Posts by Tom Semmens
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I know I shouldn't be replying to an NZ post in the middle of the night when we are on a terrace drinking beer on a glorious Spanish evening in Jerez de la Frontera, but the Labour party bugs me. They current PLP is squandering a century old legacy. If Labour has the cajones to accept just one of the four things I said it was refusing to see then it or the wider social democratic left could mount a coherent attack on the right. But its hubris is total.
-
“Labour needed to be ambitious and bold to win the next election…”
Fat chance you’ll get that from the current hopeless bunch of intellectually lazy cowards that make up the NZ PLP and it’s advisors!
This post of Rob Salmond’s is cut and paste Blairism of the most mind numbingly vacuous. Let’s accept neoliberalism. Then let’s adopt the loaded language of the right to discuss the problem. Then say, hell, the National party is kinda on the right track!!! So vote for Labour, just like National only we promise to do it a bit better! Nothing new to see here then from the NZLP, stuck in the 1990s since forever.
Rob Salmond, Pablo over at Kiwipolitico summed up the NZ Labour party brilliantly:
“Labour are hopelessly co-opted and behind the times.”
And the worst thing is, this post on policy demonstrates the Labour party is still so far up it’s own arse it can’t even see that.
And if this all seems a bit personal and rude, well I have completely lost patience with a complacent, lazy party that refuses to accept the need for internal change, refuses to move into the 21st century, refuses to accept that it is hopeless short on talent and disconnected from huge parts electorate and still refuses to give it all up and let someone else have a go.
-
Even for a country of 4.5 million where the only public voice heard is that of a particularly isolated, provincial and grasping philistinism it must take some doing to be as completely and totally fucking ideologically and intellectually bereft as the current, terminally stupid, NZ Labour party.
-
Hard News: Crowded houses, in reply to Russell Brown,
Larry Williams only sounds insane because you forgot he is the straight guy to Leighton Smith, who is about as crazy as it gets before you need medication.
It is Newstalk ZB koolaid they drink every day you know.
-
Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Kumara Republic,
I don´t think the country can afford to let the bubble burst.An economic disaster like the one in Spain just cannot be allowed to happen. We would have a civil war.
The only option is to stop prices rising and then let 10-20 years of inflation and wage growth to chip away at the affordability issue.
In the meantime, an entire generation will miss out on home ownership in Auckland. For them, we need reform to give tennants greater rights of tenure, government building programs for affordable apartments and terraced housing in cities with low entry level costs for those wanting to rent to buy or long term lease, and a recognition that this can never be allowed to happen again.
-
Nowadays though I guess we have to think from the goveernments point of view. Having neglected to do anything about the housing ponzi/bubble, they have got a tiger by the tail. Everyone knows what is required. A ban on foreign buyers of existingg homes, a CGT, a government led crash building program and a way to rapidly free up land for intensification. But doing anything concrete that leads to a substantial (25%+) downwards price correction would completely tank that section of the Auckland economy that complains the loudest, destroy the wealth a significant porportion of the Auckland (and therefore NZ) middle class with all the knock on effects of that (here in my town in Spain unemployment has sat at 40% since the 2008 crash, anything approaching that level would probably lead to a complete breakdown of civic order in NZ) and could even seriously damage the banking system. So the government wants to stop runaway housing inflation, but is terrrified of the consequences if it does. So it is all jaw jaw in the frantic hope that might do something.
In the end, probably the only economically sane solution is policies designed to halt the upward price spiral without an actual downward correction, and some mild inflation combined with a wages policy that encourages actual wage growth. Unfortunately, the political establishment is completely enslaved by the magical thinking of neoliberalism, so intervention to build houses and encourage wage growth is an anathema, and the reserve bank act has removed from the policy toolbox the possibility of mild inflation to eat away at house prices.
So we are fucked, because the government won't do anything until the political cost of doing nothing is higher than the political cost of doing something, by which time the subsequent crash will be a economic disaster.
-
Build a dam across Manakau heads. Pump out water. Build seven bedroom multi million dollar mcmansions on quarter acre sections. Sell them. Blow up dam.
-
Polity: A wilting rose, in reply to Mr Mark,
If Labour's deadwood were just a bunch of has been reactionaries determined to resist any move back to left and determined to keep their overwise miserably unemployable asses off the dole queue, they might not be a problem. But they are also the rotting corpse of Labour's betrayal grining grotesquely down on the public Betrayed. Labour needs to get them underground, for the sake of sanitation and so the stink doesnt keep reminding people not to vote for them. Then start doing something about the low wage economy.
One of the amusing aspects of the middle class left's debate around the missing million voters is none of them seemed to have much idea who they actually are, and it never seemed to occur to them that if you want the missing million to vote, it might be a good idea to have some policies that appealed to them, like protecting their wages and conditions.
Also, I challenge as glib the assertion that tough financial times lead to conservative government. Michael Joseph Savage hardly won at the height of dizzying boom. What people vote for is a coherent solution. The reason in recent times that has translated to "conservative" is because the establishment left is so fucking useless.
And out of left field we suddenly get "the new middle class" who the fuck are they? I guess he means the casualised contract middle class? Well sure I guess. Labour can get to wave something meaningless at them on their way down to, all the time happily signing free trade deals and and letting migration drive wages down.
-
Whats gone wrong? The collapse of the waged class in the face of globalisation, recession, fraud and corruption. The people who work for an hourly wage (the cleaners, the shop workers, council workmen, you know who I mean) were Labour´s grassroots. The people who will turn out to Jerry Collins funeral, who used to open the halls and provide the tea and biscuits and sweep up afterwards. And when things turned to shit, they discovered Labour´s salaried class professionals preferred clinking champagne flutes with the investment class and kissing the asses of bankers to doing anything to help them.
So they left Labour, leaving it a shrivelled urban rump of screeching identity politics factions, salaried trade unionists and self serving professional politicians. When people who have lost everything support Trump or Le Pen, or people who want an alternative to neoliberalism go for Corbyn and Sanders what they are also saying is that they see the soft as chickenshit social democratic parties of the establishment are as big a part of the problem as wall street bankers. Trump isn´t an irrational vote if you are part of the American wage class, he is the only politician who you can vote for for own self interest.
So what is to be done? Well I would suggest growing some balls and actually having the guts to say what you stand for. Working for Families was a disgrace. Who would have ever thought they would see the day a Labour government would use taxpayers money to subsidise middle class incomes andimpose crushing discrimination against poor beneficiaries while they were at it all because they lacked the balls to take on the boss class? A better policy to define Labour cowardice would be hard to devise.
Labour first needs to convince its one time supporters it isn´t just a shrunken rump of pastel pink Nats by doing things that might be actually socially democratic to convince waged people they are social democratic, and that voting for them might actually be in their interest.
Getting rid of the 1980s and 1990s deadwood parliament collecting an obscene salary to blow smoke out of their asses would a good start.
-
Oh yes one other thing. We all agree that $211 a week is a hopelessly inadequate amount to live on, but why is there so little questioning of the sky high cost of living in NZ? Food in particular is a compete outlier in NZ. I pay 350 euro a month for rent of a modern three bedroom apartment, including power and water. 15 euro covers the gas. I eat a fairly typical diet and, including alcohol, I pay 100 euro a month for groceries. A beer is 2 euro. A nice apartment can be had for 110,000 euro. Medical care is free. The schools are free and often have a lunch program. On 1600 euro a month (what is that? $2500-3000NZ?) Your standard of living is much higher than in NZ. We kid ourselves about the quality of life in NZ.
But really, I come back to food. Ten dollars for a cauliflower? Are you fucking kidding me? Basic food items in NZ should cost half what it does, especially given our wages.