Gordon Campbell on the 2013 Budget

The Budget lockup retains a symbolic value these days, but little more than that. This is the government’s best annual opportunity to bury its usual screw-ups and regale the public with power-pointed examples of its vision, shrewd thrift and judicious generosity. This is the day when the official pageant of economic management is staged before a captive audience of media celebrities and seers of commerce. “The Treasury A Team” was also there yesterday, we were told.

In his role as M.C., Finance Minister Bill English did his best to make rank ideology sound like common sense, but the austerity rationales were wearing pretty thin this year. Talk to him – as someone tried in the Budget q & a yesterday – about the inadequate stock of social housing and the government’s apparent indifference to the scale of the housing problem and English replied – astonishingly – that we should be “thankful that government wasn’t building the houses” because, he went on that sort of “short term decision making” just isn’t what governments are good at. Coming from a John Banks this would have sounded like the propeller head nonsense it was. When expressed in Blinglish, it sounded merely like a rote reply that he didn’t really believe.
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Gordon Campbell on stonewalling about the GCSB, and MMP

This week has seen two examples of turkeys refusing to vote for an early Christmas – while busily denying the evident self interest involved. First, the GCSB is refusing to identify the 88 people it has illegally spied upon – as revealed in the Kitteridge report – and is donning the cloak of national security to justify its refusal to be transparent. According to GCSB boss Ian Fletcher, there would be a risk of disclosure of operational secrets if the GCSB came clean and told the people concerned that they had been spied on. That stance would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so patently self serving…. eg. I’m sorry we can’t tell you whether you have been a victim of our illegal modus operandi, because that would reveal our modus operandi. (Surely, it can’t do much more damage to reveal who you’ve secretly been spying on illegally, given that the secret that you’ve acted illegally is no longer a secret? Surveillance can’t be so customized – can it – that merely knowing the target will reveal the M.O. involved? There may be 50 ways to leave a lover, but surely not 88 ways to install a video camera.)
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Gordon Campbell on university essays for hire, and Allie Brosh’s take on depression

Unfortunately, the buying and selling of ghost-written university essays has been part of academic culture for decades. In the mid 1980s for instance, to cite just one of many examples… the late, revered novelist David Foster Wallace used to earn a living by writing term papers for hire. “It was really good training for writing in different voices and styles,” Wallace told Patrick Arden in a 1999 interview, “[Because] you’d get kicked out if you got caught.” Writing essays for fellow students is also a pop culture staple. In the “Doppelgangland” episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer for instance, the question of whether Willow Rosenberg will ghost-write a term paper to help a scholastically challenged star football player get through college is a key point of the story. Faking it for money really is the world’s second oldest profession.
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Gordon Campbell on the debt of gratitude that National owes to Aaron Gilmore

Comes the time, comes the man. Aaron Gilmore has become the poster child for everything that is loathsome about politicians and the political process. However, it might be time for a sense of proportion to creep into the Gilmore saga. It would be nice to think Gilmore had established a new benchmark. I’d certainly be in favour of everyone in Parliament losing their job if and when they display an obnoxious sense of entitlement as they threaten the livelihoods of workers and beneficiaries. But that isn’t going to happen. On the contrary, some of Gilmore’s colleagues (e.g. Simon Bridges) are being praised for their apparent disregard for the needs of those on the minimum wage, and for the public’s civil rights to protest about risks to the environment. Gilmore, it should be remembered, was already the lowliest of National’s backbenchers He had little or no power to inflict damage on the public, beyond being lobby fodder for the government.
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Gordon Campbell on the Mighty River Power debacle

Abuse directed at anyone opposed to what you’re wanting to do. Repeated mis-representations of what you said, and did. Not to mention the flat denials that there is a problem, when the evidence happens to contradict your version of events. No, I’m not talking about Aaron Gilmore….but about Bill English, John Key etc over the Mighty River share float. Gilmore is no position to point this out, but his sins pale into insignificance when stacked against the government’s asset sales experiment.
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Gordon Campbell on the GCSB’s enhanced role

Remember when the creeping power of Big Government was being manifested only in …the energy efficiency regulations for household appliances? Back in 2008, that seemed scary enough for the likes of David Farrar to sound the alarm in these aghast terms:

“First they came for our light bulbs, and then they came for our showers!! Is there no limit to the nanny state?” Well no, there doesn’t seem to be a limit, as it turns out. Because National – apparently, with the help of New Zealand First – is about to make it legal for the Government Communications Security Bureau to spy on New Zealanders. For reasons that they’d prefer to keep to themselves, thanks. Fine by the centre-right. This time it’s their Big Brother.
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Gordon Campbell on yesterday’s Anzac Day celebrations

Yesterday’s Anzac Day saw the usual strong turnout at dawn ceremonies, to mark an occasion that is already displacing Waitangi Day – if we can believe the newspaper polls – as the de facto day on which we celebrate our national identity. If that is the case now, how much more so next year – when we will mark the 100th anniversary of the Great War of 1914-1918, and the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II? And the year after that, the Anzac Day of 2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of the landing at Gallipolli, with everything that campaign has come to signify for our sense of nationhood. The next two Anzac Days will be special.
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Gordon Campbell on lurching towards the centre on power prices

Anyone looking for legacy traces of the late Margaret Thatcher in New Zealand politics will have found them in the government’s scare tactics – “a lurch to the left” – being used to denigrate the Labour/Green plan to crack down on energy price profiteering. What about the government’s own prior lurch to the right – as its asset sales programme opened up state energy companies to price profiteering by private investors? No, there has been no discernible mention of that. Lurch wise, a movement to the left to counter a pre-existing lurch to the right sounds to me like a correction to the centre.
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Gordon Campbell on the Labour/Greens plan to cut power bills

As sure as night follows day, you could bet some financial analyst would see the death of the free market in the plans unveiled last week by Labour and the Greens to put an end to price gouging within our electricity system. Take a bow, Craig Stent of Harbour Asset Management – who managed to assemble almost every known market cliché into one report on RNZ this morning.
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Gordon Campbell on the same-sex marriage vote, and the current Dotcom law case

Since politics is so often about the perpetuation of privilege, we should all celebrate the times when Parliament gets something right. The passage of Louisa Wall’s same sex marriage Bill last night was one such occasion. It is a victory in practical terms for those now able to marry, and is also important symbolically, in ending a form of discrimination based on sexual orientation. The fact that the overwhelming numbers in support of the Bill were partly the product of cross-party teamwork (by the Greens’ Kevin Hague and National’s Tau Henare) was also worth applauding. It would be nice to think that MPs will now collaborate in the same way to combat other personal and social evils, such as child poverty. Don’t hold your breath.
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