Greens economic knowledge
Lisa Owen on The Nation asked the four leadership contenders for the Greens some basic economic data questions. The responses:
- Kevin Hague said economic growth in the last year was 0.25% when it was 12 times that at 2.9%
- Gareth Hughes said inflation was 2.0%, more than double the 0.8% it is
- Vernon Tava said the official cash rate was 7.8%, over double the 3.5% it is
- James Shaw was the only one close saying unemployment is just over 5.0% when it is 5.7%
And bad news for rich pricks from the wanabee leaders:
Hughes: I would have a discussion with our members, and I think 40 per cent is a good rate for above 100,000, and I think we could look at a higher rate for income over a million dollars.
50 or 60 per cent?
Hughes: Well, I don’t want to put a number on it.
Maybe 70%?
And they want to extend legal personhood to all inhabitants of Gaia:
We’re running out of time, gentlemen. I want to ask you, James — you say that the rights of personhood should extend to all habitants of the Earth. What do you mean by that?
Shaw: Well, we give corporations legal personhood. So humans have legal personhood. Also, corporations have legal personhood. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River and Te Urewera also have legal personhood, and I think that that is a great way of starting to think about protecting our environment.
So does that mean the rimu, the chicken and the snail — they all have personhood along with me — the same?
Shaw: Well, a corporation has the same legal personhood as you do.
I hear what you’re saying there, but I’m asking you about these other things. Does that mean we all have the same rights?
Shaw: No. I’m talking ecological features. So this is sort of playing out differently in different parts of the world. It’s a new area of law called Nature’s Rights Law or Wild Law as it is sometimes referred to.
But in your maiden speech you talked about all inhabitants. So all inhabitants of the planet, should they have personhood?
Tava: I totally agree with this, because what it means is that you grant legal standing to those things, because at the moment we’ve got this really perverse situation where we treat animals, trees, so on, only as property, or even worse, something that’s not owned at all.
So Vernon thinks all the inhabitants…
Shaw: We have to remember, we used to treat black people as property as well. And over the last several hundred years, we’ve gotten a little more enlightened about that. We used to treat women as property as well in our legal system. So this is just talking about expanding our view of what rights extend to.
Black people are people. Female people are people. Snails are not people. Pretty simple.
Hague: It does seem a little bit odd to me, I must say. I’m interested in talking to Vernon and James about that. I think that we do need to have constitutional protection for our natural environment, but I’d go in the opposite direction in relation to legal personhood. I would take it away from corporations, cos I think that’s damaging to our society.
Not sure which candidate is more scary – the ones that want to recognise snails and trees as persons, or the one saying remove legal rights from corporations, which is basically saying do away with most property rights.
I never thought I could feel wistful for Russel Norman, but they are managing to make the former marxist look like the moderate!