The glimpse of a new true Left voice in the midst of political oblivion and Morgan catches up to where TDB was in February

Dr Bryce Edwards has already begun his autopsy of Labour before they’ve lost the election and Chris Trotter has put in a few boots as well, but I’m old school and you wait until all the votes are counted before admitting defeat so I will hold my tongue until then.

However, it is important to note in the midst of political oblivion for the Left that there is a glimpse of a new true Left voice emerging in the battlefield of this election.

CTU Economist Craig Renney and First Union’s Edward Miller have written an incredible rebuttal of the economics the Right are using and has expertly dismantled the bullshit of National’s argument…

Reserve Bank shouldn’t clobber poor when oil prices are to blame

Oil prices are rising again, and are likely to keep inflation higher than we would want. This is prompting many commentators to suggest that interest rates should rise again.

But with today’s official cash rate (OCR) announcement, is it time to crank up mortgage rates, close businesses, and throw a whole bunch of workers out of work?

Since 2019, oil prices and inflation have been in lockstep. It’s easy to understand why.

Food at the supermarket is trucked there by lorry. Imported items are shipped here by tanker, cargo vessel, or by air.

When oil producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia decide to limit oil production, prices rise. That in turn causes the OCR to rise, and there is an impact on mortgage rates and employment levels here in NZ.

…as The Daily Blog has spent 5 years screaming, our woke middle class identity politics activists have done nothing but generate culture war ammunition for the extreme Right and that by playing to identity politics, we have driven voters away from the Left into the arms of the Right, EVEN THOUGH the Rights economic policy will do nothing but rob them!

Only 3000 households will get the $250 tax cut National have been campaigning on yet Kiwis are taking it hook line and sinker

That’s 3,000 out of 1,930,900?
So… 0.155%?!

National’s ‘plan’ isn’t trickle down economics, it defies political gravity and demands trickle up! They are taking $2b from the poor and giving it to the rich! This isn’t a plan, it’s Egalitarian vandalism!

Yet the Polls show the Left have become toxic!

Thanks Wokies, we get it, your manufactured identity is far more important than our common shared humanity.

The true demarcation of power in a liberal progressive democracy is the 1% rich plus their 9% enablers vs the 90% rest of us, unfortunately woke middle class identity politics dogma is more focused on division than solidarity.

The holy trinity of Woke Dogma is, ALL white people are irredeemable cross during racists, B-E-L-E-I-E-V-E ALL women that ALL men are rapists and anyone supporting free speech is a Uniform wearing Nazi who hates the Trans Community.

This mindset pushed by the Wellington Woke Twitter has driven voters from us as they struggle to find solutions to the pain they are caused by

Because most Woke Wellington Twitter are also part of the Professional Managerial Class, they have their foot on the first home and their economic well being is more important than challenging the hegemonic structure of free market Capitalism.

That’s why the low hanging fruit of identity politics is so important to them.

Because they are easy.

No poor family in NZ is sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for

The backlash to the cancel culture of MeToo, Black Lives Matter and the radioactive trans debate has been so easy for ACT and NZF to manipulate into their narratives and we all have the middle class woke to thank for that.

That’s why Renney and Miller are so important. Their focus is not on virtue signalling woke politics, their argument is on the economics of the Right.

The enormity of the political gravity climate change adaptation and infrastructure resilience has created alongside the solidarity of a shared universal experience is materialising politically in a State that has to do things itself.

The 30 year neoliberal experiment in NZ cut the State back to the bone and the political project of the Right ever since is to tax-cut starve off revenue for the State so it can’t redistribute it in the first place.

What we saw with Covid and this latest weather event disaster is that you desperately need a State with capacity. So many of the problems we encountered was the shear slowness of an underfunded, under capacity public service.

With the economic recession, the geopolitical shockwaves and catastrophic climate change upon us, we must have a debate about the capacity of the State!

That is how the Left have to re frame 2023 – vote for the Right and get an amputation of the State, vote for the Left and build new capacity for the challenges ahead.

We need more Drs, more nurses, more teachers, more Police, more State houses, more infrastructure NOT LESS!

We need to debate for a bigger capacity State using the example Covid just gave us.

We need more Scientists, Drs, nurses, teachers, Police, more State houses and more infrastructure alongside policy that directly subsidises the cost of living like removing gst off food, free dental, free public transport, free food in schools and we will fund that extra increase through targeted new taxes to rebuild the capacity of the State.

The obviousness of our need for a Ministry of Works that actually builds shit is painfully clear to everyone by now.

Take Police in NZ, we have a pathetic 203 police per 100 000 NZers!

Compare that with 212 in England, 264 in Australia, 318 in Scotland, 349 in Germany, 422 in France, hell even Fiji at 227 has more Police per 100 000 than we do!

We don’t have the capacity to create a functioning State that lives up to our expectations in a liberal progressive democracy because we won’t tax the rich to find that infrastructure!

We need to actually sell the 2023 election in those explicit terms – vote Right and amputate the State, vote Left and rebuild the capacity to actually face the challenges ahead.

These new taxes will be a sugar tax for free dental, a financial transaction tax to lower GST on everything, a bank windfall profit tax to build more State houses, a social media journalism tax.

Taxes aimed at speculators and the wealthy to fund services for the egalitarian country we want NZ to be.

Let’s have the courage to actually argue and win over our fellow citizens for solution based policy that actually builds the capacity to have the extra drs, nurses, firemen, police, and teachers.

Let’s champion policies that subsidise people’s cost of living by redistributing from the few to the many.

The voters of NZ are still waiting for the Transformative change we promised them in 2017.

We need a Ministry of Works that actually builds the infrastructure we desperately need.

We need the State to do this because the Free Market has failed.

There has already been amazing work on the creation of a new Ministry of Green Works…

Rising To The Challenge: A Ministry Of Green Works For Aotearoa

Two of the biggest crises of our times – housing and climate change – could be the target of a new Ministry of Green Works that would integrate important responsibilities related to safeguarding Aotearoa’s future, according to a report released today by FIRST Union.

A Ministry of Green Works for Aotearoa New Zealand: An Ambitious Approach to Housing, Infrastructure, and Climate Change is a policy report commissioned by FIRST Union from co-authors Max Harris and Jacqueline Paul that considers Aotearoa’s systemic infrastructural problems and how they could be addressed by a new governmental entity that builds on the former Ministry of Works and integrates several key departmental responsibilities to future-proof the country for significant challenges to come.

“From our experience in workplaces, we know that contracting is a broken model that has driven down wages and led to massive inefficiencies in construction and infrastructure,” said Jared Abbott, FIRST Union Secretary for Transport, Logistics and Manufacturing.

“As the report describes, the private sector doesn’t have the capacity to deliver on large-scale housing projects and inevitably there are now worker shortages due to poor conditions in the sector.”

“Finally there is insufficient coordination to tackle climate change under the current model – the public sector has limited powers to ensure green building standards in housing and infrastructure, and it’s not equipped to respond to other unexpected challenges, like quickly building managed isolation facilities, for example.”

The report argues that the right response to these problems will be consistent with seven values: honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi; manaaki whenua, manaaki tangata; Indigenous innovation; collaboration and coordination; creativity; safety and accessibility; and transformation of our economic model. The authors note that any new Ministry of Green Works must learn from its historic namesake and considers twelve risks related to its establishment.

The report contains feedback and interviews with experts including Ganesh Nana, John Tookey, Rosslyn Noonan, Len Cook, Andre Brett, Matthew Scobie, Syd Keepa, Judith Aitken, Susan Krumdieck, Alexis Harris, Murray Parrish, Jen McArthur, Troy Brockbank, Brendon Harre, Joe Gallagher, Ben Schrader, James Muir, Patrick Cummuskey, Andre de Groot, Ben Ross, Huhana Hickey and Nick Collins.

The report is being launched as the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) begins in the United Kingdom over the upcoming weekend.

“Even with our best intentions to fix our housing, infrastructure and climate problems individually, we will miss the boat if we don’t consider their interrelatedness and set firm goals that integrate core functions of all agencies – this is where a Ministry of Green Works comes in,” said Mr Abbott.

“When the last Ministry of Works was cut up and sold off during the extreme ‘reforms’ of the 80s, we ended up a decade later with the leaky homes scandal and a lot of pressing questions – we can’t afford to wait for the consequences of climate change to set in before we act.”

…we have better solutions and we need a bigger State.

It is time to go beyond the neoliberal 30% GDP debt straitjacket and build a new State to build the infrastructure that a allows adaptation and resilience.

Bernard Hickey argues that even if we agree to the neoliberal Wellington Consensus of 30% GDP debt, we could still borrow $60Billion and remain within that absurd ideological economic straight jacket so where should that $60billion be spent on resilience and adaptation?

We need future proofing ideas, we need a Ministry of Works to do it, we need big ideas and we need big new taxes to fund those big ideas, we need to build in self sufficiency, we need mitigation and adaptation.

While we are talking ideas, isn’t it great that Woke General, Morgan Godfrey is finally catching up to the issue of State Capacity…

As the state’s ability to deliver has shrunk, so has the people’s willingness to vote

…TDB was pointing this out in February.

It is vital that real Left voices like Miller and Renney take centre stage in any rebuild of the Left because the main problem with woke middle class politics is that once white men see themselves as  victims, we are fucked politically.

There is more common ground between us than the woke want to admit, and that common ground must be taxing the rich to ensure the infrastructure and social institutions are properly funded.

The 10 point Left wing Economic Justice Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand.

1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help.

2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs.

3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.

4: Doubling welfare payments and student allowances minus any bullshit claw backs from MSD plus Living Wage universally adopted as minimum working wage plus implementation of all WEAG recommendations.  

5: GST off food and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health.

6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.

7: Debt cancellation – student loans, welfare overpayments, beneficiary debt, easier debt cancellation.

8: Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements) 

9: Buy out houses that can’t be saved, look at universal insurance for climate change events to cover those with no insurance, survival packs in every home, solar panels on every roof, vast increase in Civil Defence equipment, social licence of essential service resilience.

10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances. 

Don’t tell me we can’t afford any of this because we can if the wealthy are taxed!

There are 14 Billionaires in NZ, and 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals, let’s start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry.

There’s no point making workers pay more to rebuild our resilience, tax the rich!

-Sugar Tax

-Inheritance Tax

-Wealth Tax

-Financial Transactions Tax

-New top tax rate on people earning over $250 000 per year.

-Capital Gains Tax

-Windfall profit taxes

-First $10 000 tax free

There is a better way to fight and win politics than middle class identity politic virtue signals.

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice – please donate here.

If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media