GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – Stunning performance by The Silver Ferns

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Wow! Just… Wow!

What a stunning performance by The Silver Ferns to win the World Cup.

If you ever wondered what difference a coach makes to a team , just look at what Noeline Taurua has achieved in under a year.

It seems incredible that her contract with Netball New Zealand has been allowed to end with the final whistle.

Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Well done Silver Ferns!!!

    Also bizarre that their coach is not being retained!

    Also it is about time our Women’s sports teams were all paid parity. Sad in the 21c and with a women prime minister that women are still paid a fraction of men in professional sport in NZ.

    The first thing they should do, is make our TV sports mandatory to have 50% equal coverage of both women and mens sports. Aka it is a catch 22 that men get most of the media coverage on TV and news then get to claim they get more sponsorship because people are more interested in watching it. If we have equal coverage then that old chestnut would be removed. Sponsers who want TV and news coverage will get it equally from womens sports news and TV coverage, and so then start to sponsor it equally with the men to protect their bottom line.

    While they are about it, government should regulate to have 25% local content that is not ‘façadism’ aka NZ commentator on overseas produced footage as well as removal of taxpayer funding used for private equity firms that under the above rules have enabled NZ to not own most of our media now. It is laughable that creative NZ is giving funding opportunities away to wealthy overseas companies to mimic overseas shows and of course nearly a million in taxpayers money to ‘Jono and Ben’, instead of something deeper and more useful to the population. When Australians made more local content mandatory it made their local film industry stronger.

    Instead is seems NZ does the neoliberal solution and gives unlimited tax cuts to the worlds most richest film industry to film here … and change the law to remove NZ film workers rights so they can be paid less.

    I wonder why we have less and less high paid jobs in NZ’s growing low wage economy, surprise, surprise, when tax payers money is always spend on subsidising billionaires rather than giving a hand up to grass roots industries, up and coming people, or training and opportunities for local management and personal development, that create skills here, and high paid jobs!

    Taxpayers giving money to billionaires for America’s cup and The Hobbit, for example are really just examples of ‘trickle down’ mentality at work. Maybe if tax payers money is instead spent on real local industry they would create more jobs and wealth here, rather than giving it to billionaires who could easily fund it themselves or raise sponsorship without taking it away from taxpayers and ratepayers who are getting poorer and poorer, having less well paid jobs, skills and experience retained in NZ and the end game of losing control over your countries media and sports and not being able to create or retain NZ skills here.

    Already there is huge discrimination against the Gen X who have mostly born the brunt of Rogernomics, the huge student loans compounding daily, the high interest rates for borrowing, the constant layoffs through the 1990’s and the new neoliberal discrimination against paying for decades of skills and experience (why would you when you pay a fraction of the price for someone with 2 -3 years experience and make more short term profit).

    This has affected NZ a lot more than other countries as our obsession with overseas (both funding and more recently to bring over over countries workers) has meant we now have broken industries that are being destroyed. Think Fonterra and the amount of damage the Theo Spirings years have taken, and now most of NZ biggest companies profits are enjoyed and run by overseas nationals for overseas interests. When things go wrong, it is easy to claim tax loses and just make more people redundant or close down the factories (Cadbury) and lose more ability to ‘value add’ in NZ.

    The more the ‘trickle down’ mentality and corporate welfare becomes the norm in NZ the more NZ becomes a low wage, unproductive, criminally active (as the only way to make money), poorly skilled and socially destroyed society who suffer from increased depression, suicide, mental illness, poverty and addiction, as real life and real opportunities for more and more people born here dry up and they are discriminated against in their own country (while nobody cares, aka world champion silver ferns get a fraction of support of what the equivalent world champion men get and many give up professional sport early, because they find it too difficult with their other full time work). Great message for our daughters and society! sarcasm.

  2. Not retaining a brilliant coach is as bizarre as the appointment of an inexperienced coach who impressed the same lot at interview with the right jargon and failed at her job.

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