Pity the UK

Pity the UK today. I lived there for fourteen years, five years under the Blair/Brown hate-hate partnership (oh they loathed each other, but needed each other) and then watched as the Conservatives squandered multiple electoral mandates by, in most cases, doing little substantial to address the growing issues the country faced.

It seems most likely the UK will vote to give Labour a significant majority, in part because Keir Starmer seems benign and stable, and in large part because Starmer has either cauterised or silenced the lunatic communist/post-modernist rump that cheered on the friend of Hamas, Jeremy Corbyn (now purged from the party).  Starmer gains largely because the Conservatives have almost entirely failed to deliver on what voters wanted from them in 2019, but he is also gaining because of the implosion, at last, of Scottish socialist nationalism in the form of the corrupt SNP.  That band of Anglophobic Marxists, whose excuse for poor performance was always to blame the English, have finally tired Scots enough that they’ll swing back to Labour largely.

Although it is patently obvious from the coverage of the BBC, ITV, Sky News and the Guardian that much of the media is chomping at the bit to see Labour elected, there is little real sign that Starmer can deliver much other than stability.  Public debt under the Conservatives went from 71% of GDP to 98%, and only a fraction of that increase came from action on Covid. There will be much talk of the end of “austerity” which was a myth, as the Conservatives raised spending on health, education and welfare, increased debt and more lately increased taxes. The state sector in the UK is at levels not seen since the 1940s – when Labour was in power bringing “democratic socialism” through large-scale nationalisation of much industry from coal to railways to bus services to steelworks, all preceding the decades of relative decline of Britain compared to its war damaged equivalents on the continent. 

To say the Conservatives have been disappointing is an understatement. The first five years saw David Cameron, a man who was far too guilty about his gilded upbringing that his focus was on atoning for the industrial revolution by slashing emissions and in pouring money down the endless maw of the state religion – aka the NHS. His main techniques for doing that were to kneecap electricity generation using fossil fuels whilst not enabling much new generation to be built at all – except for a highly subsidised nuclear power plant being built, still, by French and Communist Chinese companies.  There might have been more nuclear power plants, but his even more useless Deputy Prime Minister – Nick Clegg of the poorly named “Liberal Democrats” (for they are neither liberal nor democrats) didn’t want more nuclear power stations because, in 2010, he said they wouldn’t open until 2021 or 2022.  The Liberal Democrats did hogtie the Conservatives in their first term. One of Cameron’s most ludicrous moves was in stopping a third runway being built at Heathrow Airport, only to commission a report on options to address airport capacity in the UK, which after the following election recommended (like the two previous report on the issue) building a third runway at Heathrow. Bumbling Dave’s original promise was part of his kneejerk reactionary approach to climate change. However he was keen on building high-speed rail, so ran with Gordon Brown’s proposal to build a ridiculously expensive new railway from London to Birmingham and then onto Manchester and Leeds, because “climate change” and his other trendy term “levelling up” (code for trying to make the North as wealthy as London through state intervention).  Of course neither the third runway, nor any of the high speed rail line are open, because more fundamentally, Britain has a planning system designed to stop anything being built anywhere.  Houses, airports, businesses, railway lines, power stations, are all stopped because most politicians – Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and yes Reform/UKIP – are NIMBYs, and don’t want anything built near anyone who whinges. 

So during that first term Cameron’s achievements were to significantly boost NHS spending, to raise state spending on foreign aid to 0.7% of GDP (to atone for Britain’s imperial past and to show him to not be “nasty”), and hold a referendum on Scottish independence, which was narrowly won by the “no” side. He did of course buy the pensioner vote with the “triple lock” on the UK’s state pension system, which promised it would rise each year by the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5%, an enormous wealth transfer from future generations to current pensioners. So after five years governing as a “wet” David Cameron successfully defeated the more hopelessly wet Ed Miliband in the 2015 election, and also cut the Liberal Democrats back to a rump and gained a majority in his own right. He also gained support from the EUsceptic wing of his party by promising a referendum on EU Membership and negotiated a weak “deal” to help convince voters to stay in the EU. Of course, getting a EUphilic Prime Minister to negotiate a deal to placate EUscepticism was doomed to fail, and so the 2016 EU referendum was a disaster for him.  The UK voted to leave the EU, in part because of xenophobia towards some EU migrants (mainly from the poorest countries in the east), but also being fed up with the attitude of the EU towards the UK. The UK was seen as needing rules generated from Brussels for “solidarity” and of course the EU’s economic policy was dominated by a highly protectionism dirigisme model. David Cameron found the vote too hard so just resigned like the gutless spin doctor that he is. So then the UK got Theresa May.

The UK’s second female Prime Minister was, however, very unlike the first. May was more wet that Cameron, was enamoured by a nanny state that embraced new rules and regulations on personal behaviour, and wanted more intervention in the economy and in society.  She didn’t support Brexit, which of course hardly helped in her negotiating a deal with Brussels, but her fatal mistake was her conceit in seeking an electoral mandate in 2017 because she thought she could destroy Labour with its newly elected Trotskyite terrorist sympathising leader Jeremy Corbyn.  In fact she destroyed her electoral majority, as Corbyn rode on a wave of moronic Marxist students and media commentators who embraced his highly principled stand for socialism, as he lifted multiple backbench MPs from the sewers where most of them resided, onto his front bench. This included luminaries like Diane Abbott who once said on TV she thought Chairman Mao did more good than harm.  The Conservatives lost seats and Labour gained 40% of the vote on a socialist platform. It was only because the Democratic Unionist Party (hardline Protestant unionists from Northern Ireland) were willing to grant the Conservatives confidence and supply that May was able to govern.  

May limped on for two years of ineffective government during which the UK suffered from horrendous Islamist terrorist attacks at Manchester Arena, Westminster Bridge and London Bridge, and she proved she couldn’t negotiate a Brexit agreement that would obtain either Parliamentary support or support from Brussels. She passed the banner to Boris Johnson, who proved, much like when he was Mayor, to be a loudmouth blowhard attention seeker, who is better placed to be a comic character and writer than a serious politician.  Johnson’s greatest achievement was in the 2019 seeing off Corbyn and his band of terrorist sympathising thugs, anti-semites and communists, and seeing an unprecedented level of Conservative support for “getting Brexit done”. The problem with Johnson is that his rhetoric wasn’t matched by action, not least because his relatively new wife was infected with the same guilt complex posh Tories have about their lives, so it saw him double down on climate change policy, and do next to nothing to address issues around economic productivity, the unsustainable health and welfare systems and the perpetual housing crisis, let alone increasing issues of urban crime in major cities. 

Johnson did deliver a Brexit deal that would have given the UK freedom to innovate, to liberalise regulation around much of the economy, but he squandered his chance. Brexit and support for Ukraine were his greatest achievements, but after all that, there is next to nothing. Yes, the pandemic didn’t help, but neither did his “I don’t give a damn about the truth” approach to the rules he instituted during the pandemic. There were ample opportunities to liberalise laws from shop trading (big shops still can’t open all day Sunday in most of the UK), to planning, to financial services, but no.  He could have greatly simplified taxes, lowering costs to businesses, but no.  He could have scrapped vanity projects like HS2, but no, because the man is a vanity project in himself.

Johnson gave way to Liz Truss (third female Prime Minister) whose fatal mistake was not in her intentions, but in her and her Chancellor’s inability to judge the markets’ reaction to massive tax cuts that aren’t accompanied by spending cuts.  That sheer stupidity was naïve, and has set back the cause of free market liberalism in the UK for many years. She was inept as a leader, and had to go, but having Rishi Sunak as PM (first PM of Indian descent) was a step back to the days of David Cameron and the wets. Sunak has raised taxes, promised compulsory national service and although has a handful of Ministers with much promise (notably Kemi Badenoch, who carries the mantle for serious free market liberalism), it’s just a long line of disappointment.

So the Conservatives need to go, they are not entitled to rule, and those who join them because they want to tell others what to do, need to be purged.  The only shining light of the Conservative Government is in education, where free schools have opened up enormous opportunities for tens of thousands of school students to have education that their parents wanted, rather than what local authorities wanted. It will be very difficult to Labour to curtail that, except by stopping further expansion.  However, beyond that, and leaving the EU, there is little to be proud of.

Labour is on the frontline of Critical Constructivism, or what too many call “wokism”. So there is absolutely no hope of any progress under Starmer. The much more revolting Liberal Democrats, who are essentially middle class curtain twitching Greens, are even worse. There’s nothing liberal about them, they are NIMBYs on steroids who hate free markets and love the bureaucratic collectivism of the EU.  

What about Nigel Farage and Reform? There is some inherent appeal in a party that does appear to have some semblance of a belief in less government, and resisting critical constructivism, but Farage is a spiv. Until recently he was taking money for hire for people wanting a short video of him wishing a relative or friend Happy Birthday or any other sort of greeting. He’s now embracing being chief vandal of the Conservative Party, but it is difficult to determine what, if any, principles this media star embraces. It does seem like he is likely to actually win a seat in Parliament after his 8th try.  We will see what Reform contributes to the House of Commons.

Regardless of the outcome, it is obvious that nothing will be done in the UK to address the biggest problems facing the country.

Health policy is almost impossible to efficiently address because the NHS is a national religion. No other developed country lionises a bureaucracy like the UK does for one of the world’s largest civilian bureaucratic employers. To criticise “our NHS” is almost like questioning Islam in Tehran, and makes politicians on left and right blubber and foam at the mouth, before uttering incoherent bile that “we don’t want to be like America”, as if the world has two health systems to choose from. Labour will pour more money down the maw that is the health-professional dominated and run NHS, and in five years’ time people will still be complaining about it, and still will resist a real alternative – like a European style universal health insurance scheme (which Nigel Farage has surprisingly endorsed). Spending on the NHS has risen as a proportion of GDP from 7.5% to 8.2% in the last 14 years, but of course it is never enough.

Likewise, housing is impossible to address because of the Town and Country Planning Act which nationalised decisions on the use of land to local authorities, all of which are dominated by NIMBYs from across the spectrum.  Whether it be building up or out, most councils don’t like housing being built, unless they get to specify it, and impose conditions like “40% affordable”, which makes it difficult to built housing for a mid-market that wont pay to cross-subsidise below cost building, or banning car parks (because cars are bad as they create congestion, but only two councils have ever implemented congestion pricing because none of them actually want to make driving easier).  Labour wont fix housing because it wont take housing out of the hands of NIMBY councils.

Similarly, electricity prices in particular are a concern, but Labour’s answer is to create a state-owned retailer, rather than address the real issue which is the lack of generation built in the past twenty years. This follows a single-minded obsession with lowering emissions to atone for the industrial revolution, whilst (similar to housing) the UK makes it impossible to build substantial new power stations, such as nuclear (notwithstanding the corporatist hand-out from taxpayers to the French state owned power company EDF and Chinese state owned power company CGN to build the massively overpriced Hinkley Point C nuclear plant).  Gordon Brown, then David Cameron continued to wage war on emissions without being honest about the impact it would have on consumers’ energy bills, and Keir Starmer is placating his far-left wing by claiming it’s all just capitalism ripping people off (so a bit of state socialism would fix it).

Many Brits are concerned about illegal migration, with the large numbers of small boats, mostly young men who pay people smugglers to take them from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, seeking employment, housing and to access the generosity of the welfare state.  Few are genuine refugees, and besides they are travelling by boat from safe countries such as France and Belgium, precisely because they see fewer opportunities for employment and see the UK as more generous than the largely contributory based welfare states on the continent. While a few Brits are racist and opposed to immigration per se, most are simply concerned about people entering en masse with relatively little control over the numbers or what happens to them (as those caught are detained at taxpayer expense for months whilst they are processed).  The Rwanda solution (flying those deemed not refugees to Rwanda) has proven unworkable, as the UK Government seeks to avoid breaking international law around the treatment of refugees. The fundamental problem is that the law did not anticipate a whole industry of economic migrants seeking to enter welfare states.  

The Conservatives could either have spent a fortune on border protection, to turn back boats, detain economic migrants and process them, or converted the UK’s welfare state, including health, education and housing into a contributory system like much of the continent. However, neither were done nor will be done. The UK will continue to attract tens of thousands of young undocumented economic migrants eager to work on low wages at best, or engage in organised crime at worst.  

However, most of all the UK will do nothing to address its productivity sclerosis.  Whether it be energy, or airport runways, or roads (virtually all local authorities are averse to reducing traffic congestion), or regulations on land use, or taxation, or reducing barriers to competition, there is no real interest in the major political parties in doing anything about this (except for a rump in the Conservatives). No one will deal with the PONZI scheme of the state pension, no one will make the welfare and education system more supportive of incentivising training and work, rather than dependency and low value “degrees” from “universities” that are little more than glorified former polytechs. In the meantime, the Starmer Government wont confront at all the seething anti-semitism and Islamism that has been seen most clearly in the protests supporting Hamas in Gaza, but also has been bubbling for many years seen in pockets of terrorism from time to time.  Critical constructivism has no time for installing a sense of being “British” as something to bring people together, even though the outgoing Conservatives have exemplified a country that embraces migrants and women as leaders, noting that the next likely leader of the Conservatives is Kemi Badenoch, a woman of Nigerian ancestry who completely reject critical constructivism and socialism. That is how far the UK has come. 

It's fundamentally tragic, and of course the First Past the Post system magnifies victories and losses when they are so overwhelming. The only hope I have for the UK is that the Conservatives are the party of Opposition, and not superseded by the Illiberal Demagogues in sheer numbers. For all of that, the people who should hold their heads in shame for the loss of the Conservatives are Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and their many colleagues who thought that being in government was about managing the status quo, and fiddling, rather than using mandates to transform the country.  

I’m glad I’m out, but I'm sad that so much has been squandered by people who didn't deserve power.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion is a fundamentally low-grade, Orwellian anti-liberal project

Sunday Telegraph editor, and vehement classical liberal, Allister Heath, writes about the "DEI" movement, which has spread like a cancer around US universities and corporates, in scathing terms:

DEI is only interested in racial or gender diversity. It doesn’t really care about poverty, class or geography. It loathes diversity of thought; it preaches an imbecilic groupthink that can never be questioned. It denies the scientific method. Its more extreme North American proponents occasionally even reject the idea that 2+2=4, claiming it implies “covert white supremacy”, the sort of lunacy that would have made even the Soviet pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko blush.... 

The woke demand performative adherence to dogma, even when it is evidently contrary to reality, hence “Gays for Palestine” chanting pro‑Hamas and pro-Houthi slogans, even though both terror organisations are brutally homophobic, whereas Tel Aviv celebrates gay pride. Eliminating objective reality is every tyrant’s dream: citizens can no longer judge the validity of what they are being told. 

That's it, it's the latest part of the 20th century post-modernist excrescence that denies evidence, reason and genuine diversity between individuals.  Indeed it is a movement of neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, with staggering parallels with that most murderous period in China's history.

...DEI advocates group “justice” that is at once unjust and inequitable, based on confiscation and redistribution. People don’t matter, only aggregate statistics. Individual merit counts for nought: DEI judges people solely on their membership of a tribe based on racial or sexual characteristics. This is a reversal of centuries of Western progress towards individual dignity, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals and a readoption of pre-modern group politics....

DEI is horrifically exclusionary, seeking to cancel anybody who fails to pretend to agree: it embraces the permanent inquisition, the auto-da-fé, excommunication and (metaphorically) burning heretics at the stake. Staff are “encouraged” to take the knee, to wear special lanyards, to share pronouns. Employees are divided into “allies” and “adversaries”, with the “good” in-group pitted against the “bad” out-group. “Micro-aggressors” are denounced.

This toxic philosophy is as destructive to individual freedom as Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, Islamism and all other forms of mystical authoritarianism, because it is mystical. It is entirely based on the feelings of the proponent, it is inherently inconsistent and immune to evidence. It is a social movement that has life because of well-meaning people who take the claims of the philosophy on face value, but is catalysed by generals of sociopathic misanthropists who lead armies of dimwitted malcontents and grifting inadequates, keen to shame, cancel and scream at those they deem "the enemy".

Diversity movements, activists, units and managers are about the exact opposite. No business should have a bar of it, and should purge its marketing and human resources departments (especially the latter, which is an administrative overhead all businesses should minimise). 

Government should purge it as well, eliminate it from all government agencies and make all staff who exist to promote the concept within government redundant.  I wont be holding my breath though.

Wellington is in a funk

The general election has knocked Wellington for six and has put a great deal of public servants and more than a few in the consultancy-industrial complex in a funk, because philosophically and culturally, the change in government has shown up the gulf between them and the government. It has also demonstrated two major issues:

• The dearth of strategic and intellectual grunt in much of the public sector;

• The ideological chasm between many of the (largely young and relatively new) public servants, and the Government they have vowed to serve.

I moved back to Wellington last year after a considerable absence, and I noticed quite a few changes, and there have been a lot more since the election. Not in the sense of the urban form (that hasn’t changed dramatically), nor infrastructure (setting aside the leaks everywhere), but rather in the culture and capability of the public service, and those who provide some degree of heft in fundamental public policy analysis are in short supply.

I spent ten years in the Wellington public service before leaving it (and the country) to be a consultant.  When I first joined it was clear there was a significant cohort of senior and leadership talent in parts of the public service in particular that were formidable in their intellectual capability, commitment to ideological neutrality and interest in an evidence based approached to public policy. Sure there were differences, but overwhelmingly there was one key factor, a deep understanding of what they did and did not know, and what they could not know.  I saw this in The Treasury and the economic sector-based departments, such as what was then the Ministry of Commerce (since morphed into MBIE) and Ministry of Transport.  There was a bit less in the Department of Internal Affairs, but it was still there.  The more social policy-oriented agencies were somewhat different. Health, Education and Environment had less experience of structural reform, and still believed they could be the repositories of all that is best practice in their sectors.  The departments responsible for oversight and regulation of business and the productive sectors knew differently.  

They all knew that, by and large, they had no idea how much of the economy worked in any detail.  These were people who looked at the likes of the telecommunications sector and wouldn’t even pretend to know the details of the technology being used, because it mostly didn’t matter (unless it was related to something the government had to do, like auction radio spectrum for mobile phone use). Nor did they pretend they knew what the cost or price of inputs were, if markets were competitive or not falling between the cracks of the role of the Commerce Commission.  After all, history is replete with examples of how neither bureaucrats nor most politicians have the faintest idea about what changes in technology or markets will come next.  There were bureaucrats who knew that.  I recall sitting in a meeting room in 1997 with a manager at the Ministry of Commerce, who got the IT Department to set up a demonstration of a free application called Real Audio which was streaming radio programmes from across the world.  He said at that moment “this is the future and it will disrupt everything we do in broadcasting, it’s a matter of time”, this was when politicians were mainly fretting about the use of dial-up internet to access pornography.  That manager was right of course, but at the time the Ministry of Commerce was responsible for broadcasting policy, alongside telecommunications, IT and energy policy. Broadcasting is now within the purview of the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and the Arts, which is not an organisation with a primary culture of business and innovation. 

The beginning of change in that culture happened under the Clark Government, which was much more pro-active and wanted to “do more”.  However, that Government did get plenty of advice around the limitation of the public service to actually know what was best for particular sectors (except of course the social sectors, which acted much more as intermediaries between the strong professional producer sector interests and the government, especially since more than a few people in the social public sector would switch employments with the professional producer lobby). While the Key Government paused that change, the Ardern/Hipkins Government put it into overdrive, and the Luxon Government will be seeing the signs of it.

The election of Tamatha Paul as MP of Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter as MP for Rongotai provides a sign of what has happened to the Wellington public service in that time.  It's a far cry from Richard Prebble being elected in Wellington Central in 1996, and the time when it was seen as a marginal seat between National and Labour. No more.  The public sector has seen retirement of many men and women who were part of both the Muldoon era of extraordinary central planning, and the Lange/Palmer/Moore/Bolger era of dismantling central planning and instituting more direct accountability in the public sector for results, and in taking political and bureaucratic decision making away from trading enterprises, ranging from the Post Office to the Railways and Electricity Department.  Those people have retired, moved away or passed away. Some remain from the 90s, but are increasingly pushed aside by the well-meaning, but shallow culture around promoting “new perspectives” around “diversity”, which does not include depth or breadth or critical thinking (not in the post-modernist sense) in public policy.  The Wellington public service grew enormously in the past six years, drawing upon enthusiastic graduates, predominantly coming with support for the Government of the day, bringing with them a leftwing ideological framework, which are not just the traditional enthusiasm for state-intervention and suspicion and cynicism about private enterprise, but rather the wholesale cultural revolution in how they think about the state, society and stratification of the country into people categorised as oppressive, oppressed or allies of the oppressed. MP Debbie Ngarewa-Packer characterised it as being Tangata Whenua, Tangata Tiriti and everyone else (the racists). So a combination of left-wing enthusiasm for state intervention, regulation, spending and taxation, with an suspicion around the interests and the views of significant portions of the public, including those of more senior civil servants, because of identity factors (e.g. race, sex, gender).  None of that would matter one iota if they could put that to one side and be highly competent public policy analysts, but that competence is wanting, and it’s clear from plenty of people engaging with the well-meaning, but lacking historical knowledge and being weak on analytical capability.

As a result the mood today in many government departments, particularly the more social and environmental policy oriented ones, is one of fear and depression, as a workforce of relatively young public servants, most of whom did not vote for this government, struggle to cope with being asked to implement policies they don’t agree with. Some act professionally, and it is to the credit of some that they seem to have delivered the Government’s “First 100 day” plan. Few are obstructive, clearly one or two are choosing to leak, but many of them are moping about, worrying about becoming unemployed and are openly, to their like-minded colleagues, unhappy about the choice of voters.

When I was a public servant I was generally not happy with any government that was elected, on a lot of issues, but when it came to the sectors I worked in (and there were a few), I put it all to one side. People knew what my politics was, but I also knew what high quality public policy was as well.  You serve Ministers, you seek to achieve their policy objectives, you analyse alternatives and you implement what Ministers want.  You give free and frank advice, and they either take it, or they continue to do what they want to do, and you can simply say they were told, if the consequences don’t turn out how they wanted. That’s not the mood in Wellington now.

Of course it will change. Although there is significant scope to scale down the numbers of people doing policy in government in Wellington, the scope to scale down the depth and breadth is small, because there is a distinct lack of talented, capable and clever people, who put aside their personal political biases in favour of evidence-based policy advice.  Most importantly, there are few who will admit to Ministers “we don’t really know how to do that” or “we don’t know how that part of the economy works” or “we don’t have the knowledge or experience on that issue Minister”.

I’ll take one example in a field I know something about. “The Aotearoa New Zealand Freight and Supply Chain Strategy”. I’m frankly gobsmacked that a lot of people clearly pulled together something which smacks of the sort of central planning NZ had done away with in the 1980s. The idea that MoT is steward of the freight and supply chain system is so laughable as to be a joke.  There is no remote hope that the Chief Executive of MoT, let alone almost any of the staff, would know how to arrange the consignment of freight from any producer to customers or outlets.  There is relatively little about productivity and competition, yet 62 pages has been dedicated to a “strategy” which has as its main challenge not labour shortages (which have been a major issue), but climate change. Nine immediate actions are proposed, all of which are either about more planning or lowering emissions. It’s a manifesto for central planners.  Nobody was willing to tell Ministers that “we don’t know much about any of this, and we have no visibility into how businesses and transport firms arrange and price their services, or invest in capital”, or if they did the response was “find out, collect data”!

Where does this lead a public service that ought to be focused on delivering on an agenda that many of its staff disagree with?  It's not easy, particularly as getting talent to work in Wellington is tough nowadays.  However the government appears willing to lean down the state sector (albeit not enough), which should provide ample opportunities to send blinkered ideologues with mediocre intellectual grunt to a new life not serving a government they hate. 

There are three strategies that might help as well:

1. Cull activities in Ministries and Departments to enable competent people to focus on the priorities of the new Government. This has already started, but the competent people need to be placed on high-profile, high-risk projects of reform and delivery. This require line-by-line scrutiny of the work programmes of each Ministry, Department and agency, to strike out what isn’t needed. Then offer redundancies to those no longer needed.

2. Don’t be afraid to restructure. Who would trust the Ministry of Education to implement Charter Schools any more than you would have trusted the Post Office to implement a competing mobile phone network or the Railways Department to implement a competing trucking firm? Treasury likes consolidation, but smaller, nimbler agencies can be more responsive, and incentivised to be focused.

3. Push for cultural change in the public service. This means focusing once again on accountability, transparency, delivery and efficiency, and recognising the limits of knowledge and capability. Hayek’s “Fatal Conceit” concept would be a helpful one to promote.  Encouraging understanding of concepts around markets, competition and the "law of unintended consequences" and to be concerned about capture by interests, whether they be business, producer unions or lobbyists, even those with purportedly "altruistic" motives.

4.      Better link the public/consumers to the supply of the services provided by the state to them.  Give them incentives to perform.  This used to be done by setting up SOEs, but the scope for that is largely spent.  

It might be farewell Newshub, but intelligent TV news disappeared over 30 years ago

 I do have a shred of sadness if it turns out that TV3 wont have a news service anymore. A shred because it really is a shadow of its former self.  It seemed like New Zealand had finally joined the rest of the developed world when finally private enterprise had been permitted to broadcast television news in competition with the state-owned enterprise, TVNZ. 

However, when TV3 launched it was in the context of a transformation of TVNZ from the mixed-mode blended commercial/public service broadcaster to a fully fledged commercial broadcaster, which had dire consequences for the depth and breadth of TV news. Under CEO Julian Mounter, TVNZ achieved significant commercial success, but saw its news and current affairs shift towards the model seen largely in US local commercial broadcast news. Serious reporting of politics and world affairs got diluted in favour of crime, celebrities, sport and disaster, as the idea was to maximise the news audience by making it “accessible” (dumbed-down) and “relevant” (relatable). The preference being for stories to be binary in nature, like sport. Crime is easy – “bad person does bad thing to good person”. Disasters “bad thing happens to good people”. Nuance and depth of discussion around public policy and politics, or world affairs has little space in this. Indeed, the focus on international affairs was largely to “make it relevant” which from time to time meant finding a NZer in whatever country something was happening, so we might “understand” what it means. Of course, it worked in getting sheer numbers of viewers and pleasing advertisers, so TV3 entered the market finding it very hard indeed to attract enough people from TVNZ. So much so that TV3 effectively went into receivership in under a year, resulting in liberalisation of media foreign ownership laws so that there could be 100% foreign ownership of broadcasters.

Of course it was what happened to TVNZ that saw Lindsay Perigo leave TVNZ declaring its news and current affairs "braindead", and of course he was right.

TV3 news in the 1990s did have some highlights. It was notable in extending what was the half-hour news bulletin to one hour, at 6pm at the time of the Gulf War.  TVNZ for some time claimed it had a “news hour” because it had half an hour of Holmes, but eventually relented and extended to one hour.  TV3 took direct TV news feeds from NBC during the Gulf War, and TVNZ followed with ABC (US) and ITN.  TV3 also for a while had a weekly current affairs show called The Ralston Group, hosted by Bill Ralston, which had him discussing issues of the week with four journalists/commentators from across the political spectrum.  

Newshub today is a shadow of that, and is essentially indistinguishable from TVNZ.  It’s far from clear why anyone would prefer either channel for news, short of personal preference around personalities. Both channels take a “once over lightly” approach to news, both are more than keen to place a major sports success for a NZ team as a lead story over war overseas. Both channels also have a statist leftwing slant to their bulletins, noting most recently their willingness to report statistics published by Hamas. The fact they are philosophically indistinguishable, and also indistinguishable in terms of depth and emphasis means that it is hard to miss Newshub.  A tweet a few days ago asking what people think of the new Jetstar uniforms rather said it all for me.

So yes, it will be a shame if the only NZ television news comes from state-owned broadcasters. Yes I mean broadcasters, because Whakaata Maori (once known as Maori Television) is another TV broadcaster with news, although it is ideologically also statist, collectivist and left-wing in its bias. However, Newshub offered nothing new or different.  It could have gone more in-depth, less populist and more serious, in the hope it could attract an audience of people with higher incomes, higher education and attractive to a smaller, but wealthier base for some advertisers.  It could have been philosophically more pro-business, less-statist, less-collectivist more in the mould of Sky News Australia or GB News, which might have attracted an audience that was not keen on “woke”, identity politics or the solutions to problems being new laws or new taxpayer spending.  It could have chosen to have a current affairs show at 7pm instead of the woeful The Project, which just was a variation on TVNZ’s Seven Blunt. Given its 200 or so staff, it’s astonishing how light in content Newshub is.

I hope TV3 can come back with some form of news broadcast, even if it collaborates with Sky, relegates international news to a rebroadcast of a foreign broadcaster’s content, and just sticks to reporting a shorter serious news bulletin. Having the state monopolise TV news just feels wrong, as of course there is no hope that the current government, given the presence of NZ First, would privatise TVNZ. 

However, if it doesn’t happen, we wont have lost much, because NZ lost TV news that wasn’t braindead a long time ago.  If you want something akin to Newshub, you just need to switch to One News.

Mining companies, white supremacy, Zionism, neo-colonialism, libertarianism and education vouchers: The fascist programme to establish a racist, oppressive state that will wreck the planet

I wrote in my previous post that I am embarking on a journey, thanks to the sagacious commentator and academic, Dr. Mohan Dutta.  Although he is unaware of this, I am truly grateful for him showing me a new way and recognising that I may have been duped, for years, to be an instrument of dark forces, from overseas and paid for by mining and fossil fuel interests, who only want to make a profit exploiting others.

I said I had questions, and I do, as I have been deconstructing the network of connections that means libertarianism is actually a vehicle for fascist white-supremacy and neo-colonialism, including Zionism, which is a tool of not only apartheid, but allegedly genocide.  This is serious stuff and very confronting for anyone who has spent a good 25 years or so promoting libertarian ideas and politics, to be told that actually what you advocate for isn't more freedom, less government and getting the state out of people's lives, but rather a sinister strategy to facilitate takeover of society by mining and fossil fuel interests.  It's not advocacy for individual rights, but advocacy for racism and oppression of people.

I'm unsure what this really means for what form of government we should have, how laws should constrain freedom of speech, funding of political activities and the rights of mining and fossil fuel companies. I don't know what it means for foreign affairs, beyond ending diplomatic relations with Israel.  However, I do want to know, and I want to know whether everything I believed in is for naught, or if there are shreds of campaigning for individual freedom that are worth continuing with.

So here are some of my questions: 

1. Given Zionism is irredeemable (apartheid, settler-colonialism), do Jews have a right to self-determination as a people? If so, where? If not, what is it about them that denies them this right?  Are they not a nationality or race, but just a religion, or is it that they have a right to self-determination, but somewhere else? If so, where?

2. Does the right to self-determination on land where your ancestors once lived and governed, disappear if the people who moved there subsequently, and were part of empires that conquered that land, still have their descendants living on part of that land?  If so, does that not also apply to lands with generations of settlement of people who live on land previously occupied and governed by other people indigenous to that land?  How is this applied consistently in a principled way?

3. What makes "whiteness" a unique characteristic among racial groups globally? Does it apply to all ethnicities that are visibly "white", notwithstanding the diversity of languages, religions, histories, cultures and experiences?  If not, what is its essential nature? (I know there are books, but they are not all consistent). 

4. Is it possible to want individual freedom, small government and human beings interacting voluntarily without being part of a scheme to enrich mining and fossil fuel companies? 

5. Many declared white-supremacists are anti-semitic, and hate Jews as much as other races (such as the Nazis), what makes them different from the ones that are libertarian, who like Jews and hate Nazis, is this just internecine warfare between people who are similar, or something else?

6. Islamist militant groups universally use violence as a form of resistance and often expound racist rhetoric that is Islamic supremacist in nature. Where do they fit in, or am I misconstruing their otherwise heroic revolutionary acts of self-determination that are not to be interpreted under the lens of "whiteness"?

7. If libertarianism is fascist and white supremacist, are statist authoritarians (those advocating a very intrusive and dominant state role in the economy and society) anti-fascist and anti-racist? Or rather, is the solution to libertarian fascism and racism the adoption of a large government that has significant control over economic and social systems?

8. If education vouchers are a tool of white supremacy, does that mean that Sweden (a pioneer of educational vouchers) is a white-supremacist state?  Are all European states white supremacist? How do they avoid this?

9. Is Zionist backed white supremacy the most virulent and destructive ideological influence in the world today, or are there others? I gather the Hindutva moment is similar, as Dr Dutta has written much about it, but do other countries or cultures also promote similarly fascist ideologies? If so, what are they?

10. If the solution to Palestine is for Israel to be disbanded, should we even consider the future of Palestine at that point? What would happen to the Jews there?  Jews in most Arab countries have declined in number precipitously, is this something to be concerned about, or should we just not care what happens to the Zionists?

11.  What is the answer to Ukraine? Is this just white supremacists fighting each other? Should we all just let them fight and hope for peace? 

12. How should the international order be restructured for decolonisation and anti-racism? Presumably it means the US withdrawing globally, along with disbandment of NATO and an international order of the South having more power (excluding fascist Hindutva India).  Can we trust the People's Republic of China to lead a new peaceful world order, or will a multi-polar world just be more peaceful and just?  Does there need to be reparations paid by Western countries (and presumably Japan) to the South? How is consensus to achieve this to be reached to take such taxes from people in those countries? How do we avoid corruption in the South seeing such money accumulating in the hands of national elites?

13. Decolonisation should always exclude violence against civilians, but does that include what a post-colonial government does to civilians?  Some post-colonial governments have been brutal to the civilian population in implementing their policies (see Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Zaire/DRC), how should we respond to this?

14. Virtually all of South and Central America is dominated by people who are, by the definition applied to Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and the USA, settler-colonialists. How is this injustice to be addressed? Is resistance against these governments, from Mexico to Chile, justified? 

More questions will come no doubt

A Revelation

Happy New Year everyone. I was hoping for a break over Christmas and New Year, but I was busy. I had a Road to Damascus experience. I’ve been a libertarian for over 25 years, and having at different times been a member of ACT, Libertarianz (when it existed) the Taxpayers’ Union and the Free Speech Union, I had my own set of views, and I would happily express them. I expressed untramelled opposition to Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, and expressed dismay and anger towards those who not just ignored it but seemed to celebrate it. However, I was naïve, I did not join the dots to understand fully what I was a part of, when I tweeted my opposition to a phrase published by a man I clearly misunderstood.  I would have gotten away with continuing this if it hadn’t been for the meddling Professor. 

What I wrote

By whom I mean the world-renowned expert in developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right, Dr Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University.  Dr Dutta reminds me of Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics who became famous for his commitment to anti-imperialism and taking on global capitalism and those exaggerating or not understanding the context of emancipatory movements around the world, and the network of white supremacist, libertarian, Zionist, extractive industry funded pro-settler colonialist promoters opposing them. 

Dr Dutta caught me (and others part of this network) tweeting about him, and explained in some detail, (in over 5,000 words) on New Year’s Eve quite how it all works. In truth I am shocked and ashamed, because I didn’t quite realise the connections, but it is all clear now.   He wrote this article which I unreservedly defend his freedom of speech to produce.  I don't want him silenced, I want his views shared and of course with that he will have to defend his views, but that highlights them more.

See I thought when he said:

I was therefore not surprised to wake up today in the backdrop of what would be described as a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance and my expression of solidarity to it to angry and racist tweets by Giraud. 

He was supporting Hamas's attacks, but that oversimplified and falsely represented his views, and he opened my eyes.

I had thought that libertarian movements and groups domestically and overseas were simply people who believed that society’s problems were best resolved through voluntary human interaction, co-operation and trade, rather than through the use of coercion through government. I thought they were avowedly against the initiation of violence (violence only being approved in self-defence, and proportionately so), and that a belief in treating all humans as individuals based on their deeds and character was an ethical position to have. 

I did not realise I had been duped for so long by the world’s extractive industries (by which I take to be mining and fossil fuel extraction) seeking to make their fortunes through neo-colonialism.  You see those industries, which despite being only 12% of global GDP, exercise disproportionate power and control over governments and the public. They make money by imposing the white supremacist concept of “property rights” over land and by requiring white supremacy (even China is now doing this) to ensure labour in extractive industries is predominantly undertaken by ethnic minorities and seeks to ensure they remain impoverished. This is especially so in colonial-settler countries such as the United States and Australia, although official statistics in both countries indicate indigenous people in both countries form a tiny part of extractive industry employment, I haven’t done enough research to question Dr Dutta’s findings. He also notes the role of the tobacco industry, but I thought that was a tiny part of the global economy and not at all influential.

Extractive industries seek to promote both white supremacy (this includes the mining and fossil fuel businesses owned and managed from countries such as China, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (all of South America is colonialist-settler based though)), because whiteness brings with it the concept of privatising property and human relations (I’m not sure quite how Marx, Engels and Lenin fit into this, all being white and seeking to abolish private property, and implement an idealised society without exploitation and where there would be equal provision for all, but again I am new to this). 

This is where I once was confused.  See I thought white supremacy was what was seen in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, UDI Rhodesia and the US Deep South, of course most European colonialism was a project led by a belief in superiority of the colonisers over the colonised. This changed after WW2, when most colonies became independent, and the horrors of the Holocaust shocked most of the world, and theories of race and eugenics were seen as immoral. A more classically liberal view of humanity emerged, with human rights of individuals, not limited by race, nationality, caste or sex.  

I was wrong, in fact the classical liberal/libertarian view of rights is white supremacy, not just because it was developed mostly by white people, but because treating people as individuals blanks out the oppression people experience and feel. I thought that because the Nazis ran a totalitarian state, the Apartheid regime had severe restrictions on freedom of speech and movement, and even the segregationist states of the US severely constrained private property rights, freedom of movement and speech, that a libertarian would be absolutely opposed to racism, let alone white supremacy.  Especially given the writings of ultra-nationalists and racial supremacist politicians and political parties always seem to promote strong, interventionist states with little tolerance for untrammelled free speech, legalising drugs, free trade, foreign investment and immigration. 

So libertarians are white supremacists funded by extractive capital, but it goes further. The global network of libertarians pushing school vouchers and school choice actually want only rich people’s children to be educated, and to sustain racial differences in educational outcomes (although I’m unsure if this includes the above-average performance of children from various Asian backgrounds in many countries, including the US and the UK, but Dr Dutta might have an answer for this).  School choice is a tool of white supremacy and colonialism.

Dr Dutta rightfully places the example of Equatorial Guinea, a country I know a bit about, as an example of colonialism exploit its resources, but I’m not clear whether the Franco regime instituting Macias Nguema was designed to exploit resources that it didn’t know existed at the time (fossil fuels) who then systematically slaughtered a third of the population.

What’s most sinister though is the links between white supremacy and Zionism. Zionism isn’t a project whereby the Jewish people (who I mistakenly thought lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years) have an independent state on their historic lands, after centuries of colonisation and imperial invasion, but is a settler-colonial project. Maybe Ken Livingstone got it right and the Nazis and the Zionists were in cahoots? Of course, I was first astonished that the people who suffered the first industrialised genocide in history, undertaken by a white supremacist government, could actually be called white supremacists themselves – but Dr Dutta says it is a colonial settler regime that engages in apartheid (I’m unsure whether the Arab members of the Knesset fit into apartheid, and where non-Jews are prevented from going within Israel, but who am I to judge?).  

This all comes back to what I first said. I thought when Dr Dutta after the Hamas pogrom saying it was “a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”, that saying it is a “resistance” means it was justified (is a resistance not justified ever?), and saying it was a “powerful exemplar” meant its meaning was powerful and it was an example, perhaps for others seeking decolonisation. 

He has since clarified that decolonisation “fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives”, which infers condemning all forms of terrorism, which is a relief. No ethical person could possibly support what Hamas does to its own people, let alone Israelis.

I could go on, but the links Dr Dutta makes are clear:

Mining and fossil fuel companies seek exploitative profits and cheap labour.

To achieve this they promote idea of private property, freedom of speech (but they don’t like people criticising their ideas), school choice and small government.

This promotes white supremacy, because only white people benefit from these ideas.  Zionists are white supremacists as well, because like white supremacists that lead major Western countries (Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak – don’t let his name fool you into thinking he isn’t a tool of white supremacy), they want more settler colonialism.  They are colluding with the Free Speech Union to suppress the voices of Palestinian solidarity and to attack anti-racist concepts like Critical Race Theory and decolonisation – which proves how racist they are.

Libertarian organisations are funded by mining companies to promote policies for the expansion of genocidal white supremacist including Zionists, and will wreck the environment and exploiting non-white people.

I don’t want to be a part of that. Not just because I’ve not seen a dollar of money from extractive industries or the Atlas Network, but because I don’t want to be a part of an international ecosystem of misinformation that is about wrecking the planet, expanding colonialism and promoting white supremacy, that encourages Zionism (which is implementing genocide apparently). 

I thought the far-right were explicitly racist people wanting largely closed ultra-nationalist states that categorise people by race, with laws and money distributed by the state based on racial characteristics, and a heavy-handed state that suppresses speech, media and art it finds offensive, and hated Jews.

I was apparently wrong.

Dr Dutta has explained a lot, but I do have a lot of questions.  

New Zealand politics in 2024

2023 was a year when New Zealand voters most adamantly said they wanted change. The near personality-cult around Jacinda Ardern had well and truly eroded, as the rhetoric around the government of “kindness” (implemented using the monopoly of legitimised violence of the state) and the budget of “wellbeing” (implemented by taking money from current and future generations) seemed increasingly empty. The government so committed to ending poverty had presided over the fastest increase in personal wealth by homeowners in modern history and its primary response was to tax landlords who didn’t want to rent out their properties for fewer than ten years without selling them.  It presented itself as a victim of external forces, whether it be Covid or inflation which NZ was constantly told was due to the war in Ukraine, even though many of NZ’s trading partners had lower inflation.

Although there was a brief flurry of excitement about Chris Hipkins, appearing to recalibrate Labour on “what matters”, voters were largely unconvinced. Hipkins follows Mike Moore and Bill Rowling in leading Labour to landslide defeats, albeit for different reasons. Jacinda Ardern is nearly invisible in the country that was hailed internationally for keeping Covid out, and she is now hailed internationally by those who never visited NZ, and she is now at Harvard, whose President Claudine Gay is surrounded by scandal around claiming that if a student of Harvard advocated for genocide against Jews, it would “depend on the context” as to whether it breached its policy on harassment and bullying. Claudine Gay is also now facing accusations of plagiarism in her earlier work.

The former Prime Minister of kindness hasn’t been approached for comment on what she thinks about the head of her new gig’s ambivalence about anti-semitism, but then again why would she abandon her career of highly-paid talkfests?

Meanwhile the 2023 election saw a threeway split in positions. While 27% were willing to give Chippy a go, 15% thought Labour had been far too timid and voted for the Greens and Te Pati Maori to advance a much more radical socialist, intersectionist, ethno-nationalist set of reforms including more tax, more spending, much more transfer of power from the state and Parliament to Iwi, and radical central planning around provision of health, education and the economy, let alone expansion of the welfare state to a universal benefit. 

The Greens and Te Pati Maori saw the changes as being that Labour didn’t do enough to address what it said it was doing about key issues such as climate change, poverty and Tino Rangitiratanga.  He Puapua was seen as a step along a journey of major constitutional change that would see Iwi standing side-by-side with Parliament and the “colonising” Government sharing power. Te Pati Maori successfully sold this vision to voters in almost all of the Maori seats, but Labour couldn’t sell the path of radical change to the general population, especially when questioning or criticising the path of more co-governance was simply labelled as racist and ignored.  

Fortunately around 55% (including some of the minor parties) voted in the other direction, with a mix of centre-right incrementalism (National), classical liberalism (ACT) and a touch of conservatism and nationalism (NZ First), with a couple of bones thrown at traditionalists.  It’s a historic switch in electoral support for Labour to lose 46% of the votes it gained in 2020 as a proportion of votes cast.  

The 2020 election was extraordinary, Labour got an unprecedented majority based almost entirely on having kept Covid 19 out of the country and life being relatively normal (albeit with foreign travel restricted for all but select politicians, officials and others chosen by the Government) compared to countries enduring extended lockdowns. Labour took that as a chance to embark on a series of radical reforms that ultimately saw its undoing. As it borrowed and spent to at first save businesses from collapse during the pandemic and then stimulate the economy, it went on to literally pay people money for nothing, and then blame inflation entirely on outside factors. As it increased benefits in order to address poverty (due in no small part due to a persistent housing shortage that can be blamed on governments of all stripes over the previous 25 years). it was no surprise that as baby boomers reached retirement age, a shortage of staff would emerge, as a generation withdrew from the labour force (bolstered by National Superannuation and inflated housing prices) and a growing number simply opted out of paid work altogether. Since 2017 the statutory minimum wage had been increased by just over 44%, even though prices in that same time had increased 25%. 

Reports of increasingly aggressive crime including ramraids were far too often dismissed or minimised, at least for those who were the victims of it, as it appeared that crime increasingly did pay.  Meanwhile, much needed reforms to the water sector had layered over them a complex governance structure that was to see Iwi, in four groups, deciding half of the members of boards, who would determine the members of another set of board, that would govern fresh, waste and stormwater infrastructure across the country.  This was all apparently because Te Tiriti now meant Iwi would have governance rights over whatever sectors the Government said it should – and infrastructure was now part of that.  It wasn’t enough for territorial authorities that own the infrastructure to consult with Iwi, not enough for there to be Iwi representatives on councils through exclusively Maori wards (which are democratically elected), but that Iwi would have equivalent powers to local government. Although some of the backlash against Three Waters was ill-directed mindless racism, the core issue – why should the future management of ratepayer owned assets be half governed by Iwi (who were already at the table of local government)?

Other completely unnecessary measures also gave the impression of a government less concerned about inflation and crime, than it was on social engineering and seeking to look as if it was addressing what it thought was important, when much of the public were concerned about the cost of living and threats to their families.

The aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque attack generated calls, particularly from parts of the Muslim community, to toughen laws on hate speech, primarily around religion. This raised concern that proposals advanced by the Ardern Government would constrain speech around ridiculing religions as “hate speech”.  Ultimately this was suspended, but it helped fuel a mix of genuine concerns around freedom of speech and conspiratorial concerns about a much more sinister intent.  Jacinda Ardern’s tone-deaf but well-meaning claim during the pandemic that if information “doesn’t come from us, then you can’t believe it” sounded straight out of the playbook of a dictatorship. No liberal democracy can or should claim it has the monopoly of truth, because it simply does not and cannot. 

The Public Interest Journalism Fund came from criticism that it was funding journalism that supported the Government’s policies, which although in some ways unfair, did include funding that specifically indicated a philosophical approach to some issues that was controversial, particularly around Te Tiriti. The lines between government and activism became blurred, including by the “Disinformation Project” which was clearly endorsed by the government, but which itself had its own ideological line.

The Disinformation Project of course has its own blind spots. It’s regular reporting of research by Byron Clark, former supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a breakaway communist led terrorist faction of the PLO) and the communist Workers Party of New Zealand, who was particularly focused on what he called the “far-right” didn’t ever reflect on the perspective someone clearly from the far-left would have on what is “extremist”. 

The 2021 controversy over the so-called “Listener 7” who claimed Matauranga isn’t science, and the long list of academics who sought to humiliate and denigrate them was also part of this dominant discourse in academia, media and politics. It was seen as an attempt to “cancel” and “close” debate on the topic, which extended to Dr Richard Dawkins in the UK, and responses claiming racism and colonialism emerged.  The debate around transgender rights, and the visit by “Posie Parker” supported by a coalition of womens’ rights activists and social conservatives saw similar discourse emerge, with a vehemence of anger and hatred.  All of this rubbed of on Labour, with a strong indication that there were opinions that brought “consequences” around employment and being accepted by academia, media and even business as having “correct” views on controversial topics. 

It's a side point that many of the same people who wanted “consequences” for challenging trans and Te Tiriti discourse run frightened when supporters of the Jewish community and opponents of Hamas condemn their Hamas-inspired rhetoric and slogans.

The majority of the voting public took in a mix of the narrative around the government, the cost of living crisis and concern about a lack of delivery (and performance personally about a growing list of Ministers who simply failed to meet standards of behaviour that should be expected of them).  ACT voters were dominated by those who had had enough of the growth in spending and taxation, and the politics of intersectionality and identity. National voters were primarily concerned about performance and lack of delivery, including the money wasted on expensive schemes seen as “out of touch” with what voters cared about. NZ First happily hoovered up the Covid 19 vaccine sceptics and opponents, but also returned to opposition to Maori nationalism and separatism and hitching onto other culture wars for convenience (see trans-rights).

There is now a National-led government that appears to clearly want to stem the growth in the state and, at the very least, return its size to that seen in 2017. It has clearly reversed some policies and is winding back reforms such as the centralisation of tertiary vocational training, the separate Maori health authority and Three Waters. Although some of the discourse around the government is catastrophism and projection of deranged phobia around its objectives (claims it wants to “erase” Maori or trans-people are unhinged nonsense), it is promising as a National-led government that actually is changing direction, which seems in part driven by ACT and NZ First both wanting to make their mark on the government. This should not be a surprise, as National did not win 40% of the vote, and is more dependent on both minor parties than it had been in the Key/English era.  There is also a generation of younger National, ACT and NZ First politicians who are fed up with a centre-right government simply pausing the advance towards more government and more compulsory collectivism.  

So far so good with most measures taken. It is obvious that Fair Pay Agreements had to go, along with the labyrinthine replacement to the RMA.  It’s particularly encouraging from an individual freedom perspective to see the removal of the tobacco prohibition measures, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth of neo-puritans on the left some who rightfully campaign to legalise cannabis but can’t see the inconsistency of prohibiting sales of tobacco to a growing number of adults.  We will wait to see what will come to replace the RMA.  

What I really want to see is for charter schools to flourish, to expand in number and for the thumping fist of the bureaucratic and professional union monopolies weakened in the control of the education system. I want the RMA replaced with private property rights. Nicola Willis has promisingly indicated willingness to cut core spending of many departments to 2017 levels, and for tax cuts.  

Of course, it wont be a libertarian government, but it looks like being a government that will turn back at least some of the spending and some of the regulation, and even some of the philosophical culture of the previous government. A government that is more interested in productivity and growth of private enterprise, rather than confiscation and distribution of the proceeds of production, and regulation and control of private individuals and their property. 

I can only hope that the calibre of Ministers will be on a significantly higher level than that of the Ardern/Hipkins era, and to be honest it wont be that hard. Nobody should pretend that it is easy to address crime or healthcare, because the fundamental reasons for both of this are long-standing and difficult to confront, but this government ought to focus on some key issues that it can start to turn around.  Educational choice and performance, and the barriers to enabling more housing.  If only it can adeptly take on the inevitable barrage of criticism from academia, media and the Opposition, who are eager to call it out as racist, misogynist, transphobic, white supremacist, neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist and every other blanket collectivist pejorative that can be lazily thrown around. Hopefully the front bench will have the testicular fortitude to respond intelligently and confidently to critiques, but more importantly give minimal reasons for criticism based on performance.

So in 2024 the National Party appears revitalised, and despite the critics, Christopher Luxon has emerged as Prime Minister, it is too early to tell whether the man as PM can prove to be greater than as Opposition Leader.  However, National might actually look like a government that isn’t conservative (in the sense of not changing) about Labour policies.

Labour is scarred, having few seats outside the main centres (Palmerston North and Nelson hanging on), and about to embark on a battle between the hardliners who think it lost for not being socialist enough (although if that were true, then those voters would have gone to the Greens and Te Pati Maori in sufficient numbers to give Labour a chance at government), and those who wonder how it could moderate its image and gain the confidence of voters again. For now, it looks like Labour will spend some time in the wilderness.

The Greens are buoyant because they have done very well indeed, winning two more electorates in Wellington, demonstrating very clearly the yawning gap between many Wellingtonians (including public servants, students and those working for industries supporting government) and the rest of the country, but maybe also the arrogance of Labour which thought it could parachute whoever it chose into two relatively safe seats, and win.  

ACT has a right to be pleased, because it will now have a more influential role in government than ever before. Hopefully it will be a greater success than Rodney Hide implementing Helen Clark’s vision for a greater Auckland Council, and it should enable ACT to stamp its mark on key issues such as education, gun regulation and freedom of speech.

Nobody rules out Winston anymore, as he pivoted and succeeded in being the voice for those who felt like their views, whether on Covid or Te Tiriti or on trans-issues, NZ First became the new conservatives, and a voice for those who felt unheard. The test for Winston Peters is whether he is seen as putting enough of a mark on this government to keep support for the following election. 

Finally Te Pati Maori will feel vindicated in reviving radical nationalist socialism with its support for the destruction of Israel and indifference to Russian irredentism. At best it showed Labour’s arrogance in assuming it still could own Maori voters, but at worst in indicates the outcome of many years of the promotion of intersectionality and structuralist theories in parts of Maoridom and by the state more directly. Labour funded and supported this philosophy while in government, and those who support it have found an authentic voice in favour of it – but it is not a position a majority of Maori, let alone voters in NZ, share.

Have a Happy 2024.

Some questions for those protesting for Palestine

I'm frankly astonished at the scale, frequency and anger of protests held in solidarity for Palestinians in Gaza, which variously call for a ceasefire, call for "freedom" for Palestine and which variously accuse Israel of atrocities, using the language and statistics issued by the Gazan totalitarian theocrats. It is driven by a coalition of communists, socialists, Islamists, ethno-nationalists and many many hangers on who see this as the latest "socially just" cause. 

Few can be moved by the suffering of the people in Gaza under fire, both from Israel and Hamas's own rockets falling short, but also the relentless oppression of the Hamas death cult.  However, how many protesting for Gaza know Israel cleared Gaza of Jews 18 years ago and left it to the Palestinian Authority? How many know Egypt has full control over a border with Gaza? How many actually care and just think Israel (and by extension the USA and the entire Western World) are irredeemable evil "insert pejorative"?

I have more to write about this in the coming week or so, but for now, I thought I'd put forward a series of questions for those who protest.  Not that I expect any to read or care.

1. Do you think Israel has the right to exist? 

2. If so, do you recognise that right within the pre-1967 borders? If not those borders go to question 4.

3. If so, what is the right response of any sovereign state to being invaded by a group that engages in a sadistic slaughter of your people and takes hostages?

4. If Israel should not exist (or exist within smaller boundaries), what do you want done to the people in Israel who live within those boundaries? Where do you want them to go? How do you intend to evict them from their homes? 

5. What do you call a political organisation (in this case Hamas) that wants to eliminate another country and kill all the people from that country, and all those of the ethnic group associated with it?  Do you believe such an organisation, which actively engages in violent action to implement that approach, should be permitted to exist?

6. What do you call a political organisation (in this case Hamas) that wants a totalitarian theocracy, with zero tolerance for other religious beliefs, zero tolerance for other political beliefs, and wants an absolutist theocratic state?  Would you tolerate funding and arming of that organisation if it sought to do it in your own country?

7. Do you believe leaving a population to be under that sort of government to be giving them “freedom”? If so, do you think people of other races deserve far fewer personal freedoms if a majority of those people think that its ok?

8. Do you believe Hamas will miraculously abide by the ceasefire you are now calling for, when the last time it was under a ceasefire, it invaded Israel and slaughtered over 1,000 civilians? If so, why?

9. When Hamas next breaks a ceasefire, what should Israel do in response?  

10. When Hamas shelters underneath hospitals, schools and homes, and uses those shelters to prepare munitions, to plan further attacks and hold hostages? What should be the right response to it?

11. If Israel withdrew (again) from Gaza, and opened the sea and airspace to Hamas, do you think it would build Gaza into a city of peace and prosperity where Palestinians could thrive, or would it use it as a staging post to wage war against Israel? What has history taught about this since 2007?

12. If Israel withdrew from the West Bank unilaterally, and pulled out all of the settlements, do you think Fatah would build it into a state of peace and prosperity where Palestinians would thrive, or would it be used as a staging post to wage war against Israel? What has the experience of Gaza indicated is likely?

13. Why are you angrier and more agitated about Israel’s response to aggression, than the aggression in the first place? Are people who peacefully went about their lives at homes or at a concert, without terrorists living and planning attacks on Gaza less important than people peacefully going about their lives whilst terrorists use their territory to wage war?

14. Why are you angrier about Israel’s response to Hamas than Ukraine’s response to Russia, or Russia’s attack on Ukraine in a war that has claimed 500,000 lives, or Myanmar’s deportation of over 700,000 Rohingyas, or the barrel bombing and use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria, or the fleeing of 100,000 Armenias from Nagorno-Karabakh? 

15. What do you think of people who celebrated the Hamas attack, and called it a “powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance” and gave solidarity to it? Do you want to be in protests with these people, and giving succour to them?

16. What do you think of the many examples of explicitly anti-semitic attacks on random Jews and Jewish businesses and properties around the world, including in NZ, by people who are proclaiming solidarity with Palestinians? Does this not remind you of the actions of the Nazis? Does it concern you that your protests and cause is attracting people with such virulent hate to attack innocent people and their property? Or do you think that it is justified?

17. If you think attacks on Israeli or Jewish targets are justified in protest, do you think attacks on other foreign government targets, or on Muslims or people of other faiths and nationalities are justified, if a government engages in violent actions that harm innocent people?

Let's talk about international law, Hamas and Israel

Who is Natasha Hausdorff?

After a law degree at Oxford University and an LL.M. specialising in public international law, Natasha clerked for the President of the Supreme Court of Israel in Jerusalem, acquiring a particular insight into the Court’s application of international law. In 2018, as a Pegasus Scholar, Natasha was a Fellow at Columbia Law School in the National Security Law Program. She frequently lectures around the world on aspects of public international law and national security policy.

Natasha Hausdorff schooling the BBC

The tolerance for hatred from some MPs

Before I make my point I unfortunately feel it is important to make a few context points. I’m not a supporter of Netanyahu, I don’t believe in a greater Israel and I do hold the widespread view that there is only a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in peaceful co-existence, which necessitates two states on the land concerned.  Criticism of the Israeli government isn't anti-semitic, because millions of Israelis do it regularly. You might argue that believing Israel shouldn't exist is anti-semitic, and I don't hold that view, but it certainly rejects the idea that Jews are entitled to national self-determination, and for people who proclaim that this is a fundamental right, why should Jews be exempt from this, unless you think they are lesser? Israel is a thriving liberal democracy, it contains the full spectrum of views on the issues confronting it, from fundamentalists who are eliminationists about Palestinian Arabs, to radicals who question the very existence of Israel at all. This spectrum of opinion, assuming it exists, cannot be expressed in Gaza or the parts of the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority.  Not that this matters to purported supporters of Palestinians. This post is not about debating Israel vs. Palestine, it is about whether or not you can support Palestinian Arabs as a people, without supporting the fascist eliminationist theocratic death cult of Hamas at the same time.  I am fairly certain that most of those who believe the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong were not supporters of Japan's fascist imperial government.  However, it would appear that many Palestinian supporters find it difficult to separate them from Hamas.

What is important is the narrow band of opinion expressed by those who openly support the Palestinian Arabs in New Zealand and how silent they almost all have been since Hamas invaded Israel to murder and abduct hundreds of Israelis, who live peacefully on territory recognised by every New Zealand government as being justifiably Israel.

With the exception of the geriatric tankie John Minto, who has always been off to the far-left, the silence has been deafening.  Green list MP Golriz Ghahraman condemned the attack, but of course there is always a but… about how Israel responds. Apparently if citizens of a government are attacked, murdered and abducted, the key focus should be on “not overreacting”.  In itself it may seem fair, but it's immoral to not call for Hamas to cease glorifying killing and promoting Jew hatred, and comparing that to a military defending its citizens from attack.

Auckland Central Green MP Chloe Swarbrick and Green list MP Ricardo Menendez-March have kept silent, as has Wellington Central Green candidate Tamatha Paul.  Green list MP Teanau Tuiono and Labour Christchurch Central MP Duncan Webb, both members of a Palestinian solidarity Facebook group that, before it locked down, contained rabidly anti-semitic rhetoric including Holocaust denial. 

Then we have the absurdity of Green co-leader Marama Davidson, in The Press debate claiming that if Hamas is to be declared a terrorist group, so should the Israeli Defence Forces. She grants moral equivalence between Islamofascists who call for eliminationist genocide of Jews worldwide, and the national military of a recognised sovereign state and member of the United Nations.  Even accepting, as I do, that the Israeli Defence Forces are far from angelic, Davidson’s comparison is telling – telling of either how absolutely batshit stupid she is, or how odious is her outlook on the world, and how terrifyingly she may see political violence carried out in the name of what she supports. 

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, Te Pati Maori list MP has also engaged in “whataboutery” around all this. Again, there has been no statement from Te Pati Maori condemning Hamas, but this is a party which has a foreign policy of being “friends to all”, except apparently when one of its “friends” tries murdering another. It’s morally empty.

Bear in mind the Green Party and the Labour Party have both been vehement in their demands for tougher laws to ban “hate speech”, it’s curious how tolerant they are of their own MPs allying themselves with people who engage in expressions that would be caught by this.

I on the other hand am quite happy for them all to show who they ally themselves with and tolerate in their campaign for Palestinian rights, and who they don’t condemn, because it speaks volumes.

Contrast it to how the Green Party acted in response to Posie Parker and her rally in the debate on transgender rights.  No doubt her rallies attracted some people objectively from the “far-right”, but it was hardly dominated by it, but the approach of the Greens, and transgender rights lobbyists were to damn all of their critics as “Nazis” by association.  Curious how this doesn't, at all, apply when it comes to Green MPs associating with those backing Hamas.

Hamas, of course, has zero tolerance for transgender or anyone with sexual or gender diversity at all. Like all Islamists they are ultra-conservatives who treat women as chattels, who regard homosexuality as an aberration solved by death, but overall they are fascists. Hamas spreads wanton anti-semitic propaganda and teaches children in its schools to celebrate martyrdom and killing Jews. Nazis would find much of their literature to be familiar.

So when Green and Labour MPs who support Palestinian rights don’t simultaneously condemn, unreservedly, Hamas, its ideology and its actions, are they associating with Nazis too? Does parading their slogan (shared with Hezbollah from Lebanon, and shared with radical elements of Fatah on the West Bank) mean these Green MPs are Nazis? Or does the use of the term Nazis not apply when it is a cause you believe in, even though you share that cause with people who embrace and promote actual Nazi ideology.

You might wonder then why Palestinian supporters have not said what is actually a defensible position in favour of a better life for the Palestinians:

• Hamas is an evil fascist racist organisation that will not help Palestinians to be free, and its actions and ideology are condemned unreservedly;

• The only solution to the Palestinian conflict is for a peaceful settlement whereby there are two states that exist side-by-side with mutual respect for the existence of each other, and which promote tolerance and free exchange between peoples;

• Israel has the right to defend itself, and it has the right to do what it takes to free hostages, apprehend terrorists and destroy Hamas’s means to kill its people;

• Palestinians deserve a free homeland, and the civil and political rights we take for granted, and there should be international co-operation to promote this, to not support movements that desire to eliminate Israel and promote Jew hatred.

• Israel deserves to live in peace, and to ensure all those within its borders have equal civil and political rights, and that does not mean settlements on occupied territory or to implement a Greater Israel on the occupied territories.

If any MPs or candidates support Hamas, then we all deserve to know and act accordingly.  If any of them refuse to condemn Hamas, then consider how it would be to refuse to condemn the Christchurch shooter, or to refuse to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and Te Pati Maori and the Greens are a bit weak on that too). 

It's been a dereliction of the duty of most of the media to not ask these questions. You might ask why? The Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand published a press statement which did not condemn the actions of Hamas at all, but actually condemned those who called out Hamas. This is an organisation that gained much sympathy and publicity for its demand for tolerance after the Christchurch shooting, and rightfully so. Now it has been shown to be disgraceful sympathisers with Hamas, and as a result, sympathisers of hatred towards Jews.  

So we can now see, clear as day, what the moral compass is of those who claim to have a moral compass about human rights, about tolerance, about combating hatred and even about rights for LGBT people, and women.

It’s broken. Whoever you vote for, don’t vote for individuals who can’t condemn the gleeful murder of people, who promote a theocratic fascist state with no tolerance for dissent from Islamism, no tolerance for Jews, no tolerance for political dissent, and no tolerance for gay, lesbian or the transgender people the empty vessels of the Green Party and Te Pati Maori claim to care about. Their tolerance and their opposition to hatred doesn’t apply to Jews, Israelis or EVEN Palestinians, because they are happy for Palestinians to be led by a fascist racist homophobic misogynistic death cult.  That also means don't vote Green or Te Pati Maori.  We can be grateful that Hipkins DID condemn Hamas, as did Luxon, Seymour and Peters.

My biggest hope is that tomorrow the Palestinian rallies are tiny, and the scenes from Sydney, where a group was not just celebrating the murder of Israelis, but calling for genocide, are not repeated.  If those who are keen on the cause could just not do that...

2023 General Election what you wont hear

What's the most tedious element of this year's general election is the complete failure of pretty much all politicians to admit to what they can't do.

Child poverty is not and cannot be eliminated by government. Because an element of child poverty is about the poor choices a small proportion of people make as parents. A small number of parents (the left pretends it is zero, some on the right try to conflate this with all on welfare) are at best useless, at worst malign and unfit to be parents. Oranga Tamariki exists because there are people who abuse their children and neglect them, but no quantity of money thrown at people in poverty will eliminate it.  I'd argue the best solution to poverty is to get out of the way of people finding ways out of poverty, through employment and entrepreneurship and most of all, allow more housing to be built.  The barriers to all of this are the fault of governments, central and local, and this is what politicians should focus on.

Poverty doesn't exist because some people are wealth or on high incomes. As with parents, a very small number of wealthy people are so because they cheated or defrauded people, but by and large it is a mixture of hard work, entrepreneurship, opportunity and chance, and more than a few people have been wealthy and lost most or all of it.  The narrative from the left that because some people are rich, that means they took it from the poor is nonsense.  However, government can unjustly enrich people through protecting their businesses from competition, from printing money to inflate asset prices that government then constrains the supply of (see housing), from paying contractors or staff to undertake government work at taxpayers' expense, regardless of the cost.  Removing barriers to competition, ending monetary incontinence and reducing the role of the state generally will reduce all of this.  

Tax cuts don't take money from anyone, they take money from the capacity of politicians to spend other people's money.  You can make assumptions about what they wont spend the money on, but whoever or whatever it was meant to be for, is not taking money from people "in the future". It wasn't their money in the first place, and for more and more people, if their taxes are too high, they'll just go somewhere else.  That's when you get to the Berlin Wall theory of taking from the People - that successful people emigrating is stealing from the people you wanted to give their taxes to.  It's just nonsense.

There is always going to be a crisis in healthcare as it gets rationed by queuing and political/bureaucratic decisions. This is a feature of public healthcare systems that are taxpayer funded. Politicians can pretend they can "fix" this, but as long as the health professionals know they can get public sympathy for politicians to force people to pay them more, to deliver the same, and there is no discipline on what is and is not delivered by those who pay, it will continuously fail to deliver. What can be done is to more closely link what consumers want with what they get, including services tailored for them. This is why Maori health providers can be critically important if they deliver what consumers want, but it is also why this shouldn't be determined by a single Wellington based bureaucracy (or two in fact).  If you want universal healthcare, you're not going to deliver everything everyone needs when they need it, there are going to be compromises, and those compromises better be based on need.

Education of children isn't "one size fits all" and a Minister and a Wellington bureaucracy cannot know what is best in terms of techniques and content to teach all children everywhere. Education fails, in part, because of failing parents, some because of neglect some because they don't know what to do, so linking education to what parents want is critical to improving it for children.  Teaching unions, which primarily exist to benefit themselves and their members, have no monopoly on what is best for children, because their first interest, as in all lobby groups, is what is best for their members. Education needs to break out of being captured by producers and by bureaucratic conceit.  One side of politics thinks the producers should decide, the other side thinks it can decide, both are wrong.

Housing is a disaster and they are all to blame, but local government is to blame the most.  Look internationally (not Australia and the UK which have the same disease) and NZ's housing costs are insane. Nobody is willing to embrace the fundamental reform needed to fix this long-term problem, which requires treating planning on a property rights approach, liberalising building laws and liberalising immigration of those who will build.  It requires local government to get out of the way, and although the state can build more homes, it's simply nonsense to claim that this is the dominant answer.  ACT is closest to the right answer, but ACT is compromised because David Seymour wants to appease NIMBYs in Epsom (and likely Tamaki too).

Finally, the economy matters and it is economic growth (which some of the Greens reject as a concept) that enables more of everything. It enables more housing, better infrastructure, access to more technology and pharmaceuticals and expertise in healthcare, wider education and a better standard of living.  Government is an enabler of this only to the extent it provides a safe, secure and confident environment to invest, whether it be through law and order, property rights and a low, simple, easy to understand tax system.  

If you think politicians know best how to spend your money, then you're either admitting your own lack of intelligence or you're imbuing them with knowledge (and knowledge from public servants) to do this.  Few politicians have been great successes in their own lives in creating wealth for them and their families and others, and even fewer public servants have been. If politicians allow you to keep more of your money through tax cuts, then you too have choices how you spend that. If you are worried about poverty, then don't wait for a politician to tax you more and hope it will get to someone in need, donate your own money, property and time to helping people directly through a charity or even personally.

So if you choose to vote,  think about what most politicians aren't telling you. Many aren't admitting that they don't generate most of the wealth in the economy, that they money they spend is actually yours and that of millions of others, and that the more they spend, the more they have to take from you or (in many cases) your children and their children. You can pick politicians who say they'll make things better with more of your or other people's money, or give you something "free" which involves taking it from you or other people in the first place.  Most politicians are in this group.  Or you can pick those who want to get out of your way, and will focus on what government ought to focus on. Law and order, protecting individual and property right, and enabling others to maintain, upgrade and develop the infrastructure, services and economy that makes people better off.

New Zealand remains relatively poor per capita compared to most developed countries, and is only just above former eastern European communist dictatorships.  Those trying to sell you Scandinavian standards of living and public service without commensurate economies are lying to you.  

Hardly anyone talks about productivity, that to pay people more to do the same, means there is less money to invest, less money for producing or consuming other goods and services. Nothing is for free. If the government changes it wont be 1984-1993 Douglas/Caygill/Richardson redux, as if half the population even know what that was anymore. It might tinker a little to stop the slide getting worse. However if it stays the same with a lurch to the hard-left, it will just worsen a bit faster.  What might worsen more is the growing culture of entitlement and belief that society is made up of the oppressors and the oppressed, and the only solution to this is to do the same, in reverse.  For that is the underlying philosophy of the Greens and Te Pati Maori (and the bulk of Labour), who only see people through the eyes of Orwellian intersectionalism. 

Unfortunately, the record of National, for almost every time it has ever been in government, is not to reverse anything philosophically, but to say it is better at "delivering".  The reason being is that too many of you keep wanting a government to deliver, rather than letting you take more charge of your own life and charge of what you want to do for your family, community and society.  I can only hope that maybe some semblance of a different approach might come out after Saturday, but I'm not holding my breath.