"National's 'happy face' mask slips" - Chris Trotter

The moustachioed one on National's recent slips, sorry, policy announcements:

The mask drops back again. But, now we've seen these masters of deception vexed
to nightmare by a colleague's indiscretion, we know, for certain, that it's the same National beast that slouches towards Wellington to be reborn. (1)

Trotter still demonstrates some affection for Bill English, waxing almost homo-erotic:

His rugged Southland features were never very well suited to wearing Mr Happy
Face in the first place. Besides, there's something ineluctably honest about
Tories from the countryside. They like a good political scrap, and have never
been very keen on tricking folk into believing they're something that they're
not. (2)

Mmm. Bruiser Bill, the thinking man's bit of political rough trade. I wouldn't give English that much credit, myself.

1 - "National's 'happy face' mask slips," by Chris Trotter, in the
Sunday Star Times, 30th of September, 2007. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4220541a1861.html)
2- ibid.

Wharfies on strike

By curious coincidence, as the workers at the Port of Auckland go on strike for fairer wages, I'm reading Dick Scott's account of the 1951 strike, 151 Days. Though, on second thoughts, maybe it isn't that curious, just further evidence that things ddon't really change as much as you'd think.

According to a press release from the Maritime Union of New Zealand, the amount of freight going through the port is up by 12.6% (1). Even taking into account that increased volume might not indicate a similar increase in profit, it shows the 3.25% being offered (2) by management of the port is pathetic. Even the 4.5-4.9% (3) that the union is seeking seems restrained.

It would be interesting to know what pay increases management have enjoyed over the last few years.

1 - "Ports of Auckland workers want their share," unattributed press release from Maritime Union of New Zealand, 7th of October , 2007. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0710/S00083.htm)
2- "Workers At Ports Of Auckland Dig In Heels In Dispute," unattributed press release from Maritime Union of New Zealand, 8th of October, 2007. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0710/S00094.htm)
3 - ibid.

National's policy on Doctor's fees

Sitting in the waiting room of a medical centre, today, I gained a further insight into the reality of National's declared intention (1) of introducing competition to the medical sector by lifting the cap on doctor's fees.

Well over half an hour after my appointment, I got to see the doctor. This was no big deal, I was in no pain and I had nothing especially important to do with my time, such as work so I could pay the rent, so I could afford to wait. When we came out, people who had been waiting longer than us were still waiting. I'm sure some of them weren't as fortunate as I was.

If national win the election, they want to lift the cap on doctor's fees. John Key suggested the market would ensure that fees would not become excessive. If they did, the market would punish the doctors as their potential patients would "go down the road" (2).

Imagine what that would be like. Most people will try to see a doctor who pays less - those that can afford to go to see the doctor at all, that is. At that surgery, queues will be longer, waiting times will stretch out into hours. People taking time off work to attend the surgery will end up paying more because of hours lost waiting to be seen - but since you can't predict how long you'll have to wait, you'll have no way of knowing.

Those that can afford higher fees, meanwhile, be able to waltz into a waiting room that is sparsely populated and will receive prompt attention. Introducing competition will create what is, in effect, a two-tier health system. good quick service for some, a dismal standard for everyone else.

John Key is smart enough to know this. His claim that people will be able to "go down the road" is only part of the National vision. More fully, he is saying that people will be able to go down the road, and wait for tedious - perhaps painful - hours in an uncomfortable waiting room, long after those who can afford to pay higher fees have seen their doctor and gone home.

He will also know that for those at the bottom end of the experience, going "up the road" (3) isn't an option. They can't afford it. They are stuck with what they can pay for. Nor can they decide to do without.

It is a dismal idea.

1 - 'National to scrap cap on GPs' fees,' by Sue Eden in the New Zealand
Herald, 26th of September,2007. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10466057)
2 - ibid.
3 - See what I did there? Clever, wasn't it?

"In this age of diamond saucepans, only a recession makes sense" - George Monbiot

Monbiot points out (1) pointing out the uncomfortable but unavoidable truth that growth can't continue indefinately, because growth - which basically means the ever increasing proliferation of consumer commodities - is screwing up us up, and trashing the planet.

In the very first line of Capital, Marx (cheekily quoting himself) stated 'The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”' (2). Almost a hundred and fifty years later, we still see wealth in the same terms and we're still trying to add ever more to the pile. Now we know that we're not only wasting our own time in so doing - because we'll never get enough - but the ceaseless consumption is also endangering our way of life and the lives of millions. Yet we carry on.

1 - "In this age of diamond saucepans, only a recession makes sense," by George Monbiot, in the Guardian Unlimited, 9th of October, 2007. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2186693,00.html)
2 - Capital, by Karl Marx. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1)

National freak out with looney-tunes policy jamboree

Hurrah, hurrah, National have at last started indicating what they'll do if they get to form a government after the next election. And, like the misfortunes of MacBeth, the polices come not as single spies but in battalions. Unfortunately for John key and National, the similarities between Labour and the beleagured Scottish tyrant don't hold. The policies that National are tossing out with such thoughtless abandon are all bad, and transparently so.

First, 'Bruiser' Bill English, a man whose prowess in the boxing ring ranks alongside my own, announced that National were going to flog off state own enterprises. English suggested that the sales would be used to fund infrastructure spending (1), but the real reason would be to pay for tax cuts. Were the tax cuts were as affordable as National keep suggesting, then the sale of the SOEs wouldn't be needed. English is suggesting National will slash tax, and make up the short fall by selling off profitable and efficient state owned enterprises that bring in a steady stream of revenue to the country, not to foreign shareholders. While Bill isn't sure (2) if National would retain a majority stake in the SOEs, or squeeze out a few extra cents of tax cuts by giving up control, that isn't very important.

Selling a minority stake now opens the way to selling off the rest of it next time around: "We sold part last time, the world didn't end, so we can sell of the rest. You'll have a nice tax cut, never mind that it will be more than used up paying for the newly privatised services, and by the loss of the revenue stream the country will experience."

Realising that Bill had pretty much knocked himself out, National spin-meisters launched a diversionary assault, announcing another stupid idea. The hope was it would distract us from the last one. Announcing that the the cap on G.P's fees would be lifted (3), Key and Ryall proclaimed their vision of New Zealand health in the future - a country where injured and sick people trail about from one doctor to another, trying to find the one they can afford. Key thinks that market forces will keep prices down. Wrong. When you are sick, you are sick, and you need treatment. A market relies on people being able to bargain effectively. Sick people aren't in a position to bargain. "Nah, I don't like the price, mate. I might have Bubonic plague, but I'll hold off a few days, see if it the price comes down." Silly argument? No, silly idea. Another step in entirely the wrong direction.

Then National, crazed by the gibby rush of policy announcements after what seemed like an endless drought, indicated the way they are moving on education (4). More money for private schools, which will promote an elitist, two tier system of eduction. New schools to be built and operated through the private sector, so we'll have to pay someone to do the job and them pay other people to check they are doing it properly, which will probably end up costing more than the current system. Key also indicated that National might be reconsidering its suicidal advocacy of bulk funding of teachers salaries, but the words of Bill English from 2005 are still unequivcal - "No ifs, no buts, and no fighting in school communities over whether to have it. Everyone is going bulk funding" (5). Key backed away from this sort of rhetoric, saying the party were considering "other options to give schools more flexibility in their management locally" (6), an ominous ofrmualtion which may mean nothing at all or which may indicate National has decided to introduce bulk-funding slowly, rather than tackling the teachers head on.

And all this when Labour enjoy their best polling (7) in eons - cutting National's lead to a scrape over 5%. Most of this is the result of Natiobal support dropping. It will be interesting to see how the slew of policy misfires will affect National and Key in the next round of polls, but I suspect the public won't care particularly for re-heated ideas from the bad old days.

1 - 'Nats want to sell assets to finance tax cuts - PM,' by Paula Oliver in the New Zealand Herald, 24th of September, 2007. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10465539&ref=rss)
2 - ibid.
3 - 'National to scrap cap on GPs' fees,' by Sue Eden in the New Zealand Herald, 26th of September,
2007. (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10466057)
4 - "Key plans to boost private school funding," by Colin Espiner, in the Press, 29th of September, 2007. Reproduced on
Stuff.co.nz. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4218778a6160.html)
5 - ibid.
6 - ibid.
7 - 'Labour gets boost in latest poll,' unattributed NZPA article, 29th of September, 2007. (http://nz.news.yahoo.com/070928/3/1uwc.html)

Shakespearean nonsense

Some people who should know better are claiming (1) Shakespeare didn't write the plays attributed to him. Shakespeare authorship controversies are old hat - the involvement of Derek Jacobi gives this one a frission of respectability, but there isn't any weight behind their claims. Methinks that this may be more about Messrs Jacobi and Rylance engaging in a bit of self-promotion.

Jacobi's suggestion - that the plays were a group effort - is particularly odd. If this had happened, why would all the credit be given to one person, and a middling actor at that? Why is there no reference anywhere to this literary conspiracy? Why did they operate in secrey so dark that it completely fooled everyone of their contemporaries, who all thought that William Shakespeare wrote them? Wouldn't just one of them have wanted the acknowledgement and fame that the co-author of Hamlet, Lear and MacBeth would be entitled to?

There is no evidence that Shakespeare didn't write the plays, but there is evidence that he did, from Greene's reference to 'Shakes-scene' in A Groats Worth of Wit (2) onwards, but the most compelling reason for thinking that Shakespear wrote the plays is far more simple. It is easier, to my mind, to imagine the existance of on freakshly brilliant mind, than to imagine several such minds existing at the same time.

Also, who would be his collaborators? Shakespeare was far ahead of his rivals - there was no-one else writing for the stage who wrote like Shakespeare, apart from Shakespeare. Marlowe, even, was not writing like Shakespeare. Faustus was closer in spirit and theme to the Morality Plays than to MacBeth. Ben Johnson was caught up in fashionable ideas about the influence of elemental 'Humours' on the psyche - an silly, simplistic idea that can't describe Shakespeare's main characters. Shakespeare pre-empted Freud, for goodness sake. Do you think he was balancing Ichor and Phlegm when he created Hamlet? No-one but Shakespeare could have written the plays, because Shakespeare was too good to be more than one person at work. There isn't enough of that sort of genius to go round.

We wait, with interest, to see if Derek Jacobi will follow through on his convictions, and refuse to appear in any play attributed to hakespeare, unless his doubts abou tits authorship are made clear - "Derek Jacobi, starring in Someone-or-other's Julius Ceasar."

1 "Actors question bard's authorship," unattributed BBC article, 9th of September, 2007. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6985917.stm)
2- "A groats worth of wit"by Robert Greene, (http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html)

Bush's supreme hypocrisy (Part 345)

The US president, George Bush, today announced new sanctions against Burma amid threats by the country's military regime to crack down on anti-government protesters.

Addressing the UN general assembly in New York, Mr Bush urged its members to join the US in employing "diplomatic leverage to help the Burmese people regain their freedom".

He said the US would tighten economic sanctions on leaders of Burma's military junta and its financial backers, imposing visa bans on those responsible for human rights breaches and their families. (1)

In translation, that says "We've been quite happy to do business with them up till now, but the connection is a bit embarrassing now." Just another example of the massive, corrupt hypocrisy of US politicains (and others, of course, but the political oligarchs of the USA are remarkable in their venality). The Reagan White House killed off the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed Sanctions on Iraq, post-Halabja. Apparently, Reagan and his acolytes thought action a regime that had just slaughtered 5,000 civilians with poison gas might be premature.' (2)

The article continues:

Mr Bush said Americans were "outraged" by the military junta's "19-year reign of
fear". (2)

This begs the question why the USA has only thought to do something about it now. Bush I & II and the usurper who came inbetween had every opportunity to do something before now.

He accused the regime of a range of abuses including the persecution of ethnic
minorities, forced child labour, human trafficking and the detention of "more
than 1,000 political prisoners". (3)

Wait a minute, this sounds familiar. Isn't this rather like our valued trading partner and soon-to-be Olympic hosts in the PRC? Still, Burma isn't quite as important as the PRC, so Bush can make some noise about how terribly wicked the Burmese junta is, as it won't hurt the USA in the pocket.

1 - "Bush announces new sanctions against Burma," by Haroon Siddique in The Guardian, 25th of September, 2007. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/burma/story/0,,2176876,00.html)
2- "One Man's Battle to Stop Iraq," unattributed CBC article/transcript. (http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/kurds/battle.html)
3 -Siddique, op. cit.
4 - ibid.