Posted on 27-3-2003

MADENZ Responds To ACT's Coddington 
by Stephen Tindall, the woman

I recently read a profile of Deborah Coddington and my observation from that article was that she appears extremely eager to worship wealthy and/or powerful men, so her endorsement of Stephen Tindall - the man, comes as no surprise. It is unfortunate that Ms Coddington appears to have confused proximity with influence.
 
The Act party claim to loathe welfare, but Ms Coddington appears to be enamoured with stores such as The Warehouse whose fortunes have been made on the back of welfare dollars that purchase their imported goods. Once upon a time instead of welfare dollars being used to purchase imported goods, the money being used to purchase NZ Made goods was generated from wages earned from local productive jobs. This fact seems to escape members of the Act party. The cold hard reality is that due to the very men Ms Coddington worships at her alter, we now have 350,000 people on welfare and a mere 30,000 jobs available at the present point in time. The television set example is a tired old argument. I urge Ms Coddington to turn it off.
 
I find it interesting, though, that Ms Coddington thinks it is not the job of politicians to order people into another job. One would have to ask what she thought of her heroes, Douglas and Prebble, when they forced tens of thousands of New Zealand manufacturers to reskill, become shop assistants or become jobless when Acts free market policies forced these manufacturers to close shop in the face of subsidised imported products flooding our shores.  I would ask Ms Coddington how this fits with her assertion that it is not up to politicians to order people into another job. Ms Coddington states that the money saved by shoppers buying imported goods from The Warehouse, "creates jobs in other areas of the market". Please refer to paragraph three whereby I state that 350,000 people are receiving welfare while a mere 30,000 jobs are advertised at  present. Also Ms Coddingtons reference to the window of opportunity that cheap imports open, in regard to saving, to me looks more like a black hole of debt - now that we have the highest level of household and credit card debt ever recorded.
 
And soliciting economic advice from such people who champion Roger Douglas and his cohorts and for that matter, from people like Stephen Tindall - the man, also brings to mind a well known quote.
 
"Problems cannot be solved with the same consciousness that created them in the first place".
 
Regards, Stephen Tindall - the woman. Founder of MADENZ
 

Original from Deborah Coddington
 
She's a hard job weaning people off producerism.

Take transport. There's much debate at the moment over the Government's Land Transport Management Bill. Now, I think the Bill's a dog and Im not alone. The majority of the submitters appearing before the select committee make one common point: in its present form, this legislation will be the last nail in the coffin for economic growth and prosperity for all New Zealanders. We will have paralysis by consultation and parish-pump politics.

However, the Greens and they drafted the Bill fret about environmental efficiency. There are just too many cars, they say, and we must get back to central planning to get them off the roads.

Get off a plane at Auckland airport,said one Green member, and look at all the taxis sitting around doing nothing. That's not efficient for them, surely?

Well perhaps not, but isn't that their problem? If theyre not making any money, then theyll exit the industry. Its not the job of politicians to order them into some other job (unless the rumours Ive been told by drivers are true, and many of them are claiming welfare benefits whilst 'simultaneously employed as drivers).

Recently I had a discussion with a woman who disliked The Warehouse (no, it was not that Mad-enz woman) because, she said, its stores sold all this stuff people didn't need. I was arguing that Stephen Tindall had done a good thing when he took advantage of the deregulation and removal of import licensing Roger Douglas championed. Why shouldn't people on low incomes have access to inexpensive goods? Why shouldn't a family be able to buy each other Christmas presents for less than $5 each? The money that shoppers save at the Warehouse doesn't get used to light the fire, it gets spent elsewhere, or saved, thus creating jobs in other areas of the market.

(As an aside, when we lived in Russell in the early 1980s, and were strapped for cash, our Christmas shopping was done at the Keri Keri Bargain Centre where my kids indulged themselves in all sorts of $2 junk.)

But this woman didn't object on the grounds that The Warehouse was costing jobs, she just objected to consumerism. She was a minimalist, and believed others should be forced to go without too, through strict regulations passed by central government.

Linda Clarke on National Radio echoed similar sentiments last year when she complained about shopping becoming too popular a weekend activity. Her particular gripe was homeware - couches, fridges, tables, and bedroom suites. Once, she said, people bought just one, which lasted a lifetime. Nowadays were bombarded in the newspapers and the mailbox by leaflets advertising even more varieties of sofabeds, flash fridges and so on.

How much stuff do people need? - she wailed.

As much as they damn well want, I replied to the car radio. The alternative is returning to the pre-1984 days when television sets were ridiculously expensive and only a few thousand a year were sold. This was because the local assembly industry was protected by high tariffs and a few local manufacturers who gin-slurped in cabinet ministersoffices - were granted licences to import Japanese parts for assembling sets in New Zealand.

Because our market was so tiny, it was expensive buying such small orders of specially packed parts with English instructions from the Japanese who were making tens of thousands of sets a day. As one New Zealand assembler commented: We opened a factory, imported much machinery, paid the highest wages in the neighbourhood, employed the most intelligent engineers to decipher the instructions, used a great deal of electricity, and finally produced a TV set with negative New Zealand content at twice the imported price.

Producers ruled.

Yours in liberty, Deborah Coddington