Armstrong on referenda, the Greens and hypocrisy

John Armstrong rips into the Greens this morning, accusing them of hypocrisy over the asset sales referendum. Under the heading Referendums past their sell-by date, Armstrong opines (with our emphasis added):

The time has surely arrived to dump New Zealand's failed two-decade-old experiment with American-style citizens-initiated referendums.
Anyone questioning that recommendation should look no further than some of the self-serving behaviour following last Monday's official authorisation of such a plebiscite on National's partial privatisation programme.
The will of the people - David Lange once observed - was a fickle beast. It could be an awful tyrant; it could be a terrible slave.
Someone should have told the Greens. They are happy to accept the will of the people when it comes to the results of the forthcoming referendum on asset sales. But not so when it came to the 2009 referendum on smacking. That is hypocrisy, pure and simple. If you accept the will of the people once, you have to accept it for good. And that is not a recipe for good government.

Ouch! But Armstrong is dead right; the Greens' hypocrisy is there for all to see, and he is dead right to have called them on it.

He's not done though; read on:

If you do accept it, you accept your Cabinet decisions are going to be proscribed by referendum. The Greens would not like that happening to them. So why impose such restraints on National.

There has been a lot of talk this week about the will of the people. The Greens and Labour argued that had been ignored by John Key following the referendum announcement.
The Prime Minister was accused of being anti-democratic in refusing to halt the upcoming floats of shares in Meridian Energy and Genesis Energy, plus the sale of shares in Air New Zealand, until the referendum has taken place. He was castigated for saying National would ignore the result of the referendum because it had a mandate for the sale of up to 49 per cent of those state-owned electricity generators courtesy of its stunning result at the 2011 election.
To top things off, Key then dismissed the referendum as an "utter waste of money".
That line got wide pick-up with editorial writers across the country asking why $9 million in taxpayers' money was being spent on a postal referendum solely so Labour and the Greens could make a political point that everybody already knew - that a lot more people oppose asset sales than support them.
Sensing they were on the wrong side of the argument regarding cost, the two major Opposition parties the next day offered to help pass legislation which would enable the referendum to be held at the same time as next year's general election - a move that would be cheaper than a postal ballot. That remained conditional, however, on National putting asset sales on hold until then.
That drew a scathing response from Acting Prime Minister Bill English, who said it was typical of Labour to offer something that was not within its power.
Suddenly it was apparent the referendum horse had bolted in the four months since the petition seeking a referendum initially failed for lack of sufficient valid signatures. The public's desire for a referendum has cooled substantially. Once again, John Key had outmanoeuvred his opponents and captured the high ground when they thought they held it.

John Armstrong is dead right; the asset sales horse has bolted. Mighty River Power shares were sold some months ago, and the sky hasn't fallen, unless people foolishly bought the shares hoping to make a fast buck. That was certainly not our intent when we bought MRP shares, and nor will it be when we buy Meridian shares; they are a long-term investment in New Zealand's future.

And Armstrong gives us a bit of a political history lesson:

The country's politicians should daily give thanks to Sir Douglas Graham, National's astute Justice Minister for much of the 1990s, for making the referendums non-binding.
He was obliged to implement a promise inserted in National's 1990 election manifesto following demands from the more reactionary elements in the National Party
When the law allowing voters recourse to these devices was passed by Parliament 20 years ago, Labour's Michael Cullen described the measure as "an ill-thought-out piece of political flummery" and predicted correctly that it would end up satisfying no one. He was too kind. Making it mandatory for governments to implement the results of referendums risks making good government nigh on impossible.
Making such referendums non-binding on governments, however, renders those referendums as next to useless.

Both John Armstrong, and (dare we say it?) Michael Cullen are/were dead right. There is nothing to be gained from this referendum. It is solely an exercise in political posturing and positioning with the 2014 General Election in mind. If the public dislikes asset sales sufficiently, it will vote National out next year. And if partial asset sales are not seen as particularly offensive or significant, National may well be re-elected.

National campaigned on its Mixed Ownership Model policy, and formed a government under the conditions of the MMP system of democracy. That gave them a mandate to implement EVERY policy they had campaigned on. By contrast Labour, the Greens, NZ First and Mana all campaigned against asset sales, but did not win enough public support to form an MMP government.

It's called democracy folks. It may not be perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives.

Quote of the Day - 5 September 2013

Today's quote comes from an editorial in The Press this morning on the subject of the asset sales referendum:

When the act allowing for citizens initiated referendums to be held was passed in 1993, it provided that they could only be started after a petition to Parliament signed by 10 per cent of registered electors within 12 months.
The provision was designed to be, and has been, an effective deterrent to single-issue cranks getting their pet obsession on to a ballot paper. It means that anything that does make it to a referendum has some public support already.
It has not, however, prevented the four referendums held so far from being a waste of time and money. All four have produced the answer their proponents wanted and all four have, quite properly, been ignored by the governments of the time, both Labour and National-led.
The latest, promoted by the Green Party in opposition to the Government's policy of partial privatisation of state assets, will be no exception. It has taken the Green Party two goes, and the expenditure of tens of thousands of dollars of its parliamentary grant, to get the required 10 per cent of valid signatories, but it will be no more successful than earlier petitions to preserve the number of fulltime professional firefighters, to oppose legislation on smacking children or to reduce the number of members of Parliament.
The referendum is even more pointless than usual. Not only will it have no influence on the Government's stance on the issue, it is also on a matter on which the Government undoubtedly gained a mandate at the last election - the fate of state assets was one of the foremost issues of the election campaign. The partial sale of state assets is, furthermore, an issue for which the Government will be answerable at the general election just over a year from now. 

We could not agree more strongly. National's stance on asset sales has been completely transparent, unlike the Labour Government of the 1980's. John Key clearly stated that there would be no asset sales in National's first term of government, and he kept his word. 

In 2011, the Mixed Ownership Model was signalled in January, and again in the 2011 Budget in May. It was the single most talked-about issue by Labour, the Greens, NZ First and Mana. But from the moment that John Key was able to form a government, he had a mandate to implement the policies that National had campaigned on, including the sale of a minority shareholding in selected and named SOE's.

LabourGreenNZFirstMana wants to re-write history, and pretend that the 2011 General Election never happened. John Key will sensibly ignore them, and their Political Party Initiated Referendum. If the voting public does not like the Mixed Ownership Model programme, it will vote National out at the 2014 General Election. 

The referendum is nothing more than a cynical positioning exercise for the parties on the Left in the run-up to next year's election. They claim to support democracy, but in effect they are claiming that National does not have the rights enjoyed by a democratically elected government to implement its policies. The hypocrisy, especially that of the Greens is breathtaking, but it is not unexpected. Perhaps that explains why the Greens have still never been in government.

Watkins (T) on Norman and democracy

It wouldn't be stretching the truth to say that Tim Watkins from Pundit leans just a little to the political Left. In addition to his blogging Watkins is regularly on the radio on Newstalk ZB, where he almost always defends left-wing positions and causes.

So that makes his condemnation of Russel Norman much more noteworthy; Watkins opines (with our emphasis added):

I'm no great fan of referenda, but when phrases such as "elected dictatorship" start getting bandied around we all need to draw breath and remember how this 'running the country' thing really works

Well, it's been less than 24 hours since the Keep Our Assets groups nailed their petition, metaphorically, to the door of parliament, and there's already been a fair bit of tosh spoken about it. Some of the worst has come from Greens co-leader Russel Norman, but he's not alone.
On its second crack, 327,224 valid signatures - 18,500 more than required to initiate the referendum - were collected by the Keep Our Assets coalition and yesterday delivered to the Speaker. The referendum question will be: "Do you support the Government selling up to 49% of Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power, Genesis Power, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand?"
Driving home last night I heard Norman on Checkpoint, rejecting questions that National had won the election and therefore had the right, y'know, to govern. Norman said that people vote for an against numerous issues in an election, so it didn't mean National had a mandate for partial asset sales.
"That's not how democracy works," he told Mary Wilson.
Except that's exactly how democracy works. Elections are never single issue referendums and a party like National, which for two elections has been clear as a newly polished pane of glass on a summer's day (with not too much light, but not much cloud either) about its intentions, has every right to, y'know, govern. To argue otherwise makes no sense.
Why?
Because by Norman's logic a governing party has no right to implement policies in its manifesto that don't get a majority in separate polls. Well, that's not how democracy works. If it was, you could look at this random measure from 2003 and say Labour had no right to cut us off from the Privy Council.
Indeed, republicans have never won support for New Zealand to cut ties with the monarchy in any poll ever, so by Norman's logic it would be anti-democratic for any future Labour-Greens government to even consider such a move until it had won at least a few polls.
But we don't want government by polls. Y'know, the sort of polls that urged the US and Britain to go to war in Iraq, for example.
Norman went on to say that we're not "an elected dictatorship" and that Key must listen to the voice of the people. So let me go on with another couple of examples. Because by Norman's rhetoric it's surely more oppressive for National to have started implementing the Greens' insulation scheme in its first term – at least asset sales were a clear part of National's manifesto!

If there's anyone in Parliament who rivals David Cunliffe for being an ungracious winner, it's Dr Norman. It would be easy to excuse him by suggesting that it's the Australian way, although Australians have had precious little to celebrate in recent months, especially on the sporting field. But there's something more to it than that.

Perhaps Dr Norman is peeved that David Shearer's departure and the start of the #Labour'sGotTalent taxpayer-funded tour has pushed him out of the limelight. He has certainly hammed it up in the media over the last couple of days, but as Tim Watkins note, he has been big on rhetoric, and small on substance.

And unfortunately for Dr Norman, the words of Phil Goff have come back to bite LabourGreen on the bum; check this out from 25 January 2011:

Mr Goff said Prime Minister John Key had made this year's election a referendum on whether New Zealanders wanted to see their most important strategic assets sold.

National's Mixed Ownership Model policy was one of the very central issues of the 2011 General Election campaign. Labour in particular devoted huge resources to campaigning against "asset sales", which was an untruth in itself. We all know the outcome; National recorded its largest-ever percentage of the vote under MMP, and Labour crashed to its worst result in 70 years.

The moment that John Key was able to inform the Governor-General that he was able to form a government was the moment that the 2011 referendum on "asset sales" ended. Labour and the Greens should accept the outcome that MMP, which they of course support, threw up and move on.

And here's one other point to ponder. Late in its third term of government, Labour passed. with the support of the Greens the Electoral Finance Act and the Emissions Trading Scheme. Labour was a minority government, and neither of these policies received anything like the amount of scrutiny at the 2005 General Election as the Mixed Ownership Model did in 2005. Indeed, the EFA, later repealed by National, with Labour's support was a direct response to allegations of dodgy campaigning in 2005.

Russel Norman may support MMP and democracy, but only when tthe outcome it produces suits him. Kudos to Tim Watkins for not swallowing Dr Norman's deceit, and for calling him on it.

Emmerson on Norman, money and smoke (in that order)

Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson quite correctly identifies the effect that LabourGreens' Political Party Initiated Referendum on asset sales (of which there aren't actually any happening!) will have:

Emmerson has got this bang on the money (if you'll pardon the pun). Having wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars purchasing the required number of signatures, LabourGreen now want to waste another $9 million on a referendum which we've already had.