Year: 2017

New Zealand’s first couple (is that what we call them?) have plans for a well deserved summer holiday, but I also think they need to re-invent a famous Labour Party tradition.

Self-assisted suicide – which is what we are really discussing here, not the far more sterilised ‘euthanasia’, will become a means to a neoliberal end in NZ. 

If you are serious about changing welfare in NZ Carmel, then end the punitive debt and crushing punishment that is dealt out to those on Welfare. The bullshit need for the disabled to send in letters annually for disabilities that can’t be ‘cured’. The penalty interest rates put on welfare overpayments, the culture of fear that alienates and the staff who  refuse to inform beneficiaries of what their actual rights and entitlements are.

The current Green Party are locked into middle class identity politics and middle class environmentalism while Labour are too frightened to use the power of the State to intervene well beyond the timid measures currently being proposed.