5 posts tagged “policy”

I’m surprised there aren’t more of these clips on YouTube about Österreich’s best known export (if you don’t mention the war). The Governator speaks German.

[Excerpted from Lucire] Earlier this year, I held out great hope for Sen. Barack Obama amongst attacks from Sen. Hillary Clinton. I felt some of the attacks were racist. And in a multicultural United States, there was no room for that.
   The same motive saw me pointing out that there were elements about the free ride that the American mainstream media were giving Sen. Obama once he became the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
   I have always desired a fair fight, even if I have put my own name forward as a candidate for a political party with firm views.
   Now that Sen. John McCain has conceded, and that we can now refer to ‘President-elect Obama’ till Inauguration Day, one might wonder: what now?
   The president-elect has given some hints already in an excellent speech. He sees himself as a uniting figure.
   Just as Sen. McCain’s concession speech was classy and heartfelt, President-elect Obama attempted to reach out. He paid tribute, as did Sen. McCain, to the rival campaign.
   He hinted that the racial barrier had been shattered. He was more specific about his desire to end partisanship, and was specific about wishing to extend a hand in friendship to peace-loving nations.
   The internationalist speech of the president-elect included the ‘forgotten’ nations who were listening to his speech over the radio, a recognition that not every nation is as fortunate as the United States in its standard of living.
   In trade-mark fashion, President-elect Obama gave a hopeful speech. (Continued at Lucire: ‘Insider’.)

With any election campaign, and now being involved as a political candidate myself for the New Zealand Parliament, my observations stem from the point of view of ‘Would I do this?’
   For example, I wouldn’t have tried making fun of Sen. Barack Obama for wearing traditional African costume, as Sen. Clinton’s campaign did, using it as a tactic of painting him as an outsider. (And I said so at the time.)
   I did, meanwhile, have a field day over Sen. Clinton’s sniper-fire gag, or the time she called the still-governing Helen Clark as the ‘former prime minister of New Zealand’. I believe she opened herself up for those.
   At the end of the day, I want to see an even playing field, and I’ll do the little things that I know something about.
   And I thought today about Gov. Sarah Palin’s ‘bridge to nowhere’ remark.
   She said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ to the construction of a bridge to a community of 50 in Alaska.
   Critics say that she was for the bridge before she was against it—something pointed out by Charlie Gibson in the ABC News interview.
   As far as I can gather, Gov. Palin and her Alaskan Congress would try to apply to Washington for a share of infrastructure projects, which, from what I can gather in western politics, is normal.
   I read about something similar in John Major’s autobiography, recalling his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with each government department trying to get a cut of the budget.
   So securing a share of the cake is business as usual in most democracies.
   When Congress (Washington, not Juneau) requested that Alaska itself pay for the bridge, Gov. Palin said, ‘No way.’
   Maybe I am being totally stupid but I can’t see what she has done wrong.
   Folks, I don’t support a lot of Sarah Palin’s ideas, not least her environmental stance, and as I have pointed out, her English seems to be below par for a woman holding a journalism degree and with broadcasting experience.
   I am for the Second Amendment, personally speaking. I like how she reduced her mayoral pay in Wassila and how she sold the gubernatorial jet which her predecessor had bought, against the will of his congress.
   She could be a populist. So is Sen. Obama.
   But on this “bridge to nowhere” issue, I thought about it this way.
   I get free samples of various products here that I give out to our team members. They are happy to take them. But if I were to ask them to pay for them, they’ll say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on most. They defend their own patch, as Gov. Palin defended hers.
   Critics say that Gov. Palin maybe should have said, ‘I said, “Thanks,” then “No thanks,” on that bridge to nowhere.’ But I think it was a waste of time for Gibson to even go there.
   There’s plenty of other stuff to attack the Governor on, just as there’s plenty of other stuff to attack Sen. Joseph Biden on. Americans tire of the politicking in the news not because they are disinterested in who gets to the White House, but because the media are so happy to sway the issue to things everyday people could not care less about.

I first read about Sen. Joe Biden’s nomination to be Sen. Barack Obama’s running-mate through the MSM. It was probably on Google News, in the headlines. Then I saw it here on television, albeit briefly, since a VP nominee doesn’t really have much importance to New Zealanders.
   I first read about Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination as Sen. John McCain’s running-mate on Timothy’s Vox blog. I have not heard mentions on radio or TV here. And I realize that this is not big news to Kiwis, and I admittedly was out during the six o’clock TV news broadcast yesterday. But as someone kind of interested in US politics, I would have expected to have run into the news somewhere.
   Maybe to us, as we have had female prime ministers twice (at one point, the PM, Chief Justice and Governor-General were all female), the ascension of a woman to the presidential ticket is not a biggie. Also, then-Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro had already trailblazed on that front as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984.
   It will be interesting to see if Gov. Palin will help the McCain campaign. She is largely unknown outside her home state but that might help charges that Sen. McCain (like Sen. Biden, I should point out) is the same-old Washington establishment. With Palin’s approval ratings at 80 per cent in her home state, and a pretty solid résumé, she has quite a few pluses in terms of her hard work for Alaska.
   She has been clear on her beliefs—she has a lifetime NRA membership, she opposes the legalization of marijuana and she is pro-life—so people can judge her on those quite easily. If the majority of Americans do not see eye-to-eye with Gov. Palin on these matters, then that is democracy in action.
   Alaska, though in fact modern with large cities, has a stereotype among Americans, and being the 47th state in terms of population, the Democrats will be able to accuse the Governor of inexperience in national politics. It’s a fine line, however: Palin has had 16 years of elected public service, versus Sen. Obama’s 11; though I note that this never stopped Sen. Clinton, with eight years, from attacking Sen. Obama in the primaries.
   Her biggest plus is her whistle-blowing about corruption and the lack of ethics among certain sectors of government in Alaska, meaning Sarah Palin is a no-nonsense, clean-government advocate. How successful this image will carry through into the quagmire of Washington politics is dependent on how Americans view things: can they believe that one person can make a change, or do they believe one person will be buried among establishment thinking?
   It depends on how strongly they believe in the power of the individual.
   Palin is probably an individualist—someone who doesn’t mind bucking the trend and surprising people, and that could play well to many Americans. To some extent McCain has these values but he has also changed his mind on some, which the Democrats have rightly pointed out at their Convention.
   It will be an interesting road ahead.

We’ve ended January 2008 here in New Zealand with 10 murders. The government is saying this is an anomaly, but is it?
   Crime has been rising in New Zealand steadily since I have been observing the numbers and for older New Zealanders, the latest figures are a disgust.
   I am not overly surprised, given the rising gap between rich and poor, suggesting a mismanagement of the economy and an absence of jobs, while values and education have suffered at the same time.
   Those older New Zealanders who can remember back to the 1950s remember a country with roughly half the population and 18 convictions for murder between 1951 and 1957.
   I realize actual murders and successful convictions are different, but assuming that there were a couple of murders in this period that didn’t lead to a conviction, then we’re still looking at 20 over a seven-year period from January 1951 to December 1957.
   That’s roughly three per annum. If there’s double the population now, then we should expect statistics to show that there are six per annum for 2008.
   Remember that medical science wasn’t as advanced, so if we adjust for that, then maybe this estimate isn’t actually that far off.
   In this election year, I wouldn’t buy any party line that says things are all right. I wouldn’t even buy policies that talk about tougher sentencing. Because neither of these address the root problem.
   We need policies in New Zealand that say: we will address this rich–poor gap.
   How? Well, how about recognizing what’s going on instead of kowtowing to multinational corporations operating here?
   Since the end of Muldoonism, New Zealand has become the poster boy of the technocracy, doing everything that the economic experts said should work: privatization, free markets, the ending of tariffs.
   Ask yourself, even in the last five years, can you afford more or less of the things you want in your life? I don’t care if you are a student or a wage-earner or even a small business boss. The answer is probably no.
   When will we wake up and realize that these policies have driven a wedge between the rich and poor in a nation that once prided itself on being a fair, just, middle-class country?
   Since Labour sold off so many state assets in the 1980s, something National continued doing in the 1990s, we now have a lot of things in the hands of foreign corporations.
   Now, if these corporations were running these assets more efficiently, logically the government should be able to increase its tax take, which leads to more money for hospitals, schools and social services.
   But the idea of being a private corporation that spreads its activities across different countries is the ability to minimize the tax you pay, by writing some of it off with the operations you have in other places.
   So the opposite has happened. Meanwhile, these corporations have shed staff so the people who used to work there wound up on the dole, and there’s less money to pay out.
   The rich in cahoots with the big companies have done well while everyone else has suffered.
   To make up the shortfall in government coffers, the Labour Government introduced Lotto and basically became the biggest attraction for gamblers. Now we are reporting a rise in calls to gambling helplines.
   The other idea behind liberalizing our markets was so New Zealanders could go and compete globally. But how were we expected to make that leap? Even the richest New Zealanders of the 1980s didn’t survive the decade in good financial shape.
   We need to innovate and create and start new businesses but the support, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not there.
   Yet New Zealand is a place of great, novel ideas that often stay dormant, unless that Kiwi goes offshore and has a foreign company become interested.
   I have repeated this example many times: if TradeMe was really that successful, it would have bought Fairfax, not the other way around.
   The solution must be to have New Zealanders own New Zealand businesses, so that New Zealanders have jobs and taxes and profits stay in New Zealand.
   This is not about putting the barriers back up. The multinationals have embedded themselves too much into New Zealand.
   We can only hope to create global businesses that do for us what the multinationals have done here. We also need to encourage entrepreneurship at the small- to medium-sized business level so that everyone can have a chance to get his or her idea off the ground, beating the world. We are still blessed with a fairly good internet infrastructure that can become a useful tool for New Zealanders. 
   We need to consider tax policies that help the poor and penalize the sources for the inequity in New Zealand. The next government needs to play, essentially, Robin Hood. It needs to create policies for the middle class of New Zealand and what makes them happy wage-earners or self-employed business people, because that is where the majority of the tax will come from. ‘Teach a man to fish and he will eat for life.’ Time to stop handing the fish out and pretending it was a conjuror’s trick. (It was only cool when Jesus Christ did it with the 5,000, anyway.)
   And while I am a globalist at heart, this economy is too small at this point to allow technocratic policies to have free reign, without someone seeing to the interests of the Kiwis that need the most help. I want to see food banks disappear in five years because everyone has a job.
   An innovative government that might create new businesses itself can be a useful agent in the business community. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand’s dual-fuel natural gas infrastructure is still a dream for most countries. Yet a huge percentage of the nation’s cars ran on natural gas back then, able to fill up at the majority of stations across New Zealand.
   Government participation in a modernized Keynesian model could just work in 2008 and one only needs to look at Singapore and Malaysia for nearby adaptations of the very policies New Zealand had only 30 years ago.
   No one can claim they are paupers, and Malaysia itself did find, in 1997, that the technocratic way of thinking didn’t work for them. Having a strong man as a prime minister worked in its favour as Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad was able to say what he thought of the corporations wreaking havoc on his country’s financial markets.
   And with relatively little corruption in New Zealand, government innovation is not a bad idea, provided these state enterprises do not get overmanned to the levels they were at in years past.
   Remember, Absolut, the people who make the vodka, is a government-owned enterprise. No one seems to urge the Swedish Government to divest for the sake of the technocracy.
   Then, those who might find themselves in similar situations to the 10 murderers won’t suffer from envy, depression or rage.
   In the 1950s, New Zealand had about nine people unemployed. In the 2010s, we should be looking at 18. Full employment is key and the policies we are following now—policies which Labour and National predict they will essentially follow—won’t lead to any change in our rising crime rate or the widening gap between rich and poor, which neither party has even mentioned in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.