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Where's the Center?

Entry 1649, on 2014-05-02 at 23:24:27 (Rating 3, Politics)

New Zealand will hold a general election later this year and the inevitable political machinations have already begun. The election's result is very uncertain because the center-right block (National and maybe Act or the Conservatives or NZ First) and the center-left block (Labour, the Greens, and maybe NZ First) are nearly equal in the polls.

The two main parties, National and Labour, are competing for the center and the good news is that the center has drifted quite considerably back towards a genuine centrist position over about the last 10 years.

New Zealand, like most of the world, has been a victim of the right-wing economic theories which have represented the zeitgeist since the late 70s and early 80s. So privatisation, user pays, open labour markets, and all the other standard neo-liberal ideologies have been the order of the day. But not so much any more.

Sure our right-wing party, National, have engaged in an asset sales program which has made no sense at all and was undoubtedly the product of ideology rather than practicality, but that program involved only had partial sales (of less than 50%) and even National say there will probably be no more in the future.

It seems to me that the government has seen that asset sales aren't a good thing, but have got these ones out of the way because it was part of their agenda, and are now happy to avoid any further failures of this type in the future. At the height of the neo-liberal era in the late 80s and 90s the sales would have been total and further plans would always have been being made.

That is an obvious sign of a move back not so much to the left, but away from the extreme right. I have always said that the policies of the last 30 years have been far-right (economically, not socially), even when our ostensibly left-wing party, Labour, has been in power. Surely this move away from those extremist policies is a sign that I was correct.

You might reasonably think that the left would win easily after National has been there for 6 years and has suffered a number of rather embarrassing problems recently. But you would be wrong, for 2 reasons...

First, the Prime Minister and leader of National, John Key, is a very skillful politician. I'm not saying he's a good person, a brilliant and creative intellect, an inspiring leader, or anything else, just a skillful politician, and that isn't necessarily a compliment!

Second, the Labour opposition isn't exactly a great alternative. The problem seems to be that everything they might criticise National for could equally well be applied to them, especially in the past. During the early to mid 2000s Labour was probably about where National is now because they had moved to the right (starting in 1984) and now National has drifted back to the left where Labour was then.

So when Labour criticises National's asset sales program it seems rather hypocritical because they started it all in 1984. And when they criticise National's MPs for being rich and being out of touch with ordinary New Zealanders they should look at most of themselves first.

What Labour should be doing is confessing to their past "sins" and saying that they now want to put things right. They should say "yes, we sold assets because it seemed like the right thing at the time, but since then reality has shown us that those sales weren't good for the majority of New Zealanders so now we want to try to fix the situation".

They probably can't do too much about the type of people they have before the election but I think a major "cleansing" of all of those associated with their deviant neoliberal past should be carried out over the next few years.

At the last election over 800,000 people didn't vote. When asked why many of them say something like "because all the parties are the same". Maybe they have a point.

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