Posts by Tom Semmens
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I'll go out a limb and present a different point of view. Our treatment and attitude to migrants reflects a wider diffidence to immigration amongst New Zealanders in general. If, as Brickley Paiste claims,
The truth is that non-white and non-English speaking immigrants to this country feel no particular sentimental loyalty to NZ. Most of them I speak to, and I speak to many, want to move to Aussie/Canada/USA.
then I would suggest the feeling is mutual amongst a large body of New Zealanders who would be happy to see the back of them.
The "drive to multi-culturalism" as it has been put above was yet another 'reform" driven from above with little consultation about the numbers, consequences or wisdom of it all, and the result has been a significant and on on-going form of subtle apartheid. Ask around - every migrant knows Pakeha will always prefer a Pakeha over a migrant, that most jobs are not advertised and instead rely on networks of patronage that they don't have access to and that most New Zealanders know this and actively prefer to keep immigrants locked out of as much of the economy as possible.
Personally I'll be honest and say I became deeply ambivilant about immigration when i realised that our precious social security system, something my parents and grandparents built with the sweat of their brows, would be unlikely to survive the strains of an encounter with mass migration. Put simply, I prefer the certainties of the homogenity and shared values of my culture that gave us the historic social contract that built New Zealand to the dubious advantages of simply importing people to fuel economic growth.
Let's be honest here - the Scandinavian countries whose comprehensive welfare systems and progressive policices we so admire can only afford to do so because they maintain a cultural and ethnic homogenity and they strictly control immigration. When things go wrong, as in Holland where the legacy of empire includes a significant Moslem minority, these countries react by trying to enforce conformity.
If we are to have immigration then it seems to me the lessons of other countries says it is form of cultural genocide for the local population to try and embrace a nebulous and unworkable idea of "diversity." You must insist on assimilation, and structure our policies toward migration on that basis.
I suppose at the end of the day I just ask myself the question - if a country has no shared cultural, racial or social values what sort of country is it? Is it a country worth speaking of at all? Do we really want to becomejust another babelling tower - fractured, fractious, over-crowded and polluted?
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Your cynical view of leadership and it's ability is a little dissapointing.
The point I am making is all the inspirational leadership and great "new" ideas in the world will count for sweet fuck all if the other guy is better trained and better resourced. As they say in sport - the good big guy will always beat the good little guy.
People and companies succeed not because of some mythical advantage convered by race, culture or class but because they have systems in place that identify and support opportunity, advantage and success.
If we don't have the correct tools and culture, then sure - we'll see all sorts of victorious skirmishes, but ultimately we'll lose the war.
Success is entirely predictable.
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We need inovation and new ideas which will come from constructive leadership. New initaives not old solutions please.
This is just a load of buzz words that have become so devalued that they no longer have any meaning. Spouting platitude filled claptrap might cut it on the whiteboard in a marketing presentation, but it doesn't with me.
Don't flatter yourself on your ability to deliver innovative genius. There is no such thing as a "new" idea. All there is is the intelligent application of common sense.
But then as Voltaire said, "Common sense is not so common."
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Can you both rage against the plutocratic pilfering elite and against the attack on democracy implicit in revealing the pilfering to the long-suffering public?
Part of ensuring a Randian Nirvana is to convince people the government and democratic institutions are part the problem, not part the solution.
One thing I think has become clear - and that is the globalised, authoritarian neo-liberal project cannot co-exist with inclusive and progressive democracy. One or the other must prevail. Now, I don't believe neo-liberalism has a "plan" in the same way the Cylons had a "plan" but I do believe that like all ideologies it has an agenda that all it's adherents understand to a greater or lesser extent.
To me, Neo-Liberalism shares many of the organisational characteristics of Bolshevism. Most business elites display classic "vanguard party" behaviour. There is a rigid adherence to a centralised dogma. Democratic centralism is the prevalent decision making mechanism within modern business organisations.
I've just finished re-reading a history of the 1930's. The thing which struck me most forcibly was how complacent we are today in our assumption of the self-evident superiority of liberal democracy. Such wishful thinking was not possible in the 1930's. And I was also struck by how quickly, once people start questioning it, democracy can fall.
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I also used to work in an export orientated owner-operated business, and then moved into the service sector about fifteen years ago. Why? Because despite all the rhetoric about free market reform helping business in New Zealand the reality of the free market NZ style is that it favours private sector monopolies. Fluctuating exchange rates, excessive “user pays” government charges and banks uninterested in helping small businesses with things like cash flow meant we saw the writing on the wall and cashed up.
I don't see the issues as all that complicated. We've arrived at the situation we are at today through a set of well documented and conscious decisions. In particular, we committed ourselves to a fashionable economic framework that we applied with all the fervour of the newly converted and with all the lack of common sense that comes when ideological reasoning triumphs over observational empiricism.
We decided to raise the interests of the finance sector to a primacy over those of other sectors of our economy, including the export sector. The subsequent explosion of the service sector around banking and finance together with the speculative bubble are some of the consequences of what happens when you allow an ideology to colonise your bureaucracies.
The solution is re-assert the importance of the export sector over that of the money men. All those old "heresies" need to be dusted off and applied judiciously and intelligently to help our productive export sector. More critical examination of foreign ownership of New Zealand businesses and land. Exchange rate controls. Targeted assistance. Single desk selling where appropriate. Tariffs and import restrictions to ensure we have a healthy balance of payments and to try and halt the de-industrialisation of New Zealand as a sacrifice to the Gods of Free Trade. A recognition that the government rules in the interests of New Zealand workers, not foreign financiers or out of a sense free trade purity and altruism to the third world. The fact that even left wing liberals with guffaw at some or all of these ideas - still largely the norm in the rest of the world - is an indication of how skewed the debate over how to support our exporters has become, and how far we have to go to rebuild our vital exporting industries
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Woah, Ken: you're in danger of tilting into nihilism here.
I am not so sure. The fact that the attack on the credibility of the democratic institutions is being led by a flagship newspaper of the very oligarchs that Ken says are incapable of reform surely reinforces his argument, more than those MP's who behaved well weaken it.
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Whenever I hear John Key speak I am reminded of the Duke of Wellington's comments on the bumbling (if amiable) general Dalrymple:
he "...has no plan, or even an idea of a plan, nor do I believe he knows the meaning of the word Plan."
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The only thing saving capitalism from revolutionary forment is the total discrediting of Marxism as a credible alternative.
At the moment western working and middle class populations have lapsed into political lassitude, helplessly suffering from an economic version of battered wife syndrome.
Since communism is discredited and the elites increasingly seem incapable of self-reflection let alone self reform. what will the answer be? Where will people seek solutions? One thing is for sure - the current sense of disepoerment and hopelessness is not sustainable. It MUST eventually find an outlet.
I fear the decline of middle class will see them seek refuge in their political movement of choice in an economic crisis that afflicts them, and we may see the rise of new flaovur of syncretic Fascism in the West. It will be a new political order of demagogues blending loathing of the globalised capitalist elite, discredited traditional deomcratic vehicles and an anti-crime, anti-immigration authoritarianism into a single populist ring wing program.
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Especially if NZ finds itself at the receiving end of America's Waxman-Markey Act.
Given that National has gone from climate change denial to denying it can do anything about climate change, it is a matter of "when" not "if".
As for Katherine Rich, she just goes to show every Tory has a price.
I wonder how many lunches My Key has had with the manufacturers of B9 pills that are at the moment sold to all pregnant and planning women...
That'll explain Sue Kedgley then, she is pretty much the shadow spokesperson for crackpot medicine and homeopathic remedies.
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Apparently this was, until the Food Council hired Katherine Rich (presumably on the basis that an attractive Tory woman would be the acceptable face of allowing greater spina bifida for th convenience of their members) as their PR hack, a bi-partisan issue that National signed up to before the last election.
But like allowing fattty foods back into our schools, it is clear that if the choice is between astro-turf populism that feeds into pbase prejudice and the advice of experts and NGO's this government will pick the small minded and ignorant response everytime.
Anyway, once the Food Council (and the Green Party via the usual nonsensical utterances of their resident food nutjob Sue Kedgley) have seen of the conspiracy to mass poison us all with vitamin B9, I imagine they'll be able to deal with the REAL threat posed by the shadowy Illuminati - mass vaccinations.