Now ACT want to slash tax for the richest for a more unified society??? Welcome to ATLAS Network doublespeak

ACT leader David Seymour says simpler tax system would encourage a culture of success

ACT leader David Seymour is on a mission to convince his coalition partners to make a flatter, simpler tax system the centrepiece of this year’s Budget, arguing “you can leave everyone better off”.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has promised tax cuts in the May Budget, but she has yet to detail the way in which they will be delivered.

National campaigned on a proposal to adjust the existing tax thresholds, but as part of coalition negotiations with ACT last year, it agreed to consider whether the “concepts” of ACT’s tax policy could be incorporated “subject to no earner being worse off than they would be under National’s plan”.

In a sit-down interview with RNZ, Seymour said the key concept of his party’s plan was a flatter tax system, that is, removing some thresholds altogether and then giving targeted support to those on lower incomes through tax credits.

“If you introduce ACT’s concepts, you can leave everyone better off in the short run,” Seymour said. “In the long run, you leave the whole society better off, because we have a more unified society.”

A unified society????

Let’s be very clear that ACT are channelling ATLAS Network tax attack lines!

The ATLAS Network is the Hard Right Think Tank that ACT have used as a blue print for their hard right assault against the State! George Monbiot explains what ATLAS Network is…

A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?

…demolishing public services, privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest AND restricting the right to strike?

THIS IS ALL POLICY THE NEW HARD RIGHT RACIST CLIMATE DENYING GOVERNMENT HAVE ADOPTED!

Monbiot continues…

Coincidence? Not at all. Milei’s programme was heavily influenced by Argentinian neoliberal thinktanks belonging to something called the Atlas Network, a global coordinating body that promotes broadly the same political and economic packageeverywhere it operates. It was founded in 1981 by a UK citizen, Antony Fisher. Fisher was also the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the first members of the Atlas Network.

The IEA created, to a remarkable degree, Liz Truss’s political platform. In a video conversation on the day of her “mini” budget with another member of the institute, its then director general, Mark Littlewood, observed: “We’re on the hook for it now. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault and mine.” It didn’t work – in fact, it crashed spectacularly, at great cost to us all – but, thanks to the UK’s media, the BBC included, which continue to treat these fanatical corporate lobbyists as purveyors of holy writ, they’re off the hook.

Last year, the IEA was platformed on British media an average of 14 times a day: even more often than before the disaster it helped inflict on the UK. Scarcely ever was it challenged about who funds it or whom it represents. The three peers nominated by Truss in her resignation honours list have all worked for or with organisations belonging to the Atlas Network (Matthew Elliott, TaxPayers’ Alliance; Ruth Porter, IEA; Jon Moynihan, IEA). Now, like US supreme court justices, they have been granted lifelong powers to shape our lives, without democratic consent. Truss also put forward Littlewood, but his reward for wrecking people’s lives was blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission.

Nothing has been learned: these corporate lobby groups still mould our politics. Policy Exchange, which, as Rishi Sunak has admitted, “helped us draft” the UK’s vicious new anti-protest laws, is a former member of the Atlas Network. We might describe certain policies as being Milei’s or Bolsonaro’s, or Truss’s or Johnson’s or Sunak’s, but they’re all variations on the same themes, hatched and honed by junktanks belonging to the same network. Those presidents and prime ministers are just the faces the programme wears.

And who, in turn, are the junktanks? Many refuse to divulge who funds them, but as information has trickled out we have discovered that the Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companiesand other life-defying interests. The junktanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.

The dark-money junktanks, and the Atlas Network, are a highly effective means of disguising and aggregating power. They are the channel through which billionaires and corporations influence politics without showing their hands, learn the most effective policies and tactics for overcoming resistance to their agenda, and then spread these policies and tactics around the world. This is how nominal democracies become new aristocracies.

They also seem to be adept at shaping public opinion. For example, around the world, neoliberal junktanks have not only lobbied for extreme anti-protest measures, but have successfully demonised environmental protesters as “extremists” and “terrorists”. This might help to explain why peaceful environmental campaigners blocking a road are routinely punched, kicked and spat upon, and in some places run over or threatened with guns, by other citizens, while farmers or truckers blocking a road are not. It might also explain why there is scarcely a murmur of media coverage or public concern when extreme penalties are imposed: such as the six-month prison sentence handed in December to the climate campaigner Stephen Gingell for slow-marching along a London street.

…that’s right, all the crazy right wing bullshit getting played here has been spun by the Atlas Network.

…flat tax is just part of an international far right think tank funded by oil oligarchs to kill off Left wing policy and Kiwis are dumb enough to fall for it!

This is a class war being waged in NZ and the vast amount of political commentators and journalists seem to have no idea it’s going on!

The New Zealand Initiative is one of these ATLAS Network connected far right think tanks. Luke Malpass, Stuff’s Political Editor, was the former NZ Initiative Policy wonk, he ain’t going to tell you jack shit about the ATLAS Network and its influence over ACT policy is he?

The mainstream media in NZ is utterly over run with NZ Initiative and Taxpayer Union influence and they are peddling Atlas Network right wing chicanery.

We are getting destroyed because the middle class woke identity politics activists keep wanting to hand ATLAS Network and their proxies culture war ammunition we can’t win.

Right wing lunatic Debbi Gibbs is the Chair at Atlas Network and the lengths these free market deregulation goons are prepared to go to screw the scrum so you all get tricked into adopting this agenda…

A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike.

…are enormous.

You are being played New Zealand.

You. Are. Being. Played.

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