Thursday 9 August 2007

Nats and Greens and RMA

Nick Smith and the Greens need each other: Nick Smith needs the Greens in order to give him credentials as a human being someone who is going to "gut" the RMA (as Greens leader Russel Norman so fatuously claims); the Greens need Nick Smith in order to keep peddling their nonsense that gutting the damn thing would be a bad thing, and that the economy and the environment are somehow at odds.

The fatuousness of that last claim can be seen simply by observing that it is the world's wealthier nations that are the cleanest, and the world's economic basket cases that are enmired both in poverty and environmental squalor. Wealth buys environmental goods; poverty buys squalor. That's a lesson Russel and his colleagues need to learn.

Another lesson they need to learn is that Nick Smith has no intention of gutting the RMA, more's the pity. They could have learned that by reading my own fisking of Smith's pitiful performance at last weekend's National conference. Perhaps I can recommend it to them now?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First, a pedantic style point. When you use quotation marks around a word (such as "gut") it usually denotes that you are quoting someone literally. Unfortunately, Norman doesn't "fatuously claim" that Smith's intent is to "gut" anything in your link. He may have done so somewhere else, I'm not sure, but that is beside the point.

His piece is actually a rather even-handed and thorough 'fisking' of Smith, picking up on the policy points he agrees with, and discussing why he disagrees with others. Your piece is a one-dimensional derisory scrap of ridicule. I did however take the bait and read your own 'fisking' - noting that where Russel debates policy, yours reads largely as "Hah! That's not removing the RMA entirely, is it? What rubbish!"

It's a text book example of applying the one-size-fits-all, deregulation answer to whatever question is to hand. It really wouldn't rankle as badly except that you have attempted to ridicule someone whose own analysis of the policy is clearly more thorough, more fair, and (one dares to venture) much more knowledgeable.

DenMT

Peter Cresswell said...

Den, first a pedantic debating point. If you engage in commentary, it's usual to inform yourself on the subject in question.

Norman was all over the media early in the week suggesting the National Socialists wanted to "gut" the RMA, and predicting the end of the world thereafter. Here for instance.

Second pedantic point, if you call that a "thorough 'fisking'," then your standards are rather different to mine. If I was to apply a two-word description of Norman's statist drivel, then "one dimensional" were the very words I'd be using.

Funny that.