To SIGH: But there’s no point in a party being elected if all it is going to do is basically the same as the other folks. key made National Labour-lite in order to win in 2008. And Little is making Labour National-lite in order to win in 2017. Round and round the circus wheel goes.

Labour and the Greens did this because they want the business class to swing behind them the way it did in 1984 and 1999. They want to reassure the capitalists that they have absolutely nothing to fear from Labour-Greens.

They do this because they are parties of capitalist management, not parties of the working class.

Really, how long will the slow learners take to learn this lesson? Labour is not on *our* side; it’s on *the other side*. And no amount of pleading or advising or pointing out this or that to Labour will change that. They are *institutionally* an integral part of the other side.

We need a new movement of workers, by workers and for workers.

I won’t be voting this election because I have better things to do than choose between two rival management teams who defend the same system of exploitation and oppression. In not voting, I will also be doing what most young people and a sizeable section of the working class do.

Over on Redline, we’ll be developing further the ideas that we put forward in 2014 about a positive non-vote. As for the fiscal responsibility envelope, see: https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/capitalist-parties-behaving-like-capitalist-parties-is-a-mystery-to-some/

You’re directly buying into the paradigm that debt=bad.

Our spending should not be constrained by an arbitrary deficit amount, or debt to GDP ratios, or some other bizarre construction of neoclassical economics to propagate ‘sound finance’.

As the sovereign issuer of the New Zealand dollar, with a healthy demand for that dollar, New Zealand should spend as much as is necessary to provide employment for anybody who wishes to work, with taxation varying based on levels of aggregate demand (i.e. AD too high causing inflation, raise taxes. Vice versa).

This idea, that government spending is in no way constrained by tax income or account balances was realised 70 years ago. We buy into the sound finance dogma at our own loss.

Like you, I’m reserving judgement too.
What I’ve noticed however, is that Jimminy Cricket seems to be fronting more and more lately whilst MT is taking a back seat.
Over the years, I’ve also noticed (amongst peers, academics, careerists, politicians et al) is how the (neo-liberal) corporate agenda ‘rubs off’ on people when they go anywhere near it.
And its insidious. It now pervades the media (PSB included), academia, our defence forces and all. Capture people with indebtedness, big mortgages, fear of losing it all, and they’ll bend over and scream “take me Bernadine”. And that’s just the muddle class. The precariat are busy just trying to survive so that politics and elites are irrelevant.
They will eventually wake up though and I’ve always believed that the longer it takes, and the more inequality becomes entrenched, the more violent the outcome.
My plans for the future involve taking off to the 3rd World, rather than trying to build a cosy little gated fortress here

I thought Labour was meant to be the Party for the struggling workers and the renters…you know, that group that should be big on voting and should be pounding the street waving ‘Labour’ flags…but aren’t because unless they plan on becoming home owners or are that very small group that seem to enjoy benifits from the ‘gig economy’, they seem to be not part of Labours ‘Kiwi dream’.
Not spending, insisting on the benefits of having RSE workers, which Andrew Little insists is all about ‘foreign aid’….sure that swings over some National voters…but is it enough? Certainly not for a clear mandate for change.

Nailed it, Frank!

* The Easter Islanders kept destroying their land base and in the last years of their culture devoted huge amounts of effort and resources to constructing statues, thereby exacerbating their predicament.

Politicians are the very much part of the problem and the current crop of ‘idiots’ will NEVER be part of the solution.

Protect yourself as best you can from the liars and fuckwits that constitute the status quo establishment because what is coming quite soon ( 2020 at the latest) will be very nasty.

Socialism would be fine so long as it is introduced democratically and to an informed electorate, so a comprehensive structure laid out for discussion and appraisal well in advance

You mean, like capitalism was “introduced democratically and to an informed electorate, so a comprehensive structure laid out for discussion and appraisal well in advance”?

Funny, I don’t recall any plebiscite ever taken on whether or not to introduce capitalism.

I do, however recall the American Empire intervening in Chile in 1973, to over-turn the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Or the American funding on Contra-rebel death squads, to over-throw the democratically elected (post 1984) government of the socialist Sandinistas.

Our American cuzzies don’t seem to tolerate democratically elected socialist governments.

But they sure do support dictatorships friendly to American Empire interests.

Socialism would be fine so long as it is introduced democratically and to an informed electorate, so a comprehensive structure laid out for discussion and appraisal well in advance. Thats a high test. Without this kind of introduction it would just be a military dictatorship like USSR was. I think it will be a long time before a free electorate will reject capitalism altogether. But capitalism needs restraints so that it is made to serve society. What we have now is society serving capitalism, and capitalism serving the money/debt creators. Its all upside down.
D J S