The clever thing National have managed to achieve is in conning the mainstream media that they are in fact ‘moderate’. The truth is that there are draconian welfare reforms under way and because the Government leave middle class tax breaks alone, the media repeats the spin National are moderate.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The 30 year neoliberal experiment has succeeded in empowering the top 10% while robbing the remaining 90%.
Here are 10 examples of just how rotten to the core our hollow democracy has become.
1: Suicide
The fact we have a suicide rate twice as high as our road toll yet a fraction of the resource spent to heal the impacts of toxic masculinity and toxic individualism is a screaming wound that is purposely ignored.
We don’t want to hear that an increasingly individualised user pays consumer culture has a hollowness and disconnection with whanau. We don’t want to hear that toxic masculinity damages men as violently as it damages women. We don’t want to hear that our lack of social cohesion and under funded social infrastructure is part of a group responsibility.
We want the neoliberal myth that the individual is responsible for all. If you are poor, you choose to be poor. If you are vulnerable, you choose to be vulnerable. If you succeed and are rich, you choose that success and wealth.
Neoliberalism has to be built upon the myth of the individual succeeding in a market place with no hegemonies or biased playing fields. This allows neoliberalism to ignore having to solve any of those ‘individual choices’.
To look at tax cuts of $1.8billion when suicide prevention is grotesquely underfunded is societal vandalism.
2: Incarceration rates
We have built a private prison nation with invested Government Departments like ACC deriving a profit motive from incarceration. Our judicial system, Police, jails and Courts are ‘unconsciously’ biased towards Maori and that explains our appalling level of Maori imprisonment.
How is it that our sky rocketing incarceration rates and failed rehabilitation aren’t leading every headline? Nothing highlights the depth of NZ inequality like prison incarceration yet our media are more focused on sulky Australian rugby coach’s and All Black sex in toilets.
SERCO have not only failed at Auckland Remand prison, the same problems are now being alleged within Wiri and the Government’s solution is to build another 1500 bed private prison.
It is said that we should judge a nation on how they treat the lowest amongst them. Based on that we have become sadists more interested in punishment than justice.
3: Homelessness and Housing Crisis
Homelessness has exploded to 1 in every 100. The manner in which the Government have purposely opened up immigration to fuel a property bubble that empowers the rich and evicts the poor would be grotesque if so many NZers with property weren’t quietly benefiting from it.
When you are earning three times your annual wage in untaxed capital gains, even the most sympathetic person is still going to vote for the Party who will continue their illusion of wealth, not rupture it.
So while those who benefit are robbed of their empathy, those on the bottom are torn to shreds by the forces of a free market tilted in favour of the speculator.
Entire generations are now locked out of home ownership but the worst part about it, is that this is a political decision,
John Key still doesn’t believe it’s a crisis.
4: Poverty + Inequality
As far as the Government are concerned, not only does child poverty not really exist in NZ, if it did, it would be the total blame of the beneficiary parents who according to Anne Tolley, “like to have sex”, or who according to John Key, “like to do drugs“, or according to Judith Collins are just to blame anyway.
The manner in which the National Party are in denial about poverty in NZ is akin to religious fanatics refusing to see the lie behind their faith. For National success and failure are neoliberal choices of the individual and as such isn’t their problem.
None are so blind than National Party MPs who do not want to see.
What makes this inequality worse are under funded public services who now don’t give a damn for the actual welfare of the needy they are supposed to be helping. WINZ, ACC, Ministry of Development, Housing NZ, CYFS have all become hated by the poor who see their interaction with those departments as part of the problem, not the solution.
How does sending the homeless a Motel bill for $50 000 help? How does throwing tens of thousands off welfare without ensuring they have any means of surviving? How does banning state house tenants from being in housing for 12 months because of highly questionable meth tests help? How does sending beneficiaries to illegal garages for homes helping? How does trapping 60% of beneficiaries into debt via relationship ‘fraud’ help those people? How does CYFs torturing kids in their care help those kids?
5: Mental Health Crisis
Our mental health sector is in meltdown. With over 500 suicides each year and autistic people being locked up and schools with secret segregation rooms we have a mental health crisis on our hands and a Government who simply want to throw $1.8billion into tax cuts for the rich.
6: Water pollution
We are pouring so much intensive dairy waste into our water that we are poisoning our supplies while handing over fresh water to foreign corporations. The Farming lobby alongside National have been allowed to rob Canterbury of any democratic say in their water use and Agriculture have been given a free hand.
Wasteful use of the water for non sustainable industries is an issue that doesn’t get discussed because the interests are too large. Adding insult to this is that National sold our publicly owned hydro power stations so that they could sink $400million into more dairy irrigation!
7: Police State Powers
Slowly but surely, the level of power given to our Police and security agencies grows with bugger all oversight.
Remember, the Police gained their search and surveillance powers after being found guilty of illegally spying on NZers, and instead of being found guilty of that, John Key passed law that not only retrospectively protected the Police, it also made their illegal spying legal.
Hilarious.
The latest increase in state power will see the GCSB and SIS be able to break any law they like.
Feeling safer yet? No Government should be allowed this amount of power over their people, yet NZers have allowed it because they didn’t like Kim Dotcom.
The 2014-2015 budget for the GCSB was $86, 843, 000. Their budget for 2015-2016 is $143, 568, 000.
8: Silencing critical voices
The Key Government have been highly effective at killing off any real journalistic scrutiny and have championed dumbing down the media or threatening Journalists to ensure light weight media coverage.
- Killing off Public Broadcasting TV by shutting down TVNZ7 and having Minister’s lie about how many people watched the station.
- Raiding newspapers and broadcasters to stop them publishing the tea pot tapes.
- Defaming investigative journalist Jon Stephenson who questioned if NZs SAS had committed war crimes in Afghanistan by handing civilians over to known torture units.
- Defaming investigative Journalist Nicky Hager by calling him a communist conspiracy theorist when Hager opened up the Dirty Politics black ops team working within Key’s office.
- Calling award winning Journalist Glenn Greenwald and whistle blowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden ‘Henchmen’ when they revealed the truth of Key’s mass surveillance plans.
- Having all of Andrea Vance’s emails and phone records taken.
- Using far right hate speech merchant and Fascist Cameron Slater to smear public servants the Government didn’t like.
- Falsifying SIS information and working with the state spy service to smear Phil Goff in the media months before the 2011 election.
- Deceiving the media that SAS are not fighting in Iraq.
9: Environmental vandalism
Look at the environmental vandalism being perpetrated in Mackenzie District right now. Unbeknownst to most, 6000 cows will be moving in shortly and the intensification interests can drain every river including lake Tekapo. This has all been done under the radar and the intensification of this has barely been understood, and that’s just one tiny corner of the country.
10: I spy with my 5 eyes, something beginning with 1984
Our continued assimilation into America via the 5 Eyes drags us closer to Washington than Wellington. The Deep State answers to the NSA not the NZ Parliament. TPPA robs us of our economic sovereignty and being awash in American culture keeps us from questioning anything. The fact we’ve been in America’s war in Iraq without so much as a public debate shows how far National have gone to make NZ the 52nd state of America (the 51st being Israel).
It’s not enough to change this Government in 2017 – whoever forms the next Government must be willing to tackle each of these problems in a meaningful way. If they don’t, what’s the point in voting for them?
You forgot to mention encouraging neo-colonialism, also known as “immigration”.
Excellent summation, Martyn. Shared on Facebook and Twitter as MUST READ.
Speaking of a compliant media ( understatement I know) …. these ‘reporters’…businesspeople and cricketers heading off on a jaunt on a taxpayer-funded Airforce plane with the PM …do they have to contribute to costs ? If so, how much ?
Serious question .
Junkets are so common now that the word is seldom used.
If you are with the right crowd there actually are such things as free lunches.
How can we have a reduction in suicide rates when Jonathan Coleman’s answer is laying a false claim of increased spending into mental health AND he won’t will not answer any questions on it! In most situations we call that a dictatorship!
Another minister set to join Hekia.
We can only document the crimes. We have no agency to prevent them. It’s very much like Rome in the fourth century.
Gaia will deal with the perpetrators fairly soon: living outside the bounds of ecological sustainability only works for a very short time.
Crunch time will almost certainly be around 2020, and it will be more-or-less all over around 2030.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k.png
Unfortunately a lot of innocent people are going to suffer horribly and die as a consequence of the actions of the greedy few. However, it has always been that way through human history.
Some say our species is fatally flawed, and there is much evidence to support that contention. It is certainly true of Homo colossus -industrial man. We know the answers but refuse to implement them.
The NZ media and in reference to the NZ Herald has become over-satuated with what I will call the John Key Mutual Admiration Society sorts of journalists. Perfect examples are Claire Trevett, Audrey Young and John Roughan. It’s like the NZ Herald cannot question let alone criticise Key and co. And such bias by the NZ Herald towards National and Key are becoming obviousl as time goes by.
Here is the hyprocrisy that is rampant in the Key government. They want to fool every NZer into believing in the Planet Key doctrine that all is well. The “nothing to see… move along please….”
If we ever do see John Key doing a fund raising like sleeping on a street without his Obama-like security detail encamped around him for even one night then I am sure we would be in shock. But the Key government doesn’t give to others without expecting something bigger in return albeit a GST increase in return for a votw due to Key hedging on a promise that he will break asap once the votes have been counted.
This government has failed abysmally to provide anything for the best interest of NZers and NZ. Instead this government sleeps with whomever provides it with the money to the National Party.
When a government purely exists for the purpose of bribery then it isn’t a government for the people and voted by the people. It is a government that sells off whatever/where-ever to the hghest bidder eg the Chinese ‘property’ investor who happens to donate heavily to the National Party.
You forgot poisoning our ecosystem with 1080..
The toxic state of Lake Forsyth deserves to be an international disgrace – bluegreen but not pure. A competent government would priorotise cleaning it up, because it is desirable to develop the capacity to mitigate this kind of environmental hazard. For the screamingly incompetent ninnies who have left Christchurch in ruins it is, of course, not a priority.
Is it ok for me to ask you to learn to use an apostrophe correctly? Or even…gasp…how to spell?
You forgot to have this article proof-read. Or edited. Is it too much to ask that you learn to spell or use an apostrophe? You lost me.
Selfishness, solipsism, greed, ignorance and narrow mindedness are not gendered. Economic inequality is ultimately not gendered, it’s a class and ethnicity division. (Men get paid more mostly because they work more- fact, the oft quoted emotive stats are misleading, though the argument can be made that roles traditionally dominated by women are underpaid- but we have a system that rewards greed and selfishness remember) – Some good points made, shame about the rather hand wavy references to “toxic masculinity”, a debatable sideline irrelevant to the central theme of the article, which is economic fascism and political hegemony.
Most Excellent summation Martyn, but we must change the national government at the next election, or else there will be nothing left to fight for, it’s a chance we must all take. We must not let John key have his way.
+100 Great Post!…this should be on the front pages of our mainstream media…and on RNZ…but of course it is NOT!
Yes, this National government have been awful.
But wouldn’t the same list apply to the last Labour government?
And would Andrew Little’s policies solve those issues?
The answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second question is no.
We need a Labour Party to oppose National, not reinforce them.
“National government has been awful”
Is that it? Bloody hell, that is a flaming understatement of monumental proportions, and you have given yourself away with that one Fatty.
Besides, you don’t know that and your assumptions could very well turn out to be wrong. You are part of the problem Fatty. You would rather National stay in power, rather than give the opposition a chance. You obviously don’t give a shit about this country or it’s people, you would rather NZ was completely destroyed and foreign owned, and you will get that wish if John key stays in power.
“You obviously don’t give a shit about this country or it’s people, you would rather NZ was completely destroyed and foreign owned, and you will get that wish if John key stays in power”
Lol.
Your emotive scaremongering won’t work on me. Conservative neoliberal nationalism ain’t my thing. I prefer left-wing solutions.
You obviously don’t. and stating the fact about you is not scaremongering either.
Why don’t you try to discredit my argument instead of making baseless personal attacks on my political beliefs?
You avoid my point that these problems existed under Labour from 1999-2008, and Little’s policies won’t solve them.
Labour has to do better than present themselves as a slightly more palatable version of National. That doesn’t motivate me (and others on the far left), it fails to motivate the Labour base (no election momentum), and swing voters will stick with the devil they know (it’ll lose the election). It’s basic strategy.
Scaremongering with UKIP rhetoric about NZ being destroyed and foreign owned is a waste of time. It’s not an election winner because it delivers National-lite policies.
What’s worse is that leaders like Little reinforce neoliberalism – just like Helen Clark did. I make no apologies for critiquing Labour-neoliberals. But you can keep apologising for neoliberalism if it makes you feel better
What argument is that ? that you would rather have National remain in power becasue they were “awful” rather than take a chance with the opposition becasue they are not up to that perfect high standard that you want ?
Simplistic binarism is boring. We don’t have FPP, we have MMP. I think having Labour in Govt could mean a change if Labour had limited power.
For example, Lab 25%, Greens 20% and Mana 6%.
But if it’s Labour and NZ first, with the Greens tacked on the end, then we’re looking at an ideological approach that is similar to Theresa May’s Conservatives (conservative neoliberal nationalism).
If the best argument you can come up with for Labour is that it’s not National, then good luck convincing swing voters. And good luck ending neoliberalism, lol.
As I said, try to show where I’m wrong about Labour. You can’t
Should complete inaction on global warming rate a mention?
But NZ has always been ” … deeply rotten…” .
I’m not defending the Natzi bastards, but it wasn’t only National that played dirty little games.
The only thing that’s forcing change is the advent of the internet which allows people to freely exchange information and openly discuss the deviancy, amongst other things, that’s plagued NZ since 1922 following the creation of the NZ Meat Board, a quasi-government-esque mafia style group of rich, fat, old white men who discovered that ‘ trading’ in NZ meats was more profitable than producing it. I.e. Farming. It’s interesting to this writer that the UK has expressed an interest in reexamining export agreements with us. I fucking bet they will. A few UK farmers can’t feed 60 million three times daily in a Post Brexit shit fight.
Ever since then, lazy deviants have been trading places aboard the gravy train that is our agricultural industry and if , suddenly, NZ farmers were to awake from the trance like state that National has cast over them? There’d be some serious fucking trouble in Gods Own Mate.
… and then our government involved this country in illegal US Inc’s illegal wars in other sovereign countries – : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNWlPcZbuio
The fact that we have a PM that epitomizes those ten points and is entirely responsible and couldn’t give a shit doesn’t seem to get thru to many in this country that it is corrupt because theve never understood what corruption is
Yes those bastards have taken over most so-called democratic countries, and the result is that the poorest and the weakest suffer the most.
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