Re: Look at the mess they’ve left, November 11 letter.
Iain says socialism is essentially the art of squandering other people’s money, and that the outgoing Labour government embraced socialism to a large degree. The first sentence is wrong, and the second is true.
Socialism refers to a political ideology which advocates for government ownership of the means of production to prevent exploitation of the working class.
Jim Anderton had strong socialist views as an outspoken critic of the fourth Labour Government’s Rogernomics free-market reforms. In April 1989, believing that Labour was beyond change, he resigned from the party.
Helen Clark, who also was against Roger Douglas’s capitalistic reforms attempted to persuade Jim to remain.
Later as Prime Minister herself she engaged in policy development and advocacy across the international, economic, socialistic, environmental and cultural spheres.
As a former member of Socialist International, she advocated strongly for New Zealand’s comprehensive programme on sustainability and for tackling the problems of climate change. She became extremely active on foreign relations, and other socialistic issues.
In 2008 Jacinda Ardern was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, a movement whose purpose is to “defend and spread core socialist principles”.
In early 2009, just after becoming an MP, she presided over the union’s World Council annual meeting in her capacity as president.
In 2020, as PM she faced up to serious long-term challenges – persistent inequality and poverty, the threat of climate change, the need to diversify the economy, low productivity, limited domestic manufacturing and the abundance of low-paid jobs.
Jacinda Ardern was subtly introducing socialism back into the party, then she resigned as Prime Minister and her replacement Chris Hipkins distanced himself from her slogan that she would make “transformational” changes, moving party policy back to the “centre ground” — and you can’t blame him.
I repeat, few countries are solely capitalist or socialist. All are infiltrated with capitalism, including Russia and China.
New Zealand is about to be governed again by a National Party-led Government based on capitalist principles. Capitalism is inherently exploitative, alienating and unstable, which creates massive economic inequality and erodes human rights.
Wait and see.
Bob Hughes
