More of the same   6 Oct 2014

David Cooke

It's business as usual, and that should worry us. Here are three items that slipped by, late in the election campaign, with very little comment.

On the day before the election, the NZ Herald published the story of Customs lawyer, Curtis Gregorash, who blew the whistle on the Minister who had ordered staff to refuse Official Information Act requests. Gregorash was told by an official, "don't you dare release anything – nothing at all." He did release information, was dragged over the coals and cleared. He resigned.

This is an explosive story. It shows how easily a minister can intervene, in ways that one suspects are routine in public service these days, given the stories of civil servants unnerved by constant monitoring and oppression. We should listen to the country's Chief Ombudsman, Dame Beverley Wakem, who was appalled at the Gregorash event. Having heard numbers of similar stories, she is launching a wide-ranging investigation.

At the end of various public statements, John Key sometimes added, "and reduce ACC." This may have been shorthand for reducing ACC levies, though that is not what he said. The Party website makes the dubious claim that National has "turned ACC around from a system that was losing money." We should remember the phoney crisis that National created some years back, when it deliberately misrepresented the funding process for ACC.

Meanwhile, the website holds that ACC is now fully funded. We have to ask what that means and how it relates to reducing levies, since levies are revenue – income for ACC.

But it also adds that National will "focus ACC on rehabilitation, injury prevention, and streamlining processes." While these items sound admirable, we have to wonder what the shorthand is here: what's likely to be dropped in the wake of a new focus?

Minister Paula Bennett was fond of saying she wants to reduce the number of beneficiaries. She too is echoing the Party's website policy: "National will reduce the number of people on welfare by 25 per cent by 2017." But consider what this implies. For those who simply see an economic argument, it's a fiscal saving: reducing government expenditure. And for those who like to see self-sufficiency, it might seem like progress: "getting people off a benefit and back to work."

Back to what work? There are highly qualified and less qualified people who find it very difficult to get a job in the current economy. Many positions come at cost to the employee: poorly paid jobs, in undesirable conditions, with demanding sacrifices in transit, security and work conditions – witness unprotected night-time office cleaners, often women.

Add to that another section of the website that calls for "Requiring sole parents on welfare to look for work when their youngest child turns five." Beyond the oppressive difficulties imposed on mothers, we might remember there was a time when New Zealand actually valued parenting – including the parents of many of the National Party's current membership. But not now: work trumps family.

Our taxes and our tax-structure support many different aspects of society: start-up grants for businesses; promotion and marketing of NZ industries around the world; give-aways to cash-strapped Warner Brothers, to name a few. While I could question some such uses, in principle I support taxation that goes to the betterment of the nation, and that includes beneficiaries. Just dumping people off welfare isn't humane. It creates massive ongoing problems for family and society.

Taken in the context of this feverish election campaign, items like these are worrying, especially considering the confusions sown by some media and some politicians. Here are two familiar examples that we need to remember and respond to robustly. In the Dirty Politics debate, many were fond of saying, "Everyone's doing it." This was patently untrue and unsubstantiated. The entire campaign never revealed any documented evidence to support the claim. But it reverberated throughout the election.

And on government snooping and national security, there was conscious blurring of lines, summed up in "you've got nothing to fear if you've got nothing to hide." First, there's ample evidence that western democracies are adept at misusing and abusing government data. And second, the mass snooping of metadata was not the same issue as national security against threat. But political defence, common talk and talk-back radio became practised at fusing the two.

An especially irritating argument was that the country lacked the resources to "look at everyone's emails." This misses the point. Once you've hoovered up everyone's data, the snoops can then target anyone, for instance through identifying particular keywords using sophisticated computer systems.

John Key likes to say he won't lurch to the Right in this term. That's because he doesn't need to. He's already there.

David Cooke is co-editor of Beyond the free market: Rebuilding a just society in New Zealand (Dunmore)

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