Victor Billot

I have been selected to stand for the Alliance Party in the 2008 general election for the Dunedin North electorate.

More information as it comes to hand.  I haven’t decided yet to blog on my campaign on my old election blog or just keep it all here.

I’m pleased to represent the democratic socialist viewpoint.

I ventured out last night to the Arc, which is under “new” management (again.) It’s a good space but has struggled. I’m out of the loop with music at the moment as I have been engaged in different things in the last few years.

David Kilgour was playing a solo set along with the duo version of White Swan Black Swan . . . or is that Black Swan White Swan.

Anyway the Swans did a decent opening set, I liked the piano/guitar combination. It was actually surprisingly mainstream. Some of those retro sounds were very eighties indeed.

Mr Kilgour had a battle on his hands with guitars that detuned themselves and technology that wouldn’t play ball. His songs are completely suited to the electric-acoustic guitar and voice format. He decided to take things west with a laptop and backing tracks; definitely worth a try, but it just seemed to confuse the sound rather than adding much. That said, he pulled it all together with a last number where everything seemed to work and when it did work, it was good. Of course. First night of the tour and all that . . . I just wonder whether going back to the man and six strings format would be the best option for these analogue melodies.

The audience was sparse to say the least but made up for quantity by quality. After the Clean’s stonking set at the Regent for the Dunedin Sound thing a few months back, you would think the place would be packed. Glad I went anyway.

Went and saw Michael Moore’s new film Sicko last night. Well worth it – it’s his best yet.

A searing indictment on corrupt plutocracy running the modern day USA, as well as an important compare and contrast between the free market system and more social systems in other nations.

My concern is that New Zealand is going down the American path. But as the movie shows, there are plenty of Americans angry at the system as well.

On the theme of things “eco”, George Monbiot sums up recent thoughts rather nicely here.

He also manages to pin down the blindingly obvious with this post on Unions and the Labour Party in the UK. Some parallels to be drawn with our free trade pushin’  Government?

Last Tuesday night, it was impossible to get a seat at Tim Flannery’s lecture at Otago University on climate change. It attracted an overflow crowd. I haven’t read his popular books yet but look forward to it, as I have just got the Weather Makers out of the library.

I managed to catch him talking to a much smaller crowd the following night at the Cafe Scientifique held in the old school surrounds of the University Staff Club. He was joined by a couple of other academics from Otago, and the Minister of Climate Change David Parker.

Tim Flannery gave a fairly direct talk about the imminent threat of climate change to the survival of humanity – all of it solid, sound stuff. Yet I was more than a little surprised at his response when I questioned David Parker about the need for New Zealand to put control of power and electricity generation under democratic public and community based control. (David Parker is a good solid right winger whose quote of the night was that “wealth is generated by capitalism” – the standard view for the ghoulish Labour Party in New Zealand today.)

Professor Flannery chipped in with the view that private ownership of power (and water!) was a good thing. His example was how “heavily unionized” publicly owned coal power was being used in Australia whereas private companies were coming up with eco-friendly solutions. This seemed to me to be at best disingenous (and at worst simply wrong.)

His comments stand in interesting contrast to the views of another high profile Australian academic Sharon Beder who spoke in Dunedin recently (much to my regret I missed her talk, but have read some of her work.)

She points out the social and environmental effects of privatized power in a number of books and papers, including in the Australian context.

So I found myself concentrating a little more on Tim Flannery’s speech. Over the rest of his talk I began to notice a few recurring points that made me think that while his scientific grasp of the problem and possible technical solutions were extremely sound, he lacked a political grasp of the driving forces behind environmental devastation.

He suggested the use of hybrid cars, which of course the vast majority of people will not be able to afford, even if top level academics and business people can. Then he suggested that legal cases could be brought against environmental polluters in the same way as cases were brought against tobacco and asbestos corporations.

This to me seemed nonsense. The fact is the workers who got asbestosis weren’t around to enjoy the pay out. When we are talking about climate change, there won’t be much opportunity to hire top gun lawyers when the planet is collapsing around our ears.

The fixation with legal or “market” fixes like carbon trading, which I see as a bogus solution, seems to be a major problem. There seems to be a repetition of the slogan that we can’t do “business as usual” but all the economic and political solutions proposed many revolve around just that – business as usual.

I have a strong sense that as climate change deniers begin to vanish, we will see their replacement with a new breed – system change deniers. The system change deniers will ensure the “sacrifices” will be made once again by the working class and those with little money or social power, as the solution is found in market forces (rationing based on ability to pay.)

This is the impression I also get with the Al Gore approach. The effort goes into meeting with the “movers and shakers” to convince them to buy hybrid cars, but the solution can only lie in constructing an economic and social democracy based on the values of solidarity, equality and concern for the environment and the common good.

However, the other academics at the talk (whose names escape me) had some good solutions. One favoured abandoning globalization and the other proposed subsidized or free public transport and the rejuvenation of rail.

That’s the type of solution that indicates we are serious about climate change – and about the wellbeing of human beings. I suppose the key lesson we need to take away is that while Professor Flannery and other scientists can provide an excellent analysis of what is wrong, and possible technical solutions, we can’t rely on them to provide the political and economic solutions to climate change.

The high ranking BailterSpace have some new mp3s on their MySpace page after many years of silence.

My pick is Place of R. Some people like music to drive to. This is music to drive space freighters to.

My friend Jack Yan just posted a thought provoking article about globalization and the relationship between economy, business and society on his blog.
Jack is speaking at an open to the public session later this year at the Alliance Party conference in Dunedin on these very topics – and based on his above article, it should be well worth catching.