There are two Jacindas.
There is Crisis Jacinda who leads with kindness, compassion and grace and then there is Cautious Jacinda who stymies truly transformative policy for tinkering around the edges.
The decision to tinker rather than transform is a political decision and those who are left behind are the societal casualties of that political cowardice.
So who are Labour leaving behind?
Prisoners:
Our remand prison population has blown out and no one seems to be noticing because the general prison population is being kept deflated by rehousing prisoners in private home detention. The reforms and rebuild of our prisons simply haven’t happened and the toxic culture inside these prisons have not changed in a meaningful manner. Over the pandemic prisoners were locked up for huge stretches of time, expect deep seated frustrations inside our prison to rupture at some point.
Migrant Workers:
They have been left high and dry by being excluded from welfare or wage wage subsidies. It seems incredibly unfair if we are simply going to turn our backs on them.
Beneficiaries:
The Government have refused to implement all the Welfare Reform recommendations while creating a two tier welfare system split between the deserving and undeserving poor.
Workers:
If the pandemic taught us anything, it is that the definition of ‘essential worker’ usually means working class worker whose risk to personal safety by working gets no respect in terms of living wage and good working conditions. The CTU have put up a very valid proposal for sick pay in NZ which has been ignored alongside any meaningful employment reforms.
If Labour win a second term, those they left behind in their first term deserve extra attention and real reform.
First published on Waatea News.
Lange and the Wage Slave Labour used up their first chance when the brought in Rogernomics… their second when under Clark and Goff they signed the Free (No Zealand) Slaves Agreement with the Chinese dictatorship…
Only gNats and people who delight (secretly or otherwise) at their rising QV can see the Wage Slave Labour Party as anything remotely “left”…
Well it would help also if we had a central Labour Organisation–NZCTU–that stopped its class collaboration and wanking on about tri-partism and partnership, and got down to basic organising of workers to support action in their own interests. An urgent fightback is needed against Covid Capitalism–where employers under cover of C19 union busted and stole leave entitlements and trousered millions in bailout cash. Fair Pay Agreements need to become a reality straight after the election.
Strong working class leadership is lacking in this country and has been for too many years. There is formidable organising capacity out there as anyone that attended the motorway stopping Auckland TPPA day of Action in 2016, the Climate Strikes, and the recent BLM marches would know.
The four excellent points Martyn has made need wide support and action to resolve.
@castro.
You’re wrong, which sadly for you, is de rigueur.
Lange didn’t “…brought in rogernomics”. roger douglas did. By knifing Lange in the back.
Then Lange warned, that if caucus allowed roger back [in] he, Lange, would resign as prime minister. Which he did. Then Lange died.
And by that very action, it wasn’t even little roger who brought himself ‘back in’. It was Big Business who brought neo liberal roger, pig incarcerator, pig torturer, pig flesh eater and scum bag back in. Not disrespect to actual scum.
It’s Kiwi-as big business who has it’s arm up jacinda’s skirt tugging on her strings. big business has had it’s arm up our politicians for generations. Not up us.We’re of no value to them unless we insist we get what we taxes paid for. Not since M.J.Savage’s day would be my opinion.
big business simply waited until [we] built up enough value in our state owned enterprises and entities then when they were fattest and we were happiest [they] walked in and stole them off us for their wealth creation. Aye Boys? Fay? Richwhite?Chandler? Hart? Wattie? Fletcher? Gibb? etc…
Isn’t that correct Boys? A little fun and games? Made good coin? Now, you can drive your Ferrari’s past homeless people for a giggle on the way to The Pelican Club? Or in fay’s case, fly your helicopter over the homeless while on your way to your Mercury Island?
The thing with barking up the wrong tree is that I think we must cut down the forest until we’re left with the last tree. Then surely, that must be the tree, right? It’s time to cut that last tree down.
But we’re still lost in the woods and the dog’s run off scared shitless to instead go and bark safely at the Chinese or single parents or pot smokers or Maori or unemployed or cigarette smokers or car drivers or farmers or Muslims or LGBTQ people or Aliens if it could find any. ( Dog? Hint. Balclutha. )
Well that must be the saddest most depressing comment you have ever posted Mr Countryboy. Why? Because every single word you write is true and you have probably even understated the magnitude of the destruction and decimation working people have endured since the Lange government
Lange was an egotist often blinded by his own stature.
Do remember he set up the education system changes with a private schooler Picot and wrecked the existing publicly elected Education Boards who managed schools efficiently and with many decades of experience in lobbying the govt for money and resources.
We still lack the cohesive management of school provided by the Education Boards but are slowly looking at adopting a very watered down version.
Lange’s motivation was he was angry with his daughters teacher and could not get his own way so was easily manipulated.
As background briefing, I served as a public service solicitor in New Zealand (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Legal Section, 1979-1984), Papua New Guinea (Department of Justice, Waigani, 1984-1986) and Hong Kong (Attorney General’s Chambers and Department of Justice, 1986-2008). On subsequent visits home, I was devastated to learn how many of my former clients in the Ministry were summarily being dumped into unemployment due to the iniquitous and unconscionable Neoliberal “Rogernomics” of the Fourth Labour Government. That of course was about as far from socially responsible capitalism and governance as it is possible to get and has happened throughout the nation for decades. Reversal and rectification is required in the interests of the wellbeing of – and social justice for – all New Zealanders, not an avaricious elite. Most of my former Legal Section colleagues were graduates of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School and had been taught by Professor Geoffrey Palmer, who became Deputy Prime Minister in 1984. By contrast with Rogernomics – and as an example of truly socially intelligent and democratic responsible government – Dr Paul Cleary notes that Norway, with its consensus-based egalitarian politics, “won a lasting fortune” to secure its petroleum and hydroelectric infrastructure from multinational predators. For the present and future wellbeing of its people Norway has established a well-managed and protected sovereign wealth fund.1 (Paul Cleary Trillion Dollar Baby: How Norway beat the oil giants and won a lasting fortune, Black Inc., 2016)
Unfortunately, at least for now, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – or any other ethical, socially liberal, socioeconomically-progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal-style leader anywhere in the current elitist, globalised, Fascistic (because cruel and repressive) Neoliberal Western world of the “Greedies” (the term used by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon of the then centre-right National Party) has next to zero chance of achieving the only sound, kind, cultural, behavioural and governmental value embracing everyone in the community that there is. For practical purposes, that value includes retrieval of New Zealand’s purloined (or more accurately “fenced” – by the Government!) profitable public assets and services from the domestic and international private predators to whom they were so disgracefully gifted. The long-term earnings, from stopping the literal haemorrhaging into private plutocratic pockets of what in truth and justice is public money that rightfully belongs to the people and future generations of New Zealand, will far outweigh the short-term cost of renationalisation (which could be covered by Keynesian stimulus spending – including by printing money if required).
It would be an unthinkable brain explosion if, say, America were to privatise the Hoover Dam or Norway its hydroelectric, petroleum and rail resources – allegedly to pay off short term debt – but Neoliberal ideology was the real motivation of the New Zealand Labour Party’s pampered, socially tone deaf, Baby Boom Secret Seven Young Upstarts (namely David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett, David Caygill and Mike Moore) who emerged in the 1984 Labour Government without first disclosing their nefarious policies for evaluation by the electorate. For some years before 1984, the Baby Boomers had been plotting their treasonous Neoliberal revolution in secret collusion with big business. No police investigation of whether possibly dodgy deals were done appears to have occurred. In the interests of maintaining the integrity of democracy, a statutory (or better still, constitutional) amendment is required to prevent nondisclosure of such consequential and harmful policies from happening – and to invalidate any election in which there has been such incredible deceit.
After 1984, there quickly followed the “sell-profitable-public-assets-and-services-to-private-predators” State Owned Enterprises Act, drafted by then Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. They and subsequent Neoliberal New Zealand Governments have blood on their hands for such policies which, predictably and tragically, were calculated – that is, they were obviously likely to and did – result in the destruction of countless thriving communities, in which people were once connected to and mutually supportive of each other. Unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental distress and ill health, shortened life expectancy and suicides inevitably spiked, as did crime rates. All in the interests of enriching the rich who allegedly would somehow allow some of their Government-gifted spoils to “trickle down” to the rest of us.
Palmer too proved to be a treacherous, ruthlessly ideological turncoat to extremely elitist Freidmanite Neoliberal Chicago School economics. This was despite being mentored in his early political career by the impeccably principled, social democratic, professional economist Sir Wallace Edward (Bill) Rowling, who was the greatest Prime Minister (1974-1975) New Zealand never had for long enough. It is high time he was given due historical credit for that. Rowling and his Finance Minister Bob Tizard applied FDR-Keynesian government stimulus-spending economic policies and were finding new markets to cushion the impact of the recession which followed Britain dumping us (and Australia) to join the European Economic Community. It is virtually certain that Bill Rowling – had he not been blindsided into stepping down when he need not have to preserve party unity – would have won the 1984 general election, but for being undermined by the seven Neoliberal Baby Boom Upstarts.
Until 1984, both the main New Zealand political parties – but Labour especially, rivalled Scandinavia with its social democratic policies of “money second, people first”, full employment, social housing, free education to tertiary level, free healthcare, and social welfare to help those unable to contribute through no fault of their own. Earlier in 2020, an Australian television documentary publicised the horrific unemployment and slum landlord housing crisis inflicted on some 300,000 Kiwis (pre-Covid19) and Prime Minister Ardern’s so far thwarted (including by Neoliberal New Zealand Labourites) efforts to, as she said, “reach a consensus” on her public housing programme. That will continue so long as too many voters in New Zealand (or in democracies anywhere else, including Australia) persist with embracing moral and political analysis at the lowest Bob Jones or “Glue Pot Tavern” levels perpetrated by Neoliberal propaganda and paid political advertising.
Australian television channels have been broadcasting “feel good”, sometimes touching sometimes funny, podcasts made by people “confined to quarters” for the worthy cause of uplifting us all. But so far the clips have invariably originated from comfortable middle to upper class homes. Nothing from anyone who is homeless or the already 700,000 caught in the built-in 5% unemployment and poverty trap mandated by Neoliberals for the last four decades and counting – for which they are punished by suspension of benefit if they don’t waste their time meeting mandated quotas of highly stressful searches for jobs that are deliberately programmed to not even exist.
It was once the task of ethically responsible, properly funded and staffed, “full employment” governments to seek suitable jobs for the jobless. In 1975 New Zealand – due to Rowling-Tizards’ Keynesian economic policies after the first oil shock, and Britain joining the EEC – there were only 6000 registered unemployed despite then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon having boasted in 1972 that “I’ve spent it all”. The current ideologically built-in human carnage in Australia (and proportionately also New Zealand) stands to increase given that unemployment here is set to reach an estimated 10-15% (1.4 to 2.1 million people) despite the government’s good but too-patchy stimulus spending to beat the virus. Also on television, there have been advertisements by a well-meaning charity with a hopeless task that depict the homeless sheltering beneath a highway overpass. Further reflecting callous Neoliberal-normalised governmental failure, the ads seek donations to buy “backpack beds” which are essentially sleeping bags in the form of a small tent. Utterly and unforgivably intolerable, especially as winter sets in.
You couldn’t have said it any better countryboy
You missed Nact privatising ACC so getting their dirty little hands on a massive wad of cash mortgaged against injured Kiwis and Kiwis not treated.
Helen did bring that back into govt coffers which we should never forget.
Before ACC you got health care as needed regardless of where or when you suffered misfortune.
Savage was a figurehead and the real work was done within the party and Labour movement.
Agree with last paragraph. Just the guy who pointed that out in public was a bigger controller, dear John A. Lee.
After reading that list why would you ever bother to vote for the NZLP unless you were ignorant selfish or stupid.
Most of us commenting here are on the same page in understanding the reality of political neo liberal control in this country but how can we get real change when there is no political movement dedicated challenging the status quo.
The Adern / Robertson conglomerate is only in power because National isn’t , there is no other option.
With the general election fast approaching i will be voting in the two referendum’s but i just can’t bring myself to vote for all of the above.
I am open to changing my mind.
The Privatisation of NZ’s Health System is on the way! Join the dots. Labour appoint a ‘shill’ to run the review. Heather Simpson. Then $30m later … Maori getting shafted in a (dissen)genuine reform of Maori Health. No Mana Motuhake Hauora Service. Government signing up a ‘trade’ agreement with the UK. UK’s NHS is privatised and mostly with US health companies owning the contracts for services. NZ Maori Healthcare Services will be told to “Partner up” with a foreign investment company to tender/win contracts!
Well said. She’s a lesser watted Hillary Clinton. I’ll vote for whoever attends most to climate change and the neediest. And the balls to deliver. National crossed across my considerations after Muller’s latest speech. After the Welfare State generation, who? It’ll be over.
A rather short list, there must be more left behind.
Martyn
You forgot Business – small businesses in particular. They employ your fellow Labour voters. Read this and you’ll see why:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12341630
As background briefing, I served as a public service solicitor in New Zealand (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Legal Section, 1979-1984), Papua New Guinea (Department of Justice, Waigani, 1984-1986) and Hong Kong (Attorney General’s Chambers and Department of Justice, 1986-2008). On subsequent visits home, I was devastated to learn how many of my former clients in the Ministry were summarily being dumped into unemployment due to the iniquitous and unconscionable Neoliberal “Rogernomics” of the Fourth Labour Government. That of course was about as far from socially responsible capitalism and governance as it is possible to get and has happened throughout the nation for decades. Reversal and rectification is required in the interests of the wellbeing of – and social justice for – all New Zealanders, not an avaricious elite. Most of my former Legal Section colleagues were graduates of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School and had been taught by Professor Geoffrey Palmer, who became Deputy Prime Minister in 1984. By contrast with Rogernomics – and as an example of truly socially intelligent and democratic responsible government – Dr Paul Cleary notes that Norway, with its consensus-based egalitarian politics, “won a lasting fortune” to secure its petroleum and hydroelectric infrastructure from multinational predators. For the present and future wellbeing of its people Norway has established a well-managed and protected sovereign wealth fund.1 (Paul Cleary Trillion Dollar Baby: How Norway beat the oil giants and won a lasting fortune, Black Inc., 2016)
Unfortunately, at least for now, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – or any other ethical, socially liberal, socioeconomically-progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal-style leader anywhere in the current elitist, globalised, Fascistic (because cruel and repressive) Neoliberal Western world of the “Greedies” (the term used by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon of the then centre-right National Party) has next to zero chance of achieving the only sound, kind, cultural, behavioural and governmental value embracing everyone in the community that there is. For practical purposes, that value includes retrieval of New Zealand’s purloined (or more accurately “fenced” – by the Government!) profitable public assets and services from the domestic and international private predators to whom they were so disgracefully gifted. The long-term earnings, from stopping the literal haemorrhaging into private plutocratic pockets of what in truth and justice is public money that rightfully belongs to the people and future generations of New Zealand, will far outweigh the short-term cost of renationalisation (which could be covered by Keynesian stimulus spending – including by printing money if required).
It would be an unthinkable brain explosion if, say, America were to privatise the Hoover Dam or Norway its hydroelectric, petroleum and rail resources – allegedly to pay off short term debt – but Neoliberal ideology was the real motivation of the New Zealand Labour Party’s pampered, socially tone deaf, Baby Boom Secret Seven Young Upstarts (namely David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett, David Caygill and Mike Moore) who emerged in the 1984 Labour Government without first disclosing their nefarious policies for evaluation by the electorate. For some years before 1984, the Baby Boomers had been plotting their treasonous Neoliberal revolution in secret collusion with big business. No police investigation of whether possibly dodgy deals were done appears to have occurred. In the interests of maintaining the integrity of democracy, a statutory (or better still, constitutional) amendment is required to prevent nondisclosure of such consequential and harmful policies from happening – and to invalidate any election in which there has been such incredible fraud.
After 1984, there quickly followed the “sell-profitable-public-assets-and-services-to-private-predators” State Owned Enterprises Act, drafted by then Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. They and subsequent Neoliberal New Zealand Governments have blood on their hands for such policies which, predictably and tragically, were calculated – that is, they were obviously likely to and did – result in the destruction of countless thriving communities, in which people were once connected to and mutually supportive of each other. Unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental distress and ill health, shortened life expectancy and suicides inevitably spiked, as did crime rates. All in the interests of enriching the rich who allegedly would somehow allow some of their Government-gifted spoils to “trickle down” to the rest of us.
Palmer too proved to be a treacherous, ruthlessly ideological turncoat to extremely elitist Freidmanite Neoliberal Chicago School economics. This was despite being mentored in his early political career by the impeccably principled, social democratic, professional economist Sir Wallace Edward (Bill) Rowling, who was the greatest Prime Minister (1974-1975) New Zealand never had for long enough. It is high time he was given due historical credit for that. Rowling and his Finance Minister Bob Tizard applied FDR-Keynesian government stimulus-spending economic policies and were finding new markets to cushion the impact of the recession which followed Britain dumping us (and Australia) to join the European Economic Community. It is virtually certain that Bill Rowling – had he not been blindsided into stepping down when he need not have to preserve party unity – would have won the 1984 general election, but for being undermined by the seven Neoliberal Baby Boom Upstarts.
Until 1984, both the main New Zealand political parties – but Labour especially, rivalled Scandinavia with its social democratic policies of “money second, people first”, full employment, social housing, free education to tertiary level, free healthcare, and social welfare to help those unable to contribute through no fault of their own. Earlier in 2020, an Australian television documentary publicised the horrific unemployment and slum landlord housing crisis inflicted on some 300,000 Kiwis (pre-Covid19) and Prime Minister Ardern’s so far thwarted (including by Neoliberal New Zealand Labourites) efforts to, as she said, “reach a consensus” on her public housing programme. That will continue so long as too many voters in New Zealand (or in democracies anywhere else, including Australia) persist with embracing moral and political analysis at the lowest Bob Jones or “Glue Pot Tavern” levels perpetrated by Neoliberal propaganda and paid political advertising.
Australian television channels have been broadcasting “feel good”, sometimes touching sometimes funny, podcasts made by people “confined to quarters” for the worthy cause of uplifting us all. But so far the clips have invariably originated from comfortable middle to upper class homes. Nothing from anyone who is homeless or the already 700,000 caught in the built-in 5% unemployment and poverty trap mandated by Neoliberals for the last four decades and counting – for which they are punished by suspension of benefit if they don’t waste their time meeting mandated quotas of highly stressful searches for jobs that are deliberately programmed to not even exist.
It was once the task of ethically responsible, properly funded and staffed, “full employment” governments to seek suitable jobs for the jobless. In 1975 New Zealand – due to Rowling-Tizards’ Keynesian economic policies after the first oil shock, and Britain joining the EEC – there were only 6000 registered unemployed despite then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon having boasted in 1972 that “I’ve spent it all”. The current ideologically built-in human carnage in Australia (and proportionately also New Zealand) stands to increase given that unemployment here is set to reach an estimated 10-15% (1.4 to 2.1 million people) despite the government’s good but too-patchy stimulus spending to beat the virus. Also on television, there have been advertisements by a well-meaning charity with a hopeless task that depict the homeless sheltering beneath a highway overpass. Further reflecting callous Neoliberal-normalised governmental failure, the ads seek donations to buy “backpack beds” which are essentially sleeping bags in the form of a small tent. Utterly and unforgivably intolerable, especially as winter sets in.
Respects to my elder, who hasn’t been bought off like so many of the boomer generation. I’ve been against the friends-of-the -rich since they took power but not so much for the preceding economy. But you make a good case for it’s either the people first or money first.
As background briefing, I served as a public service solicitor in New Zealand (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Legal Section, 1979-1984), Papua New Guinea (Department of Justice, Waigani, 1984-1986) and Hong Kong (Attorney General’s Chambers and Department of Justice, 1986-2008). On subsequent visits home, I was devastated to learn how many of my former clients in the Ministry were summarily being dumped into unemployment due to the iniquitous and unconscionable Neoliberal “Rogernomics” of the Fourth Labour Government. That of course was about as far from socially responsible capitalism and governance as it is possible to get and has happened throughout the nation for decades. Reversal and rectification is required in the interests of the wellbeing of – and social justice for – all New Zealanders, not an avaricious elite. Most of my former Legal Section colleagues were graduates of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School and had been taught by Professor Geoffrey Palmer, who became Deputy Prime Minister in 1984. By contrast with Rogernomics – and as an example of truly socially intelligent and democratic responsible government – Dr Paul Cleary notes that Norway, with its consensus-based egalitarian politics, “won a lasting fortune” to secure its petroleum and hydroelectric infrastructure from multinational predators. For the present and future wellbeing of its people Norway has established a well-managed and protected sovereign wealth fund.1 (Paul Cleary Trillion Dollar Baby: How Norway beat the oil giants and won a lasting fortune, Black Inc., 2016)
Unfortunately, at least for now, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – or any other ethical, socially liberal, socioeconomically-progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal-style leader anywhere in the current elitist, globalised, Fascistic (because cruel and repressive) Neoliberal Western world of the “Greedies” (the term used by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon of the then centre-right National Party) has next to zero chance of achieving the only sound, kind, cultural, behavioural and governmental value embracing everyone in the community that there is. For practical purposes, that value includes retrieval of New Zealand’s purloined (or more accurately “fenced” – by the Government!) profitable public assets and services from the domestic and international private predators to whom they were so disgracefully gifted. The long-term earnings, from stopping the literal haemorrhaging into private plutocratic pockets of what in truth and justice is public money that rightfully belongs to the people and future generations of New Zealand, will far outweigh the short-term cost of renationalisation (which could be covered by Keynesian stimulus spending – including by printing money if required).
It would be an unthinkable brain explosion if, say, America were to privatise the Hoover Dam or Norway its hydroelectric, petroleum and rail resources – allegedly to pay off short term debt – but Neoliberal ideology was the real motivation of the New Zealand Labour Party’s pampered, socially tone deaf, Baby Boom Secret Seven Young Upstarts (namely David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett, David Caygill and Mike Moore) who emerged in the 1984 Labour Government without first disclosing their nefarious policies for evaluation by the electorate. For some years before 1984, the Baby Boomers had been plotting their treasonous Neoliberal revolution in secret collusion with big business. No police investigation of whether possibly dodgy deals were done appears to have occurred. In the interests of maintaining the integrity of democracy, a statutory (or better still, constitutional) amendment is required to prevent nondisclosure of such consequential and harmful policies from happening – and to invalidate any election in which there has been such incredible deceit.
After 1984, there quickly followed the “sell-profitable-public-assets-and-services-to-private-predators” State Owned Enterprises Act, drafted by then Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. They and subsequent Neoliberal New Zealand Governments have blood on their hands for such policies which, predictably and tragically, were calculated – that is, they were obviously likely to and did – result in the destruction of countless thriving communities, in which people were once connected to and mutually supportive of each other. Unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental distress and ill health, shortened life expectancy and suicides inevitably spiked, as did crime rates. All in the interests of enriching the rich who allegedly would somehow allow some of their Government-gifted spoils to “trickle down” to the rest of us.
Palmer too proved to be a treacherous, ruthlessly ideological turncoat to extremely elitist Freidmanite Neoliberal Chicago School economics. This was despite being mentored in his early political career by the impeccably principled, social democratic, professional economist Sir Wallace Edward (Bill) Rowling, who was the greatest Prime Minister (1974-1975) New Zealand never had for long enough. It is high time he was given due historical credit for that. Rowling and his Finance Minister Bob Tizard applied FDR-Keynesian government stimulus-spending economic policies and were finding new markets to cushion the impact of the recession which followed Britain dumping us (and Australia) to join the European Economic Community. It is virtually certain that Bill Rowling – had he not been blindsided into stepping down when he need not have to preserve party unity – would have won the 1984 general election, but for being undermined by the seven Neoliberal Baby Boom Upstarts.
Until 1984, both the main New Zealand political parties – but Labour especially, rivalled Scandinavia with its social democratic policies of “money second, people first”, full employment, social housing, free education to tertiary level, free healthcare, and social welfare to help those unable to contribute through no fault of their own. Earlier in 2020, an Australian television documentary publicised the horrific unemployment and slum landlord housing crisis inflicted on some 300,000 Kiwis (pre-Covid19) and Prime Minister Ardern’s so far thwarted (including by Neoliberal New Zealand Labourites) efforts to, as she said, “reach a consensus” on her public housing programme. That will continue so long as too many voters in New Zealand (or in democracies anywhere else, including Australia) persist with embracing moral and political analysis at the lowest Bob Jones or “Glue Pot Tavern” levels perpetrated by Neoliberal propaganda and paid political advertising.
Australian television channels have been broadcasting “feel good”, sometimes touching sometimes funny, podcasts made by people “confined to quarters” for the worthy cause of uplifting us all. But so far the clips have invariably originated from comfortable middle to upper class homes. Nothing from anyone who is homeless or the already 700,000 caught in the built-in 5% unemployment and poverty trap mandated by Neoliberals for the last four decades and counting – for which they are punished by suspension of benefit if they don’t waste their time meeting mandated quotas of highly stressful searches for jobs that are deliberately programmed to not even exist.
It was once the task of ethically responsible, properly funded and staffed, “full employment” governments to seek suitable jobs for the jobless. In 1975 New Zealand – due to Rowling-Tizards’ Keynesian economic policies after the first oil shock, and Britain joining the EEC – there were only 6000 registered unemployed despite then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon having boasted in 1972 that “I’ve spent it all”. The current ideologically built-in human carnage in Australia (and proportionately also New Zealand) stands to increase given that unemployment here is set to reach an estimated 10-15% (1.4 to 2.1 million people) despite the government’s good but too-patchy stimulus spending to beat the virus. Also on television, there have been advertisements by a well-meaning charity with a hopeless task that depict the homeless sheltering beneath a highway overpass. Further reflecting callous Neoliberal-normalised governmental failure, the ads seek donations to buy “backpack beds” which are essentially sleeping bags in the form of a small tent. Utterly and unforgivably intolerable, especially as winter sets in.
As background briefing, I served as a public service solicitor in New Zealand (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Legal Section, 1979-1984), Papua New Guinea (Department of Justice, Waigani, 1984-1986) and Hong Kong (Attorney General’s Chambers and Department of Justice, 1986-2008). On subsequent visits home, I was devastated to learn how many of my former clients in the Ministry were summarily being dumped into unemployment due to the iniquitous and unconscionable Neoliberal “Rogernomics” of the Fourth Labour Government. That of course was about as far from socially responsible capitalism and governance as it is possible to get and has happened throughout the nation for decades. Reversal and rectification is required in the interests of the wellbeing of – and social justice for – all New Zealanders, not an avaricious elite. Most of my former Legal Section colleagues were graduates of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School and had been taught by Professor Geoffrey Palmer, who became Deputy Prime Minister in 1984. By contrast with Rogernomics – and as an example of truly socially intelligent and democratic responsible government – Dr Paul Cleary notes that Norway, with its consensus-based egalitarian politics, “won a lasting fortune” to secure its petroleum and hydroelectric infrastructure from multinational predators. For the present and future wellbeing of its people Norway has established a well-managed and protected sovereign wealth fund.1 (Paul Cleary Trillion Dollar Baby: How Norway beat the oil giants and won a lasting fortune, Black Inc., 2016)
Unfortunately, at least for now, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – or any other ethical, socially liberal, socioeconomically-progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal-style leader anywhere in the current elitist, globalised, Fascistic (because cruel and repressive) Neoliberal Western world of the “Greedies” (the term used by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon of the then centre-right National Party) has next to zero chance of achieving the only sound, kind, cultural, behavioural and governmental value embracing everyone in the community that there is. For practical purposes, that value includes retrieval of New Zealand’s purloined (or more accurately “fenced” – by the Government!) profitable public assets and services from the domestic and international private predators to whom they were so disgracefully gifted. The long-term earnings, from stopping the literal haemorrhaging into private plutocratic pockets of what in truth and justice is public money that rightfully belongs to the people and future generations of New Zealand, will far outweigh the short-term cost of renationalisation (which could be covered by Keynesian stimulus spending – including by printing money if required).
It would be an unthinkable brain explosion if, say, America were to privatise the Hoover Dam or Norway its hydroelectric, petroleum and rail resources – allegedly to pay off short term debt – but Neoliberal ideology was the real motivation of the New Zealand Labour Party’s pampered, socially tone deaf, Baby Boom Secret Seven Young Upstarts (namely David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett, David Caygill and Mike Moore) who emerged in the 1984 Labour Government without first disclosing their nefarious policies for evaluation by the electorate. For some years before 1984, the Baby Boomers had been plotting their treasonous Neoliberal revolution in secret collusion with big business. No police investigation of whether possibly dodgy deals were done appears to have occurred. In the interests of maintaining the integrity of democracy, a statutory (or better still, constitutional) amendment is required to prevent nondisclosure of such consequential and harmful policies from happening – and to invalidate any election in which there has been such incredible deceit.
After 1984, there quickly followed the “sell-profitable-public-assets-and-services-to-private-predators” State Owned Enterprises Act, drafted by then Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. They and subsequent Neoliberal New Zealand Governments have blood on their hands for such policies which, predictably and tragically, were calculated – that is, they were obviously likely to and did – result in the destruction of countless thriving communities, in which people were once connected to and mutually supportive of each other. Unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental distress and ill health, shortened life expectancy and suicides inevitably spiked, as did crime rates. All in the interests of enriching the rich who allegedly would somehow allow some of their Government-gifted spoils to “trickle down” to the rest of us.
Palmer too proved to be a treacherous, ruthlessly ideological turncoat to extremely elitist Freidmanite Neoliberal Chicago School economics. This was despite being mentored in his early political career by the impeccably principled, social democratic, professional economist Sir Wallace Edward (Bill) Rowling, who was the greatest Prime Minister (1974-1975) New Zealand never had for long enough. It is high time he was given due historical credit for that. Rowling and his Finance Minister Bob Tizard applied FDR-Keynesian government stimulus-spending economic policies and were finding new markets to cushion the impact of the recession which followed Britain dumping us (and Australia) to join the European Economic Community. It is virtually certain that Bill Rowling – had he not been blindsided into stepping down when he need not have to preserve party unity – would have won the 1984 general election, but for being undermined by the seven Neoliberal Baby Boom Upstarts.
Until 1984, both the main New Zealand political parties – but Labour especially, rivalled Scandinavia with its social democratic policies of “money second, people first”, full employment, social housing, free education to tertiary level, free healthcare, and social welfare to help those unable to contribute through no fault of their own. Earlier in 2020, an Australian television documentary publicised the horrific unemployment and slum landlord housing crisis inflicted on some 300,000 Kiwis (pre-Covid19) and Prime Minister Ardern’s so far thwarted (including by Neoliberal New Zealand Labourites) efforts to, as she said, “reach a consensus” on her public housing programme. That will continue so long as too many voters in New Zealand (or in democracies anywhere else, including Australia) persist with embracing moral and political analysis at the lowest Bob Jones or “Glue Pot Tavern” levels perpetrated by Neoliberal propaganda and paid political advertising.
Australian television channels have been broadcasting “feel good”, sometimes touching sometimes funny, podcasts made by people “confined to quarters” for the worthy cause of uplifting us all. But so far the clips have invariably originated from comfortable middle to upper class homes. Nothing from anyone who is homeless or the already 700,000 caught in the built-in 5% unemployment and poverty trap mandated by Neoliberals for the last four decades and counting – for which they are punished by suspension of benefit if they don’t waste their time meeting mandated quotas of highly stressful searches for jobs that are deliberately programmed to not even exist.
It was once the task of ethically responsible, properly funded and staffed, “full employment” governments to seek suitable jobs for the jobless. In 1975 New Zealand – due to Rowling-Tizards’ Keynesian economic policies after the first oil shock, and Britain joining the EEC – there were only 6000 registered unemployed despite then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon having boasted in 1972 that “I’ve spent it all”. The current ideologically built-in human carnage in Australia (and proportionately also New Zealand) stands to increase given that unemployment here is set to reach an estimated 10-15% (1.4 to 2.1 million people) despite the government’s good but too-patchy stimulus spending to beat the virus. Also on television, there have been advertisements by a well-meaning charity with a hopeless task that depict the homeless sheltering beneath a highway overpass. Further reflecting callous Neoliberal-normalised governmental failure, the ads seek donations to buy “backpack beds” which are essentially sleeping bags in the form of a small tent. Utterly and unforgivably intolerable, especially as winter sets in.
[Sorry for the previous quadruple posts. This is an amended version.]
NEW ZEALAND AT THE CROSSROADS
The “crossroads” is whether, in the 2020 general election, New Zealanders will after nearly forty years at last reject elitist Neoliberal corporate welfarism and restore the inclusive social democracy enjoyed by all the people until 1984. As background briefing, I served as a public service solicitor in New Zealand (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Legal Section, 1979-1984), Papua New Guinea (1984-1986) and Hong Kong (1986-2008). On subsequent visits home, I was devastated to learn how many of my former clients in the Ministry were summarily being dumped into unemployment due to the iniquitous and unconscionable Neoliberal “Rogernomics” of the Fourth Labour Government. That, of course, was about as far from the socially responsible capitalism and governance which cares for all of the people as it is possible to get and has happened throughout the nation for decades. Reversal and rectification is required in the interests of the wellbeing of – and social justice for – all New Zealanders, not an avaricious elite.
Most of my former Legal Section colleagues were graduates of the Victoria University of Wellington Law School and had been taught by Professor Geoffrey Palmer, who became Deputy Prime Minister in 1984. By contrast with Roger-Palmernomics and its equally vicious successors – and as an example of truly intelligent socially, economically and democratically responsible government – Dr Paul Cleary notes that Norway, with its consensus-based egalitarian politics, “won a lasting fortune” to secure its petroleum and hydroelectric infrastructure from multinational predators. For the present and future wellbeing of its people Norway has established a well-managed and protected sovereign wealth fund.1 (Paul Cleary Trillion Dollar Baby: How Norway beat the oil giants and won a lasting fortune, Black Inc., 2016)
Unfortunately, at least for now, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern – or any other ethical, socially liberal, socioeconomically-progressive, Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal-style leader anywhere in the current elitist, overglobalised, Fascistic (because cruel and repressive) Neoliberal Western world of the “Greedies” (the term used by former Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon of the then centre-right National Party) has next to zero chance of achieving the only sound, kind, cultural, behavioural and governmental value embracing everyone in the community that there is. For practical purposes, that value includes retrieval of New Zealand’s purloined (or more accurately “fenced” – by the Government!) profitable public assets and services from the domestic and international private predators to whom they were so disgracefully gifted. The former Ministry of Works, New Zealand Electricity Department, Railways, oil, gas and other assets should also be restored to public ownership to ensure that infrastructure and its upkeep or extension does not remain a cash-cow for private owners and contractors. The long-term earnings – from stopping the literal haemorrhaging into private plutocratic pockets of what in truth and justice is public money that historically and rightfully belongs to the people and future generations of New Zealand – will far outweigh the short-term cost of renationalisation (which could be covered by Keynesian stimulus spending – including by printing money if required).
It would be an unthinkable brain explosion if, say, America were to privatise the Hoover Dam or Norway its hydroelectric, petroleum and rail resources – allegedly to pay off short term debt – but Neoliberal ideology was the real motivation of the New Zealand Labour Party’s pampered, morally and socially tone deaf, Baby Boom Secret Seven Young Upstarts (namely David Lange, Geoffrey Palmer, Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble, Michael Bassett, David Caygill and Mike Moore) who emerged in the 1984 Labour Government without first disclosing their nefarious policies for evaluation by the electorate. For some years before 1984, the Baby Boomers had been plotting their treasonous Neoliberal revolution in secret collusion with big business. No police investigation of whether possibly dodgy deals were done appears to have occurred. In the interests of maintaining the integrity of democracy, a statutory (or better still, constitutional) amendment is required to prevent nondisclosure of such consequential and harmful policies from happening – and to invalidate any election in which there has been such incredible fraud.
After 1984, there quickly followed the “prepare-to-sell-profitable-public-assets-and-services-to-private-predators” State Owned Enterprises Act, drafted by then Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer. They and subsequent Neoliberal New Zealand Governments have blood on their hands for the immense human costs of their policies which, predictably and tragically, were calculated – that is, they were obviously likely to and did – result in the destruction of countless thriving communities, in which people were once connected to and mutually supportive of each other. Unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental distress and ill health, shortened life expectancy and suicides inevitably spiked, as also did crime rates due to the desperation generated by the need to find some way to survive. All in the interests of enriching the rich who allegedly would somehow allow some of their Government-gifted spoils to “trickle down” to the rest of us. That is Oligarchy, not Democracy.
Palmer too proved to be a treacherous, ruthlessly ideological turncoat to raw cost-accounting and extremely elitist Freidmanite Neoliberal Chicago School economics. While the Labour Party still occupied the Treasury benches he and Douglas were knighted for what were obviously extremely serious governmental misdeeds. This was despite being mentored in his early political career by the impeccably principled, social democratic, professional economist (as an academic) Sir Wallace Edward (Bill) Rowling, who was the greatest Prime Minister (1974-1975) New Zealand never had for long enough. It is high time that Bill Rowling was given due historical credit for that. He was set to be the Michael Joseph Savage of the 1970s and 1980s, but for too many complacent Kiwis being preoccupied in the general elections of 1975 – and especially of 1978 and1981, in which Rowling won the popular vote each time – with gambolling on rugby fields with racially-selected teams from apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately they did not realise they were shooting themselves in the foot, taking the rest of us with them.
Until 1984, New Zealand and its main political parties – but Labour especially, rivalled Scandinavia with its social democratic policies of “money second, people first”, full employment, social housing, free education to tertiary level, free healthcare, and social welfare to help those unable to contribute through no fault of their own. Earlier in 2020, an Australian television documentary publicised the horrific unemployment and slum landlord housing crisis inflicted on some 300,000 Kiwis (pre-Covid) and Prime Minister Ardern’s so far thwarted (including by Neoliberal New Zealand Labourites) efforts to, as she said, “reach a consensus” on her public housing programme. That will continue so long as too many voters in New Zealand (or in democracies anywhere else, including Australia) persist with embracing moral and political analysis at the lowest Bob Jones or “Glue Pot Tavern” levels perpetrated by Neoliberal propaganda and paid political advertising. Jones, later a huge beneficiary of Roger-Palmernomics corporate welfare, put up posters in 1975 portraying Sir Wallace as a mouse while McPhail and Gadsby’s contribution in the early 1980s was an equally juvenile exaggeration of the pitch of his voice. Jones was knighted by the Neoliberals for “services to business”. He served his own business well.
Emblematically, Richard Prebble – one of the underhanded Seven Upstart rebels against Bill Rowling and the nation – callously closed about 1000 post offices “for business efficiency”. And never mind the unacceptably damaging human, community and social costs. Reflecting Prebble’s metallic indifference, in a newspaper column in 2013, Bob Jones gloated that he taunted a jobless postmaster, who protested that he was starving himself to death, into “quickly” committing suicide instead. In a New Zealand Herald report inaccurately headlined, “Bob Jones: Handout culture should be starved to death”, Jones wrote that the self-evidently extremely distressed and vulnerable postmaster “turned up in a park opposite my office, surrounded by the standard litter of signs, asserting he was starving to death in protest. I bowled across and nailed him with some impeccable logic. ‘Why starve to death?’ I suggested. ‘Why not get it over with quickly and commit suicide?’ So he did.”1 (“Bob Jones: Handout culture should be starved to death”, New Zealand Herald, 17 December 2013) Section 179 (1) of the Crimes Act provides: “Every one is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years who … incites, counsels, or procures any person to commit suicide in consequence thereof”. It appears to be unknown whether the Police and Crown Law Office analysed this self-disclosed documentary evidence further to their duty to uphold the law and protect citizens from criminal harm. Due account has to be taken of the human and legal rights of the victim and the loved ones who have survived him.
The Neophyte Secret Seven Labour Neoliberals were not remotely Rowling’s shirttails in either ethics or principled, competent, truly democratic governance. He and his Finance Minister Bob Tizard applied FDR-Keynesian government stimulus-spending economic policies “to keep the country going” and were finding new markets to cushion the impact of the recession which followed the first worldwide oil shock and Britain dumping us (and Australia) to join the European Economic Community. In 1975, this sensibly and sensitively created budget deficit enabled cost-accountant Rob Muldoon to rail that New Zealand’s economy was “shattered” and win the general election. However, Sir Robert’s star having radically dipped by 1984, had Bill Rowling not been blindsided by the despicable secrecy of the Neoliberal Baby Boom Upstarts into stepping down when he need not have to preserve party unity, it is virtually certain that he would have won the general election of that year.
During the current Covid “lockdown”, Australian television channels have been broadcasting “feel good”, sometimes touching sometimes funny, podcasts made by people “confined to quarters” for the worthy cause of uplifting us all. But so far the clips have invariably originated from comfortable middle to upper class homes. Nothing from anyone who is homeless or the already 700,000 caught in the built-in 5% unemployment and poverty trap mandated by Neoliberals for the last four decades and counting – for which they are punished by suspension of benefit if they don’t waste their time meeting mandated quotas of highly stressful searches for jobs that are deliberately programmed to not even exist.
It was once the task of ethically responsible, properly funded and staffed, “full employment” governments to seek suitable jobs for the jobless. In 1975 New Zealand – due to Rowling-Tizards’ Keynesian economic policies after the 1973 oil shock, and Britain joining the EEC – there were only 6000 registered unemployed despite then Finance Minister Rob Muldoon having boasted in 1972 that “I’ve spent it all”. The current ideologically built-in human carnage in Australia (and proportionately also New Zealand) stands to increase given that unemployment here is set to reach an estimated 10-15% (1.4 to 2.1 million people) despite the government’s good but too-patchy stimulus spending to beat the virus. Also on television, there have been advertisements by a well-meaning charity with a hopeless task that depict the homeless sheltering beneath a highway overpass. Further reflecting callous Neoliberal-normalised governmental failure, the ads seek donations to buy “backpack beds” which are essentially sleeping bags in the form of a small tent. Utterly and unforgivably intolerable, especially as winter sets in.
Michael Scott
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