Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
Labour’s David Parker has heralded a new era in New Zealand’s trade policy to rein in the excesses of global capitalism and make rules work for the 99% not the 1%. What would a best-case scenario for a trade policy review in 2018 look like? Before the election It’s Our Future published a set of bottom lines for a just trade policy. Post-election, I have my own wish list.
While we don’t use the c-word ‘capitalism’ much these days, Winston Peters created a bit of a stir by mentioning it in his coalition announcement speech. And former Green MP Catherine Delahunty, on Backbenchers (television), said that we must address it. These days we sometimes prefer the putative synonym ‘globalisation’ when we want to make an ideological point about the capitalism that many ‘progressives’ see as driving us to economic, social and ecological ruin.
2018 will see Unite Union campaigning to rewrite all new collective agreements to ensure that all workers benefit from the planned increase in the minimum wage to $20 an hour by April 1, 2021.
I have participated in, and written about, politics for close to 40 years, but in all that time I can honestly say I have never witnessed anything like Jacinda Ardern’s first media conference as Labour Leader.
I’m a citizen of this country, with all the rights and responsibilities that come with this particular social contract. So I am somewhat alarmed that the existence of my particular experience and expression of gender is not recorded. The state uses the information collated by Stats NZ to inform policy decisions. This implies to me that a non-binary identity is not considered in NZ policy.
If the Minister is ever to break out of the ‘Yes Minister’ straightjacket in mental health, he must turn to the community, to service users and to coalface mental health workers for his advice (and by that we don’t mean a raft of self-interested psychiatrists currently employed by DHBs around the country).
Public Equity is not a difficult concept to understand. Equity is about ownership. And equity is about equality. Equal owners own what they own equally. Two equal owners of a house own that house equally. Two people with equal shares in a business have equal equity in that business. In capitalism, we understand equity to represent a private property right. That’s why many of us distrust capitalism; the problem is that emphasis on the word ‘private’.
THE LABOUR PARTY has never been very tolerant of dissenters. It is, therefore, unsurprising that very few within its ranks have reacted positively to my recent posting on The Daily Blog. No matter how many private reservations Labour supporters may be harbouring about Grant Robertson’s “fiscally responsible” economic policies, they would rather his critics refrained from giving public voice to their concerns.
Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has produced a lot of hot air; not only from the President himself, but from the mainstream media, which seems stuck more or less in the same narrative it’s been in for decades.
One of the clear threads is the move to a greater reliance on the complex stigmatizing regime of supplementary hard to access add-on means-tested assistance. Core benefits are not enough to live on and low wages are far too low.