I forget to read Dr Michael Bassett's incisive columns as often as I should. Around a month ago he wrote about the underclass in New Zealand and what sustains it.
He tells some stark truths that are far too uncomfortable for policy makers:
"The criminals share several things in common. They are almost all from families where there is one parent on welfare, too many kids from several fathers in the household, inadequate supervision, easy prey from relatives or de factos, and access to alcohol and drugs. Far too many are Maori. The kids exist because they carry an entitlement to a benefit stamped on their brows, and the parent doesn’t care about their welfare for which the taxpayers give them money."
and
"Domestic violence rises on the days of the week when there is enough money to purchase drugs and alcohol, while for the rest of the week hard luck stories emerge about people resorting to food parcels and there being no lunches at school. The Child Poverty Action Group gives us a sermon about poverty and argues for more money for the parents, which sensible people have long-since worked out would go on more alcohol and drugs."
Contrast him to Dr Cindy Kiro who DOES play the "give them more of other people's money" card. The whole article is worth a read. He leaves one of his most damning lines for the media:
"Before going home to their trendy pads in Ponsonby and Herne Bay, the media treat this social crisis like soft porn – titillating details of one tragedy after another. There’s no proper analysis of the cause of the problems. No brains engaged."
How can anyone on the left seriously believe that throwing money at the problem is the solution? How can they ignore the absolute poverty of responsibility, role models, attention, love and aspiration endemic in far too many parts of the country? They have nothing to do with money - as much of the world is poor, but has stable family units, responsible and dedicated parents and esteem to grow onwards and upwards - this was seen in the Great Depression.
It is about ethics, culture and philosophy - and the philosophy of "it's everyone else's fault", "capitalism makes everything unfair so I'm angry and torture my kids", "everyone else owes me a fair life", is bankrupt.
It's about time those who peddle this are confronted, exposed and policy change radically - they've had their chance, and it has failed, miserably.
08 August 2008
07 August 2008
The Greens rate the Nats!
Yes well after my scoring of the Nat’s 10 point blueprint, the Greens have done the same and, curiously enough, have taken the opposite tack from me on most issues. The Greens don’t take John Key on his very moderate words, they exaggerate them so that the Nats appear to be better than I think they are. So, just for fun, I thought I’d review the review of the Green Party. Why? Because the review says more about the Greens than they may think.
1. An ongoing programme of tax cuts. I thought that this was positive but vague, but no – the Greens have a different way of looking at it. They see taxes as “being whether the government is spending enough to achieve its democratic mandate and the tax is not too onerous for the people paying it”. Which on the face of it seems ok, doesn’t it? Well, it could be “enough” or “too much”, but the Greens rarely seem concerned about too much spending, unless it is roads. The issue of tax is more curious. What does “too onerous” mean? Clearly “onerous” is ok, and more importantly the idea that the people consuming government provided services pay for it is completely off the radar. It’s pure socialism – government spends money and then it squeezes it from those it can get to pay, whether or not it is “onerous”, whether or not you actually use the services provided by the state.
2. Bring discipline to Government spending, and 3. Rein in excessive growth in the public service
Now why would you ever disagree with the government spending money prudently and why would you not want a value statement like “excessive growth”? Quite simple, you want more government, more state. The Greens are priceless on this though:
Surely these two are very hard to reconcile with a promise not to cut government spending. Bureaucrats are not evil, faceless, money suckers. On the whole they are put there because they achieve good things efficiently.
In the world of the socialist, cutting government spending is “wrong”. However saying bureaucrats are not evil, faceless, money suckers is missing the point. Evil is a strong word, but I believe some are – some like Cindy Kiro who earns a significant salary and is seeking to nationalise children with some Orwellian monitoring system. Money suckers is very true, because after all what are many bureaucrats producing?
This “achieve good things efficiently” cuts to the heart of the difference between socialists and liberals. Why are they good? How is it efficient? If it were good why must people be forced to pay for it? If it is efficient, why has commercialisation and privatisation resulted in enormous cost savings to carry out the same tasks in many sectors? Since when has big government been more efficient than small government, except when it restricts freedom?
4. Launch an attack on gangs and the P trade they support. Now I appreciate the concern of the Greens there that the “war on drugs” is unlikely to be successful, but there needs to be an appreciation that there are genuine concerns about drugs and criminal gangs. Gangs are not just another form of whanau as some make themselves out to be, but similarly the Nats only have tired old failed solutions.
5. Introduce a bill to reform the Resource Management Act The Greens will oppose this naturally, since this is a key plank in their policy to stop development as much as is possible, regardless of private property rights. The Greens will scaremonger about this, even though it will see little useful happen.
6. Invite the private sector back to the table. A welcome move of course, but the Greens want to frighten you by asking whether this is about health, education or conservation. Who cares? Why is the private sector “bad” and the beloved state sector “good”? Again it is socialist ideology, big government is about doing “good things efficiently”, no doubt the private sector is “bad things done inefficiently”??
7. Raise education standards. I thought this was bland and meaningless from the Nats, but the Greens have concocted a bizarre plot “John Key means that he will test primary school kids more often so that the failures can be re-identified and then, umm… well moved aside I guess” Yes, there is some grand neo-liberal plot to kick the less bright out of school, it is against the grand socialist plot to reward the less bright with pass marks, guaranteed minimum incomes, guaranteed university places and jobs to do “good things efficiently”.
8. Grow the amount of superannuation paid to senior citizens each week. Well the Greens love this, more state money being spent on people. Never mind that it discourages people for saving for themselves, hell tax them more and we can give more to, their parents and grandparents! No, the Greens ask for MORE money to be found from the money tree to pay to “struggling beneficiaries”.
Socialism = where you get the money you need without having to do anything for it, because we take it off those who did.
9. Repeal the Electoral Finance Act. Bleh, Greens want their “citizen’s assembly” a nice proxy for an event which busy people who own or run businesses wont have the time to participate in because they are earning money to pay the onerous taxes the Greens approve of, but the beneficiaries and others who shouldn’t be expected to work hard for a living can do so, and skew the result. Nice.
10. Hold a binding referendum on MMP. Yes the Greens are bound to oppose this, hardly a surprise for any small party.
So there you have it – the Greens want more government spending, think taxation should be onerous (not “too” onerous though), think that improving education standards is a dastardly plot and that bureaucrats do “good things efficiently”. It would be fair to say Labour is a rather watered down version of that.
Now if only we could have an election based on two opposing views of the role of the state.
Greens ignore where welfare comes from
Sue Bradford is awfully upset that a Work & Income case manager allegedly told a welfare recipient, living off compulsorily acquired funds from other people, to "f' off" after she asked for a "food grant".
Most of the hoo ha about it is simply around her use of the "f" word, which is a bit of a yawn to me. It astounds me what offends politicians - not lying, not taking other people's money and spending it on all sorts of activities or indeed unprofitable businesses that nobody in their right mind would choose to spend it on, not the Police who pursue those who defend themselves, not calls for the state to continuously monitor the lives of every child, not giving food aid to a country that enslaves children as political prisoners.
No.
However Bradford's characterisation of the event she describes is telling in two ways.
First is her absolute abandonment of the idea that people have options other than going to the state in saying that Work and Income "has the power to grant or decline her very means of survival". Oh please Sue, she wasn't malnourished and emaciated was she? Could she not seek work? Could she not ask people to give her money or food of their own, out of their own choice? Work and Income after all isn't dishing out money it has been "given", but money that has been taken.
What it tells me is that the Greens think that the state should be the basic means for us all to survive, which works as long as the majority of mugs don't use it as such.
Second is the more telling refusal to acknowledge the other side of the ledger. Every dollar that a beneficiary receives costs more than a dollar taken, by force, from a taxpayer. The Greens ignore this, treating what beneficiaries have as "entitlements", as if you are allowed to live off of the back of others, by force. Imagine if beneficiaries asked their neighbours for help, or had to go door to door asking for assistance. No, the Greens prefer the clasped fist of the state and it threatening to confiscate your property and imprison you if you don't agree to give up some of your property to pay beneficiaries.
You see I'm more offended by the way taxpayers are treated by the Department of Legalised Theft (IRD). Behind the attempts to be friendly and helpful, IRD is an agency of threats, which it is quite willing to use to extract its cut from you. More importantly, the state treats you with more respect if you murder, rape and steal, than if you don't give it what it deems you should - in a dispute with IRD you're guilty till proven innocent. Funny how all those on the left who are so concerned about human rights and freedoms are happy for the state to live off this presumption of guilt.
See I'd rather like beneficiaries to have to ask for what they want - but not ask bureaucrats, but citizens. To go to a body where people donate money and make a case for having more, perhaps in exchange for doing something in return. I'd like the Greens to acknowledge that their big beloved Nanny State isn't some warm loving entity that can dish out prizes like Santa Claus, but an institution of violence - that takes money from taxpayers under threat of violence. The Greens want it to do more threatened confiscation of people's income and give out the cash as if it came off of some tree. It doesn't - state welfare is money taken from other people, and IRD does a lot more than say "f' off" if you ask to keep more of your own money to spend on food.
Tara Marks (the woman concerned) might think a little more about whether any should give a damn that she was "offended" compared to those who she is indirectly asking to be forced into funding her and her family. Note she is using the media to have a moan about how she was treated, rather than ask for some money - she's clearly hardly on her knees is she?
Most of the hoo ha about it is simply around her use of the "f" word, which is a bit of a yawn to me. It astounds me what offends politicians - not lying, not taking other people's money and spending it on all sorts of activities or indeed unprofitable businesses that nobody in their right mind would choose to spend it on, not the Police who pursue those who defend themselves, not calls for the state to continuously monitor the lives of every child, not giving food aid to a country that enslaves children as political prisoners.
No.
However Bradford's characterisation of the event she describes is telling in two ways.
First is her absolute abandonment of the idea that people have options other than going to the state in saying that Work and Income "has the power to grant or decline her very means of survival". Oh please Sue, she wasn't malnourished and emaciated was she? Could she not seek work? Could she not ask people to give her money or food of their own, out of their own choice? Work and Income after all isn't dishing out money it has been "given", but money that has been taken.
What it tells me is that the Greens think that the state should be the basic means for us all to survive, which works as long as the majority of mugs don't use it as such.
Second is the more telling refusal to acknowledge the other side of the ledger. Every dollar that a beneficiary receives costs more than a dollar taken, by force, from a taxpayer. The Greens ignore this, treating what beneficiaries have as "entitlements", as if you are allowed to live off of the back of others, by force. Imagine if beneficiaries asked their neighbours for help, or had to go door to door asking for assistance. No, the Greens prefer the clasped fist of the state and it threatening to confiscate your property and imprison you if you don't agree to give up some of your property to pay beneficiaries.
You see I'm more offended by the way taxpayers are treated by the Department of Legalised Theft (IRD). Behind the attempts to be friendly and helpful, IRD is an agency of threats, which it is quite willing to use to extract its cut from you. More importantly, the state treats you with more respect if you murder, rape and steal, than if you don't give it what it deems you should - in a dispute with IRD you're guilty till proven innocent. Funny how all those on the left who are so concerned about human rights and freedoms are happy for the state to live off this presumption of guilt.
See I'd rather like beneficiaries to have to ask for what they want - but not ask bureaucrats, but citizens. To go to a body where people donate money and make a case for having more, perhaps in exchange for doing something in return. I'd like the Greens to acknowledge that their big beloved Nanny State isn't some warm loving entity that can dish out prizes like Santa Claus, but an institution of violence - that takes money from taxpayers under threat of violence. The Greens want it to do more threatened confiscation of people's income and give out the cash as if it came off of some tree. It doesn't - state welfare is money taken from other people, and IRD does a lot more than say "f' off" if you ask to keep more of your own money to spend on food.
Tara Marks (the woman concerned) might think a little more about whether any should give a damn that she was "offended" compared to those who she is indirectly asking to be forced into funding her and her family. Note she is using the media to have a moan about how she was treated, rather than ask for some money - she's clearly hardly on her knees is she?
More education choice? not under National
Lindsay Mitchell blogs about the success of education vouchers in that paragon of New Right neo-liberal Business Roundtable capitalist exploitation of the proletariat - Sweden.
National wont of course. Giving parents more choice, schools running at a profit. It was National policy in 1987 believe it or not, when Education Shadow Minister (as they were called then) was Ruth Richardson. The Nats could have got away with it at 1990, but Lockwood Smith proved then to be a useless inert nothing, incapable of standing up to the bloody minded self-interested Marxists of the teachers' unions.
The time has come to tell parents that National will let funding follow pupils to whatever schools their parents want to send them to. It is a small step, but it unlocks funding from central government control, gives parents more options and starts to present real competition for state schools. The tired rhetoric that "all schools should be as good as each other" is a fantasyland the same as saying "all teachers should be as good as each other" or all restaurants or all houses. It is anti-reason, it denies reality and most of all it is an excuse for centrally planned tolerance of mediocrity.
Nothing is more important to change than education, and it is telling that virtually nobody in NZ will engage on the success of the Swedish model - an approach that only the ex.communist party opposes in the Swedish parliament. So you can see where Labour (and National's) education policies have a spiritual ally!
National wont of course. Giving parents more choice, schools running at a profit. It was National policy in 1987 believe it or not, when Education Shadow Minister (as they were called then) was Ruth Richardson. The Nats could have got away with it at 1990, but Lockwood Smith proved then to be a useless inert nothing, incapable of standing up to the bloody minded self-interested Marxists of the teachers' unions.
The time has come to tell parents that National will let funding follow pupils to whatever schools their parents want to send them to. It is a small step, but it unlocks funding from central government control, gives parents more options and starts to present real competition for state schools. The tired rhetoric that "all schools should be as good as each other" is a fantasyland the same as saying "all teachers should be as good as each other" or all restaurants or all houses. It is anti-reason, it denies reality and most of all it is an excuse for centrally planned tolerance of mediocrity.
Nothing is more important to change than education, and it is telling that virtually nobody in NZ will engage on the success of the Swedish model - an approach that only the ex.communist party opposes in the Swedish parliament. So you can see where Labour (and National's) education policies have a spiritual ally!
The Mongrel coalition
Clint Heine blogs on what is a real possibility, Labour's grand mongrel coalition to stay in power that could include:
- Jim Anderton (obviously);
- the Greens (desperate for a chance at power and Cabinet);
- the Maori Party (also keen for power and to extract concessions from government, and to avoid the backlash it may risk in backing National);
- Peter Dunne (he's former Labour after all, and is almost certainly a single MP so he will be seeking a way to retain power);
- NZ First (Winston's done ok from Labour and knows the Nats are baying for his blood).
Clark knows that it only works because she leads it, but the truth is that all of them will want concessions, it could mean all get a Cabinet position.
Heine rightfully warns "I believe that behind the scenes the same sort of failed policies of the seventies mixed with the religious zeal of evangelical green nonsense and the sheer self motivated populism of Winston Peters could be forced on Kiwis if we let it happen."
Which is indeed a reminder of the despicable evil that all these parties represent, an abandonment of the mind for the pandering to fear, dependency and point scoring populism. From the Muldoonist closed minded xenophobic conservatism, to the anti-scientific, anti-rational scaremongering ecological evangelism, and cheap populist "give them what the want" pork barrelling.
Who would want that lot, right?
What party with any sense of seeking good governance and to advance rational politics would enter into a coalition or seek power with any of that lot?
What party can you vote for that wont seek to share power with the racist collectivist mystic led statism of the Maori Party and Greens, or the racist scaremongering of NZ First or power desperate meandering United Future?
- Jim Anderton (obviously);
- the Greens (desperate for a chance at power and Cabinet);
- the Maori Party (also keen for power and to extract concessions from government, and to avoid the backlash it may risk in backing National);
- Peter Dunne (he's former Labour after all, and is almost certainly a single MP so he will be seeking a way to retain power);
- NZ First (Winston's done ok from Labour and knows the Nats are baying for his blood).
Clark knows that it only works because she leads it, but the truth is that all of them will want concessions, it could mean all get a Cabinet position.
Heine rightfully warns "I believe that behind the scenes the same sort of failed policies of the seventies mixed with the religious zeal of evangelical green nonsense and the sheer self motivated populism of Winston Peters could be forced on Kiwis if we let it happen."
Which is indeed a reminder of the despicable evil that all these parties represent, an abandonment of the mind for the pandering to fear, dependency and point scoring populism. From the Muldoonist closed minded xenophobic conservatism, to the anti-scientific, anti-rational scaremongering ecological evangelism, and cheap populist "give them what the want" pork barrelling.
Who would want that lot, right?
What party with any sense of seeking good governance and to advance rational politics would enter into a coalition or seek power with any of that lot?
What party can you vote for that wont seek to share power with the racist collectivist mystic led statism of the Maori Party and Greens, or the racist scaremongering of NZ First or power desperate meandering United Future?
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