Thursday, October 16, 2014

Little looking dodgy and fickle

There are suggestions from Labour leader candidates that the election was lost due to bad policies. Andrew Little blamed the Super raising age and capital gains tax policies.

This is a cop-out. Raising the Super age is not a poor policy. It is a willingness to deal with a harsh reality. The size of the working age population - the one paying the taxes - is shrinking relative to the 65+.

The 2011 Briefing to the Incoming Social Development Minister highlighted this as a "challenge". They also point out however that , "...on average New Zealanders are living longer, healthier lives..." The obvious response is to raise the eligibility age for Super.



And while there was vigorous opposition to the capital gains tax, plenty of people believed it has merit if it can redirect investment into business and make the cost of renting or buying a house more realistic.

For Labour, Little in particular, to blame their loss on 'bad' policy so soon after desperately trying to sell it to us, just looks dodgy and fickle.

Politics isn't setting up a retail outlet. You don't do your market research to find out what people want and then act accordingly. Politics is about having policies that deal with difficult, unavoidable, problems which feature conflicting interests. It's about making a brave and fair (probably utilitarian) response and then persuading the public of its merits.

This may sound slightly mad but that's where Labour really needs to go. It was where Douglas went.

There isn't going to be the money to buy elections in the future. A 'fairer' society can only be based on less unnecessary government spending. Starting with youthful pensioners.

Young people see what are essentially late middle-aged people getting "paid to do nothing", getting free bus rides while they have to pay, chomping through 'free' healthcare while they have to fund their own education, and justifiably ask why.

We can't afford more socialism. National has the monopoly on voters who want to preserve the level we've got. The only direction that leaves for Labour is ... ACT territory.

Afterall ACT's founding members were ex-Labour. I am an ex-Labour voter.

Though thinking about Labour's current line up the idea just seems hysterical.

5 comments:

JC said...

Funnily enough Whaleoil today asked readers for a list of questions to ask of the candidates..

My was "Do you think you can outflank National on the right?

If not, why not?"

The fact is there's acres of space behind National's front line that a moribund ACT or United Future can't explore.

Labour can easily go there using Roger Douglas'rationale that (paraphrasing) "If you want a good welfare system you had better be running an efficient economy first.

JC

Kiwiwit said...

"Young people see what are essentially late middle-aged people getting paid to do nothing...and justifiably ask why." Indeed.

And Liberty Scott also hit the nail on the head with his election postmortem in which he said, "Will the NZ left recover from facing up to the fact that the National Party now embodies as much of what the public wants from socialism as it will support?"

This is the salient question for Labour.

Anonymous said...

'politics isn't setting up a retail outlet. You don't do your market research to find out what people want and then act accordingly.'Stephen Joyce and co find it works for them!

Anonymous said...

This is a cop-out. Raising the Super age is not a poor policy.

No, but it's a right-wing policy. Like KiwiSaver & the Cullen Fund. All right-wing - or at least centre-right.


Do you think you can outflank National on the right?

There is absolutely no room to outflank National on the left. What were NZ's Wat Tyler's after at this election? Child Poverty & Cheap Houses. What are John Key's priorities for this government? Child Poverty & Cheap Houses.

If the point of an election is to get policies enacted, then Cunliffe & Kim Dot Com actually won the election.


Young people see what are essentially late middle-aged people getting paid to do nothing

It's worse than that: much worse. Young Pasifika & Maāori people are the ones paying late middle-aged and older white people to do nothing. Remember that the second-nearest person we had to a Māori terrorist in NZ (Donna Awatere as was) joined ACT. This is why.


"Will the NZ left recover from facing up to the fact that the National Party now embodies as much of what the public wants from socialism as it will support?"

The National party is the mainstream left in NZ, and moving further left every time. National will eventually be replaced by a right-wing government, probably not for 6-12 years. That may be Labour, but frankly is more likely to be some reconfiguration of the Conservatives & ACT (in that order) --- or best of all, a Whale party (like Beppe Grillo's blogger-based party in Italy).

Stephen Joyce and co find it works for them!

Not only in capitalist countries --- but even in socialist countries like NZ are power-law distributed, so mean income or wealth is always several times higher than the mode. This means that any party that offers some kind of reasonably government while pandering to the politics of envy - currently National - can always find voters.

Labour's problem as a party is that National is so far left Labour as no room to offer other policies.

New Zealand's problem as a country is that National is so far left it will soon run out of the few nett taxpayers money - or run the few nett taxpayers out of the country.

Will Hainsworth said...

Lindsay, I suspect the problem was not that the polcies of raising NZ Super eligibility and a CGT were bad, rather the sales people were dreadful, and an underlying suspicion existed by the voters (probably a fair one) that Labour simply had those savings earmarked for more socialism, just for a different group ('winners' likely to be chosen by Winston or Metiria).