Moves to gut public and Maori broadcasting

October 25, 2014 by
Te Hoki New Zealand in Afghanistan, broadcast on Maori TV. Image: Scoop, Lionel de Coninck.

Te Hoki Huna New Zealand in Afghanistan, broadcast on Maori TV. Image: Scoop, Lionel de Coninck.

Ian Anderson (Fightback/MANA Poneke).

Paora Maxwell’s tenure as Maori TV CEO has been controversial. In August 2013, staff at Maori TV circulated a petition against Maxwell’s appointment by the Nats. More recently, Maxwell announced a restructuring process, and high-profile figures including Carol Hirschfeld left Maori TV. Now, plans to outsource TVNZ’s Maori and Pacific programming appear to confirm rumours of continued backdoor privatisation.

Maori TV remains the only TV broadcaster with content not dependant on advertising revenue, while TVNZ is now commercially funded. Public broadcasting enables journalism such as last year’s documentary He Toki Huna New Zealand In Afghanistan, commissioned and broadcast by Maori TV, which investigated New Zealand troops’ complicity in US occupation. Coupled with raids on independent journalist Nicky Hager’s house, and Maxwell’s banning of Hone Harawira from Marae Investigates, moves to gut Maori programming limit the capacity for critical journalism.

In an era of privatisation and neoliberal entrenchment, an era of Whale Oil and Kiwiblog, Maori TV’s continued existence is a tribute to decades of Maori struggle and organisation. At the same time, the complicity of the Maori Party in these changes reveals how a top layer of Maori have been co-opted into a system that dispossesses the majority.

With Hone Harawira booted out of his Taitokerau seat, the only serious public opposition to these moves has come from outside parliament. The struggle against neoliberal entrenchment, for a truly democratic society, is necessarily a community struggle. In addition to public broadcasting, we also need a people’s press, sources independent of capital and the state that aid struggles for self-determination.

Filed Under: Mana Party, Maori Party, Society

Mass surveillance and sexual violence: The difference between Snowden and Assange

September 16, 2014 by
Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden: whistleblowers persecuted for exposing imperialist abuses

Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden: whistleblowers persecuted for exposing imperialist abuses

Last night’s ‘Moment of Truth’ event in Auckland, called together by Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom, revealed the extent of mass surveillance in Aotearoa/NZ. Our government, in complicity with a transnational regime headed by the US, collects extensive personal data through information technology. As seen in the 2007 Urewera Raids, governments will use this information to justify attacks on ordinary people.

The ‘Moment of Truth’ event brought Dotcom together with whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Wikileaks founding member Julian Assange, and journalist Glen Greenwald.

Although Snowden, Dotcom and Assange are all sought by authorities, the nature of the charges are different. Copyright and espionage laws are largely designed to help governments and corporations protect their power; sexual violence, in the case of Assange, is itself an abuse of power.

We can walk and chew gum, opposing both surveillance and sexual violence. Fightback supports exposing mass surveillance, however we argue it is not necessary to give a platform to Julian Assange. These cases need to be distinguished.

Edward Snowden
Snowden is a whistle-blower, known for leaking classified information from the US National Security Agency (NSA). He is sought by the US government for espionage and theft of government property, currently residing in Russia.

For socialists, the real crime is not Snowden’s betrayal of his imperialist masters, but the international system of violence and surveillance he helped expose. Betraying this system is a necessary, even heroic act.

At the ‘Moment of Truth’ event, Snowden revealed that the NSA has bases in Auckland and Northland. Progressives in Aotearoa/NZ welcome Snowden (and journalist Glenn Greenwald) in helping us expose the complicity of our government in imperialist abuses.

Kim Dotcom
Kim Dotcom is a German-Finnish resident of Aotearoa/NZ, the founder of file-sharing business Megaupload. In early 2012, Dotcom was arrested for copyright infringement at the behest of the US government.

Dotcom describes this experience of state repression as a politicising event. In opposition to imperialist agreements, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) and the Five Eyes agreement, Dotcom found unity with social democratic and radical indigenous forces, forging the basis of the Internet Mana electoral alliance.

Dotcom is no angel. He’s a profiteer (although Internet Mana’s policy process has led to Dotcom advocating taxes on the rich), and was accurately described by Internet Party gender spokesperson Pani Farvid as a “product of sexist culture.”

As phrased by Jacobin Magazine’s Gavin Mueller, “it’s so easy to hate Kim Dotcom that you almost forget that the US convinced the New Zealand government to send in an assault brigade, bereft of a valid warrant but outfitted with automatic weapons and helicopters, to arrest a Finnish citizen at the demand of Hollywood studios.”

Progressives in Internet Mana unite with Dotcom around shared demands, particularly opposing corporate copyright laws and transnational state repression.

Julian Assange
Assange is a founding member of Wikileaks, an organisation whose leaking of state secrets have helped in exposing international imperialist abuses. He is also sought for questioning related to charges of sexual violence.

Some accuse the women involved of being CIA ‘honey traps,’ or the authorities of manufacturing charges.

However, the facts of the case are well-established, admitted by Assange’s legal defence. Assange had sex with a woman while she was sleeping, and had sex without a condom when requested to wear a condom. These are violations of consent.

We don’t have to trust the state to believe women’s testimony of being assaulted.

Assange should not be given a platform at progressive events. This discredits the movement against neoliberalism and mass surveillance.

See also

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Oppression & Liberation

Democracy, Freedom and the Realisation of the Imagination – or ‘What is Socialism’

May 7, 2014 by

capitalism democracy

By Joel Cosgrove (Fightback – Wellington)
(Notes from a talk in the “Introduction to Marxism” series)

We spent last week talking about capitalism (a social/economic structure which is based on the production of things for profit). The flip side of a discussion of capitalism is a discussion of socialism.

Clearly this is an hour long discussion so I’m not interested in stating a definitive answer to this question. But I am keen to start a discussion, because to be honest, I’ve been a revolutionary socialist since 2005 and I’m still learning, still pondering this question.

Let’s start with three points to build a discussion around.

• Democracy
• Freedom
• Imagination

Outside of the fact that things are good grouped in threes (which we all know people work well with), these are points that I think are important within my conception of Socialism.

Democracy
First off, I think this is a useful place to start. I think we can agree that there is more than one idea of democracy, a word which comes from Dēmokratía – Demos being the Greek word for ‘people’ and Kratos meaning “power” or “rule.”

Bryan Roper, a member of the International Socialist Organisation in Dunedin, has written a great book titled The History of Democracy: a Marxist Interpretation. In it, he talks about the polarisation between Athenian and Roman democracy, and the way in which that difference has been reflected in the application of democracy over the centuries.

To grossly generalize, in Athenian democracy you had an environment where the people were compensated to take part in the democratic process. Even though, in Greece at the time, the “people” didn’t include women, slaves or foreigners, still it was definite progress.

With Roman democracy you had an environment where those who had the time or money could take part. So what you had is a democracy where the rich could take part and the poor had no way of taking part.

It won’t be much of a surprise to say which of these examples of democracy was generally imitated. It wasn’t until 1892 that MPs in Aotearoa were given an annual salary and it wasn’t until 1944 that MPs were considered to be working fulltime. Needless to say, the history of democracy is also the history of struggle for representation by the working class. It is no coincidence that the changes above came about in a period when the Liberal government was enacting progressive reforms in the 1890s and the first Labour government was bringing increased working-class representation.

Still, within this dynamic, the history of democracy has been a history of struggle against the dominant expression of it; namely, a Roman model that structurally excludes the poor/working class. I think we can see the same thing in current practice, where hundreds of thousands of people are disengaged from the political process.

I don’t think it is a big call to say that the democratic frameworks we have currently are a bit shit. Because in part democracy is about more than putting your hand up, casting a vote every three years. It’s the environment surrounding the act of voting which frames the level of democracy we engage in. I’m not going to engage in much depth with the issue of three-yearly voting in elections. But Parliament is a relatively powerless thing, when it has no real ability to engage in the question of what is made in and what quantity. Clearly though, we need a process that involves actual participation as opposed to token involvement.

Building on that, the real gaping hole is in the workplace; namely, the lack of democratic decision making. We spend most of our time in the workplace and yet we have little say over what goes on, on what is produced. We’re not going to get on top of issues like climate change without democratization of our workplaces.

If you look back historically at the Soviets in Russia, the Factory Councils in Italy and Spain, what links them all (broadly) is a direct link between the workplace and the political decision-making bodies. But there is also a direct democracy that gives people some collective control over their lives. These are the stories that have inspired me, examples of people taking control over their lives. Yet, for some people, the fact that the Russian Revolution didn’t immediately lead to everyone having a beach house and a pool to get a tan by is some sort of indictment of the experience, as if freedom is just carefree idleness. The thing for me though, is that with this newfound freedom from their former lives under an autocratic Tsarist regime came more responsibility, not less, part and parcel with the freedoms that were won through struggle.

That unflinching determination makes sense when viewed as a fight for more responsibility, for the right to have a real say in how society is run – which echoes in part to the older tradition of Athenian dēmokratía.

Freedom/Liberty
I’m going to paraphrase both Immanuel Kant and Spiderman in saying “with freedom, comes great responsibility”. And also, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” – twelve words by Marx, that he took from the French radical tradition.

For me, freedom is a term that has become hijacked by the Right. We’ve got to be aware of the neoliberal co-option of language, especially the powerful liberatory language of the Left. The dominant (right-wing) perspective lacks a collective framework for individual freedom. For me, my individual freedom is predicated on a broader collective freedom. If society as a whole is unfree, then there is little real basis for my personal freedom.

This is important when talking about socialism, seeing the world as a totality and not the individual as some abstract decontexualised Ayn Randian superman. All too often, when you look at the “freedom” of the Right, near the surface somewhere is the oppression that this freedom rests on. But for me, freedom and imagination are interlinked to a large extent. You can’t have real freedom without…

Imagination
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” – Einstein

This is the point where I hope there aren’t too many sniggers. But I passionately believe that without an ability to imagine, we’re stuck with the status quo that we currently have. Furthermore, I think we’ve seen a gradual limiting of the space within society in which we can dream/imagine something different, something new.

You only have to look at Margaret Thatcher’s well known phrase “there is no such thing as society,” or the survey result that came out a few years ago which showed that people could more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, to see how dangerous capitalism sees the imagination as being.

If we start with the Thatcher quote, I think we see a key battleground. Not just the right to dream, but the right to dream/imagine collectively. This collective imagination is tied back to my conception of freedom, based around a relationship between the individual and the collective. On top of that, we need to be able to imagine the future; otherwise we end up trapped in the present. As Marxists we need to be able to imagine this concept of a future society, based on our critique of capitalism and our understanding of the limitations of previous attempts at building an alternative to capitalism (France, Germany, Russia, China, Cuba etc). From there we need to be able realise and develop these ideas in practice.

This is where we gather together as a small group of people dreaming of revolution, of a fundamentally changed way in which society is run, where we have a totally different conception of democracy, freedom and the imagination than the bullshit we are presented with currently.
The challenge from this point of collective dreaming is the realization of these ideas on a small scale (let’s not pretend we are a revolutionary army of thousands), which right now, could be going on a poster run to promote the next Intro to Marxism session, opposing white supremacists in Christchurch, or helping make a banner for the anti-Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement march this Saturday.

At its core though, my point is a call for radical critical thinking and corresponding action.

Filed Under: Society

Why the Internet Party is resonating

May 4, 2014 by

te kotahitanga o otangarei

By Byron Clark (Fightback).

In the March issue of Fightback we examined the politics at the then new Internet Party. The verdict at that time was that “there is no sign that it represents a progressive force”. There have been some developments since then, Kim Dotcom has dispelled the idea that he is a libertarian, confirming in his The Nation interview that he supports a welfare state. Later at the members-only picnic held at his Coatesville mansion he also spoke in favour of free education.

The policies released on their website, internet.org.nz, are all supportable (though the one about a digital currency seems like a silly gimmick). The main difference between the Internet Party and the Green Party -at least in the areas they share policy- appears to be a question of emphasis. If Dotcom were to fold the party if it failed to get over the 5% threshold for seats in parliament, something he indicated he would do, it could have been expected that the Greens would gain his endorsement.

This isn’t what happened. In what came as a surprise to many, he looked further to the left and sought out an alliance with the MANA movement. While Fightback opposed an alliance, the outcome of talks at the MANA AGM was to continue discussions between the two parties. Fightback remains opposed, but will continue to participate in the MANA movement, provided there is no compromise of core policy or principles.

The Internet Party has only got as far as it has with MANA because its message has resonated with a significant number of members. The greater chance of changing the government post-September 20th appears to be the only significant gain for MANA, and that wouldn’t be enough on its own to get people excited. The Internet Party has signed up over 2000 members in a matter of days, attracted 700 to its launch event and is equaling MANA in the polls (not to mention three other parties currently in parliament) before even officially registering. This level of support is not insignificant.

Some in MANA, as well as commentators watching the saga unfold, have questioned how relevant an ‘Internet Party’ is to ‘someone who can’t afford a computer’. This might have been a valid point had the party emerged 15 years ago, but fails to see that internet access today is seen by most as an essential utility for full participation in society. Its notable that those making this political criticism are doing it largely via Internet platforms such as social media, and purporting to do so on behalf of those who don’t have the same level of access to those platforms.

One of the Internet Party’s core policies, increasing access to high speed internet and halving the price is a policy in the same league as halving the cost of electricity. It will appeal to a late night World of Warcraft player of course, but it will also appeal to a single parent aiming to escape life on the DPB through an internet delivered distance learning course. The latter actually benefits more from the policy, even if the former might be closer to the idea of an Internet Party supporter we have in our minds.

Examples of the crossover between the demographic targeted by MANA and the the policies of the Internet Party are easily found. Wahine Paewhenua of Te Kotahitanga Marae in the Whangarei suburb of Otangarei told The Herald that when they surveyed a newly formed youth group about what they’d like to have available, computers and internet access were to top of the list. The Marae now has an IT hub with twelve computers connected to ultra fast broadband.

“Before there was nothing happening for the children and the youth. Now they just have so many projects,” she told the Herald, adding that a lot of children in the area didn’t have internet access at home and that those involved in the project also wanted to roll out the programme to the senior citizens as a lot of them didn’t have a telephone.

“Otangarei has a very transient and poor population and to run a project like this is a big ask, but this has the potential to upskill people with the many opportunities that are available,” said Piripi Moore, project manager of the hub.

This sort of project is something MANA would support in principle, but the policies to make it happen are under developed. In contrast, the Internet Party places them front and centre. The “missing million” who didn’t vote in 2011 are over represented among youth, Maori and the poor, three groups that often intersect. No doubt many MANA members including in the leadership are in favour of an alliance as they see the potential for Internet Party policy to mobilise these groups. The growth in MANA’s membership since media coverage of the proposed alliance lends credence to that idea.

While there are local branches forming and an online forum for developing policy, the Internet Party is not holding an AGM until after the election, so its membership is not having the democratic discussion about an alliance that is going on within MANA. Yet some members have been vocal about their support.

On his Facebook page Hone Harawira shared an email he received after appearing on Nine to Noon. “My husband and I are geeks, that is to say, privileged, well paid, middle-class etc. We are natural supporters of the Internet Party and I want you to know that I don’t have any problem with an alliance between MANA and the Internet Party because from my perspective, the two have a lot in common – as Internet Party supporters, we believe that good internet access is a way out of poverty.” The email went on to say;

“I am appalled by Duncan Garner’s casual racism when he talks like this: ‘Dotcom wants internet freedom. Many of Hone’s rural supporters in outback Hokianga and Kaikohe don’t even own computers, let alone have super-fast broadband at their doorstep Hone wants jobs, opportunities and better wages; Dotcom wants to stay in NZ.’

He’s talking as though he can’t imagine a world where your supporters in Kaikohe and the Hokianga use computers to access the web, and this speaks volumes about the kinds jobs he sees them doing.

A big reason for our support of the Internet Party is that we believe that the people of rural Hokianga and Kaikohe should have computers as well as super-fast broadband because it’s a path towards jobs, opportunities and better wages for them as it has been for us and our family. If poverty is an inability to participate in society then the internet is a powerful tool that can break down the barriers that prevent participation.”

Indeed MANA and the Internet Party are not necessarily the strange bedfellows a casual observation would make them appear.

The risks of an alliance

Members of MANA, and no doubt voters as well, have been skeptical of Kim Dotcom because of the treatment of his own workers, the fact he is a foreigner lacking knowledge of Te Ao Maori (the MANA AGM was the first time he had been on a Marae), his class position, and the presumed politics that come with that. People have noted his use of the phrase “social fairness” during his address to the MANA AGM rather than “social justice” or “social equality”. The difference in meaning here is subtle but significant.

The woman who emailed Hone is correct when she says “good internet access is a way out of poverty,” but it’s only a way, not the way. It’s the way used by Kim Dotcom in his rags to riches story. Providing the opportunity might be “fair,” but it can’t work for everyone – not because of individual failings, but because capitalism is not structured in a way that means everyone can be an entrepreneur and become wealthy. If the focus on innovation and entrepreneurialism that Dotcom and party president Vikram Kumar are so keen on overshadows MANA’s goal of lifting everyone out of poverty, that becomes a problem.

Internet Party members have also raised their own worries about the alliance. “My biggest concern is that the Internet Party is not going to be taken seriously by voters because it is choosing to make an alliance with the Mana party,” writes a member going by the name Alana Hyland on the party’s policy forum “Everyone that I have talked to about the Internet Party has told me that they weren’t going to vote for the Internet Party because “they’re joining with the crazy racist group”. I think the Internet Party would do better on its own.” Responses to a photo of Kim Dotcom and Hone Harawira the former shared on Twitter seem to be of the nature Alana talks about: “You had my vote. You lose it if you align with that racist idiot!” and “Hone is the biggest racist I’ve ever seen in a while” (sic).

These views of course are ignorant and incorrect, and we shouldn’t judge the party based on its supporters (its worth commending the Internet Party for a clause in their constitution stating “the Internet Party will also maintain and promote economic, cultural, social, ethnic, age and gender diversity and equality within the membership, candidacy and organisational structure of the Internet Party.”)

That said, how many potential Internet Party voters share the “Mana are racist” view, and would stay home on polling day rather than vote for an alliance? iPredict and other media are estimating the number of seats an alliance would win by adding together the poll results of both groups, yet this wont be an accurate prediction if a significant number of supporters of each party abstain.

Moreover, a joint list would have to mean a shared policy platform. At the AGM, Dotcom criticised MANA’s support of the Hone Heke (Financial Transactions) Tax and Capital Gains Tax, instead endorsing ‘luxury taxes.’ While Dotcom says he supports taxes on the wealthy, he appears to mean taxing consumption, not property or business. After Harawira’s principled opposition to raising GST, and endorsement of the Hone Heke Tax, it remains unclear whether Dotcom will compromise on this point. While it is entirely possible for a capitalist to support progressive working-class struggles, this also must mean betraying their class and making sacrifices, and Dotcom’s choices so far seem more opportunistic.

Perhaps MANA’s best course of action would be to adopt the Internet Party’s progressive policies and continue to advocate lowering the threshold for entry to parliament, remaining independent. As we go to print, results of the negotiation remain to be seen.

Filed Under: Internet Party, Mana Party, Society

The Internet Party: A progressive force?

February 3, 2014 by

Kim-Dotcom-and-Internet-Party-logo--Getty-Images

By Byron Clark, Fightback (Christchurch).

The Internet Party is going to fundamentally change this country’s political landscape, apparently. It’s unusual for a party that has not registered with the electoral commission, and who haven’t announced any concrete policy or candidates, to be viewed in such high regard by the media, yet we are seeing comments like “something fantastic is brewing for New Zealand and I for one am watching happily as it unfolds,” from Derek Handley in the National Business Review, the publication that for one reason or another has given the party the most coverage. “Kim Dotcom will unleash the force of innovation and the internet in the electoral and democratic process,” claims Handley, what exactly he means by that is unclear.

The vague policy points that Internet Party have so far around issues of surveillance and high speed internet are not exactly new and exciting. “The emergence of the Internet Party is somewhat frustrating for the Greens,” writes former Green MP and intelligence spokesperson Keith Locke on The Daily Blog, “given that pretty much all of the Internet Party’s policies (such as internet freedom, defending privacy and withdrawing from the Five Eyes) are already Green policy.”

Locke seems to agree the the new party will be significant though, stating that “the Internet Party and the Greens, together, will be able to push [these issues] more strongly in the election,” and that “the Internet Party helps legitimise Green policies,” implying the policies of parliament’s third largest party need to be legitimised by what could turn out to be nothing more than the latest plaything from the mind of an eccentric millionaire.

Maybe its not the policy that is exciting, but how that policy comes to be. For Vikram Kumar, the former CEO of Kim Dotcom’s Mega.co.nz service who resigned to become general secretary of the new party, “the process of making the Internet Party’s policies, in an inclusive and engaging manner, is as important as the policies themselves.” Presumably Kumar envisions an Internet based system for determining policy. Again this isn’t particularly new, democratic parties have always use some mechanism to create policy, there is nothing  fundamentally different if such a system uses the most up to date communication technology.

The German Pirate Party, with whom the Internet Party has been compared (though ‘Pirate’ is probably a word they are keen to avoid given Dotcom’s circumstances) who have several MPs use an online system called ‘Liquidfeedback’ to shape policy, but the system doesn’t yield anything  particularly profound. “The ridiculous truth about the Pirates,” German Green MP Volker Beck told an interviewer in 2012, “is that they take our proposals from parliament and put in in their Liquidfeedback to discuss… they are taking up our content and [proposing it] as their own”

Liquidfeedback does even less good when the Party is voting on issues of little concern to its membership, when members don’t bother using it. The magazine Der Spiegel  described it as “a grassroots democracy where no one is showing up to participate”.

“The Internet and technology are tools and ways of thinking,” writes Kumar. He is only half right. Somewhat confusingly he states that “Technologists know… that technical solutions to essentially political or business problems don’t work,” but also “it is up to us, whether by design or plodding along, to build a future for New Zealand we want. I believe the Internet Party can catalyse discussions about both the design itself as well as the need for a design in the first place. It’s not only what the State does but how.”

If by “design” he means reshaping the democratic process with a Liquidfeedback type system the future will likely be dead on arrival.

A left-wing option?

With policies most in common with The Green Party the Internet Party appears to be a left-wing option, the involvement of blogger Martin Bradbury, and former Scoop.co.nz editor Alistair Thompson lend credence to that idea. Kim Dotcom however is a capitalist by any definition. He is anti-establishment in that he represents a new media group of capitalists who are going up against states who have taken the side of the old media elite.

When manufacturing based industries began to decline in the USA and intellectual property based industry (such as film, music and software) became a substantial part of the American economy, laws were written to favour copyright holders and protect intellectual property. Among other changes, copyright terms were extended and copyright violation was turned into a criminal offence rather than a civil matter.

While New Zealand may seem a long way from the US, that didn’t stop Dotcom’s mansion being raided by armed police due to alleged copyright violation. Something that should seem ridiculous. In fact,  leaked US embassy cables from the trove released by Chelsea Manning show that a great deal of lobbying went into an effort for local intellectual property laws to reflect those of the USA.

The lobbying efforts for US-friendly copyright and intellectual property law continue through the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPPA), with John Key’s trip to Hollywood, and intellectual property negotiators from the US Trade Representative’s Office visiting Wellington.

Dotcom can take a populist anti-TPPA position that is no way in conflict with his business interests, such as when he told Russia Today two days before the announcement of the Internet Party, “What Hollywood is trying to do is basically to turn the internet into a totally censored and controlled network to their liking, and that’s what I’m fighting against.”

He’s not alone of course, no doubt Amazon.com would like to see copyright reform that let them create thousands of new ebooks that could be sold cheap but profitably without paying royalties to the authors, and Google would love to stream every possible movie and TV show on Youtube (with their own advertising of course).

But while the founders of Google and the CEO of Amazon.com are among the 85 people who together own more wealth than half the planets population, Kim Dotcom is relatively small player, allowing him to keep his folk-hero status even at a time when the wealthy are increasingly disliked and distrusted.

Kumar wrote in his NBR piece that, “the things that New Zealanders typically care about when voting can all benefit significantly from the Internet and technology. This includes the economy, jobs, health, education, and inequalities.” He doesn’t elaborate on how ‘the internet’ or ‘technology’ will solve inequality, in fact he goes on to say that “technological innovation not only perpetuates but amplifies societal divides.”

If not left, then what?

Some have been quick to label the party as ‘libertarian’, a political philosophy advocating only minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens. Certainly the announced policies of the Internet Party would not be out of place in a Libertarian manifesto. Pure libertarianism with its talk of dismantling the welfare state and abolishing the minimum wage has never been popular in New Zealand for obvious reasons (as we go to press the electoral commission has just deregistered the Libertarianz Party, most likely meaning they now have less than 500 members).

The Internet Party is unlikely to veer to that extreme, and more than likely it will want public money to fund the broadband internet infrastructure required for the high-tech future they appear to envision, as well as expecting the state to pick up the tap for the education required to create ‘internet-economy’ IT professionals, in line with how things are done in actually-existing capitalism.

The question must be asked though, with all the talk of innovation and entrepreneurship; quickly moving on from the brief mention of inequality Kumar praises “technologists” Rob Fyfe of Air New Zealand and Sir Ralph Norris of ASB Bank. Kumar then asks readers to “consider the simple yet immensely powerful call from the late Professor Sir Paul Callaghan for New Zealand to be a country where talent wants to live.” How would Internet Party MP’s vote on issues such as raising the business and high income tax rates to fund social programmes? Or bringing about protections for casualised workers?

But will they get anywhere?

Despite the hype, there has been no obvious groundswell of support for the Internet Party. While the press release for the first Roy Morgan poll conducted since the party was announced noted their existence, they failed to make a showing in the actual poll. Perhaps when the party registers with the electoral commission, announces some candidates and policy and begins a campaign funded out of Kim Dotcom’s deep pockets they will improve their polling, but its hard to say for certain.

Much of the media optimism about the Internet Party has spoke of their potential to bring members of generation Y who didn’t vote in 2011 to the polls. This view is somewhat condescending – members of this generation have concerns greater than their internet speed, things like student debt, insecure work and the falling prospect of home ownership, just to name a few examples. While digital populism may motivate some young voters, the Internet Party does not represent the alternative needed to address these concerns.

While progressives may share some common ground with the Internet Party, there is no sign that it represents a progressive force.

Filed Under: Civil Liberties, Internet Party
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