No Tolls!

Letter to editor; NZ Herald, published Monday, 16 October, '06
Transit NZ says new roads will be delayed for a decade if Aucklanders do not accept tolls. Auckland road users are being held to ransom. Who will be next?
Road building should be funded out of taxes, as it always has been. If road user charges need to be raised, or road taxes increased, then that is a political decision that needs to be faced up to. We do not need to create a whole new private profit-making tolling industry to raise funds for roads.
Transit is planning to spend $150 million to set up toll gantries and other tolling infrastructure in Auckland. This would pay the interest for at least three years on the $800 million loan Transit says is necessary to finish the planned roads by 2015.
Working class people will bear the brunt of road tolls. They often have no choice but to use the roads to get to work, and this is likely to be at times of peak toll rates. Toll avoidance will mean new roads for the rich and traffic jams for the poor.
There needs to be an all-out campaign to stop Transit NZ implementing road tolls.

Oppose mayoral asset grab

This letter to the editor appeared today (Sat. Sept 9, 2006) in the NZ Herald.
Dear Editor,
The Alliance Party and Pam Corkery campaigned successfully to save the Port of Auckland from being fully privatised in the early 1990s. Mike Lee, chairman of the ARC, completed the job last year by overseeing the buyback of the 20% of shares in the Port that were sold in 1992 by the Waikato Regional Council.
Now the big four mayors of the Auckland isthmus want to grab the $1.3 billion of ARC controlled assets, including the Port, to use to as a short-term fix for municipal spending that should be funded from local body rates and prudent borrowing. This blatant power play by the mayors, seemingly given the stamp of approval by Helen Clark and the Government, must be opposed by a similar campaign to that which saved the Port from sale a decade and a half ago.
The central plank of the mayors' plan is the abolition of the democratically elected ARC and its replacement by a patently undemocratic Greater Auckland Council which the mayors themselves and appointed business cronies will undoubtedly dominate.
The Alliance opposes this move and calls on all Aucklanders to mobilise in support of retaining ARC control of the region’s assets.
Yours etc.
Len Richards
(Alliance Co-leader)

Labour fails supporters

The failure of the Labour Government to 'close the gaps' over the last six years, as revealed by two recent Ministry of Social Development (MSD) reports, proves the urgent need for a different approach based on the needs of people rather than on the demands of the ‘greedies’ and their quest for more profits.

Hardship
The NZ Living Standards 2004 report reveals that under Labour from 2000 to 2004 the numbers of Maori and Pacific people in severe economic and social hardship has roughly doubled.
Over the four years 57% of Pacific people remained in a degree of hardship, but the numbers in severe hardship jumped from 15% to 27%.
The comparable figures for Maori were 40% in hardship, with 17% in severe hardship, up from 7%.
Overall in New Zealand, 24% of people are living in hardship. Those in severe hardship have jumped from 5% to 8% (that is a 60% increase). It is beneficiary families with children that make up the highest proportion of this group.

Housing costs and overcrowding
According to The Social Report 2006, the number of people living in households paying more than 30% of their income on housing costs has doubled in sixteen years. In 2003/04, 21.4% of people were in this category, up from 10.6% in 1988. For Maori and Pacific people the figure had been as high as 36% and 48% respectively in the late 1990s, and in 2001(the latest figures):

• 21% of Maori households spent roughly a third or more of their income on housing needs.
• 23% of Pacific households were in the same situation.
• 42% of other non-Pakeha households, many of whom are new immigrants, were paying in excess of 30% of their income on housing.

The report also says Pacific people are most likely to be living in overcrowded conditions. In 2001:

• 43% of Pacific people lived in homes requiring extra bedrooms.
• 5% of the total population were living in severely overcrowded accommodation. Pacific people and Maori made up 79% of that group (41% and 38% respectively).

The report said there is a clear correlation between poverty and levels of overcrowding, with those unemployed, those locked out of gaining educational qualifications and those in rental accommodation being more likely to live in these adverse and unhealthy conditions.

Little change under Labour
Working class Pacific and Maori voters gave Labour the support it needed for the last General Election. The electorates where these votes came from, like Mangere where 72% voted Labour, remain the poorest in New Zealand and the MSD reports reveal there has been little change since a Labour-led government came to office in 1999. The future for these voters looks just as bleak under the Labour-led Government’s programme.
Some improvements came in the first three years when the Alliance was a junior coalition party to Labour. It was then, for example, that income related rents (no more than 25% of income) were introduced for Housing NZ state houses.
Under the recently introduced "Working for Families" policy the poorest people have lost ground. Beneficiary incomes have never been restored to the levels that existed before the 1991 National Government cuts.
The MSD shows that inequality continues to increase. The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ has continued to widen from 1988, including during the years from 2001 to 2004 under Labour-led governments.

Grace: 1 Today

Granddaughter Grace turns one today. Here is a picture taken at her party held last weekend so her Aunty Carissa, home on holiday from the UAE, could attend.

Workers' rally

The largest gathering of union members seen in Auckland for many years rallied yesterday at Aotea Square against the anti-union, 90-day 'no-rights' bill being promoted by National MP Wayne Mapp. Over 3000 workers were bussed into the central city square by the EPMU, NDU and other unions.
The rally was addressed by Carol Beaumont from the CTU, Andrew Little from the EPMU, Laila Harre from the NDU and Jill Ovens, the new SFWU regional secretary, as well as delegates from worksites.
Union chants rang out across the square drowning out the motorbikes carrying the topless porn stars down Queen St, promoting a porn and sex-toy exhibition 'Erotica'.
Workers responded eagerly to the literature being handed out. The Alliance distributed nearly 1000 copies of its tabloid "The Flame". "Workers Charter" paper was also being handed out.
Workers united, will never be defeated!

Investigate this ...

Ian Wishart continues his anti-Labour crusade in the latest edition (Issue 68, September 2006) of his Investigate rag with a story purporting to raise "allegations of Labour Government interference, and massive election spending" in connection with the Service and Food Workers’ Union (SFWU). Wishart uses an internal financial report of the SFWU to try and prove impropriety on the part of the SFWU in its spending around the General Election last year.
But, as his article concedes, unions can lawfully donate services in support of the Labour Party during an election campaign. The SFWU accounting of those services is not necessarily proof of anything other than just that: an internal accounting procedure. Only $20,000 is claimed to have been donated directly to the Labour Party campaign, despite Wishart’s inflammatory claims of "nearly $240,000 of members’ funds allegedly siphoned off to help Labour".
Caning a union for supporting Labour is like attacking the nails for supporting a house: the unions built the Labour Party and the SFWU, along with the engineers’, dairy workers’ and meat workers' unions are all affiliated to the Labour Party. That means every member of those unions can be considered to be a member of Labour through that affiliation. It is quite legitimate for these unions to give financial and other support to the Labour Party.
It is another matter altogether, however, when an extremist right-wing outfit like the Exclusive Brethren Church spends over a million dollars to attack Labour and the Greens in order to aid the election of the National Party. By thine friends shall thee be known. How about a full-scale investigation into that spending Mr Wishart!
Wishart’s support for the hard-done-by members of the SFWU rings hollow given his right-wing credentials. Wishart is hardly a friend of the workers.
That said, the 10-page article makes disquieting reading for anyone genuinely supportive of the trade union movement. The question that should perhaps be asked is why there is no worker-friendly forum for debate about the issues raised in this article.

Jill Ovens – Working-class Hero

Lenin had a phrase for those who throw revolutionary rhetoric around without actually getting their hands dirty in the real work of working class politics; he said such people suffered from "an infantile disorder". Someone anonymously called Jill Ovens "a class traitor" on the NZ-Aotearoa Indymedia site. This is not only the action of a coward who won’t put their name to what they say, but also the pathetic voice of one of the "mere babblers", another apt descriptive phrase of Lenin’s.
Jill’s victory over Darien Fenton’s anointed successor to the Northern region Service and Food Workers’ Union (SFWU) secretary’s position is an extremely important and historical achievement. A socialist in the political tradition of the early Labour Party and the theoretical tradition of Ralph Miliband is now the elected leader of the largest region of the SFWU. Jill will build a model democratic union in the SFWU if she has her way. She has overwhelming support from the organisers and staff, and an impressive mandate from the union membership (via their selected delegates) to do so. This can only be good for the working class.
The SFWU is the largest union of low-paid workers and the Left should get right in behind the project to make it an even more powerful and effective tool to fight for the interests of the most downtrodden workers in NZ. In the process SFWU members will be politicised in ways the current bureaucratic union methods prevent.
For those who condemn her for joining Labour, a little more reading of Lenin might convince you that this was not the actions of a traitor, but rather the actions of a courageous and politically savvy hero of the working class.
It was Jill’s own supporters among the delegates, those who were campaigning on her behalf, who urged her to join Labour. The opposition tactic was to raise the bogey that Jill was not Labour and that it was all an Alliance plot to take over the trade unions.
In her speech to the election conference Jill proudly ‘owned’ her role as the National Council representative on the Alliance caucus and her support for the scrapping of the ECA and the introduction of paid parental leave, both measures that the Alliance had a big hand in implementing. She also said in answer to the ‘Labour’ question from the floor: "I have joined Labour but I don’t want to make a big deal of it. It is of no greater relevance than whether I am Anglican or Catholic, they’re both on the side of God. The Alliance supports workers’ rights after all. The real question is who is the best person for the regional secretary’s job."
The reason for joining Labour was to deflate the opposition tactic of turning the election into one about party affiliation, rather than who was the best person for the job. Lenin would have approved. As he wrote in "Left-wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder:
"One must use one’s own brains and be able to find one’s bearings in each particular instance. It is, in fact, one of the functions of ... leaders worthy of the name, to acquire ... the knowledge, experience and – in addition to knowledge and experience – the political flair necessary for the speedy and correct solution of complex political problems."
The SFWU election posed multiple complex political problems for the challenger. Success required the most careful attention to tactics (there is no winning strategy without winning tactics).
"It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise – not lower – the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win" (Lenin again). Note; the "ability to fight and win": this is what raises the consciousness of workers, and the members of the SFWU have gained a major win over the undemocratic, bureaucratic methods of the previous administration of the SFWU.
Lenin hammers home the point in the closing sentence of his chapter entitled "No Compromises?": "... political leaders of the revolutionary class are absolutely useless if they are incapable of ‘changing tack, or offering conciliation and compromise’ in order to take evasive action in a patently disadvantageous battle." The road to political success takes many twists and turns. Sometimes you have turn back temporarily to get around obstacles in your way before you move forward again.
Jill Ovens evaded the battle over party affiliation in order to ensure a win in the battle that mattered; the battle for the delegates’ votes. I supported this course of action. We flew by the seat of our pants a lot, but in the end we did not make any major blunders that would cost Jill the election, nor did we allow our opponents the chance to make much lee-way. Jill won handsomely; that was the testament to her tactical acumen (as well as her working-class politics).
Jill had good reasons to step back from the Alliance, and joining Labour does not mean she thinks there is no place for the Alliance. On the contrary the Alliance has a very important role to play as the socialist and left conscience of the wider labour movement. Many people who are Labour Party members and supporters acknowledge this, and the more the Left maintains a principled, ‘united front’ position with Labour and trade union people, the more credibility our left-of-Labour message will garner.

Jill Ovens Wins SFWU Election - Speech

Scenes of jubilation and tears of joy greeted the stunning victory by Jill Ovens in yesterday's election for the new Northern Region Secretary of the Service and Food Workers' Union (SFWU). The special delegates conference of 112 voting delegates gave Ms Ovens the clear mandate of a 68 to 44 winning result. Ms Ovens upset success over Lisa Eldret, Darien Fenton's anointed successor, was achieved in spite of repeated and sustained interference in the election process by the new Labour MP.
A Pacific Island woman, a delegate from a hospital in South Auckland, rang me this morning and said; "Shame on her", in reference to Fenton’s attendance at the conference. This delegate rang up all her fellow Pacific Island voting delegates in the week before the election to get them to vote for Jill. She said she supported Jill because she not only talked the talk, she also walked the talk. "Jill was always there for us", she said.
Below is a copy of the speech given by Jill Ovens to the voting delegates. One delegate who works on a well-known food factory site told Jill afterwards that hearing her speech made him feel for the first time what it really meant to "be union".

JILL’S SPEECH
Speech removed by requset of Jill Ovens. Jill wants a "clean start" for the SFWU in the Northern Region and feels her speech should remain internal to the union.

Greens leave Left political space to the Alliance

Nandor Tanczos may have lost the Green leadership race to Russel Norman, but he re-ignited the "neither left nor right" debate within the Green Party.
The real problem for the Greens is their refusal to acknowledge that we live in a class divided society. The so-called ‘left-right’ political continuum is one with a fracture right through it. ‘Which side are you on?’ is the question the Greens have to answer.
Both the co-leaders elected at the Green’s Queen’s Birthday weekend conference questioned their party’s support for a Labour-led government. Russel Norman, the new male co-leader, attacked the Cullen roading budget and maintained that on some important issues there was "barely a whisker between National and Labour". He rejected the Greens being a "clip- on to Labour" and made it clear they would be willing to work with National or Labour, depending on their position on "unlimited growth ... in a finite world".
Jeanette Fitzsimons expressed a similar view. She said the Greens might support a tax-cutting National budget over a Labour one that spends money on roads. She also said that the Greens reject a "big, all- powerful state" which she acknowledged was a similar position to that of some on the right-wing of politics.
The Green Party’s scramble to keep a position of "independence" leaves a big hole on the left of the political spectrum for a party that openly takes sides with the working and oppressed people of society.
The Alliance comes down firmly on the side of the working classes and openly opposes the domination of big capitalists. The Green concerns with ecological degradation, concerns that the Alliance shares, cannot be solved by the same market mechanisms that create the environmental problems we all face.
It is not a choice between big-state domination versus big- capitalist domination, rather one of a peoples’ democratically controlled and run society versus a market-driven one.
A party to the left of Labour needs to carve out a support base among the working class people that traditionally vote Labour. The Labour Party has adapted all too well to the status quo society over the 70 years of its existence, and only partially, at best, represents the interests of low-income New Zealanders who vote for it.
More than 70 per cent of voters in the deprived electorate of Mangere supported Labour in the last election. They are still suffering from a huge social and economic deficit after more than six years of a Labour government yet this vote was given faithfully in the absence of a more credible left alternative.
Those on the left should work for the defeat of National and other forces of the political right, while building a credible alternative to Labour.
If the Greens stand in the middle of the road, they risk being road- kill.

SFWU members reject rule change

The northern region Service and Food Workers Union members rejected the rule change up for endorsement at their recently completed round of Annual General Meetings. Over 1500 members voted at the AGMs in the Northern Region of the SFWU. A majority voted against Resolution 1, the resolution that sought retrospective endorsement of the new method of electing the leadership of the union. This method entails elections being held at conferences of selected delegates instead of by an all-up membership vote (note; NOT elected delegates – the "s" makes democracy into demockracy). The re-endorsement of these rules was made necessary because of the inadequacy of the notification given to the members for the meetings they were originally passed at in 2004. [See my previous post on this topic].
Northern region members managed to vote down the rule change despite up to a dozen extra site meetings being convened at short notice by the Acting Regional Secretary, Lisa Eldret. These were held at times and places in a manner that mostly excluded oppositional views. At these improperly notified ‘secret’ extra meetings where only the dubious ‘vote yes’ arguments were put to those attending, the members loyally voted in favour of the resolutions. At other meetings where members opposed to the adoption of the new rules were able to put an alternative view, the vote went overwhelmingly against the rule change.
A complaint to the returning officer about the holding of meetings that were not notified two weeks in advance to every member as specified in the union's rules was brushed off. The reply said that only a "technical breach" of the rules had been committed and because the national result was overwhelmingly in favour of the resolutions, no action needed to be taken.
The rules have been endorsed by the union nationally and therefore all the leadership elections will now be conducted in the way specified; viz conferences of selected delegates will do the voting rather than the whole membership.
An election policy has been drawn up in consultation with (but not necessarily with the agreement of) interested parties such as Jill Ovens who is contesting the northern region secretary position. A random selection process (ie drawing the names out of a hat) will be used to choose the delegates to attend the election conference. The delegates will be chosen proportionately by industry in accordance with the industry spread of the membership. The policy appears to seek to restrict candidate campaigning activities to making contact with the delegates selected to attend the election conference. The selection process will not be completed until about two weeks before the election.

What is to be done?

Some useful and inspiring quotes from the man who wrote "What is to be done?" in 1901-1902.
Page numbers from the 1973 Progress Publishers pamphlet reprint
Lenin on the need for organisation (Section I A, p11)
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!
Lenin on the need for alliances (Section I C, p18)
Only those who are not sure of themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances even with unreliable people; not a single political party could exist without such alliances.
Lenin (and Pisarev) on dreaming (Section V B, pp166-167)
And if indeed we succeeded in reaching the point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees local groups, and study circles took up active work for the common cause, we could, in the not distant future, establish a weekly newspaper for regular distribution in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia. This newspaper would become part of an enormous pair of smith's bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration. Around what is in itself still a very innocuous and very small, but regular and common, effort, in the full sense of the word, a regular army of tried fighters would systematically gather and receive their training. On the ladders and scaffolding of this general organisational structure there would soon develop and come to the fore Social-Democratic Zhelyabovs from among our revolutionaries and Russian Bebels from among our workers, who would take their place at the head of the mobilised army and rouse the whole people to settle accounts with the shame and the curse of Russia.
That is what we should dream of!
"We should dream!" I wrote these words and became alarmed. I imagined myself sitting at a "unity conference" and opposite me were the Rabocheye Dyelo editors and contributors. Comrade Martynov rises and, turning to me, says sternly: "Permit me to ask you, has an autonomous editorial board the right to dream without first soliciting the opinion of the Party committees?" He is followed by Comrade Krichevsky; who (philosophically deepening Comrade Martynov, who long ago rendered Comrade Plekhanov more profound) continues even more sternly: "I go further. I ask, has a Marxist any right at all to dream, knowing that according to Marx, mankind always sets itself the tasks it can solve and that tactics is a process of the growth of Party tasks which grow together with the Party?"
The very thought of these stern questions sends a cold shiver down my spine and makes me wish for nothing but a place to hide in. I shall try to hide behind the back of Pisarev.
"There are rifts and rifts," wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality [Pisarev was a 19th century Russian intellectual and a leading exponent of ‘social utilitarianism’. He held that all art and intellectual endeavour was useless unless it aimed ‘to solve forever the unavoidable question of hungry and naked people’ L.R.]. "My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men.... There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour.... The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well."
Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their "closeness" to the "concrete" ... .

Government does not go far enough with "unbundling" Telecom

The Government has not gone far enough with its "unbundling" proposal to deal with Telecom’s monopoly of the telephone lines. I agree with the separation of the telephone lines from Telecom’s broadband business, but the "local loop" lines should then be brought back under public ownership.
Monopoly ownership has allowed Telecom to gouge monopoly profits since it was privatised in 1990 by the infamous Rogernomics Labour Government of the day. When Telecom won the 2004 CAFCA Roger award for the worst multi-national, financial analyst, Sue Newberry, showed that Telecom was making over 25 per cent annual returns on its New Zealand assets year after year.
This is why telephone line and mobile call charges are so high in this country – to keep Telecom’s shareholders rubbing their hands when the $800 million profit is paid out each year. The way to stop this is to put this essential infrastructure asset under public ownership and control so it delivers an efficient, modern service at the cheapest possible cost to its customers.
The National party is defending Telecom’s monopoly position, saying that the "market" should be left to decide if, how and when broadband technology should be delivered.
This is like saying the weather should be left to decide which homes are washed away by floods, or the fox should be left in charge of the chickens. National believes this will deliver the best outcomes for New Zealand. As the ads say – "Yeah right!" Telecom’s success in preventing any real competition, along with its deliberate strategy of paying out maximum dividends rather than investing in the development of modern broadband infrastructure, gives lie to that argument.
Since 1986, when privatisation of state-owned assets began, New Zealand has been gold-rush territory for big capitalist concerns. The strategy of these largely foreign investors is one of ‘pump and dump’ – pump the profits out and dump the asset after the vampire urges of these asset strippers is satiated. Then the next lot moves in to take their share – precious little of the private capital investment that we were promised by the promoters of privatisation has ever occurred. Instead New Zealand’s vital transport, energy, communications and other economic infrastructure has been degraded to crisis point in many cases.