![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If you are on the electoral role in NZ you probably received a letter from the National Party this week, or are about to. If you are like me your first instinct on seeing "Leader's Office National Party" on the front of the envelope was to drop it straight in the recycling. Believe it or not I am asking you not to do that.
Inside is a party statement which is not worth reading[1], but on the back of this is a survey (pictured) which I urge you to fill out and return by Freepost, especially of you are not a National supporter. It's a little thing, but someone will see the results and there is a slim chance enough of them might have a trickle-up effect on policy. Also if I understand how Freepost works NZ Post get like a buck for every survey returned (from parliamentary services or some such not the National party coffers unfortunately), which is a better use of our tax dollars than much of National/Act policy.
[1] Basically repetition of the lines that Labour are poor stewards of the economy and have an addiction to spending, in the hope that if they say it enough people will believe it. Sadly this form of political attack in place of coherent, costed policy has a history of working :( If you want more reading on /why/ it is completely untrue, Gordon Campbell at Werewolf writes about it quite often.
~~~
I may blog about my answers later, but for now I want to switch tack and talk about the Labour Party for a bit.
As you probably all know I'm a firm Green Party voter, partly on policy but also because it's the best current option to drag the political center socially left.
I have mixed feelings about the current Labour Government. On the one hand they have not used their majority to green NZ's economy and improve social services as much as I would like[2] and they have outright broken promises related to these. (Read I/S at No Right Turn for a vitriolic list).
On the other had their 2020 mandate could fairly be said to be based on management of the ongoing pandemic, and I can see being reluctant to stray too far from that even as I strongly believe they should still be being more hard line about prevention. I have friends - including my wife - whose ability to socialise and even whose lives may depend on it.
However it is absolutely not accurate to say they have done nothing in government. They have made some big moves; some of which have blown up in their faces but they have made them nevertheless. Off the top of my head:
* Tackling the DHB mess.
Jury is out on how that will end up, but I feel the implementation of unifying such a complex system was rushed in an attempt to get it through in this election cycle[3]
* Three waters.
Everybody agrees /something/ had to be done, and moving the cost/debt burden[4] away from local communities who can't afford it (vs don't want to afford it[5]) seems the correct thing to do. I can see the appeal of a one-fit, centralised approach able to respond to forecast population movements rather than a potentially complex mess of individual arrangements.
TBH I haven't yet seen anyone present a substantive alternative plan, not even National who are loud about planning to repeal and replace it, but very quiet on what they plan to replace it with [[cough] more privatisation]
* Te Pūkenga
OK this is a real mess. I don't know who thought combining all the polytechs because a few of them were struggling was a good idea or why. Perhaps it was the fear that if the struggling ones were helped the others would demand the same level of support anyway, so let's do it in one hit?
* The cost of living payment.
The closest thing NZ has had to an UBI trial, this will at the least provide data for future social policy developers to get their teeth into. Yes targeting absolutely could have been done better[6] and again, implementation was rushed; but it was a bold leftwards political experiment.
So I agree with I/S that the best type of Labour government (naturally conservative and not all that different from traditional National) is one which is being dragged left on social and environmental issues by a coalition partner. Ideally the Greens because they have decades of policy development done already and potential/current MPs with the requisite experience in political deal-making to actually get things done, but equally or also Te Pāti Māori, even having TOP (who state that they will not enter into a coalition; but that doesn't rule out other types of support agreements) in the mix might work in a pinch.
~~~~
[2] Particularly angry about the current difficulties getting nurses into the country, which only builds on existing anger about the preceding and presumably ongoing difficulties foreign medical professionals face /at their own expense/ have getting recognition to practice here.
[3] I am /not/ in favour of longer election cycles. I /am/ in favour of governments from "one side of the aisle" acknowledging positive progress made by a government on "the other side of the aisle" and continuing that rather than repealing / rebranding policies based on pure tribalism.
I recently read a good article on this specifically in regard to National's "Social Investment" vs Labour's
Social Wellbeing".
[4] whole other rant - the system which requires councils to list their infrastructure as an asset in order to be able to borrow against it.
I mean, the relevant definition of "asset" is "an item of property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments, or legacies." Vs "liability", "a thing for which someone is responsible". Which of these better describes the practical existence of water(/roading/electricity/...) infrastructure, something which is basically a cost sink for no financial return?
You can certainly value the cost to replace a sewerage system for insurance purposes, but how are you going to use it to meet a debt? Dig it up and sell it? (Of course for those of a privatisation bent, selling it in-situ to someone who will then be able to make a nice private profit from charging for the use of the (publicly built and paid for) "assets" is precisely the point.)
What I'm saying is that the problem with the government moving "ownership" of the water infrastructure away from from local authorities isn't with the ownership, it's with the way local councils are funded / required to fund themselves in the first place.
[5] insert another rant about ratepayers voting against their long term best interests because it might keeps a few more dollars in their pocket now (not, at this point, learning from the mistakes of the past).
[6] among others those receiving the winter energy payment absolutely should not have been excluded - IDGAF that some people who "were ineligible" at the other end of the financial scale may have received payments especially since the sum involved was absolutely negligible compared to the total.
Inside is a party statement which is not worth reading[1], but on the back of this is a survey (pictured) which I urge you to fill out and return by Freepost, especially of you are not a National supporter. It's a little thing, but someone will see the results and there is a slim chance enough of them might have a trickle-up effect on policy. Also if I understand how Freepost works NZ Post get like a buck for every survey returned (from parliamentary services or some such not the National party coffers unfortunately), which is a better use of our tax dollars than much of National/Act policy.
[1] Basically repetition of the lines that Labour are poor stewards of the economy and have an addiction to spending, in the hope that if they say it enough people will believe it. Sadly this form of political attack in place of coherent, costed policy has a history of working :( If you want more reading on /why/ it is completely untrue, Gordon Campbell at Werewolf writes about it quite often.
~~~
I may blog about my answers later, but for now I want to switch tack and talk about the Labour Party for a bit.
As you probably all know I'm a firm Green Party voter, partly on policy but also because it's the best current option to drag the political center socially left.
I have mixed feelings about the current Labour Government. On the one hand they have not used their majority to green NZ's economy and improve social services as much as I would like[2] and they have outright broken promises related to these. (Read I/S at No Right Turn for a vitriolic list).
On the other had their 2020 mandate could fairly be said to be based on management of the ongoing pandemic, and I can see being reluctant to stray too far from that even as I strongly believe they should still be being more hard line about prevention. I have friends - including my wife - whose ability to socialise and even whose lives may depend on it.
However it is absolutely not accurate to say they have done nothing in government. They have made some big moves; some of which have blown up in their faces but they have made them nevertheless. Off the top of my head:
* Tackling the DHB mess.
Jury is out on how that will end up, but I feel the implementation of unifying such a complex system was rushed in an attempt to get it through in this election cycle[3]
* Three waters.
Everybody agrees /something/ had to be done, and moving the cost/debt burden[4] away from local communities who can't afford it (vs don't want to afford it[5]) seems the correct thing to do. I can see the appeal of a one-fit, centralised approach able to respond to forecast population movements rather than a potentially complex mess of individual arrangements.
TBH I haven't yet seen anyone present a substantive alternative plan, not even National who are loud about planning to repeal and replace it, but very quiet on what they plan to replace it with [[cough] more privatisation]
* Te Pūkenga
OK this is a real mess. I don't know who thought combining all the polytechs because a few of them were struggling was a good idea or why. Perhaps it was the fear that if the struggling ones were helped the others would demand the same level of support anyway, so let's do it in one hit?
* The cost of living payment.
The closest thing NZ has had to an UBI trial, this will at the least provide data for future social policy developers to get their teeth into. Yes targeting absolutely could have been done better[6] and again, implementation was rushed; but it was a bold leftwards political experiment.
So I agree with I/S that the best type of Labour government (naturally conservative and not all that different from traditional National) is one which is being dragged left on social and environmental issues by a coalition partner. Ideally the Greens because they have decades of policy development done already and potential/current MPs with the requisite experience in political deal-making to actually get things done, but equally or also Te Pāti Māori, even having TOP (who state that they will not enter into a coalition; but that doesn't rule out other types of support agreements) in the mix might work in a pinch.
~~~~
[2] Particularly angry about the current difficulties getting nurses into the country, which only builds on existing anger about the preceding and presumably ongoing difficulties foreign medical professionals face /at their own expense/ have getting recognition to practice here.
[3] I am /not/ in favour of longer election cycles. I /am/ in favour of governments from "one side of the aisle" acknowledging positive progress made by a government on "the other side of the aisle" and continuing that rather than repealing / rebranding policies based on pure tribalism.
I recently read a good article on this specifically in regard to National's "Social Investment" vs Labour's
Social Wellbeing".
[4] whole other rant - the system which requires councils to list their infrastructure as an asset in order to be able to borrow against it.
I mean, the relevant definition of "asset" is "an item of property owned by a person or company, regarded as having value and available to meet debts, commitments, or legacies." Vs "liability", "a thing for which someone is responsible". Which of these better describes the practical existence of water(/roading/electricity/...) infrastructure, something which is basically a cost sink for no financial return?
You can certainly value the cost to replace a sewerage system for insurance purposes, but how are you going to use it to meet a debt? Dig it up and sell it? (Of course for those of a privatisation bent, selling it in-situ to someone who will then be able to make a nice private profit from charging for the use of the (publicly built and paid for) "assets" is precisely the point.)
What I'm saying is that the problem with the government moving "ownership" of the water infrastructure away from from local authorities isn't with the ownership, it's with the way local councils are funded / required to fund themselves in the first place.
[5] insert another rant about ratepayers voting against their long term best interests because it might keeps a few more dollars in their pocket now (not, at this point, learning from the mistakes of the past).
[6] among others those receiving the winter energy payment absolutely should not have been excluded - IDGAF that some people who "were ineligible" at the other end of the financial scale may have received payments especially since the sum involved was absolutely negligible compared to the total.
