's fine, it has every right to chart its own ideology, just like ACT can be the party of white supremacists and free marketeers fused with tough on crime conservatives in some unholy alliance, and National can be whatever dominant faction at the time wants it to be.
But Labour is not left.
Every year capitalist governments allow people to starve to death, it allows children to go hungry and for the sick to go untreated. It allows people who do intense back-breaking labour to go underpaid and it allows for capital to accrue capital and for the owners of that capital to benefit from this despite doing nothing productive for society.
This is not a fair system. The family you are born into, the city you are born in, the socio-economic status of your parents, these factors overwhelmingly determine your future. You might have incredibly long bootstraps, but there will just be no pulling yourself up by them through no fault of your own.
If you step back and look at the world as a whole, nations operate the same. The United States was able to get insanely rich because cotton was one of the most sought after commodities of the 19th century, and the US had a near monopoly on it, being worked by slave labour. Pay your workers nothing to produce an expensive item? Bonanza.
Australia is often called the lucky country because geographically it just so happens to be the location of a lot of minerals that have become in-demand, meaning it can profit that way; despite a lot of the mining required to get at those minerals being utterly destructive to the planet.
So what do you do when it seems the Government is operating under a system that is designed to leave poor people struggling?
Libertarians would say leave it to the corporations, but that is a dreadful idea and would only be the current capitalist system writ large.
No, you as an individual collectivise with your fellow individuals and work within your community. If the State isn't going to help, then we ignore the State. Think of the Israeli kibbutz, something free from central government and more local. Smaller free associations that might be self-governing in some respects.
We are social, co-operative creatures inherently, so we need to tap into that again if we are to provide for our brethren. Because now there is an underclass that is just not being served, in fact are largely ignored and then taken out and beaten for political purposes.
Getting to this kind of utopia is hard. It requires a lot of co-operation and organisation, but it’s something we should aim for; no one person is materially more deserving of privilege ahead of another so let’s start living that way. The State might serve you, but does it serve everyone? And who is missing out that really needs help?
For those of you outside of Wellington you may have missed the utter cluster fuck that is our current council. Sure there are a handful of gems there - Fleur Fitzsimmons is pretty good and Rebecca Matthews is an absolute star - but for the most part they are the pits. Local Government is viewed as where good people go to die, and maybe it's this view that's led us to a situation where nothing good comes out of our council, and they seem to continually make bad decisions. There are a few councillors who are overtly awful, Diane Calvert seems to be on the wrong side of every vote ever. She's against densification, she seems to hate public transport and also voted against increasing the budget for social housing. She's also in my ward. Just this week, the council has voted on the latest iteration of the "Long Term Plan". There is a massive debt "problem"* in Wellington and so it was full of slashes and burns. The Mayor thought it would be helpful to do 11 amendments that were sent around the council the day before the vote. One of these amendments included a very vague note about effectively partially-privatising the Library. Privatising the library. That's something that us lefties make jokes about right wingers wanting to do, to paint them as hopeless, out of touch and awful. And yet here we are. You can read about this particular clusterfuck in an excellent twitter thread by Phil Quinn here: https://twitter.com/philquin/status/1362867366531596290 Mayor Andy has complained that some councillors just weren't prepared to accept that we needed to cut things and that's why there is this complaint, except that motherfucker has been on the council since 1992. If he had been any good at his job then we wouldn't need to do the cuts. All of this has led me to very seriously consider running for Wellington City Council next year. I've floated the idea with a few people and they seem enthusiastic. I don't think, for a second, that I can fix everything in Wellington, but it seems like we have so many people on our council who are just incompetent that sure I'd be better? I'd like a Wellington where there isn't literal shit pouring onto the streets, one where there's plenty of quality places for younger people to live so we can fill up the city with fun and vibrant folk again. We used to be that. Now the city just seems tired and grey. Anyway, what do you all think? Worth the run? Let me know in the comments what you think.
*the debt situation with local government needs to be looked at by central government. Currently a lot of them are hamstrung by weird rules that central government doesn't have to abide by, and maybe it's time for a change.
Hey, I just wanted to gauge how you, my favourite poeple who pay, feel about me opening up posts after a certain amount of days so people can see what I serve up, and maybe I get more subscribers?
I'd make it a week unless it was an absolute banger column, then I might give it a day or two.
As a kid, it meant fuck all. I never understood what the fuss was. There always seemed to be arguments and protests at Waitangi when politicians would go there. Why didn't they just have a day off like I was?
In fact this attitude was still present when I was at university. I just didn't appreciate what Māoridom meant for Aotearoa New Zealand. I didn't know what Māori had been through at the hands of the colonisers. I didn't properly know what colonisation was.
I don't think I have a proper understanding now. It's certainly better than it was. When I worked at the Green Party I went through a crash course in Te Tiriti training, it was three days long. At the end of each day I'd need to spend time on my own, pondering what I'd just learned. It was a form of grieving. Because I felt responsible. And the horrors that were inflected on Māori by white people echo down through the generations today.
During the heigh of the Black Lives Matter protests from last year I did a series of tweets. I said if you found the footage coming out of the protests distressing - the police using unchecked violence on citizens - and it made you turn away, you needed to reflect that you had the ability and choice to turn away. That being able to turn away and ignore it, even for a day, was a privilege. For a lot of people, they live that racism every day. And they live it here in Aotearoa New Zealand too.
I said just because we've benefited from white supremacy didn't necessarily mean we were white supremacists, but that we need to acknowledge that white supremacy had certainly helped white people get ahead.
When the curriculum changes for teaching our colonial past were announced, National was unsurprisingly opposed.
Paul Goldsmith, who is National's education spokesperson, said that the proposed curriculum focused too much on identity politics and needed more "economic history".
Goldsmith was an historian before going into Parliament so he should know better. But it seems he doesn't. In an article in Stuff, he said it was important that we learned about New Zealand’s identity but not at the expense of other issues like economics.
"How did we make a living as a country? How in such a short space of time did we create one of the highest living standards in the world?”
How did New Zealand earn a living, Paul? Off the back of colonisation. And that British colonisation was funded by slavery. So that's pretty cool stuff.
If this makes you uncomfortable to think about then that's good. We need to be uncomfortable. Because the British treatment of Māori was horrific. And not enough people know.
Understanding where we've come from and how we got here can help us make the future better for everyone. It's not about one rule for all, or no race-based advantages, it's about giving everyone the possibility of the same outcome. And at the moment that doesn't happen.
So while the stealing of land, the murdering of Māori and the attempts at systematically diluting Māori bloodlines occurred 150 odd years ago, the horrors continue. In fact huge numbers of Māori children were taken from their families by the Government from the 1940s right up until the late 1980s. Colonisation didn't end when the British stopped stealing land, colonisation continues.
When the Prime Minister visited Waitangi as PM for the first time in 2018, she asked to be held to account by Māori, and I don't pretend to know anywhere near enough to properly judge her, but by my reckoning, she still has a long way to go.
The release of the Climate Commission's draft advice to the Government was released yesterday and it's ... well it's advice.
First off, there was a comms fuck up in that some journalists got embargoed copies, and some did not; meaning that some outlets were able to have fulsome articles about it as soon as the embargo lifted as others struggled to read the hundreds of pages and pull a piece together quickly.
I don't think there was anything malicious in who did and didn't get copies ahead of the launch, I just think it was a cock-up. However we need our institutions to not make this sort of cock-up if we're to trust them; this is important to me because I work in communications and this is a communications issue.
But to the advice in general, it's fine. And you know overall it's not going to have the seismic impact on people's day-to-day life that was feared, but there are a few blind spots.
For the most complete picture of the report, I recommend reading Newsroom's coverage. Marc Daalder and David Williams have done superb work in digesting and regurgitating something that's very complex in a comprehensible way.
If you recall, getting the Climate Change Commission started at all was a Green Party initiative and part of its confidence and supply agreement with Labour in the last term. However to get bipartisan support for it from National it was watered down to be non-binding. That means the Government can choose to accept its advice or just, y'know, flag it.
The major issue that faces nearly all climate change action is the downstream costs borne by those least able to afford them. The Climate Change Commission acknowledged this by nothing that the risks to Māori, low-income earners and others from lower socio-economic classes would be likely to be hit hardest by things like price rises in petrol. The Climate Change Commission recommended targeted support for these groups.
This is a common problem. I can remember when I was in the Greens and we were talking about getting rid of single-use plastic bags; I raised the problem that "single-use" plastic bags is a privilege that not everyone enjoys. For a lot of people those "single-use" bags were actually multi-use. They were used for lunch boxes, school bags, rubbish bins, and if we were going to phase them out then we needed to do so in a way that didn't incur a cost on those who can least afford it.
It's why I hate the petrol tax, it's a regressive tax that hurts low-income earners the most.
Climate Change mitigation is necessary, but so often it's mitigation that only the wealthy can afford.
Which sucks because it's not the poor who caused this. It's not the poor who continue to cause this. But it's the poor who hurt.
Until we understand that an economic model of capitalism provides incentives to pollute, not much is going to change. Over 70 per cent of all harmful emissions worldwide come from just 100 fossil fuel companies.
We run the risk of shovelling the burden of responsibility onto the individual consumer for something that is not their responsibility. Sure, it was good to phase out something like single-use plastic carrier bags, but let's not pretend it's some environmental panacea.
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, so let's make it more expensive to operate business in a way that could damage the environment.
The companies who are the worst polluters 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!
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.
So sure, take up the Climate Change Commission's recommendations. But let's make the culpable pay for it, not those who are already living pay cheque to pay cheque.
More and more wealth is being captured and held by a smaller group of people.
The housing crisis is a good example of this. According to census data, in 1991, 61 percent of people aged 25 to 29 years lived in an owner-occupied home. By 2018, this had dropped to 44 percent. Similarly, for those aged in their late 30s, the rate dropped from 79 percent in 1991 to 59 percent in 2018.
Owning your own house isn't just the luxury of being able to put a nail in a wall at will, it also opens up other options. You can borrow against your house to buy other things, like other houses. And people do.
The New Zealand dream is no longer a quarter-acre block, it's a quarter-acre block plus a few rentals.
And while this is happening, the people who occupy those rentals get screwed. Even though tenants service the mortgage and rates, and pay for the upkeep through their rent, they don't get to keep the house. Somebody else does because they had capital and the tenant doesn't.
This is ludicrous.
Just recently I came into a reasonable sized inheritance. Not massive, but certainly not a small sum of money. I talked to some financial advisors and they told me that between that inheritance and the equity I had built up in my house (less through paying my mortgage and more from the fact my house has earned more than $50K a year for the past few years), I should buy a rental!
"No!" I said. I would not be doing that. That's a major reason why we're in the situation we're in. And while for me and my family it was the most sensible thing to do financially, I refused to do it. Instead, and this is laughable, I bought shares. I now have a stock portfolio. What the fuck has happened to the country/world when buying shares is the left-wing thing to do?
Now I watch my money earn money. So now I own a house that earns money, and I have money that earns money, and so because I have this capital above and beyond what I need to live off, I get richer.
And this is all through luck. My wife and I bought our house in 2011. We got a 3-bedroom house in Ngaio, Wellington for under $500k. It's now allegedly worth over a million. We've borrowed against the house to make improvements, put in a deck, and a new bathroom etc. And we can do that because we have the capital because we were lucky enough to get into the housing market while it was still (barely) affordable.
The main solution is to just build more fucking houses. That's what we need. But there are some things we can do on the demand side too.
A capital gains tax is not the panacea that people think it is for housing. We've effectively had a housing capital gains tax with the bright line test and it hasn't slowed down shit.
I'm a big supporter of the capital gains tax as a redistributive tool, but there are other things we can do on the demand side to try and mitigate this disaster.
Firstly, and most heavy handed, we can make it illegal to own more than X houses. This would have a consequence of fewer houses being built if people didn't think they could invest in many houses, but if the State picked up the slack there then it would be fine. Failing that, make it legal for housing developers to own many houses because their intention is to sell as soon as built. If the house isn't sold within a certain period of completion, then tax them up the wahzoo.
If not that, then we could make it much, much harder for people to buy houses if they already own one - deposits of 65% for investors, or something like that. While I think for renters, if they can demonstrate that they've been paying their rent without fail for two years then that should count as a deposit.
Right now, it's more expensive to rent in Wellington than it is to have a first-home mortgage. How the fuck are you supposed to save for a deposit when you are paying exorbitant amount for rent? Remove that barrier and get more first home buyers into the market.
Again, this would need to go hand in hand with more houses being built, because more potential purchasers mean prices go up.
I'm not a banker or an economist by a long-shot, and I'm sure there are probably flaws with my ideas, but holy shit man, we need to do something. If this keeps up, we end back at feudalism, and I think it’s within the best interests of the current landed gentry to not have that. They'll get hauled out into the streets and shot.
In my heart I don't actually believe that anyone should profit from owning housing. Housing is a right, not a privilege. I do not believe that lords of land should exist. But I know that I'm a bit out there and so I gotta work within the system.
I've been seeing reports of it for a few days now. Lots of people complaining on Twitter that they've lost followers in large numbers.
I don't pay *that* much attention to my follower count (I do pay some attention as I near milestones, like X thousand), but I hadn't noticed a drop-off of followers. This morning I got a message from a friend who has quite a large number of followers asking if I'd noticed I'd lost some. They said they'd lost about 100 overnight.
I went and checked and while I'm not 100% sure, I think I've lost maybe 50?
And I'm delighted. Because those who have been deplatformed seem to be right wing lunatics.
In the last few days I've been baited a lot by RW trolls who are particularly incensed at my campaign to not allow Chris Liddell to launder his reputation.
Fuck them, fuck him.
But the thing with this purge is that it shows that Twitter has had this power/capability all along and chose not to do anything. It is only now, when Donald Trump is at his lowest ebb and about to be ejected from the White House that it has decided to move.
This is the same as all those cabinet members quitting now. Good on you for having some kind of moral line, but why now? Why not ... say when Trump implemented his kids in cages policy, or when he put in place his Muslim ban? Or any other time he's been objectively awful?
The other thing is that the ubiquity of these platforms - like Twitter and Facebook - means that those companies have a lot of power when it comes to deciding who gets heard and who doesn't. And that's a bit frightening. Because while I may celebrate all the far-right assholes being forced from Twitter, what happens if they suddenly decide that those on the left/anarchists should lose their platform?
I don't have an answer to this, because I believe that far-right assholes should be deplatformed. Go to Parler (lol), or Gab, or Voat. I don't care.
Anyway, that's all. I just had some thoughts and wanted to get them down.
He's our man! Our man in the White House. The Kiwi who got into the Trump administration from day one and now looks like he'll still be there until the end. The longest serving senior member of Trump's administration outside of his Cabinet. Aren't you proud, New Zealand? To know Liddell, we should look at some of his background. He was a successful investment banker which immediately puts him on the wrong side for me, but that's ideological. No, we can see signs of the man he is today in some of the roles he took here in New Zealand. He became CEO of Carter Holt Harvey in 1995. Two years earlier, the Building Act 1991 became law. This deregulated the house building industry and let it take care of itself. Carter Holt Harvey was a massive supplier of leaky building products during Liddell's time at the helm. He didn't seem too bothered. Liddell's star was on the rise regardless. From 2005-2009 he was the Chief Financial Officer at Microsoft, and in 2010 became the Vice Chair of General Motors and helped lead the largest IPO in history (at the time). This takes us to the Trump Administration. Liddell has held a range of different roles, all culminating in him being Deputy Chief of Staff to President Trump. In that time, he seems to have forgotten his New Zealand roots. New Zealand's two global facing prongs are free-trade, and the environment. Liddell has helped facilitate policies that actively harm both. Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Accord on Climate Change, and at the same time Trump has waged trade wars and ground the World Trade Organisation to a stand-still by not appointing the adjudicators to the appellate body required for the WTO to function. As Trump's time as President started heading towards a close, Liddell decided he better start rehabilitating his image. He started giving a few more New Zealand interviews. In a TVNZ interview with Jack Tame he said, "I've never felt that I've so disagreed with what he's doing that I've ever seriously considered leaving." This interview was done in November, 3 months ago. The things that Trump had done in that time include, but are not limited to:
tried to blackmail Ukraine into helping him get re-elected
pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Change Accord
called Nazis "very fine people"
had Steve Bannon and Steve Miller as senior appointees
Gave senior positions in his administration to horrifically underqualified members of his family
imposed a Muslim travel ban
extorted the secret service by charging staggering amounts for them to stay at places near where he was staying
beefed up ICE and the deportation programme
instituted a family separated programme that put tonnes of refugee children, fleeing from war-torn and gang-run countries in cages
issued pardons for people who are convicted felons, but are close to Trump
went after transgender people, both in the military and at schools
made numerous white supremacist tweets and comments
ordered the tear gassing of BLM protesters just so he could get a photo shoot in front of a church before retreating to a bunker
has continued to peddle lies and conspiracy theories about the election being stolen from him, which in turn incited a riot and attempt insurrection in Washington DC
completely and utterly fucked up the pandemic response
Presumably Liddell is ok with all of these because, in his own words, he's never felt that he's so disagreed with what Trump's doing that he's ever seriously considered leaving. In fact, Liddell was on Trump's Corona Task Force. So, he's not just awful, but it seems he's become incompetent too. There's also this story which claims Liddell took part in a vote on whether or not to enact the child separation policy. People I have spoken to who know Liddell say he voted no. Which yay? But he still took part in a vote, that was ultimately passed, and he then helped enact that policy. More than one person has compared Liddell to Albert Speer, the Nazi architect. Speer tried to distance himself from the worst of the Nazi regime and claim he was trying to stop the worst excesses of it. Which was a lie. And Speer was also sentenced to 20 years in prison for his crimes. Liddell can either admit he helped carry out some of Trump's atrocities, or concede he wasn't good enough to stop them. So, despite what Simon Bridges has said about Liddell, we should not support his appointment to be head of the OECD, we should not do shit for this man. We should shun him. Liddell has never had New Zealand's interest at heart. When Trump announced a list of countries that didn't have tariffs slapped on their steel exports, New Zealand was not one of them. Liddell could have helped us out there. But instead, he chose not to. So, with all this in mind, fuck him.
