Posts Tagged ‘Politics’

New branding, but same old tories

Prime Minister John Key just squeezed himself into the New Zealand Rich list. With an entry requirement of NZ$50 million, John Key has just made it with $55 million personal worth. Compared with world standards, this can hardly be called very rich. However, among the world's leaders, he's ranking is quite high above - 18th.

What this reveals is that he must be quite clever to gain that amount of wealth, and succeed in both economic and political arena.  As a banker, you can also safely assume that he is highly financially literate. So lack of knowledge can hardly used to explained Key's comparison of wage gap between Australia and New Zealand:

Loyalty dictated John Key take the support option. To loud guffaws from the Labour benches, Key told Parliament that he had been advised that the gap between gross average weekly earnings in Australia and New Zealand, adjusted for purchasing power parity, was $160.25. "That is certainly a lot less than it was in 2005, when it was $187.60."

Indeed it is. But National did not win the 2005 election. It was elected in 2008 when - according to Key's own figures - the income gap had narrowed to $138.

There are two things that I definitely did not expect - 1. how did he become a millionaire? 2. I am actually very surprised to find out that the wage gap actually decreased - at a quite considerable rate, at the time when Labour was at the helm until the recession. I guess this is just another example of misconception that the right-wing biased media has created.  You thought you know the very essence of politics, but in fact you only know the facts as being digested and manipulated by others.

A shiny example of how ETS should not be done

New Zealand has started its emission trading scheme (ETS) from 1 July (yesterday). The country is one of the handful countries that have such scheme in place. Once again, New Zealand has become an experiential ground of a new concept for the world to observe.

New Zealand’s has experienced serious changes even before it is implemented. As the centre-right wing national government gets elected in 2009, the scheme has undergone a hasty review, and several changes were resulted.

One of the major issues that will eventually topple this ETS is the removal of caps on total amount of emissions allowed nationally, and by sector. Government is responsible to supply unlimited amount of emission units at a fixed price of $25 per unit until 2012.

Now this is a very weird thing to do by a government which proclaims itself as “pro-market”. The reason for a cap isn’t just limiting the country’s total emission, but providing a market mechanism that provides financial incentive for cleaner sectors to emerge.   By removing such cap the scheme becomes no more than a new type of tax, since there is no limit on the amount of emissions, businesses can go on as usual, and the cost of this new “tax” is conveniently  transferred to end users – i.e. every day consumers.

And this appears just like what has happened.

The effects of ETS are further reduced by not having agriculture sector included in the scheme until 2015. As the country’s largest polluter, agriculture accounts for nearly half of the total greenhouse gas emissions.  This isn’t a sign that such issue is being treated seriously in New Zealand.

No wonder this ETS receives very little support – consumers absolutely hate it, even  politicians don’t agree. From the very right wing Act Party, which highly doubts the existence of global warming, to the very left environmentalist Green Party, all voted down for such scheme.

But such scheme does provide a good example to rest of the world though – how it should not be done. I highly doubt the ETS will last as its current shape for long - a major overhaul might just be an election away.

Electoral Finance Bill

Seems that some people are determined not to let the issue fade away from media.

But at least I think, this Bill is very democratic.

We all know the basic principle of democracy - "one person one vote". If you understand the "vote" in this principle as real "vote" you would be very wrong.

Why one person is just allowed to have one vote? This is to make sure that everyone, regardless of their gender, age, social class, have the same amount of influence on how the governing body should formed - for me, this is the real meaning of "one person one vote".

Then you should start to understand why this bill is very democratic. The spending cap is like, level out the "money" factor in the election game - make sure that each of us only have same amount of influence on media - which could indirectly influence the election; so money will not buy anybody any extra influence in elections, and this sounds more than fair to me.

Theoretically the bill does give neither major party an advantage, well if Nats are feeling disadvantaged, they should just think about open up the details of all their dodgy stuffs.

I didn't like anti-smacking bill, I didn't like a lot of bills from this government, but on this Electoral Finance Bill, I'm with Comrade Helen.