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

By
Martyn Bradbury
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55
1655

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!

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

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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55 COMMENTS

  1. Chocolate rations are being increased from 30 g to 20 g.

    Seymour has some good ideas, but this ain’t one of them. Great photoshop BTW.

  2. Thank you Martyn. Possibly the most important missive you’ve ever penned.

    A grave and pernicious threat fronted by ACT, and supported by the reinvigorated Dirty Politics machine of National and their impotent leader, with NZFirst running decoy with their batshit crazy conspiracy prattle.

    When David Lange and Roger Douglas sat down on the government benches all those years ago, and charted the new trajectory for Aotearoa, who would have believed we could end up like this?
    Utterly heartbreaking.
    Sadly, and while many will try to deny it, the probability of major civil disorder and violent confrontation now increases daily.

  3. Why anyone would do a sit- down interview with Seymore is beyond me..

    A clueless clown with a massive
    deluded ego desperately wanting attention …
    His stupid unworkable, poorly thought through blind ambitions, have all the hallmarks of a meglamaniac…
    His arguements are weak, and every time he is challenged he reverts back to irrelevant analoges that make no logical sense.

    He is simply not worth listening to, but the clearly the media haven’t got alot on, because every time you turn on the radio or tv ..there he his.

    It’s like ground hog day…every day!!

      • You’re likely a nice person but fuck me, are you ignorant or what!?
        Do some research or keep appearing stupid. Or are you a part of the problem? That could be it too of course.

          • “So fuck what media”.. Do you really lack the discernment to be able to answer that yourself?
            Or are we looking at just another ditto head with no depth whatsoever?
            So tell me, why is it that tories seem to be driven to oversimplification? Is it cowardice, or stupidity coupled with arrogant bigotry, or Just that the descendants of the colonizers can’t handle their own crapulance and mediocrity, so need a scapegoat to distract themselves for that defect?
            See if you can answer that without resorting to facile memes this time..

            • Of course, my friend. We need to accept the fact that conservatism, by definition, does not only include left and right tendencies. Let’s say that the country’s policies are a hologram that contains a deep reality. The instrumental political ideologies of the politicians who manage the policies are like a cluster of planets moving within this hologram. Now, based on these policies, we can only change the instrumental nature of the hologram, not its shape. That instrumental nature is the depoliticized political ideas hidden within the socio-cultural conjuncture. The curses you utter are outside of those political ideas and reflect your rotten ideas. We focus not on these ideas but on the sociopolitical manifestations of political engagement. THANKS

    • Unfortunately Seymour holds huge sway in government, he was Luxon’s preferred coalition partner. How he gets to have so much power with 8.6% of the vote is a failure of our electoral laws.
      GPs are on the verge of collapse due to decades of underfunding yet National and ACT want tax cuts! – words fail me.

    • Have you got the ability to lead a political party and get voted into power.He and Peters are not my cup of tea but they should be respected .
      There was plenty of criticism of those that personnally critized Jacinda but it seems that there are different rules for our present leaders.

      • The only reason Seymour is there is because the vacuous Epsom fools did a dirty deal and a bunch of billionaires used their money to buy influence..

        They know a peacocking ego looking for a massage when they see one..

        Seymour is the perfect conduit for what they’ve got in mind…

      • oh come on trev he reaches uk tory levels of ignorance and stupidity, it might fly in a corprate situation but they always promote the mediocre…turds float

      • You always get mistakes and typos when you’re busy..

        Have you read your own sentence back to yourself?

        It doesn’t make sense..

        Stones….glasshouses!

  4. LINO already have incorporated regressive tax policy by refusing to impose a capital Gains Tax on speculators who buy houses to rent out anticipating a big rise in house prices eventually. A sort of ” Atlas Shrugged ” Captain’s Call. The ” Christchurch Call ” is like a flat tax to remove freedom of opinion by censorship. We’re all flattened by conformity imposed by our betters.

  6. A friend told me in December that she felt like leaving the country for the next three years. Semi-jokingly, I replied that she could return to a wasteland of armed marauders with everyone for themselves. That was before I watched the video above on right wing accelerationism. Now I believe it could be the prime goal of Act.

    • Labour were creating a wasteland ruled by gangs and ramraiders. We now have given police back the power to arrest these people .Obviously if your friend liked being here under Labour she had better leave now as National are in for the next few years until Labour finds a spin and the Greens steal their voters

  7. A friend told me in December that she felt like leaving the country for the next three years. Semi-jokingly, I replied that she could return to a wasteland of armed marauders with everyone for themselves. That was before I watched the video above on right wing accelerationism. Now, in fomenting racial division & the running down of social services, among other destructive policies, I believe it could be the prime goal of Act.

  8. ACT is a liars club. It’s where manipulative liars go to feel comfortable amongst their own kind.
    The other [thing] that ACT is, is where the monetarily rich but yet morally impoverished people go for similar reasons. If, like me, you’ve seen maggots writhing inside an animals carcass you’ll know what I mean.
    ACT is the contagion that’s spread throughout our once beautiful, peaceful and financially quite bloody rich Aotearoa/New Zealand. ACT is as a tactical defence against rising public inquiry born under urgency in board room meetings within the banking sector, the larger business enterprises covertly funded by farming or rather free farmer money which is earned from exporting but unfortunately for farmers, the only money they see is the stipends they’re forced to take at the farm gate. Once their produce leaves the lands they were created on, it becomes a golden shower for ACT’s already rich elite, if elite could be a word used to describe parasites. The Beehive, for example, could be better described more as a rats nest sharing space with wasps. No disrespect to actual rats or wasps intended.
    For those of you genuinely trying to understand what the fuck it is exactly that’s going on. Step back. Step way back and look at the big picture. Try it. Go on. What do you see? Never mind the stirrings and opinions of the littler fleas like ACT and it’s foul sire, The National Party.
    What do you see… Do you see what I see? Here’s what I see.
    I see a beautiful few islands larger in land area than the UK by about 29 thousand sq km. I see a fabulous first nation people willing to take a risk on their invaders by ‘fitting in’ with the natural progression of an evolving time, as it does everywhere all the time which is usually extremely unfortunate for First Nation People almost everywhere.
    If you’re intelligent enough to drive along the road without mindlessly spiralling off a corner or crashing into others as equally stupid you will see what was once a First World country adding to the further development of societies by using creative thinking, hard work and inventing tools and equipment to make the job easier.
    That, is what enabled Aotearoa / New Zealand to become a World First country, a world leader in so many facets and ways. Are you still standing well back! Be aware! Educate yourself! Look beyond the minuscule lies and subversions that bedevil our MSM, now a rich fuck’s plaything. ACT, is business. ACT IS NOT POLITICS. Go further back! See the picture get bigger! See how it’s painted using tiny little lies all mashed together by a bent MSM and fawning, arse kissing, cowardly, over-paid, overly entitled politicians who we trust while they stab us in the back.
    Ever seen a TV series called The Prisoner’ starring Patrick Mc Goohan. It’s fantastic. It’s truly a must-watch if that’s your retro kind of thing. It could also be regarded as a prophecy https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061287/.
    We AO/NZ’ers are living within a false reality and the rich must keep telling convincing ( Read forcing) us to simply keep working, nothing to see here, everything’s going to be just fine. ( Except those of you living in dire poverty. You, who pay the most tax in relation to your wages and salaries but worse still, you must now pay businesses or what was once your taxes paid for your essential infrastructure. Yes, you. You’re fucked.)
    National was formed back in 1936 with the sole purpose of ripping off a booming agricultural sector.
    More often than one could care to admit, it was fellow farmers who discovered that there was easier money in becoming the politicians ripping off their neighbours. EXAMPLE ! Buy wool for a few pennies a pound then store it until demand increased at the consumer end, then up the prices. There you go. I’ve just described, in a big picture sort of way in only 22 words what’s gone down that’s now coming back to haunt us.
    We’re currently flailing away, drowning in lies and logical fallacies. Our history, our politics, our economy is a lie. ACT’s little flea wants to give tax breaks to the already rich. We need to break out the flea spray.

    • You’re likely a nice person but fuck me, are you ignorant or what!?
      Do some research or keep appearing stupid. Or are you a part of the problem? That could be it too of course.

      • Ahh another rightwing troll attacking you Countryboy. Looks like your daughter is in on the act.
        Instead of insults and stupidity, debating your points would be the intellectual thing to do. I guess that’s part of the problem. That could be it too of course.

    • ” ACT is a liars club. It’s where manipulative liars go to feel comfortable amongst their own kind.
      The other [thing] that ACT is, is where the monetarily rich but yet morally impoverished people go for similar reasons. If, like me, you’ve seen maggots writhing inside an animals carcass you’ll know what I mean. ”
      The NZ carcass is still alive and has further meat to lay eggs into and devour. This parasitic process is described in Michael Hudson’s book ” KILLING THE HOST how financial parasites and debt destroy the Global Economy ” through privatisation, rentier favouritism and the FIRE sector. ( Finance, Insurance, Real Estate ) And complicit governments like LINO who refuse to do their job of stopping the exploitation. E.G. Capital gains Taxes. or finance as class warfare.

      “Debt leveraging is a major reason why the United States and Britain have lost their industrial advantage. Debt-inflated costs for housing, education and other basic needs have priced their labor out of markets abroad and at home.”
      ― Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage

  9. This is indeed interesting, and deserves more publicity than just this website. Please keep on the case. And the link to the fellow jailed in the UK for “walking slowly along the street” horrifying.

    And yet, if Labour/Greens hadn’t been so unattractively ideological, the election outcome might have been different: perhaps overstating as yet, but there’s that much-recycled quote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . . the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”

  12. This Flat Tax is not new, Roger Douglas wanted to implement this when he started the Act Party, it’s classic Neoliberal Policy to enable the Rich to escape having to pay their fair share of Tax, under the Flat Tax scheme , the Rich would pay the same Tax rate as those on lower incomes, it’s a utter scam, the current Tax scales mean the higher up the Income ladder you go, the higher your Tax deductions & the weasel David Seymour knows it, that’s why he wants to bring in this old policy, its a guaranteed pay rise to the Rich at the expense of the poor who’ll get to shoulder the burden of the Tax shortfall that the Rich won’t be paying! So Seymour wants to line his rich mates already bulging pockets further to fuel their greed & avarice so they can avoid paying their fair share of Tax but even that won’t suffice, what they really want is to not pay Taxes at all & many don’t? What a Scumbag Seymour is but what do you expect, this clown has never had a real job in his entire life or earned a honest days pay so has no concept of paying a fair share of Tax, but he should know because Taxpayers fund his exorbitant Salary & he should be paying more Tax, not less!

    • “…under the Flat Tax scheme , the Rich would pay the same Tax rate as those on lower incomes, ”

      That would be fair…unless you’re an envious socialist with rapacious greed for other people’s money

  13. This isn’t even aimed at corrupt NZ fatcats like Luxon who own eight homes, or the owners of large NZ companies.

    It’s directly intended to appeal to particularly unpleasant alien foreigners to sell them New Zealand citizenship, to become paper New Zealanders like Peter Thiel, the kind of lovely people who are enthusiastic about getting blood transfusions from nubile teenagers.

  14. In the end, this is all the NZ will be left with, nothing. The only way the masses will get somewhere is to fight these extreme right winners and their mad policies.

    By fight it will devolve into all out civil war
    Unfortunately it is the only way to get back to a level playing field.

  15. ” 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. ”

    As I pointed out on TDB last year I have been watching the situation in the U.K and of course Sunak is carrying out a large part of this agenda and most recently the draconian new public order act aimed at all protest whatever the cause may be.

    ” But the big difference for the protests in 2023 is the new Public Order Act. The government and the cops will be hoping this new draconian legislation deters people from taking action against this marketplace in death and destruction. The bad news – or good news if you’re on the right side of history – is that it won’t make the slightest difference. After all, if repressive policing deterred us, we’d have given up years ago. ”

    https://www.thecanary.co/editorial/2023/08/08/dsei-2023-excel-london/

    Now Sunak and his colleagues are gunning for the trade unions.

    ” The House of Commons will debate the Anti-Strike Bill, which aims to strip frontline workers of their right to strike.

    ” frontline workers speaking about their opposition to the new laws, passed just two years after they were applauded as pandemic ‘heroes’ in the same place. RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch and FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack will also take to the stage to oppose what they argue are attempts to make effective trade unionism illegal in Britain.

    https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2023/01/30/enough-is-enough-demo-set-to-protest-the-tories-historic-attack-on-democratic-rights/

  16. Case in point – the recent MSD staffer whose horrible phone call with a ‘client’ about his accommodation made the headlines.

    With the cutbacks in “non-customer facing” staff, that means less trainers, less quality-assurance, less personal development & less counselling/support for case managers & contact centre staff.

    So people on benefits/social housing get worse service with scant training in customer care & de-esculating situations, and stand a great chance of ending their conversations with MSD/housing NZ angrier than when they began.

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