Ex Social Development Minister and "sociologist" Steve Maharey has a column in today's DomPost titled "Centre-Left needs a new vision".
It opens:
I've heard this assertion from the academic Left before and it flummoxes me.
Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party will not be his 60 per cent support but the 4.5 per cent support given to the "modernising" candidate Liz Kendall.
The need to "modernise" gripped parties of the centre-Left in the 1970s and 80s in the wake of the neo-liberal revolution led by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US Present Ronald Reagan. Welfare states were one by one replaced by the market.
The welfare state is one where compulsory collective responsibility for social needs - education, health, and income assurance, especially in old-age - dominates.
While governments have pulled out of funding tertiary education to the past extent, in most English-speaking countries (especially the UK) responsibility for health, education and income assurance remains overwhelmingly in state hands.
Even in the United States, where reconfiguration (aka reform) of welfare was greatest, social security spending continues to grow and cause immense concern.
I struggled on with his waffle about how the centre left needs a new vision but am left with a question. How does it create a vision based on lies about the past?
4 comments:
"Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party will not be his 60 per cent support but the 4.5 per cent support given to the "modernising" candidate Liz Kendall."
We know what Maharey thinks it means but to many of us it shows a pathology of the left where Corbyn allows them to ignore reality and stick with beliefs that are now part of history and no longer relevant.. if ever they were.
Good governance is essentially non political.. it can have a "flavour" of socialism or capitalism but can't be substantially one or the other without creating instability or some form of dictatorship.
JC
Good governance is essentially non political
Oh for goodness sake! Good governance is inherently political!
Good governance means rapidly reducing welfare, scrounging, bulging, crime, and liberalism.
Bad governance means increasing all the above.
Apart from one year, 1991, all governance since NZ started electing governments has been bad.
That's why - across the Welfare West - the UK, EU, Aus & NZ - we must now recognise that the idea of a universal franchise, mass representation without taxation, is an idea whose time is long long past.
'How does it create a plan based on the myth of the past'? Quite easily as it happens. You just need to read any of the more recent Chris Trotter columns to see this demonstrated. Here is a man born in 1958 who glorifies in a mytholical left wing past that he wasn't even alive to experience. He says that most important political dates for New Zealand were 1935, 1949 and I think 1957-all dates that preceded him and to which his only access is from what people had written. Having lived through most of those I can compare what he says happened with my memory and his take is totally different. The fact that Trotter even more than Maharey can be so delighted at the election of Jeremy Corbyrn tells us more about them than anything else. Most interesting will be to read the excuses that they manufacture when he crashes and burns.
The most important dates in politics in NZ are
1893 - universal franchise
1951 - waterfront strike (and, peripherally, the Australian election)
1991 - Mother Of All Budgets
all three turned out to be decisive defeats for good governance and mathematics.
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