strypey

Tēna koe Wiremu,

Again I see a leaflet from you in my letterbox, this time your pitch as an independent candidate in the 2026 general election. So again, I thought I'd respond.

I pretty much agree with everything on your list of priorities, with the notable exception of "more you, less Keynes". Because increasing public spending is the only way to achieve every else we both want for this country. Balanced out by making sure the wealthy - and especially multinational corporations - pay the same proportion of their income as wage and salary workers. Not by running up government deficits - unless the money supply needs expanding to keep pace with a growing economy - nor by increasing public debt. Although to be clear, NZ public debt is low by OECD standards, and borrowing to pay for infrastructure that will last for generations to come is a sensible way to get everyone who will benefit from it to contribute towards the costs during their working lives.

Turning to the back of your leaflet ...

I'm not sure what you mean by "maximum wages for government". I agree that the gap between the lowest paid and highest paid people in public service has got too big, as it has in most companies. But I don't know how much could realistically be shaved from the top pay brackets for any purpose other than paying public servants. Given that at a time of record unemployment, we really ought to be increasing the number of people employed to do public service work.

Paying a worker for a 40 hour week, at the Living Wage (rounded up to $30), is $1200 a week. We already pay around half of that to most unemployed people in the form of a benefit. So throwing people out of most public service jobs only saves about half of what we pay them. The same logic works in reverse; creating a job for a person on a benefit, doing public service work fulltime at Living Wage, only costs the public purse an extra $600 or so a week. That's a bargain! It's also an investment in growing the real economy, but we'll get to that.

You mention lowering inflation targets from 2% to 0%. You might be surprised to learn that's not actually a change to the status quo. Neoliberal monetary policy always aims for 0% inflation, with 2% as a fallback position. The reason this continues to stall our economy, instead of revitalising it, is that inflation levels are entirely the wrong target. Focusing on limiting the effect, rather than addressing the cause.

Ordinary people's experience of 'high inflation' - escalating consumer prices - is mainly caused by high unemployment. Which starves small businesses of revenue (broke people can't buy as much stuff), reducing their spending at their suppliers. With businesses across the economy experiencing lower incomes while expenses remain steady, they're forced to raise prices just to keep their margins the same. These price rises then raise the costs of doing business - especially for smaller ones - compounding the problem, and driving many to the wall. Further increasing unemployment, rinse, repeat. If the Reserve Bank was tasked with reducing unemployment, rather than obsessing over inflation measures, it might actually be effective in keeping price inflation in check.

The other thing that drives inflation is excessive profiteering by monopolists (eg the supermarket duopoly), especially when the owners of the companies with monopoly control can take their excessive profits out of the country. Strengthening the Commerce Commission to break up monopolies - whether owned by offshore or onshore interests - is one important way to reduce this drag on the economy. Instead of most of our disposable income disappearing straight into corporate coffers the first time it's spent, more of it would be freed up to cycle through a number of local businesses, enabling more transactions. Growing the real economy by getting us the goods and services we need, rather than growing only a mostly-illusory FIRE+IP economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, and Intellectual Property).

Another part of the solution is carefully targeted taxes on capital. For example, as mentioned further down in your leaflet, closing the loopholes that allow highly profitable companies like Apple to pay no tax on the revenue they earn here. Especially when those taxes balance out the aforementioned public spending. Which feeds more money back into the main street economy via employing more public servants, raising benefits to livable levels (esp. disability benefits), and properly funding public services so they're not sapping money out of the economy in invisible and disproportionate taxes (like "user pays" fees).

Your comments on council spending suggest a number of misunderstandings about the responsibilities of local government and the causes of their financial strife. For a start, many of the "nice to haves" you refer to can be shown to reduce the need for greater public spending in other areas. Even if these were as disposable as they're often perceived, they are not a large proportion of councils' rising costs. There are two main drivers of council costs, which I'll briefly describe.

Firstly, successive governments have devolved many central government functions to their local counterparts. As a way of moving those costs out of their own budgets, without having to accept the political costs of eliminating or commercialising popular public goods. Where councils try in good faith to fulfill these delegated responsibilities, it's increased their costs, usually without corresponding increases in their funding.

Secondly, successive councils have responded to pressure to keep rates unsustainably low by deferring maintenance on key infrastructure - especially for water supply and drainage - and now the bill comes due. The 3 Waters reforms were an attempt to move at least some of these costs off councils' balance sheets, and use central government's cheaper access to credit to reduce the overall cost of these infrastructure upgrades to the country. The sabotage of these reforms is the main cause of the steep rates rises we've seen since the current government took office. Councils simply have no other option, except to let the sewage flow in the streets, and let our tap water become increasingly undrinkable.

You mention a relationship between immigration of skilled workers and a lack of people already living here being trained in those skills. I agree that these are connected, but I think you have the causal relationship backwards. We are bringing in skilled migrants because of the lack of skilled kiwis available to do the jobs they're filling. This lack of skilled workers has two main drivers.

Firstly, there's steadily rising student costs since "user pays" tertiary education was introduced, inadequate income support for students, and an increasingly punitive student loan scheme. This combo increasingly discourages young people from entering tertiary study, unless they can get a full scholarship, or have parents wealthy enough and willing to pay for their tuition. Secondly, those who do complete a qualification face an economy with relatively low and stagnant wages and salaries, and a high and rising cost of living. Most make a pragmatic decision to relocate to countries with higher wages (eg UK or Europe) or lower costs (eg much of Asia and South America), or both (eg Australia).

We cannot and will not fix these problems by putting up even more barriers to skilled migrants settling in Aotearoa. This can only worsen the skills shortages we already face. If we instead address the costs and disincentives of our broken tertiary education system - and this is an example of the need for greater public spending as mentioned above - and take effective steps to reduce the cost of living relative to incomes, as described above, then more kiwis will get trained and apply for skilled jobs here.

If and when that happens, it will reduce the number of unfilled positions available to skilled migrants. Since getting skilled migrant status requires an existing job that cannot be filled by someone already here, the number of immigrants getting that status would naturally and automatically drop.

But changing rates of migration are not, in themselves, a good or a bad thing. There must be a maximum population that can comfortably fit on two mountainous islands and a handful of smaller ones. On the other hand, the UK has a similar land area to Aotearoa and about 10 times our population, as does Japan with about 20 times as many people as we have. A growing population is bound to create some pressure on infrastructure and resources. But as well as needs, migrants also bring labour hours and skills to the country, often including significant entrepreneurial skills. On top of that, they often arrive with significant savings (in many cases required for their residency conditions).

What's made immigration look like a problem is mainly the aforementioned lack of investment in infrastructure, especially affordable housing (including public housing). As well as a lack of infrastructure investment in the regions - particularly in the area of affordable and reliable transport (including public transport) - which has pushed people into the big cities and prevented them making their lives in the less populated parts of the country. If we solve these problems, politicians who have an interest in them not being solved will no longer be able to blame them on immigrants.

You go on to mention a "Tenant Investments Tax Credit". I haven't heard of this, and couldn't find anything online about it. Tell me more!

You also mention the ballooning costs of healthcare and superannuation, and imply this is caused by immigration of older people. You are right that there's been an increase in the number of people over 65 moving here in recent years, but we're talking a couple of thousand people a year. In a country where the number of retirees is approaching 1 million, that's an increase in retiree numbers of about 0.2%. This is not the problem.

Our healthcare problems are mostly a knock-on effect of the defunct DHB funding model. Where elected officials faced a fixed and usually shrinking budget (relative to inflation), and had to choose between unpopular cuts to health services (and losing the next election), or finding creative ways to cut costs.

One of those ways, as with local councils, was deferring maintenance and replacement of infrastructure and equipment. Again, the bill comes due. Many of our hospitals now need rebuilding, much of their equipment is held together with duct tape, and little or no money has been put aside from previous health budgets to cover these costs.

Another way DHBs kept costs down was to outsource some of their functions, like blood testing and MRI scans, to commercial providers. Whose tenders were unsustainably low at first, to make this seem financially sensible. But now that the health system depends on them for key functions, they can charge like a wounded bull, and do. Increasing health funding can't solve this - even when it does increase relative to inflation which it often doesn't - because commercial providers can just ramp up their prices to absorb the extra funding.

Both the businesses maintaining health infrastructure and supplying medical equipment, and those providing commercialised health services, face the same inflationary pressures mentioned above (rising costs against static incomes). So even where they're not price gouging, the costs of the deferred and outsourced goods and services we rely on them to provide are still going to go up year on year. The solution to this, again, is public spending to bring as many of these functions as possible back in-house, where they're not subject to commercial pressures and exponentially rising prises.

The superannuation problem has a much simpler and sadder cause; Muldoon's short-sighted cancellation of the Kirk government's universal retirement savings scheme.

Combine this with a stubborn refusal to means-test National Super - for decades the only welfare benefit that is *not* means tested - and an unusually large cohort of Baby Boomers entering retirement, and the result is a massive bill for those still in work (including many less wealthy kiwis over 65). This is a problem that is already at or past its peak, and will partially solve itself as the Boomers die off, and the much smaller Gen X generation hit 65. Then die younger on average than Boomers, because we've lived much less comfortable lives (Particularly those born since the first oil shock in 1973).

That aside, there are only two policies that could meaningfully address the cost of Super.

One is the aforementioned means-testing. All else remaining the same, there's no good reason why a 64 year old can't get a welfare benefit if they're working fulltime or have significant personal wealth, but a 65 year old can. This is especially unfair when certain sectors of the population - notably Māori but also men as a cohort - tend to die 10-20 years younger on average than others. Especially so when those same cohorts - notably Māori - are also less wealthy on average than the rest of the population.

The other policy that could address the cost of Super is to extend the UBI we give the over-65s, to everyone. Grant Robertson produced some carefully referenced figures that showed a UBI for all wouldn't actually cost the public purse much more than the total welfare system already does. Including Super, Jobseeker, Supported Living, ACC income support, Working for Families, Student Allowances, and dozens of other piecemeal benefits. Again, this could be balanced out by higher taxes on higher incomes and hoarded wealth, so that although wealthier people get the UBI like everyone else (making it simple and cheap to administrate), they balance it out at tax time, as well as contributing to making sure other people's UBIs are not inflationary.

Finally, you reiterate your call to limit voting to citizens. I already addressed the problems with the logic of that at length, so I won't rehash the topic here. In your reply email you mentioned a submission you wrote that is now in public view. If you'd be willing to send me a link to it, I'll happily read it and give it some thought.

Best of luck with your election campaign.

Ngā mihi nui,
Danyl Strype,
Waikato, Aotearoa

PS Since I've spent a good few hours writing and editing this, once again, I'll publish it on my personal blog at strypey.dreamwidth.org.

Urrgghh. In the middle of looking after a younger family member during the school holidays, I thought I'd forgotten to hit publish on this piece here, and in the process, completely forgot that I'd decided to publish the KiwiDelivery piece on the Disintermedia blog instead. Please consider this a rough draft, published for comparison, and go to the Disintermedia link above if you want the polished version.

---

The purpose of this post is to describe KiwiDelivery, a proposal for a publicly-owned, renewables-powered alternative to the corporate supermarket duopoly. We'll get to that. But first, let's set the scene.

Back in March I wrote a thread on my Mastodon account, responding to Bomber Bradbury's advocacy for a state-backed supermarket chain. A policy he's called for a few times on his weekly podcast The Bradbury Group. Bomber must have been pleased as punch when the Greens announced policy aiming to do exactly that, by forcing the supermarket duopoly to sell a chunk of their operations - retail stores and logistics infrastructure - to a new, publicly-owned supermarket chain; 'KiwiMart'.

With all due respect to Comrade Bradbury and the Greens, this is right up there with 'GST off fruit and veges' as far as uninspiring policy goes. For one thing, it would involve risking huge amounts of public money on a business venture. One that no corporate extractor thinks is viable enough to invest in. This seems ... unwise.

Secondly until we get a woooden stake right into the heart of the corporatist policy vampire ("neoliberalism", "the Washington Consensus"), and kill it dead for good, even success could end in failure. Where the public purse takes all the risk, and corporate extractors get most of the benefit. Because if KiwiMark worked out it could be sold off to said extractors by the next NatACT government, on the basis that the state has no place in the supermarket business.

In this case - much as it sticks in my craw - I happen to agree with them on this one. Supplying food can and should be done in a decentralised way, ideally by community-controlled organisations. The supermarket system is already too centralised for my liking, and depending on the state for food security is literally putting all your eggs in one basket.

I agree with what Kieran McAnulty said on the Bradybury Group in March; public provision isn't a silver bullet for everything. I would add; especially when the public service has been been corporatised, restructured and starved of resources for decades. Take a look at KiwiBuild, or the current state of our public health system. Would you want your food supply to depend on a system run like this?

I'm all for revitalising the public service. For public ownership of connecting infrastructure, like the electricity grid, and the road and rail networks. For universal public services in areas like health and education, where commercialisation creates observable perverse incentives. But we can't wish all that into existence overnight. Adding another mission-critical load to an already overwhelmed public service is a recipe for disaster, not food security.

Side note: One thing I learned from looking into the corporatisation of universities is that much of the "wasteful public spending", bemoaned by corporatists like the NatACTs, is a direct product of their reforms. Academic departments used to share resources on an organic, 'who needs it now' basis. When universities were corporatised, each department became a separate 'business unit', and any resources shared with them by other departments are now 'expenses'. So the total on-paper cost of running them goes up, even though no extra resources are being used.

Another example is the cost of flying MPs around the country. When AirNZ was 100% publicly-owned and run as a public good, flying MPs around was just part of its role as the national carrier. If those flights were accounted for at all, they were expenses on the AirNZ balance sheet. But once AirNZ was corporatised, those flights were pushed onto the MPs expense sheets, and counted as public spending. Same flights, same provider, but suddenly a massive costs to the public accounts every year.

But I digress. Coming back to the idea of a state supermarket chain, this is a solution that reflects a lack of deep thinking about the problem. Which is not that we don't have enough owners for our highly centralised, corporate-controlled, grocery supply chains. The problem is that we ended up with these in the first place.

The supermarket chain duopoly is a symptom of that problem, not the cause. For one thing, in a country with robust anti-monopoly enforcement, it never would have come to this. But although anti-monopoly enforcement is definitely required - and incrementally starting to happen thanks to the Grocery Commissioner - that can only open up space for better food supply systems.

So what's my vision for this, if it's not the KiwiBank of supermarkets (KB is also a mostly failed solution to an essential service dominated by an oligopoly of extractive corporations)? Again, no silver bullets here. But I do have a few ideas for how I'd attack the problem as Minister of Groceries.

At the risk of repeating myself, we can't propose radical and effective solutions if we don't have a deep understanding of the problems we're trying to solve. So what is the real guts of our supermarket problem? It's pretty much the same as the social media problem, in a word; centralisation. Resulting in chokepoints where financial vampire taps can be applied to extract wealth from customers (Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow wrote a whole book about exactly this, called Chokepoint Capitalism).

So as with the social web, whatever our solutions are, they need to have the goal of decentralising the system. Moving us away from a handful of grocery supply chains, and towards a diverse network of food supply webs. While still having sufficiently robust food supply institutions, and enough of them, to ensure food security for every community. Purely peer-to-peer food webs, driven by idealism, volunteer work and affinity networks, have value as proving grounds for new ideas, and ways to temporarily fill gaps. But by themselves, they're not going to cut it here.

The creation of the a Grocery Commissioner has already taken an important step to move the grocery supply network in this direction. By mandating that wholesalers owned and operated by the duopoly must supply to any retail store on fair terms, rather than giving preferential treatment to stores within their own chain. But this needs robust enforcement, with serious penalties any time they don't do it. Up to and including a forced separation of retail and wholesale operations, as we did in 2001 with Telecom NZ and the fibre-optic network, and a few years before with electricity retail and lines businesses (but sadly not with generation businesses .. yet).

The next step is to ask serious questions about why we drive across town to a warehouse-sized store to get groceries. Instead of getting them from superettes and greengrocers at our local shops, within walking or biking distance. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that it's cheaper. A *lot* cheaper. At least on an individual / household basis (although I suspect the total resource cost to the country is much higher).

There's also the catch-22 of local shops not having enough space or turnover to supply specialist items that only certain people buy (eg coconut yoghurt for dairy-free yoghurt lovers like me). But if we could get the prices down in local dairies and superettes, and more people buying food there, that would mostly take care of itself over time. As the logic of competitive markets actually did its work for a change.

So why do local shops charge so much more - sometimes twice as much - for the same goods?

One reason is the aforementioned lack of access to wholesalers at competitive prices. I've known a few people involved in running small dairies over the years, so I know a lot of their stock is bought at retail prices from Pak'nSave. They have to mark it up significantly just to cover the full costs of doing business.

Another reason is that most local shops don't own the building they operate out of. Instead they pay exorbitant commercial rents to yet another bunch of rent-seeking parasites. Who can still profit from untaxed capital gains even if they leave shop buildings sitting empty for years, without the perceived hassles of having tenants. So shop owners have little choice but to pay the asking price, however unreasonable it might get, or go out of business (and many have).

Another reason for high prices in local shops may be lack of effective competition. A knock-on effect of the above, resulting in a lot of dairies, greengrocers, and superettes going bust. Replaced with $2-shop-style stores selling designer landfill, or empty storefronts, or most galling of all, retail outlets for 2 other kinds of economic parasites; real estate companies and tenancy managers.

So what can we do to revitalise local shops, and bring their prices down without bankrupting them?

1) As mentioned above, robust enforcement to prevent wholesalers using price discrimination to allow supermarkets within their own chain to compete unfairly.

2) Educate shopkeepers about their government-backed right to access wholesale goods at fair prices, and how to report any discrimination they experience.

3) Rent stabilisation on commercial lease buildings, when at least 50% of what they sell is food (not junk). Maybe even with an obligation to let them rent-to-own the buildings their shops are in, as individual businesses, or as a body corporate for a block of shops (say, a struggling mall).

4) Ensure access to cheap credit for people wanting to start a business selling at least 50% food, in a residential area. Unlike subsidies, loans are generally paid back. They do come with a fair bit of risk when the borrower is a new business, but this would give the state an instrinsic motivation to make sure the grocery market is as competitive as it can be, so give them the best chances of paying back that startup loan.

There are probably more things we could do to support local shopping options, where people can use active transport instead of cars, and buy fresh food more often. Those I've listed are pretty vague, and need plenty of work on the details. But so does 'start a state-run supermarket chain'. At least the ideas I'm sharing might actually go some way to solving the problem.

So that's revitalising local shops. But there's another way we could replace the weekly drive to the stupourmarket, freeing up people's time for other things, and reducing energy use and carbon emissions in the process. That's by making more use of delivery services using cargo bikes or electric vehicles. The need for contactless delivery during lockdowns was the Proof of Concept for this, as are the vege box deliveries set up by CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) schemes.

Grocery and meal delivery is another groups of services that cost far more to use than they actually cost to run. Thanks to various layers of economic rent-seekers - like Uber Eats, and the supermarket dupology's delivery suppliers - who use access to almost bottomless capital to drive most local competitors out of business, and then ramp up prices. Classic enshittification.

Again, we need robust anti-monopoly enforcement to bring some market discipline to these parasites. But again, that only opens up space in the relevant markets. How can we ensure that community-driven delivery businesses - co-ops, social enterprises, CSAs - have the resources they need to start stepping into that space? This is where the money Bomber and the Greens propose to spend on state-run supermarkets could do far, far more good in pursuit of the same goal; robust competition for the supermarket duopoly.

What I suggest is, rather than set up KiwiMarket, set up KiwiDelivery;

• Buy a fleet of electric vans. Along with charging stations, solar panels and sodium ion battery banks, enough to keep all the vans charged for all day use.


• Hire some local app designers and Open Data people to build Free Code ordering app software, using Open Standards. Workers who will then spend at least some of their earnings in Aotearoa.


• Set up an ordering website using onshore hosting. Protecting the digital sovereignty of the service and the people using it, and growing the local hosting market.

With all this in place, kiwis could order directly from wholesalers, via KiwiDelivery's trade account, and have their order delivered to their home or workplace at a time convenient to them. With little to no carbon emissions. Completely cutting the duopoly retailers and their price-fixing out the equation. KiwiDelivery could be run as a State-Owned Enterprise, producing a modest return for the public as its shareholder. But it could also be run at cost (including sensible capital retention to cover hard times), as a public good. Like a publicly-owned co-op.

The best part is, whatever the fate of KiwiDelivery as a business venture, it would at least deliver some benefits. For a start, it would definitely prove that there are alternatives to driving a carbon-spewing car across town to a giant warehouse, once every week or 2, and spending an hour or 2 doing so. Also that there are alternatives to the utter waste of urban space that is a supermarket parking lot. Most of which could eventually be repurposed for intensive housing, given they're right next to a food supply, and usually on public transport routes.

KiwiDelivery would cost a fraction of what it would cost to set up a supermarket chain, and be more likely to work, because using it would be more convenient. Even if it didn't, at least it would bring a fleet of late model electric vans into the country, which could be repurposed. Instead of leaving behind a bunch of empty buildings and disused parking lots, as failed supermarkets do. I'm not that smart, but even I can see that this would be a much better spend of public money.

The other thing even a failed KiwiDelivery would leave behind is a set of battle-tested delivery ordering software, with all its components designed from the ground up to interoperate in vendor-neutral ways. This Free Code software could be used by anyone wanting to run a grocery ordering portal, provide apps for existing ones, operate a delivery service that delivers for them, and so on. If the KiwiDelivery business failed, the software could continue to be funded as a public good, or development could continue independently, funded by the groups who continue to use it.

In that situation, interest-free public loans could also be made available to not-for-profit groups starting ordering apps or delivery services. All of which would likely result in more competitors for the supermarket chains, and more choices about where and how to buy our food.

A similar service could also be set up for meal delivery, using a fleet of renewably-fueled, publicly-owned vehicles. I can even imagine a model where ordering apps - whether for groceries or meals - are obliged by law to be interoperable with any delivery service. So customers could combine their preferred ordering app with a wide range of food vendors and delivery services, from different companies, instead of being forced to use whichever delivery service is bundled with an app.

In summary, there's definitely juice to be extracted from learning about what's worked in the past, or not, and why. As well as running small-scale, low cost, public service experiments we can study for the same reasons. We need to break the habit of trying to solve problems by treating the superficial symptoms, instead of addressing their causes at the deepest level we can analyze. If we want to solve thorny, structural problems, involving deep inequalities of power and resources, we need to get creative.

Tēnā koe Wiremu,

I got your email address from your website (https://wiremuthomson.nz/), after getting a leaflet about your voting petition in my letterbox. I share your concerns about making sure that everyone who has a long term interest in our country gets to take part in electing the representatives governing it. Not those who see Aotearoa only as a set of resources to extract. But I don't believe limiting voting to citizens is the best way to achieve that.

A number of points to consider;

1) citizens can have their right to vote removed if we are outside the country for more than 3 years. See;

https://elections.nz/media-and-news/2023/rule-change-for-overseas-voting/

Even those born here and likely to return, many of whose whānau and friends are still here and affected by government decisions. Even those whose whakapapa guarantees them all the rights and privileges of any other citizen, under the terms of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga.

I hope you'd agree that as citizens we have an inalienable right to representation in government. Officials can't revoke other rights of citizenship, like our passport, because they think we've spent "too long" outside Aotearoa. Why should they be able to deny us our right to vote if we decide to spend a few years living overseas? Which in this globalised world, with our country hobbled by inequality and the resulting poverty, is often the only way we can get ahead.

When people are required to return to NZ every 3 years to retain eligibility to vote, it privileges those who can more easily afford the cost and time commitment of long distance travel, and whose health enables it. While discriminating against the less wealthy, and those with disabilities or health challenges. This may or may not be contrary to the Bill of Rights Act (IANAL), but it certainly violates the spirit of it, and the principle of universal human rights.

A petition demanding that citizens' right to vote is respected regardless of their whereabouts is one I'd sign.

2) Limiting voting to citizens doesn't confine it to those who have a long term interest in the wellbeing of Aotearoa, its people or its environment. Take Peter Thiel, a US tech billionaire who was essentially able to buy NZ citizenship in 2011,  having spent only spent 12 days in the country. See;

Citizen Thiel

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/indepth/national/how-peter-thiel-got-new-zealand-citizenship/

Duty-free “Apocalypse Insurance”: Revisiting Peter Thiel’s New Zealand Citizenship;

https://repository.uclawsf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1870&context=hastings_international_comparative_law_review

3) I agree that allowing Active Investor Plus (AIP) visa holders to vote, despite being required to spend only 21 days here every 3 years to maintain their residency is unwise. As with Peter Thiel, these people are treating Aotearoa as an "apocalypse bolthole", to quote Matt Nippert's NZ Herald article linked above. I don't support the existence of the AIP visa. But putting that aside, making people eligible to vote purely on the basis of having an AIP is effectively auctioning off our sovereignty to the highest bidder, along with the property we sell them.

4) Permanent Residents too (as defined by Immigration NZ) have made a long term commitment to Aotearoa, Unlike Peter Thiel and AIP holders. The visa obligations to obtain Permanent Residency require spending 2 years continuously living here before being granted that status, and to show they are committed to living in NZ long term;

https://www.immigration.govt.nz/live/resident-visas-to-live-in-new-zealand/permanent-residence/becoming-a-permanent-resident-of-new-zealand/

A permanent resident has the same tax obligations as citizens, and their lives and futures too are affected by the decisions of NZ governments. I believe it would be antidemocratic and unjust to prevent them voting in the election of those governments. Although I'm open to the idea of requiring them to spend a full 3 year Parliamentary term as a resident before being eligible to vote.

I'm also open to the idea that their ability to vote here is a privilege not a right - as it is for citizens - and that it may be reasonable to revoke that privilege under some circumstances. For example if they leave the country for an extended period, putting their long term commitment to living here in question. But this already happens if they leave for more than a year.  I see no reason they shouldn't be represented in government while living here.

5) People with any open-ended residency visa are eligible to vote in NZ elections after 1 year of continuously living here. I'm open to the idea that this is too short a time, and that like Permanent Residents, they ought to be required to spend to spend a full Parliamentary term as a resident before being eligible to vote. But if someone is living here for years at a time they too are affected by government decisions and deserve representation.

6) There are strong arguments to support the idea that the current government, like their counterparts overseas, are engaged in active voter suppression. Passing changes to electoral rules that are arguably intended to create eligibility for people likely to vote for them (eg AIP visa holders), and make voting harder for people they believe are likely to vote against them (eg removing the ability to register to vote on election day). Prisoners, for example, are citizens, and government decisions affect their lives more than almost anyone else. As I argued above, I don't believe governments have a right to declare them ineligible to vote.

Any changes we propose to election rules, especially around voting eligibility, must be carefully weighed. To ensure they're not serving this corruption of the electoral system.

In a system of representative government, rigorously defending the right to vote, and to full democratic participation in the practice of government, is crucial to defending our other human rights. Thank you for putting your personal time and resources into working on this, according to your own understanding of the issues. I hope to have an opportunity to engage with your further.

Nāku noa,
Danyl Strype
Waikato, Aotearoa

PS You have shared your thoughts about this in a public leaflet, so I will publish a copy of this open letter under the title 'Protecting the Right to Vote on my personal blog at;

https://strypey.dreamwidth.org/

"Submissions" closes at midnight on the Social Security Amendment Bill;

https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/sc/make-a-submission/document/54SCSSC_SCF_09FDCD32-87EF-4C46-E703-08DD18052784/social-security-amendment-bill

What they're doing is passing policy that throws hundreds or thousands of people out of work, cutting WINZ staff numbers, then (this bill) increasing the amount of paperwork people have to get processed successfully to get and keep a benefit. The inevitable result is more poverty, homelessness, hungry children, domestic stress and violence, crime, and imprisonmemt.

They say it's about "jobseekers", which implies healthy people taking a public funded holiday from working. But in the WINZ system, "jobseekers" includes people like me who have medical conditions (some lifelong) that make it difficult or impossible for us to work fulltime.

All of this will be much worse for people from racial minorities - including Māori - and our neurospicy whānau, all of whom are already discriminated against by WINZ and the criminal injustice system.

https://pmn.co.nz/read/politics-/punitive-policy-or-a-pathway-to-employment


In summary, bad words. Bad, *bad* words 🤬

Fair warning, this gets long. Very long. That's why I've broken it into sections, so you can skip the boring bits:

Prologue: Who am I and why do I care enough to write this, carefully edit it over weeks, and then make it public? Not a Green member, but a Green ally.

Part 1: My "identity politics" problem; How could a socially liberal anarchist have a problem with identity politics?

Part 2: All Greens are equal, but some Greens are more equal than others? What happens when paying your dues becomes secondary to being born with the right identity markers?

Part 3: Is the universal compassion and egalitarianism that underlies green values and policy at risk? Do identity mandates make parties more vulnerable to entryism?

Part 4: How many one-off incidents can you fit in a trend line? Everything that goes wrong in public is the tip of an iceberg, and there's been a bunch of things of late.

Part 5: Diversity and inclusion for who? Has enforcing a narrow framing of "diversity" reduced the capacity of the Greens to hold space for other forms of diversity?

Part 6: Radical solutions to address root problems; dissent is collective error-checking, limited terms are good for MPs, diversity can be cultivated organically.

Epilogue: Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. What can happen to movements that keep going the way the Greens seem to be headed?

Coda: Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. Or what goes around, comes around.

Prologue: Who am I and why do I care enough to write this, carefully edit it over weeks, and then make it public?

In one of the pinned posts on my fediverse account, I describe myself as a greenie and human rights activist, with loud opinions about media and technology policy. With an overall political bent that could be described as left-libertarian or anarchist (of a vaguely Chomskian/ Graeberian variety).

Drawing on both revolutionary theory and my own readings of history, as well as my observations over three decades of political activity, it's clear to me that electoral politics is limited in its ability to address the problems created by capitalism. But it's equally clear to me that where a pluralistic electoral system exists, elected representatives can do measurable good within those limits, and that refusing all participation allows it to become an uncontested tool for capitalists and other authoritarians. Which seems best avoided.

So while electoral politics has never been the central focus of my own activism, I have become a member of a number of small parties to help them get the numbers to register a party list. As an act of solidarity with friends and allies involved. The most involved I've ever been in electoral parties was a one-off candidacy for the Cannabis Party - running against United Future MP Peter Dunne in Ohariu in 2008 - and my brief stint as the elected Communications Officer for the Pirate Party of NZ, short-lived as it was. During which my main achievement was to convince the rest of the board, and then the membership, that decisions about the party could be made through online participation by its members.

I've never been a member of the Green Party of Aotearoa (and quite likely I'd be rejected if I applied). But a lot of people I consider friends and political allies have been members, even officials and MPs, or still are. I still consider the party an important political ally of the environmental movement and the progressive left. If they believe what they say about taxing wealth, to rebuild our rotting infrastructure in ways that are both sustainable and futureproof, and to restore universal public services - and I believe they do - I want to help them succeed.

So this not a public airing of internal disagreements, nor am I rubbing my hands with glee as the Greens struggle from one crisis to another. Quite the opposite. I'm aware that as an outside ally I can openly publish what concerned party members may only be able to whisper in private. So my intention here is to offer an outside perspective, in the hopes that it can help - in some small way - to right the ship.

Part 1: My "identity politics" problem

As befits any rational humanist who advocates for human rights, I'm very socially liberal. Annoyingly so, as my oldest friends would no doubt confirm.

Since my early teens, I've spoken up both privately and publicly for the equal rights of women, Māori, immigrants of colour and their descendants, homosexuals, gender non-conformists, people with disabilities (whether physical, intellectual or cognitive), non-human animals, and the ecosystems we're all embedded in. Pretty much anyone that conformist mainstream culture has tried to treat as an inferior, with less rights, just because they differ from the mythical "average New Zealander". Despite what I say here - in fact because of it - I intend to keep doing this for as long as I draw breath.

So while I am, technically speaking, a heterosexual Pākeha, and a man born a man, I'm not a right-wing nut job, who thinks that anyone who doesn't have my in-born privileges should know their place. Convenient as that accusation may be when I'm openly critical of the strategy and tactics of "identity politics", for similar reasons to the ones Frances Lee explains beautifully in a series of pieces they wrote in 2017.

This paradox seems to annoy some people.

But quite frankly, that's their problem. Being annoyed is a pretty minor downstream effect compared to being publicly shamed, or viciously smeared, or losing your livelihood, or having CSAM injected into your server in an attempt to get you put in jail. I think it's high time to stop rationalising this kind of behaviour and start talking about the rampaging elephant in the room.

So what does any of this have to do with the Greens?

Part 2: All Greens are equal, but some Greens are more equal than others

Over the past decade or so, I watched with growing concern as the public communications and internal rules of the Greens began to change in ways that were clearly alienating people. Including some of their most enthusiastic early supporters and members, some them since the proto-Greens party known as Values. As time went on, newcomers to the party were increasingly being pushed into high level positions, including on the party list. Often at the expense of long-serving party members, whose ability to do the job as well - if not better - was never in question.

Why? Perhaps because of things like rule changes guaranteeing spots on the party list to people with certain identity markers (see section 8.2 of the 2022 Candidate Selection and List Ranking Procedure). Rather than being corrected against, oppressive hierarchies based on in-born identity, such as gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, were being enforced in reverse. Other values, such as long term commitment to the green movement and the party, diplomacy and persuasion skills, and the ability to keep a cool head under fire, seemed to become secondary to the otherwise laudable goal of diversifying representation.

This doublethink version of "identity politics" - popular with corporate managers, neoliberal bureaucrats and reputation launderers - has become a sacred cow within the party. So much so that careerists and bullies regularly use it to shield themselves - and the party - from legitimate criticism.

Part 3: Is the universal compassion and egalitarianism that underlies green values and policy at risk?

Solving problems begins with identifying them. To this end, I recently posted on the fediverse about my theory that those identity marker mandates in the candidate selection rules - and the discourse surrounding them - could be the vulnerability that allowed someone like Darleen Tana to become a Green MP. Despite being a person co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick later described as "completely at odds with our party’s values, policies and kaupapa", and having no experience as a Green candidate before the 2020 election.

What I said was;

"I support political parties having robust processes to ensure their people are not being blocked because of identity markers (gender, ethnicity, sexuality etc), from promotions they deserve. That demonstrates a genuine commitment to social justice.

But when ticking identity boxes become a primary criteria for candidate selection, that's how you end up with debacles like Elizabeth Kerekere, Golriz Ghahraman, and now Darleen Tana."

Read in context, these are shorthand references to the political scandals surrounding these MPs, not personal attacks on them. The Kerekere affair was certainly a failure of caucus unity and membership solidarity, whoever was at fault, but I still don't know what to make of her ousting. While it's hard to have much sympathy for Tana, or her husband, I'm definitely sympathetic to MPs like Ghahraman, and Julie Anne Genter, who are clearly buckling under intense workplace stress. As I most certainly would in their place, and much quicker too.

Many of the replies to this post were thoughtful and open-minded. But inevitably some of them resorted to strawman arguments, based on the smear that I feel threatened by seeing positions of power and influence held by women, or brown people, or homosexuals. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of the miasma of nonsense that allows a Darleen Tana to avoid critical scrutiny for long enough to become a Green MP.

Here's a summary of my exchange with the chip on one person's shoulder;

1) I post a structural criticism (see above)

2) The reaction is a deflection and a thinly-veiled personal attack implying I'm a "RWNJ" (Right Wing Nut Job)

3) I respond in good faith, attempting to bring the thread back to the point of the original post

4) The reaction puts words in my mouth, misrepresenting my structural criticism as a personal attack on Golriz Ghahraman ...

> "DEI hire"

... and then doubles down on the hyperbolic ad-hominem;

> I think you're pushing a barrow for misogyny and racism

I can just imagine them thinking as they posted this; 'He'll never see this razor sharp critique coming!'. Or to put it another way...

Nnnnnnobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Cardinal Fang... bring out... the Comfy Chair!





I welcome disagreement, if it's well argued and fact-based, and I'm more than willing to admit when I get it wrong. But the style and tone of these posts demonstrate that it doesn't matter to this person whether I'm right or wrong. If it did, they would be addressing the arguments I actually made.

What mattered to them is that I was spouting heresy - and worse I'm an apostate - and I must be punished. In my experience - both online and off - warning shots like these, if not heeded, proceed to presistant campaigns of character assassination and calls for ostracism.





The age of the film this meme references makes it clear there's always been people like this in activist politics. They've always been part of the Green Party of Aotearoa, and that's fine, they need representation too. The problem is they've been allowed to make rules for the whole Green party, and until recently, control its political strategy too.

Part 4: How many one-off incidents can you fit in a trend line?

The narrowed political vision resulting from these ideological blinders can be seen in things like staging a leadership coup against James Shaw, but missing the step of coming up with even a single candidate to run off against him. Let alone one capable of doing the job.

Or the other co-leader at the time, Marama Davidson, issuing a delirious hot take on camera, blaming people of a particular gender and ethnicity for all the country's violence. Practically rolling out the red carpet for political opponents, who quickly started handwaving at statistics produced under her own ministerial portfolio, which painted a very different picture.

Now you can point out that she was ambushed by camera-wielding Useful Idiots, after having been run down with a motor vehicle by others, and that's true. Obviously I condemn those actions. But a competent political strategy team could have planned to avoid this.

This happened after Davidson participated in an aggressive counter-protest, against a professional concern troll whose gigs are well known to attract actual fascists. For a start, competent strategists would have anticipated that this could result in counter-escalation, and damaging media coverage.

Really competent strategists would have convinced Davidson not to be there. For the same reasons Jeanette Fitzsimons, Rod Donald and Russell Norman weren't at the National Front's flag-waving stunts at the Cenotaph during their co-leadership, despite supporting the counter-protests against them. Maybe I'm being unfair to the Green strategists. Maybe they tried and Davidson wouldn't be convinced. That would point to a huge failure of leadership and good sense on her part, and more evidence of the party pushing people into jobs before they're ready to do them well.

But even in those circumstances, competent strategists could have protected the party - and Davidson herself - from the worst potential consequences of that decision. By making sure there was a team around her at all times running interference, and having transport ready to get her offsite as soon as things got heated, so there wouldn't be a chance for riled up reactionaries to aim a motorbike or a camera at her.

Coming back to Golriz Ghahraman, perhaps I'm wrong that she would been just as effective - and much happier - as an extra-Parliamentary activist than as an MP. Or perhaps I'm right.

But even if I am wrong on that, competent strategists would have convinced her to stand down. Well before she started coping with her stress by stealing designer handbags, bringing herself and the party into disrepute. For her sake, as much as anyone else's.

Besides, those focusing on a perceived personal attack on Ghahraman are missing the forest for the trees. If it was just Ghahraman, or just Kerekere, or just Tana, it would be fair to dismiss it as an abberation. Like we did when Ian Ewen-Street decamped to National after two terms as a Green MP. Because it was an isolated incident in an otherwise unified caucus.

But what we have here is a trend, and anyone with eyes to see can tell it's getting worse. I've offered one theory that might explain at least some of it. I've yet to see anyone offer a more convincing theory. That in itself, and the bad faith argumentation offered instead, are all data points worth considering.

Part 5: Diversity and inclusion for who?

Even as they were gold-plating an ideologically narrowed "diversity" and holding it up as a sacred cow, the Greens have in many ways become less socially and politically diverse. In the 1990s, although their pet policies didn't necessarily make it into the party platform, the Greens included a wide range of activists who have since been pushed out, or simply walked away in frustration.

Alternative economics people who advocate for community currency projects, who I've heard high-ranking Greens sneeringly dismiss as "funny money" people. People who oppose 1080 or water fluoridation. People who are passionate about holistic health, and sceptical of vaccines. Whatever your opinion on these issues, some of these people helped to build the party from the ground up, in good faith.

Then there's people who champion freedom of expression and internet freedoms, who were alienated by the majority of Green MPs voting for the Harmful Digital Censorship Act (hat tip to the three who crossed the floor to vote against it, including Gareth Hughes, who championed the crowdsourced Internet Rights and Freedoms Bill). Just as they would have been if Greens had voted for the TICS and GCSB Acts that turned the GCSB into a proto-Stasi.

During my time in the Pirate Party I met a lot of young libertarians who leaned rightward economically, but told me they voted Greens because of their principled positions in defence of privacy, media freedoms, copyright minimalism, transparent government, democratic participation, and so on. I doubt they still voted Green in 2023.

As the old saying goes, the left looks for traitors, the right looks for recruits. The Greens' loss has been the right's gain, aside from those who left for other left-wing parties like Mana, and more recently the rejuvenated Te Pāti Māori. A lot of those alienated people decamped to the Outdoors Party, Internet Party, TOP, ACT, and pre-COVID Winston First. Others to Billy Te Kahika's Public Party and a plethora of other tiny post-COVID paranoia parties, and to post-COVID Winston First.

The inevitable counter-argument is that these people were always right-wingers or bigots, or both, and the Greens are better off without them. But I've known and worked closely with a lot of these people, and in the vast majority of cases it simply isn't true. This elitist attitude is a combination of sour grapes, and exactly the kind of essentialism that's rightly rejected when it's applied to people from minorities who commit crimes. Greens ought to know, better than any other political movement, that we are all shaped by our environment, in political development as much as biological.

The failure of the Greens to keep holding space for contradictory views, and working towards consensus, is a sad failure to enact another of their key principles; appropriate decision-making. One practical consequence is that it has lost them members, allies and voters. Existing and potential.

For a single-issue activist network, where keeping the focus on a specific set of shared beliefs and goals can be more important than the size of the support base, this is nothing to worry about. For an electoral party that can't just spend money to reach potential voters, depending instead on boots on the ground is any many neighbourhoods and interest groups as possible, it's an existential threat that needs to be taken seriously.

Part 6: Radical solutions to address root problems

This is not a counsel of depair. For anyone in the Greens who is ready to acknowledge that there's a problem and do something about it, I have three suggestions.

First and most importantly, stop letting the People's Front of Judea run the party.

Those who remember the 1980s Labour government know that political parties - even those born of grassroots social movements - can become professionalised and lose touch with their activist base. That when that happens, they become vulnerable to being hijacked by their political opponents.

One of the key tactics of these hijackers is to push a strict party line and characterise dissent as disloyalty. In a truly democratic party, open dissent is to be encouraged - even when its wrong-headed - not shouted down. Disagreed with, definitely, argued with, sure. But with the dignity and respect and commitment to intellectual honesty that were once the universal hallmarks of the Greens' approach to politics.

So I'm not proposing you cancel the cancellers, shout them down, or marginalise them. That would be a continuation of the problem, not a solution. Just that you need to stop walling off their opinions and tactics from internal criticism.

Party members or allies who have reservations about identity mandates, or anything else, deserve to be heard. Without being condemned, shamed, or smeared. Even if their thinking is being warped by subconscious bias. Even if they've got it totally wrong, having people listen to understand, is the first step to helping them get it right.

Secondly, set a maximum term limit for Green MPs of 6 years.

Allow members to serve as many 6 year terms as they like, for as long as they have the support of the party membership to do so. But ensure they take a least a 3 year break between them.

This in itself would allow for more diversity of Green representatives. It would increase the pool of Greens with Parliamentary experience, who could serve as mentors to first-time MPs, or as support people for MPs who are struggling. But more importantly, it would mitigate the accumulation of stress that leads to compulsive shoplifting, or bullying of other party members, or standing over people in Parliament.

Thirdly, get rid of any and all identity mandates.

Without those, there's no reason to parachute people like Darleen Tana into the party list, often with little or no history with the party, just to make sure you can meet quota. For every highly capable MP like Chlöe Swarbrick, or Teanau Tuiono, or Efeso Collins, or Lan Pham, you risk a Tana or an Elizabeth Kerekere.

Sure you need bunch of other policies and structures to make sure a diverse range of people are recruited into the party, and given training and opportunities for advancement. So the candidate pool is inclusive enough to produce a diverse party list organically. With regular reviews to see how well it's working and improve it as necessary.

But from what I've observed, the Greens were always good at that stuff. So even if my suspicion is wrong and the mandates cause no problems whatsoever, I still don't think they're necessary.

Epilogue: Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away

In the first decade of this century, there was a thriving anarchist movement in Aotearoa that had been growing since the 1980s. With affinity groups and practical projects all around the country, supporting a dizzying range of activist campaigns and infrastructure projects. From local infoshops, social centres, community gardens, and food rescue teams, to country-wide print zines, and news gathering and online publishing projects.

So what happened? The same things I've seen happening in the Greens over the last decade or so, taken to truly disturbing extremes.

Rumour-mongering and manipulation replacing honest and open critcism, and robust but respectful debate. Oppressive hierarchies being reversed instead of abolished. People being censured and banished without due process, including for breaking rules about things you can't say (out loud).

In any political movement built on the passion of volunteers, rather than the spending of astroturf funding, this stuff is cancer. People become confused, and distrustful, and afraid, and then exhausted, and alienated. Sooner or later either they too get purged, or they just shrug their shoulders and walk away.

Having been active in the movement for over a decade by that point, helping to start a bunch of those infrastructure projects, including Aotearoa Indymedia, I was hard to purge. Wisely or not, I was too stubborn to give up easily. I spoke out, in face-to-face conversations, in meetings and in writing, about exactly what I was seeing, and why I was concerned about it. But most people were too afraid of drawing fire, and it was too little, too late.

I was misquoted, bullied, and ostracised (selectively, they still wanted to benefit from my technical skills and infrastructure maintenance). I was misrepresented as speaking up for oppression, bigotry, bullying and violence. The very things I was trying to expose and help fix.

Eventually the social environment became too toxic. I cut my losses, resigned from my roles in any groups or projects the cancer had spread to, and moved on. Hanging my shingle at disintermedia.net.nz, and working with organisations like Permaculture in NZ and NORML NZ. Co-founding CreativeCommons Aotearoa/NZ (now TohaToha), which led to my association with NZ Open Source Society, and supporting the Loomio Cooperative in their early days.

I think Peak Absurdity was reached not long after, when a handful of leftist identitarians turned up to protest against an activist-organised Climate Camp, complete with megaphone and comically huge banner. Why? Because a person once accused of abuse - under very questionable circumstances I might add - had been allowed to help the project, in a purely off-site technical capacity. As Karl Marx famously quipped; history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce.

These days, you have to look hard to find the remains of that once-thriving anarchist movement. The Aotearoa Indymedia website, once a clearinghouse of activist news from a wide range of citizen journalists and activists groups around the country, is gone from the web. After years as a zombie project, the features column a private blog for a narrow group of activists, the open publishing newswire choked with unmoderated spam and tofu.

Why am I publishing this? Because I'd hate to see the Greens go the same way.

One advantage of having been cancelled already is that I've lost the fear of it that makes people censor themselves. Someone has to be the unsophisticated child who says out loud that the Emperor wears no clothes. Since I'm a longtime ally of the Greens, not a members, and not subject to their internal "accountability", it might as well be me.

Coda: Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering

"... violence often refracts within and around a political movement that endorses it".

- Timothy Snyder, Professor of History

Perhaps the saddest example in radical history of this self-consuming dynamic was the decline of the Situationist International. A network of highly creative post-Marxist groups, whose members played key roles in political uprisings all around the world in 1968. The most famous being in Paris, home of SI guru Guy Debord.

After this peak, the SI starting purging members and whole groups, one by one, until there was only Debord and one other member left. Debord purged him too, of course. Eventually, in a final reductio ad absurdum, he purged himself, by ending his life.

Debord's writings are full of insights that remain relevant to anyone wanting to leave the world better than we found it, maybe even more relevant than they were in his time. But his final act offers a tragic illustration of the old anarchist principle that rather than our actions being justified by the beneficial outcomes we're trying to achieve with them, the outcomes we get are unavoidably determined by the kinds of actions we take. As well as Snyder's insight that the treatment we aim at our political opponents, inevitably reflect back on our own.

CreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0

It was blue. Blue. I didn't know what to make of it. Nobody did. But there it was, on the card, in blue and white. I was so surprised, I barely noticed the date, or rather, the lack of a date. All the blue text said was one, simple, solitary word.

"Never".

I showed the card to my parents. My Dad said it must have been misprinted. My mother was more encouraging, "maybe it means exactly what it says?" "But how can that be?" I asked, "I mean, 'never'? Really?".

I didn't know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

My parents got out their cards for comparison. There was my father's date, in the usual green font. He was in his mid forties and still had just under thirty years until he died of natural causes. My mother's was red and as we all knew, had known for as long as I could remember, she only had a couple of years left.

I asked them why they hadn't opened the envelope containing my card when I was born. Why they had waited until I was eighteen. "The same reason we didn't let the scan technicians tell us your sex", Mum told me, smiling softly, her eyes moist with memories whose rough edges had long since been softened by the passage of time, "we wanted to let you surprise us." "We thought we'd had the biggest surprise of our lives where the midwife told us you weren't a boy or a girl", added my father. "Can we take it back?", I asked, "if it's a misprint, a mistake, some kind of April Fools joke gone wrong, I really want to know. If it's right ..." I couldn't even finish the sentence. It was inconceivable. It must be a mistake. But I had to know for sure.

My parents sat on either side of me on the worn fake leather couch at the Department of Mortality. We'd been waiting for several hours and the smell of stale cologne and floor polish was making my eyes water. The waiting room was small, like a dentist surgery, except that all the magazines covering the chipped veneer of the coffee table were about funeral parlours and monumental engravers. I realized I was chewing my knuckles and snatched my right hand away from my mouth with my left. Minutes later, I realized the left knuckles were in my mouth. I sighed and wedged both hands between my knees.

Finally, the receptionist caught my Mother's eye and waved us through. The office was even shabbier than the waiting room and the rumpled man behind the desk was smoking two hand-rolled cigarettes, holding them in one hand while he pecked away at the keys of an ancient desktop computer with the other. The optical disc drive had been wedged open and repurposed as an ashtray holder, which was full to overflowing with half-smoked butts. He grunted and jerked his head in the direction of three chairs, each sitting in a halo of empty floor that looked like it had been rapidly cleared only minutes before, in order to place them there.

The man took a final, vengeful stab at his keyboard and settled back into his chair, peering at us over his reading glasses, and clearing his throat with a sound like a kitchen blender full of gravel. He wore what might once have qualified as a suit. His creased brown pants, which almost matched the threadbare jacket casually draped over the back of his chair, were accompanied by a shirt the colour of nicotine-stained fingers and an orange bow tie, flecked with soup stains. We waited for him to say something, but he didn't. He just sat, and stared, and occasionally coughed.

My parents and I looked at each other. Just when it seemed like one of us had decided to say something, the man spoke. His voice was surprisingly smooth and debonair, giving the distinct impression he was lip syncing to a statement someone else had recorded earlier. "The ...", he began, then thought better of it. He started again, "we checked the deep data processes that produced your ... child's prognosis".

He paused, again, for an uncomfortably long time.

"We can find no flaws".

He chewed on his lips, as if he found this news profoundly agitating. Just as I took a breath to reply, he went on.

"We have checked your cards against the algorithms and your due dates too come out exactly as predicted when you were born. There has been no mistake".

He took a deep and noisy breath, making a show of adjusting his tie and straightening his filthy glasses. "Good day to you", he said, and went back to his irritated typing, as if we were no longer in the room.

That was over two hundred years ago. My parents died exactly on their due dates, just as everybody did. My mother was electrocuted in the swimming pool when a malfunctioning automated lawnmower trundled into it. My father, having been preparing himself for years, remarried a couple of years later. He died in his early seventies of an undetected brain aneurysm. I'm still here. Grey haired, but healthy as a horse. Still, nobody knows why.

Nobody I know these days was born before my hundredth birthday. I'm lonely, in a way that nobody more than a century younger could understand. I never married. Never had children. How could I do that to them? Knowing I would outlive them all?

But I'm not completely alone. Every few months I go back to the Ministry of Mortality, worrying, and later hoping, that some improvements made to the deep data cluster in the intervening years will make it spit out a date this time. It never has. Every time, I drink a glass of whiskey with the rumpled man in the orange bow tie and we wonder why we're the only two people in the world to ever get a blue card, saying "never".

This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.

This post was republished as one of the Indymedia Stories on the Disintermedia blog, under the title Rob and Me.

---

In the late 1990s, like a lot young and idealistic anarchist geeks, I was inspired by EFF founder John Perry Barlow declaring independence for the internet ("cyberspace", as some people were still calling it). I was fascinated by the potential of the net for democratically coordinating action among global citizens. These were the days of the "anti-globalization movement" (a meaningless buzzphrase coined by corporate media, see footnote). A series of huge, distributed protests, coordinated on a global scale, through online networks like People's Global Action. I joined and created a lot of email lists, and I saw a lot of this happening in real time.

It was on one of these email lists that I first encountered Rob Gilchrist. I didn't get on with him at first. Like many activists (well.. real activists... but we'll get to that), he could be abrasive to deal with online.

After I moved back to Ōtautahi at the end of 2000 I ended up meeting him in person. He was already involved in a few of the groups that pooled resources to create the InterActive activist centre, which we set up in 2001. At the time, a network of local groups was communicating on yet another email list about setting up Aotearoa Indymedia. I was part of the Ōtautahi Indymedia group, which helped find a space to rent for InterActive, organise a network connection, and source computers, inspired by examples like the original Independent Media Centre in Seattle. This pushed me into regular contact with Gilchrist, and I still remember him insisting I install PGP email encryption on the InterActive computers, and claiming to have found a "bug" (listening device) in the building.

I was suspicious of Gilchrist from day one. To this day, I couldn't tell you exactly why. Something just... smelled wrong about him and his origin story. I was so suspicious of him I contacted a few geeks friends, who I'd seen at public meetings against state surveillance, asking if they had any idea how to check his background without tipping him off, or his handlers.

But I was young and green, and my understanding of the ins and outs of anti-activist spying was pretty limited. I presumed that anyone spying on us would hang around a few weeks, a few months at most, whether they were informants for the cops, corporate-funded contractors (like Thompson & Clark), or more sinister alphabet agencies. By then, I figured, either we'd get wise to their game, or they'd finish their operation and vanish. My spidey-senses never stopped tingling when I had anything to do with Gilchrist, but when he was still around a couple of years later, I started to rationalise it away.

As a result of both my own activism, and my role as a roving reporter and ambassador for the Aotearoa Indymedia website, I spent the next few years going to all kinds of protests, picket lines, occupations, public meetings, conferences, and camps, all around Aotearoa. Gilchrist turned up at a surprising number of them. Often doing what seemed like really useful work.

I never fully trusted Gilchrist. But I freely admit to developing a grudging respect for his commitment, and asking myself some hard questions about the possible sources of my distrust. After all, I thought, paranoia is an occupational hazard for any long-term activist. Got to keep in check. After he gained the trust of a number of the older activists I respected, it started to seem crazy to think he was a spy, spidey-senses be damned.

How wrong those rationalisations were. Because my intuition, as it turned out, was right on the money.

In December of 2008, just a couple of months after the Operation 8 raids that unleashed shocked and awe on activist communities around the country, investigative journalist Nicky Hager exposed Gilchrist's real game in the Sunday Star Times newspaper. Hager's article revealed that for about a decade, the cops had been paying him $600 a week (on top of his social welfare benefit) as an informant. A comfortable salary at a time when benefits were about $2-300 a week.

There were a number of lessons in this experience for me. But the most important one was to trust my intuition. Because when I screen out any jumping at shadows that's coming from anxiety - and if I pay attention I can tell the difference - my intuition is always right. I don't know how this works, but it does.

I've read theories about deep pattern-matching abilities, which lurk beneath the rationalising surface of the mind, but who knows. My experience has consistently been that when I let my rationalisations shout down my spidey-senses, it always blinds me to an important truth.

For the last 15 years or so, I've walked a tightrope strung between the twin poles of tinfoil-hat paranoia and rose-tinted naivety. It's possible to over-correct in both directions. As Chomsky once pointed out, just because there are lots of crazy ideas out there labeled "conspiracy theories", that doesn't mean there are no real conspiracies. On the contrary, he says, history is full of them. The trick to staying out of the conspiracy rabbitholes people can tend to go down, I reckon, comes down to two things.

Firstly, I try to be clear about what I *know*, and how. Keep my focus on that. Speculation is useful to a limited degree, if it helps me come up with ways to test possibilities, and gain more useful information. But if I spend too much time speculating, and not enough time testing and discarding, the fantasy world of the speculation can take on a life of its own. As the Wizard of New Zealand used to say, "never believe your own bullshit".

Secondly, along similar lines, I'm very careful not to get lost in the things my spidey-senses are tingling about. Which ironically, seems to get easier the more I *listen* to them, and trust what my intuition is trying to tell me. It's important to unplug and go for a walk, hang out with friends, watch a funny movie, listen to music, juggle, sing, confuse the cat with silly dancing, anything fun that distracts me from the paranoia-inducing stuff I'm probing, and helps me to put it in perspective.

Can I prove any of this story about my personal history with Gilchrist? Can I prove I was suspicious of him from the start? Can I even prove I'm the same Strypey that spent years reporting for Indymedia? Don't know. Probably not, unless there's a Web of Trust that connects you, dear reader, to someone who knew me back then. You can choose to believe me, or assume I'm a raving nutter. That's entirely your business.

But although I can't prove I didn't read about it in the newspaper, or find it online, I can direct you to a range of sources that confirm the Gilchrist story. Turns out there's a few Rob Gilchrist's in the world. Or at least, people with names similar enough to his to come up when you web search it. For your convenience, dear reader, I've spent a bit of time sorting the wheat from the chaff.

In order of publication, here is everything a quick web search turned up on the subject of paid police informant Rob Gilchrist. Both corporate media articles and op eds, and blog pieces from a range of political alignments. It's notable that this is a rare case where activists, journalists, and bloggers - on both left and right - mostly agree with each other. That it's gross and unethical for the cops to be paying a guy a salary to spy on and sleep with activists.

Many of these links date back to a time when news and blog sites still had their own comment sections. Rather than outsourcing that to the datafarms, probably the first of their many mistakes that helped the datafarms eat their business.

Anyway, when you skim a few of these comment threads, it's also notable that many of the shorter comments are spouting the same handful of talking points. I presume this is because they're either being posted by sockpuppets doing PR arse-covering, or Useful Idiots echoing those sockpuppets when the talking points fit their biases.

Note, to create equal opportunities confusion for both local *and* overseas readers, when it comes to dates, I've used the ISO 8601 format that pretty much nobody else uses (year-month-day).

2008-12-14 - Crossing the line: the activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20090531212020/http://www.nickyhager.info/crossing-the-line-the-activist-who-turned-police-informer/

2008-12-14 - The activist who turned police informer
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217031940/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792177a6619.html

2008-12-14 - Who the police were spying on
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042627/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792188a6619.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216020616/http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4792178a6005.html

2008-12-14 - Anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20081214131056/https://www.stuff.co.nz/4792627a11.html

2008-12-14 - Chief of police called in over spies
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/chief-of-police-called-in-over-spies/B4KJMTY7HSGGIDVQS5DE4EEJ7U/

2008-12-14 - Sunday Star Times
https://thestandard.org.nz/sunday-star-times/

2008-12-14 - Police state
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-state.html

2008-12-14 Rob Gilchrist : Police Informant
https://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1551

2008-12-14 - The SST Police spying story
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_sst_police_spying_story.html

2008-12-14 - How Gilchrist was found out
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120311/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76507/index.php

2008-12-14 - Police anti-terror squad spies on protest groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090127054440/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76508/index.php

2008-12-14 - Rob Gilchrist: I'm a Police Information (video clipped from TV3 news)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPTtG9x1hlo

2008-12-15 - Loose lips sink ships…
https://newmasses.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/loose-lips-sink-ships/

2008-12-15 - State snooping on activists
https://fightback.org.nz/2008/12/15/civil-rights-fast-disappearing/

2008-12-15 - Is the NZ left naive or paranoid?
https://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/12/is-the-nz-left-naive-or-paranoid.html

2008-12-16 - Gordon Campbell On The Transition Package, And Paid Police Spies Within Protest Groups
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202062628/http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/gordon-campbell-on-the-transition-package-and-paid-police-spies-within-protest-groups/

2008-12-16 - Police using spies and lies to make case
https://web.archive.org/web/20081216120315/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76514/index.php

2008-12-16 - Special Intelligence Group targetting political dissidents.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514224310/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76343/special-intelligence-group-targetting-po

2008-12-16 - Unsubstantiated accusations
https://web.archive.org/web/20100514083018/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76345/unsubstantiated-accusations

2008-12-16 - The limits to tolerance of the police
https://thestandard.org.nz/the-limits-to-tolerance-of-the-police/

2008-12-16 - Capitalist state just doing its job
https://web.archive.org/web/20081228113024/https://workersparty.org.nz/2008/12/16/capitalist-state-just-doing-its-job/

2008-12-16 - Rochelle hits back
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/rochelle_hits_back.html

2008-12-17 - Rob Gilchrist - police informant for 'anti-terror' unit
https://web.archive.org/web/20081220142203/http://indymedia.org.nz/feature/display/72017/index.php

2008-12-17 - Who else are they spying on?
https://thestandard.org.nz/who-else-are-they-spying-on/

2008-12-17 - The Murky World of Rob Gilchrist
https://web.archive.org/web/20111124055808/https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2008/12/murky-world-of-rob-gilchrist.html

2008-12-17 - Greens say spy passed information to police on anti-Taser protest
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/greens-say-spy-passed-information-to-police-on-anti-taser-protest/QZH7FI7HGSP7C5ZVPVHXYE74V4/

2008-12-17 - Garth George: Greens' criticism of covert police surveillance a fair cop (doesn't mention Gilchrist by name but is a response to the preceding article)
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/igarth-georgei-greens-criticism-of-covert-police-surveillance-a-fair-cop/Z4I7NQNPYFYSWW2C6CAJKVIQEY/

2008-12-18 - Strange Bedfellows
https://web.archive.org/web/20090113224854/https://blog.greens.org.nz/2008/12/18/strange-bedfellows/

2008-12-18 - Police spied on unions
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2008/12/police-spied-on-unions.html

2008-12-18 - The Gilchrist case gets murkier
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_case_gets_murkier.html

2008-12-18 - https://ludditejourno.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/police-and-terrorism/
Aotearoa – the most terrorist dense population in the world

2008-12-19 - State Of It: Police SIG Unit Wasted On Tag-Busting
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0812/S00364.htm

2008-12-19 - Mark Eden-Should The Police Be Monitoring This Man? (a rare exception, this blogger supports the spying, but check out the comments...)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110101143750/http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/12/mark-eden-should-police-be-monitoring.html

2008-12-20 - 'Nice little memento' for police spy
https://web.archive.org/web/20121107005757/http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10549050

2008-12-20 - Bill Ralston: No spying line a cop-out
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/ibill-ralstoni-no-spying-line-a-cop-out/PR7LGCGPVTHF4EOSO55MOGCLSE/

2008-12-20 - Matt McCarten: Spying on lawful organisations should set alarm bells ringing
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/imatt-mccarteni-spying-on-lawful-organisations-should-set-alarm-bells-ringing/M3U53JZ5KSSX6RMREKQZCPHSWM/

2008-12-21 - Activist to take police to court over informant
https://web.archive.org/web/20100518073112/http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/770658

2008-12-21 - Pepper sprayed activist to take police to court over provocateur
https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141333/http://indymedia.org.nz/article/76380/pepper-sprayed-activist-take-police-cour

2008-12-21 - Rob Gilchrist sent naked photos of teenage activist to police
https://web.archive.org/web/20090122211120/http://indymedia.org.nz/newswire/display/76545/index.php

2008-12-21 - The Gilchrist saga gets yucky
https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2008/12/the_gilchrist_saga_gets_yucky.html

2008-12-21 - It’s not often that I agree with a Commie, but here’s an exception to the rule
https://kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/its-not-often-that-i-agree-with-a-commie-but-heres-an-exception/

2008-12-24 - NZ: The beauty of hindsight - police informant caught after 10 years - Indymedia UK
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416010.html

2009-01-10 - What DeLillo can tell us about Gilchrist
https://books.scoop.co.nz/2009/01/10/what-delillo-tells-us-about-rob-gilchrist/

2009-04-25 - The activist who turned police informer
https://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/features/760466/The-activist-who-turned-police-informer

2009-07 - How Police Spy Rob Gilchrist Was Exposed By His Partner
https://web.archive.org/web/20170427040356/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180c.htm

2009-07 - Police Informer Caught After 10 Years of Spying on Activists
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712175956/http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-180b.htm

2010-07 - Aotearoa NZ Military Imposters - Robert Stephen Gilchrist – Christchurch New Zealand
https://web.archive.org/web/20100712141550/http://www.anzmi.net/gilchrist/gilchrist.html

2012-07-07 - How To Avoid Getting Robbed
https://web.archive.org/web/20170409064726/http://archive.indymedia.org.nz/article/82640/how-avoid-getting-robbed

2013-02-12 - Case for compensation, says police spy's ex
https://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/8289572/Case-for-compensation-says-police-spys-ex

2013-02-13 - Police spy sues for mental pain
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8285326/Police-spy-sues-for-mental-pain

2013-02-25 - Spy sues cops for pain of decade of deception
https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/8345622/Spy-sues-cops-for-pain-of-decade-of-deception

2013-11-7 - Better work stories?
https://boundmaus.wordpress.com/2013/11/07/better-work-stories/

2014-08-07 - Rob Gilchrist On Nicky Hager
https://thestandard.org.nz/rob-gilchrist-on-nicky-hager/

2015-08-30 - Former spy paid to infiltrate Greenpeace and unions
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/71357903/former-spy-paid-to-infiltrate-greenpeace-and-unions

2015-07-04 - Police spy's girlfriend: I want answers

2018 - Activists and the Surveillance State (this is a book, but the blurb references Gilchrist)
https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/activists-state-surveillance-political-policing/


Footnote: the "anti-globalization movement"

What exactly was this "movement of movements" against, and what it was for as an alternative? These are reasonable questions, but they're very hard to answer, simply because there's no one answer. Every political group that contributed - and perhaps every person involved - will have their own answers, and they'll all be different. For me it was a movement against the massive social and environmental harms caused by neoliberals, as they took over the state in many countries - both rich and poor - and used it to shift control of resources and regulatory powers from the public to corporations; deregulation, corporatisation, privatisation, etc.

This post was been moved off my personal blog onto the Disintermedia blog.

All my life, I've gone through long periods of crippling depression. Depression and I are old adversaries, like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, The Doctor and The Master, MacGyver and Murdoch. This post is for all my fellow depression survivors and especially those who are new to the club.

I was once asked if depression could make a person hate being around people. My answer? Hell yes.

Depression is exhausting, and social interaction uses up way more energy than we're normally conscious of. Also, depression is usually accompanied by its old pal low self-esteem, which can make us unusually anxious about upsetting other people or damaging relationships with them. If John Paul Sartre never suffered from depression, he summed up the experience nicely in his famous "hell is other people" line.

It really helped me to learn that there are a number of kinds of depression, and a person experiencing a depressive episode often goes through a number of them. One of them is sometimes known as 'irritable depression'. As I understand it, it's actually a combination of depression and mild mania. It can be hell to go through, but it can also be a sign that you're coming out of the depths of the depression, starting to recover. Your system is trying to get your moods back in balance, and over-correcting a bit at both ends (huge thanks to another fellow survivor, Andrew Solomon, who explained this in his magnum opus 'The Noonday Demon').

When I'm suffering from the irritable stage of depression, I find it helps to limit contact with strangers or new people (although being alone in a crowd can be strangely comforting), and spend as much time as I can with old friends and family that I'm close to. People who I know I can tell about how I'm feeling, and will forgive me if I'm a bit prickly to be around (although they tell me I feel like I'm harder to be around than I really am). YMMV :)

It also helps to keep telling myself "this too shall pass". In fact, I would go so far as to say this mantra has kept me alive at times. Good luck!

This is a message for everyone I've been working with on ethical tech projects over the last few years. I think it’s time that I let you all know that, with great sadness and frustration, I am formally withdrawing from all voluntary work commitments for the foreseeable. Please remove any privileges or access on your community platforms that you are concerned about casual contributors having, and leave me out of any issues discussions or fediverse threads about project work.

You may have noticed I haven’t participated much in anything over the last year or so. This is because of a series of increasingly disruptive events in my personal life since the start of 2020. I had hoped to be able to bounce back by now and pick up where I left off. But it’s become clear that my path to recovery is going to be a longer one than I anticipated, and that it requires me to step away from everything I can, and simplify my life as much as possible.

I wish you all well with any ethical tech projects and other social change work you are involved in.