If you intend to take over a political party, your motivation to do so should be driven by a deep political belief that you have better ideas than the current leadership and that those ideas are filled with so many self-evident truths that your disloyalty is forgiven and a better set of ideas put in place under your leadership and authority.
To date, Todd Muller, the newly elected leader of the National Party who ousted Simon Bridges, has managed to not justify why he should have taken over or articulated any vision for what National would do if they won power in September.
Add on top of this lack of leadership, all the media interviews Todd Muller has appeared on over the last 7 days which have been considered so bad that National Party cheerleaders like Mike Hosking and Mark Richardson have publicly and aggressively denounced Muller’s first week as a leader.
This smells like the desperation of backbench MPs who saw the terrible poll numbers for Simon and in fear replaced him in the hope they wouldn’t become unemployed by getting voted out in September.
In such blind panic moments of self-interest, we need to be sympathetic to the National Party. Fear of unemployment, a reality many New Zealanders are now facing in the tens of thousands post the lockdown, looks like it has driven National to elect a leader whose only real motivation was naked ambition mixed with frightened privilege.
How else can you explain their appointment of white candidates for the first dozen positions on the Party list?
This was blind panic and naked privilege at work and in that frenzy of self-interest National defined ambition as white and selected thus.
It’s not that National actively wanted to silence Māori perspective in decision making, it’s just that they forgot about everybody but themselves.
When your only defence on why you have no Māori leadership in your front bench is ‘But Paul Goldsmith is Māori’, you know you’ve had a bad day.
Now National COULD have simply turned around and said, ‘we are selecting on meritocracy’ and argued the best people were selected.
But they didn’t do that, their first response was claiming Goldsmith was Māori because this hadn’t been a meritocracy, it had been a self-interested lolly scramble for power.
National were blindsided by their own blindspot.
We ended the week with Todd Muller blurting out that there was nothing wrong with being white and Judith Collins having the gall to claim she was sick of being demonised for her ethnicity.
Really Judith?
Ask Māori what it’s like to be demonised for their ethnicity.
National are passively racist and this ultra defensiveness of their whiteness painfully revealing.
I don’t think National MPs are racist, I think they are self-focused and have shown us all in their scramble for survival that they are willing to sacrifice anyone else for that survival.
Are those the people we want running the Government at a time when we are all trying to survive?
I think National supporters will look back on Simon Bridges 29% as a golden result compared to what Todd Muller will end up getting them.
First published on Waatea News.
Yawn. You can’t please the woke, Simon Bridges and Paula Benefit who identify as Maori, didn’t please the woke either.
NZ First as a party in power who probably have the most Maori as a percentage are ‘racist’ according to the woke.
Last time I looked Jacinda the darling of the nation and Grant looked ‘white’ and had the least diversity in the top 2 in terms of woke speak (in which ethnicity is the only indicator of diversity), but they are very popular….
Rather than looking at the ethnicity of the candidate….maybe look a bit further into the policy and how it helps Maori… or doesn’t might be a start.
When The Maori party were in power, they appear to have helped the Natz make conditions worse for most Maori, and on the side they were steadily removing Maori’s number no 2 spot in NZ for ethnicity and thus makes them vulnerable going forward in terms of voting power…. COL seemed to have continued the trend while botching up the census that might have made it clear even for the dimmest.
I’ve pointed out that it is only a matter of time before new ethnic groups will vote out the Maori seats as being ‘racist’… apparently we are not a bicultural country anymore and the treaty of Waitangi should be celebrating multiculturalism. You don’t see Maori or woke challenging this view at all. On the other hand, a bunch of white guys gathering is apparently white supremacists in action.
In the name of expanding neoliberalism, massive demands on the social welfare of NZ are being introduced with huge competition to get NZ benefits shared out more and more by insatiable demand…
As Mike Treen used to point out, our essential skills of chefs, dairy cattle farmer, cafe/restaurant manager, retail manager, carpenter, dairy cattle farm worker, retail supervisor, aged or disabled carer, truck driver, registered nurse (aged care) should be filled by NZ school leavers and training…
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/08/07/must-read-migration-chefs-and-essential-skills/
Instead somehow a bizarre (I’d consider it brainwashing) u-turn in the discourse has led to NZ importing in massive amounts of poor people who now compete with NZ’s workers creating massive poverty here… It’s not an accident and in some type of Stockholm syndrome or re-education process at work, because now those that predicted the doom, are now in the other camp of expanding poverty in NZ with more migrant visas…
Some of the headlines that are predictors of where NZ is going….
Focus on housing squeeze, not refugees – Whanganui mayor
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395707/focus-on-housing-squeeze-not-refugees-whanganui-mayor
Aging population NZ demographics
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12281479
NZ ain’t the only unpopulated place in the Pacific that seems to be targeted… helps when drugs flood in…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/24/the-new-drug-highway-pacific-islands-at-centre-of-cocaine-trafficking-boom
And where are all the ingredients coming from?
“Though some clandestine labs that make fentanyl from scratch have popped up sporadically in Mexico, cartels are still very much reliant upon Chinese companies to get the precursor drugs.
Huge amounts of these mail-order components can be traced to a single, state-subsidized company in Wuhan that shut down after the outbreak earlier this year, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, which monitors Chinese websites selling fentanyl.
“The quarantine of Wuhan and all the chaos there definitely affected the fentanyl trade, particularly between China and Mexico,” said Ben Westhoff, author of “Fentanyl, Inc.”
https://nypost.com/2020/04/19/coronavirus-lockdowns-are-crippling-the-global-drug-trade/
Sadly the woke seem hell bent on re-running meaningless headlines which help neoliberism, instead of putting 2 and 2 together to work out Maori are losing ground in every area and the woke are leading the charge with lazy headlines on lazy racism, that make the other 98% of non woke, turn away from the left.
Hmm, great way to demonstrate how you don’t understand what the issue is. Not going to bother trying to explain it to you as I doubt you would be able to understand it even then.
Ignore that other comment, was posted accidentally, meant for something else
I hope that last sentence of yours comes true. However I fear this Country is still divided down the middle as it ever was and there is much hardship to come before the election. Just follow the money and watch the National dirty tricks brigade. I fear we have a hell of a fight on our hands
Yes National will institute another round of “Austerity” like they did 2009 – 2017, as records show they love using it to steal the rags left on the backs of the working poor, disabled and elders.
Hear hear as all right wing parties the word over do.
Read Noam Chomsky
It goes much deeper than National not having one Maori in their front bench (and not just a Maori, not one anyone other than white European).
National do not represent Maori as a people, of course Maori and others can be National Party members, MPs and even a PM, but it comes as no surprise that until very recently, the fact that Bridges and Bennett were Maori was barely noticed. They were not there representing the Maori point of view, there really isn’t a place for that in National.
The left is more conducive to Maori representation as Maori culture tends to be more collectivist. It is interesting that NZ First try to place themselves as centrist and indeed, Peters and Jones walk easily in both worlds.
So while individual Maori are able to work within the National Party, there is little representation of Tikanga Maori there, so even if Maori were in that front bench, they would not be there as Maori, representing Maori. It is absolutely fine that we retain the distinction, as New Zealand is the only home of Maori Tikanga, we do not have to see it as “apartheid” or anything approaching that.
Day 9 of Todd Watch: media training day or not available to the public day.
Day 10 of Todd watch: the Govt must do what I say day or Waiting for Judiths book day.
Look, we do have a great fight in our hands. But listing back and forth here won’t win it. Seymour’s brainlessness is gathering momentum and his supporters are getting stronger and more vocal. We need to be on his page(s) trying to re-educate those lost souls who think he’s the new messiah.
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