The Unions have failed to realise for years that the ideal is not to grab bigger slices of the pie by getting more members in the companies to join the Union, but to make the pie bigger by ensuring the success of the companies for which their members work. Unions should be ensuring fair and egalitarian contracts rather than trying to get the best deals to the detriment of businesses. Basically, a partnership.

I wish to stand for Parliament in the future, and I am pleased that Labour seem to be taking the ethical high ground. Asset sales are terrible. I maintain that all strategic resources (water, power, telecommunications, transport etc) should be in the public sector so that unethical companies cannot hold us to ransom. Asset sales are selling off profitable businesses, thus denying a significant income from the ownership of these assets. We have moved away from the moribund SOEs that used to cost a fortune, and now most SOEs are lean, profitable and successful. Having got here, to sell them off only benefits the speculators and the rich in society. I want all to benefit.

As for welfare, there are many other ways to organise those without work to ensure that they retain their dignity, do not rely on handouts, yet have enough to not just survive, but to live. I used to live in Jersey in the Channel Islands. If you were unemployed tehre, the States of Jersey would step in and give you a job. Ideally it would be in the area in which you are trained, but even if it was picking up rubbish from the verges, it ensured a neat, tidy country and zero unemployment. If we did that for 3 days a week on a basic wage, we would have zero unemployment, a motivated workforce geared at self improvement, and a tidy country. Also, people would not have to be shamed that they do not have a job, but proud that they are earning their living fairly. They have 2 extra days to seek alternative work, and we would not need WINZ offices or to assess people to ensure that they are looking for a job. If someone was not looking for a job, so what? They are working, and so it would be a non issue.

What I am saying is that we can have ideas that break the mold and think laterally. It is a good socialist principle to think around the issue and come up with different ideas. If the workforce and corporate world were on the same page, perhaps as Henry Ford put it, to make as much profit with as few costs whilst paying the workers the maximum possible wage, we would have a successful country.

What I like about Labour is that these ideas are not necessarily rejected, but are beginning to be considered from a socialist perspective to see how we best can serve not just the poor, but also the wealthy, to ensure a truly democratic and unified New Zealand is the result.

I had heard no-one in the public voicing concern about asset sales, before Labour decided it was an issue.

And I find it quite disturbing the way “OWN OUR FUTURE!” and other variants on “STOP ASSET SALES!” have filtered down from the top of Labour to their activist base and then their voting pool… when it’s clear just by listening to them talk that few in the Labour hierarchy let alone the Labour voting pool understand the economics of the Key Govt’s proposed sales.

It is just a chant.. not at all unlike FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD. It astonishes me that so many people seem willing to be told what to think like this, but there you have it.

And then there was the Darien Fenton vs the Mad Butcher thing…

Basically Labour are doing many things badly, and the one thing they have done well (energise their base over the asset sales) is somewhat scary IMHO.

Meanwhile, The Key govt talk to us like grown-ups, they look and sound like competent business people, and they are doing anything but have a bonfire of everything the previous Labour govt built (as Clark feared in her 2008 concession speech.) As someone who’s historically been a relatively centreist Labour voter, I find I have more in common with the Nats now, maybe that’s why Labour just can’t get anywhere?

The old way of politics, where it was in some part about ideas, is dead. Politics is now mostly carping about inanities, and a kind of American Idol, but for ugly, old people. The left can’t function in such an atmosphere, so they might as well admit that and go home and do something useful with their lives. Blairism is just a way of avoiding the reality so that the Paganis and Mallards of this world can keep their jobs.

Interestingly, the perpetual moaning machines at The Standard were complaining about those who no longer vote being responsible for Labour’s poor showing in the polls. They’re right about that, but wrong to think they can do anything, because there’s no prospect of anything for these people to vote for. Hence the risible nature of he schemes being hatched at The Standard to “fix” the left.

The other reason I suspect that the left in general prefers not to be hard on crime is that they recognise that the criminal class is growing and that they almost inevitably vote left. They voteless of course because the left validates and basically approves of their life choices.

It is now led by middle class intellectuals ,academics and homosexual activists who wouldn’t know shit about the people (workers) they pretend to represent.