Matt McCarten's mindless musings

Lindsay Mitchell and Cactus Kate have both written well on this, we should remember what Matt McCarten's great political achievement has been - the virtual demise of the Alliance. During his reign the Alliance lost the Greens, and then lost its modest personality cult of a leader (his party is still in Parliament, in the form of him).

He thinks laissez-faire capitalism is this "Its ideology is quite simple: we're all essentially greedy and we should be free to make as much money as we can. If we exploit others in the process - well, that's just the free market at work." It isn't that we are all essentially greedy as much as we should be free to do as we wish, as long as we don't initiate force or fraud against others. You see Matt approves of state violence, he thinks it is ok to steal, defraud, and spend other people's money against their will. However you might wonder why he still matters?

Why has Amnesty forgotten North Korea?

Amnesty rightfully calls on governments to address the worst human rights crises, though I question when it says "There is a growing demand from people for justice, freedom and equality" as to what the hell "equality" is. Creating equality can damn people more than letting things be.

It lists countries where it is clearly has the highest concern - China, Myanmar, Russia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iraq and the territory of Gaza.

However, what of North Korea? The only country that imprisons children as political prisoners, that runs the entire country as a prison - that condemns entire families when one speaks out of line. It is an Orwellian horror, but no it first mentions China - yes a place with many concerns, but which has also improved considerably over recent years. North Korea hasn't. It mentions the USA, and as much as modest torture by a Western liberal democracy is unacceptable, it is light years away from North Korea. Russia is getting worse again, which is a genuine cause for concern. It raises the issue of EU complicity with rendition.

This is all small fry compared to Zimbabwe, which itself is small fry compared to Darfur- perhaps the only instance comparable in scale to the North Korean prison state horror.

Amnesty says nothing, although deep in its website it does note North Korea. The Green Party remains absolutely silent about it, like it remains silent about human right abuses in Vietnam, but jumps on the China/Tibet bandwagon because it is popular - even though abuses of freedom and individual rights in China look like a holiday compared to North Korea, but are similar to Vietnam.

So how about it? Who the hell is going to stand up against the child torturing slave state run from Pyongyang? I'm convinced Amnesty doesn't support it, I'm also convinced the Greens don't, so why don't they bother? The more this is publicised, condemned and outrage is expressed, the sooner this will stop.

Labour to let Kedgley damage NZ trade policy

Sue Kedgley, hysterical hyperbolist, according to the Greens "is attending the High Level World Food Security Conference in Rome next week, as a member of the New Zealand delegation."

She is paying her own way, but by what measure does she have the right to be a member of the official delegation? Especially since she will be talking in a way that sabotages and undermines New Zealand's long standing (and bipartisan between Labour and National) call for the liberalisation of trade in agricultural commodities. New Zealand has argued for many years at the WTO that trade in food should be free from export subsidies (like manufactured products), free from trade distorting subsidies and free from non-tariff barriers to trade (that are not genuinely about biosecurity), with tariffs on food imports being capped and negotiated downwards.

Now Kedgley is going to mouth off nonsense like "We need to challenge the doctrine of free trade and accept that people's right to food, to be free from hunger, must have priority over an ideological fixation on allowing market forces to prevail at all costs."

For starters, there is no free trade in food, secondly why DO we need to challenge it? How do you guarantee this fictional "right to food", proposing a global social welfare scheme are you? How do you propose food production increase unless prices increase to encourage it? How about the boondoggle of subsidised biofuels, which Labour is continuing with, the Greens are supporting and which is contributing towards higher food costs worldwide? Diddling with the market doing wonders there isn't it? Thought of attacking the EU, USA and Japan for grossly distorting agricultural subsidies and protectionism which has stifled agricultural production in other countries?

No - you're a vapid idiot.

SO why the hell has Labour let this banal control freak loose on the world when she says "I expect there will be intense debate between the free trade marketeers and those who believe the free trade agenda is one of the causes of the present crises"

Yes New Zealand is the free trade promoter, and by no stretch of the imagination can anyone outside the manufactured propaganda laden hysteria of Kedgley can honestly assert free trade is to blame for higher food prices - because it simply doesn't exist in food.

Kedgley is a vapid control freak who has for years sought to ban what she hates, make us do what she likes, make us pay for what she thinks is good for us and tax what she doesn't like. She distorts, peddles hysterical unscientific nonsense again and again, and has been the snake oil merchant for opposing genetic engineering, and concern about "safe food".

This woman shouldn't be let near any conferences claiming to be speaking on behalf of New Zealand. At best her views are economic nonsense, and as shallow as the rhetoric in her press releases, at worst she will provide succuour to the agricultural protectionists in Brussels, Washington, Tokyo and Paris who want to continue undermining world trade in food, world food production and currently strip around 1-2% GDP growth p.a. from the NZ economy.

So why is Labour letting an anti-free trade nutcase argue against government trade policy at an international forum?

Maori Party defends constitutional racism

The Maori Party unsurprisingly condemns the Business Roundtable calling for the abolition of the racially determined Maori seats, because without them, it may not be in Parliament.

It says "A recent Business Round Table report tries to rein in the resurgent political power of tangata whenua. It recommends abolishing the Maori seats out of pure self-interest, and definitely not for the good of Maori"

The Maori Party isn't self interested in defending the Maori seats? It never polls over the 5% threshold for party representation, and would fight to get maybe 1 or 2 electorates if the Maori seats were abolished (Maori votes changing the dimensions of general electorates like East Cape and Northland).

Parliament is not about representing races, it is about representing the views of individuals who vote. It does so in two ways, by representing communities defined by location and by representing parties that people want represented in Parliament. The Maori seats balkanise the country into Maori locations and non-Maori.

They are racist, they have no place in a modern 21st century liberal democracy, and no collectivised mumbo-jumbo can disguise that they are racist. The Maori Party wants to entrench this racism, rather than let Maori stand tall as people, as individuals with a shared national/ethnic identity, that don't need to be treated differently from everyone else. It could embrace the opportunity for electorates with high Maori populations to have Maori MPs, but no - it wins out of the current system, and will defend it to the end, and call anyone opposing it to be selfish and racist - which is so ironic.

Lorries protest fuel tax

Thousands of lorries blockaded streets around London this week, most notably parking on the A40 Westway (one of the short pieces of incomplete motorway scattered round London) reducing it to one lane. The reason? Fuel prices.

You see in the UK governments have for some years regarded the road transport sector as a light touch for taxation. Fuel taxes have been increased year on year to match inflation, and absolutely none of it is dedicated to roads. They are taxes, pure and simple. As a result UK fuel taxes are the highest in Europe. The reason for the high taxes?

1. Fuel tax is easy to collect and hard to evade (although having different coloured fuel for road and offroad use with different taxes is a problem);
2. Increasing fuel tax looks like it’s environmentally friendly, although if the fuel tax was only charging for CO2 emissions it would be far lower, and it does not reflect exposure to emissions. You pay the same whether you drive round the Highlands of Scotland or if you drive in suburban London;
3. Increasing fuel tax has a modest effect on congestion by keeping the cost of using cars up. However, given this has paralleled a paucity of road building, the UK now has the second highest levels of road congestion in Europe.

Fuel tax in the UK is 50.35p per litre for both petrol and diesel. To put that in context this is NZ$1.27 per litre in fuel tax alone, before VAT of 17.5%. In NZ petrol tax is NZ$0.42524 per litre before GST, ACC levy and a couple of minor other taxes.

One problem faced by trucking companies (road hauliers as they are called in the UK) is that trucks from continental Europe enter the UK with large fuel tanks full of diesel taxed at lower rates. So there is unfair competition.

The UK government twice looked at measures to address this, but doesn’t know how many foreign trucks enter the UK. It looked at an electronic distance based charge for all heavy vehicles and rejected it, and then looked at the vignette system, commonly used in Europe, whereby foreign vehicles buy a licence to operate for a certain number of days in the UK and are checked at the “border”.

So what SHOULD it do? First it should define why it is taxing fuel at all. If it is about paying for roads then part of the tax should be dedicated to funding roads (and there should be an independent non-political funding agency set up to manage that). The UK Treasury hates hypothecation because it fears waste, and loses control, but it has worked in New Zealand for many years. Indeed NZ is seen in some quarters as a model for how to manage road funding (shows you how bad the rest of the world is). If the tax is environmental, then have an honest debate about why, how effective it is and how fair it is at all? If it is revenue, be honest that road transport is being pillaged to fund social welfare and education, and see how the public taks that.

Sadly the UK is stuck in a bureaucratic arrogance that “nobody else in the world does it better” and wouldn’t look to NZ, or even to France and Italy which run motorways as private and government run businesses (with tolls). It taxes bluntly, it runs roads as political driven bureaucracies and decides road funding on a loose economic appraisal approach, whilst funding roads barely higher than it subsidises rail transport. The cost this underfunding of roads and blunt overtaxing of road users upon the UK is considerable, and it hides the true cost of the UK leviathan state – as it keeps income taxes down. It’s about time this was reversed and road use was charged on an economically efficient basis.

Tax on fuel is only justified as a transition to proper road pricing. It should be capped, roads should be privatised, and motorists able to contract with road providers for road use, and opt out of paying fuel tax in exchange. It is technically feasible, the problem is the political instransigence that treats roads as special. Roads are a network that needs maintenance and investment, and provide an economic good. Is it any wonder people complain about them when their management is subject to the appalling incentives of politics and bureaucracy, rather than investors, producers and consumers.