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[pf] this is how politics should be; Student Radio political comment
by David MacClement
02 December 2000 18:40 UTC

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· Sent to: David MacClement via: GreenViews
http://web.archive.org/web/20010830232916/http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0012/S00001.htm
   Column: HARD NEWS from Russell Brown, is:

HARD NEWS 01/12/00 - This Little Prick Won't Hurt

      GOOD DAY MEDIAPHILES ... whatever its challenges this year, the
[Labour-Alliance] coalition has frequently allowed us to forget that it is
a minority  government. But that fact became all too clear this week as the
new district health boards legislation reached its reckoning.

      Law like this usually goes unmolested at this stage of the
legislative process. All the action ought to have been over and done with
in select committee. But, for whatever reason, National and the Greens'
minority opinion in the committee report was rewritten by its chair, Judy
Keall - earning a rebuke from the Speaker [Chairperson of Parliament] and
the wrath of those two parties.

      It briefly appeared that things might get truly nasty as Michael
Cullen, showing all the grace and diplomacy you'd expect of the Leader of
the House, accused the Greens and National of doing dirty deals with each
other. The Greens had their customary fit of the moral vapours and National
MPs sniggered behind their hands.

      It took the Prime Minister gliding in like an expensive battleship to
get things back on track; instructing health minister Annette King to
accept amendments which improved her bill. So National, the Greens and even
- if only so the sodding Greens didn't get all the limelight - Labour's
coalition partner the Alliance got a turn. In this sense, it was MMP in
action, and it might have continued to look that way had there been more
diplomacy on offer.

      But Cullen - this time in his role as Minister of Finance - appeared
to then take unseemly delight in exercising the government's right to veto
measures for which it cannot fiscally provide. Chief amongst these was the
Greens' pet proposal for a stand-alone public health agency.

      The government, having set up a directorate to do the same job within
the Ministry of Health, was in no mood to find the money to indulge the
Greens' plan. That plan was, of course, backed by  National - even though
National actually abolished the Public Health Commission when it was in
government. Could it be that National was being just a wee bit cynical?

      Quite a bit cynical, actually - and you can double that for Tony
Ryall's comments on the re-introduction of income related rents for state
housing, which is restored as of today. Only the 20% of poor people who
live in state housing would be helped by this, whined Ryall.

      The other 80% of the needy will be no worse off, and can probably
assume their private rents won't by driven up by Housing New Zealand
clattering around in the market, the way they were during the market rents
era.

      The fact is, National's market rents policy not only helped spark a
surge in tuberculosis and other diseases of poverty and overcrowding, it
now costs the taxpayer nearly a billion dollars a year in subsidies via the
accommodation supplement [that the National Party brought in when it was
the Government]. The effect on the economy itself was to even further
encourage the unfortunate New Zealand tendency to run up household debt and
sink cash into property rather than the productive sector.

      I'm not aware of a single independent social agency that hasn't
greeted the new policy - which makes state house tenants now liable to pay
no more than 25% of their incomes on rent - as a return to sanity. Even
Ryall has admitted that the National Party wouldn't bring back market
rents, telling National Radio recently that itwas "a good policy for the 90s".

      It's curious then, that the authors of a new report on the New
Zealand economy from the OECD think the move back to income-related rents
will somehow harm our prospects for economic growth and investment.

      In the course of a modestly optimistic forecast, the report's authors
officially anointed the Employment Relations Act as a return  to the
international mainstream - but criticised the rise in the top  income tax
rate, the renationalisation of ACC and such harbingers of the creeping
socialist plague as as, er, export credit guarantees.

      As a cure for our bad habit of throwing money at property, the report
prescribed not only a capital gains tax on owner-occupied houses, but a tax
based on imputed rental income - in plain language, a tax on the activity
of living in your own house.

      Never mind that that appears to run completely counter to what the
report demands on public housing - there is no doubt that market rents and
the big, deep trough of subsidies for private landlords helped feed the
residential property spiral of the 90s - do  these economists seriously
think any New Zealand government could go into an election with that as a
policy?

      Furthermore, I do not subscribe to the view that unless we  get up on
the bar, drop our pants and lustily sing Yankee Doodle Dandy then foreign
capital won't want to know us. That for the  foreseeable future we have to
be the freak show of the South Pacific just to get anyone to notice.

      The irony of course, is that the OECD itself is based in France, with
its lavish public health system and all. The authors of  the report
wouldn't have to come within 10,000 kilometres of the consequences of their
recommendations for benefit and pension cuts and nobbled public housing in
New Zealand.

      Abstraction is, of course, the luxury of economists. Reality is
somebody else's job.

      Reality, apparently is no friend of Sir Douglas Myers either.  The
richest man in the country made speeches this week in which he assailed the
whole concept of biculturalism as a wicked plot and said  the Closing the
Gaps policy failed to recognise that the causes of  poverty were often
"personal decisions and a poverty of culture."

      "I don't mean the outward symbols of culture such as language, music,
festivals, dance and foods," Myers continued. "But the inner motivations
and moral fibre."

      So what are you saying Doug? Poor people want to be poor?  Maoris are
lazy? Brown people lack moral fibre? It's not your fault?

      A couple of years ago I called Doug Myers an arsehole on this  very
radio station. This abuse was occasioned by an appalling opinion  piece he
wrote for the Herald, in which he declared that such lefty  civic fancies
as libraries were not a public good, and that it did  him no good if some
poor bastard were to read a book.

      The amusing upshot of the arsehole comment was that Myers  collared
Bill Ralston at some function the following week, having mistaken my rough
and ready tones for Bill's cultured presence on the wireless. It does
happen. Well, Doug, don't go blaming Bill this time. And hear this: if
there's anywhere moral fibre is wearing thin it's in high-born pricks like
yourself, who have never in their lives wanted for anything yet feel able
to pass judgement on the morals of those who don't share your fortune. Doug
Myers, the word arsehole was made for you - G'bye!

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 Friday, 1 December 2000, 12:35 pm
 Column: HARD NEWS from Russell Brown 

 Approved: hardnews.kiwifruit
 Subject: HARD NEWS 01/12/00 - This Little Prick Won't Hurt

 HARD NEWS is first broadcast in Auckland on 95bFM around 8.45am on Fridays
and replayed around 4.30pm Friday and 10am Sunday on The Culture Bunker.
You can listen to 95bFM live on the Internet. Point your web browser to 
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