WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that the most accomplished class warrior to emerge from the struggle to improve New Zealand’s labour laws would be Winston Peters? No one else with a dog in this fight saw the class issues at stake as clearly as Winston Peters and NZ First. Not the employers; not the unions; and certainly not the Labour, National or Green parties. Peters and his colleagues can walk away from this debate as the undisputed champions of small provincial business. The electoral consequences of NZ First’s decisive intervention should not be underestimated.
There is a strong temptation on the part of left-wing activists in the major metropolitan centres to write off the people of the provinces as a bunch of undifferentiated reactionaries. To your average Labour or Green activist, provincials are racist, sexist and homophobic “rednecks”. The sort of people who still see nothing wrong with sending a float filled with people in blackface down the main street of their little town. Hopeless and irredeemable, these voters are not worth wooing – unless you’re Stuart Nash. (And the less said about Stuart Nash the better!)
Winston Peters knows better. Like his predecessors in the Social Credit Political League, the NZ First leader is acutely aware that the small rural towns and provincial cities of New Zealand are hotbeds of class conflict. Not simply the classic Marxist conflict of capitalist versus proletarian, but also the no less bitter conflict between large and small businesses. Indeed, it is possible to characterise life in provincial New Zealand as a constant struggle of the particular against the general: of individual agency against institutional power.
People living in large cities have a bad habit of romanticising small towns. They like to think that in a place where everybody knows their neighbours life must be wonderful. The reality is almost the exact opposite. In a small community the social hierarchy is much more sharply exposed. Yes, everybody knows their neighbours – but they also know exactly where they sit in the social pecking-order. Fun, one imagines, if you are positioned at or near the top. Wretched, if you are located near the bottom.
The local lawyers and accountants, for example, are perfectly placed to know exactly how well, or how badly, their neighbour’s are doing. The town’s doctors and teachers are similarly well-positioned. If knowledge is power, then these provincial professionals have a lot to play with.
The senior managers of nationwide chains, salarymen who will not lose their houses if their executive decisions turn out badly, may look down their noses at the senior bureaucrats employed by local and central government but, in truth, their day-to-day jobs are distinguished by the same petty protocols; the same demands from above. Well remunerated, but subjected to unceasing “performance reviews”, many opt to take out their frustrations on those further down the totem pole.
Not that the owners of the town’s small businesses would include themselves among the pen-pushers’ inferiors. In their own eyes – and often in the eyes of their employees – they are town’s true heroes.
Independent of spirit, willing to have a crack, contemptuous of those whose only purpose in this world appears to be making the lives of people like themselves as difficult as possible, it is difficult not to admire these small businesspeople.
It is no mean feat to keep a business afloat in the provinces. Notoriously under-capitalised, they all-too-often keep their operations afloat by paying themselves less than their workers. They are no friend of the trade unions with their one-rule-fits-all approach, but neither are they friends of the banks who bleed them dry or the big firms who expect them to submit ridiculously low bids for the jobs they then take their own sweet time paying for.
But without these small business people the towns and cities of provincial New Zealand would die. Their absence is frighteningly easy to spot. Main streets are dead: their shopfronts boarded-up and the real estate agent’s “To Let” signs fading in the sun. The young people those shuttered businesses might have employed have either fled or broken bad. The only signs of life are around the local office of the MSD.
These are the towns NZ First is pledged to restore to economic health. Winston Peters and Shane Jones want those kids in jobs, earning money, dreaming of one day becoming their own boss – just like the man or the woman who took them on under the 90-day rule, to see whether they had what it took, and then employed them permanently when they proved themselves hard-working and trustworthy. The unions can knock on the boss’s door as often as they like – they will find few, if any, takers here.
Of course there are exceptions – but in small-town New Zealand it is more common to find the small employers and their workers united in solidarity against the people who live on the hill. It’s one thing to be paid by the taxpayers; to grow fat on the fees you charge; or draw the salary only a big corporation can afford to pay. It’s quite another to keep the town’s cars and trucks filled up and roadworthy; or to fill the bellies of its inhabitants with decent tucker. All those engaged in small businesses: both their owners and the people who work for them; have taken a bet on themselves. Very often that bet is lost. Fair enough. Making a small business pay has never been easy. All the players ask is that the game stays honest: that the deck isn’t stacked against them.
That is the pledge NZ First made to them – and that is the pledge it has kept. Wages are not always paid in cash. Sometimes they are paid in dreams. By honouring that currency, Winston Peters and NZ First have made the heroes of small-town New Zealand their own.
@ CT? Meh.
“…fill the bellies of its inhabitants with decent tucker…” What? What? What the fuck!? For me, reading the word ‘tucker’ is like seeing someone else’s fresh, green phlegm on the footpath. Same as ‘feed’ as in ‘I had a good feed’. ( Uh oh! Little bit of sick. ). The White, Right dopy denizens of small NZ/AO towns are ‘feeding’ on ‘tucker’! For rooting power, right? “ UUk uk uk uk uk uk …………….! Bleeeeeeeech! “
Have I warped into a parallel universe where everything and everyone is the polarised opposite of everything I’ve come to know about everything in my home-Universe? winston peters! Keeps his pledge! To small-town NZ/AO What the fuck!? And Chris Trotter wrote that! ? Double What! Double The! Double Fuck!
More on this later. I’m off to scrub my eyeballs with borax and Jiff, take my pills, call my therapist, weep quietly whilst sucking my thumb in a foetal position.
Calm down, Countryboy!
I know you find it difficult to marry your oft-cited love of the farming community with the political effort needed to support it, but try, mate, try.
You do have a point about “tucker”, though. I was channeling my inner Barry Crump. A little too much.
@ CT. Ha. An inner Barry Crump! The mind boggles.
You read “ Bastards I have Met”? I liked the bit where the truck driver on Speed thought he saw pixies running about on the road after not sleeping for days. Truck was found stopped in the middle of the road, loooong skid marks, driver was found running about in the bush.
‘Calming down’ though is what brought us to the calamity of the cross-emotions we must navigate through as our country’s taken from under our noses
When? Exactly, is the right time to de-calm up then? My passions are waining now as my testicles get ever closer to the floor, and are like everyone else’s passions; not without fault but purified by good intentions one would hope.
And sadly, any love of the farming communities I might display is really vengeance in disguise. When my mother, father and myself were swindled off our farm the first in the door of the real estate auction rooms were our neighbours. Perhaps delighted at the prospect of finally being rid of us but more likely to get a killer deal on 3000 acres of free hold land with its own stream, forests and hill country.
I’m not being flippant when I say that the best thing that could happen to NZ/AO rural towns is not winston peters but to pack those towns with foreign refugees and asylum seekers. Get some colour, life and humanity back into the bleak, anal-retentive, boring, bible bashing little speed bumps.
And ! God, nearly forgot. The end of animal farming for meat. Cheeses, eggs and wool I’m good with. Wool in particular is an extraordinary fibre and we have a well developed infrastructure to manufacture and distribute the stuff. For the animal? It’s a bit of running while shitting ones self, a bit of a crush, like going to a Justin Bieber concert not that I’d know, a spot of upside down while being roughed up by the rudest barbers ever then outside with a new do. Bit of skin off but clearly? Didn’t need it.
And cannabis. Lots of cannabis. Everywhere. Road sides, hill sides and NO pine trees.
‘The Hemp Revolution’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdEfdS2DbJ0
Whenever I hear the words “a feed of” I think of small town New Zealand eating the last remaining relics of the whitebait species, and claiming it as their “right” as New Zealanders
Sometimes Chris, you come out with a gem and this is one of those days. Adding to your story, there is a much bigger economic issue at work here.
Consider:
1. We are spending billions in urban areas to transport urbanites around ever more crowded cities. We’re jamming the poor buggers into handkerchief sized apartments and we’re so desperate for land we considering building apartment blocks on golf courses and parks.
2. At the same time we have half empty rural towns crying out for people and money. Where a house on a decent section cost a fraction of that of an apartment in Auckland.
The solution to both problems is to encourage the former to move to the latter! And take their barista with them. With the majority of office jobs now being purely online, nobody needs to commute to Queens Street every morning. Given decent bandwidth and the banking, insurance, and design (architects, engineers etc) can set up shop anywhere.
The daftest thing I’ve seen in years is the government rebuilding the Stats building back in Wellington, where land is expensive and the seismic risk is enormous. The Dept. of Statistics is a proudly independent body. Why not move it to Palmies or Wairoa to Kaitaia?
From strategic risk perspective we should be creating a distributed government with assets right across the country so that when the ‘big one’ hits the capital, basic government functions are retained. We should be tilting the tax playing field to move money and people out of Auckland. Thereby killing two birds with one inexpensive stone.
“We are spending billions in urban areas to transport urbanites around ever more crowded cities. We’re jamming the poor buggers into handkerchief sized apartments and we’re so desperate for land we considering building apartment blocks on golf courses and parks.”
Same thought crossed my mind, Andrew. It reminds me of the dystopian sf novels if the 60s and 70s where over-population had over-filled decaying cities and the environment had turned to shit. Real life has followed art.
Maybe it is time to wind back migration and set a limit on our population.
But the ‘main street’ of smaller towns and cities are pretty much full of chain shops, and op shops (who don’t pay their staff). “tucker” mostly comes from the chain supermarket’s.
The small businesses are usually food manufactures, cheeses and beer and chocolates and baby balms, who enjoy the small town lifestyle, but make money sending their good to the big cities. And sure, some may “keep their operations afloat by paying themselves less than their workers’, but the workers are still nearly all on minimum hourly wage, and more often than not, part timers, and often seasonal.
And if you ask the right questions many of these small businesses admit having a long term plan to sell their business off one day to ‘the big boys’, for a nice profit.
Many are either newcomers to town with money from their city/overseas jobs, or the children of the towns wealthier ‘people on the Hill’. They are interesting people doing good stuff… but they aren’t economic martyrs.
The people they employ are not about to start their own business on their low wages and high costs. They are not being “paid in Dreams”.
..and anyway, tell us Chris..as our provincial rents sky rocket thanks to Auckland landlords and investors, do you think they’ll accept ‘dreams’ instead of cash?
Some ‘Think Big’ is required to get the provinces humming, but lets not get all misty eyed about whats happening out here.
Another insightful piece by Chris and just as the Clinton campaign seemingly treated the small town / rural populations of the US with at best lip service and at worst disdain doing so with smaller towns in NZ is to run the same political risk / engage in the same arrogance and ignorance.
Not all those living in small towns are racist idiots just as not all those living in the large cities are their cultured and educated ‘betters’.
In simple words, Peters has found a voter-base ignored by thr three main parties and he is meeting their needs, aspirations, fears. Pretty much what Trump did in the US “rust belt”.
Chris just used more pretty words than I did.
There is truth in this.
It is fashionable for western liberals to sneer at the likes of Trump and call them ‘populist’. In other words – implementing polices that are popular.
Who’d have thought that would get a person elected? 😉
I don’t think the Greens ignore this voter base, so much as this voter base ignores the Greens. Hardly the fault of the Greens
So Marama Davidson is settling to her natural level then?
Seriously, did she look at Collin Craig’s conservative campaign, and decided to up her crazy eye game.
The Greens aren’t for serious, sane people.
No, Andrew, quite the opposite. But you could say the Greens aren’t for people like you.
Just you keep investing in that beachfront property…
Frank, my house is 40m above sea level and if there was a 1 metre sea level rise I’d gain water frontage and the ability to install a boat ramp at the bottom of the section. 🙂
Things like sea level rise need to be taken in context:
1. Sea level is rising. It’s up over 100mm since the 1940’s and averages around +2mm per year.
2. It’s been rising at about the same rate for the last 6,000 years and far more steeply before that. It’s conceivable my ancestors were driven out off the East Anglia coast in the UK in the medieval era because of sea level rise.
3. During the previous interglacial peak, sea level was several metres higher than now. 5m higher as measured on the Kaipara and between 6-9 metres globally. All without industrial emissions… 😉
So relax! Whatever happens will happen and the Greens aren’t related to King Canute.
Frank can answer for him self but anyway.
1. Even by your own made up castle in the the sky numbers the rate at which sea level rises is accelerating.
2. Recheck your own statements
3. And people used to be able to walk from Indonesia to Australia all with out industrial emissions.
Supplementary evidence only works when you collect the data to build a model. What you’ve done is build an airy fairy model to fit the data. Well done champ.
The willing to have a crack thing and general contempt of government is correct but unless there is something tangible seen from Peters then it’s just more waffle from the city pretending they have a clue about rural life. Eh Chris.
great post CT and right on the money. Happy that I voted for Winston he is straight talker and knows whats goin on. yes the pecking order/moneyed people is as prominent as ever small town taranaki, let them dream I say. The small people are the real ones in NZ and money doesn’t get you a seat. Old winnies a maori and they see right thru this rubbish. The best place to live is small town nz but some help wouldn’t go astray. go nzf.
Not a bad effort …and more accurate than Waitakere Man.
Hi Chris
This is the kindest I remember you being to the people who employ the vast majority of NZ workers. I think what you say here is very true and relevant. I think C B should read it carefully again. It is hard to understand his objection.
D J S
@ DJS.
I object to winston peters in all permutations. My imagination fills in the rest when others speak or write of him in even the dimmest of positive lights. Not exactly an infallible approach but then exactness has no place in the workings of the criminal machinations of crooks.
As a farmer, I’m well used to being patronised, victimised, MSM vilified, dehumanised, abused, accused, parasitised, swindled then left in a cultural limbo to shut up and work harder. An edict politically preached exclusively by those with a vested interest in living off the farmers back. And I don’t mean the ‘average’ urban person. I love Auckland and Wellington. I love the city energy.
I mean, the capitalist elite. Those few multi millionaires and billionaires flying here and there in their helicopters. They’re criminals. They’re not hard working good bastards. They’re crooks who took advantage of their ridiculous good luck in stumbling over a paddock full of blind hens wading about knee deep in worms. They get knighthoods because they give them to themselves. Perhaps to further the impression upon us that they are, in fact, noble fellows and deserving of the wealth, and status, they took from us, and gave to themselves.
It’s my view that winston peters is a Machiavellian confederate wearing a cloak of mirrors coated in vaseline and works for ‘Them’. The evidence speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
He’s spent years rustling around within one of the most covertly corrupt governments in the Commonwealth ( As described by Hong Kong Chinese bankers during the Wine Box Inquiry ) and he’s found nothing of substance? TDB has found more dirt on politicians than he has. There is a difference between missing the truth and avoiding it.
The only thing urban people need to know about rural townships, as do the people themselves who live and work in rural townships, is the truth. And the Rural truth is, as yet, far from being explored.
That’s kind of what pisses me off. I fucking hate the common farm-advisor blather like “ Going broke, farmer? You’re neighbour suicided? Why, then don’t be him or her! Instead? Make do and get by. Diversify! Goats! That’s the thing! No? Wait? Deer! No? Wait? Llamas! No! Wait? Aardvarks! Bit stringy to eat but great bristles! Just borrow a lot of money and put in Aardvark milking machines and bristle harvesters” It’s an attitude fed rote-like by the MSM and others to keep farmers on the hop. And I don’t mean the good kind. It’s really that simple.
Fuck ‘ make do and get by’ ! More like ‘ Stand up and fight back’! You’re being screwed Farmers! And most farmers bend over with a screw driver in one hand and a screw in the other with a sign that says ‘ Help yourself’ pinned to the arse of their odious, blue overalls.
Here’s the thing farmers should do. And I mean SHOULD! Clear enough?
Farmers MUST ALL PARTICIPATE IN PROTECTING ONE ANOTHER! No exceptions. And if a farmer refuses to participate? Then, that farmer had better come up with an exceptionally good excuse for the rest of you or the repercussions could be frightful and expeditious. The farmers greatest hurdle to overcome is the belief that farmers are individuals working individually. That’s like being a sheep in wolf country trying to go it alone. You would have a short life full of unpleasant surprises culminating in one last, very big surprise indeed. Your earthly body at your grave site being comprised of nothing more than wolf shit and worms which would not be pretty nor classy. And here’s a metaphor for you? What if all the sheep were dumb and arrogant enough to try it ‘alone’? And what if the wolves knew of that and used that misplaced sense of individualism to kill and eat all the sheep one by one? But now that all the sheep have been eaten, the wolves begin to starve?
Politically, that’s why it’s important for politicians to maintain a rural status quo. Just eat a few, Mr Billionaire. Eat too many, and you’ll raise suspicions. Well, Mr Billionaire? Too fucking late. You were too greedy weren’t you? No Class, see? You got a Ferrari but you look like an old Dick in it.
Farmers? Focus on nothing else other than welding yourselves together at this point. Getting together is vital and extremely important for farmers, and NZ/AO generally. Even if it means you just standing there eyeing each other up of an evening. Someone will come up with an idea then everyone else will start listening then a debate will start, then ideas will flow…Or a punch up. Who cares though, right? At least your hanging together. Farmers!? That’s how things work. If you don’t function like that, you just continue being someone else’s lone sheep Bitch.
A structure of getting together would literally be ‘getting together’ once fortnightly. Once monthly’s too apart long. Weekly’s unreasonable all things considered. And each group of farmers can be live-streamed with other groups of farmers via the internet and broad cast on big screen TV’s. It’s what corporations and companies do so why not you, farmers? Bi-weekly meetings to keep steerage of your profession, in a professional manner? And for Gods sake. No red band gumboots. Dress as if you respect yourself and your colleagues. That’s extremely important. Do you see surgeons doing dinner of an evening still dressed in their blood spattered surgical gowns? Not sober ones. Doing a line of coke off the forehead of a car crash victim after you discovered their stash then off for a Pinot could be the thing of fiction but not in real life darlings.
The way farmers dress off duty, the way farmers speak, spit, brawl, drink, swear, curse, express bigotry, racism, sexism and contempt for their city people is installed, unbeknownst to them, by a corrupt MSM using well documented psychological mechanisms so as ‘they’ can, in turn, use those, shall we say, unsociable characteristics to demonise and belittle publicly as required to keep farmers being, and feeling, isolated and misunderstood by the greater populace which makes it a walk in the park for the capitalist elite to swindle farmer earned money away into their bottomless billion dollar pocketses. Yes! That’s right farmers! Your best mates, National, are fucking you over! With all the cynicism of a joke cracking hangman.
Here’s an interesting little discovery to make.
Turn on Google Earth. If you live in a rural area you have time to sow wheat, harvest it and have another baby while the page loads…
There! See? NZ/AO. Isn’t it beautiful?
Look at the bottom bit from Dunedin across to, say Frankton? Then down to Tuatapere, then across to Stirling Point then back up to Dunedin.
Go north to beautiful Canterbury with its wonderful weather and equally wonderful plains and mountains? From, say Oamaru up to Christchurch then across to Springs Junction, then down to Omarama, along the Waitaki back to Oamaru?
Go to North and over The Straight and criss cross that stunning north island and look down…
What do you see? Tourists? House prices, which is simply debt foreign banksters tempt people with? A logical fallacy. Foreign bankster profits? Massive domestic debt? Suits and ties? Well rounded vowels?
I see farms. Thousands of them. Sure, farming practises must change. But there’s no other way to make foods in such quantities, as yet, than by growing plants out of carefully nurtured organic soil.
And we’ve been taught, by criminals, to hate on those who’s perseverance and professional determination feed us and bring in our foreign currencies. Because the criminals are on a gravy train like no other. And it deeply saddens me to have an erudite fellow like Chris Trotter whom I have an enormous respect for let winston peters land so softly on the terrible miscarriage of justice that is our primary industry by callously using such misty eyed tactics as the ‘survival of rural towns’. He couldn’t give a fuck about rural towns. Remember $1 houses? One could buy a house in, say, Tapanui, for a dollar. Just agree to pay the rates and it’d be yours. The council rates were constantly ramped up which is what forced people to flee to the cities during the late 1980’s swindles. Tapanui is dead square in the middle of some of the richest farm lands in the world in relation to productivity.
$1.00 dollar. Yet $3k a year in rates in certain parts of Otago and Southland. Including little Big Billy english’s home town of Dipton.
I personally owned a house with a QV of $72k which I paid the Clutha District Council $2k a year in rates. All those good ol’ CDC boys do drive very shiny Toyota 4×4’s but. bill english country. todd barkley country.
A direct quote from a Balclutha working fellow. “ Yeah-nah mate. Don’t want any o’ them foreigners or outsiders here. We like it the way it is. “
And winston peters is going to change that? While he lives in Auckland? While he was tea and ginger nuts with don brash, while he railed all the way through The Wine Box Inquiry and aggressively found nothing to answer for. While a Green Party MP and coalition member to peters is rubber stamping the sales of NZ/AO farmlands to rich foreigners? Riiiiiiiiiiight.
Vulgar here and there, I admit. But you get my drift @ DJS?
… [ The way farmers dress off duty, the way farmers speak, spit, brawl, drink, swear, curse, express bigotry, racism, sexism and contempt for their city people is installed, unbeknownst to them, by a corrupt MSM using well documented psychological mechanisms so as ‘they’ can, in turn, use those, shall we say, unsociable characteristics to demonize and belittle publicly as required to keep farmers being, and feeling, isolated and misunderstood by the greater populace which makes it a walk in the park for the capitalist elite to swindle farmer earned money away into their bottomless billion dollar pocketses. ] …
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Brilliant.
All of it, actually. And though I don’t share your distrust of Peters I do share your belief in a cabal of criminals who have raped, – yes raped ( such an ugly word and even uglier action ) this country for the last 3 decades.
But ugly it has been.
There is no other way to describe it.
I keep going back to this website,… as it lays it all bare in graphic , easily read detail why NZ is like it is today . Which is what we need. This is no time to be fooling round with these criminals and these issues. That time is over. As is much of our generations working lives.
New Right Fight – Who are the New Right?
http://www.newrightfight.co.nz/pageA.html
But there is a new generation,…. our children and our grandchildren to consider.
Do we really want to go down as the ‘weak generation’ ?
It is time to fight.
Yes I get your drift CB. But I was thinking more about the article’s references to small employers than about Winston himself. These small employers must include most farmers.
The prevailing criticism of Winston is that he says what he judges will appeal to his audience rather than that he actually believes it himself. In My case he has been pretty adept at that over the years, far more so than any other politician. i don’t know whether he really believes what he says or not, but it seems a better bet than supporting politicians that you are quite clear you do not agree with. Whether they believe what they are saying or not.
He quite often takes a stand against wealth and power, which I suppose is his appeal.But anyway I think it is reasonable to support a politician for the stance taken on issues when you agree with the stance, irrespective of what you think of them personally. It’s hard to see any issue being addressed if people oppose it because they don’t like the messenger.
lots of people must love the cities’ energy or something about it. I don’t personally. But we have just been to Paris , Vienna , Venice , Naples , Patras and Athens. And back to Auckland, and I sense that there is something about cities that the bigger they are the more people want to be there, not just out of necessity for work or graft, but out of a primordial herding instinct. Once there you might think they would exude love and affection for all their fellow citizens, and it must be said that some are proactively friendly and helpful to strangers, but that isn’t the norm. Mostly they are glum and terse and resentful and unfriendly to each other. They crush together on the Metros like sardines and studiously look into the middle distance to avoid making eye contact with each other.Even if you’r a customer the con act is usually limited to the essentials of getting the money.
D J S
But the real and core reason why these conditions exist is because the rural sector was gutted by the treasonous neo liberalism of Roger Douglas and his little cabal.
Remember all the Post Office closures up and down the land?
Recall all the freezing works, forestry jobs , railways that were privatized / corporatized , and then sold off to the lowest overseas bidders ? And the ‘downsizing’ and the ‘making more efficient’ by sacking thousands and keeping on skeleton staff paid on flat rates?
Remember all the glowing promises of a ‘ level playing field ‘ , and cheaper prices because of ‘more competition’ ?
All BULLSHIT by stealth and by design.
We had low unemployment back then and the wealth from having people employed and recycling finance back into govt coffers through taxation more than offset any complaints about ‘inefficiency ‘ or ‘waste’ that the bogus arguments of the neo liberals used later on…
Now look at the exorbitant costs of electricity. Look at the obscene premiums charged for rental accommodation we now have because of the deregulated free market. Look how Telecom rorted NZ’s for decades before they were told to pull their horns in after our telecommunications infrastructure were sold off for a song. Look at all the workers on subsistence wages now in this country. Look at the unprecedented poverty levels with family’s holding two jobs yet living with their family’s in cars on the streets. Look at the constant political bickering over funding for basic health and education because the domestic economy has been gutted by the same neo liberal pirates for so long .
Remember the mass ongoing protests against the Employment Contracts Act 1991 ? ,- and then the sell out to big business by the public unions vetoing the call of the private unions who wanted a rolling general strike? You said so yourself , Chris.
Recall Michael Fay and David Richwhite and the BNZ bank sale? The deregulation of NZ ‘s banking industry’s and the buying up of the same by Australian banks, with their punitive ‘fees’ and jacked up mortgage interest rates, – particularly affecting farmers and private residents alike?
If we really wanted to rectify the current situation we live under and resuscitate the rural sector we would be dismantling the neo liberalism of the past 3 decades.
But not before characters like Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson, Jenny Shipley , Mike Moore and all the rest responsible were dragged before our courts for treason and had their titles stripped. And for posthumous penalty’s, – assets and the like to be stripped. Irrespective of current beneficiary’s of their nefarious wrong doings. Then we should be looking at the NZ Institute ( formerly called the Business Roundtable ) and doing the same.
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Those services mentioned above were built up by generations of gritty New Zealanders over decades to provide the basic necessities of life and ensure people did not live in poverty in a purported first world nation. They were the great generation, who saw what war, poverty and deprivation did to a people. The population were happy to pay taxes for those first class services because it was considered vital and even the lowest of workers could afford to pay it out of their weekly surplus. All benefited.
Even the wealthy.
And there were plenty of millionaires in NZ under that system. But greedy eyes both here and overseas looked on NZ as just another fat calf ripe for the slaughter and its people as absolutely inconsequential. They were the neo liberals. Led by those criminals who call themselves the ‘Mont Pelerin society’ of the ‘London square mile’ in England.
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New Right Fight – Who are the New Right?
http://www.newrightfight.co.nz/pageA.html
Ruthanasia – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthanasia
New Zealand – In a Land of Plenty Full Doco – YouTube
Video for New Zealand – In a Land of Plenty Full Doco▶ 1:44:13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x04aJ_ICqYo
New Zealand – Somebody Elses Country Full Doco – YouTube
Video for New Zealand – Somebody Elses Country Full Doco▶ 1:47:20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQvKIHV6n4
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It is no coincidence that Winston Peters has had a long 3 decades fight against these criminals. But I also suspect even he can only give moderate relief to the rural system as long as this criminality is allowed to carry on unnoticed and unchecked , and the root cause unaddressed.
There are now around 650,000 expat New Zealanders who now call Australia their permanent home. A huge number from such a small country. Almost akin to the Irish Diaspora of the 19th century. Most of them were the cream of NZ’s working population who saw the writing on the wall and escaped the coming poverty in NZ in the early 1990’s – as a DIRECT RESULT of the neo liberal ideology.
And the hypocrisy of these criminals was to then fabricate such lame excuses about NZ’s young workers as being ‘drug addled’ , lazy , ‘unreliable’ – while employers paid insultingly low wages because they were enabled to ( exemplified by the odious National party under John Key and Bill English – both classic examples of neo liberal globalists ).
This is how and why they justified cheap immigrant labour to pour into the country unchecked , – from country’s who were either authoritarian or who had no concept whatsoever of trade unionism. And who were prepared to work for slave wages or no wages at all in order to gain entry to this country. Thus putting downwards pressure on wages and conditions. AND breaking our laws both regards labour and Human Rights.
While at the same time passing ever more punitive laws to strip trade unions of any ability to campaign for their members. Urban OR rural.
And all through those preceding decades , and even more so now , – it was inferred that we were ‘xenophobic’ and that we must be ‘ tolerant’ and embrace ‘multiculturalism’ ,- which really was just a cynical code for…
” We want a class of cheap laborers to man our industry’s that are casual, compliant and expendable and easily gotten rid of if they rock the boat”…
I hope Peters can affect some modicum of relief for the rural sector, but even he and his party know that as long as neo liberalism is allowed to remain so entrenched in this country all attempts will be tinkering with the problem. And I suspect that if they could, – NZ First would be the first in line to close down neo liberalism in a heart beat.
And actually , … are about the only ones now who have the motivation to do so.
They have long seen the destructive criminality that has caused the gutting of our rural sector and widespread poverty caused by neo liberalism. And this is also why the big business community hates and fears NZ First and Winston Peters.
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