An economic depression generated by geopolitical friction beyond our control is going to swamp us with enormous social damage and political carnage.
The Left must be ready for this.
Unfortunately our focus is on alienating woke dogma virtue signals like hate speech, cancelling Hairy Maclary for lack of gender representation, or painting out the Lion King in Te Reo as the greatest cultural achievement since Shakespeare.
We need less alienating pronoun policing on the Left and more focus on universal services that provide material well being to people who are hurting right now and will be suffering in 6 months.
We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
The minefield of social justice and its never ending pure temple deplatforming of everything that triggers it will only drive people further from the Left in an intense economic downturn because you can’t eat virtue signalling aesthetics.
We need material solutions and we need them now!
1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help. The slow incrementalism touted by favourite public sector for dragger apologist Max Rashbrooke isn’t good enough because the lower middle classes are feeling the same pinch thanks to mortgage rises and universal school lunches and breakfasts would help them as well.
2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs plus Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements)
3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.
4: 30% stake holder in a new Government backed supermarket operation run to provide lower food prices for kiwism better prices for supplies and better conditions for workers.
5: GST off fresh fruit and vegetables and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health plus a sugar tax.
6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.
7: Fair Pay Agreements that allow unionisation and real collective bargaining power for workers outside the tiny public service clique they currently cover.
8: Taxation focused on corporations and banks like financial transaction tax and first $20 000.
9: Offer nurses, teachers and Drs free education and living allowances in return for bonded time in our health and eduction systems.
10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances.
The geopolitical shockwaves that are about to push NZ into a steep economic recession require the State to step in and run fundamental services for social cohesion by removing the tax yoke off workers and placing it on the corporations and wealthy.
We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.
We urgently need Left wing political solutions, not more middle class virtue signals.
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Yeah, well, I’m all for this, so why don’t we have it – any little snippet of it! Enough of this we need this, we need that. How about we ask – why don’t we have it!? Why? Why, why, why…do we not have just a little piece of this? I’m not going to answer this…I’m well past sick of being silenced…but there’s a reason, a clear effin reason why, we the people, are going backwards….
Reason the word got me thinking Bellamy Brothers. This pleasant little song could keep me high on hope for good living in NZ if it was our mainstream ‘gospel’ song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icF1GTqx1yU
What is the importance of gospel music?
Gospel music has been a powerful force in American culture. It has helped slaves escape to freedom, it enriched America’s diversity, it was a supporting backbone in the Civil Rights Movement, it paved the way for different genres of music but most of all it has empowered people to be more than they can be.
Music is an important aspect of every society.
https://depts.washington.edu › Papers › GospelMusic07
Regards #10…on your list Martyn.
… TVNZ is becoming FOX TV of the South Pacific.
Time to get rid of Simon Power by the new Minister of Broadcasting, Willie Jackson
Nothing is ever free so good luck trying to convince struggling kiwis to vote in someone who wants to raise taxes
I am old enough to remember a time when our society was healthier than now and functioned better than now for most, and taxes were higher than now.
Funny, that, XXX.
It seems to me that the policies you favour are the ones that produce the problems we now experience.
In vino you have read me wrong here: I am all in favour of what MB suggests and I have no probs paying higher tax
My point is National will campaign on lower taxes and if your a broke kiwi who will tempt you more?
Recipe for Disaster:
Not Building State houses faster than you demolish them.
More motels will need to be purchased by the government.
11. Flood protection for New Zealanders fleeing to Australia?
If NZ wants equality they want more middle class, aka less poor and less wealthy people – thus more equality.
The woke are mostly middle class with a chip of their shoulders on their own identity, with limited experience of real life (they live it through others). They hate themselves and thus hate the middle class. Woke also tend to be the most entitled, privileged people you can ever meet while disguising it by denouncing everyone else as being too privileged.
Hopefully woke broaden their horizons – go overseas and live and work and have children in some of the countries that they seem to idealise the most – I’m sure it will be a rude awakening and NZ can hopefully avoid them trying to moving everyone into NZ while saying how great the other country is.
If it was that great, why are people leaving it and why don’t the woke migrate there?
Yep
Meanwhile in the real world there are 5 dentists in the practice I go to and I have to wait 3 weeks for a check up costing $155 for a 15 minute appointment. How long would you wait if it was free ?
Incentives for medical workers and teachers is a good idea but travel time to round of their life skills should be allowed for.
Any fiddling with gst is a waste of time as administration costs would nullify any price lowering.
Free school meals is a great idea but what happens when holidays come around .Parents need to realize the children they create need looking after so they need education to stop have children they cannot afford.
It is a sick joke to think that a government dept could run a grocery business as most of them could not run a bath without a committee formed to write a bill on details of delivery
Free public transport with a fleet of small people movers but unfortunately this only works in larger centres those living rural are left out
Quite right.
Toast?
Ownership of land is already largely reserved for the wealthy. The means of production will concentrate in fewer and fewer hands too.
‘The Left’ in power now have swapped timeless, universal themes for Johnny-come-lately, woke ideologies. As such; ‘The Left’ and their media acolytes are becoming madmen – at a loss to understand the social problems plaguing Kiwis, let alone able to give aid in improving social conditions.
“Colonialism” and “Capitalism” are often decried by those least able to define either term, which is surely a danger or at least insidious!
Innovation is banned, trading is banned, building is banned, grannies are threatened with fines for selling their jam. All the while money is borrowed into existence to bid up the price on housing and other essentials.
The RBNZ is still not taking inflation seriously. Labour has absolutely stuffed the NZ housing market, the county is likely toast. Even the landed gentry will have to walk among the social decay occasionally.
Here in Christchurch I’ve never seen the social decay and poverty so bad. It’s a lifeless place other than a few pockets and one-or-two shopping malls. People look miserable and the city smells foul.
But you can jump on a plane and in a few hours be in Oz, around happy people making the most of their lives.. enjoying a lovely, lovely climate. The word is out, so the brain-drain, which is actually just a labor-drain will accelerate into 2023.
Labour want house prices to increase, to achieve this controlling inflation has to be given up on. As such NZ will continue to decline and State Media will continue to pump smooth words into the soft heads of Kiwis..
NZ is Toast.
Bon Voyage.
Your comment is about observable things so can’t be disagreed with except on some finer point. This piece made an impact on me. I would like you to give examples as we can get used to various ‘maladjustments’ and not see them for the lamebrain policies they are.
Innovation is banned, trading is banned, building is banned, grannies are threatened with fines for selling their jam. All the while money is borrowed into existence to bid up the price on housing and other essentials.
The bit about grannies and jam resonates with me. It is hard for ordinary people to front a stall at a local market, have a small home enterprise with ambition to raise income by selling to the public unless it is done from a commercial kitchen, which then has to be rented by the hour and takes most of any residual income away. A not for profit enterprise is not what is needed!
The overbearing health and safety requirements act to regulate small initiatives by ordinary people out of existence. An example, the kitchen used must be up to a high commercial standard, dishes washed have to be rinsed, and then air dried. They can’t be tea towel dried because the towels may carry germs. It makes no difference if fresh, washed and clean teatowels would be used.
Our governments have acted to reduce or contain wages, while allowing house and rental inflation to rocket skyhigh, and now all products affected by inflationary pressures, but the means of adding to low incomes from people’s own endeavours and initiatives is stymied. (An excellent word that has trickled down to us from Scotland and golf apparently.
(Words express our ideas and concerns of the time so it’s instructive to look for first use.)
stymie (v. https://www.etymonline.com/word/stymie
1857, in golf, from stymie (n.) “condition in which an opponent’s ball blocks the hole” (1834); of uncertain origin, perhaps from Scottish stymie “person who sees poorly,” from stime “the least bit” (early 14c.), itself of uncertain origin. General sense of “block, hinder, thwart” is from 1902.
Used in Old Norse,; we appear to have the same problems with pollution and sewage as they did:
Thereupon dug the thrall a large ditch in the sty & carried away the earth, and afterwards placed wood across it. The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade)|Snorri Sturluson
(Does thrall mean slavery?
a person who is morally or mentally enslaved by some power, influence, or the like: He was the thrall of morbid fantasies. a person held in bondage or slavery. slavery; thralldom.
– (Could apply to those dairy farmers putting profits ahead of decent animal husbandry, both for the cows and for the cheaply-paid workers they obtain!)
Well said Martyn. I agree with all of your agenda. Tax the hell out of the rich to stop them buying houses.