Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
The breakfast launch of the joint Labour/Greens fiscal rules policy last week was pleasantly surprising. They actually haven’t boxed themselves into a rigid set of rules. At the outset they downplayed the use of mechanical orthodox indicators like surpluses and net debt to judge success:
There’s a pattern. The government lets companies regulate themselves until they get exposed for causing damage to the public interest. Deny, fudge, delay, until there is enough of an outcry that it starts to be politically damaging. At that stage, the government does just enough to make the public think that the problem is sorted. But not enough to stop the companies from making big profits.
I’m therefore going to break ranks somewhat with many of the other voices on the liberal left and respectfully suggest that maybe Winston IS on to something here, and that there is, in fact, a case to be made for getting rid of the present section 59.
In the words of Jon Stephenson: “Is [NZDF Chief] Tim Keating really saying there were two raids using identical aircraft, in identical places with identical commandos, that left behind identical munitions in that one village, then [in] a village two kilometres south? Seriously?”
I think TOP is worth paying attention to and here are my main reasons:
We should all feel a profound sense of shame.
Late last week, the abysmal healthcare ‘reform’ proposal of Paul Ryan’s which Trump had inexplicably chosen to support … failed fairly unequivocally. How badly did it flounder? It didn’t even make it to First Reading, on grounds that even other Republicans could not bring themselves to vote for it.
Nicky Hager and John Stephenson’s new book, Hit and Run, claims the NZ SAS carried out a revenge raid on an Afghani village which killed six and injured 15 civilians, including women and children. In response, the jaded and inhumane say ‘civilians die in war’, ‘human collateral damage is inevitable’.
The strange part of Labour and the Greens signing up to tired dogmas from the past is that people actually don’t care about them. Only the ruling elites do. There are not many votes there. That’s Math.
FOR THOSE WHO THINK Labour and the Greens are being too cautious, economically-speaking, I have only one word: “Venezuela”. Andrew Little may not resemble Hugo Chavez in the slightest. Nor are Labour and the Greens, by any stretch of the imagination, Bolivarian revolutionaries. But, to hear the Right tell the story, New Zealanders are being courted by dangerously left-wing political parties.