Is racism worse than murder?

Ayn Rand described racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”. However, she wouldn’t and neither would most people with any measure of morality would describe a verbal expression of racism as being worse than murdering another.

A radical comedy today might parody modern “anti-racism” to a ridiculous absurdity, defending people from claims of racism over defending people from murder. 

Reality is not funny though.

British journalist Ed West wrote a few weeks ago on his Substack an article called “Moloch must be Fed”. 

He recalls the following instances…

Salman Abedi 

 “One evening in May 2017 a security guard in Manchester was alerted to something that didn’t look right: a man of Middle Eastern appearance with a rucksack was seen by a member of the public approaching a pop concert filled with teenage girls. The man looked ‘dodgy’, in the words of the 18-year-old guard, who later recalled his moment of agonising: ‘I felt unsure about what to do. It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male. I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race. Concerned that he would be accused of racism, the young man went with his doubts and let the British-born Libyan Salman Abedi walk on. The rucksack was packed with homemade explosives, mixed with nuts and bolts to maximise the suffering they would inflict on human flesh, and fifteen minutes later Abedi pressed the detonator, killing 22 people, ten of them under 20 and the youngest aged just eight.”

Valdo Calocane

“had attacked his flatmate on one occasion, and assaulted strangers on others. He was clearly very dangerous, and while mental health professionals had been ‘leaning towards’ sectioning him, he was released after they ‘considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention’. Calocane went on to butcher three people in broad daylight, including two 19-year-old students from the same university”

Axel Rudakubana

“At the Acorns School in Ormskirk, headteacher Joanne Hodson said she felt a ‘visceral sense of dread.”.. about him, as he “had been caught bringing a knife into class in his previous school, and when Hodson asked him why, had replied coldly: ‘to use it’. When she raised the risk posed by the dread-inducing young male, mental health workers accused her of ‘racially stereotyping’ him as ‘a black boy with a knife’.”

Rudakubana went on to murder three girls, aged nine, seven and six at a dance workshop for girls aged six to eleven in Southport.

The story about Henry Nowak is giving cause for concern among many in the UK about the priorities of policing. The criminal justice system’s first priority should be to protect the public from violence.  The Daily Telegraph has published the sentencing notes for Nowak's murderer and the background to the case.

Nowak called out to Vikrum Digwa, and asked if he was a “bad man”, and filmed Digwa on his phone. Digwa, a Sikh, alleges his turban was knocked off by Nowak.  Digwa stabbed Nowak four times and his face was slashed.  One of the stabbings proved fatal. Digwa and his brother filmed Nowak escaping, scaling a fence before landing on a car and falling to the ground, where he bled to death. By then the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary had arrived. Digwa’s father was helping keep Nowak upright, but Digwa had told the police that Nowak had racially abused him. 

The teenager is then heard shouting in a hoarse voice “I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance”.

Officers can then be heard asking Digwa for his version of events, before dragging Henry across the gravel while saying: “Let’s get you out of there, shall we?”

When the university student again told them he had been stabbed, the officer responded: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Henry is then placed in handcuffs while repeatedly telling officers: “I can’t breathe.”

With the teenager in handcuffs, a female officer asks Henry, “where do you think you’ve been stabbed?” before saying to her colleague, “we have to check, don’t we”.

The near-three-minute footage ends with the arresting officer asking for Henry’s name, before reading him his rights.

At this point, the female officer seems to realise his deteriorating condition and calls an ambulance, noting that “his pupils aren’t even reacting”.

Nowak bled to death in handcuffs, because police were more concerned about Digwa’s claim of racism, than Nowak actually having been stabbed. 

Nowak calling “I can’t breathe” has shades of another event we all know, although there are multiple differences in the contexts, the primary point remained – the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary prioritised “anti-racism” over a murder.

Of course, the police were, in fact racist. It prioritised the feelings of one man who was hardly scratched over another bleeding to death, because of racism.

Many on the left in particular wonder why politicians they deem “far right” are getting popular appeal. I can’t imagine how blind they might be when these instances are happening, time and time again. The people who want to protect others, like the security guard, the teacher and most police, mean to do well.  They are undermined by a philosophy, which is advanced by academia, accepted by much of the media, absorbed by gateway professional associations and implemented by “professionals” and it is all facilitated by politicians.  

It’s a repeat story that could be a parody of a lunatic political philosophy if put into practice, if it weren’t a parody and hadn’t been put into practice. It is the application of today’s melding of various post-modernist philosophical movements into politics and into law and social/cultural practice. It combines Constructivism (which posits that there is no such thing as “objective truth” but rather reality is constructed by people as part of social processes, interests and beliefs), Structuralism (which posits that human behaviour can be understood through structures and systems within which they operate, rather than the specific behaviour itself and Critical Theory (which posits that injustice exists in current power structures which exist primarily to benefit and sustain those with power, who are deemed to be members of groups that created or succeed the most in those structures).

As with most philosophical movements, there is some truth in all of them in different contexts. However, the culmination of all of this applied consistently is that identical behaviour by two separate people is interpreted differently according to each person’s background and deemed level of privilege or disadvantage within the “system” they are living. Critical theory has little time for Common Law justice systems which treat individuals as free agents (unless proven otherwise) who, if they act to infringe upon the basic rights of other free agents, should be subject to judgment and punishment according to what they did and the harm they caused.  For example, while there may be mitigating circumstances in specific situations (e.g. self-defence), murder is murder. 

Objectivists, rationalists, classical liberals and other modernists regard racism as a pre-modernist view of humanity. The idea that human beings should be judged based on their inherited characteristics rather than their behaviour, is a legacy of pre-modernity. Race or ethnicity is not determinative of unjust behaviour, and especially not determinative of justifying injustice against that person. Awareness of this grew enormously in the aftermath of World War Two, the Holocaust, the legacy of Japanese militarism and subsequently decolonisation of much of the world, and the Civil Rights movement in the USA have made people aware of the need to treat people as they are, not for what they are.

In almost all societies deliberately killing another person, especially a child, is seen as the most morally depraved and injust act that can be committed. Yet in the UK today, there is a growing number of incidents whereby people, when judging whether to act to protect others from murder, have chosen to act based on another concern – is my action going to be seen as racist?

I'm reluctant to grant any politicians in the UK a shade of belief in their ability to confront this philosophical cancer.  Keir Starmer or those willing to replace him in the Labour Party have no remote interest in confronting this - for they are the ones who have facilitated this ideology. The Liberal Democrats and the Islamist adjacent Greens are even worse. Nigel Farage is an opportunist, and in calling for a "cold rage" he is showing his irresponsibility, and the emptiness of his thinking.  However, it is unsurprising he has popularity when for so long the Conservatives held no principle other than to retain power (when they were in power for a wasted 14 years). 

There is a chance, just a chance, that Conservative leader and Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch, could, if only because she is the only party leader who can confront the issue of racism with a background that befuddles the "anti-racist" racists.  She has said:

What Nigel Farage is doing is reinforcing the difference. I have said that we need to find what we have in common, not what separates us. I don’t want to hear about Black Lives Matter. I don’t want to hear about White Lives Matter. We all matter.

“Enough of this nonsense, where we keep separating everybody and splitting people into different groups. We are descending into tribalism. I do not want that. It is why I say that we should be a multiracial country, not a multicultural country. Let’s have one shared culture, British culture. How the police treat everyone should not matter, depending on the colour of their skin, and we shouldn’t pretend that racism is something that only happens to ethnic minorities, it happens to everybody, black or white"

I hope it is not too little, too late, to avoid the anger and violence which comes from people who think, not only is there a fundamental problem with the philosophy behind how so much of the state and the institutions of power function, but who think it is all fundamentally antagonistic to them, their family and their community - and are willing to burn the whole lot down, by handing power to those who literally have no coherent answers.

The next Mega-Ministry is coming and it is going to disappoint

Notwithstanding the histrionics from the Greens and other hard-left activists, the Ministry for the Environment isn't being shut-down, it's being merged with two other Ministries and part of a Department to create the Ministry for Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT). 

I opposed this when it was floated nearly a year ago, and I still oppose it.  Not because of the claims that it will risk MfE's work programme (if only!), but because bigger bureaucracies are NOT more cost efficient, and they are certainly not more dynamic, nor do they result in integrated and co-ordinated thinking.

I've worked in both large and small government agencies, but it's not just that experience that informs my opinion, it's the experience seen elsewhere. The views on savings are largely from the perspective of accountants, who typically measure "X-efficiency" which is about minimising wasted resources. In the context of government it is really around the number of managers vs. output, which given the outputs are highly subjective, is hard to assess without a close understanding of the detail of those outputs. It's not goods sold or customers satisfied.  It might consider productive efficiency based on numbers of people relative to outputs, although the "productivity" of policy agencies ought to reflect the quality of output, which I'd be astonished if the Public Service Commission could identify at more than a rudimentary level. 

What definitely isn't measured is dynamic efficiency (how responsive organisations are to innovations and technology), nor do they measure allocative efficiency (allocating resources to meet most specifically what is desired - in this case by Ministers).  

From experience, large Ministries can be awfully inefficient and slow to be responsive. For example, I half wonder if I still have a live "on demand" employment contract with MBIE, even though I left its predecessor permanently 26 years ago, although I did work casually for it for a subsequent 2 years. I never received any communications terminating it.  However I digress. 

One of my favourite administrative failures of MBIE's predecessor - MED - was how it spent three years developing an all of Ministry centralised Document Management System, which was designed primarily for "security". There were full time staff dedicated to this project, who were bewildered when one senior advisor pointed out that every single document created in this system was copied onto individual PC hard drives, which were accessible to anyone who logged onto the PCs. It took another year for the system to be implemented, by which time it was already obsolete.  

As much as there are efforts to try to bring together people in a single Ministry to be co-ordinated across sectors, the record of doing so successfully, without bringing other activities to a snail's pace is not particularly inspiring. By and large, MED and its predecessor the Ministry of Commerce, largely operated in silos.  The idea there was some commonality between how energy, telecommunications, land planning (RMA) and industrial/trade policy was fanciful. Electricity was heavily regulated and resulted in structural separation, telecommunications was very lightly regulated, land use planning was largely about tinkering with the RMA (and monitoring the impacts of its implementation), industrial/trade policy focused on tariff removal and supporting MFAT on trade negotiations.  Throughout the five years I had there, the proportion of effort of the Secretary/Chief Executive in telecommunications, broadcasting, postal and IT policy as a share of activity was <5%.  In other words, mega-Ministries struggle to get their senior management across everything they do.  Small ones don't have that problem.  Of course that can be an advantage for divisions/directorates/units led by managers who want to get on with their jobs without micro-management at a more senior level, but it is hardly amenable to accountability.  Of course what it does mean is that there are multiple Ministers for the Ministry to report to, over the head of the Secretary/Chief Executive (otherwise the Secretary would spent all of her/his time at every Minister's office). 

What mega-Ministries DO implement is a rather significant in-house administrative function, which inevitably justifies more staff to perform functions across IT, HR, finance and information management. 

I've pointed out that MBIE and DIA, both large Ministries have not displayed much capability in delivering innovative reforms over recent years. MfE of course delivered an abject disaster with Labour's proposed RMA replacement with two pieces of legislation imposing greater costs on property owners and more complication through centralisation of power.  This is primarily because MfE's culture is antithetical to economic growth, development and private property rights (you can still see in the new Planning Bill which is far more diluted and modest than what is needed to address the sclerosis in development). This was so apparent when in 2023, Vicky Robertson departed as MfE Chief Executive and stated:

In her presentation she pointed to the programmes that will have a profound and lasting positive impact on our environment.

She spoke about how reforming the resource management system has been the Ministry’s key priority and remains our single biggest deliverable for a system that is future-focused, adaptable, and encourages decisions that are good for our long-term wellbeing.

I'm not sure whose wellbeing she meant, certainly not taxpayers...

“People still say what they love about the Ministry is how people care about each other. They still say that now, as they did when I started. It’s pretty incredible how we’ve gone from 320 people to 1200 and held onto our culture. I’m proud we’ve been able to do that,” she says" 

Being proud of more than trebling staff numbers says all you need to know about bureaucratic culture.  Now that is being merged with the local government arm of DIA (which spent decades responsible for the statis of water policy), the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (which was established in 2018 and presided over the country's most rapid increase in housing prices) and Transport (which itself has seen a more than doubling of staff numbers over 25 years). 

Another example. 

In 2004, Transfund New Zealand was merged with the Land Transport Safety Authority to become Land Transport New Zealand.  That entity was merged with Transit New Zealand in 2008 to form the NZ Transport Agency. The end result has been to create a bureaucratic monster.  In 2004, the three separate agencices had a combined total of around 700 staff.  In the 2023/24 financial year, NZTA had 2,769 permanent employees.

In 2007 announcing the merger, then Transport Minister Annette King said:

“Combining the functions of Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand will create one organisation accountable to one board, ensuring improved focus on value for money for land transport activities and an appropriate balance of land transport activities".

Value for money?

In Australia, a mega-Department I've previously done work for had a total of six project leads for a single project I was involved in as a contractor, over five years.  Each time the new lead had to be brought up to speed and learn again.  The reason why was because the mega-Department kept poaching anyone talented to work on other projects in other areas.  One comment I heard from a different agency was "this is the Department you send projects to so they die". That's a bit unfair, but isn't entirely untrue. Quite simply there are five layers of management on top of each project or activity, so it is easy for them to get lost.

So I'm not optimistic. I'm not sure a single entity co-ordinates better than separate entities, because the bigger the organisation the more sluggish it is to work as an integrated whole. Moreover, so much of what these agencies do is not across other portfolios. I doubt aviation policy has ever paid much regard to housing policy, local government or the environment, but I am sure there are people in a couple of those who would keen to get involved - which would slow it down.  A mega-Ministry has great potential for sclerosis.

I hope I'm wrong, but I've seen multiple mega-agencies in several countries over 30 years.  I'd love to see the example that, by an objective external measure, has delivered serious innovative reforms that have released productivity, growth and dare I say "wellbeing" for taxpayers and the public.

Is New Zealand a capitalist command economy?

Head of Lifestyle Economics at the UK's Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a free-market thinktank, has written an excellent piece at The Critic called "On Britain as a capitalist command economy". 

The central hypothesis is that the UK is both far removed from being a free-market economy with a small state and light-handed regulation, and from being a state-owned economy run by bureaucratic, politically driven trading departments.  It is worth reading in whole!  

He describes the conundrum of how to describe the UK economy...

The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much interest in seizing the means of production. Keir Starmer’s government is more left-wing than he wants you to believe, but even if he renationalises the rail and water companies, it will be a nostalgic gesture rather than a heartfelt effort to control the heights of industry. Only on the fringes of the left is there any desire to return to the days when British Airways, Jaguar and Thomas Cook were under “democratic control”.

Arguably New Zealand isn't much different.  Of course the Greens, TPM and parts of Labour will say the country is under the oppressive yoke of neo-liberalism, their latest scapegoat "billionaires" and "foreign capital", and of course people like me will rail against the "commie kids" on the left in Parliament, and in local government, but there's little real evidence of NZ embarking on Douglas/Richardson Mk. 2 or becoming the DDR under the last government.

Jim Bolger put the brakes on free-market liberalisation and shrinking of government after the 1993 election, although the direction of travel largely remained the same until 1999 when the Clark Government starting turning things back - notably by passing legislation to cancel the contracts of private ACC employer account providers to return ACC to a state monopoly insurer.  Clark followed by renationalising Air NZ and the Railways, setting up a state retail bank (Kiwibank) raising income taxes and vastly expanding the welfare state with "Working for Families". The Key Government did little to change this trajectory, and the Ardern/Hipkins Government doubled down, with significant spending increases (even leaving aside the Covid response), and increasing both the size of the public sector and scale of regulatory intervention in the private sector.

On the face of it, the post-Thatcher settlement has held, but there is nothing Thatcherite about this government, nor the ones that preceded it. 

Likewise in NZ. It's not to say the Douglas/Richardson (note it isn't the PMs noted for these reforms) reforms have been unwound. New Zealand isn't returning to rampant protectionism, nor has Labour embarked on vast renationalisation (the Government isn't going to get a national bus company, shipping company, hotel network or life insurance company), but what has happened is an accretion of central command and control.  The UK of course has long had it with the Town and Country Planning Act, the single biggest act constraining housing supply and enabling local government to be the greatest NIMBYs in the UK's history. It was passed in 1947!  New Zealand has only had the Resource Management Act since 1991 (passed during the height of Ruth Richardson's reforms, but inherited from Labour led by Geoffrey Palmer - which speaks volumes), but it too had kneecapped housing supply, inflated the cost of infrastructure and is only now with a chance of being replaced with something a bit less worse.

Snowdon writes about price caps introduced in the UK on energy, the Starmer Government's ban on "no-fault evictions" of tenants and enabling legal challenges on rent increases. 

He highlights the nonsense of the Equality Act in the UK, which is being used to impose "pay equity" claims of the sort Brooke Van Velden has put a stop to, much to the chagrin of retired former politicians. 

the Equality Act ... stipulates that men and women should be paid the same salary if they do work of “equal value”. Grotesquely over-interpreted by activist judges, this led to the bankruptcy of Birmingham City Council and 16 months of strikes after it was ruled illegal for (mostly male) dustmen and gravediggers to be awarded bonuses when (mostly female) cleaners and carers were not. ..

In the Next case, it was revealed that the company offered its 25,000 retail staff a chance to work in the warehouse but only seven took up the offer (three of whom walked out within a year). Despite one of the claimants admitting that she didn’t find the prospect of working in a noisy warehouse appealing but would have considered it if she was offered a lot more money, the company still lost.

The process used to determine what was "equal value" is what Snowdon describes as "that looks like something from a Marxist professor’s fever dream to decide the value of an employee’s labour."  This diagram is the basis for a bureaucratic central planner's view of how people's pay should be set, which bears zero reference at all to how many people want to do the job for the pay offered.  Have you seen a single politician or journalist in New Zealand outline how ridiculous this is? This is exactly the outcome of the philosophy of the capitalist command economy.

Snowdon describes it as essentially the application of activist state seeking to remould capitalism to meet centrally determined goals:

An activist state is systematically coercing the private sector in the pursuit of a range of social engineering goals, all of which are implicitly assumed to be more important than the economy. It is a form of central planning, albeit with a patchwork of different plans rather than one overarching goal.

Following on from my previous post, this is exactly what you can see from the Opportunity Party, whose leader "stepped into the world of... purpose-driven business". The purpose you can be sure is not why people and other businesses risked capital in the business, it's a purpose that is mostly about signalling virtue, and just chips away at its competitiveness, its resources to respond to consumers and competitors (especially in economies that don't have this sort of regulatory impost).

It's commonplace for people to refer to the People's Republic of China as a "communist" country. While it is led by the Communist Party, and has a great deal of central command and control, in many aspects it lets private enterprise run rip and be competitive, especially when exporting and seeking to win against foreign rivals. While it has plenty of state owned enterprises it directs and controls, it is less interventionist in the private sector.  You see China actually cares about economic growth and development, because it works.

In the UK and across much of the developed world, governments are far more concerned about social engineering goals. Snowdon notes Net Zero (regardless of cost) which in the UK sees car retailers fined for selling too many cars that people want (petrol or diesel powered) relative to cars fewer people want (EVs).  The market doesn't price goods the politicians want people to buy cheaply enough, and the public don't want to pay more for them, so the politicians penalise companies selling people what they want.  The Ardern Government did this more softly by taxing the cars people wanted to subsidise the ones the government wanted people to buy. It did it by implementing US style government procurement rules to preference responses to tenders that included Maori enterprises, just because of their ownership, regardless of the value the enterprises offered to taxpayers relative to others. 

Snowdon notes how far the public health lobby has gone in the UK (and it's obvious the same lobby in NZ wants similar steps):

Supermarkets have already been banned from offering multi-buy price discounts on “less healthy” food and are prohibited from displaying these products in certain parts of their shops. Wes Streeting plans to go even further and start fining supermarkets for selling too many calories.

I don't think New Zealand is quite so bad. A cursory look at economic statistics indicates:

- State spending as a proportion of GDP is 41% in NZ, 44% in the UK

- Tax as a proportion of GDP is 27% in NZ, 35% in the UK

- Public debt as a proportion of GDP is 41% in NZ, 98% in the UK.

It's notable that many of the command and control steps in the UK haven't been followed in NZ, although some of these were stopped with the removal of the Hipkins Government.

However, the approach of regulatory control of the private sector remains at the heart of what the Wellington bureaucracy advances to meet social goals, and it has widespread support in academia.  Some elements of the capitalist command economy remain very much in place.

Even with its replacement, the Resource Management Act will still not put private property rights first, and will still mean local government very much is in command.  

The electricity industry remains a weird blend of a market economy, with significant state investment, constrained by the planning system, which neither resembles a free market (given how difficult it is to build new generating capacity, and the state majority owning three quarters of the sector), nor a socialist system (as there is not a monopoly state provider). The previous ban on new oil and gas production (which in the current environment seems absurd) was purely an exercise in social engineering and virtue signalling, to show off a commitment to "Net Zero" even though it made virtually no impact on such targets (and no impact on climate change).  However it certainly scared off new investment in the sector, fearing a change in government could ban its industry once again.

While supermarket competition is not what some would wish, this is largely due to the planning system, although there remain calls to split up the industry in ways unheard of in other countries, with even the Finance Minister having floated it, and it still being a "live" policy with some political parties.  The fact this was even considered by a purportedly centre-right government indicates how far from the 1980s and 1990s NZ has gone. 

New Zealand lacks the compulsory centralised pay bargaining seen in Australia, which bears the cost of it because the wealth generated from mining is so significant, the loss in productivity is diluted.  However, it was only a change in government in 2023 that stopped it being implemented in NZ. 

So I'd say New Zealand isn't quite as far down the path of regulatory sclerosis as the UK, but that is not because of a lack of will to continue down that path. You can see it in Labour, the Greens and the Opportunity Party, as well as within the glance of part of the National Party and NZ First to seek to add "just another" regulation to make business have "purpose" to meet the politicians' goals.

The fascists of the 1930s (actual fascists, not David Seymour) didn't advance communist style nationalisation of the economy because they preferred to use regulation and state control over business and industry to meet their goals. The word is vastly overused by the far-left, but its approach philosophically is not a million miles away from the bureaucratic command and control state regulating capitalism to meet the lofty ambitions of politicians.

One thing is for sure, it sure isn't a free-market capitalist economy.

The Opportunity Party is clearly on the left

What was TOP and founded by the eclectic Gareth Morgan has been through a few leaders, and is into its latest one, and instead of using the acronym, has gone from the “Opportunities” party to just Opportunity. Just one opportunity, presumably for its candidates to get a handle on power.

I last wrote about it in 2020 when I said:

The centre-left policy wonks' party. For clever people that would usually vote Labour, and think they can solve many solutions if only the tax system were tinkered with. There are a couple of clever people here, but it just the intellectual wing of the Labour-Green parties, and takes its support from there.  Long may it do that.

This remains largely the case. While it avoids the Hamas-adjacent one-eyed view of Israel of the Greens, and the self-interested grifting of unions seen in Labour, it is essentially a party of left-wing activists combining those who have made careers in corporate virtue signalling and productivity sapping, or in the public sector. You need only look at the profiles of the leader, deputy-leader and some candidates to get a clear picture that this isn’t a party of free-wheeling entrepreneurs, advocates for freedom of expression and competition and choice in public services.

Leader Qiulae Wong profile states “After studying law and politics, she stepped into the world of human rights, disability inclusion, ethical fashion, climate and purpose-driven business”

Now that fits right into the standard box-ticking of left-wing virtue supporting. Human rights, inclusion, ethical and then the weirdest... "purpose-driven business"

If you think “purpose-driven business” is different from other businesses, then you don’t understand business. The purpose of business is to make a return on capital. However, she presumably thinks that isn’t enough, and business should seek to show off some noble intent beyond providing goods and services at a quality and price that customers are willing to pay for.  

She led the “B Corp” movement in NZ which is a corporate grift that seeks to extract money from businesses to get a virtue signal stamp to: 

“Be part of a growing global movement working to create an economy that benefits people and the planet”

This is largely vacuous nonsense. The economy exists because people produce goods and services that benefit people.

However, if you want to be part of a movement that is about putting productivity and wealth creation secondary to sacrificing shareholder value to identitarian and zero net impact climate change goals, then good for you, but let’s not pretend this is “centrist”. I am sure they will think I am some awful mean nasty capitalist individualist who thinks it's ok to run people over and kill pandas and whales to make a buck, but this sort of language and empty concepts are largely conceived by small groups of people who are very much the same as each other.  They are all trying to prove to one another that despite their considerable wealth, education and relative luxury level of living, they are actually altruistic and generous people who care about something beyond themselves and their family, and this is proven by showing off credentials that are popular amongst themselves.  

You can be sure probably none of them donate to Iranian's fighting the Islamic Republic, North Koreans trying to defect to the free world, Mauritanians fleeing slavery or Ukrainians repelling Russia. It's far more glorious to save a few tonnes of emissions from installing a solar panel or getting equal numbers of highly paid women on the local board of a major accounting multinational.

It could be right from the Green Party.  You see these movements are great for big companies that can afford to waste money hiring people or consultants to do zero-value research, publicity and branding to look good to airhead consumers, finger-wagging politicians and activist NGOs. However, they are deadly for small entrepreneurs just trying to break even, minimise costs and maximise consumers in taking on competitors like this.  

Deputy Leader Daniel Eb is cut from the same cloth. “Dan works to transition Aotearoa New Zealand to a just, regenerative food system”. Wait, what? How is it unjust now? How is not regenerative? Well he might tell you because…

“Dan founded a communications agency to help tell stories about rural innovation, community building and nature-positive farming”

Again, this could be right from the Green Party. Marketing and spin oriented.

Dr Kayla Kingdon-Beb (Wellington Bays candidate - where she is up against Julie Anne Genter) is “a well-known environmental policy leader and advocate. She believes Aotearoa’s most crucial (and undervalued) asset is nature”. She is Chief Executive of WWF-NZ and before that was Director of Policy at the Department of Conservation.  Again, could be right from the Green Party, and probably a good candidate to win votes from the far too frequently angry Julie Anne Genter.

I wont go through all the candidates, although this image of them tells a story that shows how it isn’t like the Green Party. The Green Party isn’t keen on white males as candidates anymore, whereas the Opportunity Party is.  Indeed a majority of candidates are male. Maybe it's centrist to not just select people on identitarian grounds nowadays?

Yet it is policies that tell you how leftwing the Opportunity Party is:

Universal Basic Income: Welfare for all. Paying people to be idle (of course it’s not characterised as that), by taxing some people more is a distinctively leftwing policy. It is directly redistributive, taking from some to give to all, and it is distinctively uninterested in productivity or wealth creation. $370 a week to everyone isn’t enough for some to live on but is a nice handout to the daughters and sons of lawyers, doctors and policy wonks at university. Note it doesn’t replace all benefits. The proposal is that solo parents get extra money, there are extra payments for people with children, housing support. So “admin” savings on this aren’t going to be total. With labour shortages in some sectors, the idea that people should receive other people’s money unhindered by any obligation to do anything is fundamentally socialist.

Fully subsidised Public Transport: This is another transfer from taxpayers to a small number of people, which has been proven elsewhere to achieve little. It is a blunt tool to help the poor (many of whom don’t live in places with much or any public transport, or certainly not public transport that goes to where they need) but is a big hand out to middle income taxpayers who work downtown in major cities like Auckland and Wellington. Overseas experience indicates it does little to relieve traffic congestion but does a lot to attract people from walking and cycling. Making the supply of a service free at the point of use is a fundamentally socialist concept. Imagining it is “just” for a six-figure sum public servant in Wellington to get a free trip into work, but for the shift-worker in Naenae who starts at the airport at 4am to not do so (because she drives) is quite something.  Of course the party also wants to pour more money into public transport, regardless of net benefits (because well… socialism).

Land Value Tax: New Zealand already has this in rates, but this extends it to central government. The premise being that it could replace some income tax, but the proposal is that there would be three income tax brackets – 28%, 34% and 39%. Lower income tax rates are abolished because of the welfare to everyone payments. The point of the Land Value Tax is to encourage more intensive use of land, except in rural areas (the party is keen on zoning of course). There would be lots of exceptions as well including Māori land, conservation land, land owned by NGOs, government and social housing.  Woe betide government be taxed the same as the great unwashed “speculating land bankers”. Now I don’t think Land Value Tax is necessarily left wing, if done simply and lowers income tax equally, but this isn’t it. 

Citizens’ Assemblies: Heaven help us all if this comes in so that the curtain twitching finger-wagging brigade of semi-retired activists get to dictate public policy. This sort of direct-democracy will inherently exclude business-owners and people with multiple jobs (who won’t have the time to participate), but be perfect for lobbyists, activists and retirees who are just aching to get involved in running other people’s lives. It’s exactly this sort of approach to planning that has caused NIMBYism, and which ultimately gets hijacked by people who want to interfere, who want to tax and spend other people’s money and run any policy area like a village.  It’s the atmosphere that has no place for radical individuals, doing something different in business, community, society, art or even just in their own lives that doesn’t harm anyone else.  The Greens would love it.

There’s other stuff like creating a “circular plastics economy” presumably regardless of cost or impact. Implementing Labour’s previous ban on smoking for adults as they age (helping grow the black-market in tobacco for organised crime). Raising youth court jurisdiction to 25 (soft-pedalling on repeat offenders who cause untold harm to victims). 

It’s interesting it has dropped capital gains tax because it wouldn’t have the same impact as a land value tax, but let’s not pretend the Opportunity Party cares much about economic growth and productivity as much as it cares about redistribution and being virtuous. 

It talks about bringing left and right together. Well it brings left for sure, I’m not sure what it brings on the right.

For example, what does it say about fiscal prudence? There is little about saving on government spending, the main emphasis appears to be to let the economy “grow” to surplus (although that seems a bit like Nicola Willis to be fair).

What does it say about foreign affairs? Nothing

What does it say about greater choice in health and education provision? Nothing

What does it say about improving New Zealand’s competitiveness internationally? Nothing. Just keep sliding down below the per capita GDP of Italy (and well below Australia)

I’m very happy for the Opportunity Party to attract some voters from the Greens or Labour, but let’s not pretend this is some haven for disaffected National voters who think there is a chance for any principles of smaller government, personal responsibility and individual freedom to be respected. This is still a party of policy wonks, now led by a grifter of “corporate social responsibility”.

It's a victory!

In July 1953, then Premier of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung, declared victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (the "Korean War" to the rest of us).  This was a war he started in 1950 (although he claimed the US started it), and had a clear purpose, which was to obliterate the Republic of Korea (south Korea) and unify the country under his communist rule. 

This was after over 200,000 military deaths and the death of over 1 million north Korean civilians (and likely over 200,000 Chinese deaths, as Mao intervened to deter the US attacking China), and the net loss of 3,900 square km territory.  However, Kim Il Sung treated it as a victory and the Kim dynasty has done ever since.

Sure it lied about why the war started, and it is logically impossible to think that the war was any sort of victory for the north, but at least the Kims have an excuse - they are part of a psychopathic totalitarian dynasty clinging to power.

Trump doesn't have that. 

Sure, 90% of the Iranian Navy has been destroyed, but it is clearly fully capable of attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz, using small boats, coastal based cruise missiles and drones. The US and Israel have obviously not destroyed that capability.

Sure, most of the Iranian airforce has been destroyed, and its ballistic missile capability has been badly damaged, but it isn't over. Perhaps its nuclear programme is completely, or mostly destroyed, but its motivation to have a nuclear programme will not have abated, indeed quite the opposite.

After all, Kim Il Sung himself also knew that once the Soviet Union collapsed, the only security guarantee the regime in Pyongyang could rely upon is having its own nuclear weapons.  That has been proven, as there is little real chance of the US engaging in a first strike against north Korea, because the risk of nuclear retaliation, whether to the south or to Japan or beyond, is very real.

The Iranian regime has been weakened, it has lost leaders, but it has not loss control of the borders, the mass media or the instruments of domestic repression. It has not been destroyed, but it has been battle hardened and has - rightfully - claimed victory. Victory against the United States is defined as survival. It is not a victory Saddam Hussein could claim, as the Iraqi Government fell completely.  It is not a victory Muammar Gaddafi could claim either (although the regime of Nicholas Maduro is - largely - intact without him).

Trump's claim of victory isn't quite as hollow as Kim Il Sung's, but at best he has diminished and deferred the ability of the Islamist regime to project its terror abroad, and only moderately diminished its capability to project terror domestically.

If the regime remains, it will be more hardline, more focused on advancing terror abroad, including targeting the US, Israel and liberal democracies globally. 

I bet the Cuban regime isn't that worried anymore.

TACO indeed.