Alliance Party says Hillside rail decision an attack on Dunedin and New Zealand workers

Alliance Party media release
16 December 2010

Alliance Party transport spokesperson Trevor Hanson says the decision by KiwiRail management to award the contract for 300 wagons to China's CNR rather than Hillside Workshops is an attack on jobs and local industry.

"KiwiRail management should not be allowed to get away with it. Nor should the John Key Government who must explain their abandonment of local jobs and industry.”

The John Key government's first priority must be to keep New Zealanders in work, says Mr Hanson.

Instead the Government has spent millions on the beneficiary bashing Welfare Working Party to make life harder for the unemployed, whose numbers have soared during its time in office.

At the same time National has allowed massive government funded contracts to be sent offshore instead of work being done by New Zealand workers.

The Alliance has backed calls to do “whatever is needed” to keep local jobs intact.

“We fully support any solidarity actions such as the support offered by the Maritime Union (MUNZ) to help Hillside workers in their fight to keep their workshop viable.”

The Alliance calls on other organizations and workers to do the same.  This is a fight that New Zealand workers cannot afford to lose.

The Alliance Party has actively supported Hillside workers and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) campaign, and organized a well attended public meeting in South Dunedin earlier this year to promote their cause.

For more information, contact Alliance Party Transport Spokesperson Trevor Hanson on 021390585

Video: Matt McCarten at the Alliance conference

Matt McCarten speaking at the 2010 Alliance Party conference.

This video is part one of three, to watch the rest go to Socialist Worker’s YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/SocialistWorkerNZ

Video: Tax Justice talk at Alliance conference

Socialist Worker’s Vaughan Gunson spoke to the Alliance Party conference about the Tax Justice Campaign, which is jointly sponsored by Socialist Worker and the Alliance.

This video is part one of four, to watch the rest go to Socialist Worker’s YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/SocialistWorkerNZ

NZ petition targets financialisation, the heartless heart of capitalism

by Grant Morgan

Michael Lewitt, who founded capital management firm HCM in 1991, has just authored a fix-the-system book titled “The Death of Capital: How Creative Policy Can Restore Stability”. He is a conservative free market capitalist.

In a recent column (see below), Lewitt bemoans how “the United States has strayed from a free market model to a system that privatizes gains and socializes losses”.

He continues: “During the last two decades, the American economy has suffered from a series of legal, fiscal and monetary policies that have favored speculation over production. The result has been the financialization of the economy, which has been characterized in economic terms by an unhealthy growth in debt at all levels of the economy and in cultural terms by the monetization of all values.”

Lewitt is calling for “a Tax on Speculation that would apply to the types of speculative activities that have so badly damaged the American economy, including naked credit default swaps, leveraged buyout, quantitative stock trading strategies and other stock and bond transactions”.

Lewitt’s strident criticisms of “speculation” and “financialisation”, and his call for a “Tax on Speculation”, personify the raging disunity within global elites which is starting to unravel their “Born to Rule” legitimacy. The Anti-Revolution is starting to eat its own babies.

Lewitt is trying to rein in financialisation in the belief this is required for American capitalism to overcome its critical “challenges”.

Marxists, however, understand that financialisation is capitalism’s main last hope of surviving a systemic crisis of profitability. If financialisation goes down the toilet, so does capitalism’s global economy. That’s why financialisation cannot be reformed into something else.

(For much more information on financialisation, and the convergence of systemic crises, see my essay, “Beware! The end is nigh! Why global capitalism is tipping towards collapse, and how we can act for a decent future”, http://unityaotearoa.blogspot.com/2010/03/grant-morgan-beware-end-is-nigh.html.)

On Budget Day, 20 May, it looks like the National-led government in New Zealand will raise GST to 15%. That is similar to save-the-speculators austerity measures by Europe’s governments which are sparking popular protests not only in Greece, but also Portugal and Spain.

On 22 May, two days after National’s budget, Socialist Worker and the Alliance are jointly launching a nationwide tax petition calling on Parliament to remove GST from food and tax financial speculation.

In effect, our petition is targeting financialisation, the heartless heart of neoliberal capitalism. As seen in Europe’s protests, financialisation is becoming the central battleground over what sort of economy we should have and who it should serve.

For more information on the tax petition, keep your eyes on UNITYblog website or email campaign co-ordinatir Vaughan Gunson at socialist-worker(a)pl.net.

Jim Flynn & Eugene V Debs

by David
At the recent* Alliance Party national conference Jim Flynn, emeritus professor of politics at Otago University, gave an informative account of the busting of the USUS housing bubble in 2007, explaining how the banking system got caught out when the housing bubble burst. Flynn explained that an important part of his “social-democratic” analysis was looking at the world through “class spectacles”. Nevertheless, he seemed to accept, rather than challenge the basic pillars of a capitalist economy. For example, he talked of banks having a “legitimate function”, which is to spread risk for investors and to match those who have money to lend with those who want to borrow. But surely, looking through “class spectacles”, reveals that the wealth capitalists invest and the “return” on investments, comes from the exploited labour of workers. How can any part of this system be considered legitimate? Another gripe: Flynn’s solutions to financial crisis seemed very technocratic. Several times he mentioned the idea of a committee of academics (on one occasion this was to include business leaders too) who would regulate the banks and other corporations and “tame the market”. But why would the corporations submit to being tamed? One theme that Flynn returned to several times was the lack of a “social-democratic culture” and the need to build one in the US and NZ. For those not so familiar with political jargon Wiktionary gives a useful definition: A “social democrat” is:

A supporter of social democracy, a political ideology which in its contemporary form aims to reform capitalism democratically through state regulation and state sponsored programs which work to ameliorate injustices inflicted by the market economy.

And “social democracy” is:

A moderate political philosophy that aims to achieve socialistic goals within capitalist society such as by means of a strong welfare state and regulation of private industry.

When he talked of “social-democratic culture”, I took Flynn to mean a situation were social-democratic policies (such as a strong welfare state and government regulation of the market) are the standard or common sense response of politicians and business leaders, to any problem or crisis. Leaving aside the question of whether social democratic policies really can tame the market and ameliorate injustices of capitalism, the question of how to fight the dominance of market ideology and push social-democratic, socialist or generally left-wing ideas back into the mainstream, is an important one. As you might expect from a professor of politics, Flynn’s ideas on how this might be done seemed to come back to the work of academics and other experts. However, this wasn’t the main topic of his talk and he and the Alliance may well have other ideas about how to rebuild a left-wing culture. One answer is to look at how the mass socialist movements that existed 100 years ago were built in first place. Flynn mentioned the tradition of the US Socialist Party, and it’s greatest leader Eugene V Debs (1855–1926) [pictured below]. For Debs promoting socialist ideas and political campaigning went hand in hand with union organising, industrial action and other grass roots campaigning. I think that this remains the way forward for the left today.

Eugene V Debs

* OK so it was on October 17, which isn’t all that recent. It’s just taken me a long time to finish off this article.

GST increase would be unfair for low and middle income earners

Alliance Party media release
4 September 2009

The Alliance Party says an increase in GST would hurt low and middle income earners.

Alliance Economic Development spokesperson Quentin Findlay says suggestions from the Taxation Review Group to increase GST to subsidize corporate tax cuts would increase the pressure on many New Zealanders.

“The vast majority of New Zealanders spend a lot of their money on food. There has been a major increase in food prices in the past years due to a range of factors. An increase in GST would push food prices even higher and in some cases out of the reach of ordinary people.”

A rise in GST would cancel the effect of the recent tax cuts on middle income earners. However, for lower income workers, beneficiaries, students and superannuitants, who didn’t get a tax cut, an increase in GST would mean real hardship as basic living costs rose even more.

“The main focus for this tax review is to push the right wing agenda as far as possible in the shortest time possible. A rise in GST would be another move backwards.”

Mr Findlay says that the Alliance was committed to removing GST and was particularly committed to removing it off food in the first instance. The Alliance advocated a Financial Transaction Tax to replace GST.

“At the moment, lower and middle income earners subsidize the rich and businesses through the tax system. The Alliance’s Financial Transaction Tax would go someway toward correcting that imbalance by being levied at a progressive rate, ensuring that those who could well afford it paid more.”

The Alliance is also opposed to placing more people on the benefit when they did not need to be. The solution to that was obvious, Mr Findlay said.

“What is needed is more jobs at award rates with their conditions guaranteed. People should not have to get a benefit merely to buy bread and the Alliance will ensure that they don’t.”

See NZ Herald article on the proposal made by the Taxation Review Group to increase GST to 15% GST hike should not be written off.

See also

• The Standard supports raising GST by Auckland Unionist
• Greens should come into line with leftists on GST by Grant Morgan
• GST – Don't raise it, take it off food! RAM media release

Living Wage campaign: Wellington Public Meeting video

A couple of dozen grassroots campaigners gathered in Wellington on August 9 to organise community support for Unite Union’s campaign to raise the minimum wage. The goal of the campaign is to gather the 300,000+ petition signatures needed to trigger a Citizens Initiated Referendum asking, “Should the adult minimum wage be raised in steps over the next three years, starting with an immediate rise to $15 per hour, until it reaches 66% of the average total hourly earnings as defined in the Quarterly Employment Survey?” Matt Jones from Unite talked about why the union had decided to initiate the petition, and how the campaign was going so far. “We’re still putting our feelers out to the wider activist communities across New Zealand to try and get a support base”, he said, “before we push out into the streets and make our campaign known to the wider public. So we're still at the initial stage where we make our arguments to people such as yourselves.” Although the immediate goal of a $15 minimum wage, and then linking the rate to 66% of the average wage, are both in line with Council of Trade Unions policy, there's been a noticeable lack of active, top-level support from most other unions. One exception is the Maritime Union of New Zealand. Joe Fleetwood from MUNZ talked about how his union was gathering signatures, and also how he saw it fitting into the wider political picture. “The flyer and the petition went out. Our communications officer put that into all our magazines, that go to about 3,000 members. All worksites down on the wharf – especially our passenger vessels – have got these packs already. Our young activists are out there asking passengers, while they're travelling on the ferries, to sign the petition.” The public meeting was jointly organised by RAM – Residents Action Movement, and the Alliance Party. Growing cooperation between these two parties in Wellington had already seen the start of joint street stalls, gathering petition signatures. “Small parties like RAM, the Alliance and the Workers Party have stood in elections and campaigned against the market-driven policies of National and Labour”, said RAM chair Grant Brookes. “But what we urgently need is a bigger, broader, more united Left that can take the fight to National and become a credible alternative for all those without a voice. The petition can bring together Left and grassroots activists – like those of us in this room – and build connections for joint action and cooperation in other areas as well.” After the meeting, RAM and the Alliance decided to take their collaboration further by producing a joint leaflet. To get involved with the community campaign, or help out on the Saturday street stalls in Lower Hutt, Newtown and other areas, contact Grant on 021 053 2973.

Marxism Alive 2009 conference video, Part 2

Several dozen activists attended Socialist Worker's Marxism Alive conference on June 27. It was broadest gathering of the Left in Auckland in recent memory. Over the course of the day-long educational forum, the panel speakers and participants contributed to a penetrating analysis of trends and charted moves to unify the Left. Here is the second in a series of video highlights from key conference debates.

Conference participants discuss Broad Left unity

Don Archer, Socialist Worker

David, Socialist Worker

Grant Brookes, Socialist Worker

Marxism Alive 2009 conference video, Part 1

Several dozen activists attended Socialist Worker's Marxism Alive conference on June 27. It was broadest gathering of the Left in Auckland in recent memory. Over the course of the day-long educational forum, the panel speakers and participants contributed to a penetrating analysis of trends and charted moves to unify the Left. A series of video highlights from key debates will be posted on UNITYblogNZ over the coming days.

Is National the new natural party of government? Will Labour return to social democracy?

Daphna Whitmore, Workers Party

Sarita Divis, Alliance Party

Grant Brookes, Socialist Worker