Why can Government only pass woke virtue signals on gay conversion, sexual violence & hate speech but can’t do anything on mental health, poverty & housing?

1. https://www.salon.com/2021/02/18/the-contradictions-of-cancel-culture-where-elite-liberalism-goes-to-die/

2. ‘Every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.’

   Yep. The banks and corporations and opportunists love it!

   And you only have to watch a bit of TVNZ to realise the intellectual standard of NZ has been pushed down to the 15-year-old level at best, and much of the time down to the 11-year-old level. That is the kind of level our elected representatives perform at.

   ‘luckily for us the economic depression alongside the meltdown of the climate crisis will be so deep and damaging that even Cautious Jacinda and Extra Cautious Grant have no choice but to reform and rebuild.’

   In your dreams Martyn.

   Their other option is to keep lying to everyone {and themselves} and keep doing what destroys the nation and their own progeny’s future.

   It’s a safe bet that is what they WILL do. Or resign if the going gets too tough. After all, Jacinda and Grant are there to serve the banks and corporations and opportunists, and themselves, not the people.

   I cannot think of any organisation I have ever experienced or witnessed that acknowledged it had a problem and dealt with the problem promptly and effectively. Denial of the existence of the problem or “see what happens” are the normal strategies for crisis management in NZ (and most of the rest of the world).

   As for Antonio Guterres’ recent warning that “humanity is on a suicidal path”, if Jacinda even noticed, she will have forgotten by the following afternoon.

   Of course we ARE on a suicidal path:

   https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

   But graphs are ‘boring’ for most people. Especially politicians, bankers and economists.

   Never forget: we are governed by people who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, and lots of smiling counts for nothing. One TDB commenter noted Robertson has become so cocky he is now smirking.

3. Q: Why can Government only pass woke virtue signals on gay conversion, sexual violence & hate speech but can’t do anything on mental health, poverty & housing?

   A: Because the Labour and Greens caucuses are heavy on identitarians (feminists, sexual minorities, “gender” activists etc) drawn from the professional middle classes.

   It’s not rocket surgery.

   • Disagree. As a professional middle classer from a professional middle class family- a big family – I reject any suggestion that we are as pre-occupied with all this sex stuff as much as politicians are. They need to grow up.

4. TOP – evidence-based policy, but who wants that?

   • yep the only party I could be bothered voting for.

5. Judasinda has shown a deep antipathy to supporting anyone who is poor or young? Her sole focus is making people with houses much richer. If you own one house she has made you rich, two houses very rich, three houses intensely rich and soon…. With one in six houses in NZ being owned by a person who owns 20 or more houses she has made many people who don’t need any more, so much more? Why… Why is she being so horrifically unfair?

6. Because they don’t have a mandate to do anything about poverty or housing – NZ voters (those people that bother to turn out to vote) are not struggling with issues of poverty – their concerns are about preserving and accumulating their own wealth. Paying more in taxes to increase public services and social housing is an election loser out of the box. Paying lip service to the attitudinal and cultural changes that already exist does not require any economic heavy lifting or hard work.
   The constant stream of articles and middle class concern about housing affordability has very little to do with addressing poverty or restructuring our economy to help the economically marginalized, it’s an expression of middle class anxiety about not being able to build up their own portfolio of extractive, non-productive rentier assets.

   • Correct Peter. Is an alternative ACT/ National government any better, most certainly not. They suffer a blinding madness of the trickle down theory and everyone is born equal. The voters vote to keep the status quo, clearly that was no longer National.

7. I don’t know if we need new parties but an alternative is a new broad-based unaligned political movement that forces the existing parties to start taking action

   • My suggestion since the election, is for NGOs and Unions to unite as an extra Parliamentary “opposition” and get active to breach the impasse on working class issues. Community organisation and appropriate direct action will be necessary to put pressure on the Labour Caucus to break with their unwanted by many, adherence to neo liberalism.

     • Judasinda 2017 (phoney) https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/96739673/jacinda-ardern-says-neoliberalism-has-failed

8. Overheard an acquaintance referring to our government as Beijing’s arse wipes the other day. A little harsh but apt none the less.

   • If you think our government is that, then what is it for the United States, frankly we have been their poodle for years.

9. “The foundations of the 35 year neoliberal experiment in NZ have been exposed and found to be cracked to their core, with the climate crisis demanding a radical change, this pandemic is the perfect time to challenge the religious orthodoxy of free market dogma”.

   Couldn’t agree more.

   Of late there’s been a bit of comment on TDB on msm, little of it positive. I do watch a bit of free to view TV but mostly the movies and docos on Maori TV. It seems their ethos and relative independence from corporate media allows them to source some interesting stuff. Last Sunday’s movie was a 2014 awards winner, Leviathan, a powerful tale of an ordinary man brought to his knees by circumstances beyond his control, some would say an allegory of the power still invested in the modern Russian state. It is a story of love and tragedy experienced by ordinary people. The movie received partial funding from Russia’s Ministry of Culture.

   Closer to the topic, it reminds me of Ken Loach’s, ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (also screened on Maori TV if I recall), a woeful tale of one man’s battle with the social and economic fallout from neoliberal ideology in Thatcher’s Britain (or was that post-Thatcher).

   The point is film is such a powerful medium. Why isn’t there in AO/NZ brave, talented and imaginative souls here willing to engage with social satire of this magnitude. Nothing so grand as Leviathan perhaps but closer to the stark reality of Daniel Blake’s lived experience, film that, in your own words Martyn, challenges the religious orthodoxy of free market dogma. For sure there are any number of noble keyboard warriors, and the late Bruce Jesson (among others) made an honest attempt at alerting ordinary folk to the madness, but where are the film-makers? They used to exist.

   • I recently watched a movie called “In Time”. I have never seen a dystopian movie that so perfectly recreates the current inequality we are increasingly witnessing in NZ. It shows a future where people stop ageing after 25 and they then need to buy time to live. The rich (landlords and speculators) enjoy care free lives and become immortal with more time than they could ever want (thousands of years) while the poor (renters, maori, poor, FHB’s, young) have to try a scramble for survival with daily life and death struggles controlling every second of their lives. Most of the poor have less than 24 hours left and every day have a desperate fight for more time. The rich (Judasinda, Grand, Megan and Adrian) are safe in their ivory towers with all the other time rich friends becoming infinitely richer. They have vast walls protecting “their” people. NZ did not have to be this way !!!

   • I mistakenly thought Maori TV would make more films of their own. Unfortunately they are stuck in a modern day cultural cul-de-sac where BS prevails. Wooden acting and worthless scripts with amateur cinematography is never gonna create quality drama. When Non Maori are not welcome as teachers and co collaborators nothing will be learned but belief in one’s own bullshit. We need writers desperately. No one in NZ television has learned this basic tenet. Only South Pacific pictures and they went for cartoon CGI crap and unintelligent dialogue in the end.
     Ken Loach is a collaborator therein lies the lesson NZ TV has never grasped. It’s hard work after all to listen .

   • There is a huge amount of talent in NZ. It is ignored by the likes of TVNZ because TVNZ is a big club* and you and I and the people with talent are not in the big club.

     * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso

   • ” in your own words Martyn, challenges the religious orthodoxy of free market dogma ”
     ” Free Market: To the classical economists, an economy free of land rent, ( habitation rent ) usurious banking practices and monopolies ( such as privatisation of energy and vital public utilities ) in private hands. But as finance capitalism has superseded industrial capitalism, it has inverted ” free market ” rhetoric to mean a market as one free for rent extractors to obtain land rent ( rent for property plus capital gains ) natural resource rent , monopoly rent and financial gains ” free ” of government taxation ( wealth tax and CGT’s ) or regulation. This inverted re-definition depicts a free market as one free for the financial and propertied classes to subject the economy to a network of extractive tollbooth fees. Such a ” free market ” has become a doublethink term for the path to neo-feudalism, financialisation and kindred rentier policies. ” J is for junk economics by Michael Hudson Also extreme asset price inflation as in housing and an eventual debt deflation plunging the normal economy into the doldrums.
     So, NZ is not a free market society but a Rentier one dominated by the F.I.R.E sector. This free market assertion is just B.S.!

10. Why do these issues to do with gender, hate speech, homosexuality, abortion and gun control (I’m not against) get pushed through the house with much haste and urgency, while we had to wait 3 years for a referendum on cannabis law (actual discrimination) only to maintain the status quo that near half the electorate voted against keeping in place?
    Answers please.

    • The answer: instant gratification. Haste on those issues makes it look like is she quick to sort issues and makes it looks like she is achieving A LOT!
      When in reality, what she should be achieving as CEO of NZ Inc, is to make the whole business function better. There is the real problem, she is neither CEO material nor does she understand that NZ is indeed a form of business, and needs to be run as such. NZ needs to make money to afford improvements in many departments of NZ Inc – housing, transport, worker well-being, everything…
      As a CEO she’s a miserable fail. She is the the PR dept, nothing else. Pity there’s no higher board to simply toss her out.

    • Alternative answer: They’re the easy issues with which to virtue signal – the real back-breaking work was done years ago, starting with the legalising of homosexuality- thanks to Fran Wilde. All these “moral” issues provide earnest fourth-form level debates, whereas things like equitable taxation, or addressing systemic poverty, are too much of a challenge.

11. Zoning is the new ponzi of NZ, which is why there are only 12 houses built.

    Part of the problem is allowing precedent for rich companies to buy up unzoned farmland and try and get zoning changes making gigantic fortunes with grandiose proposed projects (that tend to go horribly wrong for everyone but a few individuals who make a killing)…

    Government need to concentrate on building houses on land already zoned with resource consent and infrastructure already in place and paid for, not keep rewarding more and more rich corporations trying to make money off unzoned farm land in the middle of nowhere.

    New housing and industrial areas should be built closer to existing towns and infrastructure!

    The price of food is horrendous in NZ – and agricultural productive land is wasted – there are too many ‘trends’ in NZ, aka conversion of forestry to dairy 10 years ago, (only to have the reverse happening now but in overseas ownership), meanwhile too much prime agricultural land is being bought up for speculative housing projects and thus will no longer provide local agricultural jobs, pollution controls and food with less food miles in the future!

    Fletchers
    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/fletcher-plans-huge-new-housing-development-in-kumeu-west-auckland-but-residents-up-in-arms/FROJPAX3BDOWYRZ2BH5QQICHY4/

    Lord Sleepyhead
    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sleepyhead-estate-waikato-regional-council-under-fire-for-anti-business-opposition-to-plan/724MO6INP6AEEQM22QLBQIWUBI/

    $2b infrastructure spending puts Drury centre stage
    https://www.made.co.nz/drury-becomes-aucklands-biggest-development-zone

    The government strategy has not worked. They need to stop the mistakes and concentrate taxpayer and rate payer money into existing infrastructure in existing towns to be of a workable standard (aka many cities in NZ now are grinding to a halt with lack of trains, public transport, congestion, water treatment, sewerage). The billions of infrastructure should be spend where the people currently live for our expanding cities, not for some developers future profits!

    For affordable housing the government and councils should concentrate on getting normal working people to build normal houses (for themselves not for profit) with normal builders and tradespeople who are not bought into NZ in their hundreds/thousands who don’t know anything about NZ building and are Ponzi schemes, as horrible mistakes keep happening!

    Foreign workers are taking more housing, super, justice and hospital places, schools, ACC leading to a significant part of the problem. NZ under mass immigration experiment is getting worse not better in most overseas statistics for anything from hospital beds to educational standards. Neoliberalism does not work out well for most people living in NZ!

    We can pat ourselves on the back for Covid, but it still could hit us. We don’t know the future.

12. @ MB. ( Sorry. I can’t help myself.)
    “Why can Government only pass woke virtue signals on gay conversion, sexual violence & hate speech but can’t do anything on mental health, poverty & housing?”
    Basically, it’s because we, the general public, no longer have steerage of our country. The banks do. Mental health, poverty and housing costs money to manage. If the banks, particularly the Reserve Bank say no, we don’t get none.
    The other unfortunate, and quite insignificant really, problem for most AO/NZ’ers to ponder, you poor little things, is where our money comes from.
    Where does our spending money come from…? AO/NZ’s a bit flat with a few bumps here and there. It’s on a bit of an angle. Two main islands. Auckland’s not much more than a sink plug down which our money runs and is populated by quite mad people who think that by frantically running about during the week doing pointless little things they some how keep the whole writing maggots nest afloat. And on the weekend the poor dears snort coke or smoke meth or buy junk they can’t afford while the retail banksters pirate them with all the conscience of a psychopathic, hereon addict, child prostitute pimps and yet no one seems to know where our money comes from for Auckland’s luxuries which most Aucklanders consider necessities.
    Moving south and you’ll find another island that’s a bit more bumpy and a lot less populated by humans and a little more populated by ‘animals’ on ‘farms’ and all ‘farmed’ by ‘farmers’…!? I know? Crazy right…? How do they do that?
    Recently, there was a righteous rebellion by Gore farmers who felt that they were being fucked without the kissing by the all-bought-and-paid-for gubbimint so they drove their tractors through Gore in protest.
    Sure, most would agree that sucking water up a pipe to hydrate a cow so it could piss it back again is not the done thing. But that’s not the point, is it?
    The point is, that Gore farmers got fucked off with being treated like fools by swanky wanky city fellers so they protested. But wait, there’s more?
    I read about the protesting Gore farmers in the Southland Times.
    Guess what else…? That’s the only media that reported such daring do’s.
    I could be wrong mind you. I read feeble little rnz every morning because it’s the only media I can stomach before breakfast. I can’t listen to kath ryan shushing of her esses, I refuse to listen to vile commercial radio, I read The Guardian just to make sure the rest of the world does, in fact, exist and there was nothing at all about a brave few cockies rolling up their sleeves to take on you greedy fuckers whining about your house prices and the mythical value to your over priced contributions to fuck all.
    The real reason why I couldn’t read about protesting farmers was because ” Shhhhhhhhhhhh…….. !? ” Can’t have them cockies finding out the truth can we Boys? Because guess what? It’s the beastly Fama Dahlings that makes the money that feeds the Beasts and the Beasts can no longer allow even a single crumb to drop from their haughty tables down to The Great Unwashed lest the game is given away.
    labour and national are the same ‘thing’ and the foreign banksters own them both. And us by extension.
    Can I ask? What do you think might happen if the retail banksters suddenly hiked up retail housing interest rates to, say, 22% at the behest of the reserve bankster? Remember bare chest brash? Remember third and fourth generation farmers being foreclosed upon then watching them on the tee vee walk to their car in tears to drive off into poverty?
    But don’t worry? Auckland and the internet will save us and feed, shelter and clothe us.

13. Western economics are one big debt based ponzi and housing is doing the heavy debt-lifting. Seems to be particularly bad here in NZ sadly. People driven to real estate instinctively as the only path to wealth. Megan Woods 12 houses is govts catch cry to investors “see we’re really doing nothing, let’s keep this ponzi moving” Confidence in currency declining..

14. Why? because during the 80s, 90s, and 00s, Neo Liberal individualism romanced Post Modernist philosophy, and they had a baby–and they called it–Identity Politics.

    For anyone interested here is a class left analysis of identity politics…
    https://www.counterfire.org/articles/opinion/19484-the-return-of-idealism-identity-and-the-politics-of-oppression

    Social Democratic parties such as NZ Labour pre ’84, while class collaborationist, at least supported certain reforms–welfare, public housing, pensions, public owned power generation and supply, compulsory unionism, etc.

    NZ Labour is still a cross class party (“we will govern for all New Zealanders”, J. Ardern, Election night) but crossed the line under Rogernomics by not only openly pandering to the capitalist class via state asset sales and free in and out flow of capital, and allowing penetration of state infrastructure by private capital, but also legislating Finance Capital structural into legislation via the Reserve Bank Act, State Sector Act, SOEs etc.

    Labour’s timidity is actually an orthodoxy that none in the Labour Caucus have the political understanding or courage to organise against, and break. That is why the people must unite and make them do it.

15. What’s happening in the U$k ( Locking up the World’s foremost investigative journalist Assange at the behest of the Washington war criminal regime ) Also Kim dot com? today is happening here: the deliberate cunning exclusion of an alternative constituency its voices and opinions that challenge the status quo with its rigidified exploitation machine.
    Keir Starmer’s War on Democracy | Ronan Burtenshaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIxcJlHZOBY
    TOP
    We live in dangerous times and if we don’t push back the rich will just trample us to the ground
    Steve Fox
    Democracy is an illusion of freedom to choose who controls us. “the last man to enter parliament with honest intentions was Guy Fawkes”

    Paul Oneill
    Corbyn=real politics
    Boris/Starmer = political theatre, “oh no I never- oh yes you did” blah di blah blah.

16. This saga reminds me of playing rugby at school: There was this one kid who was utterly useless but was always there on the wing screaming for the ball. On the rare occasions we would pass it to him he would stand there, stock still, not known what to do.

    That’s the left. They’re always out there on the wing screaming for the ball but given it, they’ll surely drop it.

17. More than 40% of millionaires paying tax rates lower than the lowest earners, Government data reveals
    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300238241/more-than-40-of-millionaires-paying-tax-rates-lower-than-the-lowest-earners-government-data-reveals

18. The government can borrow money at a ridiculously low interest rate. They should be borrowing and pumping it into our own bank Kiwi bank to be lent to people to buy houses. The amount you have to have makes it impossible. We should also have ‘proper’ rent to own schemes. People have to pay these ridiculous rents that are higher than they would if they could just get a house and pay a mortgage.

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