Predictions: 2024 the Year of War

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Now.

None of what I am suggesting below may ever happen, and I hope they never do, but 2024 has been building like a subconscious nightmare since Trump first won the Presidency and the gravity of simultaneous cascade collapse could well envelop 2024.

I just don’t think the market has actually calculated the true risk of where this year could take us.

Internationally shockwaves are building that will cripple global trade and that will have an immediate impact upon us as a trading nation.

Domestically the last pillar of Jacinda’s legacy will be ritually sacrificed by this new hard right racist Government. Jacinda’s kindness was mocked but her aspiration was enough to force State Agencies to use kindness as their benchmark rather than the punitive boot in the face. This new hard right racist Government intends to turn the State from an instrument that lifts and builds to one that punishes and harms. There is an entire generation of Kiwis who are used to Aunty Jacinda’s kind state, they haven’t seen punitive punishment State before and it could light a popular front backlash.

Here is where I think the trigger points for conflict could be in 2024.

International:

China, the economy and the dairy death spiral:

Our economic reports paint glowing growth in Chinese exports but notes demand will ultimately taper off early next decade. Based on those rosy numbers, we get to economically keep our head above the water, what isn’t considered is if Chinese demand slows and drops.

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Surely the low price of oil internationally tells us that Chinese demand must have dropped considerably. With spluttering economic conditions, why are we assuming they’ll keep buying our products?

That seems like an enormous gamble. The debt the banks forced Farmers to rack up for dairy intensification has locked them into confidence games about future growth that are highly questionable.

The data out last week shows a feeble growth rate for China with a shrinking population. The impact of China’s one child policy has generated a demographics nightmare that dooms them and their huge speculative property bubbles are utterly unsustainable.

The millisecond the manufactured food industry can reproduce synthetic milk powder our economy suffers an Alpine Fault level rupturing.

 

AI:

A year in, those who wish to use technology for evil intent have worked out how to use AI, I think this will trigger a rise in sophisticated scams and see a lot more people robbed of their money.

I think we have a large part of the South holding elections and deep fakes will be tested out in these elections.

I think AI will lead to enormous jumps in efficiency and in doing so cost huge numbers of jobs.

The suggestion is 40% of current jobs could be replaced with AI. That is a massive dislocation while a few continue to make billions…

World’s five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer

Oxfam predicts first trillionaire within a decade, with gap between rich and poor likely to increase

…I think we will see leaps and bounds in technology thanks to AI design that keeps evolving to more efficient products and outcomes.

For those with money AI will become an important navigation tool for endless self gratitude while for the poor, it traps them out of a life they can never touch, forever banished from a heaven of luxury.

The robots don’t need to start a war with us, as a species we are already dead.

 

Climate Change:

The spike in heat temperatures recorded last year are so off the charts they are asking if we are on the cusp of grand tipping points that once breached spell doom for large chunks of the planet.

We simply don’t know what a spike like this does.

What we can guess is extreme weather events that cause mass damage to infrastructure and habitability beyond our current scale of comprehension.

Shit ’bout to get real on the climate front. Strap in, looking forward to hearing how it’s all a hoax from Shane Jones.

 

Putin:

When Putin invaded the Ukraine, we all told ourselves in the West that the great Chessmaster had blundered and had grossly underestimated the power of sovereignty to the Ukrainian people.

I wrote at the time that I hoped we were right, and that he had blundered, but I feared it was we who were blundering.

I argued Putin would invade because of his strong Orthodox Christian faith and that he had come to view his leadership in comparison to the great Russian Leaders of the past and after the attempted coup in Kazakhstan, Putin decided that true greatness for Mother Russia would reside outside of America’s Rules based Order regime and that Russia could be great again in a destabilised world.

I fear Putin forced his country into war and sees the 370 000+ casualties and dead as a great price to pay for Russia to seed chaos and build power from that chaos.

His only regret is that he didn’t start sooner!

The blackbelt Judo in him knows winning can be the one prepared to take the most pain and that submission is as good as a knock out.

It is absolutely in Putin’s interests to seed more disruption. Russian Intelligence finger prints are all over the Hamas plans of October 7th and Russia’s new friendship with Iran sets up the Middle East as a new front in Putins war.

Already Western appetite for Ukrainian support is waning as money is taken to Israel.

Russia’s ability to throw their own men into slaughter to literally blunt Ukrainian forces is staggering and has gridlocked any gains. The new Western heavy armour and jets will be ready for early this year and if the Ukraine can’t force an advance, all Putin has to do is wait for Trump to win and cut a peace deal with Trump.

The reality of how little time the Ukraine has to make advances could lead some to a desperate cross border escapade into Russia triggering a far more extreme response from Russia.

You can see the impact of these new weapons already with the downing of a half billion dollar Russian spy plane.

Expect more problems in Serbia as Russian backed interests start destabilisation tactics to keep the Europeans worried.

Putin knows he just has to hold on till Trump is re-elected and Trump will freeze Ukrainian funding and force Zelensky to the negotiating table.

Zelensky knows this too.

Expect a spike in escalation for world attention as Israel’s ethnic cleansing war crime continues and worsens.

 

Middle East:

The far right zionist Government Netanyahu put together demanded laws that over rode the Judiciary. This had caused 10months of intense protest in Israel punctured by the attack by Hamas on October 7th.

The disproportionate response by Israel is a war crime and is ethnic cleansing.

The IDF dropped more bombs in the first week on Gaza than America did on Afghanistan over an entire year!

0ver 25 000 are dead, over 60 000 wounded and almost two million traumatised and dislocated.

The IDF have killed more civilians in 2 months than Russia has in almost two years.

Israel and America have no comprehension how theses images are shaping a new generation of TicTok kids watching in horror.

It is in Putin’s interests that there is an escalation and NZ aligning with a counter productive attack on the Houthi is only providing accelerant to escalation.

Hizbollah have been so far held back.

Why?

My fear is Russia will gift Iran the final tech they require for an atomic test and the news will flash around the world and Hizbollah will be used as a threat then to any Israeli response.

Iran successfully testing a nuclear weapon before Trump is elected makes strategic sense and reorganises the power dynamics of the entire Middle East.

It will be the trigger point for an enormous military intensification that could destabilise and mutilate the region.

We are wildly dancing on the lip of an active volcano with no sense of balance.

 

China, Taiwan and the South Sea:

While America is busy in the Ukraine and Middle East, now is the time before Trump is re-elected for some sabre rattling and conflict, especially after the recent Taiwan election result.

While I don’t think Xi will risk a full invasion of Taiwan, I think he would take some of the fringe islands around Taiwan and proclaim symbolic victory. Expect a blockade of Taiwan that will be ended once the Great Peacemaker Trump calls Xi to end the blockade (while China keeps the fringe Taiwan Islands).

China’s economic pain and demographic collapse are generating social pressures that will demand a military adventure to channel those social pressures away from criticising the Party.

 

Trump:

All eyes are now on Trump. His possible re-election is the momentum for every other power to try it on and take as much as they can before he is elected and then ‘negotiate’ a symbolic peace while keeping what they want.

If Trump wins, he will bring a level of isolation and internal fascism never seen before. His militarisation of ICE with massive detainment camps is the effective creation of an internal secret police with vast unchecked powers.

It’ll be the worst bits of the Handmaids Tale mixed with Toxic White Christian Nationalism.

He will refuse to leave office if he is elected.

 

Destabilised Africa:

We will continue to see regional powers using proxies to take control over resource points inside Africa alongside regions that will actually simply become uninhabitable thanks to Climate change and civil war.

 

German Economy, Argentine madness, Indian Banking + Private Equity meltdown

There could be serious issues with a German Economic meltdown, civil uprising in Argentina, a collapse of the Indian Stock exchange and a global Private Equity bubble collapse as markets distort and crash.

 

Global Refugee crisis:

As parts of the world collapse we are going to see a surge in refugees fleeing climate change, war and social collapse. The West will freak out at the surge and demand angrier responses as social policy.

 

Another Pandemic:

We were lucky that the kill rate of Covid was so low, but the next mutation or next pandemic will sweep us aside and cause total societal meltdown. Look at what Covid did with its low death rate, imagine anything with something over 5% and you would see societal collapse. We are far more fragile as a Global society than we think we are.

 

Domestic:

Increasing Civil Disobedience: 

While the Māori King’s hui was a strategic success, it was a tactical failure. There was no declaration made to force National to dump ACT’s race war inciting redefinition of the Treaty Principles as the Māori King pulled his punches with a simple, ‘Be Māori’ message.

That won’t blunt ACT nor allow the tsunami of racism that is about to explode by allowing ACT to metaphorically burn crosses across the nation.

This tactical failure by the Māori Kings Hui is a reminder that every great Māori movement have been generated by the Flaxroots and not from the elite’s table.

Once Flaxroot groups arise, there will be true opposition to the Settler Nation agenda.

As the extremes of climate change become increasingly impossible to ignore, expect a huge spike in civil disobedience environmental activism as cell groups start to become more determined to stop the system.

Jacinda’s kindness legacy produced a State that had to act kindly, but the new hard right racist Government wants to use the State to punish and harm. This will be a shock to an electorate that had grown accustomed to kindness and could cause a populist backlash against the kind of State National, NZ First and ACT have mutated us into.

Political Polarisation & Extremism:

The rise of Qanon and fear antivaxx lunatics inside NZ First and the promotion of conspiracy theories as actual social policy has strengthened and enabled the conspiracy theory factions in NZ politics.

These extremist cell groups will continue to radicalise especially if effective Left protest starts to impact the debate.

There will be a real possibility of right wing domestic terrorism in the next 3 years.

The poorly advised prosecution of the CounrerSpin Hosts will feed this nightmare, especially if they win.

Most socially isolated Kiwi don’t appreciate that their Facebook feed suppresses actual journalism in favour of feral conspiracy theories so drift further and further down rabbit holes.

This could end up impacting as much as 10% of the vote.

As economic downturn driven by international shockwaves swallows more and more of the country, this polarisation and fear driven politics will only multiply.

 

Economic downturn and rising inequality:

The NZ Economy will only do well if the global economy does and at the moment that’s looking increasingly unstable thanks to looming geopolitical explosions, current wars and extreme climate events.
The idea that somehow 6.5% cuts to all Government departments and a punitive social policy agenda will protect Kiwis from an economic downturn seem optimistic in the extreme.
The under regulated capitalism we have will produce more distortions as the big players rip NZers off like absentee landlords exploiting monopoly rentals.

Climate Events

While the Mining Industry, Dairy Industry and Big Oil rule NZ, there won’t be any meaningful climate change policy. National have gutted public transport and killed off the successful EV subsidy while allowing their mates in Dairy and Trucking to pollute without remorse. Killing off Light Rail in Auckland was the final kick in the balls for any hope.

We will get hit by more forest fires, heat events and massive flooding rainfall. This is the age of consequences now and we goin’ ta git some.

Unemployment

Orr has to burn the economy to save the economy and the rising unemployment rate will spike as the 250 000 exploitable migrant workers are shipped into the economy to create the desperation necessary for a NZ labour market addicted to its Low Wage Economy.

Hilariously one of the industries that exploits the low wage economy is demanding MORE migrant workers to exploit…

Job check delays by Immigration NZ are causing stress – Hospitality NZ

…expect migrant worker exploitation to jump at the same time as unemployment does.

Domestic Violence, Suicide + self-harm

When the State goes romper stomper on its people it causes unique stresses that explode in domestic violence, suicide and self harm.

Expect them all to spike as this new hard right racist Government starts filling our prisons beyond capacity.

Gang showdown

I am expecting Mark to make a symbolic hanging of the current Police Commissioner to stamp his authority and implant some gung-ho dickhead to undermine all the good work Police have done and to attempt some stupid symbolic crackdown that will generate counter productive results. He will direct Coster to go into a gang funeral to remove gang patches at Coster will tell him to take a running jump because the whole idea is stupid and dangerous. Mark will sack him, force the crack down, it will immediately turn into a blood bath and Coster will be saying, “I told you so”.
Expect a prison riot at some stage.

Government Privatization and Social Investment Agenda

Wellington Bureaucrats worship their new Big Data Fascism, Orac

As National scrambles to slash budgets because their tax cuts aren’t funded, the social investment model will be dragged out more and more as a cost cutting ‘solution’.

The argument is that people from backgrounds with specific features are the worst in terms of cost to the State, so if the State steps in and removes the children quickly enough or cuts them from welfare quickly enough or throws them out of Kāinga Ora State Houses quickly enough – that cost will fall.To do this they passed law reducing the legal rights of parents, streamlined their 0800 numbers, weaponised uplifts and we will see it with all these new work tests for drug addicts, the disabled and beneficiaries.

Settler Police State:

Watch how quickly harsh law designed for da gangs…

New Zealand takes a page from Western Australia’s anti-bikie gang laws

Our new Police Minister has gotten an invitation from Western Australia’s top brass, as he prepares to bring in a raft of gang laws.

But, Mark Mitchell says he’s far too busy to accept it. He’s got the task of making National’s promise of cracking down on gangs a reality within the coalition Government’s first 100 days.

Our proposed legislation will be peppered with references to WA’s tough anti-bikie laws – which top officials say has changed the state overnight.

It includes the introduction of dispersal notices, anti-consorting laws, and the banning of gang insignia in public.

…mutates into law against protestors…

National Māori Action Day: Rush-hour ‘gridlock’ expected on Auckland motorways as Te Pāti Māori calls for protests

Mass protests planned for tomorrow are expected to result in gridlock on the main highways heading into Auckland’s city centre, likely causing millions of dollars in lost productivity, Te Pāti Māori party says.

Disruption is expected across North Island roads tomorrow morning as Te Pāti Māori calls for nationwide action in response to the Government’s “assault on tangata whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.

Te Pāti Māori party secretary Lance Norman said they were expecting hundreds – potentially thousands – of vehicles to join convoys heading slowly into Auckland’s city centre along the state highways from the North Shore, the northwestern and southern motorways.

He said the protests would likely cause “millions of dollars in lost productivity”.

 

…the Settler Police State is coming.

In Judith Collins as the new Minister for the GCSB, SIS, Defence and Attorney-General we have an enormous amount of power for someone who has a long track record of abusing power.

She is the most irresponsible appointment by Luxon which only highlights Luxon’s weakness as leader.

No one as ruthless, dangerous and manipulative as Judith Collins should ever be allowed anywhere near the Intelligence Apparatus!

It’s like giving an arsonist a flame thrower and a subscription to Burn Porn! (do not google that!)

She is the most unsuited human being for that level of power and if ANYTHING keeps you up at night, it should be Judith Collins as the Minister for Spooks!

Remember when she blew Ian Lees-Galloway’s brains all over the TV3 studio by just outing his affair live on TV?

Remember when she outed a Journalist who asked her for a reference?

Remember when she destroyed Simon Bridges reputation with a shit encrusted me too harpoon?

Yeah, her – she’s now in charge of the spies, the Army and the legal arbiter of martial law and suspension of civil rights.

Add to her, former private mercenary Mark Mitchell as the Minister of Police and you have all the ingredients for a Settler Police State.

Watch for how quickly draconian legislation aimed at da gangs immediately gets used against environmental protestors, Māori Rights Protesters and anyone protesting this Government in a way that angers ZB listeners.

Chippy’s inability to comprehend:

‘Sometimes you lose’: Labour leader Chris Hipkins reflects on 2023

Two months on from Labour’s election-night shellacking, leader Chris Hipkins still cannot pinpoint what the party could have done differently during the campaign to win.

It makes the task of rebuilding and repositioning for 2026 all the more difficult as Labour readjusts to opposition and a diminished caucus of just 34 MPs.

Speaking to RNZ in Parliament’s final week this year, Hipkins said one of the few advantages of opposition was the extra time to reflect. But his reflections on the campaign thus far do not appear to have produced much in the way of meaningful lessons.

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” Hipkins said. “The tide comes in and the tide goes out.”

Ummmm.

What?

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, the tide comes in and the tide goes out.”

Ummmm.

Sure, but not having any meaningful election policy platform and no vision didn’t help either eh Chippy?

Labour won the Covid war but lost the Covid peace because their incrementalism only wanted to rebuild to the existing inequality rather than expand and grow beyond that!

We were promised transformative, what we got was less left wing than the British Tory Party!

The current in-house review of why Labour lost will of course be a whitewash with zero credibility but it will provide Labour with a fig-leaf defence to avoid the actual reasons they lost and we shouldn’t allow them to get away with that.

Look, I’m not saying there wen’t some gains over the last 6 years: Free school lunches, trust tax, new top income rate, free prescriptions, most state houses in 50 years, record investment in housing, healthcare and investment, regulate property managers, clean car discount, apprenticeship scheme, benefits to wages, FPAs – all great first steps, but after 6 years of ‘first good steps’, you realised you were just jogging on the spot!

Labour are over run by the Professional Managerial Class, they see the solution as better bureaucratic structures rather than an upgrade of the Capacity of the State and so spent 6 years recreating bureaucratic structures without the necessary upgrade of capacity.

Labour refused to explain what the hell 3 Waters or Co-governance meant because Jacinda hated conflict (her Cabinet meetings were nicknamed ‘The Good Ship Lollypop’ because she wouldn’t tolerate any negativity) and wouldn’t engage on co-governance or 3 Waters which allowed astroturf dark money to take over the debate and manufacture it into an existential race issue!

Fundamentally Labour needed to tax the rich to pay for the social infrastructure we needed upgrading, but because Labour at heart are intellectual cowards, they refused to engage in that, which left voters asking, ‘why bother voting for Labour’.

Why indeed.

What was the point of Bread and Butter politics if no one could afford the Bread or the Butter?

GST off my banana only made me feel Labour didn’t understand how acute the cost of living crisis was for many of their own supporters!

That this all seems to be news to Chippy is terrifying!

With the Left over run by identity politic activists and woke middle class  dogma, Chippy’s inability to understand how disrupted the political culture is and why class Left economic universals funded by taxing the uber wealthy is the solution all combine to suggest he’ll cost us the 2026 election as well!

Chippy doesn’t know what the problem is and has no solutions! The damage this hard right racist Government is about to cause the vast number of Kiwis demands a political Left with actual answers to the real problems.

Labour either understand this quickly or squander another 3 years in Opposition.

Anti-vaxx Grievance Jamboree + Long Covid + next pandemic

The grievance Jamboree looking into covid that Winston has promised his conspiracy swamp supporters won’t give them the revenge they want. The medical cost of Long Covid will start to expand and we are totally ill prepared for the next pandemic.

The death of Jacinda’s kindness legacy

Jacinda’s much vaunted ‘Kindness’ legacy, which started out as an incredible political strength and ended up being used as a term of derision by those embittered by Covid, is complex and the ending of it by this new hard right racist climate denying Government is going to cause a cultural dislocation far larger than our Pandemic response.

There were two Jacinda’s

The first was ultra conservative and saw change in incremental stages that were heralded  as ‘great first steps’ but amounted to jogging on the spot, and then there was the Jacinda with the enormous emotional intelligence who could channel NZs infamous emotionally stunted headspace to embrace the huge moments that defined crisis in NZ.

From volcanoes, to terror attacks, to a once in a century pandemic, she cut a glowing light of hope against the darkness of those moments.

Her masterclass in leadership that Jacinda performed defying the feral QAnon antivax lunatics and death cult capitalists by protecting us from 20 000 Covid deaths deserves special attention.

Was the personal sacrifice steep to all of us?

Yes.

Was the economic cost steep?

Yes.

Do the recent revelations by Pfizer that the vaccine didn’t stop transmission suddenly prove all the anti-vaxxers right?

Not at all…

Fact Check-Preventing transmission never required for COVID vaccines’ initial approval; Pfizer vax did reduce transmission of early variants

Social media users are circulating video clips of testimony by a Pfizer executive, who is said to “admit” that the company and its partner BioNTech did not test whether their mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine reduced virus transmission prior to rolling it out – which is something the companies were not required to do for initial regulatory approval, nor did they claim to have done.

To get emergency approval, companies needed to show that the vaccines were safe and prevented vaccinated people from getting ill. They did not have to show that the vaccine would also prevent people from spreading the virus to others. Once the vaccines were on the market, independent researchers in multiple countries studied people who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and did show that vaccination reduced transmission of variants circulating at the time.

As these results on transmission were emerging in early 2021, national health authorities in many countries implemented or proposed vaccine-passport-style regulations that prompted ongoing debate (here) over the ethical and legal basis of the rules.

The misleading posts imply that national restrictions such as vaccine passports were based on a promise of vaccines blocking virus spread that neither the companies nor EU regulators made before the vaccines were marketed.

…Jacinda’s courage to go hard and go early caused deep societal anger and dislocation, but so would have 20 000 dead!

We all sacrificed, some more than others, but we all paid a pound of flesh to get through this horror and while the response wasn’t perfect, the truth is we were running blind through a once in a century pandemic and Jacinda saw us through that better than most.

The immediacy of banning the favourite machine guns of psychopaths in the wake of the white supremacists terror attack in Christchurch was another example of her ability to provide true leadership.

Those crisis moments made her and saved us, but her incremental reform of the neoliberal Wellington Bureaucracy, her ‘Neo-Kindness’ is what robbed her of her strongest strengths leading a Government with an unprecedented MMP majority.

Jacinda’s aspiration didn’t meet the reality and in her last interview with Jack Tame had the audacity to call any criticism of her aspiration unfair by arguing  it was better that she had high aspirations rather than not having any at all.

That’s her argument, sure we aren’t doing anything meaningful or transformative, but it’s important she had high hopes.

That’s neokindness.

At the end of 2017, 108 people said they lived in cars and John Key’s Government was torched for that.

Last year there were 480 people living in their vehicles.

A Million dollars a day was spent on motels for vulnerable people causing enormous social carnage with no real wrap around support services present and 27 000 are on emergency waiting lists – we can’t solve those problems apparently but the Government can spend a billion dollars on consultants each year?

$1bn spend on consultants each year

“Labour’s spending on contractors and consultants has climbed to nearly $1bn a year, despite Labour coming to power suggesting that they would rein in this use of the private sector. Much of this is spent on the “Big Four” contractor firms – Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst and Young.”

What the hell happened to left wing transformative change?

You can not spend a billion dollars a year on the professional managerial class in consulting while 150 499 children live in extreme poverty, while 600 000 require food banks each month.

You can’t spend a billion dollars a year on consultants while so many are in material hardship.

Jacinda’s neokindness wasn’t enough,  if you aren’t forcing the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite into radical reform, they play you and stymie your agenda.

All that said however, Jacinda’s neokindness did have a shallow response that actually was more important than her policy results on poverty, inequality and climate change and which when reversed will trigger an enormous dislocation.

What Jacinda’s ‘kindness’ actually did was force all State Departments and Agencies to act with kindness to everyone who used their services.

If an example of unkindness could get to the media, that Department rushed to solve the issue because they knew Jacinda expected kindness.

The first stand Jacinda made was dumping private spy company Thompson and Thompson from having anything to do with the State.

And this kindness mantra worked! Welfare punishment, state housing punishment, IRD actions, sentences, debt issues – every Department of the State was expected to be kind and they were.

An entire generation of people have grown up under 6 years of the State being kind, the new hard right racist climate denying Government now however wants to remove any carrot and just use the stick.

Take roading.

National have stripped money out of road safety features to keep people safe and will instead use the power of the Police to just ticket anyone speeding.

Rather than spend more money on making our roads safer, National will just use the power of the State to strictly enforce the rules.

It’s easier to fine a speeding driver than build better safer roads.

This new hard right racist climate denying Government will use the State to beat the bejesus out of the people and I don’t think Kiwis remember what it’s like to have a State that is out to get us all the time.

Jacinda’s Kindness legacy is about to be juxtaposed by a State that is actively attempting to hurt you and we will miss her then.

Political centre leaves National + none vote shocked into action

Let’s be very very very honest about why the majority of Kiwis voted National.

They did so in the hope their house price would go up 10%, they sure as Christ weren’t buying into NZ First’s Culture War Revenge Fantasies or ACTs crazy desire to redefine the Treaty and take the country to the edge of a race war.

For cosmopolitan National voters, they probably speak the Reo and pride themselves on their tolerance, just as Luxon does, the over the top white Settler fantasies of rump right wing voters however disgust these cosmopolitan voters and Luxon is desperate to downplay the Hui or that this new hard right racist Government.

The game now is pretending this new hard right racist climate denying Government isn’t hard right or racist or climate denying, and that repealing workers rights, renters rights and taking $555m from the poorest families is all very moderate and middle of the road.

Luxon has every right to fear the backlash his new hard right racist climate denying Government is provoking because middle NZ hates this race conflict stuff and will quickly walk away from National for enabling it.

2023 had a lower voter turn out than 2017, a lot of that Left wing vote who were disappointed in the lack of real progress from Labour will be jolted back in to voting once the magnitude of damage this new had right Government creates start to manifest.

Conclusion:

We are fucked.

This election wasn’t won, it was bought by private interests manipulating your anger at post Covid bitterness.

I’m not pissed that the Right won, that’s democracy, I’m pissed they won with such vapid and venal policy!

This knee jerk crap alongside counterproductive punitive measures alongside Real Estate Lobbyist wet dreams combine to vandalize the Egalitarian State

Taking from the poor to give to the rich ain’t my bag baby and we are a collectively worse nation for this outcome

The only thing that warms the cynical black splinter of what is left of my heart is the thought of Winston, Seymour and Luxon all having to work together.

If that’s ‘winning’, losing don’t feel so bad

If this Government were a fable, it would be a scorpion riding on a fox’s face sitting in the open jaws of a great white shark.

If you think this arranged marriage of inconvenience can last 3 years, you also believe in National’s rock solid foreign buyers tax revenue numbers and think climate change is a hoax!

Luxon claimed Māori, Labour and Greens were the ‘coalition of chaos’, well, here’s their  ‘Alliance of Arseholes’.

This Government has formed because the election was a grudge fuck against Labour, all that binds them is a shared glee to beat the bejesus out of beneficiaries, prisoners and gang members. This is the worst of us as a country congealed in a venal self interest that would make your average drug cartel blush.

We now can see the full hard right racist agenda of this Government and the obscene direction they intend to take for their political donors.

This fight against the most right Government ever elected will demand a level of resistance that crosses into civil disobedience because it will require mass civil disobedience protests to fight this Government’s hard right racist agenda.

They will be a dreadful Government for a dreadful people.

This is what we is now. This is us.

Old Zealand wins. New Zealand loses.

Welcome to Q Zealand.

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12 COMMENTS

  1. “ Let’s be very very very honest about why the majority of Kiwis voted National.”

    Because they thought that the Ardern/Hipkins government wasn’t much good.

    • “…they thought…” No they didn’t. And that’s the problem. From 1984 and after parasitic old roger douglas AKA ACT genius and two term Labour Party minister of finance, AO/NZ’ers have abandoned thinking in preference for being comfortably numb.
      That’s why we have a luxon, a corporate fairy and mantlepiece ornament and a fucking ugly one at that and then there’s whinny peters, a useless lawyer who decided on a ‘career’ in politics because he discovered he never had to keep up with performance criteria. Besides the money is easy and all he has to do is lie, which is a lawyers forte lets face it. And there’s seymour… What the fuck is the seymour?
      He likes to twerk…. that’s about it. He’s an ephemeral and dark little spirit, an ether waiting for substance. He’s close to douglas which guarantees he’s an expert liar and equally an expert performer when required which returns me to twerking. While we were all a-giggle at his twitching antics he’s flocking with the vampire bats in douglas’s crypt. seymour is a mystery figure which means he doesn’t want you or I knowing anything about him which means he has agendas and given the hole the natzo-neoliberals have thrown us into and now are desperate to keep us within they must be quite the secrets. I wonder..? Would it have anything to do with the presence of 14 multi-billionaires, 3118 multi-millionaires with personal wealth in excess of $50 million nett each and four foreign owned banks working us to death on our rich and plentiful islands while stealing away with $180.00 a second after taxes 24/7/365 and who are outside the scrutiny of us and what pretends to be our politics while there are 600,000 people needing food bank support and almost certainly largely comprised of Maori and Pacifica people. Perhaps we could ask his wonderful, beautiful fellow, who’s a lesson to us all on how to pull ones self up by one’s own bootstraps? That, and some seriously dodgy shit he’s done behind closed doors with our taxes paid for assets.
      Know Your Class Enemy: Graeme Hart
      Joshua O’Sullivan
      20 January 2017
      https://iso.org.nz/2017/01/20/know-your-class-enemy-graeme-hart/
      “As Matt Nipert writes in a 2015 New Zealand Herald profile, it was in 1987 that Hart began his corporate empire with a small hire company, Carlton Party Hire under the holding company Rank group. To survive the 1987 crash, he sold off the hire business in order to keep the holding company debt –free. He then did his first deal which would epitomise his relationship with parliament and those in power. In 1989, He successfully bid for the Government Printing Office for $23 million which caused considerable controversy. The company was independently valued at $71 million and to add fuel to the fire, the payment for the deal was delayed by 5 months allowing Hart to pay for the business through its own profits, essentially acquiring the company without having to pay for it at all. Using this capital as a base he then continued expanding, into more stationery and paper companies, including large stationery chain Whitcoulls for $71 million (by using debt financing and bank loans). Whitcoulls also used this method of debt financing to secure other international chains and in doing so briefly became the 5th largest bookseller in the world.”
      ” So what?” Some might ask which will make you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  2. Martyn – My picks for 2024

    – Hipkins is a goner
    – Russia – Ukraine Peace Treaty
    – Donald Trump becomes President
    – NZ remains peaceful, despite the efforts of a few hot heads
    – China continues its decline

    • Nathan here’s my pick for 2024?

      – Hipkins stays for another Election cycle & Labour loses again!
      -Russia obtains a unconditional surrender from Ukraine but Ben Morgan continues his Slava Ukraina gaslighting?
      -Donald Trump wins the US Election in a LANDSLIDE & continues with the same US Deathcult Policies as Biden did?
      -NZ rejects Peace & signs up to more Wars as our Sovereignty & our neutrality gets the arse from Winnie Peters who signs NZ on to support America’s never ending Wars for profit & we become a US Empire, Vassal State!
      -China continues to boom & replaces the US as the Worlds largest Economy.
      -Biden & his Incompetent Neocon Regime attack Iran resulting in a massive Iranian retaliation with the Straits of Homuz shut down, cutting off the Oil & the destruction of Israel & all US Military bases in the Middle East with Russia & China coming to aid its Iranian ally from American retaliatory attacks & then it’s Game over, that’s WW3!

  3. Bomber Russia and China are not the main problem. Sure they are big powers. But they are still relatively weak compared with the US and its allies. Weak, in the sense that the US still the hegemon, and R&C are only 30 years into their rise as new imperialisms.

    But to say that Russia and China are driving the geopolitical agenda is only half true. Economically, they are both growing. China is growing above 5% compared to the stagnation and recession of the West. That growth reflects their legacy as former bureaucratic worker states (the bureaucracy ruled but still needed to defend state property in the name of workers) that were forced to restore capitalism (they never really had it), because you know, the bureaucracy. Without workers in control of the plan, the economy stagnates.

    The restoration of capitalism around 1990 did not guarantee R&C escaping the hegemony of the West, but the advantages of a strong centralised state and huge national resource base made it possible. It was the power of the bureaucracy now acting as a new bureaucracy managing capitalism that turned possible into probable.

    It took Russia 10 years to resist the Western invasion. In 2000 Putin came to power and made the former soviet state apparatus serve the interests of Russian state capitalism, not those of Western or Russian oligarchs. From that point Russia was on the road to imperialism.

    But what was critical in unleashing Russia’s potential to become a great power was the foreign policy of the US and its allies to systematically engage in economic and proxy wars to provoke its breakup through regime change. This is what drove Russia to a defensive war in Ukraine.
    It was that war that forced Russia to abandon its economic ties to Europe and turn towards an alliance with China to protect its imperialist interests

    China was much more successful in it’s conversion of the former bureaucratic workers state apparatus into a capitalist state serving Chinese capitalism. Since 2000 it has ‘gone out’ internationally to become the biggest imperialist economy threatening the rule of the West. Far from declining (from 10% to 5% growth) China is expanding rapidly. The property collapse is no threat (the private investors are the loser in this collapse), nor is the Chinese population decline given China’s tech advances impact on labour productivity all over the world.

    So what is really driving geopolitics and producing crises, wars and revolutions everywhere, is the decline of the West, specifically the US as its sphere if influence dwindles against the Global South, BRICS, etc. The US would be a failed state without its dollar hegemony. Its national debt is around $34 Trillion. De-dollarization will work to fulfil Trump’s isolationism but create a critical mass for a fascist dictatorship.

    And as is always true, the ruling classes download their crises onto the backs of their imperialist rivals, neo-colonies, and ultimately the workers and most marginalised oppressed.

    So what ends up as genocide in Gaza, or in a ‘police state’ in Aotearoa, is what happens when imperialism in terminal crisis rules the world. The decline of the West and the rise of the East is merely a division of labour between the great powers over who gets the lions share of our labour while the system collapses.

    That is why fiddling around in parliament, the UN and ICJ, is being played for suckers. When capitalism is in terminal decline and cannot prevent stop its own death march, workers have to unite globally to stop it and create a new society that can rescue humanity and restore it to nature.

    • I think the US antagonism to Russia is to stop China linking to Europe and being economically dominant. So break Russia into small countries (more ‘stans) run by US sycophants. Not necessarily drunk like Yeltsin but just as compliant.

  4. “Let’s be very very very honest about why the majority of Kiwis voted National.”

    Well, you allude to it by mentioning the number living in cars, in poverty, etc.

    Current tax rates (except top 2% of earners) were set in 2010. Someone on the average wage paid 15% of that in tax. Bracket creep. Nats gave tax cuts in 2017, Labour immediately put them up again on winning the election. And left them there. So now that person on the average wage pays 20% of that in tax. Yup, about $60 per week.

    And so when they can’t buy groceries the “kind” government did nothing. They had to overcome shame and go to charities to get a food parcel, if they hadn’t run out.

    So Labour had a history of telling the poor & middle class to get stuffed and pay more tax even though they couldn’t afford it. Nats said have some of that extra tax back. No one cared if they could pay for it or how it would be paid for – they just desperately needed to balance their budgets.

    The good news for the left will be that the tax cuts happen and the low to middle class voters forget about that 6 years of pain.

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