Stuff declares that Big Government is back.
Is it?
Certainly the universal shared experience of lockdown and Covid have made people rush towards the State for protection and National’s small Government mantras are a joke.
Certainly deregulation has dirty example after dirty example to pursued Kiwi’s the free market is a scam.
But is the Government really challenging the failed free market when it comes to Housing, Poverty, Inequality and social services?
In the words of the great Unionist, Robert Reid…
…Labour won by accident in 2017 and Covid overshadowed 2020 so none of them have any real reform platform for the Public Service which allows the neoliberal public service to call the shots.
The ideological right wing acolytes who have taken up residence in our public service, must be cut from the body public as one cuts out a tumour. These spiteful people have spread their hateful right wing beliefs and infected every inch of what should be a welfare system designed to protect and help rather than punish and torture.
We have seen example after example after example of how these ‘servants’ damage and kill the poor they are supposed to serve. Hounding a beneficiary into suicide for a debt that never existed is an abomination.
Our civil service has become uncivil.
Our Public Services are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism which are essential for a progressive liberal democracy progressing. Instead, spiteful zealots mutate it into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.
Just like Oranga Tamariki stealing babies, Housing NZ evicting tenants, Motels housing the homeless, Corrections miscalculating Prisoner sentences and sparking prison riots– all of them don’t care about the actual welfare of the people they are supposed to care about.
Prisoners, the poor and beneficiaries have no rights as far as our burnt out and mutated public services are concerned, and attempts to push through new Government policy will fail if there isn’t a vigorous counter attack inside the Ministries.
Big Government may be back, but if it’s the same neoliberal Wellington Bureaucratic Elites, why rejoice?
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Thought experiment here…
–If–the PSA was a class left focused union (hold the bwahahahas a moment) with delegates and members educated in why there are hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people needing assistance–overwhelmingly because of macro decisions made well outside their ability to influence them; then industrial pressure could be put on the neo liberal bludgers at the top of Ministries. Make them reapply for their own jobs, and laugh in their faces as the likes of Robert Reid, Mike Treen, Debbie Ngarewa Packer, Jane Kelsey, or younger versions of them perhaps, are appointed to replace them!
Regardless of that, the PSA could right now put its bogus “politically neutral” stance to one side, it only ensures nothing changes in respect of the structural elements of neo liberalism entrenched in our Govt. Departments. The Public Service should serve the public not private capital as it does now in so many ways following the 80s and 90s–contracting out, market rates, user pays, paying dividends, State Sector Act, Reserve Bank Act, SOEs etc. etc. The PSA could educate members at MSD and Kainga Ora to name two, to understand a class society and stop torturing their fellow citizens because they can, and might get a bonus for doing so.
A number of the State Bureaucrats are indeed Fifth Columnists, really representing the capitalist class rather than the ordinary citizen, yet they are happy to spew over the working class at every opportunity while taking their taxpayer funded salaries. The public service leaks big time to the NZ National Party and ACT, that is one sure way to know Martyn is spot on here.
The PSA serves its members well and acts to protect their interests – unfortunately for Bomber they are mostly also members of the Professional Managerial Class so it would seem change, at least that he’d like to see is away on the never never
US Police unions serve their members well too, but at some cost to their society and non white individuals in particular.
While I would definitely not directly equate bent cop unions with the PSA, the PSA has a negative effect on thousands of New Zealanders via its political neutrality–i.e. support for the neo liberal status quo, and with MSD, ACC, and Kainga Ora case managers not providing full lawful entitlements and practising discriminatory behaviour.
The PSA leadership in fact was a prime enabler of the 1991 Employment Contracts Act that started the decline of the NZ Union Movement, and the low membership density of today. At a special NZCTU Affiliates meeting in Wellington the PSA voted against a national workers stoppage to try and stop the ECA, despite thousands of its members taking action around the country.
‘The ideological right wing acolytes who have taken up residence in our public service, must be cut from the body public as one cuts out a tumour.’
We’ll have to wait for a proper government to gain power before that happens, Martyn.
In the meantime we have to endure more of the same, as the system takes us down the path towards ‘implosion’ (US10YT now 1.62%)
By the way, this Covid thing is unlikely to ‘go away’ any time soon.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/explained-3-major-covid-19-variants
(Click on the graphics to enlarge)
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