I can’t leave Auck­land behind with­out com­ment­ing on what is an increas­ingly bizarre and irra­tional polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. On my not infre­quent trips back to New Zealand I’m always hit with how over­whelm­ingly wealthy the place seems to have become. Not stink­ingly, offen­sively wealthy with extremes next to grind­ing poverty as you find in much of the world, across Europe, Asia and much of the Amer­i­cas. No, there is no real wealth in global terms in New Zealand despite some hav­ing aspi­ra­tions, but nei­ther is there much real poverty as found else­where. Poor but not no drink­ing water poverty.

No, what always hits me, from Pon­sonby to Man­gere is a rough equity, across a range of course. New Zealand, espe­cially when you con­sider its lack of nat­ural resources al la Aus­tralia, and lack of pop­u­la­tion, has done rather well for itself in recent years. The pop­u­lace is well fed, largely healthy, well edu­cated, and has, with obvi­ous excep­tions, an eco­nomic sta­bil­ity it’s never seen before, at least in my life­time. It’s as close to a real democ­racy with all the free­doms that requires as any soci­ety has ever been in his­tory. It’s a happy, largely peace­ful, clean coun­try with an excel­lent infra­struc­ture. The econ­omy has boomed over the past decade and every­one who wants a job has one, and one which pays, despite the banging-on about trans Tas­man inequity, as well if not bet­ter in real qual­ity of life terms than vir­tu­ally every­where else on this planet. Peo­ple take plea­sure in whing­ing about all those things but seri­ously, get on a plane, look, get a life for god’s sake.

It’s a very dif­fer­ent place to what it was ten years back.

Which brings me to the bizarre. Every­body, seem­ingly, wants to change all that. You rarely hear a good word about either Helen Clark or the Labour gov­ern­ment, and the word seems to be its time to go.

And no-one really, if you ask, seems to know why.

From my per­spec­tive, quite some miles away, but still very inter­ested, the glar­ingly obvi­ous ques­tion seems to be are you all bark­ing mad? For­get the pol­icy vac­uum that John Key seems to be…oh that’s right you’ll get small “tax cuts”, and despite National’s shock­ing his­tor­i­cal track record, they are ‘busi­ness friendly’…forget any per­sonal feel­ings that you may have towards the cur­rent PM (although when­ever one men­tions NZ in this part of the world the lis­tener inevitably says, with thumb up, “Helen Clark”..she’s given the coun­try an aura of respect it didn’t have before in Asia)…forget every­thing else and think back.

I know that a large part of the elec­torate is too young to really remem­ber but it is worth remind­ing them and every­one else what it used to be like under a National gov­ern­ment. The grey, divided, depressed and depress­ing place that Labour inher­ited in 1999.

And what it would have been like under a National gov­ern­ment just a few years back when National shadow min­is­ters were urg­ing NZ to fol­low, with­out ques­tion, the US into Iraq.

But think fur­ther back to what National gov­ern­ments meant to NZ. Under National gov­ern­ments we had dawn raids; Bas­tion Point; Spring­bok tours, with hugely divi­sive and vio­lent riots up and down the coun­try; troops dying in Viet­nam; crip­pling think big projects that NZ paid for, for decades, with no real gain; team polic­ing units that ram­paged through inner city Auck­land baton­ing and beat­ing all and sundry with lit­tle provo­ca­tion (I saw it many times); gross eco­nomic mis­man­age­ment that was han­dled, ludi­crously, by arti­fi­cial price and wage freezes and Stal­in­is­tic con­trols; the IRD was told to take the gloves off by min­is­ter Bill Birch which led to sui­cides and ruth­less bank­rupt­ing regard­less of the human cost and via­bil­ity of the busi­ness attacked; a tax sys­tem that taxed top earn­ers at 66%; an arts sec­tor that was grossly under­funded; and slashes in ben­e­fits that threw many onto the dust heap and has caused social prob­lems to this day. Cou­ple all that with an unnec­es­sary and quite depilat­ing national tor­por and I cer­tainly have no desire to go back to those dank old days.

How soon we forget….

So here we are in the midst of the UN cli­mate talks in Bali, most of which is being held some 20km away from where I’m writ­ing, at the gilded ghetto (that’s what it’s actu­ally often called) of Nusa Dua.

It’s actu­ally not been as bad as we all thought it might have been. 10,000, mostly lower level, func­tionar­ies, their spouses, and, by all accounts a swarm of the next gen­er­a­tion of snake oil mer­chants, car­bon credit merchants..mostly out of NYC it seems. The Amer­i­cans may be the envi­ron­men­tal bad boys but they are not adverse to mak­ing money out of Kyoto.

Lots of places one may have though would be rather over pop­u­lated are quite quiet (see Ku de Ta on left last week), although the Queen’s Tan­door was pump­ing a cou­ple of nights back.

The traf­fic has been the usual quag­mire but apart from the odd bus full of spouses being dragged up to the sil­ver shops or the mon­key for­est, scream­ing past on the bypass at 90 kmh with flash­ing police escort as all and sundry dive out of the way, not that much worse than before. Oh and there are guys in cheap plas­tic shades (all aged circa 17) stand­ing on each cor­ner with sub­ma­chine guns, almost like Sin­ga­pore. As Brigid pointed out, if one was to want to exe­cute a very, very impor­tant per­son, a sniper shot to each of these guys first, as obvi­ous as they are (and I really don’t think the guys arrang­ing this are smart enough to have thought about hid­den gun­men too..in RI its all about the obvi­ous bravado) would allow an aspir­ing assas­sin free reign.

There are Indone­sian navy patrol boats off shore too. I guess there is some con­cern about Al-Qaeda trained Sea Tur­tles on sui­cide missions.

My favourite com­ment so far is from the lady from Uganda who com­mented on how orderly and well behaved the traf­fic in Bali was. I’ve made a note to keep out of East Africa.

It’s a con­fer­ence of con­tra­dic­tions to be sure.

Firstly there is the venue. Nusa Dua, built by the World Bank, in col­lu­sion with the Suharto fam­ily and assorted bud­dies has a bit of a taint to it in this part of the world, what with vil­lages hav­ing being forced out with­out com­pen­sa­tion, reefs being dyna­mited and the like. It’s a part of Bali’s often dark, and still unre­solved (or admit­ted) past. It seems like an odd place for the World to come together to sort out its prob­lems. That cou­pled with the fact that locals, unless they work there, are really not that wel­come within its walled 60 acres (nor would they likely wish to..its a ghastly, hor­ren­dously over­priced, ster­ile sort of place with lit­tle soul pop­u­lated by gar­ish they-could-be-anywhere chain hotels).

Sec­ondly the idea that over 100 jets needed to be parked in the region seems at odds to the whole con­cept of cli­mate control..haven’t these peo­ple heard of plane pooling……

I’m not at all sure about any of this.

A few things I came across last night that I found of inter­est, which I’ll link to with lit­tle comment…first up this story on the dis­ap­pear­ance of Iraq’s Christians….under the watch of a born again President….

All of the major Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, echo­ing the White House, assure us the surge is work­ing, that things are much bet­ter in Iraq. They say we’re win­ning, that Iraq is a gen­er­a­tional ide­o­log­i­cal battlefield.

These men believe invad­ing a Mus­lim coun­try that posed no threat to Amer­ica was a good idea, but not one of them has explained to their pre­dom­i­nantly Chris­t­ian base that the poli­cies they embraced not only killed or dis­placed mil­li­ions of Mus­lims but also opened a pandora’s box that oblit­er­ated a mil­lion mem­ber Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity. Some­one should ask them about that.

Then a rather prag­matic Salon piece about the Surge from Pro­fes­sor Juan Cole…

What the recent pub­lic­ity about the “suc­cess” of the troop surge has ignored is this: The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has down­played the col­laps­ing polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Iraq by direct­ing the public’s atten­tion to fluc­tu­at­ing num­bers of civil­ians killed. While there have been some rel­a­tive gains in secu­rity recently, even there the pic­ture remains dubi­ous. The Iraqi min­istry of health, long known for cook­ing the books, says that a few hun­dred Iraqis were killed in polit­i­cal vio­lence in Novem­ber. How­ever, inde­pen­dent observers such as Iraq Body Count cite a much higher num­ber — some 1,100 civil­ians killed in Iraq in Novem­ber. They reported that bomb­ings and assas­si­na­tions accounted for 63 per­sons on Sat­ur­day, the first day of Decem­ber, alone.

Then, in the after­math of the rather shock­ing (for those who want yet more blood in the Mid­dle East) US NIE report comes this time­line from Digby illus­trat­ing how the US hard right have made it up to suit their agen­das for years: and from Arms Con­trol Wonk, who argue that none of this is really a sur­prise to any­one who’d actu­ally thought about it..or of course if you’d lis­tened to Mohamed ElBa­radei, this is pretty much what he and his agency have been say­ing for a hell of long time.

“Despite repeated smear cam­paigns, the I.A.E.A. has stood its ground and con­cluded time and again that since 2002 there was no evi­dence of an unde­clared nuclear weapons pro­gram in Iran,” a senior agency offi­cial said. “It also val­i­dates the assess­ment of the direc­tor gen­eral that what the I.A.E.A. inspec­tors have seen in Iran rep­re­sented no immi­nent danger.”