I opened my email this morning and got this…
It seems the right are in full voice this morning pointing to the tiny improvements to poverty as some sort of second coming of Adam Smith.
And who on the Right wouldn’t want to purposely misinterpret a report from an organisation now reliant on Government funding to operate? It’s got all the criticism of a serf reporting to their Lord on last years stock take. Seeing as the Salvation Army have just come out and questioned the farce of National’s ‘UnSocial Housing’ mass privatisation of state houses, many pundits want to quickly obscure that inconvenient truth with a few poverty stat improvements from the SA’s own State of the Nation report.
There is little in this report to cheer and almost none of it has anything to do with National Party social policy.
The tiny improvements will have more to do with National’s free market approach to cheap immigration and the record influx of new migrants than well thought out policy.
24% of our children living in poverty is nothing to salute and cheer about and National’s response of ideologically driven prejudice is spiteful not compassionate.
The mythology of neoliberalism is that success has nothing to do with privilege and hegemonic power structures within society, it is actually a personal achievement which the individual deserves. Likewise, failure is a personal responsibility which the individual deserves. The need to downplay those the Free Market fail and hold up tenacious gains as symbols of success ungraciously ignores the magnitude and impact of NZs poverty.
Actually, I would hazard a guess that with the rapid growth in Auckland’s population, at least, that the actual number of people still in trouble is probably the same and possibly more
Bearing in mind the approx $80 billion that this Government has borrowed, the one-off amount we received from part selling our energy companies and the billions that the private banks have poured into the economy just to boost house prices, you would think the body would show some response.
When they turn off the oxygen it will be interesting to see what the ‘doctors’ will prescribe next.
Martyn, any truth to the rumour that the National Party are going to change their name to the National Socialist Party?
They would never be so honest, they are more likely to use that other socialist term – corporate, the National Corporate Party
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