Matt, that’s called ‘leadership’. It’s good for our leaders to be aspirational for New Zealand. Other economic commentators have been far more generous than you and engaged with the actual content of the Green’s plan.
We were well placed as a country to take advantage of the boom in wind turbine technology over the last decade and we got almost zip. Let’s not make the same mistake with geothermal.

Kimble – don’t be a hater – it’s an ugly look. Besides, if that’s spamming, then I guess every single political party is guilty of it which kind of makes your green hate argument quite irrelevant.

Julie – I think you’re brilliant, as is the Green party and it’s courage to have policy which deals with the real issues that everyone else wants to ignore and shoves aside into the ‘too hard’ basket.  The Green Party have my vote, no worries.

People can be spambots.

“to win seats you need to speak to people in language that resonates with them and inspires them”

Even when that means lying to them, or inventing figures to convince them that ‘science’ proves your policies are good.

“The only way to prove or disprove any of this is to try it, and see what happens.”

Lets not try it and see if it was a problem to begin with.

Seriously, though, is that your line? Forecasts are rubbish so why not just do what we want and see how it plays out?

Ok Kimble, I admit you’re right. I didn’t do a good job of laying out my points (and I may just be digging myself into a deeper hole here). But I swear I’m a person, not a spambot. There’s not a conspiracy. No one directed me to go comment on blogs. This has nothing to do with MaxCoylegate. My friend is subscribed to this blog and forwarded this post to me and I felt compelled to respond, because I’m a candidate who is passionate about the Greens and about sound economic policy, and I have a great deal of intellectual respect for RN and the researchers in the Greens office.
My first point wasn’t meant to debate the substance of the plan, because neither of us had seen it. I was responding to what I read in the post as “The Greens are trying to get elected, how dare they…I can’t vote for a party that’s trying to get elected”. I just don’t think it is realistic or fair for policy wonks (of which I consider myself one) to expect political parties to educate the electorate during an election campaign. In order to implement policy you need to win enough seats to be influential, and to win seats you need to speak to people in language that resonates with them and inspires them. Once you’re there, you can be as wonky as you want — all Green policy is transparently published on the web. How many other parties have that much policy detail available? Recently I’ve heard similar criticisms from people who are really passionate about responding to climate change who think the Greens aren’t emphasizing it enough in the campaign. Our Climate policy hasn’t changed, it is a priority for us, but not many people are going to be voting on climate change this election. So if we only have limited bandwidth, we’ve got to choose the messages that are important to us that are also most important to the electorate. I just think that’s the Realpolitik, but I still think wonks have good reason to vote Green.
The next comment was simply to say, I know these numbers were not just cynically made up, as was being suggested here. Now we can debate the merits of the assumptions made (if anyone bothers to check the sources), but my other point was that when you start examining any forecast you see that it relies on some sort of assumption, and one can always call it into question. The best thing we can do is be transparent about the assumptions used.
The only way to prove or disprove any of this is to try it, and see what happens.
 

The Greens are trying to get their faithful out into the comments sections of blogs and forums to spread the campaign message and support the policies. They want to be a loud voice.

They have tasked people with going to the blogs and forums to run interference for Green policies. Just look at the first response here. It doesnt debate anything. It defends the policies lack of info by saying it was due to a lack of resources,  tries to rewrite history by claiming a decade of rational dfiscourse, and blames the ‘abandonment’ of this on voters for being stupid. It ends with a solicitation for a party vote.

The next comment complains that a lot of hard work was done to generate the figure (labour theory of value anyone?), and that all other forecasts are rubbish anyway. It uses as an example, a 40 year forecast that has failed to accurately predict what was to happen in the following 2 years! And that one ends with a claim that it is unfair to call the Greens figures dodgy because other people use dodgy figures too!

Thats not debating the issue.

Kimble, it is hardly spam to engage in debate. I mean come on, when you have David Farrar on both Stuff and NZherald a little comment here and there can hardly compete with kiwiblog’s coup of two major websites.

1. The forecast came first because it was a foregone conclusion that any forecast created after the fact would support the policy, no matter what that policy was.

The fact that the figure was inflated beyond reasonable belief makes it just another “Really Big Number”. It leaves thinking people in little doubt that the work involved in coming up with the figure was mostly spent in creating analysis that would produce a particular result.

2. Its spam when we are in a countdown to an election and there are stories floating around about systematic attempts by the Greens to dominate conversation on blogs and forums.

There doesn’t seem to have been much debate about whether these are new jobs or merely transfers, it is highly unlikely that it’s the former (but if so, have the costs of education, training, etc. been factored in? My guess is no) … and if it’s the latter then which industries will these workers be transferred from? Construction? Hope not given that we’re supposed to be rebuilding ChCh. Dairy farming? Hope not given the productivity gains there. I suppose there are a few policy analysts knocking around …

Very poor from the Greens; I actually expected better.

Two things and then I’ll give up and leave you in peace. 🙂
1. In asking which came first, the forecast or the platform: Are you proposing that one should work backwards from job creation and infer the policy? The only way I can conceptualise policy development is to identify opportunities and new markets, come up with some ideas, and then run the numbers to estimate the impacts. There’s no question that we are looking for opportunities for job and wealth creation that aren’t in oil and gas, because we don’t think we have the option to use all the remaining fossil fuel and have a healthy stable climate. So, yeah, we’ve ruled some things out in our identification of new market opportunities. (oh and these are the robust figures we’re up against http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/StandardSummary____44660.aspx). Maybe I’m really dense, but I don’t think you can forecast anything unless you already have a policy platform to test, right?
2. Is it spam to comment on the content of the blog post and engage in a bit of a debate about the ideas expressed therein? If so, I am genuinely sorry to waste everyone’s time. I thought the purpose of a blog was to engage in some sort of dialogue, and I thought that I was being very transparent about the fact that I am involved with the Greens. But if you don’t want comments like this, happy to not engage, and my sincerest apologies. (I admit to being a little defensive on behalf of the people who worked hard on this policy package).