Green Party Economic Strategy worthy of Aotearoa New Zealand

Simon Wilson continues to be one of the best columnists the NZ Herald has, his review of the Greens Economic Strategy and the criticism it got is an honest appraisal of where we are as a culture right now…

One of the things about being human is that we’re very good at holding two contradictory ideas in our head at the same time.

We all know the institutions of liberal democracy are failing us. Yet polls suggest most of us believe the solution is to keep on with the economic and political policies that have caused, contributed to and allowed this to happen.

Some of us, including about half of all Americans, have rejected this and now support a tyrant. They forgive his faults, because he’s got his eye on a bigger goal: tearing down the establishment that caused the mess we’re in. Or so they believe.

Even while we lose trust in institutions. Even as we recognise that the mainstream policies we have relied on for so long cannot solve the health crisis or the infrastructure deficit and cannot protect us from the climate catastrophe or the AI revolution. Even as our media ecosystem relies ever more strongly on algorithms designed to destroy society.

Margaret Thatcher said it, most famously: “There is no such thing as society.” If it hasn’t always been obvious what she meant, it should be now. We’re not supposed to think and act communally, for the greater good. We’re not supposed to notice what’s not working and, more pointedly, to do anything about it.

We’re not citizens, we’re consumers. What we’re supposed to do is go shopping.

…we have allowed all tribe no village culture war social media hate algorithms to rip is to pieces while the Billionaire class, the polluters and the mega wealthy keep us fighting amongst ourselves rather than reform the corrupt capitalism causing the deeper material damage.

Simon’s analysis of the Greens Economic Strategy is spot on…

The Green Party has a Green Budget, featuring a wealth tax designed to make free healthcare and early childhood education both realistic possibilities. It also proposes a Ministry of Green Works, to speed the creation of infrastructure that will serve the country resiliently and efficiently through the rest of the century.

The party’s emissions reduction plan sets out a programme the party says will allow us to decarbonise energy generation and consumption while improving public options for warmer homes, better transport and lower power bills. And the Greens also have an $8 billion industrial strategy, which includes a green jobs guarantee for at least 40,000 new jobs.

None of this is fantastical. In fact, much of it draws on the same technologies, such as residential solar, the Government also supports. It’s just that the Greens want to do it at scale and speed, without also indulging the fantasies of fossil-fuel industrialists who believe there is a future for their industries. Also, the Greens want a focus on poorer and more vulnerable communities.

…the predictable scream from the right was as infantile as it was idiotic…

But if there’s one thing guaranteed to generate some frothing at the mouth, it’s Green economics. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the party’s alternative budget was “absolute madness. And kookiness.”

Finance Minister Nicola Willis called it “ludicrous la-la land”, while Winston Peters started referring to “Chloe Marx and Marama Engels”. Such deep thinking.

…all they have to defend and protect their corporate interests are insults in the hope you don’t recognise how corrupt the status quo is…

On Tuesday the Greens released a Fiscal Strategy: a heavyweight piece of economic analysis that builds on the party’s budget plans. At the strategy launch in Wellington, party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said that “no field is treated with more mysticism than economics”, and yet many economists and the politicians who follow them “have nothing to say about why we have a society in which homeless people sleep on the pavement outside luxury stores”.

“We don’t live in a game of Monopoly,” she added. Monopoly, she explained, was invented in the 19th century “to teach children about the pitfalls of an economy based on land speculation and luck.”

…and that’s what we have, an economy based on speculation and luck.

We deserve a true vision for the economy, that works for the people, not the polluters, not the corporations, not the speculators.

The silver lining for the Left is that the burning planet will force these adaptations and changes no matter what the climate deniers claim.

We must be better than this…

 

 

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