Last Straw

Just a quick word of thanks to all those National and ACT voters out there in NZ, espe­cially those who were in a “mood for change,” because now you’ve got it. A gov­ern­ment of rad­ical right-wingers, many proven untrust­worthy in the 80s and 90s, ready to turn New Zea­l­and upside down and shake.

Almost everything I said New Zea­l­and can expect is right there in National and ACT’s sup­ply and con­fid­ence agree­ment:

A huge increase in pris­ons and prison pop­u­la­tion, under “three strikes” law, where some­body con­victed three times goes to jail for life. You only need com­pare the U.S. or even New Zea­l­and to some­where like Nor­way or Fin­land, where crime and incar­cer­a­tion rates are well below ours, to know that this is about appeas­ing the sad­ists and the hang ‘em high bri­gade rather than actu­ally redu­cing crime and mak­ing NZ a bet­ter place.

You get Rod­ney Hide as Min­is­ter of Local Gov­ern­ment, which means local coun­cils are going to have Hide’s dis­cred­ited ideo­logy — that all is bet­ter if it’s privately owned — shoved down their throats (think privat­ised water and roads).

You get Heather Roy as Min­is­ter of Con­sumer Affairs, which means in prac­tice that you’ll have a min­is­ter look­ing after the affairs of busi­ness at the expense of consumers.

There’s ACT’s “Tax­payer Bill of Rights Bill,” a rad­ical Liber­tarian policy that would cap gov­ern­ment spend­ing to what it is now and tie it to infla­tion plus pop­u­la­tion growth. This is designed to make any­thing fun­ded col­lect­ively by the tax­payer inad­equate, so that people lose faith in demo­cratic pub­licly fun­ded ser­vices and turn to the private sec­tor. The ulti­mate aim being to trans­fer wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, by way of profits.

The private sec­tor will now get to review gov­ern­ment policy with a mind, no doubt, to privat­isa­tion, luc­rat­ive con­tracts for cronies and the cut­ting of social pro­grammes (edu­ca­tion, health, etc.). Again, all ulti­mately aimed at trans­fer­ring wealth from the pub­lic realm into private hands, by way of profits. You won’t see the pub­lic being able to review the way the private sec­tor spend profits of course.

And, poten­tially the most dev­ast­at­ing, going with ACT’s anti-science pos­i­tion: the killing off the Emis­sions Trad­ing Scheme. As No Right Turn writes:

Look­ing at the terms of ref­er­ence, they’re going right back to the start, includ­ing “hear[ing] com­pet­ing views on the sci­entific aspects of cli­mate change” and look­ing at whether we should do any­thing about it any­way (and of course float the idea of a car­bon tax to fur­ther delay things). In other words, repeat the entire policy pro­cess of the past fif­teen years (which has included sev­eral select com­mit­tee invest­ig­a­tions, as well as a national interest ana­lysis [PDF]), only in a more politi­cised con­text, with a politically-dictated out­come on the sci­ence. After fif­teen years, we’re right back to square one.

Mean­while, energy and indus­trial emis­sions — which were going to be covered by the ETS from Janu­ary 1 2010 — will be free to rise, and pol­luters will con­tinue to be allowed to exter­n­al­ise the cost of their pol­lu­tion. And we will be pick­ing up the tab for all of it.

The only thing left for them to do is to declare that they’d like to send more of our sol­diers off to Afgh­anistan to be killed in another futile immoral war led by the only nation in the world to have attacked another coun­try with nuc­lear bombs.

There are a myriad of reas­ons I hope you don’t vote National this Sat­urday, such as their record on selling off the coun­try or their keen­ness to send Kiwi kids off to get killed in illegal wars to curry favour, but if there’s just one reason it’s this: our democracy.

National wants to take away one of the things I’m most proud of about our coun­try, our pro­por­tional elect­oral sys­tem, MMP.

“Rep­res­ent­at­ive demo­cracy,” to my eyes, is a con­tra­dic­tion in terms and one day I hope we put this little step­ping stone behind us and move onto the greener pas­tures of par­ti­cip­at­ory demo­cracy, but in the mean time a rep­res­ent­at­ive one is what we have and the move to MMP has made it enorm­ously more effect­ive as a demo­cracy and given many more people a right­ful say in the run­ning of the country.

It’s some­thing to be proud of and some­thing I’ve really missed while liv­ing here in Bri­tain. I have no doubt that if Bri­tain and the U.S. had pro­por­tional vot­ing sys­tems, such as MMP, the Bush/Blair gang would never have been able to launch a war of aggres­sion — the “supreme war crime” — against Iraq. And they may even have avoided the dereg­u­la­tion that led to the credit crunch.

If National gets their way we’ll go back to an undemo­cratic sys­tem where people who man­age to gain power in parties like Labour and National can impose their nar­row agen­das on the rest of us at our expense. All the other really import­ant things such as the eco­nomy, the envir­on­ment and peace will cease to be mat­ters up for debate. This is why the mat­ter of demo­cracy is so important.

You know what to do. Keep New Zea­l­and demo­cracy safe on Sat­urday, vote for some­body else.