It’s weird isn’t it, 4 months out from a General Election and the list of issues that our political class and corporate media are avoiding is just extraordinary…
- Mass incarceration rates and a racist prison system only creating more damaged individuals.
- Suicide rates that are out of control and may be 3 times higher than officials claim
- A toxic culture inside WINZ, CYFS and MoD that denigrates and destroys beneficiaries
- Catastrophic climate change and how we will adapt to that
- An unemployment and under employment rate far higher than officials admit
- A speculative property bubble that can’t be tamed
- Polluted rivers destroyed by dairy farming
- Egregious under investment in infrastructure
…it’s almost as if the Middle Classes who are property investors don’t care as long as they can get another 5% in untaxed capital gain and those desperately just trying to get by don’t have the time or energy to engage while the mainstream media simply regurgitate the latests CCTV Dairy violence without ever questioning how over zealous tobacco policy is fuelling that violence.
None of those issues can be covered but we can get updates about Bill English’s run/walks and his tinned spaghetti pizzas or whenever John Oliver mocks us.
We can have wall to wall fucking coverage of all that crap, but we can’t have true debate about the 30 year neoliberal social and economic experiment that has failed New Zealand.
“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
“From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.”
George Orwell 1984
And that is why we need Waatea 5th Estate back on TV pronto.
What is the problem with getting that up and running?
Why has Face TV been running a terrible programme with whale oil on it and yet a quality programme like Waatea can’t get a look in?
There are no alternative voices out there on mainstream media.
Depressing!!
“There are no alternative voices out there on mainstream media.
Depressing!!”
Indeed, I get more and more depressed, the closer the election comes.
And even when the MSM has something to report, it goes under endless less important drivel news very quickly so few ever note it.
There was something very disturbing on RNZ’s Nine to Noon this morning, that Kathryn Ryan reported on, and where she had an interview with a kind of US entrepreneur, as it seemed.
It was about a company keen to introduce a new app for landlords and tenants, to find the highest bidding tenants. I could not believe it, when I heard the discussion.
Here is the audio for the interview and discussion:
‘Rent bidding apps heading for NZ’
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201844661/rent-bidding-apps-heading-for-nz
“A new app to enable tenants to bid against each other for a property will drive up already barely affordable prices, renters say.
The US-based app Rentberry describes itself as a “price negotiation platform uniting tenants and landlords”.”
“It is one of a number of rental apps poised to enter the Australian market and New Zealand soon after.
Chief executive Alex Lubinsky said it was a one-stop shop putting all the aspects of finding and leasing a rental in one system.”
Listen to it, and get very worried, dear renters, as it will be even more dog eat dog out there, as it already is now. It will favour the better off, the higher earners and those with money available to pay deposits, and condemn the ‘losers’ in such bidding to homelessness and boarding houses, garages and less welcoming places.
This is capitalism going rampant, even more rampant and ruthless.
Sadly our app hungry younger consumers will most likely fall for this crap in too high numbers, and continue the divide within society ever more.
We are nearing a scenario where social class warfare will return to the streets and homes of NZ, after decades of slumbering of too many apathetic people, resting in the perceived ‘comfort’ of BS neoliberal “achievements” and lies.
It is time to prepare for the fight, this just cannot be allowed to continue to corrupt our society even more.
NO other media is reporting on this, nor did they on this:
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/watch-budget-all-mothers-greens-make-election-promise-220-per-week-kiwi-families
That is a truly sickening notion, that we’ve lost any kind of fellow feeling and solidarity.Not so long ago, maybe a generation, anyone using an App like that would have been socially shunned.
Life has become a lot more predatory.
If we can’t all own our own homes we need security of tenure and rent ceilings, more like the European model
Our societal loss of values is reflected in a very shallow media,and compliant journalists
Patrick Gower has the journalistic integrity of a gruesome game show host with the smell of blood in his nostrils
Whole heartily agree,not a journalist at all and can not be taken seriously.
Quote:
It’s weird isn’t it, 4 months out from a General Election and the list of issues that our political class and corporate media are avoiding is just extraordinary…
“* Mass incarceration rates and a racist prison system only creating more damaged individuals.
* Suicide rates that are out of control and may be 3 times higher than officials claim
* A toxic culture inside WINZ, CYFS and MoD that denigrates and destroys beneficiaries
* Catastrophic climate change and how we will adapt to that
* An unemployment and under employment rate far higher than officials admit
* A speculative property bubble that can’t be tamed
* Polluted rivers destroyed by dairy farming
* Egregious under investment in infrastructure
…it’s almost as if the Middle Classes who are property investors don’t care as long as they can get another 5% in untaxed capital gain and those desperately just trying to get by don’t have the time or energy to engage”
You got it, Martyn, you have assessed it as it is!
This is the truth, go over the points you listed, take note, they are more or less ALL minority issues, that are serious ones, but only affect minorities in this country, who see, hear, feel and experience those shortcomings. These are not matters that the bulk of the middle class are confronted with, who live in urban centres, big and small, in this nation, and who drive their cherished four wheeled cars day in and day out, who only take the train and bus in small numbers when commuting to and from work Monday to Friday, but who enjoy the cars for the rest of the time.
Most continue to live in suburbia in villas and bungalows, or at least units or town houses, have their own patches, some admittedly choose the no frills apartment lifestyle, but they live in the better parts of town.
They shop in sanitary clean supermarkets, filled with nicely packaged goods in lots of plastic, paper, card board and aluminum, they watch and listed to appealing and teasing ads that stimulate their brains to fall for the latest consumer craze.
The ones who own homes do NOT want they property of THEIR house or unit drop, as it is THEIR equity and investment, even if it is just their owner occupier place.
They love their bit of luxury, even humble bits, like the weekend outing, the sports event, or going to a club, and indulging in one or the other past time or hobby.
All are geared to “improve” their lives, through study, work, career planning, and they “invest” in saving schemes, including Kiwi Saver, bank saving plans, they love the latest gadgets and apps, and feel “modern” and in fashion, keeping up in appearances with the Jones’.
Welcome to NZ Inc. 2017, collective effort, sharing, equal opportunity, ahem, yeah in words, but hardly in action.
It is a race now, a competition, a fight for the piece or crumbles of the pie, between competitors, be this represented in jobs, in incomes, in tax cuts in perks, that is what they chase after, they also want to avoid being looked upon as losers. So most keep to themselves, amongst equal minded folks, and some frown on the ones at the bottom, those no hopers.
Neoliberalism and what comes with it has reshaped human thinking and behaviour, just listen to those TV hosts, even watch the arrogant news readers, they wear the latest fashion and only read out stuff, which they barely bother to reflect on.
I learned a lot of interesting stuff not long ago, through a new migrant who first did some study here, he comes from a poorer country and did all kinds of low paid jobs, just to keep above water, and he worked as a waiter also, for some of the upmarket hotels. So he told me in confidence, how some of our MSM “Personalities” conduct themselves on parties at the hotels where he served them, oh my god, what I learned confirmed to me all I had thought with some prejudice, they are mostly self serving, arrogant pricks, who look down on many others, who have no qualms about being served my new migrants working for barely above the minimum wage, talking lots of shit, and drinking beers, wines and so, costing as much as one of their servant workers get paid per hour!
The ‘working class’ in NZ Inc these days are not that many born and bred Kiwis now, the bulk of service workers and low paid workers in Auckland seem to be new and not so new immigrants, Polynesian in the more manual jobs, and Indian, Chinese, Filipino and whatever else, some Middle Eastern and South American also, who do the service work in service stations, in restaurants, in supermarkets, in elder care, in cleaning jobs, and taxi and bus driving, and what else there is. Also technicians working for Chorus and so are in high numbers not born here.
They see NZ often as a very selectively choosing country, with Immigration NZ picking the ones it sees fit, and employers doing the same, while actually a fair few born and bred people look down on them, as mere servants.
So they do not identify much with Labour and Greens, hardly with NZ First, and even when they become permanent residents, they may not even bother voting, as they feel they don’t quite yet belong here.
Most born and bred Kiwis do not care, as long as they manage in reasonably paid jobs, and they just follow the usual lolly scramble kind of election campaign, and pick and choose the party that fills their shopping trolley and wallet, e.g. through more tax cuts. They have no time for prisoners, no time for beneficiaries, expect farmers to produce food for them, and only face dirty rivers if they stumble across them during the brief annual holidays, that is if they can afford to leave town or city.
Accordingly they vote, sadly too many the Nats.
@Mike – It’s slowly starting to change – re your comments on the immigrant involved in servicing the whims and proclivities of our comfortable MSM participants and various politicians. Some are starting to get more than a little ‘hacked off’, and like a growing number of the populace – the bullshit and jellybeans is just that.
Obviously there are a number of dynamics at play but when you see ‘special cases’ being granted to various South Island workers, whilst at the same time – those with equivalent decade-long dedication to NZ Inc. now being labelled as “low value”, or “low quality”, having come here on a NZ designed SCAM, and when they’re expected to suck up the NZ shit from the ponces and pretenders – it’ll only last so long.*
There was once a ‘Class of 87’ – and how they protested! long and hard when the coke and the insider trading didn’t flow so readily – some even lost everything then immediately began to do it all again – doubling down.
*Christ! shades of the Okker/Dutton/Korman/Manus-Christmas Island queue jumper/boat people language.
And of course we protest (as we should) about Australia’s treatment of us – but we have absolutely no moral high-ground when we cry “unfair, disgusting, etc.” whilst we’re busy trying to deport the “low value and low quality” we’ve imported now that we’ve used them up to satisfy our needs (or should I say ‘wants’).
No surprise too that when we go grovelling for free trade agreements, they’re not coming that easily
It is absolutely insane that war has been declared on young Aotearoans by greedy/complacent old people and no one wants to discuss it. At least none of the dyspeptic old boomers that comprise my peers.
Perhaps they are hoping for a real war; there’s an arsehole of an amerikan who wants to crank one up to distract from his own foot in twitter stupidity.
That would suit the selfish old pricks down to the ground, send off all the kids to war on the deal they get 6 months tuition knocked off their student loans for every year they spend dodging friendly fire from the moderate terrorists and their amerikan advisors.
The fact that the generation eager to send them assiduously avoided the same for themselves fits neatly with abolition of free education, public housing, the inalienable right for everyone who wants to to buy a block and a crib etc., so sending the kids over the top will seem no more outrageous in 5 years than saddling them with lifelong debt does now.
Meanwhile ‘back home’ the old tossers could stay in their jobs till they turn 70 ‘investing’ their super income in property asset appreciation ensuring that none of those obnoxious millennial will ever escape the old pricks’ slumlord tactics.
If we need young people to ‘think outside the box’ we can just import a few planeloads more of rapacious poms to clutter up the bureaucracy.
Although there is a major problem with that one that the old pr1cks are too set in their ways to ever acknowledge.
That is, once the racists of england get their way and scarper from the EU into a plethora of ISDS laden bilateral trade agreements (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settlement), shackling the the shrinking brit parliament with the scum of the legal system for ever more, it is highly likely that an EU determined to discourage any other potentially recalcitrant states from following, will be searching out relatively inexpensive ways to stick it up the poms.
NZ is likely to be offered a far better trade deal with the EU than is possible with a precipitously devaluing pommie pound.
In that case it is essential we have a bureaucracy that is 100% loyal to Aotearoa (englander immigrants are less likely to swap their passport for an Aotearoa issued one than any other immigrant group and those who fancy a ‘globalist’ career the least likely of all) is vital.
Senior bureaucrats are charged with advancing the interests of their employing nation, a deal to sell our primary produce into the vast market of europe will always be in the best interests of Aotearoa – yet how can we do that when the department of the cabinet, our intelligence agencies, primary production even education are chocka with foreigners who owe allegiance to a competing interest?
Digressions aside, I suggest engaging with any/all available over 50’s to fully comprehend their intransigence in the face of a very dim future for young people.
“I’ll be dead by then” is a common refrain if one can even get through their armour of denial.
Back in ’14 I spent a deal of time and money trying to convince young people to make a mark on a ballot – it doesn’t matter who – what party – anything, the reality is, as (clark was want to blather like a scratched record) pols of all stripes won’t give a flying fuck about the dark future for our young people as long as young people refuse to lower themselves to the indignity of voting for any one of the sociopathic, self serving & incompetent arses who rate themselves as pols here. Even some of my own kids failed to take heed of my entreaty so I shan’t bother to do the same this year.
BUT
You don’t hafta like the pols or their policies – shit you’d be a derp if you did, but given that we’re still a way off the rock bottom where people start reaching for an ak47, making a chicken scratch on a slip of paper is the only viable way to try and avert the horror likely to befall the young.
“Digressions aside, I suggest engaging with any/all available over 50’s to fully comprehend their intransigence in the face of a very dim future for young people.”
You may not be aware of this, but there are, besides of those over 50 who may have “done well” in life, a fair few who are also not doing well, who are NOT better off than the younger persons who have little hope.
Some older folks have not had jobs for longer periods, be this due to sickness, disability or other circumstances, and they face a grim future also. And unless someone managed to save, invest in a home and so, there will only be a meagre super or pension, that will barely pay the rent.
“besides of those over 50 who may have “done well” in life, a fair few who are also not doing well, who are NOT better off than the younger persons who have little hope. ”
I don’t deny that, yet sadly for the last 4 decades Aotearoans have been electing neoliberal pols whose message has always been “fuck everyone else you’re the only thing which matters”.
They will do so again this year because too many of those battlers either believe all the lies or won’t get off their arses and resist.
i’ve been banging on about that..
http://www.whoar.co.nz/2017/facebook-dark-ads-op-ed-gareth-morgan-warning-impending-peril-labour-partyandrew-little/
The ad apocalypse spotted
Nick Smith is now reduced to being just a stool pigeon now worthless as an effective politician to help our environment.
Another hollow politician in Nactional now to add to the rest.
Like me @ Cleangreen, you’re probably old enough to remember a much younger Nick Smith.
He epitomises everything that’s fucked. I mean it’s not that he isn’t actually all that bright despite whatever bits of paper he has to prove his “high value” credentials, it’s that he is a case study in how the smug, comfortable, ideologically driven, weak-Willy little prat starts out as something slightly principled, but then becomes captured. Not unlike a Finlayson, or a few others I could name.
….. and then there’s the likes of Joyce, and Bennett, and 10 Bridges, oh and Ngaro – who didn’t really have all that much to begin with other than that ‘left wing gift’: affirmative action of the right-wing kind
““From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.”
Then up pops the ambitious middle class intelligensia, guns up the proles with lies and scaremongering aaand when the revolution stops spinning park their comfy bottoms in places of power, reward a few of the brighter proles with a smattering of rewards
and life goes on.
Don’t believe me? Do the names ‘Prebble and Douglas’ still raise shudders on spines and buckets to lips? Or is all forgot in the mists of time?
Those in-a-hurry prole saviours. Too fond of self-aggrandizing, leaving bloodshed and misery for others.
Also missing from the government’s bullshit narratives (and missing from the bullshit narratives of other parties) is the coming collapse of industrial civilization, as the net energy obtained from rapidly depleting oil reserves declines and the absolute quantity of liquid fuel available goes into global decline.
‘Brace for the oil, food and financial crash of 2018
80% of the world’s oil has peaked, and the resulting oil crunch will flatten the economy’
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/brace-for-the-financial-crash-of-2018-b2f81f85686b
Four months to go and I am wondering if Labour is totally ready to take the election by the scruff of the neck.
https://willnewzealandberight.com/2017/05/20/labour-has-four-months/
I note, thanks the Herald etc, that the National Party strategy this election is the economy, emphasising the “Surplus” and God knows I use that word in its most imaginative form.
We are told we are really fortunate to have a ‘surplus”, thanks to Nationals wizardry whilst Australia has a “deficit”. Playing to our competitive “trans Tasman rivalry” crap, like the rugger and other such cliched shit the good news story’s just keep on a rolling.
It astounds me that our so called media missed the glaring point that under English’s moronic guidance we ran deficits for almost the entire existence of the Key government despite cut backs and frozen budgets and mass borrowing. And when we did run a surplus is was imaginative accounting at best.
And now when Health, both medical and mental, Justice, Policing, Education, Social assistance, the Environment and Culture all suffer from strangled budgets these idiots in the corporate media seem to think we are doing well with a ‘surplus”. How the fuck do you think we manufactured a surplus you fools?
The surplus is a lie, a mirage and laughable, were it not so serious. And National are incompetent but its best the voting masses don’t realise this!
“I note, thanks the Herald etc, that the National Party strategy this election is the economy….”
and they’ll trot out some trite old slogan like “It’s the economy stupid” whilst feigning originality – and when that happens the response needs to be “It’s the stupid economy stupid” – but I’m not yet sure it will be
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.”
And that is it under National isn’t it? This fuck up of an economy, the one where wages stagnate or grow a little, where housing is unobtainable, where living in cars is now everyday, where people scrounge in bins, that’s all we are good for now and, apparently, it is the best we can hope for in this country. This sub average economy where being a part time barista is about it. Where booking up credit to the bank means you one of us. No aspiration, just muddling along and keeping a smile and thanking our lucky stars we are not like Syria. Just like Aunt Paula does.
For fuck sake NZ, wake up!
I sat down with pen and paper a few months ago and came up with near 20 important issues that are facing nz society, this govt on all sides is a disgrace. We need citizen initiated referendums to resolve these issues, the govt is not working. dissolve it.
Yep, I totally agree Martyn, with one addition…Education. The gross underfunding of our public education system and increasing privatisation of all things education.
Pretty much bad management, corruption and a media buyout by the Nats. New Zealanders are up against it. But as with the current UK elections – things can change quickly – with good, commonsense policy. Labour UK are reeling in the Torys fast, even with the MSM right wing bias. Will be interesting…
See the same parallels here – but our opposition parties ( all of them) don’t get much of a look in. That’s why the TDB is more important than most realise…. and bring back Waatea 5th estate ASAP. It makes a change to hear people speaking the truth.
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