John's key to hiding Rodney and honing Harawira

There's a lot of fuss at the moment about Rodney Hide and Hone Harawira misusing the parliamentary travel perks for private benefit. The media had a go at Chris Carter a while back, but when they were challenged that had he been heterosexual they wouldn't have done this they went quiet. Having carefully checked that both Hide and Harawira are heterosexual they decided that they could bay for blood over much lesser amounts.

All humour apart, Rodney Hide's infraction was particularly galling to many as he has publicly stood up a "perk buster" for a few years and was specially vigorous in that role before he took over as leader of ACT. It used to really gall me that he was going on and on with a populist line more fitting of Winston Peters than a party of principle like ACT, but to be fair the press wasn't reporting ACT except for Rodney, so it was a way of getting some publicity however bad.

On the other hand, Hide was merely using a benefit that is part of his employment package. It's really no worse than airline staff using the travel perks they get or bank staff and their cheap mortgages, if these still exist.

Hone Harawira was sent to Brussels for some kind of meeting with officials of the European Parliament. Don't ask me why they made the trip, but Europe is a very important trading partner and any improvement in relationships can only be good, so even if it was a touchy feelie thing, it's still of benefit to New Zealand. The only problem is that Harawira decided to bunk off from the last day of the trip and go to Paris to try and solve the Da Vinci code. When this was discovered he is supposed to have sent a private email couched in very offensive terms to another party member. Normally I wouldn't condone racist outbursts like that, but in this case it was a private email to another member of the Maori party, and should have stayed private. In other words it was a beat-up.

There's a big fuss at the moment, but it will all blow over after a bit for a few reasons and Harawira will not be expelled from the party nor punished in any meaningful way. The main one is that although it is a racially organised party, the Maori party is pluralistic and diverse party and not some kind of Nationalsozialistische Maori Arbeiterpartei. While other parties such as ACT or The Greens can appeal to a narrow economic or social segment of the population, Maori cover the range of demographic groups from Kaumātua and Kuia like the highly educated, urbane Pita Sharples and the grandmotherly Tariana Turia to the opposite extreme; and the Maori party has to find how to appeal across that huge diversity. Harawira does appeal to the economically disadvantaged Maori in a way that neither Sharples nor Tariana Turia will. The NZ Herald has just published a "Marae-DigiPoll survey" about Maori attitudes to the Maori party and other Maori politicians that shows that the three most popular Maori politicians are Sharples 33%, Turia 16%, and Harawira 6.4%.

Rodney Hide needs to make serious attempts of eating humble pie and repairing his reputation ... either that or he needs to go. ACT is a party of principle and must live or die by those principles. It's no excuse that members of the tired old centrist duopoly had their rorts ... nobody expects otherwise of them. It's no excuse that the Greens used their pension scheme for their rental scheme ... for all the ecological rhetoric, the Greens are a doctrinaire socialist party and still hold with Lenin's slogan "Expropriate the expropriators" and although many Maori deplore the ripping of of the system, others have been raised on an attitude of dependency and see nothing wrong with ripping off the government.

Hone Harawira is quite safe, as long as his support remains a lot less than theirs, Sharples and Turia won't touch him as they need him, or someone so like him to make no difference, to appeal to the minority segment of Maoridom he holds for the party. They'll make tut-tutting noises, but they are both to clever to alienate him or his electorate. Nor should they, their party is supposed to represent Maori and Maori interests and that means trying to appeal to all Maori. As John Key put it recently in a different context, Parliament needs diversity in order for the House of Representatives to actually be Representative.

Rodney Hide, MP for Epsom

As well as being leader of ACT New Zealand, Rodney Hide is my local MP, a position he's held for just over three years.

In the lead up for the 2005 general election, the ACT party seemed finished, founding leader Richard Prebble had resigned and the party was polling well under the 5% threshold to remain in parliament, things looked hopeless for ACT unless they could somehow win an electorate seat. In an interview with the student newspaper Salient, Rodney described winning Epsom as his most memorable moment in parliament

"Without doubt, off the top of my head, it is winning Epsom in 2005. because we had such a trauma for 18 months with everyone, everyday writing us off, and then to sneak through – and it was an enormous amount of work from myself and a number of supporters."

Until a few days out from the election nobody really expected him to do it, National had abandoned the centre and was trying to collapse ACT's vote. The leafy tree lined avenues of Epsom housed one of Auckland's most blue ribbon electorates that had voted National since some time in the Precambrian, yet Rodney and his team were out there every day knocking on doors waving placards and doing everything else you could imagine to promote themselves.

On election night, Rodney had the numbers to take Epsom and the party had just enough votes to bring in Heather Roy as a list MP.

For the last three years Rodney has worked hard as our local MP, turning up at all types of community events and even becoming a "television personality" with appearances on talk shows and his spectacular run on Dancing with the stars. Spectacular mainly because he managed to survive on the popular vote for several weeks despite the judges wanting to write him off ... sounds a lot like his political life.

In the 2008 general election Rodney increased his personal vote winning Epsom by a large majority and ACT increased its party vote and now has 5 MPs in parliament. As I am writing this the new National ministry is close to being announced, possibly only hours away, and it seems highly likely that Rodney will be a minister outside cabinet.

(Update 6PM) It's been announced that Rodney and Heather Roy will both be ministers.

His job now, is to stand for the values that ACT was elected on and to effectively represent those views in parliament, but he also needs to remember that he is there, not because ACT passed the 5% threshold, but because the people of Epsom put him there. We look forward to seeing him doing as good a job for us this parliamentary term as he did in the previous one.

Originally published on Qondio

Rodney Hide, Communist?

Rodney Hide, my local MP, says in his blog that he's a Linux fan. In one of the comments on his choice of operating system he got accused of being a commie, perhaps half in jest.

The following is a lightly edited version of something I originally wrote for Slashdot in April, I thought I'd reproduce a slightly cleaned version here.

I wish the people that bandy around terms like commie (communist) would stop and consider what these terms mean.

I am a worker (In my case an intellectual worker, but that doesn't matter) under both capitalism and communism I would be creating a product.

Under capitalism I create something, and I can sell it or give it away as I wish. It doesn't matter if that something is a wooden table or a computer program. It's my choice what I do with it.

The person I sell/gift it to can do with it as he or she wishes. In other words, my product is covered by a BSD licence.

Under communism everything (including the fruits of my labours) belongs to "the people", in actual implementation "the state". I make something, the state pays me a wage and it determines how and by whom the product is used.

Under capitalism (as described by Marx) competitive pressure forces the price of commodity goods down towards the cost of production. The producers can only make a profit by reducing their cost of production, including wages, to a minimum.

What's the true commodity cost of software? The cost of downloading and perhaps the cost of burning it to a CD.

Under communism, the state restricts competition, and interferes in the market, thus keeping the price of commodities high enough to ensure a decent wage for the workers.

The exact mechanism for how it restricts competition isn't that relevant. It could be "5 year plans" stating exactly how many will be produced, it could be limiting the number of people permitted to make the product, or it could be changing the patent rules to permit patenting the product rather than the old "patenting the process" model.

Under communism you have the state creating or enforcing monopolies on the production of commodity items. It doesn't matter if those items are cornflakes or software, the prices are kept artificially high to permit "the workers" to keep more of the wealth.

Looking to the USSR experiment, "the workers" that retained the wealth weren't so much the ones on the factory floor as the managers and the communist functionaries that replaced the former owners, but no-one can realistically argue against the belief that the upper echelons of the society of the USSR were wealthy.

Under capitalism, a number of people chose to develop (or pay others to develop) operating systems like Linux, office suites like OOo, games, etc and then give these products away. Some do it because they see it as fun, others (such as IBM) do it because they aren't in the business of producing commodity software and see this as a step for maximising their profits in the areas where they do see their business. It really doesn't matter, either way it is a capitalist activity.

Rodney Hide selects the best commodity software for his purposes and pays the lowest possible price for that software. Sound lake capitalism to me.