A sip, sometimes a whiff, is enough. It is not necessary to consume the entire bottle to know its contents.
We need to talk about Christopher.
The United Kingdom has ended 14 years of Conservative rule. Three years longer than their experiment with republicanism. What has been achieved?
Sovereign debt has risen, from 70 to nearly 100% of GDP. There has been no significant economic liberalisation. Nothing was done to unpack Tony Blair’s expansion of the state. They continued to run deficits. The rate of taxation as a share of GDP has increased, and now sits at over 33%; the highest since 1982.
The Conservatives campaigned from the right. Governed from the left. The final abrogation of their values was a prohibition on the sale of cigarettes; an illiberal and anti-conservative policy derailed by the early election.
Whatever the successive Conservative governments in Whitehall were, they were not conservative.
We do not need to wait 14 years to have the measure of the current prime minister and for this we need to acknowledge the Honourable William Jackson.
Jackson was the minister of broadcasting for 25 minutes in the waning months of the last government and used his limited time proactively. He introduced the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, forcing digital platforms such as Google and Facebook to enter into agreements to pay for news; if they link to local websites.
The bill is bad philosophically and practically. As Melissa Lee stated when this bill received its first reading; “This is not a fair bargaining code. This is literally… a shakedown.” It will not work. Similar regimes in Australia and Canada are producing the predictable outcomes as search engines have or are considering blocking access to news sites rather than pay up.
Such a scheme is antithetical to the values of conservativism and Luxon should have vetoed the idea. He did not do that because he is not a conservative. He may not even know what one is. He believes, as he said in his maiden speech, in doing stuff; “…I want to solve problems, and I want to get things done.”
In his government, if not under his leadership, good things are being done but to understand the nature of the problem we can look to the Education reforms.
Erica Stanford, the National Party Minister of Education, is focused on using the Ministry of Education to make schools function better. Her associate minister of education, David Seymour, wants to disentangle schools from the ministry so those who run them can navigate their own path.
It is a different philosophical approach that, ultimately, will matter. Seymour’s reforms will endure. Stanford’s will be undone by the next government.
Many ministers are making excellent advancements. Chris Bishop and Simon Court are redrafting the behemoth that is the Resource Management Act.
Simeon Brown has been outstanding in transport; tackling infrastructure, congestion charging and lifting the dead-weight of the environmental restrictions hobbling our fleet. Progress is being made in areas like building products, relaxing regulations on consumer lending and bringing down the number of civil servants.
Wonderful as these reforms are they amount to an engine upgrade on a ferry powering towards a beach. The structural problems are getting worse.
Nicola Willis’ budget forecasts a return to surplus by 2027, based on an optimistic projection of 2.9% sustained economic growth and no major adverse events. Her budget shows growth in welfare spending and has taxation rising as a share of GDP from where Grant Robertson left office at 28.4% to 29.5% by 2028.
On the macro issues Luxon’s government is indistinguishable from its predecessors. He will be a more competent manager of our decline than Ardern and Hipkins and will slow our path towards penury.
Luxon is from the same vineyard that gave us nine wasted years under Key and English. He will prove less impactful than Jim Bolger who successfully introduced a profound reform of the labour market that remains the basis of employment law and custom to this day....The full article is published HERE
Sovereign debt has risen, from 70 to nearly 100% of GDP. There has been no significant economic liberalisation. Nothing was done to unpack Tony Blair’s expansion of the state. They continued to run deficits. The rate of taxation as a share of GDP has increased, and now sits at over 33%; the highest since 1982.
The Conservatives campaigned from the right. Governed from the left. The final abrogation of their values was a prohibition on the sale of cigarettes; an illiberal and anti-conservative policy derailed by the early election.
Whatever the successive Conservative governments in Whitehall were, they were not conservative.
We do not need to wait 14 years to have the measure of the current prime minister and for this we need to acknowledge the Honourable William Jackson.
Jackson was the minister of broadcasting for 25 minutes in the waning months of the last government and used his limited time proactively. He introduced the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill, forcing digital platforms such as Google and Facebook to enter into agreements to pay for news; if they link to local websites.
The bill is bad philosophically and practically. As Melissa Lee stated when this bill received its first reading; “This is not a fair bargaining code. This is literally… a shakedown.” It will not work. Similar regimes in Australia and Canada are producing the predictable outcomes as search engines have or are considering blocking access to news sites rather than pay up.
Such a scheme is antithetical to the values of conservativism and Luxon should have vetoed the idea. He did not do that because he is not a conservative. He may not even know what one is. He believes, as he said in his maiden speech, in doing stuff; “…I want to solve problems, and I want to get things done.”
In his government, if not under his leadership, good things are being done but to understand the nature of the problem we can look to the Education reforms.
Erica Stanford, the National Party Minister of Education, is focused on using the Ministry of Education to make schools function better. Her associate minister of education, David Seymour, wants to disentangle schools from the ministry so those who run them can navigate their own path.
It is a different philosophical approach that, ultimately, will matter. Seymour’s reforms will endure. Stanford’s will be undone by the next government.
Many ministers are making excellent advancements. Chris Bishop and Simon Court are redrafting the behemoth that is the Resource Management Act.
Simeon Brown has been outstanding in transport; tackling infrastructure, congestion charging and lifting the dead-weight of the environmental restrictions hobbling our fleet. Progress is being made in areas like building products, relaxing regulations on consumer lending and bringing down the number of civil servants.
Wonderful as these reforms are they amount to an engine upgrade on a ferry powering towards a beach. The structural problems are getting worse.
Nicola Willis’ budget forecasts a return to surplus by 2027, based on an optimistic projection of 2.9% sustained economic growth and no major adverse events. Her budget shows growth in welfare spending and has taxation rising as a share of GDP from where Grant Robertson left office at 28.4% to 29.5% by 2028.
On the macro issues Luxon’s government is indistinguishable from its predecessors. He will be a more competent manager of our decline than Ardern and Hipkins and will slow our path towards penury.
Luxon is from the same vineyard that gave us nine wasted years under Key and English. He will prove less impactful than Jim Bolger who successfully introduced a profound reform of the labour market that remains the basis of employment law and custom to this day....The full article is published HERE
Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective.
12 comments:
Couldn't agree more - Luxon is NOT the PM for me, or NZ.
He is a place-holder. He is scared of real change and any kind of confrontation. Which makes him an ideal "centre-right" leader for our crazy Left, to be tolerated until the NZ public inevitably lose their senses again and re-elect a Labour/Greens/Maori Party government. And it won't take much to make that happen.
But, I suspect that's what many Kiwis actually want. The opinion polls regularly show only a slim margin between the right and left blocs, despite 6 years of abortive leadership under Labour et al. And the Greens, with their associated constant scandals and ruinous agenda, still poll regularly around 12%!! Higher than both ACT and NZFirst.
I hate to say it but those who stand up against co-governance and support the Treaty Principles Bill are likely only a small minority in NZ today.
Once upon a time, Labour stood for those who wanted the government to do something for them.
National stood for people who wanted the government to leave them alone, so they could do for themselves.
Today, both parties stand for people who want the government to do something for them; National just claims to do it more efficiently.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
National is Labour Lite.
New Zealand’s political centre of gravity has shifted steadily to the Left over the past 40 years.
National now sits where Labour used to as a moderate Centre-Left party.
And the ‘far right’ ACT Party now sits where National used to sir as a moderate Centre Right Conservative party.
The road back starts with a total clean out of the education system from kindergarten to tertiary level; and of the public service.
What is an advantage to educational changes in NZ and it returning to effective traditional teaching methods, is the world wide changes in particularly US and UK back to phonics in reading instruction and abandoning Whole Language (WL) which is based on the ideology of constructivism ( child-centered- teach- yourself -learning), one of the the main tenets of Progressive Education. The proven failure of WL and constructivism in reading from mountains of recent research and findings of cognitive and neuro -science is now well established. We in NZ also have the lowest scores for reading in the English speaking world. When phonics was still taught explicitly back last century we scored highest. We also now have one of the longest tails of underachievement in the developed world.
Learning to read is the quintessential element of schooling and the consequences of students failing to read is correlated to prison and welfare numbers as well as the lowest incomes in a working life.
These statistics on reading failure are of concern to a significant proportion of the population and all shades of political belief. Hopefully, and consequently, the entrenched academia, Teachers' Colleges, unions and Min.of Ed. will and should become more up to date in their beliefs and be forced to abandon their ideology, somewhat.
When one reads this article, one must ask - Damien which side of the center line do you stand?
I for one would rather have as a Leader, some one who has "business nous", rather than a person who "assumes that the mantle of chief is theirs", and here in NZ we have had plenty of those.
You could almost add the lines - "since I was born I have always wanted to be a Prime Minister".
In a conversation with a local business owner, in the City I reside, the topic of conversation was on our current inhabitants in the City Council (duly elected Councilor's)and their collective bumbling in handling a "matter that raised the ire of the People, and after 30 seconds of listening to a Public Forum, on the issue, pressed a head". The business owner said - "In future we need Councilor's who have some practical business background, not social justice warriors and/or green orientated botnicks".
It is interesting, that since a change of Govt, the scrutiny they have been under, I do not recall that same scrutiny with Jacinda Ardern.
thank you Damian for calling this out again, Ive heard you say this previously about the current PM, so I believe we have another timewaster who will maintain the status quo. I have done a cost benefit analysis of moving back to Australia and financially it stacks up, the continued mismanagement of the NZ economy makes me so angry the more I read about how this Govt and the previous ones lets not forget the role they have played in spending up large and putting it on the future. They have put our kids and grandkids future on the credit card. There are so many unknowns at play and our rising emissions that may bankrupt this country sooner than the estimated 2040 as Douglas writes about. Also the continued industry protectionism and a lack of vision to open up the opportunities to create a level playing field. They are trying in construction but whoop dee doo. I read a whitepaper on closing the inncome gap with Australia by 2025 published in Nov 2009 https://www.treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2017-11/2025tf-1streport-nov09.pdf, it was a sobering read because nothing has changed that I could link to where we are today in 2024. I have started mentally making the move in my head to leave for Australia, its a hard one as my heart is here but needs must Damian. Its really alarming that so many people dont realise whats happening in real time? I do my best but people have closed minds and dont want to think about the future. Anyway, this has been theraputic writing this post because it confirms to me that I am making the right decision. Sincerely Mary
so the essential difference between labor and National is who they form coalitions with.
As such if you want meaningful change towards the right vote Act.
The good news is that National are as left as possible but know that going with Labor in a coalition is suicide. they would if they could.
This article has been written just in time. We have settled into this National-led co-party government now for over six months and they deserved that time to find their feet. Upon finding those feet, however, they seem to be walking in the footsteps of the previous government whom, like Beetlejuice, I dare not speak aloud for fear they might reappear. More efficiently, or slower than that heinous 2017-2023 cabinet - I don’t know. What I do know is that they are not leading us to a better place.
Perhaps a small light to be found is that New Zealanders for all our bluster seem to follow in the footsteps of the larger world-culture and I see there a pushback on woke and on insane dogmatism and on cancel culture and I hope that we can find our collective balls to do the same here.
Thank you for publishing Damien’s articles which are always enjoyable to read.
Two cheeks of the same backside. Party politics is a scam, a psyop, with all power and control to the party and not the people. The people just vote for the party and give our power away.How dumb are we then?
When you are up against it, it is imperative that you know exactly what you are up against, what can or will attempt to get in your way and what the critical path to success is, assuming you can overcome those who would knock you off your course. That also presupposes that you know what that course ought to be and that you and those you are in coalition with are all singing from the same hymn sheet. That is one big ask! An apt analogy might be that it is akin to herding cats ... good luck with that!
We do not know exactly how the coalition is operating and can only make assumptions as to cohesion based on what we perceive as its achievements. We had what seemed a good start but PM Luxon showed his weakness quite early on when he effectively caved to the media pressure doing what he did regarding the Treaty Principles Bill. Thee coalition partners have to work this out because the Maorification/co-governance mess must be dealt with firmly and effectively to get it out of the way because there is a far bigger elephant in the room - as anyone who read and understood the 1970's Limits to Growth should know. A look at the 2023 recalibration shows clearly that World Industrial Output has hit the Seneca cliff along with World Food Production. All the Critical Race Theory the Marxists can muster will not save us from this. NZ needs to overcome all distractions like that and focus on what will give us the softest possible landing - not easy when the choice is between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Thank heavens we never had children. Bottom line for our PM, stop messing around and wake up, NZ needs real leadership from one who really knows what the issues are. We do not need a clone of previous PM Key.
The People get the government they deserve...Luxton or any other figurehead is not going to make that much difference until the People wake up, take a good look at the current (woke) state of affairs, and demand real change.
Anons 8.45 and 8.63 get it right.
The big picture is dire... but NZ is self-absorbed when it could be a nimble economy.
That being said, the Maorification issue has now become so serious - politically and culturally - that it could easily sink the country.
Luxon (and this government) is doing what the WEF puppet masters tell them.
The new road user charges? Just a new answer to the 15 minute cities. Road taxes are already being paid and roads have been already paid for. Just another tax to pay for govt. surveillance.
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