Homepaddock

Labour ministers’ rebellion reveal a government in chaos – Steven Joyce :

. . . I made an observation at the time of the wealth tax cancellation that Finance Minister Robertson was very open with his displeasure about the decision, referring questions to the “Labour leader” and being clear that he still thought the tax was the right idea. Since then things have got worse.

David Parker’s behaviour was petulant, openly declaring he disagreed with the announcement and then taking the almost unheard-of step of requesting to be relieved of the revenue portfolio. In any Government I can recall, that would result in you being relieved of your ministerial warrant in full, not just the portfolio you felt so burdened by.

Which brings us to this week’s latest tax confusion. It was National that suggested Labour was about to announce removing GST on fruit and veges, but it is the response from Labour — or more correctly, assorted Labour ministers — that has given the idea legs. With Chris Hipkins failing to rule it out, and novice ministers Barbara Edmonds and Ginny Andersen clumsily almost ruling it in, it seems reasonable to assert that the idea is at the very least under active consideration. And that’s despite the latest forceful rejection of it by Minister Robertson just weeks ago. Former Revenue Minister Parker added fuel to the flames with his enigmatic response about whether it was GST off fruit and veges or the wealth tax which was the final straw for him.

Removing GST from one class of goods or services, however deserving it may seem, would be a very backward step. Once that door is open there are any number of worthy candidates for GST removal (other food, sanitary products, new houses, transport fares and so on). Before you know it, we’d be back to the hodge-podge of sales taxes we used to have before GST was created. To say nothing of the eternal debates about the merits of fresh versus canned or frozen veges.

I’m just old enough to remember how companies would change the ingredients of, say, dishwashing liquid to avoid the tax on soap-based products, one of hundreds of silly rules that used to need an army of tax inspectors to keep up with.

If people are struggling to pay for the basics, as many are in these inflationary times, the most sensible answer would be to reduce the tax burden on their income, not our administratively efficient Goods and Services Tax. That’s why governments of all stripes have sensibly left GST alone.

Taking the GST off something is the desperate gamble of a party in opposition or headed for it. Grant Robertson knows that, as does David Parker, and at least until recently, so did Chris Hipkins.

The bigger question is what all this says about the internal state of the Government and whether it is in any shape at all to lead the country after the upcoming election. The Kiri Allan saga has obscured matters, but the public disagreements about tax policy make it clear that Hipkins and two of his most senior colleagues are no longer seeing eye to eye on the direction in which they wish to take the country. Moreover, they are clearly unable to discuss and resolve their differences behind closed doors for the good of their team and the people they govern.

And that is the crucial thing. All governments have policy disagreements. The fact of disagreements is not the problem, it’s how you work to resolve them. You need to take the time to talk things through and hammer out a common position. If all your senior people disagree with you, a wise leader would take a pause. After all, even the Prime Minister doesn’t win all the time. Jim Bolger used to say he only agreed with about 80 per cent of the decisions his own Government made. You also shouldn’t let a minister run and run with a policy idea if you ultimately could just end up closing it down. That’s just building a hill for him or her to die on.

Hipkins, in his obvious desperation to do almost anything at all to hang on to his premiership, is starting to look like a man alone. Through a combination of ministerial mishaps and policy disagreements, his remaining visible supporters are a small bunch of junior ministers and the ever-present campaign chair Megan Woods, who must be starting to wonder what she signed up for.

It is news that the Justice Minister was arrested, but the overall state of the Government is much more consequential for the decision voters will make in the polling booth in less than three months.

Irrespective of your politics or your policy preferences, it is getting harder to believe the current leadership of the Labour Party is in any shape to coherently and competently lead a positive Government after the election. And that, surely, is the pre-eminent test.

What should be Kiri Allan’s enduring legacy – Peter Dunne :

. . . It is clear, with the benefit of a few months’ hindsight, that Hipkins inherited a seriously dysfunctional Cabinet. Performance failings had been glossed over or ignored, and only passing attention had been paid to established guidelines and procedures like the Cabinet Manual. When compliance proved too awkward or inconvenient, the established rules had simply been ignored as not relevant. The Cabinet’s primary function seemed to be sustaining the personal standing of the former Prime Minister who had delivered them such a stunning election victory in 2020.

Hipkins’ “new broom” swept aside several Ministers to make way for new talent, mainly departing Ministers who had said they wanted to leave at the election anyway. Since then, Hipkins has faced five separate Ministerial crises, leading to three Ministers being forced to resign, one censured by Parliament following a Privileges Committee inquiry, and one simply walking out altogether to join another party.

Hipkins’ handling of the three cases leading to Ministerial resignations has been consistent – and has failed on each occasion. He has treated each initial revelation about Ministerial conduct failures as an aberration that the Minister would correct given time, and to which he should not overreact. In each case he dismissed suggestions that further damaging revelations might come to light. But each time he has been let down by those Ministers as further lapses have been revealed and he has had to ask for their resignations. Nash and Wood were able to thumb their noses at the Prime Minister for several weeks longer than any Prime Minister made of sterner stuff would have tolerated.

However, the situation involving Kiri Allan is a little different, even if Hipkins’ handling of it has been just as woeful as the other cases. Unlike Nash and Wood, who thought they could get away with ignoring the rules around Cabinet confidentiality or disclosure of personal interests by virtue of who they were, Allan’s downfall is far more tragic. It has been precipitated by some very personal crises that Hipkins and those around him have been very slow to respond to.

The warning signs first appeared with Allan’s now infamous remarks at the Radio New Zealand farewell for her former partner. Here was a case of a Minister struggling to understand the constraints being a Minister placed on her. Rather than dealing with the issue then, the official response was very casual, tossing aside the reaction to her remarks as exaggerated and unnecessary.

When the accusations about her treatment of staff and officials arose, the initial reaction was similar – these were “unsubstantiated” accusations and “no formal complaints have been laid”. Only belatedly, when more revelations seemed likely, did Hipkins suggest Allan take time off, to get over these accusations and the recent ending of her relationship. The problem was seen as primarily Allan’s, which time away from the job would help overcome.

Her demise came less than a week after she decided to resume her normal duties, prompting Hipkins’ response then that maybe she had returned to work too early, even though he understood she had had some counselling during her absence. Again, his response seemed far too casual.

Allan’s fall is an indictment of the lack of pastoral support the Parliamentary environment provides those within it. Too much is still left to chance. If the Prime Minister felt that Allan’s personal position was sufficiently fragile for her to take an extended period of leave to recover, the very least that he should have ensured was that before she returned to work, there was a standard medical certificate or similar confirming it was safe and that adequate support mechanisms were in place for her to take up her duties as a Minister once more. But no, all it took was Allan saying she was ready to return, and Hipkins accepting her assurance.

While it is easy and convenient for Hipkins to now say Allan’s behaviour earlier this week made her continuing to be a Minister “untenable”, he must accept a measure of real responsibility for what happened, and the consequent end of Allan’s political career. Although he undoubtedly and genuinely thought his softly, softly approach was both compassionate and in her best interests at the time, the awful truth is that downplaying her fragile state has led to the current, very sad situation. . .

 Making Parliament the good and safe workplace that has been promised throughout this government’s term now needs to become a priority and not just a platitude.

Ensuring all future governments focus on this should be the enduring legacy from Kiri Allan’s short and troubled political career.

How net zero will punish ordinary people – James Woudhuysen :

This Net Zero surcharge of £170 a year is far from trivial. And like any fixed-rate tax, it will hit the poorest hardest. This is yet another blow to people’s living standards, delivered in the name of Net Zero.

We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. It’s not just the government that’s committed to Net Zero. Almost every UK MP also supports Net Zero, and so there has been very little opposition to the levy.

In fact, almost every MP has fully embraced the religion of environmentalism. And they support the basic principle of environmentalist dogma – that is, that ‘the polluter pays’. You might expect this to mean that, say, oil and gas firms would be made to carry the can for Net Zero. But in truth, UK households are also seen as ‘polluters’ by Westminster.  . . 

For our political elites, £170 a year per household might seem like a small price to pay for ‘saving the world’. They seem to have persuaded themselves that the more sacrifices we make, the better. In fact, they are especially keen to ensure that Britain is seen as a ‘world leader’ in eco-austerity. . . 

Essentially, for our political class, the fight against climate change is as much about showing off on the world stage as it is about reducing CO2 emissions. They’re happy for us to pay more just to heat our homes or cook our food, because it gives them a warm self-righteous feeling. It lets them pretend they are staving off the apocalypse.

In this sense, Net Zero is a very expensive piece of political grandstanding. And as the levy on our bills confirms, it is ordinary households who are expected to pay the price.

What Just Stop Oil really wants – Tom Slater :

Everyone’s fed up with Just Stop Oil. The eco-extremist troupe’s recent stunts – bringing traffic to a standstill with their ‘slow marches’ through London; disrupting play at the snooker, the cricket and now the tennis – have turned off even its natural allies. Last week, Californian millionaire Trevor Neilson, who once helped bankroll the group, said its activities had become ‘performative’ and ‘counterproductive’. Even Swampy (aka Daniel Hooper), the notorious, tunnel-digging eco-warrior of the 1990s, has distanced himself from Just Stop Oil. When asked by The Sunday Timeswhether he would storm the pitch at Lord’s, as JSO did last week, he said ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no’, adding that greens today should focus on ‘bringing communities together’. When Swampy is telling you to tone it down, you know you’ve lost the room.

The penny finally seems to be dropping among the chattering classes that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and all its other spawn aren’t the wonderful campaigners they once thought. Working-class people, of course, had their number from the beginning, given their antics disproportionately affected those with real jobs. But since JSO decided to switch from disrupting the lives and leisure activities of the working class to those of the upper-middle class, from blockading builders to storming Harrods, from ruining the snooker to interrupting the Glyndebourne opera festival, it seems its support among the bourgeois set is starting to waver, too. Its latest exploits certainly haven’t received the gushing, uncritical coverage that Extinction Rebellion first enjoyed when it burst on to the scene, blocking roads and bridges, in 2018.

But there’s a problem. The media seem to talk endlessly about Just Stop Oil’s tactics, about whether or not they are turning people off, even though they quite obviously are and have been from the beginning, all with barely a mention of what this group actually stands for – of what sort of society it is agitating to bring about, and what principles guide its irksome activism. The great and good seem to take it as read that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion et al have their hearts in the right place. . . 

So let’s talk about that cause for a moment. Because for all the hippyish, faux-left trappings – for all the placards, singsongs and craft-table kitsch – this is the most reactionary movement to hit Britain’s streets for some time. This demand that we ditch oil and gas, in the midst of a crushing cost-of-living crisis, the pain of which is being borne disproportionately by the most hard-up, is a demand that we push people into poverty so as to appease Mother Earth. That we put the quasi-spiritual beliefs of well-to-do greens ahead of the living standards of working-class people. It is a policy that is both barmy and unbelievably cruel.

This is not really an environmental movement, it’s a doomsday cult. Just Stop Oil’s well-worn lines about today’s young people ‘having no future’, its prognostications of imminent mass death, are not borne out by any credible reading of the evidence. . .

So, what sort of society do Roger and Co envisage, after they’ve done away with our only cheap and reliable energy sources and thus avoided this Mad Max hellscape? Well, it isn’t some high-tech ecotopia, in which we live lives even freer than we do now, only powered by windmills rather than those nasty fossil fuels. Not least because ‘renewables’ are expensive, unreliable and incapable of keeping the lights on at the moment.

On this front, Hallam is at least more honest than most of his fellow greens. The society he wants would be semi-feudal, with crushingly low horizons. Not only does he want to ban flying and cars, he also wants an end to all ‘non-essential consumption’. He has called for a society ‘similar to a Covid lockdown scenario, but with local people being able to meet, socialise and be politically active’. . . 

All this talk of hanging – sorry, imprisoning – opponents explodes any notion that this is a democratic movement. One of Extinction Rebellion’s central demands is that we initiate ‘emergency citizens’ assemblies’ to work out how best to usher in eco-austerity. But there would be nothing democratic about this. These greens have already decided what we supposedly must do. Ordinary people would be left only to hammer out the details, guided by handpicked ‘experts’.

Poll after poll tells the same story: that while the public are concerned about climate change, they refuse to be made poorer in any transition away from fossil fuels. . . 

Whether or not the populace is onboard is irrelevant to these people.

The sons and daughters of privilege who swell the ranks of Just Stop Oil are so detached from the real economy, from the work of actually doing and making things, that they see industrial society as a silent killer, even though it is because of economic development that we are now so much better protected from the whims and ravages of nature (deaths from climate-related disasters have plunged by over 95 per cent over the past century). And they are so detached from working-class people, and so ignorant about their lives, struggles and desires, that they see them only as ignorant polluters and consumers, rather than human beings with aspirations well beyond their supposed station.

So forget the tactics of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and the rest. Their creepy, authoritarian, anti-human ideology is easily the worst thing about them. This reactionary little cult has no claim to the moral high ground – and it never did.

The anti-conspiracy theory conspiracy – Karl du Fresne :

You can see what’s going on here. An assault on a senior politician is attributed to undefined conspiracy theories, for which no evidence is presented. These same nefarious conspiracy theories are then blamed for deterring politicians from going about their business in public – an assertion that we’re expected to believe simply because Shaw said it, although I’ve seen nothing to indicate that it’s true.

The implication is that democracy is imperilled. But wait: Undercurrentwill save the day by exposing the shadowy far-Right forces that are manipulating public opinion for their own malignant ends and scaring the hell out of our elected representatives. The podcast is compiled and presented by Susie Ferguson, so we can be assured of its absolute objectivity and dogged pursuit of the truth. In fact we can be doubly confident, since Kate Hannah of the unimpeachably reliable Disinformation Project is involved too. (You can see the two of them stoking each other’s paranoia on the Undercurrent website.)  

Ferguson provided a clue to the ideological tone of the series this morning when she cited the Posie Parker incident in Auckland as an example of supposedly extreme beliefs. It was clear that in Ferguson’s eyes, Parker, whom she described as an anti-trans rights activist, was the problem – not the violent mob that succeeded (with police help) in denying her the right to speak.

The Morning Report item continued with the deliberately muddied voice of someone from an outfit called Fight Against Conspiracy Theories (FACT) Aotearoa revealing some of the offensive content circulating in what Ferguson called the murkier recesses of social media.

That merely tells us there are some seriously disturbed people lurking in cyberspace, which we probably knew already. Anyone who goes hunting for them is bound to find them, just as you might uncover a few unspeakably vile creatures by trawling through a sewage pond.

But knowing these people exist doesn’t tell us how much, if any, traction their views get among the wider public. I’m guessing hardly any at all, since most New Zealanders have more useful and important things to do with their lives than spend their days diving down creepy internet rabbit holes.

In fact it’s likely that by constantly drawing public attention to the supposed threat posed by far-Right platforms such as Telegram, the Disinformation Project is perversely giving them far wider exposure than they might otherwise get and creating the impression that they wield more influence than they do. An own goal, in other words.

In any case, who are the real conspiracy theorists? The label can just as accurately be applied to people like Hannah and her equally tiresome sidekick Sanjana Hattotuwa (who also predictably popped up on Morning Report) as to the people they purport to be protecting us from. They’re all swimming in the same toxic cesspool. The two sides of the disinformation debate feed off each other, ramping up divisive rhetoric that’s alien to most New Zealanders. In the meantime ordinary people just get on with their lives, oblivious to all the shadowy intrigue.

Why we should place our trust in outfits such as the Disinformation Project, which consistently refuses to disclose the source(s) of its funding, or FACT Aotearoa, whose website reveals nothing about the people behind it, isn’t clear. (Click on the comically mislabelled “About Us” button on the FACT website and you’ll find not one identifiable individual.)

Why should we believe organisations that are just as shadowy as the people they claim to be guarding us from? If they truly championed the values of an open, democratic society, as they profess to do, they should have nothing to hide.  

Transparency is a core democratic principle. If they genuinely believe in what they’re doing, why can’t they be up-front about who they are and where they get their money? And please spare us the self-serving cant about not wanting to expose themselves to attack by far-Right vigilantes, which was presumably the reason the gutless FACT spokesman had his voice disguised this morning. For all the hysterical fear-mongering, New Zealand is still an open society where people with all shades of political opinion assert their right to free speech every day with no fear of retribution.

Perhaps more to the point, who poses the bigger threat to democracy in New Zealand: outfits like the Disinformation Project and FACT Aotearoa, or the subterranean agitators they claim to be protecting us against?  To answer that question, you have to ask where the real power resides.

The Disinformation Project has the ear of government. Its advice is accepted uncritically in the corridors of power. The mainstream media have similarly been captured. The result is that the authoritarian strictures of the DP go uncontested. It is largely left to Hannah and a coterie of censorious neo-Marxist academics to decide what constitutes “disinformation” – which could be anything that challenges the far-Left consensus of the ruling elite – and therefore supposedly presents a threat to social cohesion.

By way of contrast the extreme far Right, which we are supposed to regard as the real threat, exists in the shadows and on the margins. It wields no power and its existence would probably pass largely unnoticed if it were not, paradoxically, given disproportionate exposure by the anti-conspiracy theory conspiracy theorists (for that’s what they are).

Intellecutal disfunction – Theodore Dalrymple :

When did things begin to go wrong? The Garden of Eden is one possible answer, of course. But we nevertheless look for more proximate answers to a question such as “When did transgender ideology become an unassailable orthodoxy in large parts of the academy?” . . 

As with so much in the modern world, one is not sure whether to laugh or cry. Deep academic solemnity and utter intellectual frivolity are often combined in the same sentences; academics pore over propositions that no intelligent person could entertain for a moment, as if, with enough study, some valuable truth might emerge from them. Such academics are the alchemists of our times. 

In essence, this is state-funded stupidity. Without state funding (or, in the United States, without funding from charitable foundations or endowments that have been deeply corrupted from within), no such drivel could ever have been produced, certainly not in the industrial quantities in which it has been produced: and one cannot blame a commercial company such as Taylor and Francis for profiting from it. If anyone wanted proof of capitalism’s astonishing capacity to turn anything into profit, just read the passage above from the spoof paper that I have quoted and marvel how Taylor and Francis (and, of course, other publishers) have turned a profit on hundreds of pages of such rebarbative prose: that is to say, prose which hides its meaning from the minds of readers as modestly as any woman in a burqa hides herself from the gaze of strangers.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, some academics in the field of gender studies (the alchemy de nos jours) have claimed that the authors of the spoof inadvertently enunciated truth in their paper because, presumably, the penis really is best thought of as a “social construct”—meaning that in another society, a penis would cease to be a penis, and become something else entirely.

It has long amazed me that those who engage in “gender studies” and the like never seem to grow tired of reading clotted prose that is to meaning what fog is to clear vision . . .

The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is that their search is not for truth but for power: for in a world without transcendent meaning of one kind or another, power is the only good, the only thing worth having. Truth has no value and nothing to do with it.