Category: politics
Cannabis Cowardice is Punishing Andrew Little in the Preferred PM Stakes
Andrew Little has been the Labour Party leader since 2014, and has struggled so far to gain much traction with prospective Labour voters. A recent poll brought some very bad news for him – namely that he has now fallen behind his deputy Jacinda Ardern in the preferred Prime Minister stakes.
No doubt the Labour Leader will have a team of pollsters working overtime ringing people up to ask why they’re not interested. However, they won’t ask the large numbers of Kiwis who are disenfranchised from the political and economic systems – and this is supposed to be Labour’s constituency and is the key to their recent failure.
These disenfranchised people are mostly the young, the invalid’s beneficiaries and Maori. These three groups will all tell you that they are crying out for a change to New Zealand’s cannabis laws.
The young are crying out for a recreational alternative to alcohol. All young people have had the unpleasant experience of watching people in their parents’ generation destroy themselves with alcohol, while noting that people who preferred cannabis generally had a much better time of things.
Invalid’s beneficiaries are crying out for medicinal relief for their suffering. Huge numbers of invalid’s beneficiaries in New Zealand have found that cannabis is a better medicine for alleviating the suffering that comes with their condition than the pharmaceutical alternatives.
They will point that since medicinal cannabis is now legal in 28 states of the USA there’s no continuing to deny that it is a medicine.
Maori are probably the group worst brutalised by cannabis prohibition, for a number of reasons. The foremost is the lack of genetic resistance to alcoholism that has seen so many Maori come to prefer cannabis as a recreational alternative to cannabis.
Not only Maori – there are many, many New Zealanders whose close family history has a detailed history of either alcoholism or violence related to drinking. All of these people are desperate for a recreational alternative to booze.
Andrew Little’s refusal to even consider a 21st century approach to the cannabis laws is causing him to bleed support among all of the Labour Party’s major demographics – all of which are crying out for some kind of cannabis law reform.
On the cannabis issue, Little appears to hover somewhere between cowardice and supporting a National party-style prohibition. This hits hard against exactly those sort of people who like to vote Labour.
As has been described in an excerpt to Dan McGlashan’s upcoming book Understanding New Zealand, the sort of person who votes Labour is the same sort of person who is likely to be adversely affected by the country’s cannabis laws.
The correlation between median age and voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party in 2014 was -0.55, which tells us that the bulk of ALCP voters were young. The correlation between median age and voting for the Labour Party was -0.70, so that tells us that Labour and the ALCP are competing for the same voters to a large extent.
The correlation between being on the invalid’s benefit and voting for the ALCP in 2014 was a very strong 0.76. This is because many, if not most, people on an invalid’s benefit would be greatly helped by any change to the law that made cannabis more readily available.
Finally, the correlation between being Maori and voting for the ALCP in 2014 was a whopping 0.89. This is not at all surprising considering that Maori suffer by far the worst of the abuse from cannabis prohibition. This is enough to suggest that a mature, intelligent cannabis law reform policy would attract masses of Maori voters.
All three of these groups also have very strong correlations with not voting at all in 2014 – because of the total failure of any of the mainstream political options to represent their needs.
What this tells us is that there are legions of disaffected, disenfranchised New Zealanders who will not support the Labour Party as long as it has a leader who is too timid to support a definitive change to the country’s cannabis laws.
Going by the large numbers of young, sick and Maori non-voters who are desperate for a change, we can predict that the Labour Party will lose the General Election this year unless it adopts an intelligent, modern, compassionate cannabis law reform policy.
Understanding New Zealand: Voting Patterns of Tenure of Dwelling
There was only only party that had a significant correlation with living in a mortgaged house. This was the negative correlation of -0.25 between this and voting Green in 2014.
None of the correlations between living in a mortgaged house and voting for any of the other parties were significant. These ranged from the ACT Party’s -0.09 to the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party’s 0.14.
Living in a mortgaged house also had a perfect lack of correlation with turnout rate in 2014 – a nice, even 0.00.
The reason for this was the very strong positive correlation being living in a freehold house and turnout rate in 2014, which was 0.72, and the corresponding very strong negative correlation between living in a rented house and turnout rate in 2014, which was -0.66.
Probably the single most fundamental pattern described in this book is the simple and obvious one that disenfranchisement from society – by any measure – closely correlates with disenfranchisement from the voting booth.
Because someone living in a house rent-free is almost always doing better than someone who must pay that house’s owner about a third of their income or get thrown out into the street, it’s not surprising that the tenure of a person’s dwelling is a strong predictor of their voting patterns.
Living in a freehold house had a correlation of 0.67 with voting National in 2014, as opposed to living in a rented house, which had a correlation of -0.76.
This was the mirror opposite to Labour, for whom living in a freehold house had a correlation of -0.64 with voting for them in 2014, and for whom living in a rented house had a correlation of 0.67 with voting for them in 2014.
Probably more than any other single section in this book, the correlations here describe how New Zealand society essentially works: anyone capable of enforcing a claim to land ownership lives for free and does not want to change this arrangement, while anyone not capable of enforcing a claim to land ownership must pay money in the form of rent to those who can, and these people generally do want to change the arrangement.
This is essentially how politics started, and the description of it above is true of almost all times and of almost all places.
The correlations between voting for the other parties in 2014 and tenure of dwelling generally reflects the pattern of disenfranchisement described above. Living in a freehold house was also positively correlated with voting for the Conservatives (0.63), but not for any other party besides National.
The correlation between living in a freehold house and voting Green was a not significant -0.05, which probably reflects that many Green voters, even if highly educated and making a good income, are not old enough to have saved the money for a house just yet.
This age factor would also explain why there was a positive correlation between voting Green in 2014 and living in a rented house – this was 0.28. Many Green voters are wealthy enough to get a mortgage but are too young to have settled down yet and so still live in flats.
Predictably, given the general degree of Maori disenfranchisement, voting for most of the parties with high levels of Maori support had significant positive correlations with living in a rented house. Living in a rented house had a correlation of 0.40 with voting for the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, one of 0.53 with voting Maori Party and 0.54 with voting Internet MANA.
The exception to the rule was New Zealand First. Voting for them in 2014 had a correlation of 0.06 with living in a rented house. Neither were there significant correlations between voting New Zealand First in 2014 and living in a freehold house (-0.05) or living in a mortgaged house (0.12).
This probably reflects the degree to which New Zealand First, like nationalist socialist parties everywhere, represents a very broad spectrum of society when it comes to class.
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This article is an excerpt from Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan, published by VJM Publishing in the winter of 2017.
The Consequences of Making All Fun Illegal in Nelson
In the words of Doug Stanhope: “Boredom is a disease. Drugs cure it.” This might be a throw-away line from a famously irreverent standup comedian, but it points to a truth that our society lacks the sophistication to debate: boredom causes legitimate human suffering, and this costs money and even lives.
Some psychologists are aware of the consequences of boredom. It’s now believed that boredom literally causes the brain to degenerate, as it requires a certain minimum amount of excitory stimulation to maintain the strength of existing neuron connections.
This is why it seems to actually hurt. The mental pain associated with boredom is the pain of your brain dying from a lack of stimulation, in the same way that a newborn infant neglected by its mother may die of hospitalism from a lack of oxytocin.
It’s not likely that anyone in Nelson will go as far as shooting someone out of sheer boredom, as happened to the unfortunate Chris Lane in Oklahoma. But the more boring this city becomes, the further we move towards forcing people to become violent in order to combat the pain that comes from so many fun things being illegal.
Boredom is a real thing that makes people misbehave. It has been observed in British prisons that boredom leads to misbehaviour.
The reason for this ought to be clear by now, especially if the reader knew any juvenile delinquents while growing up. Because boredom is painful, people suffer from it, and as a result of the suffering they become willing to destroy in order to alleviate it.
Almost everyone has done something recklessly stupid at some point because it felt good on account of that it relieved boredom.
Unfortunately, the people making the laws in New Zealand are whores, not psychologists. They have whored themselves out to the pharmaceutical, tobacco and alcohol industries, and these industries have commanded the politicians to make recreational alternatives to their products illegal for the sake of wiping out their competitors.
Neither is the Nelson City Council any better. They have proven themselves utterly incapable of taking care of a single homeless protester outside the Farmers building, so the expectation that they could comprehend an end to the War on Drugs is far too much to ask for.
Nelson, like all provincial New Zealand towns, is not an easy place to live in when a person is aged between 18 and 30 or thereabouts. If you’re a young person and consequently have a high point of homeostasis for excitement, there are not many really good options.
Cannabis is illegal, the drinking culture is violent and disgusting, the hookup culture is vile and depressing, and the control freaks have even taken away the simple pleasure of having a cigarette to relax by making it too expensive to be enjoyable.
Well, this is the price. This is how we end up with burnt-out cars sitting on the side of Maitai Valley Road.
As this column has previously argued, there ought to be cannabis cafes on Bridge Street. Giving the young people of Nelson greater recreational options than booze and television would result in less boredom, which would result in fewer burnt-out cars.
This would necessarily require a change to New Zealand’s cannabis laws, which would have ancillary benefits, not least putting a stop to the current wastage of $400,000,000 of tax money every year.
Perhaps some of the estimated $120,000,000 of Police funding that would be saved from cannabis legalisation could then be used to clean up the mess on the side of Maitai Valley Road, as it has been sitting there for over a week.