Green policies too expensive

Cost may rule out a number of Green Party policies.

One of the Greens’ policies is to “prohibit New Zealanders serving as mercenaries in any armed conflict anywhere”. How would they enforce that, do you imagine, and by what right? Being a mercenary is not an ethical job, but nor is selling cigarettes in a corner dairy. Or, for that matter, being a journalist on the Sun.

For a party to think it can dictate where and for whom New Zealanders may work in their private capacity when overseas is a very slippery slope, although the Greens are probably saved by the fact that legally it would be nigh on unenforceable. But then a number of Greens policies look as though implementation would be impossible, mostly because of cost.

The party promises to investigate “the economic and social benefits of a 35-hour working week” (just ask France), introduce a universal child benefit, extend paid parental leave to 13 months (it’s currently 14 weeks) paid at the average male wage and, in a gradual way, write off student debt, introduce a tertiary student allowance and get rid of tertiary fees while aiming to have affordable childcare on campuses and affordable public transport to and between campuses.

Hell, why stop there? Actually, the Greens don’t. The student-support policy also says students should be paid the dole over the summer holidays, and be eligible for an accommodation allowance like that paid to beneficiaries. Well, that’s nice. So, too, is the idea that New Zealand could create up to 81,000 new “high-value” jobs out of renewable-energy technology “if we can capture just 1% of the global market for renewable-energy solutions”. But if we can’t capture that, then there goes the rest of the dream, presumably.

A bold vision is much better than no vision, but the fantasy/reality divide seems blurred – as might be expected when an actor fronts your campaign. Some of the Greens’ policies are a tad inconsistent – they think tourism should not be subsidised by central or local government, but then advocate introducing “legal changes so that Tourism New Zealand can be directed to spend a higher proportion of its promotional budget on encouraging domestic tourism”.
The Greens have a great political brand, although among their MPs I’m inclined to think that other than Kevin Hague most of them seem more pinko than greenie, but perhaps I’m doing Hague a disservice. Still, you have to love a party whose defence policy includes a plan to “investigate ways of reducing the environmental impact of the training of our armed forces through mechanisms such as the appropriate use of simulators”.

Is it heroic or utterly absurd that six men just spent 520 days locked in a mock spaceship in Moscow, pretending to be on their way to Mars? The purpose of the simulation, which included eating astronaut rations, was to work out whether humans could stand the stress of a possible trip to Earth’s celestial neighbour, but since the spaceship never left the ground – because it wasn’t actually a spaceship at all – who knows whether the stress the men experienced would be akin to that of real astronauts. It is, oddly, difficult to figure out whether it would be more stressful to know that a walk in the fresh air and the taste of fresh food was only five metres away, but for more than a year you could not reach it, or to know that it was on a different planet.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s 75-year-old billionaire prime minister, survived all the reports and photos from his infamous bunga bunga parties, his dalliances with prostitutes, his sexual encounters with beautiful teenage girls and the bestowing of tax-free gifts of cash and jewellery upon them. It’s the one time the trickle-down theory has seemed to work. He had even managed to deflect his involvement in four different court trials, and survive saying that the economy must be okay because the restaurants were still full. After all that, what is finally toppling him is something as spectacularly unsexy as 10-year bond yields. A billionaire should have known not to underestimate the power of the markets.