Chris Trotter

Once again it is up to Chris Trotter from the left to insert some sanity into the often shrill debate about free trade:

And if we, the people, were serious about preserving our patrimony, a majority of us would’ve voted for the political parties  the Alliance, NZ First, the Greens, Mana  which promised to do exactly that.

But, the closest the New Zealand electorate’s come to voting against free trade (27 per cent) was the election of 1993. In 2011, the anti-free trade vote was just 19 per cent.

It’s a little late, now, to shout: “Stop!”

Chris Trotter in a DomPost opinion piece has called out David Shearer and Labour for their hypocrisy and racism over the Crafar Farms deals:

It was all the more perplexing, then, to hear Opposition leader David Shearer declaring his and the Labour Party’s opposition to the sale. It’s simply inconceivable that Mr Shearer is unaware of the MFN prohibition against denying China the same right to buy land as the nations that bought upwards of 650,000 hectares of our national patrimony exercised when Helen Clark was Prime Minister, and Mr Shearer’s friend (and former boss) Phil Goff was the Minister of Trade.

To avoid the inevitable charges of rank hypocrisy and populist opportunism, Mr Shearer needed to accompany his statement opposing the sale with an announcement that Labour was committed, immediately on regaining office, to repudiating the New Zealand-China FTA and tightening up the legislation regulating overseas investment.

I’m still waiting for those other shoes to drop. And, frankly, I think I’ll go on waiting. Why? Because I simply don’t believe Labour is about to abandon its long-standing commitment to free trade. Nor am I confident Mr Shearer is any more willing to court the fury and retaliatory trade restrictions of the Chinese government than Mr Key. Both are well aware that this country’s future prosperity is inextricably bound up with China’s.

If foreign ownership of our land was something successive governments wished to restrict, they should have legislated against it before they embraced the doctrine of free trade.

 

Chris Trotter has written about the Crafar Farms decision:

AT THE RISK of being branded a “traitor”, I’m declaring my support for the Crafar Farms sale. Not because I like seeing productive New Zealand farmland pass into the hands of foreigners, I don’t. The reason I’m in favour of the sale is because I believe New Zealanders should keep their promises and fulfil their undertakings.

In 2008 this country ratified a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the Peoples’ Republic of China. That agreement was hailed as the most important foreign policy and trade achievement of the Helen Clark-led government of 1999-2008. Not only was it the first such agreement to be signed between China and a western-style democracy, but it also offered New Zealand businesses immense economic opportunities.

Those opportunities were, of course, reciprocal. The Chinese have been merchants and traders for the best part of three thousand years. They needed no reminding that in this world you don’t get something without giving something in return. And what we gave China was “Most Favoured Nation” (MFN) status.

In the context of the Crafar Farms Sale, MFN means: “If it’s okay to sell New Zealand farmland to Americans, Englishmen, Germans and Indonesians, then it must also be okay to sell farmland to the Chinese.” Under the terms of the NZ-China FTA, the Peoples’ Republic is legally entitled to no lesser consideration than that shown to the most favoured of our trading partners.

That’s what Prime Minister John Key meant when he said “our hands are tied”. It’s what New Zealand’s leading critic of the NZ-China FTA, Professor Jane Kelsey, meant when she stated:

“If the New Zealand government had declined the Shanghai Pengxin purchase of the Crafar farm it could have faced an international law suit for breaching its free trade agreement with China […] The government cannot treat applications from Chinese investors differently from similar applications from other countries’ investors under what is known as the ‘most-favoured-nation’ or MFN rule.”

And that’s not all. Had the application from Shanghai Pengxin been declined by the Overseas Investment Office that decision would almost certainly have been challenged in a New Zealand court. And rightly so. We’d have broken our own rules.

This is why I read and enjoy Chris Trotter’s writing. He is partisan but not so blinkered that he can actually see reality before him.

Chris Trotter has blogged about the Christchurch City Council. He sounds very much like he is a gnats whisker from endorrsing action to remove the council:

But to meld a council of strong-willed and opinionated individuals into a united team of citizens’ advocates requires leadership of the highest order. Unfortunately, this has not been forthcoming. Neither the Mayor, Bob Parker, nor the Council CEO, Tony Marryatt, appear to have grasped the urgency of transforming the Council into the principal advocate of – and for – Christchurch’s battered citizens. On the contrary, both men seem to have scant regard for the three principles indispensable to the construction of unity: transparency; consultation; and accountability.

Local democracy is not about gathering together a bare majority of compliant cronies whose sole contribution to local government is to rubber-stamp the joint recommendations of the Mayor and his CEO. And it is certainly not about the Mayor’s cronies, puffed-up with pride at their insider status, heaping scorn upon those councillors denied admission to the magic circle of power. Indeed, nothing is more calculated to breed disunity, disaffection and defensiveness: the very feelings that cause politicians to resort to that time-honoured response to secrecy and exclusion – the leak.

Of all the many sins capable of arousing the fury of administrative authoritarians the leaking of privileged information is the most egregious. Their invariable response is to double-down on the secrecy while setting in motion a witch-hunt for the person or persons responsible. The “Us versus Them” mentality is thus transferred from the council table to the council bureaucracy. In consequence, the political and administrative dysfunction, far from being reduced, intensifies.

Sounds like Nick Smith really needs to act with alacrity.

Chris Trotter writes that Labour is yet to have it’s “Kodachrome Moment”:

My friend, the photographer and artist, Barry Thomas, reckons the manufacturers of Kodachrome and the New Zealand Labour Party have a lot in common. Both were once at the cutting edge. Both had something to sell which masses of people were happy to buy. And both, by failing to keep pace with a rapidly changing world, have seen the power of their “brand” dwindle and fade.

Ouch, Trotter isn’t holding back:

Mention Labour in 2012 and most New Zealanders will struggle to conjure-up any images at all, apart from a succession of vaguely recognisable faces and a sorry string of embarrassing headlines.

The Labour Party Opposition should be in the business of displaying courage, thinking the unthinkable, searching for the root causes of the nation’s problems and coming up with solutions that require the voters to discard their prejudices, step away from past failures, and take the risk of committing themselves to something new.

A successful Opposition doesn’t waste time attacking the Government, it devotes itself to enlisting the electorate in a great adventure.

If a vote for Labour is anything less than a decision to join that great adventure then the party will share the fate of Eastman-Kodak. It neglected its core business: preserving people’s memories. Labour’s core business, in 2012, must be stimulating New Zealanders’ imagination.

Using digital, colour, and, if necessary, black-and-white.

Clare Curran thought she was being cute. She wrote a haiku to John Hartevelt, Labour’s fan-boy at Fairfax:

Though our aim divine/
The delivery human/
A labour of love

A haiku about Red Alert dedicated to John Hartevelt

Readers of Red Alert felt inspired, like Danyl McLauchlan:

As the dying eel
drifts to the sea floor
Labour drifts into social media

…and Chris Trotter:

The summer rains fall,
Hopes for better weather fade,
Shearer says nothing.

Yeah, not sure that the haiku was a good idea Clare.

Chris Trotter has written a post ostensibly about Josie Pagani, but mainly against the “Whatever it takes” attitude saying that leads inextricably down the road to corruption:

“ALL POWER CORRUPTS”, wrote Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But the risk of political degeneracy exists not only in the proximity of power, but is also present in its absence. If winning is the politician’s sole objective, then seeing victory slip through her fingers over and over again surely renders her equally vulnerable to corrupt counsels?

The most persuasive of these siren songs is the one that begins: “One day in Government is worth a thousand years in Opposition.” Meaning: genuine political achievement is available only to those with access to the levers of power. Once this precept is accepted, the idea that serious politicians must be willing to do “whatever it takes” to win office becomes dangerously easy to sell.

And the moment it is purchased, the politician is lost. The means we adopt inevitably shape and determine the ends we arrive at. Being prepared to do “whatever it takes” means being willing to enlist evil in the cause of right; and in that encounter it is not evil which is changed.

Like all stories peddled by the corrupt, the notion that political achievement is restricted to those with access to the levers of power is a lie. The greatest movers of human events are ideas and the moral force they generate. And a person does not need to be in government – or even in Parliament – to advance an idea or exert moral force.

…To abandon Labour’s new position, as a gesture of appeasement to the ill-informed prejudices of working-class National voters – because that is what it takes – would signal a willingness to march into office over the backs of impoverished families.

It’s hard to conceive of a Labour victory more corrupting – or less worth winning.

It is not that hard to conceive of a Labour victory more corrupting. Chris Trotter himself once suggested that Labour’s $840,000 rort for their pledge card and the subsequent Electoral Finance Bill that the furore spawned was “acceptable corruption“.

There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter’s disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour’s pledge card had been acceptable corruption.

So it seems that some level of corruption is acceptable to Chris Trotter…in achieving victory just not the corruption that Josie Pagani is suggesting.

UPDATE: Chris has posted the full article in the comments. He is pointing out that I have misquoted him and so I have. He never did say the words “acceptable corruption”, what he in fact said was INHO much worse:

Which is why, with all due deference of the Auditor, Solicitor and every other “General” with an interest in upholding the letter of the law, I am glad that, for once, Labour erred on the side of – “Let’s f**k these bastards!”

Had Helen Clark, Heather Simpson, Mike Williams and Mike Smith not decided that social democracy was worth a decent scrap, New Zealand would now been in a whole world of woe.

Social peace for a paltry half-million dollars? Strikes me as the most courageous – and forgivable – kind of corruption.

Just so there is proper context. What Chris thinks is a “courageous – and forgivable- kind of corruption” was the stealing of $840,000 of taxpayers money, and then when getting caught retrospectively validating it and at the same time creating the Electoral Finance Act to attempt to silence anyone who dared speak against the Labour party.

Chris later blamed the Electoral Finance Act partly for the demise of the Labour party in the 2008 election. But as the old saying goes, he was for it before he was agin it. Or as Chris says “it’s the little things that get you”.

David Shearer has graced us with his presence after a holiday surfing and staying off line and out of touch. Nothing shows just how out of touch he is than the first news article showing him racing to Christchurch to cover a story that is weeks old. Like Phil Goff he is more interested in disaster porn than saving his ailing party.

Or is he just out of touch in his quaint way of appearing out of touch.

It also shows the folly of keeping new Chief of Staff, Stuart Nash, on gardening leave till February while Trevor Mallard sits in the office pulling the strings. While Stuart Nash has been busy with his newborn, Trevor Mallard, the old soldier is giving birth of his own to new plans…..he wouldn’t go on holiday, so fearful he is of losing the mechanisms of control within the party. Word has it that his lights have been burning bright in the parliamentary precinct during the break.

One thing for sure though is that the party is getting antsy. We have seen the hard left Labour local board members come out in support of the wharfies. Chris Trotter, ever the loyal servant of the party has expressed his disappointment through an open letter to Shearer and Denis Welch is openly disdainful of the “New ” Labour party lead by David Shearer.

Wise head John Pagani thinks, like David Farrar, that Labour should stay silent, but in doing so they are ceding the moral high ground on the issue to the Greens. They aren’t afraid to comment and are increasingly being seen as the go to guys for comment in the media. They are big fans of coastal shipping. Their credentials are much stronger than Labour’s which right now doesn’t even include platitudes for their long suffering funders.

Enter Helen Kelly, long time friend of hard core unionists like Trevor Mallard and Darien Fenton. Mallard has been furiously re-tweeting her assistance for MUNZ.

If the CTU can change Shearer’s mind it will prove once and for all that Labour is STILL in the pockets of their funders – the Unions…and Labour is no different than the one that polled its lowest in 80 years in November. Labour would have learned nothing from its electoral defeat.

David Shearer has to do something. It is clear that Labour hasn’t focus grouped this, otherwise we would have had some sort of pronouncement from the spokespeople concerned. So the old warhorses like Mallard have been quietly txting Shearer to stay tight and at the same time keeping a muzzle on Fenton because she is feral and can’t help herself saying something nasty.

Is it a slight on the confidence in Darien Fenton that she has been muzzled by the men from becoming the fourth woman on the wharf?

However in doing so Shearer now stands charged with becoming the puppet, albeit a silent puppet of Trevor Mallard. You have to wonder why he didn’t put his name forward for the leadership.

It might be his first week back but David Shearer can’t sit tight any longer. The test of his leadership will be the day of the strike. If Fenton shows up and says or does anything to show support for the striking unionists then it shows his control over the party caucus is tenuous. Shearer will have to act to exert caucus discipline otherwise he will be a lame duck leader, the puppet of Mallard.

Time and pressure will tell…sometimes it makes diamonds but most times dirty coal.

Chris Trotter is grumpy with David Shearer and especially with Trevor Mallard:

So, I ask again: Why so silent on the Ports of Auckland dispute?

Is it because you’ve been listening to Trevor Mallard, Mr Shearer? I sincerely hope not. Because Mr Mallard and his ilk are the very last people you should be listening to at the moment. They are, when all is said and done, the people who devised the campaign strategy which culminated in Labour’s worst election result in more than 80 years. The people whose political counsel is dictated by opinion polls and focus-groups. The sort of people who purport to lead by following. The people who would have asked those Sudanese children scrabbling in the dust which variety of scraps were their favourite.

Or, perhaps you’re recalling the example of “Side-line Stan” Rodger – Minister of Labour during the darkest days of Rogernomics. Mr Rodger made a virtue out of staying on the side-lines of industrial relations and refusing to involve the Government in settling strikes and lockouts.

It took just a week for Len Brown to crack from the pressure, but David Shearer has so far remained silent on the Ports issue.

Perhaps he is just relaxing with the phone off the hook, either that or Labour’s polling company hasn’t yet managed to focus group the issue. Worse though is that they have and told Labour to STFU on the issue.

Danyl McLauchlan suspects it is a focus group issue:

I don’t know why the political left is silent on this issue – but I’ll throw a cynical idea out there. Maybe Shearer, Brown et al haven’t spoken out on this issue because it happened over the summer  holidays, when everyone’s away and all the polling companies are closed down. They don’t know what the public thinks about the issue and they can’t find out for another week or so – so they don’t know whether defending the union is a good idea or not.

Eventually they’ll have some meaningful data, and if enough people side with the wharfies then our politicians can show courage and leadership and side with them too.

Chris Trotter has now joined the chorus of those wondering where David Shearer is:

WHY SO SILENT, Mr Shearer? Why has the Labour Party not voiced its solidarity with the Maritime Unions of New Zealand? Why have you not spoken out against the Ports of Auckland CEO’s outrageous threat to sack his entire workforce? What’s the matter with you, man?

The white sands and Pohutukawa blooms of Northland are beautiful at this time of year, and God knows you’ve earned a break, but you must know a politician is never truly on holiday. Time and the twenty-four-hour news cycle wait for no man.