Posts by Tom Semmens
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Wasn’t a former ACT MP jailed for stealing money from an education charity she’d started?
Well now you mention it…
Although I am sure ACToids will claim she was just stealing back what had been stolen as tax in the first place, so she is really a modern Robin Hoodette.
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How does crony capitalism makes money out of charter schools? Some snake oil son-of-a-bitch friend of the National party will suddenly discover an interest in education and set up a corporation to run a charter school in South Auckland. In a smiling photo opportunity, he’ll be slipped a huge pile of public dosh from which he’ll subtract the amount to run any normal school and skim the rest as a huge, fat CEO salary and all the other fees he can think of. If he isn’t completely stupid, he’ll also cheery pick the best students from the local schools and provide basically the same education as they would have got anyway, but he’ll claim their success as proof of the concept of charter schools.
Upshot: A wealth transfer from the public to the private sector, a group of cheery picked students who would have done well anyway get exactly the same education, and the rest? Well, we all know the underclass need a stern guiding hand with plenty of stick and no carrot.
ACT’s 2014 policy concession should National win again? The re-introduction of the 1834 poor laws. The Herald will publish an editorial saying Poor Laws are a step in the right direction. John Key will be relaxed, saying it is all MMP’s fault. The Business sector will rub its hands in glee at the money to be made from the right to operate privatised workhouses.
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OnPoint: Spending "Cap" is Fiscal Anorexia, in reply to Greg Dawson,
But doesn't it come back to an analysis of motives? This is a secretive government that has marked paranoid suspicion of the public service that I can only put down to watching far to much Fox News during their long confinement in opposition. There is real bias towards solutions that allow the government to privatise the delivery of public services. That is why I don't think the primary driver here for charter schools is as culture war driven as in the USA.
I think there are two primary drivers behind this governments push for Charter Schools (and things like Whanau Ora). Firstly, Private organisations are not subject to the OIA (and they don't leak) so they help salve the paranoid imagination of the likes of Steven Joyce. And secondly, the government knows the public will not accept the wholesale transfer of our remaining state assets into the the hands of the economic vandals of our right wing business elite, but they also know that this failed business elite is growing impatient in its wait for the promised monopoly rents. In the meantime, privatised schools and ACC accounts provide a fine mechanism for buying off this incompetent and risk averse crony business class with fat taxpayer contracts.
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OnPoint: Spending "Cap" is Fiscal Anorexia, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Danyl over the dimpost is of the view the whole TABOR thing is a joke, since it can be ignored by the right and will be repealed by the left. Nothing but a sop to the Monster Raving Looney party and it's leader John "Barking Mad" Banks.
the real knife in the guts is the onward march of third world crony capitalism designed to enrich the National party's mates by privatising the attractive bits of the education system (Charter Schools) and ACC and leaving the shit and the dross to be dealt with by a public sector being happily drowned in the bath by the double dipper of Dipton - a man who doesn't need the excuse of a TABOR to enjoy his knife work.
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A touch of ageism towards baby boomers you say? A hint of resentment towards the most selfish, greedy and egocentric generation ever born in any civilization anywhere you opine?
Who would have thought!
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Given the Greens election campaign was explicitly premised on smart jobs and child health as well as clean rivers, your confusion tells us more about you than the party.
On come on. smart jobs is a slogan from a party that knows it'll never be in a position to have to come up with some concrete initiatives. And I love clean rivers. I love my mum and apple pie as well. How are the Green's actually proposing we get clean rivers? If it involves reducing the competitiveness of the only industry that stands between us are the third world or imperils the tens of thousands of real, today jobs in the dairy industry how long do you think those dairy workers will place the environment ahead of their jobs?
We both know where this is going perhaps we should stop this discourse and get back to Labour. Whatever The Greens are Labour will need to learn to co-operate with them.
Fair enough.
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I don’t think Labour has much to fear from the Greens, largely because I am yet to be convinced the Greens know themselves what they stand for. I find the idea that somehow the environment is going to become the most important issue confronting voters when they come to voting a complete load of old clarts. More important than jobs? The economy? health? Really? Yet this seems to be the assumption that is lying at the very heart of the thinking of the Green party supporters right now.
Claire Browning commits some confused thoughts to the internet here on Pundit, and since the comments are largely laudatory I can only assume her words accurately represent a lot of the current Green “philosophy”. Based on that piece, to my mind the Greens can offer no vision for the future for the poor, low and middle income New Zealanders struggling to actually live in this country in 2011. That is because as a party they are unable to offer a sensible analysis of the world we live in and what to do about it. The Greens have no answers to poverty or unemployment, merely a fantastical appeal for us to all indulge in double think (neither left nor right! The Greens will never be an environment party!) and a use of the fig leaf of semantics (“…Social Justice is a conceptual part of Socialism and is but a fraction of the big picture encompassed by Social Responsibility…”) both of which seem to me to reveal a Party having an intellectually mushy base of vaguely neo-liberal thinking. Bring out the healing crystals and the self-empowerment seminars, dude.
If Browning is to be taken at her word, then the fundamental thinking underlying the Greens is that incipient environmental crisis is somehow going to unite us all in a (Green party led) global crusade to save the planet. I see no historical evidence for this and it looks like little more than wishful thinking born from watching to many re-runs of Star Trek. the more likely outcome is for environmental damage to worsen both internal class and external international conflicts over resources. Standing on the beaches imploring the resource hungry and desperate invaders to be reasonable will butter no parsnips with most people, who will see a more immediate logic in voting for the party that plans to tool us up with missiles and machine guns.
Charitably, you might ascribe Browning’s piece as a bit of a late night stream of conciousness on her part – in which case it reads like a steaming load of confused horseshit. The less charitable might ascribe some actual thought having gone into her piece, in which case it emerges as a slightly sinister call for some kind of one party state solution, the typical authoritarian new age twaddle that seems to always be the Green’s final philosophical refuge of choice.
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>q>Yet you expect the reverse to apply, comrade? Previous post-election negotiations were revealing.</q>
You play the cars the electorate deals you, don't you think?
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Some people have really strange ideas about how politics works. The Greens are in serious need of a reality check. They are all terribly cocky right now on the back on a 10% result of 68% of voters who bothered to vote – so really, the high tide of the Greens is around 7% of all voters. This result has been achieved on the back of polling in the low teens and after Labour’s worst performance in a very, very long time. Labour is already stirring organisationally to make sure the 2011 result is not repeated in 2014. Last night there was an unusually long piece on TVNZ news about changes in immigration laws relating to actors that seemed to me to be as much about re-framing the Hobbit film debate in a way critical of the government as anything else, and after seeing that I have no doubt the favourable media tide is going out on this government – something that will mostly favour the incumbent opposition party. So all the Green cheerleaders crowing about inheriting the earth seem terribly premature to me, especially as Green supporters cheerfully admit they have no real answers to class based economic issues beyond weak as piss water claims that they no longer exist or are not relevant anymore. And on top of that, the Greens have an organisation on the ground that is less effective than a Girl Guides biscuit sales drive in getting out it’s vote. If the tide goes out on National, Labour’s working poor and poor supporters come out to vote again in a bigger turn out and the dinner party middle class liberals band-wagon back to Labour, the Greens could easily find themselves frantically scratching around for 5% again in 2014.
A broad spectrum party like Labour would be insane to openly concede a chunk of it’s vote to the Greens on the back of one average result for the Greens. Why would they? Why should they? Why should Labour give votes to a party that is frankly middle class and therefore implicitly hostile to the political imperatives of the poor and working poor that the Labour party was founded to represent? A political party that publicly says it is abandoning a chunk of voters to another party is a political party that is intent on committing suicide “here, takes these voters that are traditionally ours and I’ll tell you what – we’ll compete in our voter heartland with you instead”. All market segments are up to competition at all times in politics, especially to a centre left broad spectrum party. The sort of angst ridden delusional thinking of Green supporters “it’s not fair, Labour are such meanies and bullies to us wah wah wah” – cry me a river – comes across as coming from a party made of whinging middle class soft cocks who have grown up expecting everything to be done for them. All the resentful whining in the world about being owed a living by Labour won’t stop Labour looking to drive the Greens back into the margin of threshold error in 2014. The Greens had better get used to that. They have to shift for themselves like everyone else has to and forget about anyone doing them a favour because, you know, they are so terribly sincere. Yeah, whatever. Politics is hard nosed exercise about power. It is all about winning baby. The Greens will get no electoral or campaign concessions from Labour (or National) and in a democracy they shouldn’t expect any.
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Brent Edwards on Checkpoint just claimed that Parker has pulled out of the Labour leadership race partially because the HoS has been snooping around asking questions about his private life.
Make of that what you will.