Key's curious desire to talk policy

It is refreshing to hear John Key demanding the media focus on policy in the election campaign. Curious strategy, since I would have thought National's policy platform was their Achilles heel but they do need to get away from the poor handling of the storm in a teacup.

National has relied heavily on John Key's easy-going charm, using things like RadioLIVE’s 'politics-free' Prime Minister’s hour and a presidential-style campaign, and Key's overreaction to what should have been a minor affair hurts his brand. Ironically, the party which has expended so much effort to play up Key's personal characteristics now has to convince people to shift their gaze.

Which is a good thing. It would be nice to think the election might be decided on what the political parties plan to do if they become government, rather than which of the leaders we'd rather have round for a barbie. Anything which takes us closer to that goal has my support. This is especially true in the context of an on-going global financial crisis, looming oil supply constraints, accelerating environmental degradation and increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change..

National has been criticised for being on the “smile and wave” plan when it comes to economic management. In my view that is unfair. National does have a clear plan for the future, which is to strip mine the country.

From Key's enthusiastic support of Solid Energy's plan to dig up lignite (the lowest value and dirtiest type of coal) and convert it into briquettes, urea and diesel, to his secretive meetings with Anadarko boss James Hackett this week, one of the companies involved in the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to his on-going commitment to dig up the conservation estate, National remains committed to coal mining and deep sea oil drilling, despite this putting at risk the natural environment that is so fundamental to our national identity.

Similarly, National intends to strip-mine Aotearoa's wealth by partially privatising a number of State Owned Enterprises. This will turn a sustainable income from the returns from those shares into a one-off payment, effectively giving Key's government (if elected) a chunk of money to spend but leaving a short-fall for future governments to make good. As with deep-sea oil drilling, National seems prepared to sacrifice the future well-being of the country for a short term cash boost.

What makes it worse is how National intends to spend the money. A significant portion of it will be spent on education and health – which is a bit like selling the tractor to pay for school fees. Education and health spending are basic budget items that should be paid out of income. It would be lunacy to sell income-generating capital to pay for them.

The rest of the money will go on subsidising farm irrigation. This will speed up the expansion of dairy farming at the very time when we need to put limits around it.

Creating taxpayer-funded artificial profits for farming (which are increasingly owned by corporations rather than families) prevents diversification of the economy by preventing more efficient land use in marginal areas. It also speeds up the killing of our lakes and rivers and makes it impossible for us to pull our weight in international efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The problem voters face, of course, is where else to turn. Labour has taken a bold step in announcing a range of courageous policies that begin to take it back to its base.

Phil Goff is looking more attractive to the public when he occasionally manages to relax at bit and stop trying so hard. The fact that most of Labour's best ideas are actually samples of long time Green policy may be a good or a bad thing depending on how one looks at it, but what Labour lacks in my view is coherence. Labour needs to be clear about its vision if it wants to be convincing, and it may just be too soon after its foray on the right to do that.

The party that does have a coherent economic policy, one that actually grapples with the realities of the 21st century, is the Greens, which is why they seem to be on a trajectory to becoming the main opposition to National. Let’s just hope they get enough votes this election to prevent Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee doing the skinhead moonstomp all over Aotearoa New Zealand.

Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Keys-curious-desire-to-talk-policy---blog/tabid/419/articleID/233219/Default.aspx#ixzz1e3SnSVyl

Sustainable mining? LMAO!

I can't help wondering whether the Government and the mining industry are using the same PR company, after hearing their chorus about the need to 'balance the ledger'. To be fair, perhaps Gerry Brownlee is just borrowing the industry's lines, as he did its inflated accounts of how much money is to be made digging up our national parks.

It wouldn't be surprising though. National has now admitted that it “may” have told the mining industry that it was interested in opening up mining in NZ a good two years before the 2008 election, and almost four years before it told the rest of us. Having read in Nicky Hager's well documented book 'The Hollow Men' about the cynical manipulation of the public by the National Party (including 'faulty memory' about its collusion with the Exclusive Brethren) in the run up to the 2005 election, you'd have to forgive me for seeing a pattern here. In particular because while Don Brash fell on his sword, other characters implicated in the book, including John Key and Steven Joyce, remain in place.

For all his relaxed approach to the facts, though, I haven't yet heard Mr Brownlee try to repeat the assertion made by Doug Gordon, the head of the Mining Industries Association, that mining is a sustainable industry. I had to laugh really. Mining is the epitome of unsustainable. Regardless of how sensitively you do it, mining consists of digging up non-renewable resources. It doesn't take a PhD in maths to realise that this means it has a limited future.

That is not to say that mining could not be part of a sustainability plan, if we ever elected a Government with the wit to develop one. Unfortunately both National and Labour's grasp of the concept of sustainability seem to be as shallow as Mr Gordon's. They all seem to think that sustainability is no more than a marketing brand.

There are two main approaches to sustainability – what are called 'weak' and 'strong' sustainability. A weak sustainability approach recognises the existence of different kinds of capital – manufactured, social, natural etc - and says that to be sustainable the totality of capital needs to be preserved. Under this perspective logging old growth forests will sustainable if we invest the scarcity rent into other forms of capital development, such as knowledge. Rod Oram makes an interesting case for a variation of this approach in relation to the current mining debate.

An ecological approach says that you cannot substitute natural capital with other kinds of capital. The total sum of natural capital must be maintained seperately. In addition some specific ecosystems are so important that they must be preserved. Herman Daly operationalised this by saying that to be sustainable we need to ensure that:

1/ We do not harvest renewable resources at a faster rate than they can regenerate
2/ We do not pollute beyond the capacity of the receiving ecosystem to assimilate the pollution
3/ We do not use non-renewable resources faster than we develop renewable alternatives

Self evident, I would have thought. Yet the thinking that is driving the government, including in the current debate around mining, fails to address these issues at all. It seems to come down to a desperate search for money to flush through the system. Yes, we do need to balance our national accounts, but to dig up our mineral wealth and use it to fund our current profligate lifestyles is both stupid and immoral. It is akin to inheriting a beautiful house and dismantling parts of it to flog off the timber to pay for dining out and fast cars.

When it comes to the need to balance the ledger, the most critical account to balance is the environmental one. We are living way beyond our means. The discussion around mining might not be so depressing if it was part of a plan to generate capital to move this country towards sustainability. It could have been part of a comprehensive rethink that included the recent tax review, the massive infrastructural investments in transport, the RMA changes, local government changes... these now wasted opportunities might all have been elements of a strategic plan to prepare New Zealand for the carbon constrained, low energy future facing the world this century. Instead it looks like the government intends us to dig up some of the most beautiful places in the world, consume the proceeds and flush the end product down the loo.

(from my TV3 blog)

Wanted: an independent Green Party

This is my column, published in the Waikato Times on January 12:

The summer break is usually a good time for the Greens. People have been away from work, with time to think about more than the daily grind. They go to the beach and maybe reflect on the lack of kai moana (sea food) or whether there is faeces in the water. That will be cold comfort to the Green Party this year. Some people won big when National took the election (or at least felt satisfaction at sticking it to Labour) but it looks like the environment will be the big loser.

The same cannot be said for Maori. John Key met tribal leaders immediately after the election and invited the Maori Party to talk. It was an astute move to pull ACT's teeth, but it also reflects a generational attitude shift. There are great risks, for both sides, but it is already paying off, with two Maori Party ministers and a new focus on Treaty settlements. This would never have happened under Labour. In return, John Key has had the doors to te ao Maori opened to him, as evidenced at Pukawa Marae.

Did the Maori Party get only the shiny wrappings of power and no actual presents, as some suggest? Their relationship agreement contains few policy points. The Greens' experience with Labour suggests everything needs to be in writing and signed in blood. Even then Labour would claw it back. Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia may find it hard to deliver much, if National plays the same game. Yet their agreement starts with the importance of the relationship. In the end it will be about whether Mr Key, and his Cabinet, is serious about that.

There is no relationship for the Greens, however. National has already got rid of the biofuel obligation on petrol companies, and new green investments and jobs have disappeared as a result. The Government's position on climate change is dangerously myopic. ACT (always critical when other people waste money) has demanded a special select committee, hoping to challenge the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its thousands of scientists. The result of this farce: business uncertainty, investments cancelled and valuable time wasted.

National itself is treating climate change negotiations like a trade negotiation, trying to get sweet deals and special favours for New Zealand. These are not trade negotiations. They are an attempt to co-ordinate an international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for the good of all people (actually all species) now and for the foreseeable future.

But then National is not an environmental party. It is the Green Party's job to influence governments on the issues that count and why would National listen to them? The Greens made it very clear in the election campaign that they were not interested in talking to National.

I thought at the time that it was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, to fasten your lifeboat to a sinking ship. Greens do best when there is an outgoing Labour Government, but this election the results were disappointing. The Green Party might well have won their biggest caucus yet, if they had been prepared to stop licking Labour's hand.

There is a question of whether National would have paid any attention to them anyway. Senior National MPs were privately hinting so early last year and Mr Key's approach to the Maori Party indicates a new openness. There was never a better time for the Greens to see if they could forge a new political space, genuinely independent of Labour and National. Unfortunately for us all, they lacked the courage to try.