I get the feeling that we used to support a political party, in order to vote for it, whereas today political allegiance has taken a back seat in favour of opposing another party in order to get rid of it. When elections come around, and even during the political term, parties just attack each other instead of pitching to the voters what is in it for them. Imagine if a company was planning to go public, and instead of the prospectus outlining information and details to the public about the benefits of investing, it instead just dissed other companies of similar ilk (I realise a prospectus is a legal document but you get my gist).
Good point, Deborah! There is a lot of 'anyone but...'. I have yet to see a single good idea come from successive governments about raising productivity AND sharing the prosperity fairly. It's either deregulate or tax/spend. (Maybe someone will point out something I missed now that I've gone out on a limb!) Cheers.
This comment from your post answers your question as to why electors have lost faith in "traditional political parties and leaders":
"...Once Seymour’s bill has been dispensed with, then, National and Labour might even show some statesmanship, reach across the aisle, use their majority to short-circuit further debate and reunite the country – and win back some voters – with a more balanced codification of Treaty principles. John Key did something similar to end a divisive debate about child discipline law..."
People have lost trust in politicians that ignore their wishes. We wanted to retain parents' duty to raise their children... and some children only understand physical constraint (a smack, not "beating"). We want a say in crucial constitutional matters and for National/NZF to deny New Zealand citizens that right will result in the National losing votes. The sooner the better!
Hi Peter. Good comment, and I agree that constitutional changes should occur with public awareness and consent. Failure to do that partly explains Labour's defeat in 2023. I note though that there's been a record number of submissions to the select committee on the treaty principles bill, so people are having their say at the moment. Cheers.
Mainstream party voters tend to be already well established in career, home ownership & family & prefer not to put it all at risk; while those feeling shut out of "the dream" vote for third parties to "shock the system".
As I may have previously mentioned, while Mussolini was consolidating power in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The economic orthodoxy of Reaganomics & Thatcherism is disintegrating in real-time, and right now the world is in the aformentioned interregnum. And the morbid symptoms include inequity, deglobalisation, authoritarianism, among others. To anyone here who's an ethnic or sexual minority, it may be time to batten down the hatches.
I agree that that orthodoxy is disintegrating – a process that began in 2008, I'd guess. And yes, battening down the hatches may be a wise move. Things could get even more morbid!
Over the last three or four decades voters have taken a blow from the right and a blow from the left. This leaves us disoriented and with considerable disappointment.
The neoliberal right, that I would align with, reduced the value of factory and other jobs by opening our economy up. We all got a benefit by being able to buy bedroom-inches of cheap plastic toys for the kids, from the Warehouse, but workers suffered. There turned out to be no plan to anticipate and address this. This was out of step with traditional expectations as to how the people to whom we entrusted delegated power would act. We believed we had sagacious leaders and we got ideologues.
The woke left dropped the same workers like a hot potato, chasing off after land rights for gay whales and communitarian virtue signalling. Again, this is not how we expected them to act - although to be fair they have historically had a hankering for fashionable ideologies.
That said, the last thing I want to see emerging from this febrile landscape is a strong, charismatic and visionary leader to make everything better.
Great thoughts, thanks John. I agree about the swings that have left people disoriented. And indeed, maybe the last thing we need now is charisma! Cheers.
Love the 'bedroom inches of cheap plastic toys' - our stubbed toes suffered too. But when you say the workers suffered, you overlook the fact these same workers also could benefit from cheap plastic toys for the kids. Not only cheap plastic toys, but affordable baby clothes, shoes, pushchairs.... And remember Roger Douglas did have a plan for addressing the workers vis a vis tax but was sacked when Lange went wobbly. That said, I wouldn't call Douglas an ideologue nor a sagacious leader. I would say the order of the reforms could have been better planned; the privatisations better managed, but hindsight's always a luxury.
Bringing back the memories, Deborah! Those were heady days. And, yes, some better sequencing of reforms may have helped. Now we see a 'flood the zone' mentality in DC! Cheers.
Yeah, no question but that getting rid of the tariffs and import licenses did something very good. I could drive through Onehunga by the late-90s and know that every factory was there because they were creating real value inside. I could drive in a much more reliable second-hand Japanese car, to your point, along with the rest of New Zealand. Douglas has balls. If I remember, it was to be flat tax at maybe 15%.
But I still haven’t seen the replacement for the railway workshops or the navy shipyards for training apprentices. (Except, and it’s not big enough, but there are some really good iwi initiatives.) Fair enough that pouring money into the telephone system is an expensive way of training technicians, but those essential actions of privatisation had a future cost on the value the children of then can create today.
I build robots. I sell them based on the ‘labour units’ that they replace. After that monumental relief of an election in 1984, and then with farmers killing themselves over SMPs, I watched for the signs of, well I don’t know, anything? Training programs? A big push in education? I have lived mostly in South Auckland and these are my neighbours. I don’t know what budget I would have pulled money out of, everyone was hurting. But the kids from those days are still working (because there are lots of jobs) in lower productivity and less value creating jobs now.
An indictment on what we've lost, John – but eloquently worded! The next stage of AI turns NZ into subscription serfdom, with incomes going to Silicon Valley. Rural land values may drop with innovations in agriculture as food production moves into urban spaces closer to consumers.
Yes Grant, precisely. AI for the jobs that are not done using hands, and anthropomorphic robots plus AI for the rest. As a community we are not likely to prepare adequately for the consequences of this.
Things that reduce the cost of doing stuff (new technologies, deregulation, open borders, globalisation) makes things cheaper, but they also reduce the value that used to be generated in their doing. This is what used to pay the wages of the workers who used to be involved. I am repeating myself, but I think it is worth repeating. Society becomes richer but there are losers. My neighbours in South Auckland and grumpy workers in flyover states in the US (you know, the deplorables and the garbage, racist homophobes to a man) can attest to that.
Interestingly the winners this time, apart from Silicon Valley, may include some of the poorest on the planet as stuff becomes cheaper. (Just as a truly wonderful outcome of globalisation was the lifting out of abject poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants.) I can’t see the mechanism as to how they will pay, but when you make stuff cheaper it becomes more affordable.
I’m no Luddite, my foot has the pedal firmly to the metal in my business regarding the use of AI (I’m an engineer, AI is beautiful, magical). And I have seen the scares of ‘tech is coming for our jobs’ multiple times over the years. But. I think this time is different.
Historically the children of wheelwrights and buggy-whip tradesmen became website designers, you know what I mean. But probably not this time. AI and robots are a universal solvent, as far as I can see, for doing stuff.
You see a niche where doing stuff is not yet automated? I see a target with a bullseye on the backs of those workers, with a dollar sign in the centre. So I am working hard to be the owner of some AI-controlled robots while the present sun still shines.
True, John. If we trained an AI on all my previous writing, it could write my next book for me in a minute. At the moment, it might not be very good. But soon it might be even better. Oh well, I could trade in my Toyota for a home-help robot!
I'll be interested to read your solutions to the political leadership crisis as you publish them. Also, nice Yeats quote! I alluded to that same line in a new song I'm writing.
From my perspective as a minor party voter who hasn't been represented in parliament since 2017, I think the problem is complacency amongst the major parties. I've read the interminable manifestos published by each party before the election, and consistently found them lacking in originality. They seem to just retread the same tired talking points about why our country is declining: National blames Labour, Labour blames National, Greens blame everything that isn't a native tree or bird, ACT blames over-regulation, etc...
Meanwhile, these manifestos lack an original, positive message about how their party will fix productivity, the housing market, declining education outcomes, and all the other issues that Kiwis are concerned about. It feels like, instead of trying to innovate, those charged with developing policy are just stealing innovations developed in other countries then implementing them poorly.
All of this contributes to an annoying phenomenon in my personal life. When a Labour government is in power, I criticise the government's lazy policy ideas and my friends leap to the defense of the 'good guys' who are 'trying their best'. Meanwhile, when National is in power, everyone agrees with my policy critiques because now it is the 'bad guys' who are 'destroying the country' with their lazy policy.
My belief is that the NZ political and journalistic system needs a shake-up before competent, charismatic, and pragmatic political leaders will emerge from it. No idea how this would happen though...
Great comments, thanks Stephen! The Trump effect is confounding my thoughts at present, but I can drip feed ideas on here. Saving the world from poor leadership, one post at a time! Your right that journalists need to kick their addiction to gotcha scandal reporting and try not to let their personal biases frame what they write. Grant
-Plato i. “The Republic," critiques democracy as leading to mob rule and suggests that a philosopher-king or a more authoritarian form of government might be necessary to achieve true justice and order.
José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930), discusses how the rise of the "mass-man" could lead to a decline in civilization, potentially necessitating a return to more authoritarian governance to maintain order and culture.
Various 20th-century thinkers during the interwar period, particularly in Europe, echoed concerns about the fragility of democracy, fearing that it could lead to chaos, thereby making totalitarian regimes seem appealing to some as a means to restore stability or national pride.
George Orwell write about the vulnerabilities and potential degradation of democratic systems. He critiqued how manipulation of democratic principles might deliberately occur in order to give rise to authoritarianism. To the punt we may clamour for it
In “1984," Orwell presents a dystopian vision where democracy has been entirely replaced by a totalitarian regime, showcasing how language, history, and truth can be controlled to maintain power. The book implicitly warns about the dangers of totalitarianism replacing democracy, particularly through the manipulation of public opinion and the suppression of dissent.
In "Animal Farm," Orwell satirizes the corruption of revolutionary ideals into authoritarian practices, showing how the pigs, initially representing a democratic or communal ideal, turn the farm into a dictatorship. This can be seen as an allegory for how democratic revolutions can morph into autocratic rule under the guise of protecting or advancing the original democratic ideals.
I get the feeling that we used to support a political party, in order to vote for it, whereas today political allegiance has taken a back seat in favour of opposing another party in order to get rid of it. When elections come around, and even during the political term, parties just attack each other instead of pitching to the voters what is in it for them. Imagine if a company was planning to go public, and instead of the prospectus outlining information and details to the public about the benefits of investing, it instead just dissed other companies of similar ilk (I realise a prospectus is a legal document but you get my gist).
Good point, Deborah! There is a lot of 'anyone but...'. I have yet to see a single good idea come from successive governments about raising productivity AND sharing the prosperity fairly. It's either deregulate or tax/spend. (Maybe someone will point out something I missed now that I've gone out on a limb!) Cheers.
This comment from your post answers your question as to why electors have lost faith in "traditional political parties and leaders":
"...Once Seymour’s bill has been dispensed with, then, National and Labour might even show some statesmanship, reach across the aisle, use their majority to short-circuit further debate and reunite the country – and win back some voters – with a more balanced codification of Treaty principles. John Key did something similar to end a divisive debate about child discipline law..."
People have lost trust in politicians that ignore their wishes. We wanted to retain parents' duty to raise their children... and some children only understand physical constraint (a smack, not "beating"). We want a say in crucial constitutional matters and for National/NZF to deny New Zealand citizens that right will result in the National losing votes. The sooner the better!
Hi Peter. Good comment, and I agree that constitutional changes should occur with public awareness and consent. Failure to do that partly explains Labour's defeat in 2023. I note though that there's been a record number of submissions to the select committee on the treaty principles bill, so people are having their say at the moment. Cheers.
Mainstream party voters tend to be already well established in career, home ownership & family & prefer not to put it all at risk; while those feeling shut out of "the dream" vote for third parties to "shock the system".
As I may have previously mentioned, while Mussolini was consolidating power in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." The economic orthodoxy of Reaganomics & Thatcherism is disintegrating in real-time, and right now the world is in the aformentioned interregnum. And the morbid symptoms include inequity, deglobalisation, authoritarianism, among others. To anyone here who's an ethnic or sexual minority, it may be time to batten down the hatches.
I agree that that orthodoxy is disintegrating – a process that began in 2008, I'd guess. And yes, battening down the hatches may be a wise move. Things could get even more morbid!
Over the last three or four decades voters have taken a blow from the right and a blow from the left. This leaves us disoriented and with considerable disappointment.
The neoliberal right, that I would align with, reduced the value of factory and other jobs by opening our economy up. We all got a benefit by being able to buy bedroom-inches of cheap plastic toys for the kids, from the Warehouse, but workers suffered. There turned out to be no plan to anticipate and address this. This was out of step with traditional expectations as to how the people to whom we entrusted delegated power would act. We believed we had sagacious leaders and we got ideologues.
The woke left dropped the same workers like a hot potato, chasing off after land rights for gay whales and communitarian virtue signalling. Again, this is not how we expected them to act - although to be fair they have historically had a hankering for fashionable ideologies.
That said, the last thing I want to see emerging from this febrile landscape is a strong, charismatic and visionary leader to make everything better.
Great thoughts, thanks John. I agree about the swings that have left people disoriented. And indeed, maybe the last thing we need now is charisma! Cheers.
Love the 'bedroom inches of cheap plastic toys' - our stubbed toes suffered too. But when you say the workers suffered, you overlook the fact these same workers also could benefit from cheap plastic toys for the kids. Not only cheap plastic toys, but affordable baby clothes, shoes, pushchairs.... And remember Roger Douglas did have a plan for addressing the workers vis a vis tax but was sacked when Lange went wobbly. That said, I wouldn't call Douglas an ideologue nor a sagacious leader. I would say the order of the reforms could have been better planned; the privatisations better managed, but hindsight's always a luxury.
Bringing back the memories, Deborah! Those were heady days. And, yes, some better sequencing of reforms may have helped. Now we see a 'flood the zone' mentality in DC! Cheers.
Yeah, no question but that getting rid of the tariffs and import licenses did something very good. I could drive through Onehunga by the late-90s and know that every factory was there because they were creating real value inside. I could drive in a much more reliable second-hand Japanese car, to your point, along with the rest of New Zealand. Douglas has balls. If I remember, it was to be flat tax at maybe 15%.
But I still haven’t seen the replacement for the railway workshops or the navy shipyards for training apprentices. (Except, and it’s not big enough, but there are some really good iwi initiatives.) Fair enough that pouring money into the telephone system is an expensive way of training technicians, but those essential actions of privatisation had a future cost on the value the children of then can create today.
I build robots. I sell them based on the ‘labour units’ that they replace. After that monumental relief of an election in 1984, and then with farmers killing themselves over SMPs, I watched for the signs of, well I don’t know, anything? Training programs? A big push in education? I have lived mostly in South Auckland and these are my neighbours. I don’t know what budget I would have pulled money out of, everyone was hurting. But the kids from those days are still working (because there are lots of jobs) in lower productivity and less value creating jobs now.
An indictment on what we've lost, John – but eloquently worded! The next stage of AI turns NZ into subscription serfdom, with incomes going to Silicon Valley. Rural land values may drop with innovations in agriculture as food production moves into urban spaces closer to consumers.
Yes Grant, precisely. AI for the jobs that are not done using hands, and anthropomorphic robots plus AI for the rest. As a community we are not likely to prepare adequately for the consequences of this.
Things that reduce the cost of doing stuff (new technologies, deregulation, open borders, globalisation) makes things cheaper, but they also reduce the value that used to be generated in their doing. This is what used to pay the wages of the workers who used to be involved. I am repeating myself, but I think it is worth repeating. Society becomes richer but there are losers. My neighbours in South Auckland and grumpy workers in flyover states in the US (you know, the deplorables and the garbage, racist homophobes to a man) can attest to that.
Interestingly the winners this time, apart from Silicon Valley, may include some of the poorest on the planet as stuff becomes cheaper. (Just as a truly wonderful outcome of globalisation was the lifting out of abject poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants.) I can’t see the mechanism as to how they will pay, but when you make stuff cheaper it becomes more affordable.
I’m no Luddite, my foot has the pedal firmly to the metal in my business regarding the use of AI (I’m an engineer, AI is beautiful, magical). And I have seen the scares of ‘tech is coming for our jobs’ multiple times over the years. But. I think this time is different.
Historically the children of wheelwrights and buggy-whip tradesmen became website designers, you know what I mean. But probably not this time. AI and robots are a universal solvent, as far as I can see, for doing stuff.
You see a niche where doing stuff is not yet automated? I see a target with a bullseye on the backs of those workers, with a dollar sign in the centre. So I am working hard to be the owner of some AI-controlled robots while the present sun still shines.
True, John. If we trained an AI on all my previous writing, it could write my next book for me in a minute. At the moment, it might not be very good. But soon it might be even better. Oh well, I could trade in my Toyota for a home-help robot!
The late Stephen Hawking posted this caution on a Reddit AMA:
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/K4PLWsqU7u
I'll be interested to read your solutions to the political leadership crisis as you publish them. Also, nice Yeats quote! I alluded to that same line in a new song I'm writing.
From my perspective as a minor party voter who hasn't been represented in parliament since 2017, I think the problem is complacency amongst the major parties. I've read the interminable manifestos published by each party before the election, and consistently found them lacking in originality. They seem to just retread the same tired talking points about why our country is declining: National blames Labour, Labour blames National, Greens blame everything that isn't a native tree or bird, ACT blames over-regulation, etc...
Meanwhile, these manifestos lack an original, positive message about how their party will fix productivity, the housing market, declining education outcomes, and all the other issues that Kiwis are concerned about. It feels like, instead of trying to innovate, those charged with developing policy are just stealing innovations developed in other countries then implementing them poorly.
All of this contributes to an annoying phenomenon in my personal life. When a Labour government is in power, I criticise the government's lazy policy ideas and my friends leap to the defense of the 'good guys' who are 'trying their best'. Meanwhile, when National is in power, everyone agrees with my policy critiques because now it is the 'bad guys' who are 'destroying the country' with their lazy policy.
My belief is that the NZ political and journalistic system needs a shake-up before competent, charismatic, and pragmatic political leaders will emerge from it. No idea how this would happen though...
Great comments, thanks Stephen! The Trump effect is confounding my thoughts at present, but I can drip feed ideas on here. Saving the world from poor leadership, one post at a time! Your right that journalists need to kick their addiction to gotcha scandal reporting and try not to let their personal biases frame what they write. Grant
Totalitarian rule
-Plato i. “The Republic," critiques democracy as leading to mob rule and suggests that a philosopher-king or a more authoritarian form of government might be necessary to achieve true justice and order.
José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher, in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930), discusses how the rise of the "mass-man" could lead to a decline in civilization, potentially necessitating a return to more authoritarian governance to maintain order and culture.
Various 20th-century thinkers during the interwar period, particularly in Europe, echoed concerns about the fragility of democracy, fearing that it could lead to chaos, thereby making totalitarian regimes seem appealing to some as a means to restore stability or national pride.
George Orwell write about the vulnerabilities and potential degradation of democratic systems. He critiqued how manipulation of democratic principles might deliberately occur in order to give rise to authoritarianism. To the punt we may clamour for it
In “1984," Orwell presents a dystopian vision where democracy has been entirely replaced by a totalitarian regime, showcasing how language, history, and truth can be controlled to maintain power. The book implicitly warns about the dangers of totalitarianism replacing democracy, particularly through the manipulation of public opinion and the suppression of dissent.
In "Animal Farm," Orwell satirizes the corruption of revolutionary ideals into authoritarian practices, showing how the pigs, initially representing a democratic or communal ideal, turn the farm into a dictatorship. This can be seen as an allegory for how democratic revolutions can morph into autocratic rule under the guise of protecting or advancing the original democratic ideals.
Great comments, thanks Alasdair. And your remedy is...?