Is a Transformational Left-Wing Leadership of the NZ Labour Party Possible?
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- Date published:
4:57 pm, August 17th, 2024 - 79 comments
Categories: Bernie Sanders, Economy, election 2023, Jeremy Corbyn, labour, political parties, Politics, uncategorized -
Tags: alliance party, jim anderton, neo-liberalism, te tiriti o waitangi, working class
By Elliot Crossan – Cross-posted from post at System Change
It is a painful experience, to have fought long and hard for something you knew was inadequate and to have even that taken away.
This whiplash is being felt by activists across Aotearoa, some of whom have spent years and others decades fighting for climate action, workers’ rights, livable incomes for all, access to decent housing, and for Te Tiriti o Waitangi to be honoured. Campaigners spent years organising and marching for a fair and sustainable future, were given crumbs by the last Labour Government, and are now watching aghast as the new government tears up the minimal progress that was made in the previous six years whilst advancing their own right-wing agenda at a breakneck speed.
The Labour Party has long urged activists to be ‘realistic,’ arguing that only incremental change is possible; that it is impossible to transform Aotearoa overnight, that the voting public will never accept radical reform, and that three year terms and the MMP electoral system force parties to be moderate and tack to the ‘centre ground.’ National, ACT and NZ First have sent these arguments up in smoke.
The Coalition is taking a scorched earth approach to reform. As soon as the government was formed, the three parties launched an aggressive 100 day agenda, using parliamentary urgency an unprecedented number of times to roll back a number of key Labour reforms. High on the list of axed policies were Fair Pay Agreements, the key workplace reform which private sector unions had spent nearly all of Labour’s two terms awaiting, and the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling projects, a pivotal demand of the climate movement. Nicola Willis is cutting the public service to the bone, embarking on an austerity programme the likes of which Aotearoa has not experienced since the early 1990s.
The government’s campaign against Te Tiriti o Waitangi threatens to send us back decades on the hard-fought rights won by Māori through relentless struggle. The Treaty Principles Bill is vile; but even if National and NZ First refuse to sign ACT’s most extreme policy into law, they are still set to unleash an avalanche of racist policies. Benefit sanctions and ‘tough on crime’ policies will hit Māori harder than any other group; and the Fast Track Bill constitutes a real and present danger to both the Treaty and the planet.
Workers’ rights, indigenous rights and environmental protections are being bulldozed in front of our eyes, all in service of insatiable corporate greed.
A Labour Party in Crisis
The First Labour Government of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser, elected in 1935, knew how to use three-year terms to deliver transformational change to benefit working people. The Fourth Labour Government also unleashed radical change, but in the opposite direction; forty years ago, Finance Minister Roger Douglas rolled back the welfare state established by his predecessors. Douglas famously spoke of moving in “quantum leaps” to keep opponents distracted and confused, unable to fight against his uncompromising agenda. This Coalition knows it too — National, ACT and NZ First know that even if they are only a one-term government, moving at speed and scale means they will achieve more than the Ardern-Hipkins government did in two terms; perhaps even more than the Clark and Key-English governments achieved in three.
Chris Hipkins last year led Labour to its second-worst election defeat since the 1920s, with the biggest fall in vote share that either major party has ever experienced. Ardern in her five years failed to deliver the transformational change she had promised in 2017; upon becoming Prime Minister, Hipkins moved the party even further toward the ‘centre,’ ditching a series of reforms and refusing to implement taxes on wealth or capital gains — despite the popularity of such policies. At the precise time that Labour needed to move left, and deliver radical reform in the interests of its working class voter base who were suffering in the cost of living crisis, the government instead moved right, and went down in flames as a result.
The fact that Hipkins remains leader of the Opposition is a clear sign that the Labour Party does not intend to change direction. Activists will not tolerate this; we will not settle for another incrementalist centre-left government which fails to bring about fundamental change in the wake of the bonfire of progressive policies we are currently witnessing. In the midst of a climate crisis, a housing crisis, a crisis of inequality, and an all-out assault on Te Tiriti, social movements know that transformational change is not just desirable, but necessary now more than ever before.
The incrementalism of Hipkins, following in the footsteps of his predecessors Ardern and Clark, fits perfectly into the mould of Third Way politics which has dominated the western centre-left since the 1990s. The ‘Third Way’ was the agenda of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, political leaders who sought to adapt to the neoliberal revolution of the previous decade rather than overturn it. Blair and Clinton left the low-tax, low-spend, privatised economic model of the free market in place, and only offered mild tweaks to the supposed ‘trickle down’ system which kept allowing the rich to get richer and richer. Third Way politics has been hegemonic within the New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) since Helen Clark’s leadership.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the austerity that followed discredited the neoliberal economic model in the eyes of many. In the years since, social movements overseas have attempted to capture the leadership of the leading centre-left parties in their countries in order to force them to adopt transformative politics, in the knowledge that existing leaders are resistant to any real change. Activists demanded that social democratic parties abandon neoliberalism and austerity, and side with workers instead of the corporate interests that these parties had served for two decades.
Could this phenomenon occur within the NZLP? Austerity and sociopolitical polarisation have belatedly arrived upon the shores of Aotearoa, mirroring the experience of many European countries in the 2010s. Is now the moment for activists to attempt a takeover of the Labour Party and turn it into a vehicle for transformational change, returning it to its founding purpose of representing the working class?
The Corbyn Campaign — Could It Happen Here?
The most famous examples of this phenomenon in the English-speaking world were the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020. Sanders sought to win the Democratic Party nomination on a platform which included taxing and regulating Wall Street, doubling the minimum wage, and establishing a universal public healthcare system; he identified as a democratic socialist and railed against the billionaire class and their “greed and reckless behaviour.” He won an unprecedented number of votes for a socialist candidate in the US, but failed both times to win the nomination. However, as the United States has a presidential system and an entirely different party structure to Aotearoa, the Sanders campaigns are not comparable to what left-wing activists might hope to see here.
Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign for the leadership of the UK Labour Party is a much more comparable example for activists in Aotearoa. The colonial New Zealand state and parliament are modelled on the British Westminster system — the main differences between their system and ours are that Britain has a House of Lords as well as a House of Commons, and that Britain still uses first-past-the-post, the electoral system we abandoned in favour of MMP in 1993. Parliamentary parties in the UK are generally structured similarly to how they are in this country, particularly in the case of the NZLP, which is largely modelled on the UK Labour Party. This example is the closest comparison we can make between Aotearoa and a country which has seen a left-wing insurgency within a mainstream centre-left party.
Between 1983 and 2015, Jeremy Corbyn served as a backbench Labour MP. He was among the most rebellious MPs in his party, consistently voting against the neoliberal Blair/Brown Government on issues such as privatisation and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Corbyn was part of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), a small group of 20-40 left-wing MPs committed to returning Labour to its roots as the party of the working class. The SCG vision of socialism was more Marxist than it was Keynesian — although they fought for immediate social democratic reforms to improve the lives of workers, Corbyn and his comrades were proudly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and committed to a socialist world based on peace, justice and genuine democracy.
Here is the first hurdle a left-wing movement in the NZLP would come up against. If such a faction exists within the existing Labour caucus, it is very secretive indeed. There are certainly ‘soft left’ MPs, social democrats with ties to the union movement, but it is hard to see who their leader is at this stage. Michael Wood was seen by some last term as the leading figure on the soft left, but Wood lost his once-safe seat in Mt. Roskill in the 2023 election when the Labour vote crumbled in Auckland. The ‘soft left’ are not radicals like Corbyn — they merely want Labour to move an inch or two further leftwards, rather than committing unreservedly to transformational change outside of the Third Way neoliberal paradigm.
There is no hard left faction in the NZLP. The most outspoken, rebellious wing of the NZLP broke away in 1989, when Jim Anderton led a split from the party in disgust at the right-wing reforms of the Rogernomics period. Anderton created the NewLabour Party, which later became the dominant faction within the Alliance, the left-of-Labour party which won an impressive 18.2% of the vote in the 1993 election.
Anderton was the most prominent social democrat to oppose Aotearoa’s turn to neoliberalism. But even he was hardly an equivalent figure to Corbyn — his vision was to return to the Keynesian social democratic policies championed by Labour between 1935 and 1984; and when it came down to it, he was happy enough being a Minister in the Third Way Clark Government from 1999 to 2008. The Alliance split and then collapsed when Anderton and three of his colleagues voted with Labour in favour of the War in Afghanistan. The Alliance represented the most left-wing element of the postwar NZLP; its leadership was barely radical compared to the SCG; and it is now a long-dead party.
At the beginning of 2015, Corbyn remained a relatively obscure figure in UK politics. When Labour lost that year’s election, leader Ed Miliband stepped down, and three Third Way candidates emerged to replace him — Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall. The SCG decided to put Corbyn forward as the fourth candidate. They did so because they believed that an anti-austerity, anti-war candidate was needed in the leadership race in order to shift the debate to the left; they didn’t think in a million years that they would actually win. Bookmakers early on put Corbyn’s odds of victory at 200/1.
The year before, Labour had changed its leadership rules to a one-person, one-vote system, with members of the party and affiliated trade unions eligible to vote, as well as any member of the public who paid £5 to register as a supporter. The previous voting system had been an electoral college, in which one-third of the vote was allocated to MPs, one-third to party members, and the remaining one-third to affiliates. Under the new system, the only sway MPs held was in the nominating process, as candidates needed to be nominated by 15% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in order to stand.
The 2014 rule change was seen as a victory for the Blairite faction of the party against the soft left, as the common sense was that the general public were more conservative than most Labour MPs. Pundits believed that the new rules would drag the party further to the right; some Blairite MPs even nominated Corbyn because they believed his candidacy would be so unpopular that the hard left would be humiliated. They were completely out-of-touch with what was happening in British society.
If they wanted to know who the new leadership rules would favour, journalists and MPs should have looked to the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people had spent five years marching against the Conservative-led Coalition’s harsh austerity measures. A wave of strikes and campus occupations took place — not since the resistance to Thatcherism had unions and social movements been so combative. Corbyn and his allies supported the movements, linking arms with protesters while the Labour leadership ignored them. Miliband, despite being on the soft left himself, had campaigned on an austerity-lite manifesto, promising to reduce, rather than end, the government’s cuts to public spending.
The Corbyn leadership campaign squeezed onto the ballot at the last possible minute. Once debates and public meetings began, the campaign exploded. People queued around the block to hear this once-obscure figure make a clear and principled case against austerity. Activists flooded into the Labour Party, and membership exploded from 200,000 to nearly 300,000 — it would later peak at close to 600,000, as Labour became the largest party in western Europe under Corbyn’s radical leadership. More than 100,000 people registered as supporters, overwhelmingly to vote for Corbyn.
When the final result was declared, Corbyn’s overwhelming mandate was revealed: 251,417 votes, or 59.5%. Even among party members alone, excluding supporters and affiliates, he won 49.6% on the first ballot, with the three other candidates splitting the remainder of the vote between them. The Third Way MPs and bureaucrats used to controlling the party with an iron grip looked shell-shocked; the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall came last on 4.5%.
Shockingly, the NZLP did not allow party members to vote for the leader at all until an electoral college system was implemented in 2012. From 2012 onwards, 40% of the vote was given to MPs, 40% to members, and 20% to affiliated trade unions, with candidates requiring nominations from 10% of caucus to stand. But in 2021, the rules were changed again to give more power back to MPs — today, the initial round of voting takes place in caucus through an alternative vote ballot, to see if any candidate can secure the support of two-thirds of Labour MPs. Only if no candidate reaches this two-thirds threshold is the electoral college system used, allowing members to have a say.
Crucially, within three months of a general election, a new leader can be chosen by caucus through a preferential vote if the previous leader steps down or is removed through a vote of no confidence. This means that members and affiliated unions can be bypassed entirely, and that a leader who faces significant opposition from MPs can be removed regardless of how much support they have outside of caucus.
Corbyn faced overwhelming opposition from his own MPs. He was forced to fight a second leadership election in 2016, after a no-confidence motion was passed by more than 80% of the PLP. He won this election by 313,209 votes (61.8%), an increase of 61,792 (2.3%.) Even after this renewed mandate from the membership, a significant number of MPs spent the entirety of Corbyn’s tenure undermining him. Even MPs from the soft left participated in this campaign to bring down their elected leader — it wasn’t only the Blairites trying to bring him down at all costs. Diane Abbott described this campaign as an attempt to “break him as a man.”
In April 2017, Theresa May called a snap election with less than seven weeks notice. Labour were polling at just 24%, and the Conservatives were predicted to win a landslide majority of unprecedented scale. Had the UK Labour Party followed the rules of the NZLP, the PLP would have simply replaced Corbyn there and then. Thankfully, they did not have the power to do so.
Corbyn ran a campaign so inspired that it captured the attention of left-wing activists the world over. In the face of clear hostility from big business and the mainstream media, the party released an anti-austerity manifesto entitled For the Many, Not the Few. The radical document promised to tax the top 5% of British households in order to bring vital utilities back into public ownership and invest in public services and infrastructure; it included a sorely needed expansion of workers’ rights, a green transition away from fossil fuels, and an end to UK involvement in illegal wars.
The manifesto was wildly popular, and motivated an army of volunteers to mobilise across the country. Many young people felt hopeful about politics for the first time in their lives; this was reflected in polls estimating a significant increase in youth turnout in the election, with young voters overwhelmingly favouring Labour — this phenomenon was dubbed the “youthquake.”
Instead of a landslide, Theresa May lost her majority in Parliament. Labour surged to 40% of the vote — 16% up from the beginning of the campaign, and 9.6% up on 2015, the party’s biggest increase in vote share since 1945. 12.9 million people voted for a party campaigning on a socialist manifesto.
Whatsapp messages leaked three years later revealed that party staffers — who had been hired by Corbyn’s Third Way predecessors — were shellshocked when they saw the exit poll predicting that Labour had gained seats for the first time since 1997. They had been hoping that Corbyn would suffer a defeat devastating enough that he would be forced to resign in disgrace. His opponents smear him as unelectable; but the number of votes received by the party under Corbyn’s leadership remains its high water mark this century.
Corbyn never won a majority, and he never won the popular vote. He resigned as leader after the 2019 election, when the issue of Brexit tore Labour’s voter base apart. But he came closer than any radical left leader in the Anglosphere has ever come to winning power. Had he not been relentlessly sabotaged by his own MPs and party employees, who knows how many more votes and seats Labour could have won. 2017 was close enough that it is possible Corbyn could have become Prime Minister had he not been fatally undermined.
Instead, Corbyn has been expelled from the party he dedicated his life to by his successor Keir Starmer. The new Starmer-led Labour Government won a landslide majority of seats in the 2024 election, but did so with a record low share of the popular vote for a winning party, amidst the second-lowest turnout since the UK adopted universal suffrage. Labour won fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019, let alone 2017. The Starmer Government is already declining in popularity just weeks after entering office, as it has committed itself to austerity and refused to enact an immediate arms embargo on the genocidal regime of Israel.
Corbyn is now faced with the need to create a new left-wing party in the UK. Corbyn won his seat as an independent after being purged from his former party, as did four other ‘Gaza independents’ who won seats from Labour; the Greens meanwhile won four seats, having previously held just one seat in their history. These results represented unprecedented success for left-of-Labour candidates in Britain. But the far-right are also on the move, with Nigel Farage’s Reform party winning four million votes. Riots have broken out in recent weeks, in an horrific display of racist, Islamophobic violence. Britain needs transformational change, for the many not the few, even more today than it did in 2015.
Any radical left-wing leader of the NZLP would face the same level of hostility from business, mainstream media outlets and Labour MPs that Corbyn did. The neoliberal establishment is deeply resistant to transformational change, and most Labour MPs are part of that establishment — in Britain and in Aotearoa.
Yet that is not the only barrier to a left-wing takeover of the NZLP. There is no hard left faction in Parliament, not even a single socialist MP who could lead the charge; even if there was, they wouldn’t get the nominations to stand for leader; even if they did, they would be blocked by two-thirds of caucus; even if they weren’t, they would need to win a mandate from an electoral college in which MPs hold hugely disproportionate sway; and even if they won in this system, a simple majority of MPs could oust and replace them three months out from an election.
Thus, a campaign to transform the NZLP would need to start from the bottom-up. It would need to involve both replacing the Third Way majority of Labour MPs with socialist candidates, and campaigning for a one-member, one-vote party democracy.
Such a campaign would take years of hard work. It would involve huge hostility from the Labour membership towards its own leaders, without any guarantee of success. Either more than half of current members would have to turn entirely against the party they chose to join, or enough radical left-wing activists would need to sign up to Labour to overwhelm the existing members — enough activists that it would be easier to simply start a new party altogether.
People flooded to the Corbyn campaign because they knew that electing a leader from the radical left would be a shortcut to social movements against austerity and war winning mainstream representation in British politics. Although the Corbyn project did not fundamentally change the makeup of the Labour Party, and although Third Way MPs were allowed to remain in a position where they could continually undermine and eventually purge Corbyn, this project did mean that for four years, one of the two major parties in Britain offered real hope of real change in the interests of working class people.
There is no such lightning rod here to attract a sudden rush of momentum for a takeover of the NZLP. The Labour leadership in this country are unlikely to repeat the organisational errors that allowed Corbyn’s ascension — they will have learned their own lessons from what occurred in the UK. A soft left leader of the NZLP is possible; but a transformational leader opposed to neoliberalism altogether is virtually out of the question.
A Socialist Party Is Needed
The New Zealand Labour Party is what it is. A moderate, incrementalist Third Way party, which will deliver small crumbs to unions and social movements when pressured, and when under intense and sustained pressure may even yield slightly more than crumbs. But it is incredibly unlikely that Labour will ever return to being a socialist party of the working class; it is unlikely that it will implement Treaty-based constitutional transformation unless it has no other option; and it would take an absolute miracle for Labour to adopt the kind of radical programme for climate action that is desperately required for the survival of humanity.
Chris Hipkins is the leader. Noone expects him to experience a Damascene conversion to radical politics. Complacent rhetoric about the inevitability of the Coalition being a one-term government is foolish when they remain ahead in the polls despite their divisive agenda — Hipkins may well lead Labour to another defeat. If he does, don’t expect his successor to be anything more than a soft left leader who will soften the edges of neoliberal capitalism rather than transform the system.
Thankfully, unlike the UK, Aotearoa has a proportional representation system which allows us to have a multi-party democracy. Whilst neither the Greens or Te Pāti Māori are class-based parties, both are committed to policy platforms clearly to the left of Labour. Both parties would put some pressure on a Labour Government if they entered into a coalition.
But the need for a party created by and for the working class remains; a party which will not abandon its socialist principles like Labour has. Activists, socialists and trade unionists in Aotearoa are faced with the question: when is the right time for the formation of such a party?
We know that transformational change for working people in Aotearoa is necessary. The situation is filled with desperate urgency by the austerity and racism of the Coalition, and by the looming threat of climate change. We know that Labour will not deliver transformational change. But the impetus for change has to come from somewhere. An alternative to the Labour Party must emerge.
Elliot Crossan is an ecosocialist writer and activist from Auckland. He is the Chair of System Change Aotearoa.
System Change is hosting Sue Bradford next week to discuss the question: Does Aotearoa Need a New Radical Left-Wing Party. The event is at 6pm on Tuesday 20th August at the Auckland Irish Club (Rocky Nook Ave, located within Fowlds Park, Morningside, Auckland). There will be a Zoom link available for people who cannot attend in person. RSVP here if you are interested in attending.
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The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts and talking about the week’s news with:The Kākā’s climate correspondent on the latest climate science on rising temperatures and the debate about how to responde to climate disinformation; and special guest ...5 days ago
- Have We an Infrastructure Deficit?
An Infrastructure New Zealand report says we are keeping up with infrastructure better than we might have thought from the grumbling. But the challenge of providing for the future remains.I was astonished to learn that the quantity of our infrastructure has been keeping up with economic growth. Your paper almost ...6 days ago - Councils reject racism
Last month, National passed a racist law requiring local councils to remove their Māori wards, or hold a referendum on them at the 2025 local body election. The final councils voted today, and the verdict is in: an overwhelming rejection. Only two councils out of 45 supported National's racist agenda ...6 days ago
- Homage to Simeon Brown
6 days ago
- Government of deceit
When National cut health spending and imposed a commissioner on Te Whatu Ora, they claimed that it was necessary because the organisation was bloated and inefficient, with "14 layers of management between the CEO and the patient". But it turns out they were simply lying: Health Minister Shane Reti’s ...6 days ago
- The professionals actually think and act like our Government has no fiscal crisis at all
Treasury staff at work: The demand for a new 12-year Government bond was so strong, Treasury decided to double the amount of bonds it sold. Photo: Lynn GrievesonMōrena. Long stories short; here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Friday, September ...6 days ago - Weekly Roundup 6-September-2024
Welcome to another Friday and another roundup of stories that caught our eye this week. As always, this and every post is brought to you by the Greater Auckland crew. If you like our work and you’d like to see more of it, we invite you to join our regular ...6 days ago
- Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies; Excerpt Four.
Internal versus external security. Regardless of who rules, large countries can afford to separate external and internal security functions (even if internal control functions predominate under authoritarian regimes). In fact, given the logic of power concentration and institutional centralization of … Continue reading ...6 days ago
- A Hole In The River
There's a hole in the river where her memory liesFrom the land of the living to the air and skyShe was coming to see him, but something changed her mindDrove her down to the riverThere is no returnSongwriters: Neil Finn/Eddie RaynerThe king is dead; long live the queen!Yesterday was a ...6 days ago - Bright Blue His Jacket Ain’t But I Love This Fellow: A Review and Analysis of The Rings of Power E...
My conclusion last week was that The Rings of Power season two represented a major improvement in the series. The writing’s just so much better, and honestly, its major problems are less the result of the current episodes and more creatures arising from season one plot-holes. I found episode three ...6 days ago - Who should we thank for the defeat of the Nazis
As a child in the 1950s, I thought the British had won the Second World War because that’s what all our comics said. Later on, the films and comics told me that the Americans won the war. In my late teens, I found out that the Soviet Union ...6 days ago - Skeptical Science New Research for Week #36 2024
Open access notables Diurnal Temperature Range Trends Differ Below and Above the Melting Point, Pithan & Schatt, Geophysical Research Letters: The globally averaged diurnal temperature range (DTR) has shrunk since the mid-20th century, and climate models project further shrinking. Observations indicate a slowdown or reversal of this trend in recent decades. ...7 days ago
- Join us for the weekly Hoon on YouTube Live at 5pm
Photo by Jenny Bess on UnsplashCome and join us for our weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream for our chat about the week’s news with special guests:5.00 pm - 5.10 pm - Bernard and ...7 days ago - Media Link: Discussing the NZSIS Security Threat Report.
I was interviewed by Mike Hosking at NewstalkZB and a few other media outlets about the NZSIS Security Threat Report released recently. I have long advocated for more transparency, accountability and oversight of the NZ Intelligence Community, and although the … Continue reading ...7 days ago
- How do I make this better for people who drive Ford Rangers?
Home, home again to a long warm embrace. Plenty of reasons to be glad to be back.But also, reasons for dejection.You, yes you, Simeon Brown, you odious little oik, you bible thumping petrol-pandering ratfucker weasel. You would be Reason Number One. Well, maybe first among equals with Seymour and Of-Seymour ...7 days ago - A missed opportunity
The government introduced a pretty big piece of constitutional legislation today: the Parliament Bill. But rather than the contentious constitutional change (four year terms) pushed by Labour, this merely consolidates the existing legislation covering Parliament - currently scattered across four different Acts - into one piece of legislation. While I ...7 days ago
- Nicola Willis Seeks New Sidekick To Help Fix NZ’s Economy
Synopsis:Nicola Willis is seeking a new Treasury Boss after Dr Caralee McLiesh’s tenure ends this month. She didn’t listen to McLiesh. Will she listen to the new one?And why is Atlas Network’s Taxpayers Union chiming in?Please consider subscribing or supporting my work. Thanks, Tui.About CaraleeAt the beginning of July, Newsroom ...7 days ago - Inflation alive and kicking in our land of the long white monopolies
The golden days of profit continue for the the Foodstuffs (Pak’n’Save and New World) and Woolworths supermarket duopoly. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMōrena. Long stories short; here’s my top six things to note in Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate and poverty on Thursday, September 5:The Groceries Commissioner has ...7 days ago - The thermodynamics of electric vs. internal combustion cars
This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler I love thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is like your mom: it may not tell you what you can do, but it damn well tells you what you can’t do. I’ve written a few previous posts that include thermodynamics, like one on air capture of ...7 days ago
- Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Three.
The notion of geopolitical “periphery.” The concept of periphery used here refers strictly to what can be called the geopolitical periphery. Being on the geopolitical periphery is an analytic virtue because it makes for more visible policy reform in response … Continue reading ...7 days ago
- Venus Hum
Fill me up with soundThe world sings with me a million smiles an hourI can see me dancing on my radioI can hear you singing in the blades of grassYellow dandelions on my way to schoolBig Beautiful Sky!Song: Venus Hum.Good morning, all you lovely people, and welcome to the 700th ...1 week ago - I Went to a Creed Concert
Note: The audio attached to this Webworm compliments today’s newsletter. I collected it as I met people attending a Creed concert. Their opinions may differ to mine. Read more ...1 week ago - Government migration policy backfires; thousands of unemployed nurses
The country has imported literally thousands of nurses over the past few months yet whether they are being employed as nurses is another matter. Just what is going on with HealthNZ and it nurses is, at best, opaque, in that it will not release anything but broad general statistics and ...1 week ago
- A Time For Unity.
Emotional Response: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon addresses mourners at the tangi of King Tuheitia on Turangawaewae Marae on Saturday, 31 August 2024.THE DEATH OF KING TUHEITIA could hardly have come at a worse time for Maoridom. The power of the Kingitanga to unify te iwi Māori was demonstrated powerfully at January’s ...1 week ago - Climate Change: Failed again
National's tax cut policies relied on stealing revenue from the ETS (previously used to fund emissions reduction) to fund tax cuts to landlords. So how's that going? Badly. Today's auction failed again, with zero units (of a possible 7.6 million) sold. Which means they have a $456 million hole in ...1 week ago
- Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Two.
A question of size. Small size generally means large vulnerability. The perception of threat is broader and often more immediate for small countries. The feeling of comparative weakness, of exposure to risk, and of potential intimidation by larger powers often … Continue reading ...1 week ago
- Nicola Willis’s Very Unserious Bungling of the Kiwirail Interislander Cancellation
Open to all with kind thanks to all subscribers and supporters.Today, RNZ revealed that despite MFAT advice to Nicola Willis to be very “careful and deliberate” in her communications with the South Korean government, prior to any public announcement on cancelling Kiwirail’s i-Rex, Willis instead told South Korea 26 minutes ...1 week ago - Satisfying the Minister’s Speed Obsession
The Minister of Transport’s speed obsession has this week resulted in two new consultations for 110km/h speed limits, one in Auckland and one in Christchurch. There has also been final approval of the Kapiti Expressway to move to 110km/h following an earlier consultation. While the changes will almost certainly see ...1 week ago
- What if we freed up our streets, again?
This guest post is by Tommy de Silva, a local rangatahi and freelance writer who is passionate about making the urban fabric of Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland more people-focused and sustainable. New Zealand’s March-April 2020 Level 4 Covid response (aka “lockdown”) was somehow both the best and worst six weeks of ...1 week ago
- No Alarms And No Surprises
A heart that's full up like a landfillA job that slowly kills youBruises that won't healYou look so tired, unhappyBring down the governmentThey don't, they don't speak for usI'll take a quiet lifeA handshake of carbon monoxideAnd no alarms and no surprisesThe fabulous English comedian Stewart Lee once wrote a ...1 week ago - Five ingenious ways people could beat the heat without cranking the AC
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Daisy Simmons Every summer brings a new spate of headlines about record-breaking heat – for good reason: 2023 was the hottest year on record, in keeping with the upward trend scientists have been clocking for decades. With climate forecasts suggesting that heat waves ...1 week ago
- No new funding for cycling & walking
Studies show each $1 of spending on walking and cycling infrastructure produces $13 to $35 of economic benefits from higher productivity, lower healthcare costs, less congestion, lower emissions and lower fossil fuel import costs. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāMōrena. Long stories short; here’s my top six things to note ...1 week ago - 99
Dad turned 99 today.Hell of a lot of candles, eh?He won't be alone for his birthday. He will have the warm attention of my brother, and my sister, and everyone at the rest home, the most thoughtful attentive and considerate people you could ever know. On Saturday there will be ...1 week ago - Open Government: National reneges on beneficial ownership
One of the achievements of the New Zealand’s Open Government Partnership Fourth National Action Plan was a formal commitment from the government to establish a public beneficial ownership register. Such a register would allow the ultimate owners of companies to be identified - a vital measure in preventing corruption, money ...1 week ago
- Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.
This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical landscape and geo-strategic context are interpreted differently by small … Continue reading ...1 week ago
- Tea and Toast
When the skies are looking bad my dearAnd your heart's lost all its hopeAfter dawn there will be sunshineAnd all the dust will goThe skies will clear my darlingNow it's time for you to let goOur girl will wake you up in the mornin'With some tea and toastLyrics: Lucy Spraggan.Good ...1 week ago - NLTP 2024 released – destroying pipeline of shovel ready local projects
Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Waka Kotahi yesterday released the latest National Land Transport Plan (NLTP) for 2024-27. The NLTP sets out what transport projects will be funded for the next three years, including both central and local government projects. As expected given the government’s extremely ideological transport policy, it’s ...1 week ago
- Can Brown deliver his roads
The Government’s unveiling of its road-building programme yesterday was ambitious and, many would say, long overdue. But the question will be whether it is too ambitious, whether it is affordable, and, if not, what might be dropped. The big ticket items will be the 17 so-called Roads of National Significance. ...1 week ago
- New paper about detecting climate misinformation on Twitter/X
Together with Cristian Rojas, Frank Algra-Maschio, Mark Andrejevic, Travis Coan, and Yuan-Fang Li, I just published a paper in Nature Communications Earth & Environment where we use the Computer Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism (CARDS) machine learning model to detect climate misinformation in 5 million climate tweets. We find over half ...1 week ago
- Excerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”
In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N qualitative comparison of the security strategies and postures of three small … Continue reading ...1 week ago
- Hating for the Wrong Reasons: Of Rings of Power, Orcs and Evil
A few months ago, my fellow countryman, HelloFutureMe, put out a giant YouTube video, dissecting what went wrong with the first season of Rings of Power (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ6FRUO0ui0&t=8376s). It’s an exceptionally good video, and though it spans some two and a half hours, it is well worth your time. But ...1 week ago
- Te Tai Tokerau MP Slams Govt Overreach in Scrapping Māori Wards
Mema Paremata for Te Tai Tokerau, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi, has reflected on the decisions made by the councils of the North amidst the government’s push to remove Māori Wards and weaken mana whenua representation. “Actions taken by the Kaipara District Council to remove Māori Wards are the embodiment of the eradication ...8 hours ago
- Govt already seeking advice on Treaty referendum
On one hand, the Prime Minister has assured Aotearoa that his party will not support the Treaty Principles Bill beyond first reading, but on the other, his Government has already sought advice on holding a referendum on our founding document. ...15 hours ago - Release: Aged care will be worse off if redesign rushed
New Zealanders needing aged care support and the people who care for them will be worse off if the Government pushes through a flawed and rushed redesign of dementia and aged care. ...16 hours ago - Release: Govt fails hundreds of workers as mills close
Labour is devastated at news hundreds of workers are set to lose their jobs following the closure of Winstone Pulp mills. ...22 hours ago
- Job losses from mill closures consequence of Govt inaction
Hundreds of jobs lost as a result of pulp mill closures in the Ruapehu District are a consequence of government inaction in addressing the shortfalls of our electricity network. ...2 days ago
- Ngarewa-Packer devastated for Ruapehu following WPI closure
Te Pāti Māori Co-Leader and MP for Te Tai Hauāuru is devastated for the Ruapehu community following today’s decision to close two Winstone Pulp mills. “My heart goes out to all the workers, their whānau, and the wider Ruapehu community affected by the closure of Winstone Pulp International,” said Ngarewa-Packer. ...2 days ago
- Release: Cabinet should stop the Treaty Principles Bill
National Party Ministers have a majority in Cabinet and can stop David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, which even the Prime Minister has described as “divisive and unhelpful.” ...3 days ago
- Release: Staff gagged to keep fast track list secret
The National Government is so determined to hide the list of potential projects that will avoid environmental scrutiny it has gagged Ministry for the Environment staff from talking about it. ...3 days ago
- Release: Labour challenges Te Whatu Ora gag orders
Labour has complained to the Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission about the high number of non-disclosure agreements that have effectively gagged staff at Te Whatu Ora Health NZ from talking about anything relating to their work. ...3 days ago
- Greens call on Treaty Principles Bill to be abandoned after letter from Christian leaders
The Green Party is once again urging the Prime Minister to abandon the Treaty Principles Bill as a letter from more than 400 Christian leaders calls for the proposed legislation to be dropped. ...3 days ago
- Sign the petition: Keep military-style firearms off our streets
Help us tell the Government that reintroducing military-style firearms should not be up for debate. ...5 days ago
- Vast majority of councils support Māori wards
Councils across the country have now decided where they stand regarding Māori wards, with a resounding majority in favour of keeping them in what is a significant setback for the Government. ...6 days ago
- Release: Government on the wrong side of Māori wards
The National-led government has been given a clear message from the local government sector, as almost all councils reject the Government’s bid to treat Māori wards different to other wards. ...6 days ago
- Release: Labour congratulates Kuīni Ngā Wai hono i te po Paki
The Labour Party congratulates Kuīni Ngā Wai hono i te po Paki on being crowned as the eighth Te Ariki Nui – head of Te Kiingitanga. ...7 days ago
- Green Party welcomes new Maaori Kuiini
The Green Party welcomes the coronation of the new Maaori Kuiini, Te Arikinui Nga Wai Hono i te Po, today in Turangawaewae. ...7 days ago
- ECE teachers deserve better than this Government
The Green Party is unsurprised but disappointed by today’s announcement from the Government that will see our Early Childhood Centre teachers undermined and pay parity pushed further out of reach. ...1 week ago
- Urgent intervention needed on supermarkets
The Green Party is calling on the Government to intervene in the supermarket duopoly dominating our supply of groceries following today’s report from the Commerce Commission. ...1 week ago
- Release: Rainbow youth neglected in mental health funding
Labour backs the call from The Rainbow Support Collective members for mental health funding specifically earmarked for grassroots and peer led community organisations to be set up in a way that they are able to access. ...1 week ago
- Release: Transport in NZ has to be more than just roads
As expected, the National Land Transport Programme lacks ambition for our cities and our country’s rail network and puts the majority of investment into roads. ...1 week ago
- Speech: Barbara Edmonds Building Nations 2024
Tēnā koutou katoa, Thank you for your warm welcome and for having my colleagues and I here today. Earlier you heard from the Labour Leader, Chris Hipkins, on our vision for the future of infrastructure. I want to build on his comments and provide further detail on some key elements ...1 week ago
- Govt transport plan deepens fossil fuel fix
The Green Party says the Government’s new National Land Transport Programme marks another missed opportunity to take meaningful action to fight the climate crisis. ...1 week ago
- Greens call for public to back Wrybill in BOTY and beyond
The Green Party is calling on the public to support the Ngutu Pare Wrybill not just in this year’s Bird of the Year competition but also in pushing back against policies that could lead to the destruction of its habitat and accelerate its extinction. ...1 week ago
- Building consents data bad news for construction
News that the annual number of building consents granted for new homes fell by more than 20 percent for the year ended July 2024, is bad news for the construction industry. ...2 weeks ago
- Te Pāti Māori Pay Tribute to Kiingi Tūheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII
Papā te whatitiri, hikohiko te uira, i kanapu ki te rangi, i whētuki i raro rā, rū ana te whenua e. Uea te pou o tōku whare kia tū tangata he kapua whakairi nāku nā runga o Taupiri. Ko taku kiri ka tōkia ki te anu mātao. E te iwi ...2 weeks ago
- Release: Gaps still to be addressed in callouts response
The Government must guarantee New Zealanders will not be at risk after making changes to the way mental health callouts are handled. ...2 weeks ago
- Poroporoaki: Kiingi Tuheitia passing
Haere e te Kīngi o te kotahitangi Haere ki o nui, ki o rahi I te pō ...2 weeks ago
- Green Party pays respects to Kiingi Tuuheitia
The Green Party is paying tribute to the Māori King, Kiingi Tuuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero XVII, after he passed away earlier this morning. ...2 weeks ago
- Potaka Brings Whakaata Māori to its Knees
Today’s Whakaata Māori announcement is yet another colossal failure from Minister Potaka, who has turned his back on te reo Māori, forcing a channel offline, putting whānau out of jobs, and cutting Māori content, says Te Pāti Māori. “A Senior Māori Minister has turned his back on Te Reo Māori. ...2 weeks ago
- Release: National restricts access to disability care homes
With disability communities still reeling from the diminishing of Whaikaha, a leaked document now reveals another blow with National restricting access to residential care homes. ...2 weeks ago
- Release: Govt must help save 230 manufacturing jobs
Labour is calling on the Government and Mercury Energy to find a solution to the proposed Winstone Pulp mill closure and save 230 manufacturing jobs. ...2 weeks ago
- Govt shirks its responsibility to Whakaata Māori
The Green Party has called out the Government for allowing Whakaata Māori to effectively collapse to a shell of its former self as job cuts and programming cuts were announced at the broadcaster today. ...2 weeks ago
- NZ First Member’s Bill To Disestablish Auckland Transport
Today New Zealand First has introduced a Member’s Bill that will restore democratic control over transport management in Auckland City by disestablishing Auckland Transport (AT) and returning control to Auckland Council. The ‘Local Government (Auckland Council) (Disestablishment of Auckland Transport) Amendment Bill’ intends to restore democratic oversight, control, and accountability ...2 weeks ago - Release: PM fails in constitutional role and leadership
The failure of the Prime Minister to condemn his Minister for personally attacking the judiciary is another example of this Government riding roughshod over important constitutional rules. ...2 weeks ago
- Waititi urges Rotorua Lakes Council to immediately stop works at Lake Rotokākahi
Te Pāti Māori co-leader and Member of Parliament for Waiariki, which includes Rotorua, has written to Rotorua Lakes Councillors requesting they immediately stop sewerage piping works at Lake Rotokākahi in Rotorua. “Mana whenua have been urging Rotorua Lakes Council to stop works and look at alternative plans to protect the ...2 weeks ago
- Release: Patient care at risk from redundancies
Patient care could suffer as a result of further cuts to the health system, which could lose thousands of staff who keep our hospitals and clinics running. ...2 weeks ago
- Greens call on Govt to wake up on child poverty
The Green Party says the latest statistics on child poverty in this country highlight the callous approach that the Government is taking on this issue of national shame. ...2 weeks ago
- Release: Police are off the beat under National
Foot patrols around the country have decreased 15 percent since National took office, despite National’s Mark Mitchell claiming otherwise. ...2 weeks ago
- Release: Climate denial is an insult to Pacific leaders
Winston Peters’ climate denialism at the Pacific Islands’ Forum is an embarrassing new low. ...2 weeks ago
- Govt must end solitary confinement
The Green Party is urging the Government to end the use of solitary confinement within our prisons after new research revealed some prisoners have been held in confinement for more than 900 days. ...2 weeks ago
- Fossil fuels never the answer in climate crisis
The Government’s moves to enable the import of Liquefied Natural Gas is another step away from the sustainable and affordable energy network that this country needs. ...2 weeks ago
- Driving structured literacy in schools
The coalition Government is driving confidence in reading and writing in the first years of schooling. “From the first time children step into the classroom, we’re equipping them and teachers with the tools they need to be brilliant in literacy. “From 1 October, schools and kura with Years 0-3 will receive ...12 hours ago - Labour’s misleading information is disappointing
Labour’s misinformation about firearms law is dangerous and disappointing, Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee says. “Labour and Ginny Andersen have repeatedly said over the past few days that the previous Labour Government completely banned semi-automatic firearms in 2019 and that the Coalition Government is planning to ‘reintroduce’ them. ...14 hours ago
- Govt takes action on mpox response, widens access to vaccine
The Government is taking immediate action on a number of steps around New Zealand’s response to mpox, including improving access to vaccine availability so people who need it can do so more easily, Health Minister Dr Shane Reti and Associate Health Minister David Seymour announced today. “Mpox is obviously a ...17 hours ago
- Next steps agreed for Treaty Principles Bill
Associate Justice Minister David Seymour says Cabinet has agreed to the next steps for the Treaty Principles Bill. “The Treaty Principles Bill provides an opportunity for Parliament, rather than the courts, to define the principles of the Treaty, including establishing that every person is equal before the law,” says Mr Seymour. “Parliament ...20 hours ago
- Government unlocking potential of AI
Science, Innovation and Technology Minister Judith Collins today announced a programme to drive Artificial Intelligence (AI) uptake among New Zealand businesses. “The AI Activator will unlock the potential of AI for New Zealand businesses through a range of support, including access to AI research experts, technical assistance, AI tools and resources, ...21 hours ago
- Government releases Wairoa flood review findings
The independent rapid review into the Wairoa flooding event on 26 June 2024 has been released, Environment Minister Penny Simmonds, Local Government Minister Simeon Brown and Emergency Management and Recovery Minister Mark Mitchell announced today. “We welcome the review’s findings and recommendations to strengthen Wairoa's resilience against future events,” Ms ...21 hours ago
- Promoting faster payment times for government
The Government is sending a clear message to central government agencies that they must prioritise paying invoices in a timely manner, Small Business and Manufacturing Minister Andrew Bayly says. Data released today promotes transparency by publishing the payment times of each central government agency. This data will be published quarterly ...21 hours ago
- Acknowledgement to Kīngi Tuheitia speech
E te māngai o te Whare Pāremata, kua riro māku te whakaputa i te waka ki waho moana. E te Pirimia tēnā koe.Mr Speaker, it is my privilege to take this adjournment kōrero forward. Prime Minister – thank you for your leadership. Taupiri te maunga Waikato te awa Te Wherowhero ...2 days ago
- Interim fix to GST adjustment rules to support businesses
Inland Revenue can begin processing GST returns for businesses affected by a historic legislative drafting error, Revenue Minister Simon Watts says. “Inland Revenue has become aware of a legislative drafting error in the GST adjustment rules after changes were made in 2023 which were meant to simplify the process. This ...2 days ago
- Strong uptake for cervical screening self-test
More than 80 per cent of New Zealand women being tested have opted for a world-leading self-test for cervical screening since it became available a year ago. Minister of Health Dr Shane Reti and Associate Minister Casey Costello, in her responsibility for Women’s Health, say it’s fantastic to have such ...2 days ago
- Ministry for Regulation’s first Strategic Intentions document sets ambitious direction
Regulation Minister David Seymour welcomes the Ministry for Regulation’s first Strategic Intentions document, which sets out how the Ministry will carry out its work and deliver on its purpose. “I have set up the Ministry for Regulation with three tasks. One, to cut existing red tape with sector reviews. Two, ...2 days ago
- Māori Education Advisory Group established
The Education Minister has established a Māori Education Ministerial Advisory Group made up of experienced practitioners to help improve outcomes for Māori learners. “This group will provide independent advice on all matters related to Māori education in both English medium and Māori medium settings. It will focus on the most impactful ways we can lift ...2 days ago
- Government welcomes findings of NZ Superannuation Fund review
The Government has welcomed the findings of the recent statutory review into the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Minister of Finance Nicola Willis says. The 5-yearly review, conducted on behalf of Treasury and tabled in Parliament today, found the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation ...2 days ago
- First of five new Hercules aircraft takes flight
Defence Minister Judith Collins today welcomed the first of five new C-130J-30 Hercules to arrive in New Zealand at a ceremony at the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s Base Auckland, Whenuapai. “This is an historic day for our New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) and our nation. The new Hercules fleet ...2 days ago
- Have your say on suicide prevention
Today, September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, a time to reflect on New Zealand’s confronting suicide statistics, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey says. “Every death by suicide is a tragedy – a tragedy that affects far too many of our families and communities in New Zealand. We must do ...2 days ago
- Action to grow the rural health workforce
Scholarships awarded to 27 health care students is another positive step forward to boost the future rural health workforce, Associate Health Minister Matt Doocey says. “All New Zealanders deserve timely access to quality health care and this Government is committed to improving health outcomes, particularly for the one in five ...3 days ago
- Pharmac delivering more for Kiwis following major funding boost
Associate Health Minister with responsibility for Pharmac David Seymour has welcomed the increased availability of medicines for Kiwis resulting from the Government’s increased investment in Pharmac. “Pharmac operates independently, but it must work within the budget constraints set by the Government,” says Mr Seymour. “When our Government assumed office, New ...3 days ago
- Sport Minister congratulates NZ’s Paralympians
Sport & Recreation Minister Chris Bishop has congratulated New Zealand's Paralympic Team at the conclusion of the Paralympic Games in Paris. “The NZ Paralympic Team's success in Paris included fantastic performances, personal best times, New Zealand records and Oceania records all being smashed - and of course, many Kiwis on ...3 days ago
- Government progresses response to Abuse in Care recommendations
A Crown Response Office is being established within the Public Service Commission to drive the Government’s response to the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care. “The creation of an Office within a central Government agency was a key recommendation by the Royal Commission’s final report. “It will have the mandate ...6 days ago
- Passport wait times back on-track
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden says passport processing has returned to normal, and the Department of Internal Affairs [Department] is now advising customers to allow up to two weeks to receive their passport. “I am pleased that passport processing is back at target service levels and the Department ...6 days ago
- New appointments to the FMA board
Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister has today announced three new appointments and one reappointment to the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) board. Tracey Berry, Nicholas Hegan and Mariette van Ryn have been appointed for a five-year term ending in August 2029, while Chris Swasbrook, who has served as a board member ...6 days ago
- District Court judges appointed
Attorney-General Hon Judith Collins today announced the appointment of two new District Court judges. The appointees, who will take up their roles at the Manukau Court and the Auckland Court in the Accident Compensation Appeal Jurisdiction, are: Jacqui Clark Judge Clark was admitted to the bar in 1988 after graduating ...6 days ago
- Government makes it faster and easier to invest in New Zealand
Associate Minister of Finance David Seymour is encouraged by significant improvements to overseas investment decision timeframes, and the enhanced interest from investors as the Government continues to reform overseas investment. “There were about as many foreign direct investment applications in July and August as there was across the six months ...6 days ago
- New Zealand to join Operation Olympic Defender
New Zealand has accepted an invitation to join US-led multi-national space initiative Operation Olympic Defender, Defence Minister Judith Collins announced today. Operation Olympic Defender is designed to coordinate the space capabilities of member nations, enhance the resilience of space-based systems, deter hostile actions in space and reduce the spread of ...7 days ago
- Government commits to ‘stamping out’ foot and mouth disease
Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard says that a new economic impact analysis report reinforces this government’s commitment to ‘stamp out’ any New Zealand foot and mouth disease incursion. “The new analysis, produced by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, shows an incursion of the disease in New Zealand would have ...7 days ago
- Improving access to finance for Kiwis
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Hey Elliot Crossan, go right ahead.
Just to remind you what starting a party looks like at an election:
Battling it out on the deep right you had New Zealand Loyal, New Zeal, New Nation, New Conservatives, LeightonBaker Party, FreedomsNZ. DemocracyNZ, and the ACT Party … all full of righteous vim. total result of all of that effort for all of them was 11 seats.
Then on the deep left side you had Women's Rights Party, Aotea Legalise Marijuana, the Green Party, and the Maori Party … full of similarly righteous vim. Total result for all of them 20 seats.
That's out of 120 seats.
There's no room for a radical party on that track record.
If you really think there's an Anderton-like figure who can reunite the rag-tag battlefleet of the deep left and also attract great swathes of Labour, then it's well time you gave us all that name.
Otherwise go return to your Marxist reading group.
I find your positioning of TPM, WRP ALM and GP on the "deep left", whatever that is, a bit odd.
That aside, if we had a few more "Marxist reading groups" maybe the left in this country wouldn't be in such a parlous state. Maybe I wouldn't constantly be wanting to put left in inverted commas.
Go right ahead, form one, and see if life improves.
Well, this overly long Guest Post has stolen most of the thunder of a draft that I wrote today and was hoping to finish tomorrow.
To state the obvious, I fully agree with the stated problem, but much less so with the suggested solution. Instead of keeping our powder dry we’re wasting it on fighting numerous trench culture wars with ACT + allies making much ground on TPM + allies. This could take many years – status quo suits some more than others.
I would be interested in your piece still, Incognito.
FWIW, put it up anyway.
We need more of this korero to organize and energise around. To sell a vision to those apolitical folk in our lives.
I would be interested too, as you have always had a go at me for not embracing incrementalism.
Have you had a change of heart?
Maybe inspired by the fact we will have 1.5 degree increase locked in for 2027, shown you how shit incrementalism is in the real world?
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/16-08-2022/the-side-eyes-two-new-zealands-the-table
Cheers Elliot, a good read. Something for some of us to get excited about.
In the UK, they really stooped to have a crack at Corbyn, ie the anti semite smear, which more than a couple round here were happy to repeat.
The opposition will come not only from Labour MPs, but folk who claim left wing credentials.
Those who bemoan housing inaffordability but have a couple of rentals, hand wring over to inequality and have a share portfolio, point out neo-liberalim's short comings but draw a wage from subcontracting.
Liberals will be anti any movement emerging from the left.
Don’t be quite so dismissive Ad.
At our LEC meeting the other night we were discussing, quite animatedly, the fact that at the moment the Labour Party is lacking more left wing policies. No-one is defecting, but there is a feeling that the current caucus, and policy platform is still way too neoliberal. Most of the angst being against Hipkins for his no capital gains “captains call.”
The hope is the Policy Council, and upcoming conference, will start to turn things more left.
I love LEC meetings, wish there was one in Wanaka, but they now have zero relationship to policy formation.
Remits still count.
And someone has to organise meetings and campaigns.
I thought the no CGT "captain's call" was from Ardern.
No Rosielee it was Chris Hipkins – which I certainly didn't agree with.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/493726/week-in-politics-hipkins-makes-a-captain-s-call-as-labour-slides-in-the-polls
Ardern also ruled it out
That is an extraordinary graph, thanks for sharing it.
Treasury is forecasting rising debts for decades after 2030, preparing us for another TINA period – limited government capability and dependence on foreign capital for infrastructure. This government is in lockstep with that direction.
There is a need to both provide an alternative to this, as well as re-visit the path taken since 1984 (neo-liberal deconstruction of the concept of democratic society citizenship – returning us back to class order rule, by capital).
The Green Party way of sustainable society, is the modern alternative, not socialism. It shares common values as per access to universal rights – to housing, health, education and adequate income. And economic planning – but with the focus being to operate within the limitations of habitat as per finite resources and protection of the environment.
This requires a major overhaul of government funding.
This should allow us to operate in the local Tasman (and global) market for staff (as per pay and conditions).
Socialism!
Labour and particularly its right wing are redundant if there isn’t a strong New Zealand left wing voice.
(Though all three of the other parties are currently barreling right so fast, there might be room where National was. If that’s Hipkins’ target, it’s a very bad one.)
Ad is a case in point.
Leadership doesn’t particularly give a damn what is happening at LECs, so he says they have zero relationship to policy formation.
But LECs are the people who turn up to door knock and sell your policies. They are your ground game. If they are weak you end up getting squashed where you don’t intend to. How do you get your vote out if you can’t even get your volunteers out?
I’m sorry to say I haven’t read the article yet. Turned up to congratulate a Labour MP on some good work shining a local light on a nationwide issue. May have to go to another thread for that though!
does the membership have the capacity to change some of the internal structure and process so that the membership has more power?
how did it come about that the members lost some of their power to choose leaders?
Possibly, because the last one they chose, Andrew Little, was effectively unelectable.
The two subsequent ones were elected by the party members.
Ardern took the Labour Party to within a whisker of a majority – and was able to negotiate effectively with Peters to become the government (Little, based on all of the polls, and all political commentary, would have failed dismally).
Hipkins, despite being failed by several high-profile ministers engaging in recklessly stupid behaviour, was able to save the furniture for the Labour Party. A defeat, but not an outright annihilation.
I seriously doubt that retaining the policies dumped in the 'bonfire' would have improved the results for the left as a whole. Those who were outraged, voted for other left parties (they weren't exactly going to shift their vote to ACT, were they). And, retaining them would have bled even more 'soft' left votes to National. It was the best he could do with the poor hand dealt to him. And, it resulted in a bare majority for the right-wing coalition – rather than an outright clear-cut one.
There is already at least one hard left party in Parliament (GP) – the difficulty they have is that they have very little actual working class support (mostly middle class, and upwards – just look at the electorates they gain the most vote from) If (and it's a very big if) they can attract this, they can potentially become the dominant left wing party. However, I don't see any realistic attempt to do so – and they are hampered by the unions being welded to Labour.
There seems very little prospect of a true socialist (whatever that might look like in the 21st century) party gaining any traction, let alone parliamentary presence.
I see the GP as being more liberal than left. They have some very good policies that left wingers can get behind, however, their principles, values etc show they don't have a structural analysis of inequalities and power dynamic. Though I think some of their members and MPs do have a structural analysis.
They focus their appeal a lot on students, many of whom are middle class or from low income backgrounds while aspiring towards being middle class. The GP's liberal approach probably is why strategically they are pretty poor: don't have strategies to counter the society economic power of the ruling classes.
That's an interesting idea, haven't heard it expressed in that way before. In what ways do you see them as strategically poor?
The Labour membership had gained the right to have more say in electing the caucus leader during the Cunliffe era. However, there remained a clause that allowed caucus to choose the leader if a new one was needed in the run up to an election. The caucus grabbed the opportunity to use it when Little resigned.
Then I understand the Ardern-led party, when in govt, changed the rules back to giving more weight to caucus.
I guess Labour members really need to seize back the initiative again.
that's my understanding, and am curious if the members have the power to seize the initiative again. The post is saying they don't.
Our LEC is well pissed off about that.
Perhaps Labour needs the UK Labour Party rules, where the Deputy Leader is a direct Party appointment.
is it true then, that the members no longer have any real power in the party?
I was dropping my daughter at her takeaway job Friday night. Cold night..lots of homeless people…everyone else struggling with power and food prices. Hipkins comes on the radio…he's got 1 chance to give me a strong message to ponder over the weekend (maybe something like build 2 or 3 State owned dams)…and instead we get "we def need to put 10s of millions of state money into… Chch Cathedral " ffs who's advising him? Are they setting him up to fail? And endless Sausage roll pics on his instagram = pie 🥧 brain.
He couldnt get a strong message across in the GE campaign so aye aye captain steady as she goes….down.
I'm firmly of the belief that not one $1 of public money should have gone into Christchurch cathedral.
If the Anglican dioscese didn't want to repair it (and they didn't), and the city council didn't want to repair it (and they couldn't afford to), then those campaigning for the repair should have been invited to stump up the cost by public subscription.
If all that failed (within a year or so) – the Dioscese (well, their insurers, actually) should have been allowed to remove it, and do what they pleased with the land (new cathedral, social housing, etc)
This is what really dismays me about the right. Being conservative, you would think they'd be good at recognising the value of culture and tradition for identity and the national good.
It makes sense to save what can be saved and for those who benefit to share the cost. New right theory though reduces the importance of shared and diversified culture in favour of an homogenous, hyper-pragmatic, secular individualism*.
This is perhaps the biggest driver of division in the developed world.
*You can see it in the not so sly dig at the Anglican Church for not abandoning their icons in order to stick to their knitting which apparently is to provide social housing wherever the government abdicates its responsibility and refuses to do so.
Perhaps you're mistaking Right for Centrist. The right are all in favour of heritage protection – it's a bulwark against the encroaching hoardes – and enables them to use price and zoning to keep them out.
Note that the Anglican church *did not want to rebuild* the cathedral in its current form. It was way too large for their congregation, cost far too much in upkeep, and didn't meet the current church objectives (which, much as you don't seem to realize) are all around charity.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2024/04/10/how-christchurch-got-sucked-into-an-eye-wateringly-expensive-cathedral-rebuild/
It seems to me that al the loud voices around restoring it exactly as it was – were all from people who wanted someone else to pay for it.
It amazes me that 'lefties' who are all in favour of removing heritage zoning from the inner city (because it's used to block low cost intensive housing – which it is) are also adamant that an infrequently used, expensive dinosaur of a building should be restored at vast cost.
Can you give me one benefit that a rebuilt ChCh cathedral would offer to the working class?
Hope……………
Hope for what? A better life in the next world?
I'm specifically talking about the current government and their supporters, who in this case are not interested in heritage protection as far as the Christchurch Cathedral goes.
There's a point where a rare example of gothic revival architecture becomes more than the needs of the local congregation. It was conceived 170 years ago and consecrated in 1881. There's fuck all standing in NZ from that time so maybe it's worth conserving in some form. Not least to soften the Christchurch concrete slab rebuild.
None of your numerous comments on this forum seem remotely concerned with the working class so I assume this is a troll question.
Just to be clear, in what is clearly a budget crunch (in the Government's opinion), you want scarce resourcing to be diverted to maintaining a 'cultural icon' rather than invested in something which practically makes people's lives better.
Or is this just a convenient stick to beat the government with? (I should have thought they'd have given you plenty of other ammunition).
I agree with you completely. Labour can be making hay with a lot of bad government stories. Hipkins urgently needs media training, and a media team that give him good one-liners. McNulty hits it every time, as did Ardern when in opposition.
In short, no–unless Rogernomics is finally repudiated and a few rule changes made to assert primacy of the ordinary membership over the “Parliamentary Wing”.
Some musings on a very wet Sunday morning.
The existence of a political “left”is vital to the maintenance of the appearance of liberal democracy. In essence, Neo-liberalism has dragged the fulcrum point of the political spectrum to the right so what was once mainstream left wing theory and praxis is now labelled far left, hard left, radical left, and what was once clearly right wing is seen as centrist. The effect is to pull what was always seen as far-right closer the apparently respectable middle ground.
NLism sidelined the old red left, which always acted as both the brain and the conscience of the liberal left, and it bought off large sections of the latter with the beads and blankets of :
a) a place in the numerically strengthened managerial, technocratic, professional strata whose status and remuneration were increased – and with that, their stake in the system;
b) the granting of certain formal rights and increased social acceptance of previously proscribed or marginalised sections of society which allows the left-ish (many of them way more -ish than left) members of the coordinator class to feel better about their privilege, and to console themselves with the belief that they haven’t sold out because look – equal pay for women, criminalisation of marital rape, decriminalisation of homosexuality, indigenous rights, gay marriage, trans rights …
Consider how many of the social advances that the left claim as victories over the past 4 decades have been granted under overtly Neo-liberal or NL compliant governments. All those formal rights and social advances are hugely important but do people really believe that if they posed any sort of existential threat to corporate capitalism they would be tolerated, much less enthusiastically embraced and promoted?
As the ideologically-captured NZ Labour Party was passing a raft of socially progressive laws, and pushing for increased social tolerance, it was also neck-deep in moves to asset-strip the state, and to destroy or weaken the great working class collectives – trade unions, worker education associations, friendly societies etc – and institutions which protected the interests of working class people.
In the UK those moves were spearheaded by the Tories and carried on by the LP under Blair & his successors.
The attacks on both the red left and working class collectives and institutions, were in advancement of the push for increasing exploitation of the working class domestically, but much more so, in the parts of the world to which capital went in search of greater profits – not just in respect of lower wages and poorer conditions of employment, but also in relation to laxer health & safety laws and environmental controls.
One of the clearest examples of how the iniquitous system works was in asbestos manufacture in which the UK was the main centre. Asbestos prohibition laws were first introduced in the mid-1980s. In 1985, the U.K. banned import and use of blue and brown asbestos; in 1992, some uses of chrysotile asbestos, which is considered less lethal than the other forms of asbestos, were also banned. As the countries of the developed world banned the domestic production which made some people rich, and thousands terminally ill, owners invested in manufacture in India which became and remains the world’s centre of asbestos production. They were attracted by not just the much lower pay rates, but the absence of health & safety and environmental laws – which has put potentially hundreds of thousands of Indian workers and their families at risk of mesothelioma. 2400 people still die annually in the UK from asbestos- related cancers so the rates in India for these slow-developing cancers will be massive.
The Neo-lib Pale encompasses the ruling class, (the owners and controllers of capital & remnants of the old feudal order) and the well rewarded buffer class of politicians, managers, consultants, technocrats, ideologues, enforcers, etc. That leaves the majority of people, both inside the imperial bubbles, and far more so outside them, beyond the pale in every possible sense. It was very clever, in a fiendish sort of way.
So… what to do? One of the things the old red left understood was the critical importance of worker education, of the coming together in a community to reach collective agreements on both principles and praxis, of creating a common sense of solidarity and purpose, and the building of a solid base of support as that is where a resistance movement’s strength lies.
It's no accident that interest group politics, which sprang up inside the left initially to push for progress around issues related to sex and race, morphed into forms of identity politics which now trend in the direction of hyper-individualism and aspirational self-expression.
As I do love an analogy – we've allowed a bunch of short-sighted maniacs to retain control of the locomotive which they're driving at full speed towards a cliff edge while we all argue with each other over who gets to sit where in the carriages.
It's obvious that we must work together to decouple the locomotive but frankly, if some on the left can’t even see the insanity of such things as the off-label use, in gender dysphoric kids, of endocrine-disrupting, anti-cancer drugs dispensed by members of a medical-industrial complex which is wedded to a petrochemical industrial complex which is saturating the planet in literally tens of thousands of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, I’m afraid we’ll still be arguing over who sits where as we all plunge to our doom.
Spot on about the granting of formal rights and increased acceptance to and of marginalised communities by NL governments, who regarded these rights as mere baubles. We can see currently that these same rights, now more entrenched, are frightening the NL Atlas-funded horses, hence attempts to undercut and disestablish them. Especially for Māori. But also for people with disabilities, and for others who fought for a slice of the pie. All getting too uppity as resources get scarce. Incidentally my dad died from long exposure to asbestos in various factories he worked in. He lived until he was 90, though, but had a struggle through the final decade.
Excellent analysis. Agree on the need for community education – closing it down was part of the neolib agenda.
I did some WEA courses and some left wing community organised ones (in drafty church halls) in the UK, which was my introduction to Marxism and socialist feminism – thinking also of your earlier comment about the importance of Marxist reading groups.
I had a friend there who said that there were a lot of faults with the likes of the SWP, but their reading groups and encouragement of reading left wing texts, gave young people a very good political education.
I was one of many LGB people who weren't over-enthused with the whole gay marriage move. It didn't really tackle underlying homophobia. Paid parental leave benefits middle class women more than those on low incomes.
In the digital age, group solidarity is harder to develop. Social media is constructed to prioritise and encourage individualistic, identitarian practices and attitudes. Blogs are a much better forum that don't incorporate so much of the neolib features. Also, offline meetings like the Sue Bradford one in the above post are valuable in creating a sense of community. I went to some of the conferences organise by Sue Bradford's ESRA organisation. Those sort of events are extremely useful.
Agree totally with your last paragraph, TWW
Given the role of religiously or state sanctioned marriage in the perpetuation of patriarchal family and wider power dynamics, and civil unions, it surprised me when some lesbians and gay men lobbied for the right to marry, even going as far as replicating patriarchal traditions like the bride wearing a white dress, veil etc.
The drive to break society down to the level of the individual and then allow only reaggregations that either benefit, or do not threaten the socio-economic SQ was there from the beginning of NLism.
Capitalism created the class of nominally free workers, legally free to enter into a contract to sell their labour. The progression into the era of the atomised and alienated individual has been enabled by technology.
I remember back in the day being bemused by Bill Gates' vision of the gated community within which (affluent) people would live and work and play, their atomised lives both governed and cushioned by digital technology … it was the early vision of the Neo-Lib Pale.
We have to find ways to make the technology work for us, not be slaves to it or victims of it. It needs to enable interpersonal and community connections, not replace them.
It may be you are looking only at the trappings of marriage and not the underlying legal benefits, such as recognition as nearest kin for medical and funeral decisions; joint ownership of assets; in some countries job benefits such as medical insurance and retirement payouts, etc.
As to how people want to throw a party, that's up to them, surely?
Those things could've been changed without going full in for marriage. Civil Unions were a better direction to go in for that.
A lot of the changes in partnership laws – de facto, marriage, etc, is more to do with property rights, so that the state didn’t need to cater to individual court processes to sort out who got what when someone dies, or relationships break up.
All of those things can be and now are guaranteed in other ways, such as a civil union. I'm not opposed to marriage – I've been married for over 40 years but we married because it was the easiest way back then to ensure all those things you mention (and to ensure I wasn't deported by the Thatcher government.)
On one level gay marriage subverts the patriarchal heterosexual norm which is why the religious right hate it so much but I'm fascinated by why the traditional "white" wedding with all the patriarchal trappings is more popular than ever.
When my sweetie and I had our Civil Union we were determined that it had nothing to do with "marriage". Our invitations were very clear – this is not a wedding, nobody is giving anybody away, and there is definitely no Best Man!
We wanted the security of sorting all the legal stuff out in one place – we had been together for 20 years, so a party was in order anyway.
Everything else you analyse, spot on.
Unless it can guarantee to pull 5% of the vote or win an electorate seat, it will work against a left victory in 2026.
Better to convince the middle that it’s in their interest to champion some of the more lefty causes.
how did that go last October?
True, but last October there was a move against the left and a National party that was promising everybody everything, even when some of what it promised compromised some of the other things it was promising.
I don't think that will be the case in 2026.
I think your comment is essentially saying "If you do what always did, you'll always get what you had before", but that doesn't apply in politics.
My earlier comment assumed that the left could get its message across to the people it is trying to persuade.
fair enough. I just don't think a Hipkins Labour can do that. And it's not like Labour have to radical (we have the Greens for that), but fairly sensible and well received policies like a GCT are no brainers.
Its kind of drole that politicians still come up out terms like "working class", (squeezed) "middle class", "renting class", "beneficiary class" and a host of others.
That is part of the problem.
When you put people into classes there is a certain amount of polarisation and people believe that the "other classes" are out to steal their cookies, as is depicted by a certain cartoon that appears occasionally on The Daily Blog. Class is a notional concept in New Zealand, we have people who are rich, people who are comfortable and people who are poor – but they pretty much started off from either similar European roots or Maori tribes. Unlike Britain we don't have a history of feudalism and an entrenched economic class system.
The Labour Party of today does not represent the working class because you could argue that there is no real working class anymore – everyone works to some degree, it is just that some have much better and higher paid jobs than others. Sure, some think they are more privileged than others, but that is due to their own vanity.
I would argue that the Labour party should think about a new name. The word "labour" still conjures up images of people working manual jobs – cleaning, digging, mining, etc. etc. but our society is vastly vastly different from the times when labour parties began springing up in various parts of the world. Some successfully, some barely even got off the ground (like the US). Labour parties are inevitably regarded as left wing, and I wonder if anyone thinks our Labour party is still that.
There is a lot more I could say on this but I have deliberately left my comments brief so I don't bore everyone to death.
I don't agree that classes aren't important in a New Zealand context. Part of the problem with the modern left is the deviation from class analysis towards identity politics.
Sorry, but it's really screwed up what people now consider as leftist.
We end up with bizarre situations where priviledge is negated because of a nebulous gender identity.
e.g. Laurel Hubbard's gold at the Pacific Games and the fact the public wasn't outraged by it.
Feagaiga Stowers and Luniana Sipaia just had to suck it up. There should have been mass protests.
A pivotal read for me was a biography of MJ Savage. Savage was very aware of the need to educate the electorate, and had regular radio spots before becoming an MP, and after, at a time when radio was a very new mass medium. I guess the inverse of the talkback radio format that has transmuted into NZ's awful ZM "news" and commentary radio stations that push outrage porn and RW framing on a continuous loop.
Somewhere to start.
https://thekaka.substack.com/p/introducing-the-kaka-project-of-2026
very interesting, thanks
Thanks Stephen for the link.
It's great to see one of our brighter minds pivot towards a solution rather than echoing the carnage.
It is not Hipkins or any of them, It is Atlas and all the billionaires money and power. They are holding all the positions of power, and they are using them without to much recourse to democracy. Lefties fighting over who is Left enough is food and drink to them. We do too much navel gazing, instead of regrouping and creating a framework for people to hang their hat on. We have to sell some ideas which voters feel they can relate to and believe in.
No. Hasn't been possible since the ACT party take over since 1984.
Anything more socialist than that ever since, is considered "too radical"!
Does that include Anderton? And the Alliance?
Thanks for proving my point.
No it's why many of us switched to the Greens who at least had decent welfare policies.
Precisely. Labour stopped representing people outside the PSA many years ago. It cannot reform itself. It is not worth reforming by outsiders.
As long as I can remember we have had a Socialist Workers Party in some form. I don't think they contest elections any more. Yep there was the Alliance, and the meltdown that happened but I would hardly call that radical left. The Greens do well in middle class urban areas, but I don't think Sue Bradford is a member anymore. Certainly Gareth Hughes isn't. Then we had the Mana Party and alliance with the Internet Party, paid for by billionaire Kim Dotcom. If you go further back in Labour, there was John A Lee who famously failed to successfully challenge the leadership of MJ Savage and Peter Fraser. And if anyone ever read Sonia Davie's biography, you will see she was expected to wash the sox of Norman Kirk. For those who can be bothered please read the NZLP constitution and rules. We've had open leadership contests on two recent occasions : first was when David Cunliffe won on his platform of being “more left” and took Labour to a whole 24% result in the election ; second was when Andrew Little won and at least had the humility to stand down as Labour was staring at yet another defeat. Finally, this is MMP. The first three years of a Labour government relied on votes from NZ First where Winston was again DPM. I know NZF blocked a lot of progress, particularly on workers' rights which couldn't be changed until the outright win of Labour in 2020. I guess I am just saying, know your history.
This post has ideas for making Socialism a political winner but the history it then tells suggest that those ideas don't work. Sanders? Corbyn? They both ultimately failed, as has every "radical left" movement inside mainstream Western Left parties.
And when they've gone out on their own they've also failed, even in the face of things like Rogernomics.
And that's before we get to the failure of Socialist theory in practice, even in its watered down forms of mere increases in taxation, especially wealth taxes and such, plus massive increases in state spending and state ownership.
And then things like this happen:
why did Corbyn 'fail'?
Disunity in the party, including a deliberate effort to undermine their party success while he was leader. Our ABC period (2014) was mild in comparison.
This was in concert with a wider (media campaign) effort to pose his leadership and his supporters as anti-Semitic.
his is my understanding too, so it's not so much that socialism failed, as it was monkeywrenched.
No people didn't vote for him in large enough numbers to win the government benches. It is simple really and to suggest it was a jackup by Labour at the time is suggesting that all of those Labour people in the UK who supported him, who campaigned for him were looking for a defeat. Jezza is old news now.
that doesn't make sense. Of course they weren't looking for defeat. But it wasn't up to them.
If half the party that hated him were trying to undermine and destroy him, who wants to vote for a party doing that?
The fact that he won his seat despite the right of the party he'd devoted his life to doing its very best to defeat him, aided and abetted by the media which had played a massive role in Labour's defeat when he was leader, hardly makes him old news.
With regard to why he didn't win an election, I had never seen as overt a demonisation of a Labour Party leader or trade union leader as vicious as the propaganda campaign waged against him; it was worse than the attacks on Michael Foot and Arthur Scargill and I thought the rightwing UK press had reached the bottom of their foul-smelling old barrel with them.
The allegations of anti-semitism (ie his decades' old commitment to Palestinian rights) were a major factor as was the divisiveness of the Tories' 2016 announcement of a review of the GRA to allow for sex self identification by statutory declaration.
Corbyn was a threat to the comfortable UK establishment and the tweedledee tweedledum arrangement where you can change the rulers every few years but only tinker around the edges with policy.
Just like some of our NZ politicians who actually try and make changes that benefit the majority over the wealthy oligarchs.
They are only allowed short political lives as the "system" reacts violently to remove the "infection".
You only have to look at the orchestrated backlash against the Adern/Robinson Government when we had such a strong and positive example of the “power of the State to do good”. That could not be allowed to continue! The personal attacks, paid propaganda and volume of bullshit directed at what was comparably mild Government intervention is unprecedented since the 1050’s.
A nation without a CGT or estate tax will not just be developing a class divide, it will also be lacking the funds for infrastructure investment. This lack would lead to both dependence on global utilities corporations and investment funds and poor performance in public health and education – as well as a lack of social housing.
Difficult economic times lead to fundraising – such as the pawning of goods, renting out of rooms/taking in boarders as well.
Funny how Western countries have been more successful, the more "socialist" they have been.
The 80% taxes on millionaires , the new deal and the GI bill in the USA, for example.
How is the regression to rule by oligarchs, austerity and removal of workers rights and social welfare going?
Much of the USA now resembles a third world rather than a first World country. Without the worlds biggest “socialist” enterprise, the US military, redistributing income to poor and middle class soldiers, who would otherwise be unemployed, the USA would be a total basket case.
In Aotearoa also we have a coalition of fools and puppets heading us downhill towards similar social and economic disintegration, so a few can profit, as fast as they think they can get away with it.
Where did these newly available rental units come from?
Were they vacant because the rent control discouraged rentals?
Did landlords evict a shed load of long term tenants?
You actually think people paid 80% tax? In fact from the start there were hundreds of tax credits to get around it since nobody would pay. Kennedy's team were the first to reduce the highest income tax rates, which were around 90%, because they realised that would increase tax revenue.