Green party donations

At Bryce Edward's Liberation blog I came across an interesting post on the funding of the NZ Green Party.

Among the companies to have given donations to the party include Westpac, Telecom, Ericsson, Clear and Macquarie Bank.

Such a combination of Banks and Telecommunication communications seems and odd bunch of supporters for a left-wing anti-business party - wouldn't such parties prefer to support centre-right parties which advocate less regulation and lower taxes?

However, it does make sense if you look at it from the post modern perspective of corporate image rather than vested interests.

Supporting trendy left-wing parties makes companies look better in the eyes of the SWPL crowd, and helps diffuse militant opposition from the far-left. Why spike trees when you can get a nice desk job working for the Green Party or Greenpeace.

This corporate policy of appeasing your opponents is highlighted by fact the party has actually turned down donations from Sky City (on the grounds they don't support gambling) and an undisclosed mining company.

Interestingly, Edwards concludes that the increased funding of the Green Party hasn't had much impact on the party's electoral success, with the party consistently polling around 4 -6 percent of the vote, but it has helped fund more paid jobs in the Green Party hierarcy.

Lack of realism from the Greens

Recently I came across this post on NZ Green Party policy, which comes some way towards explaining why the party isn't opposed to relatively high immigration levels.

Apparently the Ministry of Environment has estimated the human carrying capacity of New Zealand to be around 5.5 million, that's the point after which the environment will be unable to sustainably accommodate increased population growth. Subsequently, the Green Party believes it's OK to continue to expand the population (currently at just over 4 million) to just under the 5.5 million mark.

One problem with this reasoning is that it doesn't take into account how the country is supposed to provide a high standard of living for this larger population.

At present New Zealand relies heavily on primary exports such as meat, timber, aluminium, wine and diary products, which require large amounts of land, water and electricity to produce.

However, if the population continues to expand, more arable land, water and electricity will be needed to cater for the larger population and less resources will be available for producing these income generating exports.

Also with traditionally strong industrial economies like Germany and Japan unable to compete in manufacturing with China, and with the service sector now struggling to compete with India, it may be wishful thinking to assume NZ can compensate for a shrinking resource base by developing alternative industries.

A safer, more sustainable approach would be to limit immigration and cash in on the rising demand for food and industrial materials generated by Asian industrialisation. The Green's may believe in protecting local manufacturing in principle but they certainly aren't realistic producerists.

Mind you, I probably shouldn't overstate the influence of carrying capacity arguments in Green thinking in general.

They certainly don't explain the pro-immigration policy of the Australian Green Party, which continues to ignore calls for immigration restrictionism even though Australia is already approaching the upper estimate for its carrying capacity (estimated at 17-23 million).

So it's likely that old-fashioned socialism still plays a powerful part in Green ideology.