Election 2020, No the Other One

James K

James is a government policy analyst, and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. His interests including wargaming, computer gaming (especially RPGs and strategy games), Dungeons & Dragons and scepticism. No part of any of his posts or comments should be construed as the position of any part of the New Zealand government, or indeed any agency he may be associated with.

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6 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    On a scale from Blair to Corbyn, how left-wing is the New Zealand Labour Party? The thing about preferring state housing (which costs taxpayers money) to upzoning (whose cost is borne voluntarily by the private sector) is nutty enough to suggest that it’s more Corbyn, but housing policy is one of those things where otherwise reasonable people can be pants-on-head stupid.Report

    • James K in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      That’s a little complicated. During the last term, Labour’s main policy response to our housing issues was Kiwibuild. It was a pretty standard left-wing approach to housing affordability, assume that developers don’t build cheap houses because they’re stupid or something and have the government commission “affordable” housing directly and coordinate first-home buyers with the developers to sell the houses.

      This worked about as well as you’d expect. They could build almost no new house sin the areas where prices have been rising, in three years the scheme built 452 homes against a ten-year target of 100,000. And most of those were either in places where demand was already being met or were so expensive only high income people could buy them (one of the first Kiwibuild homes in Auckland was bought by a couple who were both doctors).

      That said, they recently issued a National Policy Statement forcing councils to upzone land near public transport and just 2 days ago Labour announced that they now intend to replace the Resource Management Act to “reduce planning barriers”, so it looks like their thinking has evolved a little recently.Report

  2. Alan Scott says:

    I’m a huge fan of NZ’s version of the Westminster system, and wish we could incorporate features like MMP and parallel electorates into our constitution here in the US. And maybe this is just my American efforts to force left and right to map the the US versions speaking, but I’m glad to hear that New Zealand First and Peters are likely to go away.Report

    • James K in reply to Alan Scott says:

      New Zealand First is a good example of how left and right can vary between countries. In the US, New Zealand First would be straightforwardly right wing (Winston Peters is basically a smarter version of Donald Trump). but in New Zealand they are (slightly) left of centre because here it’s economics that drives the left-right divide and National haven’t been anti-immigration since the late 1980s.

      In fact the party New Zealand First has the greatest enmity with is Act, the most right-wing party in our Parliament.Report

      • Stillwater in reply to James K says:

        In all seriousness I can’t imagine a smarter version of Donald Trump. His ignorance and idiocy are 100% a part of his identity.Report

        • James K in reply to Stillwater says:

          Look past the surface. Imagine a politician with a flair for getting both the media to pay attention to them and disaffected white people to vote for them, like Trump does. Now imagine that person with 40 years of experience in politics, who has a keen understanding of how government works and how to use it for his advantage. Imagine someone as good at cutting deals that benefit his as Trump thinks he is. That’s who Winston Peters is, there’s a reason why he’s been an essential powerbroker in New Zealand politics since 1996 despite his party never getting more than 10% of the vote.Report