The Listener asks…
Why doesn’t middle-class NZ care about child poverty?
Middle-class New Zealand has become indifferent to child poverty, say the people who are dealing with the damage.
…the reason why the NZ Middle Class don’t care about poverty any longer is because they don’t focus on the economic hegemonic structure in favour of woke identity politics virtue signalling.
The public struggle session of Joel Maxwell over at Stuff as he narrates his journey to use more te reo has to be read to be believed.
So much guilt and shame for someone with property.
This performance art is the new activism of the middle classes whose property portfolios have kept growing.
Like a Parliament of Land Owners, the self interest by the middle classes to form a blind spot to the economic system that is rewarding them pushes for more performative virtue signalling to drown out those 27 000 on emergency housing wait lists.
The reason the middle classes kept voting John Key for a decade despite mass surveillance lies, despite dirty politics and despite Kiwis living in cars was because their house values went up more each year than their wages paid them!
You can have every work of Marx in the home library but when John Key is giving you more wealth than your job pays each year, whose your daddy?
The middle classes focus on identity politics and roaming cancellations now as their activist aesthetic so that no one notices all those beneficiaries rammed into Motels.
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“You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.”
– Thomas Sowell
Then Thomas Sewell must have said, if he was thinking things through, ‘that the subsidisation must be spent on showing and helping people to become responsible, and then to help others to reach the same goal’. That would be the responsible move to make. That would have been a wise and unobjectionable advice from that gentleman.
But we can subsidize corporates and developers and we do expect them to be responsible but this is often not the case.
I agree! The irresponsible Globalist billionaire class and their PMC mandarins must be stopped from subsidizing their lifestyles via working/underclass and environmental/fossil fuel exploitation.
Agree with performance art is the new activism…..
but the leftie hatred of middle class is misguided,
To engage in a social democracy we need more middle class and less poor and rich.
Most of the policies of the Labeen woke and right wingers, create the opposite, remove wealth from the middle class via lost wages and reassign to the growing poor ‘managers’ with the rich getting a margin on top.
AKA woke and right winger dreams of NZ ghettos of rented housing estates owned by global companies for the super rich, with guaranteed rents of a growing poverty class. Thus importing in more poverty via NZ’s mass 2022 induction of 200,000+ low/no wage, low/no skill immigration, this is a growth industry in NZ – someone needs to fill up the houses and get this PE/NZ initiative off the ground!!!!! What better way than another 200,000 people who need essential government paid but privately led services on a daily basis!
The more the woke colonise Te Reo the more of a caricature it is going to become. Woke have already started cancelling Maori for being the wrong look. https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2022/09/21/mediawatch-wait-wait-wait-the-woke-cancelled-a-maori-event-organised-by-maori-students-because-it-was-offensive-to-maori-language-week/
Don’t worry about the poor having a house, Te Reo red guards are banging down the doors of social housing at 8am to induct them into the Amway of Te Reo will set you free. Marketers and diversity bean counters are rubbing their hands at another lucrative government sales pitch – for more ‘essential services’ of Te Reo and spiritual wellbeing which are FAR MORE important than food, housing, power, water, freedom of speech, family and coincidentally don’t cost as much so the profit margins are HUGE.
A book could be written on this…that’s right, many have been…including Jane Kelsey’s “FIRE Economy”.
“The FIRE economy – built on finance, insurance and real estate – is now the world’s principal source of wealth creation. Its rise has transformed our political, economic and social landscapes, supported by a neoliberal regime that celebrates markets, profit and risk. From rising inequality and ballooning household debt to a global financial crisis and fiscal austerity, the neoliberal ‘orthodoxy’ has brought instability and empowered the few. Yet it remains remarkably resilient, even resurgent, in New Zealand and abroad.”
https://www.bwb.co.nz/books/the-fire-economy
So yes, while there are definitely hordes of selfish bastards involved–the middle class even got their own more generous second tier MSD benefit during COVID. Neo liberal hegemony and post modernist philosophy have most to answer for. Labour, National, Green etc. listen to the middle class because they have reliably voted mainly for the status quo for almost 40 years. The numbers will be different from 2023 and 2026 on, new gens will outnumber boomers and this is the chance for the dump renters and precariat to intervene and roll back Rogernomics and Ruthanasia.
You’re not wrong Martyn. As an aside, part of the problem in my view is that we use the phrase ‘child poverty’ at all. It’s meaningless to a lot of people because there aren’t many children who are wealthy in their own right, it’s families that are wealthy or impoverished. We should absolutely direct some support straight to kids in need, like school breakfasts, but also recognise that doing this is just addressing the symptoms of broader poverty issues like NZ’s low wage economy.
At the end of the day, If you are white male the only way you can climb the woke world career ladder in NZ is to throw your creed under the bus with endless virtue signalling articles like “The public struggle session of Joel Maxwell over at Stuff as he narrates his journey to use more te reo”. It was that, or self identifying as a woman.
That’s why Martyn can’t get creative NZ funding.
He’s just too fucking invested in real issues!
Stop being fucking straight for fucks sake, stop being male, stop being white, grab the $$$$ from labels Woke INC private stash to self identify as something better.
2.6 million for Bevan Chung’s, from the ‘other woman’s perspective creative funding TV series https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/entertainment/26-million-in-nz-on-air-funding-for-bevan-chuang-and-len-brown-film/.
Now that’s what were talkin about! Woke fodder, made and created by woke for the 5% but growing woke entertainment agenda.
Males at spinoff crying into their soy latte’s at the hopelessness of being so right in a world of 99.99% racists and homophobes got 6.1 million. https://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2021/07/61_million_to_the_spinoff_from_taxpayers.html
To make money in NZ stop worrying about real issues, the government funders generally only relate to and fund trivia and virtue signalling and division thinking, not real things anymore.
Well, given that this piece is under the MEDIAWATCH heading, then it is apt to say that a key reason why people care, or not, about any given matter, is the attention (and the bent) that media pays towards a given issue. Further more, I believe that media, now days, primarily serves rather than questions the corridors of power. Government doesn’t want the masses questioning ‘structure’, or policy that was created by the moneyed class specifically for the benefit of said upper class, aka neoliberal economic policy. No, the focus of the people needs to be directed on issues that do not threaten the structures of the moneyed class.
In short, this focus is not by accident and even better if a given focus can get the masses squabbling among themselves, well then, that’s just icing on the cake.
As for the popularity of the Key government, given the events of the last two years, its clear to me that he benefited from a relatively calm political/economic world, thus as long as he didn’t trip over himself or face an opposition leader with similar ‘personality’ power to his own, then he was good to go, bearing in mind that both main parties are more alike than different to each other.
Bottom line being, the media drives focus and for whom does the media primarily serve…..
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