Keeping Stock alerted Alf this morning to Phil Goff’s appearance on TV3’s The Nation on Saturday.
Among other things, Goff confirmed that:
* Labour will NOT roll back any increase in GST – whatever happened to Axe the Tax, we wonder?
* Labour will restore the top personal tax rate to 38%
* Labour will be happy to work with Winston Peters if, God forbid, he returns to Parliament in the 2011 election
Giving Winston Peters another Ministerial limousine strikes Alf as being remarkably daft. So does the commitment to re-raising the top tax rate after we Nats have lowered it.
But in the immediate aftermath of Alf’s posting yesterday about nudists, Fabians and fairies, there’s a more bothersome aspect to the Goff interview.
It was the bit about Goff taking advice from the bloody Fabians.
PHIL Oh we’re developing that policy and it’s clear that we think there are changes that are needed to monetary policy. Why do we need that – because if you put the whole weight on interest rates on people’s mortgages, you’re not going to achieve the results you want, you’re gonna hurt a lot of people, you’re gonna hurt a lot of businesses, because higher interest rates means a higher exchange rate, which puts your export business out of business.
DUNCAN So are you listening to groups like the Fabian Society and so forth in the background who are developing policy like this around monetary policy?
PHIL We’re talking to a lot of groups, we’re talking to the Manufacturers and Exporters Association, we’re talking to people like Selwyn Pallet, we’ve got a group called the Fabian Society that are exploring different ideas, we’re talking to economists.
DUNCAN So they’re working on your behalf are they, when you say we’ve got a group, are you actively involved with the Fabian Society?
PHIL Well the Fabian Society is one of a number of groups, it’s an inhouse think tank that the Labour Party operates, so will we do eve they say – no, will we listen to a whole range of opinions on this – yes, will we get the best policy internationally and from our people in New Zealand, the economists here that are looking too for some changes in that policy – yes.
DUNCAN So you are looking at changing and ending this current consensus aren’t you, because those people on the Fabian Society are saying look this needs to be changed Mr Goff.
PHIL Yes, I’ve made that announcement that we are in Opposition challenging that consensus, it’s not delivering everything we want. Does that mean we’d give away inflation control – not on your life, that’s critical but it’s not the only thing, it’s also about growth, it’s about getting you’re export sector up so that this country can live within its means.
Goff has done us a favour, of course, in reminding us we have Fabians in our midst.
Their immediate agenda seems innocent enough:
The Fabian Society is an independent membership-based policy forum that aims to provide a forum for education and debate on progressive policy priorities by providing quality events, publications and research.
Initially, we will focus on the fundamental requirement that New Zealand shapes a sustainable economic future for itself.
Via a series of lectures and seminars, we will provide a forum for critiquing the prevailing economic orthodoxy and the advocacy of viable alternatives and reforms.
No doubt these Fabians will be influenced by John Maynard Keynes, who was both a Fabian socialist and…
Yep. He had a gay side.
Keynes’s early romantic and sexual relationships were almost exclusively with men. Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. One of his great loves was the artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, and he was also involved with the writer Lytton Strachey. Keynes was open about his homosexuality, and between 1901 to 1915, kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his sexual relationships.
The NZ society is not distancing itself from its British counterparts, because from the NZ Fabian Society’s website we are told –
The Fabian Society is an independent membership-based policy forum. It aims to provide an open, pluralist space for education and debate on policy, through quality forums, publications and research.
The Society is squarely in the Fabian tradition of applying progressive values to contemporary issues. First established in the UK by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the UK Society has had a major influence on British policy formation in its 100+ years of work.
This – of course – is the outfit that included in its membership one of the blokes Alf mentioned yesterday, Edward Carpenter, English socialist, philosopher and – to use the language of political correctness – gay activist.
But it seems these Fabians also believe in a New World Order.
I will not delve into the initial beginning of this “New World Order”, but I begin at a pertinent point in its history that will, hopefully, explain just what they plans have been, how those plans have been implemented and how they will ultimately be defeated by their own plans.
It is vital to understand that the New World Order is inextricably tied to the Fabian Socialists which formed in England during the later part of the 1800s and their intricate plans for a global fascist-socialistic society. In fact, there is no New World Order outside of the Fabian Socialist agenda. It should be remembered that the Fabian Socialists were equally accepted in both the Nazi/Fascist and the Communist/Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Trotskite ideologies. The Fabians have been, throughout their history, political and social chameleons who have, through stealth and deception, changed their outer skin to infiltrate every political, social and educational institution around the world, particularly in Great Britain and the United States. Speaking of chameleons, the primary symbol of the Fabians is a “wolf wrapped in a sheep’s skin”.
Arnold Toynbee, another of the Fabian gang, is on record as saying:
“We are at present working discreetly, but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of the world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.”
It is not plain from this remark what “we” are actually up to with our hands.
Wanking, Alf suspects.
Betcha a close examination will show their economic policy agenda is a load of fairy dust, too.
Alf Grumble 
Phil Said “Well the Fabian Society is one of a number of groups, it’s an in-house think tank that the Labour Party operates, so will we do eve they say – no, will we listen to a whole range of opinions on this – yes, will we get the best policy internationally and from our people in New Zealand, the economists here that are looking too for some changes in that policy – yes.
Sorry Phil G that’s incorrect and a quick look at the Fabians Web site will address that issue http://www.fabians.org.nz
Given the fact that Mike Smith and others are from a Labour background it’s perhaps forgivable to make that leap of faith and believe it’s in house but it isn’t true!
The Fabians started with a very specific no political alignment policy and have stuck to it.
The issues we are debating should be of interest to all political parties and we don’t care who picks them up as our goal are about getting policies in place that correct the current imbalances in our economy and society in that order.
Bill English is right our economy is heavily out of whack and needs addressing. Treasury is right, the IMF is right and yet we do very little and hence the need to debate the issues in public and “incite debate”
The TAX working group showed we can be grown up about debating difficult stuff in public and informing everyone as they went. The Fabians has the same goals except over a much wider group spectrum. The TWG didn’t address monetary policy for example and yet it is arguably the biggest tax we have, but mostly on exporters and mostly to the detriment of a balanced economy.