Posts by Tom Semmens
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to izogi,
I hope she stays in parliament, we need her story - and you shouldn't let the pricks win.
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Sacha,
This Greens policy announcement being over-personalised is not good politics, and it would certainly have cost Labour some votes on both edges but I doubt that was some cunning dastardly intent. More of a cock-up.
Oh come now, you surely don't believe that? The timing, the content and the target made the intent unmistakeable.
I don't think Labour has a God given right to the votes of the left, but that wasn't my point. My point was the Greens made a power play - one that involved trying to shiv Labour, there supposed political ally - and it has backfired on them. The Greens assaulted their gaoler and got a baton across the face for their troubles, but they are behaving as if they are victims of the brutality of the system.
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Sacha,
"Metiria Turei's benefit fraud revelation was an act of political cannibalism that backfired both for her and the centre-left, writes Bernard Hickey"
It seems to me the Greens are getting a lot of rather undeserved sympathy for this whole shemozzle. Lest it be forgotten, this whole affair and it’s aftermath was of their own creation, and boy what a nasty bit of creative work that was. Like an excited bunch of little political Italians, the hand that held the political dagger decided the time was ripe and tried to stick it into the back of its political neighbor and sometime ally Labour. The Greens - for whom Turei, do not forget, was riding point at that time - thought a clumsy power grab would make them look like a bunch of very clever clogs, triumphally marching to the head of the progressive army.
Only the Greens, as is often the case with Greens, are not as half as clever as they think they are and they made the critical strategic error of basing their plans on the assumption their victim would conform to their plans and simply roll over and expire. Only Labour didn’t and it hasn’t, and now the whole damn lot has blown up in their face.
So yeah, the Greens can cry me a river if they want any sympathy or even a bit of understanding. They gambled on a particularly craven stunt of political betrayal to try and win the day, and they lost hard and in being so inept they've also damaged the wider chances of the centre left of gaining power in six weeks.
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The CRL will be the work of Len Brown, not the transportblog folks.
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to Russell Brown,
and (some) Green supporters yelling class treason.
Hahahahahaha! The Greens wouldn't know class if it bit them on the backside. Typically self-righteous of them though.
Anyway, I think Ardern has played the politics of this right. Above all, she has been decisive, and the voters lap that stuff up. Pretty adroit instinctive politics so far.
I think Metiria just has to concentrate on living to fight another day. She should survive if the heat is allowed to go out of the whole thing and there is little doubt that she can be rehabilitated eventually over the next few years.
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7 Sharp last night was purely and simply a party political broadcast on behalf of the National Party. We're in an election campaign: that program should be taken off the air.
Hoskings has complete control of that show, and the powers that be have abrogated any responsibility to be a fair handed state broadcaster. The only way to get Hosking's off air would be a brutally political one - Labour and the Greens would have to tell (off the record, but clearly and slowly) the TVNZ CEO that his job, and everyone on his board, will be gone if they keep 7 Sharp on air during the election campaign, and they get the chance to form a government.
If TVNZ wants to play dirty politically with Hoskings and 7 Sharp, they need to be shown that is a game two can play.
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Little seemed to be hated by the white right wing jocks of the MSM like Gower, Garner and co who took advantage of his lack of charisma to gang bang him at every chance. I don’t know quite why they disliked him so much, but the dislike was pretty obvious. I am not sure if they'll be able to get away with the quite the same vitriol aimed at Ardern.
Modern democratic politics in NZ, with our degraded, depraved and debaunched MSM news and current affairs, is at the electoral level incredibly shallow - presidential popularity contests where how you look and perform in front of the camera is everything. Ardern has on-screen charisma, is attractive, and in sum is “aspirational” to whole tranche of voters who have not voted Labour for almost a decade.
Part of Littles demise has to be put down to a disconnect between Labours strategic plan and it’s ways and means. Labour’s strategy of cleaving to the centre left meant they always ran the risk of being outflanked on the left by the Greens and on the socially conservative right by NZ First, while National’s grip on to “aspirational” NZ meant Labour would not win new voters. Given their political ways (Little as leader, hostile MSM) the risks of their electoral strategy became practically certainties. Ardern is much more likely way to grow the Labour vote amongst soft National voters to compensate those lost on the left to the Greens - in other words, grow the left ‘pie’ that is needed for victory - than Little.
By way of an anecdote, I saw Ardern several months back at a corporate lunchtime event on female leadership at one of NZ’s biggest and swankiest companies. Her star power packed the place out and she was fawned over by staff and management in a way I thought was probably unimaginable for Andrew Little. She has got charisma in spades, and is very popular with the middle class, at least.
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Sacha,
Eastern suburbs have that vibe when I venture there. Two nations.
It is the culture shift that occurs when you have massive inequality. Perfectly nice middle class Chileans know nothing and care even less for the people who live in the slums of Santiago, beyond seeing them as an irritant that entails much higher security measures.
The rich white Castelano population of Venezuela didn't give a shit about the poor there either.
We have to accept tat this culture shift has occurred here as well. It is why the poor are now invisible, why the media treats low income/poor NZ as a foreign country and why Mike Hoskings can live with 250,000 children growing up in poverty.
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Sacha,
I have heard allegations she was receiving undeclared income from a rental property.
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. But let’s assume it is. The thing is this is how the NZ economy operates in the real world. Cash job discount here, a little bit of undeclared income there, let’s not mention the boarders over here or the barter off the books. And the reason it operates that way is because for thirty years governments of both stripes have successfully driven wages and benefits down. To stay afloat through tough times millions of NZer’s have turned to the black economy and become sharp practitioners and/or minor fraudsters against the state. The middle class single income and a bit of overtime Dad with Mum at home world of the early 1980s has been replaced by middle class dual incomes and a converted garage granny flat paying cash rent, just to maintain a middle class standard of living – and even then, we’ve relied on the exploitation of slave wage labour offshore to drive down the prices of the things the middle class like to have. The dole and the DPB etc etc are now weaponised tools of humiliation and oppression designed to strip people of their dignity and keep them in grinding poverty. That undeclared boarder paying $150 a week most likely is what keeps all your kid’s school fees paid.
The problem with the likes of that hyper-arsehole Farrar and the rest of the pompous pricks who sit high and mighty in judgment is they are fat and sleek from the winnings of being on the bosses side of neoliberalism. They’ve allowed themselves to be persuaded that the bullshit from the bankers and crackpot economists like Eric Crampton at places like the New Zealand institute about our economy is the truth.
More than anything, the trials of Turei and Bennett – about the only two MPs who experienced welfare post Richardson – is an unwelcome intrusion of reality into the rarified income strata of the ruling elites. Of the two of them, one took the lesson and vowed to try and make sure no one else was ever in her position. The other one turned into a class traitor who kicks the down and outs as a way to assuage her sense of humiliation. I guess that is about the right ratio for that sort of thing as well.
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Rob Stowell,
while now WINZ feels like weaponised war on the poor.
Chris Trotter describes it as an "Empire of cruelty" and, having had some interaction with them in the last year I can see why. I did OK - for reasons to do with race and privilege - but even then, after being employed for a six months I got a letter from section of WINZ or another demanding repayment of $200. I knew they were in the wrong. I had carefully ensured my benefit ended exactly when it should of and I had the bank payments to prove it. I couldn't be bothered going through the rigmarole of fighting them, so I just coughed up. The sooner tey are out of my life the better, I reasoned.
But the atmosphere of the average WINZ office lingers. They are not places of social security, where sympathetic staff help the worst dregs, the down and out, the defeated, the sick, halt and lame, the temporarily embarassed and the middle class redundancy victims. They were places of colonial administration of a class of people all branded indolent and hopeless . Like all colonial officers they were protected by security guards, the state as an occupation administration of it's own people. And like all colonial governments, the cruelty was casual, normalised, and in the best interests of the natives.