My favourite right wing lie at the moment is that National are ‘centre right’. That can only be true if Caligula is the centre.
Let’s count the ways in which Key is hard right and not center right…
-Private prisons
-Adopting Charter Schools from a political party with 1% of the vote
-270 000 children in poverty
-Yawning chasm of inequality between the haves and the have nots
-Privatizing public assets for the benefit of the 2.5% who bought them
-Retrospective legislation legalizing Police surveillance in the largest erosion of civil liberties since the ’51 waterfront lockout.
-Allowing the GCSB to spy on NZers
-Disqualifying tens of thousands from welfare under the guise of ‘getting them jobs’.
-Beneficiary bashing as social welfare
-Billions in tax cuts to the richest NZers while cutting tax breaks for the poor
-Killing off public broadcasting
-Restricting university education to the rich
-Arresting students at the border
-Forcing mothers back to work after second child turns 1
-Hundreds of millions in corporate welfare while those on welfare rot
-Privatizing state homes
-Crushing Ecan local democracy for farming interests
-Legislation for big oil to criminalize Greenpeace
-Walking away from meaningful global warming reform
-Pointless Union crushing policy just for the sake of crushing unions
-Manufacturing a crisis at The Hobbit to attack Unions with
-Cutting shonky crony capitalism deals with Sky City
-Using urgency to ram through more legislation without democratic oversight than any other Government before him
…how Key manages to get away with calling his opponents far-left Devil Beasts while implementing hard right policy and keep his balance on his ‘centre right’ meme is testament to a mainstream media being as intellectually curious as Seven Sharp.
Key has managed to get away with hard right policy in drag because he conducts all of this with an ideological nonchalance. He shrugs and says ‘I’m comfortable with that’ which goes down nice and dandy with that anti-inetllectual streak inherent within redneck NZ. Key has depoliticized the role of Prime Minister and in that depoliticized space he gets to ram through all this policy minus any idealogical tags.
Key is the wolf who cries centre-right.
His mother taught him well.
I’m sure Caligula like his modern counterpart Berlisconi
would have had the backing of the MSM !
His plan has worked – He has spat on the political biscuit and now no one wants any part of it
Every time someone cals Natz “Centre Right” I squirm then shout at the TV/Radio, “Key is right of Genghis Khan you idiots”. Nice to know you also challenge that “centre” bit. Labour under Clark supposedly became the ‘centre left’ – another misnomer. They were just over the line into the “centre right’ on a political positioning chart. Clark did nothing to change the extreme right policies of Douglas or Richardson except to say. “no more privatisations”. You could here the collective sigh of relief that swept through the country and sent me back to the Labour camp after a New Labour/Alliance dalliance that was self destructing.
Blair’s “Third Way” that Clark’s Labour adopted was Thatcher’s and Reagan’s neoliberalism….why else would Thatcher say Blair was her most successful product and was the first to land at 10 Downing St to congratulate him on his election win. Clark at least was a more pleasant and friendly person and more honest than Blair but definitely not centre left. So John ‘Genghis Khan” Key it is then.
The problem is that parties such as labour have moved so far rightwards. The greatest achievement of the neoliberal era has been to savagely undermine the parties of working class sentiment.
If labour And the greens dug themselves out of the politically ambiguous trench they so carefully prepared, running for actual socially progressive policy, then nationals claim of centre would be shown for what it is.
But when all the parties try to inhabit the same post, like too many seagulls on the post at a wharf, a screeching cackling mess. Is it little wonder those without a political-historical perspective are so easily fooled?
We need to talk about the proud history of the left and its many gains, to remind people of what they are actually losing. Not just a word but real material gains.
And now he’s giving $10m to S.I. high country squatters.
That’s a nice picture of the devil beast
Mr Key should be re-branded Jon Key Un, to better mimic that centrist regime slightly north of the 45th Parallel. Kim jong un, in his shy retiring manner, did comment on his North Korean Facebook page that “even we think that Jon Key Un of New Zealand is very more right wing compared with our glorious country of the burgeoning nuclear powerdom”.
Jon Key Un smiled politely and muttered something under hs breath, to which Winston said “Do you want me do do a hatchet job on him, like we did on Dunne?”
“Down Winston,” growled Jon Key Un. “Once we get back in the nuclear club, nobody will mess with New Zealand.”
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