Words of wisdom from the 19th century

One of the most amusing things in the granny today is Garth George, our iconoclast from Rotorua ripping another hole into the credibility of the Brash Taskforce 2025.

Absurdities abound, the first of which was the appointment of people like Dr Brash and Mr Caygill who, along with their soulmate, Act Party seat-warmer Roger Douglas, are not just yesterday’s men but last century’s men.

That caused me some hot problems as when I read it. I wound up laughing so much that I had to do some rapid brushing to get the spilled coffee off my lap. My opinion on Garth has been for a long time that the 20th century was wasted on him. He would have fitted the 19th century better.

However, while also railing against the whole concept of climate change, he also made some telling points about the Taskforces report. You can see his experience in word-craft as he said

The taskforce report itself is, of course, full of absurdities. It could have been nothing else since it was written by a bunch of far-right, laissez-faire capitalists whose deeply flawed theology, long discredited, has created a new poverty-stricken underclass and robbed the country of ownership of some of its richest business resources.

A flat tax of 20c or 25c? That means that those on incomes up to $14,800 pay either 7.5c or 12.5c more on every dollar earned and those on incomes up to $48,000 either pay 1c less or 4c more. Those on higher incomes, however, benefit by up to 19c in the dollar. Great way to help our less well-off, eh?

Abolish subsidised doctor visits and reduce subsidies on prescription medicines? Who will that benefit? Certainly not those on minimal incomes, particularly if they have families. This reeks of the same sort of vicious selfishness exhibited by the right-wing greedies in the United States who want to deprive millions of their fellow countrymen of medical insurance.

After those paragraphs, he then started to really rip the reports precepts to pieces in a way that I can only admire.Definitely worth a read.

His final conclusions on the Taskforce 2025 report

The description of the report by Finance Minister Bill English as “too radical” is the final absurdity. The report is not just too radical; it is economic and social bullshit, a serious waste of taxpayers’ money, and every copy should be recycled into toilet paper.

Ouch! That sounds like my writing about it – but written with far more finesse.

It looks like the media hasn’t failed as badly as I suggested yesterday. Apart from Fran O’Sullivan, almost all of the other commentators have been tearing this report to pieces. It is a marked contrast to the editorial control of the NZ Heralds front pages when the report was released. I’m not surprised that the people who read the report haven’t been kind to it. The report was a requirement of the ACT coalition agreement to form the NACT government. As Garth, I, and others have pointed out, it is a statement of a particular faith. A dissertation of a particular theology common in ACT. As such it is a waste of taxpayers dollars.

But Garth really should read some science some time. While a lot of the Greens philosophy often falls in the same camp of faith, the issues with climate change science are not one of them.

It is almost worth looking him up when I head down to my folks for a few beers. He could give me pointers on how to write some genuine sarcastic prose and I can help bring his earth sciences knowledge into the 20th century, with pointers to where it has advanced to in the 21st. Maybe then he could unleash the same prose on the CCDs.