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  1. All those numbers quoted need money to address. If Shane Jones fast tracks some mining operations that generate billions for NZ, how is that a bad thing? NZ sits atop trillions of USD worth of high quality coal. Vast swathes of the West Coast (once Labour’s heartland) have an abundance of minerals. Everything in Politics, as in Life has trade offs. I would rather we dig some stuff up and sell it and use that money to build a healthcare system that works, be able to pay teachers, nurses and policemen a wage that lets them raise a family here in NZ so that they don’t leave for Brisbane or Perth.

    China and India are going to keep needing coal, nothing we do will stop that so why not sell them some and look after NZ rather than making us either stay here and get poorer whilst using deteriorating services or to leave for Australia.

    1. china is the biggest up taker of green energy so will need less coal in 10 years time .We wont have any mines running before then and imagine the roads needed to transport to ports .The big companies will cream the profits off shore so I dont see hospitals being built .Remember the coal industry that closed down on the west coast because the Indians no longer wanted it because it was too expensive to ship it from here .

    2. Except NZ isn’t poor. There isn’t a lack of funds in NZ. For the size of the population NZ has quite a large economy.

      The problem in NZ is that we refuse to raise revenue appropriately, and that’s not going to be addressed by allowing strip mining of sensitive or conservation land.

      Why do similar mining jobs pay far less in NZ than in Australia? Because we’ve allowed people like those in the current government to destroy unions, kill workers power, and a lot of the associated benefits to the wider population. We aren’t suddenly going to get improvements there with transnational mining conglomerates that will influence the government to reduce worker rights, meaning even the mineral wealth you speak of will simply be extracted, with low cost labour (and likely also migrants labour).

      The actual solution is to adequately raise revenue from our sizable economy and invest that in the health, education, and other public sector institutions.

    3. Right. Even a socialist government would be mining every viable mineral resource (including Labour, via the old State Mines). Miners tend to be unionised, so an expansion of the base of the labour movement is possible here. Organised labour should also be demanding a policy of energy independence, a source of many high wage jobs.

      Bomber points out that the Atlas Network (and the Mont Pèlerin Society) are sprawling transnational entities, as are the multinational lobbies and multilateral intergovernmental bodies. The labour movement needs to be similarly interlocked across borders — and given how weak, backward and racialistic the local labour organisations are, they need to be sending cadre to countries with the largest workers’ parties for training.

    4. Unless we buy back the banks first any money we earned will just flow off-shore and out of the NZ economy – ready to be lent back to us to spend on housing; that’s even before we consider the environmental considerations of your suggestions.

    5. High quality coal? Oh, thats right, NZ is world famous for the quality of its shitty brown coal.

  2. All the mainstream media, The greens, TPM and Labour are doing is trying to head off at the pass the uncomfortable realization that most New Zealanders agree with Seymour’s principle bill.
    Like it or not eventually public opinion will win.

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