Support for the center-left environmentalist party has risen to 28 percent, seven points higher than in Forsa’s previous survey.

The Social Democrats (SPD), traditionally Germany’s largest center-left party, are polling at 23 percent. The SPD is normally the senior member in coalition governments with its partner-of-choice, the Greens.

Add up the numbers!  If that happens, there will be a Green-led Government in Germany, with the SPD (our equivalent is Labour) as its minor partner.  The CDU (our equivalent is National and ACT) would be in Opposition, because, despite being the largest party bloc, it has less support than the Greens and the SPD combined.

How quickly things can change in politics!

Germany has to wait another two years for a national election.   We in New Zealand  have another seven months, but we have essentially the same very democratic electoral system as Germany, so it could happen here.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could soon start to replicate the German polling here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.  It’s up to you all, and our Green MPs in Parliament, to make it happen.

Kia kaha!

We may have a Government that is clueless about the economy, has done nothing to create jobs in the wake of the global financial crisis, and is threatening to impose massive Budget cuts in two months time, not to mention their post-election privatisation proposals and Working for Families cuts.

We may have the major (at least for now) Opposition Party in complete disarray, with a Leader who also has no credible economic plan other than to leave us to the whims of the market and revealing himself as completely incompetent in dealing with a crisis of allegations of sexual offences against one of their senior MPs.

But back to cricket, there is some hope. It will be a massive task for New Zealand to beat Sri Lanka at their own home of cricket on Tuesday and make the final, especially given NZ’s hopelessness against Sri Lanka’s spin bowlers in the preliminary round. Get past that, and anything is possible.

But, hey, let’s hope. A win in the Cricket World Cup would help bolster New Zealanders to cope with the inevitable defeat by France in the Rugby World Cup.

The little guys and girls can win though.  We just need to play really well on the field and get stronger support from those in the stands.

It’s like that in politics too.

I went to a hastily organised public meeting up the hill from my house last night about a proposed cellphone tower in Hataitai, Wellington. Vodafone want to put a cellphone tower on top of a street light pole among a bunch of houses near the school.

Vodafone only notified two local residents, and they in turn notified some of the local community – one of those notified was Fiona Kidman and she ended up in the DomPost yesterday about it. 

The meeting at the school, organised at short notice, had 30 or so people at it. They resolved to ask Vodafone to talk to the community about the tower before they built it. We were fortunate to have someone come along from the fight over towers in Titahi Bay to give us some support and advice.

Health and precaution

The issue of concern is the potential health risk associated with chronic exposure to non-ionising radiation, or radio frequency radiation, being emitted by these towers, or base stations. A French Court, for example, forced a telecommunications company to take down a cellphone tower in 2009 on the grounds that 

While the scientific discussion remains inconclusive, the company Bouygues Telecom has not demonstrated in the present case either the absence of risk nor the respect of any principle of precaution…..Considering that, while the reality of the risk remains hypothetical, it becomes clear from reading the contributions and scientific publications produced in debate and the divergent legislative positions taken in various countries, that uncertainty over the harmlessness of exposure to the waves emitted by relay antennas persists and can be considered serious and reasonable

There is a lot of evidence out there that casts some uncertainty over the safety of these masts and enough uncertainty to suggest a precautionary approach to the issue.

And yet, as I will demonstrate, NZ’s approach has been the exact opposite of the precautionary principle. How cellphone towers are put up in our neighbourhoods is a case study in how corporations exercise power and how the Labour Party is complicit in this.

Your rights and Labour’s NES

The extraordinary fact is that you have no legal right to have any say over the placement of cellphone towers on street poles on the road reserve. You have no legal right to stop them putting a cellphone mast one metre outside your kids’ bedroom if that’s where the street pole is. Period.

Your legal rights were all removed by the Labour Govt by regulation on Sept 8, 2008.

Labour removed all of your legal rights while calling it something rather positive sounding – they did it by enacting a National Environmental Standard. Sounds good doesn’t it; say it aloud and you’ll feel positive about our government: National Environmental Standard.

Trevor Mallard was the so-called Minister for the Environment who pushed through this so-called National Environmental Standard (NES) for Telecommunications Facilities.

The NES says that, so long as the telcos meet certain rules around the size of the cellphone towers and boxes, and meet a NZ Standard (NZS 2772) on the radiation coming out of the equipment, the telcos don’t have to get any permission from the local council or the residents to put up as many cellphone towers as they like on street poles on the road reserve. You can read the cabinet papers here.

Normally you think of an environmental standard as a minimum standard of environmental protection. Instead this standard is a maximum standard – councils are not allowed, for example, to say that they want to have a more precautionary approach to radiation in their district and require the towers emit less radiation than they are allowed to under this NES.

I think it’s wrong to impose a maximum standard of protection. If a local community, as represented by their elected council, wants to reduce the radiation coming out of cellphone base stations in their area then they should be allowed to.

Telcos and the NES

Now, Labour’s NES is pretty draconian, forcing people to accept devices around their homes and schools that continuously emit radiation, so if you were going to impose such a draconian set of rules on people, you’d want to be pretty confident that independent people with a strong health focus wrote the rules wouldn’t you?

Think again. According to the Parliamentary Library, Labour got the following people together to form the  Telecommunications Industry Reference Group which wrote the report which formed the basis of the NES:

• Alistair Dixon, TelstraClear Limited
• Chris Horne, Incite (Auckland) Limited, Resource Management Consultant for Telecom
• Christine Turner, formerly Telecom New Zealand Limited
• David Willetts, Enfocus Planning Limited – Ministry for the Environment Consultant
• Harry Hopkinson, Telecom New Zealand Limited
• Ian Hutchings, Ministry of Economic Development
• Irene Clarke, Local Government New Zealand
• Karl Mischewski, Vodafone New Zealand Limited
• Pat Holm, Local Government Advisory Group
• Poul Israelson, Harrison Grierson, Resource Management Consultant for Vodafone and TelstraClear
• Richard Hawke, Ministry of Economic Development
• Sally Gilbert, Ministry of Health.

As you can see there was just a single person who was there to represent a health perspective, the rest were either the telcos, or govt agencies supporting the telcos,. or local govt. The telcos had an interest in lowering the cost of putting up towers, the government departments were there to help lower costs, and Local Govt NZ was not there as a health expert. It was a jack up.

Labour then used the report of these people as the basis of the National Environmental Standard. Feeling safe and secure?

The NZ Standard

But I hear you say, what about the New Zealand Standard 2772 that underpins the NES. That’s gotta be legitimate right? I mean a New Zealand Standard just sounds solid and proper doesn’t it? We’re the most uncorrupt country on the planet, surely a New Zealand Standard, is the gold standard of health protection?

OK here is the group that decided on the New Zealand Standard, NZS 2772: Part1: 1999, Radiofrequency Fields, Part 1, Maximum Exposure Levels, 3kHz to 300 GHz (according to the list at the front of the standard):

• Adopt Radiation Control
• Broadcast Communications NZ
• Local Govt NZ
• Ministry of Commerce
• National Radiation Lab
• NZ Assoc of Radio Transmitters
• NZ Inst of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
• Telecom NZ

Again, another committee dominated by industry and government departments with one health professional. A group dominated by those trying to reduce costs for telcos.

The telcos, and government departments supporting the telcos, wrote the New Zealand Standard that underpins the NES, and ‘guarantees’ its safety. Or does it guarantee its safety? It has this rather disturbing little disclaimer at the start:

There is scientific research, including epidemiology, which has suggested associations between some adverse health effects and exposure to RF [radio frequency] fields at levels lower than the basic restrictions specified in this Standard, however causation has not been shown.

So they haven’t guaranteed that it’s safe. You may remember this language – it is the same language that the tobacco industry used about smoking . They were forced to agree that there was a correlation between smoking and disease but quite correctly said you can’t prove “causation”. Of course eventually causation was established but the tobacco industry used exactly this argument for years to fight off attempts to regulate tobacco.

The NZS 2772 Committee said that, while there was uncertainty as to the safety of radiation from these cellphone towers, they would “continue to monitor the results of this research and, where necessary, issue amendments to this document.”

That was in 1999. There has been only one minor amendment in November 1999, which looks like a correction but has no explanation. So much for amending and updating the Standard. It hasn’t changed.

Now the paper on which this NZS 2772 relies is by the International Commission on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNRP) from 1998.  Yet, there has been lots of research questioning the level of radiation allowed by the ICNRP in the more than a decade since it was written but the ICNRP standard has remained unchanged. A number of countries have abandoned the ICNRP standard and have required lower radiation levels from the towers. But not NZ.

Summary

So, in 1999, a committee dominated by the telcos and the Ministry of Commerce wrote the NZ Standard 2772 that set the levels of radiation allowed from cellphone towers. Then a committee dominated by the telcos and MED used this NZ Standard as the basis for the National Environment Standard that the Labour Government adopted in 2008. This NES forces us all to have cellphone towers on any street pole in the country without any legal right to object regardless of how close it is to people’s houses or schools.

I would wager that 99% of New Zealanders know almost nothing about this story and if they did they would be furious. But they will only find out when the tower goes up, and that happens pole by pole. The Government should have protected us from the telcos and operated a precautionary approach, instead they did their dirty work and willfully tied the hands of citizens and councils. The corporations have taken hold of our government, and Labour happily aquiesced.

If the Nats really wanted to show that they weren’t in the pockets of the telcos like Labour, they could publicly review the NES and the NZ Standard, but I don’t like the chances.

Not only is the image of Mr Burns rafting the Hurunui River strangely similar to many of those from Russel’s Dirty Rivers Rafting Tour…

…but the language is suspiciously familiar as well. ‘Quality of Life’ is an old Green Party slogan from years ago. On the back of his leaflet Mr Burns has this to say:

‘Clean and green’ is the basis of our economic livelihood – both for what we produce and our huge tourism industry.

Now where have I heard that before? Oh that’s right, at Russel’s speech to the Green Party AGM in June.

We say clean and green is the basis of our economic success. No environment, no economy. Clean and green: If we keep it real, we’ll all be better off.

Funny, I know it was in Christchurch, but I don’t think I saw Brendon Burns there. He must have read it online.

Here’s something else Russel said in that speech which Mr Burns seems to have conveniently ignored:

When Labour was in office the export economy was driven by massive expansion in dairy and tourism. Both sectors are built on clean and green, but they’re heading for a terrible collision. 

Labour took advantage of clean and green as tourism boomed, but put up no fight to protect our rivers and lakes while those waterways were being overwhelmed by dairy effluent. 

Labour invested in clean green branding PR but did not invest in keeping it real.

It’s nice to see that Brendon Burns now agrees that clean water is our birthright, that our brand is the basis of our economy, and that our precious wild places, like the Hurunui River, are under threat.

But his party had nine years in Government and not only did they do nothing about it, they actually facilitated the destruction by supporting irrigation schemes like the Hurunui Water Project. They sat on their hands while our rivers and aquifers were drained and polluted, and attacked the Greens when we spoke out about it.

So excuse my cynicism but actions really do speak louder than words. It’s a little hard to listen to the party that caused the water disaster telling us about the passion for clean water they have suddenly acquired now that they’re in opposition.

The Greens will be supporting the Bill to Select Committee, despite concerns about the lack of spending caps for those campaigning in the referendum.  Hopefully that issue will be addressed by the Select Committee.

So it is timely to recall how much of a perverse affront to democracy the First Past the Post (FPP) electoral system New Zealanders threw out in 1993 was.

The United Kingdom still has an FPP electoral system, and is in the middle of an election campaign at the moment.  One recent poll put the Liberal Democrats on 33% of the vote, the Conservatives on 32%, and Labour on 26%.  But translate that poll result into seats in the UK Parliament and we get this absurdity:

The Liberal Democrats get only slightly more than half the seats Labour gets, despite being the highest polling party, and Labour gets the most seats despite trailing well behind in third place.

The same undemocratic FPP system here saw the National Party winning a majority of seats and forming governments without the need for a coalition partner in both 1978 and 1981, despite receiving fewer votes than the Labour Party in each of those elections.

Why on earth would anyone want to go back to that or to the similarly undemocratic Supplementary Member electoral system ?

Hat Tip: No Right Turn

[For the political junkies, Labour have voted with National 12 times at first readings, and 16 times at third readings, since the start of this term of Parliament. For the Maori Party it's 13 and 17. For the Greens it's 0 and 1.]

Yesterday, Labour voted with the Government again on a Bill that everyone except the Greens supported – the Education Amendment Bill.

We opposed this supposedly “technical” Bill because it included clauses to facilitate corporate control of school boards. In doing so, we seem to be the only ones consistently opposing privatisation in the education system.

The Maori Party did express concern about these aspects of the Bill but they still voted for it.

It’s fascinating, because if you just read the Regulatory Impact Statement which describes the Bill it would seem to be just about police vetting of school tradespeople and registration issues for teachers. Actually, like most legislation there is always fine-print to examine.

This Education Amendment Bill continues a trend towards corporate control by allowing corporates to be statutory managers of schools. It also allows the combining of school boards, potentially disenfranchising local communities.

The Quality Public Education Coalition (QPEC) was one of the small number of submitters against this Bill who saw its potential to further undermine public schools. QPEC has the experience and the capacity to step back and analyse the bigger picture.

With their support, we are prepared to be a lone voice in Parliament to at least make sure there is opposition to any form of privatisation on the public record.

Schools are not businesses to be managed efficiently in order to produce more labour for the market. Schools are communities, and as communities in partnership with the state they need the ability to run their own affairs and proper resources. We don’t need Pepsi Cola High School being managed by a firm of corporate auditors whose bottom line is profit.

Waiheke last Thursday attracted 40-odd fired up Islanders, over 60 attended at Onehunga on Tuesday, and last night around 120 Westies spoke their mind at the New Lynn Community Centre.

There was also a good turnout in Takapuna where Keith Locke represented our point of view.

Despite the period for submissions opening as people went home for Xmas, and ending just as folk are returning to work or study and busy getting kids back to school, it seems we will have plenty of submissions coming through by the due date of February 12^th.

The major concerns that are emerging include the fact that the so-called Council Controlled Organisations will in fact be very difficult for the Council to control, especially given that the directors will be appointed by none other than Minister Hide, who I’m sure we can rely on to appoint people sympathetic to his privatisation agenda to these critical positions.

Public ownership of water is something most people value very highly, and realising how well the CCO model paves the way to privatisation of this and other public assets is at the front of many peoples’ minds.

There is real concern that the local boards will end up with lots of functions and compliance duties, but no real opportunity to engage strategically in the shape or form of their communities, and no resources to support community aspirations.

It is already clear that the lack of clarity around what boards will be able to achieve is deterring people who might think about putting themselves forward as candidates later this year.

Tonight the roadshow moves to the Grey Lynn Community Hall, then next week to Mt Albert, Warkworth, Mangere, and Kumeu.  A full schedule can be found here.  It would be good to see you there, and in the meantime get those submissions under way.

What irks me no end is Labour’s Phil Twyford grandstanding on the axing of tree protection, when he and his Labour Party voted in favour of gutting the RMA last night.

For shame Labour. Empty promises about reversing this decision if you win the next election are in vain.

It will, as usual, require the Greens and other small parties to keep the old grey parties honest – under MMP.

This dishonest double-speak and I hope people remember it.

Labour is just as culpable as National when it comes to the RMA deforms.

But the riff I want to highlight is the idea that the problem is so big, and the proposed solution is so small, that it’s better to do nothing than take a step towards the solution. Funnily enough Members’ Bills can only ever be partial solutions due to the constraints of standing orders.

Jeanette Fitzsimons’ Resource Management (Climate Protection) Bill sought to return to the RMA “the consideration of climate change in the granting of air discharge consents and the formulation of regional plans”. The Greens argue that climate change requires responses at all levels – individual, community, council, government and international – and having climate change emissions ignored by the RMA makes for planning and decision that make emissions worse. For example, the commissioners on the Rodney gas station were unable to consider the emissions from that plant as having any impact on the environment. Despite this, one of the arguments used by National’s Nicky Wagner in the debate [not online yet] was that climate change is far too big an issue to leave it to the RMA or Councils to deal with. Well, obviously, but is that a reason not to allow the RMA and Councils to play their part?

Also up for Second Reading was former MP Matt Robson’s Liquor Advertising Bill that would have restricted liquor advertising on television to between 10pm and midnight (currently 8:30pm to midnight). The Bill’s new sponsor, Brendan Burns, acknowledged that the Bill was not the whole answer to the problem, but that: “It confronts what can be done immediately to reduce the harm of alcohol advertising.” Yet, despite National MPs accepting that excessive drinking by young people is a serious problem, National’s Nikki Kaye tried to argued that:  “We need to consider the whole problem” as a reason to oppose this step. Despite it being a conscience vote, all National MPs voted nay.

All I can say is that we’d be well advised to apply the motto from Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody: “From little things, big things grow…”

Predictably, on the radio interview National blamed Labour and Labour blamed National.

Actually they’re both right – New Zealand’s rise in deforestation and slump in afforestation in recent years is a plague from both their houses. Labour failed to come up with a price on carbon until the dying days of their administration, and National – before and after the election – failed to give certaintly to the sector that forestry would earn credits and those credit would be worth something.

But it’s not just about quantity. The NatLabs have often agreed with Green ideas of diversifying our production forests beyond the Pinus radiata hegemony, and creating higher-value wood products rather than just the raw and methyl-bromide drenched logs that make up the bulk of our forestry exports. But they both singularly failed to do anything to change this situation. The latest stats show that “radiata pine is the dominant species, making up 89 percent of the planted forest area. Douglas fir is the next most common species, making up 6 percent”. And the slump in sales due to the recession is exacerbated because we have all our eggs in the raw log basket.

If we’d applied Greens’ policies on forestry and climate change years ago, deforestation would have long ceased and new plantings of quality trees would be well established. However, rather than just spouting “we told you so”, as the Greens’ forestry spokesperson I am promoting specific ideas and plans, and we hope the Government will take an interest. MAF’s forward-looking study signals we have to move in that direction anyway, but I think the sooner we do it the more our economy and environment will benefit. I am also exploring options for adding a forestry component to our Green New Deal we launched last week.

Labour has made a meal out of critiquing the Maori Party for their agreement with National, notwithstanding Labour’s own utter rejection of the Maori Party in 2005. Labour’s dismal failure to take heed of its own Maori MP’s over the foreshore and seabed issue came back to bite them in the proverbial and only has itself to blame for the emergence of the Maori Party as a political force in opposition to Labour.

Funnily enough, Labour has since the election a new found enthusiasm for defending Maori, noticeably absent for many years now. So, given Labour’s hue and cry over the effect of National’s policy on Maori, why werent they at this hui to support Maori representation on the Auckland council? What is their position? Its a bit of a mystery.

There are still no declarations from National or the other parties, including United Future, although perhaps we can expect to see them in the next couple of days.

This is appallingly murky and suggests that Labour was treating voters with disdain. Many voters punished Labour for, among other things, its negative campaign. So as it turns out its attempt to circumvent the donation rules didn’t affect the outcome of the election significantly, but it was still undemocratic and disrespectful.

Hopefully with the election now behind us and the large donations from the gambling and unsustainable fishing industries already in the pocket other parties can now turn their bipartisan attention to developing a cleaner and more open set of rules for fund-raising and donations.

Senator Brown said the injection of new ideas in politics around the world was coming from the Greens and there was never a time when the Greens were more needed than 2008 in the face of an economic collapse.

Without environmental and sustainable policies, the economies of the world would continue to struggle.

Green policies were helping feed the world, he said.

Labour conveniently released some environmental policy while lunch was being served.

Ms Fitzsimons said the policy seemed to be what Labour had done, not what it was going to do.

And she was “amused” to find Labour claiming credit for the $1 billion spent on retrofitting cold and damp houses and introducing biofuels legislation with a sustainability clause.

“So, they are Labour policies now. I sat across the table and pushed and pushed and pushed for the $1 billion and ended up with 20 times more than Labour was initially going to give us and we only agreed on the Biofuels Bill after we wrote in the sustainability clauses.

When they proved too inept to write it themselves, we wrote it.

“Labour is desperately grasping at Green ideas. If we are in government with them, we will give them heaps of Green ideas and get them into law.”

Miss Clark noted several times that NZ First may not be back in Parliament – and yesterday acknowledged it was facing “a tough fight”.

“I think everyone’s reluctant to draw firm conclusions but obviously it’s looking tough.”She also moved yesterday to anoint the Greens as her preferred partner – a prospect that would make any deal with NZ First, even if it does return, difficult.

“The Greens have waited a long time to be in Government. Their time is here,” Miss Clark said.

It’s not like we were deliberately standing around making sure everyone else had a turn.  Clark’s last minute attempt to conveniently change dancing partners reflects what many of her local candidates have been saying around the country – that they would personally prefer to work with the Greens than NZ First.  I’m left with the impression that, ethically, individual Labour members would prefer to deal with the Greens, but institutionally Labour finds NZ First easier and less demanding to cut a deal with. In the end it will be uncommitted Labour voters, rather than Clark, who will make the decision by showing Clark which of the two parties they would rather see her work with.

All power to Viv Goldsmith, Labour’s candidate in East Coast Bays, for speaking out against the fiction that school fees are “donations”…

Ms Goldsmith, a teacher herself, says she mails off her request for fees to the minister each time she gets one and challenged people at the election rally to do likewise.

Sadly she’s ranked 67 on Labour’s list and standing in East Coast Bays’ Murray McCully, who has a majority of 7,000 votes.  And she doesn’t have a lot of support from her party:

However, her party bosses might not be so pleased she’s drawn attention to the embarrassing fact that after nine years in power, Labour has still not stamped out the thinly veiled extortion too often associated with this “voluntary” giving.

The Human Rights Commission’s Report on Human Rights in New Zealand notes that:

The Education Act 1989 stipulates that every person who is not a foreign student or attending a private or integrated school is entitled to free enrolment and free education at any state school from the ages of five to 19. That is, state schools may not charge fees.

However most schools in New Zealand now charge set fees (that are legally only donations).  Consumer Magazine found three years ago that of the of the 119 schools that responded its survey,  only four (decile one schools) indicated they wouldn’t be asking parents for a donation. Metiria has been arguing that we need to take a two-pronged approach to the problem.

First we need to increase school funding by progressively increasing operational funding to schools to meet the full cost of funding for every student, and increasing the overall funding of TFEA so that programmes in schools are adequately funded.

Second we need to enforce the current law that prohibits schools from demanding fees by extending the requirement of ERO reports to include an assessment of fees and donations.

Rudman notes that Labour has grizzled and grumped about school fees/donations but they continue to be charged and grow in size. And National’s approach has been even worse:

Anne Tolley [National's education spokesperson, claimed] Ms Goldsmith’s refusal to pay the “voluntary” charge was “selfish and irresponsible”.

Some of the anecdotes I’ve heard over the years remind me of stories of certain churches which shame their congregations into giving by reading out the size of family “donations” at Sunday worship.

That’s why I think even if Labour had the smoking gun over the H-Fee allegations that it claimed to have it wasn’t good politics.

The fact that former SFO Director Charles Sturt has said that John Key was innocent and that Mike Williams has got two different people’s signatures confused is an embarrassing backfire for Labour.

But the fact that Labour has based so much of its campaign on attacking Key and his trustworthiness is worse for them.  It’s increasingly leaving people with the impression that the only thing Labour has to offer the electorate this time around is the fact that it is not National or John Key. By making this its major message it is in danger of allowing it to become its only message.

Interestingly Winston’s $80,000 donation from the Spencer Trust now shows up on the party donation returns to the Electoral Commission for 2007. And when you go to look for it you also get to see the $230,000 that the Labour Party took from lawyers representing undisclosed clients and the $500,000 that the National Party took from anonymous sources including the Ruahine and Waitamata trusts. 

Mr Carson, who came up with Labour’s “Keep it Kiwi” and “This one’s about trust” campaigns, says the key to advertising a political party is to pit yourself against your opposition. In the commercial world, you want to be positive about your product. In politics, you want to malign your rival.

All parties should and do criticise each other on various issues and sometimes more generically they will criticise each others’ very reason for being.  But when parties have only 15 or 30 seconds of advertising time to get their message across and they choose to use that to abuse or denigrate their opponents it shows a lack of vision and commitment to improving things for New Zealanders.

Under MMP attacking the opposition rather than promoting yourself misses the point.  Labour voters who enjoy denigration and abuse of political opponents would be better voting New Zealand First – Winston is better at it.  If however they want a positive, practical vision they can choose Green.

Speaking at Parliament this morning, National leader John Key did not specify what portfolio Mr Dunne would be given under National but said he looked forward to ‘Peter serving as a minister’.

So I guess you can now add another head to the monster that would be a National-led government? No major surprise there.  I’ve suggested before that United Future, when it does have policy, is often to the right of National.

That decision now leaves the Maori Party and Labour in a diminishing minority of parties that won’t let voters know before the election what it is that they will be voting for.  You could, I suppose, add New Zealand First to that set too if it were not for it having its mind already made up for it by John Key.

Labour has sent signals that despite wanting to be associated with the Greens again before the election it would rather work with Peters after the election.   Which really means that a Labour leaning voter that wants Labour-Greens must now be thinking about party voting Greens to make sure that Labour is forced to negotiate with the Greens rather than Peters.

Savage, a fellow immigrant from Australia, knew that having a right means having a chance, it means having a roof to shelter under and a meal on the table, a school and a doctor. That a nation that truly values the rights of her citizens promises a fair go to each and every one. Savage helped create a society where there was hope of a better life, and there was fulfilment of that hope.

I think what hurts Labour people about speeches like that, more than anything, is it reminds them how far they they have come from the sort of social justice ideals and policies that Savage was working for in the 1930s. Suddenly their present incrementalism seems a bit less satisfactory.

It left me thinking that the last Labour leader who was neither an incrementalist nor a rogernome was Big Norm, Norman Kirk.

So perhaps, with campaign season upon us and a new Big Norm, six-foot Russel, now in the house, it is time to listen once more to that 1974 song from Wellington band Ebony which made it to No. 4 on the national charts that year.