WHILE THE OLD Soviet Union had a series of five year plans intended to develop and reconfigure the national economy, Chris Bishop has gone one better than Joe Stalin. The Infrastructure Minister wants a thirty-year plan for New Zealand, which will be overseen by his newly established National Infrastructure Agency. If a Labour Government had announced such a plan, the corporate media would have certainly attacked it as 'communism by stealth'. Instead, Chris Bishop's thirty-year plan has been praised by such free market acolytes as Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking and Heather du Plessis Allan. Who knew they were Stalinists in disguise?
Of course, in the Soviet Union, the five-year plans could not be upended or changed by the election of a new government with different policies and ideas. The Soviet bureaucracy ruled the roost. And the five-year plans were as much about protecting the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy as they were about re-developing the Soviet economy. Similarly, Chris Bishop wants to protect the interests of capital by securing the support of the opposition parties for his thirty-year plan. In one fell swoop, representative democracy becomes, ever more so, the rubberstamp for capitalist interests.
But there's zero chance the opposition parties will agree to Bishop's proposal. There's little appetite for Chris Bishop's vision of Corporate New Zealand, especially since that vision has already involved overturning many of the policies of the previous Labour Government. And Labour will also recall incidences like Chris Bishop and National throwing out a bipartisan housing agreement because National was worried it might damage it electorally. Karma's a bitch, eh, Chris?
Of course, the onus is also on the opposition parties to provide an alternative to Chris Bishop's thirty-year corporate plan. Given that Labour has provided no indication that it believes in anything but more of the same, it's unlikely Labour will ever challenge the status quo. It remains stuck in the quagmire of centrism.
We might have expected more from the Green Party, though. Co-leader Chloe Swarbrick has talked often of the need for fundamental economic change. But not only has it yet to translate into concrete policy, the Green Party continues to peddle ex-co leader James Shaw's fantasy of a 'green capitalism'.
In response to Chris Bishop, Green Party infrastructure spokesperson Julie Ann Genter has said that any thirty-year plan must have environmental interests and climate change at its centre. Frustratingly, Genter is suggesting that the neoliberal economy can be regulated into being environmentally friendly. This is magical thinking and has been rejected by many other Green Parties, including in the U.K. and the U.S.
In response to Chris Bishop's corporate-focused plan, the Green Party should be taking this opportunity to campaign for a plan that is people-focused, namely the Green New Deal. Tinkering with the settings of the neoliberal economy, as the Green Party presently advocates, is not a solution. We need the kind of fundamental economic transformation that the GND demands. The fact that the Green Party continues to ignore the GND suggests it is more entrenched within the political status quo than Chloe Swarbrick is prepared to admit.
As Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw wrote shortly before the 2020 election:
'So far no Green New Deal has emerged in New Zealand despite growing calls for this more substantive approach to addressing our current crises. This election we see at best a group of individual policies from the main parties on climate change or conservation that don’t go anywhere near creating a vision of a country that has responded to climate change effectively in the timeframe that is required. There is no clear pathway laid out that articulates the upstream issues or solutions that a Green New Deal covers.'
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