The real power struggle in NZ isn’t Left vs Right, it’s between the Professional Managerial Class Corporate Consultants who influence policy to maintain their dominance and profit margins vs the self serving Public Service wanting to spend taxpayer money on their latest glass palace.
The Politicians are merely a masquerade of democracy to ensure participation that generates legitimacy, but the real power is between the Corporate Consultants who influence all policy to keep NZ deregulated and the self serving Public Service who are in it for their own fiefdoms.
The only chance any truly progressive movement gets in NZ politics is to ram your changes through in the first 100 days of any new Government.
That stops the self serving Public Service from stymieing your agenda and it stops the corporates from influencing it.
If we want true progressive policy to tax the rich and remove costs from peoples lives, it needs to be rammed through in the first 100 days or it won’t happen.
That’s why Labour have been so feckless and useless, they had no 100 day plan in 2017 and they didn’t expect to win an MMP majority in 2020.
They effectively became captured b y the self serving Public Service and the Corporate Consultants.
A Labour/Green minority Government with Supply and Confidence from the Māori Party with a clear legislative agenda for the first 100 days is the only way we will see the State gain the revenue to fund the social and physical infrastructure we desperately need.
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I think you’re being harsh on Willie. He achieved more than he ever dreamt of, none of which was even campaigned on! How about that? Otherwise Labour Green had no competent people with which to put through their wishlist, barring Kelvin Davis who has delivered par excellence on prisoner reduction! 100 days or 10000 days, makes no difference!
X-ray. If Davis wants to empty prisons, then he’s an idiot being complicit in banishing the Commissioner for Children. Childhood sets the pathway which, more than almost anything else, leads to prisons, and why independent well-qualified commissioners were banished, in favour of faceless public servants, defies rational explanation. Governments which protect themselves more than the persons they’re meant to represent, deserve to fail.
So you are OK with US style prisons then? Locking people up in their own filth for 23 hours day in a cell with 5 others, or allowing gang factions in prisons to beat, stab and rape weaker prisoners. Or withholding medical treatment/medication?
Who cares as long as those filthy brown people are locked up, and you can walk the streets without seeing a ‘filthy darkie’.
Millsy, what planet are on currently?
Let’s have a short history lesson.
Starting with Helen Clark, who ruled the Labour Party by dividing it against itself, pitting the unionists against the gays against the feminists against the marxists etc. The result was a broken and divided party once she departed. So, broken in fact that they couldn’t even have proper internal policy debates. Thus, they had no real policies other than an uninformed and idealistic wish list.
Then Winson came knocking and they formed a government with no real policy foundation. Just brain farts that were doomed to fail eventually. For a while the Christchurch massacre and Covid provided cover, eventually they were bound to be exposed.
So, the reason for the fortune spent on consultants and the massive expansion of a flaccid and self-serving public service is because this government had no real policy platform from the very start.
Andrew. Interesting what you say about Helen Clark. Even her media trainers couldn’t make her palatable or less hubristic, but it seemed to me she emasculated the Labour Party, and this had, or has had, a lasting effect. Her apparently mentoring the current Wellington mayor, and heaven knows who else, is regrettable; Wellington isn’t her patch; IMO, she’s as big a fool as zealots inevitably are, if they fail to realise what they may learn from the hands which they refuse to touch.
I hear what you’re saying as part of her post government legacy, but I certainly do miss her governments competence, achievements and control. Light years from this Labour administration!
She acheived nothing. She didn’t reverse benefit cuts, reduce power bills, or increase state housing.
Millsy. The power bills weren’t as high then as they are now. Winter subsidies are government’s acknowledgement that they’re unreasonably high, and of course, the subsidies generate greater profit for the rapacious electricity companies.
No, they were high back then. I was there. It directly stems from privatisation and deregulation of power. Something you support.
However you will probably scream blue murder if the government did anything about it.
The part I missed in my comment above was that in order to retain absolute control, she white-anted or pushed out anyone who could possibly challenge her for the PM role. So, her legacy was an overall loss of competence within the party. That Ardern became PM is a telling point: Prior to landing that job she’d never held a ministerial warrant nor even put together a successful private member’s bill.
As X Ray mentions her government was at least competent, but I suspect that competence was most her and the infamous H2 making all the decisions.
Rubbish Andrew when National was in power they also spent millions on consultants and flags.
New Zealand is simply a relatively poor country compared to other OECD nations (remember that “wealth” can only come from some sort of productivity surplus compared to others that you can exploit so that you can import goods you can’t make yourself at zero net cost to those buying it), that likes to moonlight as being “rich” towards its own population. We all need to live “within our means”, but for some reason the Government never seems to think they do (since the taxpayer is some sort of bottomless pit of “revenue”).
The fact is we need to slash health, sport, arts and even education expenditure – none of these are really an investment in anything that will increase the wealth of the country. Health expenditure technically is only beneficial (and yes, I’m being deliberately super harsh and exaggerating with this point) if it results in an outcome that the patient can ultimately contribute to society after a set amount of care. Education is slightly an edge case, but teaching kids social studies and woke ideology is waste of their time and our money.
Tax money should be directed at infrastructure and projects that provide genuine cost savings to the taxpayer that is funding everything. A coal to fuel plant using Manapouri hydro so we can be independent of petrol/diesel prices would be a good idea. Similarly a small scale pharma project so we are no longer beholden to overseas big-pharma grifters (like Pfizer) for basic medical supplies would be a good idea too imo.
Wow, so you do want US style healthcare imposed on this country. Showing your true colours now boy. I suppose you think we are too poor to house people and you think that should just live in their cars and love it
I’m very much against private health care. So 100% incorrect.
You want healthcare funding slashed and user pays imposed.
There is nothing that Labour want to achieve the first 100 days that they couldn’t have achieved in the last 900 days.
You know Labour never planned to do anything truly progressive because they are an integral part of the Neo-liberal machine, a slightly different flavor to give the illusion of choice.
National or Labour? Watties or Oak? Well, you peasants are only getting baked beans for dinner, you have a choice which, but they are both made in the same factory. Neo-liberalism marches on into a brighter future, but it’s not for you, it never was.
Money rules, nothing else. Trick is to find out whether the problem here is money-power-related or super dumb-arse politics.
The late David Graeber wrote an excellent article exploring the professional managerial class in the context of how it’s affected the univerities and academia in general:
https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/
The late Mark Fisher’s writing on Capitalist Realism is also relevant…
Two late – read. learn. practical act now – before too late.
Engel, hart soul art, human grasp. social, who you say knowing/island, how shallow, your isolated uncaring humanity care.
Bomber, bugger, voting, green.
They! thought the prefect,, eh they missed the BUS,, THESE FARM FENCE WIRED EGITS shall we be carring, outside their corporations uncaring mind wash, profit us our profit,, bomber, trar them appart.who breath eh breath, pin number, your breah.
Bovis, how us moo, care done, farm fence, our care has done.
Engel,, Bomer. heaps of beating my union care. truth scare most, socialist .
Breath;
Goin Engel, grasp the thought care.
Harm , not, History, Jim Knox, leader of the LABOUR Union party of New Zealand, walking down wellinton manners mall. with a t bone steak.. saying join the union,, you can buy one of these. Truth, who you. truth.
Yeh Mulldoon, wis giving Knock, words,, liked that todays National clown in our parliament, fool see, that welly east eh! Seatoun, eh come, here understand;
Bomber, how them brain dead fucks, understand humanity socialism. Bomber,no need, these fuckers farm fence get now to control, political rrevolution new zealand,, farm fence protection,, care, fuck care green, dont publish, slauchter care socialist,, all those egit who rubbish let them
Shall there shallow city, control profit, exploit say,, us our farm fence city bank controlled say.
t
Who, you, government, care, labour exploit, eh!, social thought, care knowing,, who these road workers, talking about China, who these, rice hand feed.
Bomber, your leftie 100 day agenda is never going to happen even if they were to get back in. They are still ideologically captured above all else.
Oh you are listing the PMC KPIs. The rub is which way the KPI is meant to move? PMC manage for increased beneficiary debt, reduced state housing, increased electricity prices.
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