The past is a different country. They do things differently there. It can be an illuminating place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. There be dragons.
It's ANZAC Day, and fresh from one blogger dodging one set of lawyer monkeys, it seems another is set up against some gorilla class action.
Russell Brown sought to revisit a controversial current affairs program from 1990 in this week's Media 3 program. A visibly frustrated Russell Brown explained during the show that several pieces were cut on legal advice, and Roger Douglas had thrown legal action at them to try and torpedo the entire program at the last moment. The blog post For the Public Good Revisited has been pulled, although nothing online is ever offline.
Which is a shame, because I was rather looking forward to a look at the events of that era. My dead old man was in the thick of it, and all I've got so far is his side of the story:
Without that guidance, Lange made
a complete mess of the 1987 campaign. He offended some women
dramatically on a television interview while he was on tour in the South
Island. I think it was at Rangiora (It was in fact Geraldine - goNZo). In my own electorate, I had gone to
considerable pains to prepare the way for Lange at the Palmerston North
Teachers Training College in the morning, only to have him in the
afternoon verbally abuse some student again on television over his shirt
or some other trivial matter. These were two major television blues
that forced the Labour Party to spend around half a million dollars on
TV adverts in addition to what we expected to spend, in order to cover
his misdemeanours in this regard.
What I did discover is why so many Lefties have bad blood towards my old man, and probably against me personally. The evidence is lacking but they want so hard to rage against the de Cleene.
How about we frame it thusly, in order to defuse the tensions? Just as the Tuhoe Terror defendants don't have to justify a goddamn thing to the police or the public, neither do the Dark Artists have to justify historic campaign financing now.
How much have things changed? Here's what being a minister outside of cabinet was like before reform (Book of Trev, same chapter as above):
I would rather in
retrospect have been under-secretary of finance to Roger Douglas than I
would have been Minister of Pies & Ice-cream in the cabinet. There
were several reasons for this. The first was financial. Under the Higher
Salaries Commission, Ministers and under-secretaries were paid one
hundred odd dollars tax-free a day for the time they were not in
Wellington. The idea was that they were doing their job elsewhere. I
thought this was ridiculous but it rendered my under-secretaries' pay up
with a cabinet minister. I didn't have to go down to Wellington on
Monday and was paid this $100 for fishing and shooting. That later, on
our own instigation, was altered and is not the position now. That was
the ridiculous nature however of much of the way of fixing salaries for
ministers and under-secretaries in those days.
How much has stayed the same? Well, the statute of limitations has expired on whatever corruption lies behind John Banks and his campaign financing. If you can keep the corpse buried for six months, you can never be guilty.
How about we work on current affairs like that instead of picking over really old bones? Unless someone has a bone to pick, that is.
Here's an old treat from HalfDone; a selection of NZ bloggers graphed according to their scores on the Political Compass. You can take the test here, and current ungraphed bloggers can have their scores posted by emailling scrubone (see link).
You can see the high density on the far right, while the Left Libertarian fields around my yard are more diffused.
It was not reassuring to discover that the closest Labour party stalwarts to my co-ordinates are Helen Clark and Iain Lees-Galloway. Not unless there's an indoors smoking section, anyway.
Whatever your compass point, have a hippy Labour Day. Before Goldenhorse, there was Frente!
It's Friday night and I don't really want to rip into a long post on SOE sales and Rogernomics, but posts by David Farrar and Chris Trotter are really grinding my gears. Someone is wrong on the internet.
David Farrar's piece on the political cost of partial SOE floats should be a bit easier to lambast, seeing as Paul Walker at Anti-Dismal has shredded his arguments quite nicely. The old man used to discuss aspects of Labour IV's 1980's asset sell-off with me. Parts of his arguments appear in Walker's post.
For example, the whole point of selling down an asset is to get the very best price for its sale. When the Fourth Labour Government started its state sell-offs, the calculus was straight-forward. They would balance the retirement of massive public debt against the strategic utility of that asset.
That's why Petrocorp was one off the first on the block. The high risk, high expense speculation of oil and gas fields might have been potentially lucrative, but it would take the luck of Jed (Beverley Hillbillies) Clampett to make anything of it. The NZ government was not in the position to go huntin' for some crude with its then-dire balance sheet.
Same with the Forestry sale. Sure, those saplings might be worth something in twenty or thirty years' time, but owning future logs was not core infrastructure. I remember the old man coming home after selling the forests. It was one of the rare occasions where my father looked genuinely happy. Y'see, the forestry sale paid off the last chunk of New Zealand's serious public debt.
Trev was aware of the political cost of asset sales. He used to crow that he'd have flogged Air New Zealand off to Singapore Airlines or JAL, but the RSA brigade would crucify them with "Who won the bloody war anyway?" arguments.
Times have changed but the maths hasn't. The partial float of power companies will not get the best price for what it's worth. Believe me, it makes the 80's fire sales look well-priced in comparison. OK, don't believe me. Here's Paul Walker:
[H]aving foreign bidders just means that the price the government gets for its assets is higher than it otherwise would be. A higher price is also paid for a controlling share in a firm, selling a partial share in a firm will lower the price paid. 51% is worth a lot more than 49%!
A partial float is rotten value for the government. OK, so why sell it anyway? The puny sale prices will not go towards paying down structural debt, but is instead earmarked for pork; roads, schools and so on. Stuff that should be already budgeted for in normal government expenditure, but will instead be used to sway marginal constituencies to National's tune.
A far lesser reason to sell up is to prop up the moribund NZX with companies of some scale. This is a rubbish reason. Brian Gaynor highlights this corporate stagnation nicely:
In December 1986, all of the 10 largest companies had private sector origins, and most were named after their creators. Top 10 company founders included Ron Brierley, James Fletcher, James Wattie, Bob Jones and Frank Renouf. Chase and Equiticorp were also dominated by individuals, Colin Reynolds and Allan Hawkins respectively.
Thirteen years later only Carter Holt Harvey and Brierley Investments remained in the top 10, and Brierley's value is down from $5481 million to $1097 million.
Sure, those 80's companies were pre-1987 sharemarket crash. But as Gaynor points out, even former Telecom CEO Teresa Gattung cashed up her shares and stuck it in gold. Such is the confidence with which the NZX is held these days. Sticking a few more former state owned assets on the board is not going to breathe life into that beast.
Electricity companies are core infrastructure. They quite literally power the country. Or at least, 75 percent of it. The other 25 percent off their output goes to the aluminium smelter in the Deep South. We've all seen what happens when you sell one off. Contact Energy is losing customers hand over fist due to bad press and competitive pressure.
Then there's the Enron thing. The California power crisis rorts and swindles of the early 2000's was well described in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Then there's the TVNZ Charter problem. That horrible mish-mash when a company faces conflicting objectives of serving the shareholders as well as the public good. It ends up a PushMe-PullYou bush pig.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO just under half of the news items on the six o’clock news were devoted to politics. Today, less than a quarter qualify as political coverage...
The answer, of course, is “Rogernomics”.
At the heart of the neoliberal revolution that Roger Douglas and the Fourth Labour Government ushered in was a profound hostility towards, and impatience with, New Zealand’s highly participatory political tradition.
I have blogged previously on some of the reasons why "New Zealand’s highly participatory political tradition" has declined in the intervening decades. Short answer, it wasn't Rogernomics.
Rogernomics did not repeal compulsory unionism. People still had to be riveted to the TV to see how much of a wage increase Federation o'Labour's Jim Knox had got them in the latest award rates round. No-one's glued to the telly these days wondering whether the PM is going to declare a wage and price freeze. That's a good thing.
Rogernomics did split the Post Office into three; Telecom, Postbank and NZ Post. The rapport between constituent and MP widened as MPs no longer had sway over who got their phone connected earlier than six weeks. These days, we're limited to MPs pork-barreling over who gets government paid fibre optic to their home first.
The one thing that Chris Trotter could have used against Rogernomics, he doesn't. The Fourth Labour Government spawned government Public Relations spin. The advent of television saw the Beehive respond with media advisors in the 1980's. Where once MPs just blabbed to reporters directly or through their private secretary, now the press secretary ironed and starched their releases. The hollow age of professional politics was born.
The old man was rather proud that he was the only government minister who hadn't succumbed to getting a press secretary, but it was not a trend that anyone else picked up on. Similar principles led him to always pick male private secretaries, so the risk of cheating on his second wife was greatly diminished. It's a lesson many have yet to learn even now.
And now, here's Peter Garrett way before he nailed his hand to the Oz insulation scheme:
All the interest (and swarm of party leaders' visits to come) for the Mana by-election has thrown up some remarkable contours of the coming vote. Unlike general elections, which are becoming less about the people and more about the presidential glamour surrounding the party leaders, by elections are all about the people.
Sean Plunket has wasted no time after being taken off the NatRad leash, colouring in his meanings of the local place names to us f/palangis in the Dom Post and a little ripper of a story at The Nation. Much detail is made of the wide disparities in livings standards within the electorate, straddling the gutter black to the gentry further up north, sitting in their no alarms and no surprises retirement villas.
There's some fuss made about the Labour selection process as well, which saw PR paratrooper Kris Faafoi pitted against local heroine Josie Pagani. David Farrar has rubbed salt into the broth. But it's the same as it ever was in the Labour Party. Just ask Chris Trotter about this old vote:
There was Ernie Hemmingson, Secretary for the Hotel Workers' Union. Not a very bright person to say the least of it. He was sitting down with a deck of 54 votes; card votes. I told the audience that in any other meeting of card players, he would be thrown out for having too many in the pack. Anderton moved that the Unions' vote be restricted and I seconded him. But of course the card vote manifested itself and the motion was lost.
Fair go to Goff though. Faafoi might seem an empty vessel, but he'll be a centre-left one. I fear Josie Pagani, who seems a good sort, would be too hard left for the parliamentary mix. The Labour caucus is still brimming with hard lefties, part Clark legacy, part fusion with Chairman Jim's Progressive Party. Labour needs to rebalance, and if that means the Mana LEC gets vote spammed, that's how it is.
But back to the people. Yeah, there are contrasts within the electorate. You've got to wonder how our electorate boundaries are worked out. There's communities of interest mixed with a representative slice of the spectrum. I think our election wonks do a pretty good job, all things considered.
A big congratulations to the new Labour opposition line-up. Well done, Phil Goff and Annette King. It was smart of the Labour caucus to choose unanimously to support Goff. It's too early to have leadership challenges manifesting themselves, so a sign of unity is a great start. In Labourthink, it was Phil's time anyway. He has patiently waited his turn, therefore it's his go. However, there are more important points to consider for the Labour left beyond seniority and obvious skill.
It had to be Phil, because any other choice would have left the possibility that Helen Clark sat in the backbenches twiddling with a Universal Remote Control and an RFID chip in, say, Cunliffe's brain. The best thing for Labour is for Helen Clark to depart with graceful yet great haste. Nice of John Key to oblige with support for an international posting for her. Real Helen can then re-emerge from behind the PR gloss that increasingly constrained her and play a mana-enhancing role for NZ overseas.
Regime change is necessary in Labour, and with Goff's political baggage, he'll need to take a more truthful stance than would be possible with Clark hanging about. Just as Clark had changed the political ball-park for the Nats, so too with Key. His style will influence the style of future government challenges. A shift to the far left would not only step on the the Greens vote, one third the strength of Labour's seats, but it would also leave Labour out of the running for at least two terms by alienating that middle electoral vote. Quite simply, Goff will have maintain the centre and reconcile his support of the Rogernomics era. Goff will have to out-Key Key with a Labour compromise.
Leonid Brezhnev, upon taking office found the two letters and a note Khrushchev had attached:
"To my successor: When you find yourself in a hopeless situation which you cannot escape, open the first letter, and it will save you. Later, when you again find yourself in a hopeless situation from which you cannot escape, open the second letter."
And soon enough, Brezhnev found himself in a situation which he couldn't get himself out of, and in desperation he tore open the first letter. It said simply, "Blame it all on me." This Brezhnev did, blaming Khrushchev for the latest problems, and it worked like a miracle, saving him and extending his career. However, in due time Brezhnev found himself in another disaster from which he could not extricate himself. Without despairing he eagerly searched his office and found the second letter, which he tore open desperate for its words of salvation. It read thus:
While it was sensible for Helen Clark and Michael Cullen to announce they are standing down from the Labour leadership after Saturday's election results, what's in store for the other parties? Tariana Turia and Jeanette Fitzsimons have both announced that they won't be standing next election. Pita Sharples, respected co-leader of the Maori party is a couple of years older than Tariana. Will 2008 also be his last election?
With 5 MPs in the House, will the co-leadership remain or will the Maori party choose one leader to lead them all? Since Angeline Greensill missed out winning Hauraki-Waikato, it leaves Rahui Reid Katene as the only other woman in the Maori party caucus aside from Tariana Turia. Maybe the co-leadership will disappear and Hone Harawira will emerge as the heir apparent.
As for the Greens, there will be an interesting contest between Sue Bradford and Metiria Turei for the co-leadership. My money's on Met.
