MEDIAWATCH: Damien Grant slavery bill – why he’s 50% right and 50% wrong
A feel-good slavery bill that won’t catch the worst offenders – Damien Grant
Stuff
It’s been a year since Damien Grant hypocritically self mutilated his own award winning Political Podcast and let’s be honest, his been grieving ever since.
His usually stellar columns have been grim, depressing and humourless.
Much like Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged‘.
How many time do we not care about his jogging?
He’s pulled his punches and the normal humour which has always been a hallmark of his writing has disappeared as he endlessly torments himself with the intellectual hypocritical self mutilation of his own award winning Political Podcast.
Well he’s grieved enough (and watched his own Political Podcast bomb) so it’s good to see he’s finally writing newspaper columns that are funny, moderately interesting and 50% wrong again.
This line is very funny…
Companies that fail face consequences. Fines up $600,000, being prevented from competing for government contracts and subject to a relentless series of articles in the Spinoff.
…his column is bemoaning the latest anti-slavery laws that his beloved ACT are against.
Humorous lines denigrating The Spinoff aside, he’s 50% right and 50% woefully wrong.
He’s right to criticise the fact that smaller players in NZ won’t have to comply with the new slavery standards.
The top tier corporates should start, and then gradually those standards have to be implemented further down the market to ensure slavery is eradicated in our supply chain.
But to simply shrug and say it’s all too hard for those top tier corporates to even bother with the challenge is libertarianism apathy at its most limp.
Globally there are 50 million slaves producing quarter of a trillion in illegal profits and estimations are there are 8,000 slaves in NZ and we imported $8 billion worth of “risky goods” in 2022 that were sourced using slavery and that $8 billion represents around 10% of our imports in that year.
So this isn’t chump change, this is actually quite large loop holes that are allowing slave supply chains.
Shrugging and saying it’s too big a problem is what we are seeing the Political Right say about climate change and let’s look at how that denial is helping us.
Whenever the true social cost of a product is ever demanded, the Libertarians always claim it’s too hard.
