The New Zealand labour movement used to have its own newspaper. A group of us thought that now might be a good time for it to be digitally reborn: The Standard v2.0.
There’s a lot of fuss about at the moment over Ayman al-Zawahri’s labelling of Barack Obama as the kind of “house negro” described by Malcolm X. It’s a rather absurd comparison, and in my view probably more a sign of Al-Qaeda’s increasing irrelevance than anything else.
But as it turns out, I was listening to that exact Malcolm X speech just a couple of nights ago. While I disagree with a lot of Malcolm X had to say, he sure knew how to say it. And, unlike with Obama’s vacuous rhetoric, Malcolm X left his audience in no doubt what he stood for. Here’s the video for some context:
70 years ago (more or less) and The Standard was correctly predicting a Labour victory as the ‘Nationalists’ ramped up a hollow election campaign. In true Standard-style, there’s even some stats. Click on the image for the full article.
In an attempt to cover for John Key’s ignorance of New Zealand history, National’s Gerry Brownlee has pulled out a quote from Michael Cullen that he asserts says the same thing as the Key quote. You compare: Continue reading ‘Same thing?’
Mr Key on NewstalkZB: “We’re not a country that’s come about as a result of civil war or where there’s been a lot of fighting internally, we’re, we’re a country which peacefully came together”.
It’s incredible enough not to remember the Springbok Tour, or whether you took part in an attack on the New Zealand currency, or whether you said “we would love to see wages drop” but not knowing that New Zealand went through decades of warfare in a contest for sovereignty between the Maori and Pakeha takes the cake.
Such ignorance is not befitting of a man who would be Prime Minister. I don’t care how nice your smile is; if you don’t know the first thing about New Zealand history, you’re not in a position to be running this country. Being one dimensional is the cornerstone of Brand Key, but it’s not something we can afford in a Prime Minister.
[For an in-depth analysis of the Land Wars see here or watch Jamie Belich's series]
Today is the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the National Party. So, it’s an opportune moment to reflect on the founding principles of the National Party and ask that age old question ‘why are they called National anyway?’
If only I’d been around in 1969, and hanging out in upstate New York.
Hard to believe that the best we can do today is Westlife.
Well, that’s not fair. I like these lyrics from ‘Think Twice’ the song put together by a group of New Zealand musicans following recent violence in South Auckland:
Creeping around, reaping hell
Like the only consequence is that clink of the cell
But feeding the mouths of those speaking aloud
Of tightening your freedoms and your rights on the Right-wing
They’ve singled them out and they can’t think for themselves
They play into the hands of the extreme
Living clichés; bringing calls for a Police State
It has become a media mantra that winning a fourth term of government is nigh on impossible, but is that claim actually based on the record of past governments or just a political myth?
The first government formed along party lines in New Zealand was the First Liberal Government, which took office in 1891. Since then, there have been thirteen party-based governments (twelve, if you count the 1928 United Government and the 1931 Reform-Liberal ‘National Coalition’ Government as the same government under a different name). Seven of them have faced an election to win a fourth term in Parliament. Four of those have succeeded in retaining power.
Those are pretty good odds: if a government wins a third term, it is more likely than not win a fourth term. That’s hardly a basis to say that winning a fourth term is rare or intrinsically unlikely. It certainly won’t be easy for Labour to win a fourth term but there is no reason to think the weight of history is against them.
Record of first term governments winning a second term: 9/13
Good to see Ruth Dyson finally admitting we have left beneficiaries behind. I would hope now that there would be a lot more done than simply indexing benefits to wages though. Increasing the benefit to real pre-1991 levels would be a good start.
A lot of people know about the benefit cuts but not many know about the rationale behind them. At the time the plan was to increase the “gap” between welfare and work in order to make people compete harder for jobs. Effectively it forced people to take lower and lower wages for any job they managed to secure.
The figures treasury and the National party used for the benefit cuts were based on what they called the “New Zealand income adequacy standard”. In theory this was a poverty line. In effect it was well below that. Figures for the cuts were based on research from Otago University’s department of human nutrition which determined the lowest level of income people could survive on while maintaining basic needs such as balanced dietary intake. Unfortunately this lowest level was based on things such as bulk purchasing, slow-cooking cheap cuts of meat, making food from scratch and a whole lot of other saving methods that presumed time and skill. The Dunedin researchers discovered that in practice nobody was able to feed themselves properly on their minimum food budget but that didn’t stop the National Government adopting it and cutting it a further 20%.
The results were predictable. Coupled with other National party policies such as market rents for state housing tens of thousands of New Zealanders fell into extreme poverty, food-banks sprang up and third-world diseases such as TB, glue-ear and meningitis ran rife. In 1996, 473 New Zealanders ended up in hospital with rheumatic fever - a poverty-related disease that was virtually unknown in most western countries since the 1960s - and one in four of them died from it. The next year the National Government launched a publicity campaign that misrepresented benefit fraud levels and attacked beneficiaries as bludgers. Prior to the 1990’s people who could not get a job were thought of as vulnerable people we should all look after. No longer.
Some of the worst effects of the cuts have been ameliorated by income-related rents, PHOs and the fact that we have had a period of strong economic growth and at the moment there are few people on a long-term benefit and there are plenty of jobs. But if the economy slows we’ll find out how little we’ve moved on from the 90’s. Until we increase the benefits to a meaningful level and start thinking about social welfare as, well, integral to the welfare of our society then we will not see wages for low-skill jobs increase without minimum-wage intervention and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of New Zealanders will continue to risk the same poverty we saw in the 1990’s if we have a downturn.
As an aside, I note that Judith Collins claims better budgeting advice is all that is needed. It reminds me of how in the late 90’s Jenny Shipley claimed beneficiaries just needed to grow their own vegetables and everything would be fine. I hope Labour does something to fix this. After reading Collins’ delusional comment I know National won’t.
A new poll suggests that National Leader John Key may be up against a bigger obstacle than he thought in knocking Prime Minister Helen Clark off she is the person New Zealanders most admire after Sir Edmund Hillary.
The much-loved mountaineer topped the Roy Morgan Poll with 17.4 per cent support, followed by Clark on 15.1 per cent.
NB: photo is of Sir Edmund Hillary and Prime Minister Helen Clark arriving in Antarctica for the 50th Anniversay of Scott Base, Jan 2007
After reading Steve’s piece about suicide prevention and the subsequent comments I’ve decided a short history lesson on this issue is needed.
In the late eighties and early nineties the mental health model was shifted from an institutional model to the “recovery model”. Effectively this meant mental health patients were shifted from facilities such as Cherry Farm and Sunny Side into the community. While this is an approach that is proven to work for many people with mental illnesses it comes at the price of loss of economies of scale and makes it expensive to monitor illness.
At the time that money was not provided and the task of resourcing that care was left to the family and friends of those lucky enough to have them to fall back on.
On top of that a lot of the cost was transferred onto the Ministry of Social Development which was not prepared to deal with these issues. One of our recent commenters, Vic, reminded me of this with this story:
“The way the benefit system was structured he [the commenter’s mentally ill friend] had to prove he was financially independent from his parents every single year of university. Administrative delays every year meant that he went without income for weeks and even, on one occasion, more than a month. He couldn’t pay rent, couldn’t buy food at times and ended up being dependent on his mates, which was bad for all of us.”
This kind of problem was not unusual. There had been a shift in the policy at income support (which at the time was rebranded WINZ) toward providing entitlement only on demand. This meant that people with mental illness, who could not advocate for themselves and prepare their own argument and had very little advocacy support, were effectively disenfranchised. Applications would often involve providing considerable documentation and a good understanding of the Act (something that is difficult at the best of times and almost impossible for many mentally ill people.) This left many seriously mentally ill people with no care and often no income. As you can imagine, this did not bode well for society.
When I wrote to the MPs asking them for their thoughts on John Key’s “we would love to see wages drop” quote (results here), Nick Smith’s bio page reminded me of this little gem:
Ah, the Brash-Smith dreamteam. Pity it couldn’t quite last the whole three weeks.
When a society goes through trauma, one of the first results is a drop in the birth-rate. People choose not to have children in a time of strife and uncertainty. When good times return, the birth rate bounces back. The pattern could be seen worldwide following the two world wars. In Eastern Europe, where economic and social turmoil followed the collapse of communism, birth-rates are only recovering now.
New Zealand also went through trauma in the 1990s: National cut public services, particularly those targeted at children, abolished the Family Benefit, and made ordinary people’s labour more ‘flexible’ meaning less job certainty, lower wages, and higher unemployment. Young families were forced to depend on benefits that were drastically cut and depend on food-banks. National was elected and young couples got a headache, the birth-rate tumbled.
15 years later, the birth-rate has bounced back on the back of family-friendly policies promoted by Labour and its allies. Paid parental leave, 20Free childcare, Working for Families, B4 School checks, better pupil to teacher ratios, more doctors and nurses, lower unemployment, higher wages, greater job certainty; these have all given couples renewed confidence to start families.
New Zealand Labour movement activists will support Irish unionists - the political sort - who wish to remove Reform Prime Minister Massey’s statue from Limavady in Northern Ireland’s Derry County.
Massey is remembered without affection by trade unionists here for the mounted special police known as “Massey’s Cossacks” who were used to hunt down strikebreakers in 1913.
Auckland historian and ACT party member Dr Michael Bassett says removing Massey’s statue would be over the top because he was “not an extremist”.
However Bassett says in his biography of Peter Fraser that a colleague of Massey described him as “unimaginative as a clam … he goes his way guided by a hard, cold obstinate bigotry, which is proof against argument, entreaty, ridicule and the lessons of the past.”
Massey led the Reform party, the hard right group that led through Coates (equally unsympathetic to working people during the depression), and after the merger with United to form the National Party in 1936 to Holland, Brash and now Key.
It’s no surprise that Brash supporter Basset also judges him kindly but he sounds like an extremist to me. They never change.
Am halfway through “Kiwi Keith”, Barry Gustafson’s portrait of our third-longest serving Prime Minister. He obviously had something, as he was picked out as a young man by Reform’s Coates and others as having leadership potential from his early days crop-farming in Motueka. As a young MP, after surviving the Reform-United Coalition defeat in 1935, he was seen as a possible contender for leadership in 1936 when as Gustafson says, split infinitive and all, that “a conference was held in Wellington to permanently fuse the remnants of the Reform and United-Liberal parties, and any other anti-Labour groups who wished, into a new New Zealand National Party.”
Just had this sent through to me by a Levin reader. The reference to the Federation of Labour and getting the army in to sort out the workers should have been a dead giveaway that the piece was thirty years old, but in the timewarp that is Levin you never can be too sure…
On the morning of October the 12th 1917 845 New Zealand soldiers lost their lives in a failed attack on Bellvue Spur during the Battle of Passchendaele.
At commemorations held in Flanders yesterday, Peter Kennedy, The New Zealand Ambassador to Belgium reffered to the attack of that morning “the greatest disaster in New Zealand’s history, in terms of lives lost in a single day”.
We Shall Keep the Faith by Moina Michael, November 1918
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
