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Wee gripes: 3 of 3

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 2:57 pm, July 17th, 2009 - 41 comments

Business New Zealand and other assorted tossers. Stop calling our country ‘New Zealand Inc’. This is our home. This is where we live our lives and raise our families. It’s not some profit-maximising engine for your shareholders.

Wee gripes: 2 of 3

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 3:52 pm, July 16th, 2009 - 30 comments

Maori unemployment is ballooning day by day but the most important thing that Maori Affairs Minister Sharples can spend his time on is debating which flag will fly on the Harbour Bridge next Waitangi Day. “Having a flag under which Maori can rally under is really, really, really important. And people might see it as […]

Wee gripes: 1 of 3

Written By: Zetetic - Date published: 12:46 pm, July 16th, 2009 - 7 comments

It takes two days from folate blowing up as a political issue for Key to get Crown Law onto finding a way for us to get out of it. It’s been nine months and there’s still no action on the economy and jobs. Priorities? By now, we know what Key’s priorities are: Dampen down any […]

Quandary

Written By: Eddie - Date published: 8:06 pm, June 4th, 2009 - 59 comments

This evening, Labour tabled in the House, with her permission, a statement from the woman that Richard Worth harrassed with his corrupt ‘jobs for favours’ proposals. Journalists got copies and have quoted from it but not shown it. Except, the Herald briefly posted an image of it. Here’s why we’re in a quandary. We’ve been […]

Meeting Joe Overton

Written By: Guest post - Date published: 12:03 pm, April 4th, 2009 - 17 comments

A little while ago we had some discussion here about the Sensible Sentencing Trust and their status as a charity. That’s not what this post is about. Rather, I’m going to write a little bit about the functional role groups like the SST play in the political process and how they are successful. The SST, […]

Worrying about the big stuff

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 6:00 pm, March 4th, 2009 - 12 comments

In the age of the media politician, where catch-phrases are given more attention than laws and good politics is awarded more points by the commentariat than good government, it’s not fashionable to worry too much about the health of our constitutional arragnements and our institutions. But I do. Here’s some of the things that have […]

No, you leave YOUR ideology at the door

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 2:39 pm, February 27th, 2009 - 49 comments

There’s all this rubbish at the moment about people moving beyond ideology. At the Jobs Summit, attendees were harangued to ‘leave your ideology at the door’. Everything I’m hearing out of the Summit says they haven’t. The business leaders want weaker work rights, lower tax, and subsidies. The few workers’ representatives that were invited want […]

Pillow talk

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 6:57 am, January 5th, 2009 - 17 comments

I’ve been thinking about the concurrent crises we face – peak oil, climate change, and tightening food supply – how the limits to growth are starting to hit us and how, each reinforcing the other, they constitute the major challenges to our collective welfare in the years to come. I’ve been thinking about how we […]

Thoughts arising from the press gallery drinks

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 10:14 am, December 19th, 2008 - 45 comments

I had some good conversations with journos at the press gallery drinks. We’re often critical of the media, and sometimes specific journos, and I don’t resile from that – criticism is criticism, it’s either well-founded or not and people are free to take it or leave it based on that. I’ll admit sometimes writers express […]

Threshold

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 4:06 pm, November 12th, 2008 - 117 comments

[I’ll just preface this post by saying I have no love for Winston Peters’ politics and I’m happy to see New Zealand First out of Parliament but, then, I would also be happy to see National out of Parliament and, surely, we shouldn’t base an electoral system on particular outcomes for particular parties, rather, on […]

The fundamental question

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 10:17 am, November 7th, 2008 - 45 comments

The fundamental question of politics is how the wealth of society should be divided among the members of society. We live in a capitalist society. That means it is the people who own the capital (businesses, factories, farms) who own the things that are made and get to choose how to divide the wealth between […]

Musical interlude, einher mit die Philosophie

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 1:32 pm, October 11th, 2008 - 10 comments

A utopia, an ideal socio-politico-legal system that we can work towards if never reach, should lie at the heart of ones political philosophy. Ones support for ideas and policies should be based on whether they further progress towards ones utopia. One of the earliest expoundings of a utopia was in Plato’s The Republic. Plato recounts […]

Fighting the moral fight

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 11:16 am, October 5th, 2008 - 34 comments

There are two core strains to left-wing thought. Both of them can be seen as rooted in the evolution of the scientific method during the 18th and 19th centuries, although the essential ideas, of course, existed long before. The first is liberalism. Liberalism holds that we must always keep an element of self-doubt and criticism […]

Back to basics

Written By: Steve Pierson - Date published: 3:22 pm, September 22nd, 2008 - 55 comments

I’ve had some interesting conversations with people recently that have me thinking we need to get back to some political basics to build up to the practical policy questions of today, otherwise many of us are talking past each other. Here are three founding principles, which I hope to build from in an occasional series […]