Child poverty stats have stalled, public health and public education are in crisis, there is a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, a poverty crisis and an environmental crisis.
TDB’s own Professor Wayne Hope calls it a ‘Polycrisis‘…
Everything seems to be going wrong, everywhere all at once—COVID-19, Ukraine, bank failures, inflation, extreme weather events.
Crisis afflicts the geopolitical system, global financial system, global climate system and global health system. The interconnectedness of different crises across overlapping systems has been termed a ‘polycrisis’. In these circumstances, governments confront multiple unfolding emergencies. Elaborations of the concept appear in the blogs of economic historian Adam Tooze and in research from the Cascade Institute.
Never-ending crises and emergencies disrupt the election cycle in different countries. Traditionally, popular governments, recently elected, serve two, maybe three terms before departing office. Before that point, mainstream political journalists and the commentariat declare that the incumbents are infighting/out of touch/losing credibility/tired/making mistakes/out of ideas. Public disquiet/anxiety/resentment with the government and ‘disappointing’ opinion poll results feed into each other. Meanwhile, the major opposition party, their leader (and coalition bloc under MMP) are deemed, implicitly as fit-to-govern – judgments which opinion poll trends seem to confirm.
…we are now in an age of consequences whereby the failure to act in the past has borne a harvest of spite we are all forced to bitterly pick from.
The problem is we are never allowed to ever reconsider the 40 year Neoliberal experiment of deregulation and privatisation that infects the NZ public service and State.
That’s what these BIM reports point to, a hollowed out State with barely the capacity to respond let alone get ahead of our problems…
Briefings to incoming ministers released to National-NZ First-Act coalition Government
Concerns over gangs, extremist views by prisoners, migration numbers and disassociation from school following Covid-19 have been raised by government department officials in briefings to new ministers.
The Bims are produced by public servants after each change of government or change of minister and usually set out trouble spots and challenges looming in each portfolio area, some preliminary advice on government policy as well as a basic introduction to how the government department operates and the ministers’ responsibilities.
…Our corporate led media and their Public Broadcasting quislings are there to enforce the fundamental lie of NZInc, that cut throat free market neoliberalism supersedes all else and that regulation is the filthy abortion of a stillborn egalitarianism that once held pretensions upon these far flung shores.
NZInc has become an interwoven tapestry of parochial self interest and corporate malfeasance, a warren of monopolies and duopolies endlessly molesting NZ for tino rangatiratanga rentals.
Right now the Australian Banks are exploiting billions annually from our us.
Right now the wealthy manipulate regulations to exploit our dependence upon them.
Right now politicians and consultants and a self interested public service manipulate legislation in order to give vast sums of public money to private interests and pretend that’s due process.
Right now under regulated markets are held hostage to the vested interests of the old boys club.
Right now the shopping Duopoly is milking a million per day in profits from hungry desperate NZers.
John Key sold 49% of our Hydro power using taxpayer sweeteners that triggered Māori water claims and created a $400million irrigation slush fund to Dairy intensify the South Island. Not only did he rob NZ of our hydro assets, his privatisation damaged our climate for private interests that left us geopolitically exposed to China.
This never ending vandalisation of the egalitarian pillars of our society has created the neoliberal wasteland of vulnerable people as ‘clients’ and a public service managerial class more focused on micro aggression policing contracts than doing the mahi.
We are not allowed to challenge the neoliberal dystopia that NZ has become despite its failure being everywhere all at once.
Here’s what our 63,000 public servants actually do – and why we have so many of them now
The new government is determined to reduce the number of public servants, decrying the serious growth seen under Labour. But the debate usually skips past who they are and what they do. Henry Cooke explains what a public servant is, what they do all day, how they grew under the last government, and how ours compare to others.
The first problem is working out who on earth we mean when we talk about “public servants”.
Do we strictly mean people in Wellington helping ministers develop policy? Or do we include, say, the caseworker at the MSD office down the road, or the security guard outside the door? It’s clear that someone writing policy at the Ministry of Education is a “public servant” – but what about the teachers? What about the folks at State Owned Enterprises like Transpower which runs the national electricity grid? What about the cops?
The lesson from Covid was that we need more State Capacity, NOT LESS, yet we never pause to evaluate the 40 year neoliberal revolution of the Lange/Douglas Fourth Labour Government.
We don’t just need more teachers, drs and nurses, we need new hospitals, now schools and new capacity!
New Zealand has an egregious infrastructure deficit in NZ!
The Left have to make the argument for a bigger capacity State funded by taxing the mega wealthy. They have to show where the money will come from and they have to show they will have a plan ready to go.
Because our under regulated capitalism has been robbed of revenue by a rigged economic system that benefits the rich, we are desperately needing more hospitals, more passenger rail, roads, schools, storm repair, tens of thousands still waiting for State Houses.
The reality is that we are not spending nearly enough and we need a far larger State capacity, not less of it!
There is a class war happening right in front of our eyes as the wealthy pour millions in donations to National and ACT while Climate Denying Federated Farmers join ACT and National push for landlords to have the power to evict when some of their biggest donors are Real Estate pimps.
The political project of the right is to amputate the State’s capacity to raise revenue so that it can’t be redistributed in the first place.
There are 14 Billionaires in NZ + 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals with over $50million each, why not start start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry to pay their fair share before making workers pay more tax!
When Treasury is begging for a capital Gains tax, you know shit gone cray…
Treasury’s warning to new Government: Consider Capital Gains Tax quickly to plug spending hole
Are those stats that live up to the egalitarian dream of NZ?
The ‘cash was splashed around’ by Labour during Covid as the price paid to prevent a mass death event from a once in a century pandemic.
Pretending otherwise is simply rewriting history while denying the underfunded present which dooms us in the future.
We need a bigger State, not a smaller one.
This is the time for the political Left to walk away from woke pure temple politics and embrace Broadchurch class solidarity.
Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 40 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society.
If we don’t provide people with Hope that there is a better way of being for us all, if we don’t provide vision that actually addresses the material well being of our voters, if we aren’t prepared to debate the expansion of State Capacity by taxing the mega wealthy and funding the climate change adaptation, if we don’t do all that, this hard right racist climate denying Government will win again.
The 40 year neoliberal experiment has been a spectacular failure and we now have the data to prove it…
Human Rights Commissioner: NZ’s quality of life record ‘alarming’
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- New data shows New Zealand is failing on every social and economic human rights metric
- The country is not delivering adequate rights to education, health, housing and work, based on what it could be achieving with the money available
- When it comes to the right to food, New Zealand’s record is steadily declining
- Māori, people with disabilities, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds are most likely to experience human rights violations
…The danger of woke middle class identity politics replacing class left analysis is that the politics devolve into a micro aggression deplatforming campaign that alienates rather than builds solidarity against free market capitalism.
The true demarcation of power in a democratic capitalist state is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers Vs the 90% rest of us.
Identity Politics simply cements into place a caste system of intersectionism alongside a terminal tribal affiliation to your skin colour, gender or identity.
There needs to be far more common ground and shared values.
We need a new taxation and regulation model to stop the neoliberal rot. We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.
In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
This isn’t progress.
We either attack the economic settings of this madness now and fight to retain our egalitarianism or we are doomed to live in the shadow of Capitalist greed.
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After the cold war ended, the peace dividend was supposed to have redirected defence spending into social spending. Now we can see where all of those threads ended up. Into budget cuts and tax cuts. And for a time peace was relatively high until China started started to overtake the American economyp, now China has the peace dividend and we don’t.
So, attacks upon the treaty, sovereignty and the economic project have to be reacted to and resisted. Arguments for the Treaty, defence and economic sovereignty are not attacks or rebukes against the way politics or how media operates or whatever.
Arguments for New Zealand’s sovereign power should be affirmations of the projects importance. There for in a massive undertaking like this if you do not have a righteous purpose we will never actually underwrite a peace dividend.
There for deniers, doubters, sceptics or obstacles have to be removed, discussed or run over because these issues are not about us its abour the little kiwi project reconstructing New Zealand into a fortress.
The global commons matter to all of us whether it be war, trade, climate change. The state of the oceans matter to us all and its foolish to believe that global warming is not a consequence of human activity. A rational government will support policies which sees radical adaptation to the conduct of carbon abatement in this case. That’s what NZDF is about. That’s what the climate fund was about until Nicola Willis got her gruby little hands on the peace dividend and that’s what a carbon trading scheme is about in respect to climate.
Perhaps the most important thing to do is bringing food, housing, welfare, particularly trade and foreign affairs, health and education and the rest of government into a new national security framework and making it into an economic argument where cleaning up New Zealand becomes an economic task and a leading cause of economic growth yknow there is no law of nature that says we have to buy cheap heavy machinery and ships from abroad etc. New Zealand has specific requirements, vehicals need improved water crossing capabilities. Houses need better insulation, heating and air-conditioning. Our navy and military has to operate in at least to different oceans we are not a continent. New Zealand is an island nation with very unique requirements that the global supply chains can not support so where ever possible kiwi entrepreneurs have to step in in order to meet demand for products designed specifically for New Zealand.
But interms of scale and impact and the adoption of key principles the military is going to have to underpinning New Zealand’s peace dividend into a new national security framework.
In the late 50s and 60s NZ built roads schools and hospitals along with state houses like there was no tomorrow.If you google the 4 eyed monster PAUL GOLDSMITH .you will find work he did whie working in treasury .The big difference was workers paid bugger all tax along with small business with a butcher earning less than 32k in todays money paid no tax .
From the 70s that was rotated 180 degrees so the filthy rich paid no tax and the lower incomes paid the most which has continued till today .
The current government goes on about tax releif for the low lifes but does all it can to give that money to the filthy few .
Mean while they reduce services ,make people redundant and let everything fall into disrepare such as is evedent with the current water situation
Essentially, when the wealthy paid their fair share of tax one could rely on very year being better than the last.
Poverty and unemployment are a feature, not a bug. They rail against and fear the poor, but regard them as a necessary reserve of cheap labour in order to keep workers in line. Along with migrants of course. Incidentally, there is no such thing as child poverty – it makes about as much sense as reverse psychology. There is only poverty. Can’t think of too many kids there are poor when their parents are rich.
I’m sorry Martyn but this Country is FUCKED, for over 40 yrs, this failed Economic Theory & Religious Theocracy has permanently turned NZ into a Economic Backwater & Neoliberal basket case, we a a Failed State, you only have to look at our crumbling infrastructure & water infrastructure particularly to confirm this conclusion? Neoliberalism & add NeoConservatism & Neocolonialism is engrained into the Society of NZ & can’t be excised, the Rot is to deep & invasive? Neoliberalism WON & judging by the Election of this new Far Right Govt, NZers fucken love it, gluttons for punishment & self flagellation, they have voted for Death Cult Capitalism, which is what Neoliberalism is, for over 40 yrs, isn’t that what David Seymour has advocated, the Individual over the Collective self Interest, the Tyranny of the Majority which spoke loudly at the Ballot box in 2023? So NZers can whine all they fucking like about the HUGE INCREASES in the Cost of living, Healthcare, Food, Fuel, Rents, Mortgages, Interest rates hikes & massive Rate increases & Bene cuts but I’m sorry NZ, you bought it, the hard right Govt so you can fucken pay for this broken down Nation that YOU voted for! Choke on them goddamn Apples? And as the Joker said in the same named Movie, when questioned about this self inflicted suicide, he replied, because you wanted it, don’t be surprised because “YOU GET WHAT YOU FUCKEN DESERVE”, a Neoliberal Hellhole of a Country run by Right wing crooks & criminals & Neo feudal overlords, enjoy your Serfdom Kiwi peasants because its only for the Rest of your miserable lives because YOU voted for it!
Why don’t you move Antforce62?
Bob the knob, spoken like a true knuckle dragging imbecilic Ape! DOH why don’t you leave, well why don’t you get a brain transplant because yours is clearly fried!
Yeah, but hang on a minute.
Lange quit as PM when he learned of rogers traitorous intentions. I heard him say and do so live on rnz.
neo-liberalism isn’t something that seemed like a good idea for everyone at the time. It was a milton friedman brain fart to swindle stuff, things and money away from the public then pour it into private pockets. A more simple word by way of explanation is burglary.
roger and his cronies knew exactly what they were doing and what they were doing was amoral and premeditated. We should be clear about that and for God’s sake, keep it simple. What roger and his buddies did was a con job. They conned us out of our wealth and now, to cover their tracks, they’ll fucking sell AO/NZ out from under our noses. luxons fanatical pursuit of the destruction of the treaty is to disarm Maori so they won’t be able to resist when foreign buyers start pulling up in their Gulf Streams and Super yachts.
We AO/NZ’ers are in the deepest shit imaginable and we’re given sport, beer and street violence to distract us from the very real threat that’s looming over us, compounded by global heating too, it should be said.
You morons who voted for national and it’s little hemorrhoids did this. You fucking fools! What have you done!?
How is ‘quitting’ acceptable? Roger Douglas should have been imprisoned, by any means necessary, and tried for his crimes. There’s still time.
The well is already poisoned – too late! Understand?
It’s never too late. We should look forward to trying all these neoliberals for the crimes against the nation. Indeed, we must. I cannot imagine accepting that these butchers will be allowed to continue their cull of the innocent rather than paying a price. If you think that’s acceptable, you might as well take advantage of the Ardern Party’s only policy innovation, support for so-called ‘Assisted Dying’.
Lange had no choice, his cabinet had publicly given him the fingers with their support of retaining the Dodger, his mana to remain leader had been stripped from him. Resignation was the honourable course of action, he had been emasculated.
Many lesser creeps may well have remained and sacrificed their mutable principles to support the dominant faction.
He could have openly condemned the traitors.
He could have openly condemned the traitors, and called for a national uprising.
If he’d had courage, and wasn’t a tool of the demon Douglas, he could have won.
He did condemn much of Douglas’s agenda and timeframes.
From your comments I have the suspicion that you weren’t actually around at the time.
Thank heavens for Roger Douglas without whom New Zealand would have degenerated into third world status.
LOLS NZ has dropped from the top tier something like twenty or thirty places in the world’s standard of living rankings since the date that Douglas took office.
LINO has had two opportunities to overturn the neoliberal revolution. Instead they ran away with radical identity politics.
The extreme monopolisation of the local press (absolute monopolies in every metropolitan newspaper market; only two private broadcasters in most television markets) has ensured that the ignorant little villagers will never be allowed to remember anything that happened prior to 1991.
The local propaganda since that time has been more extreme than almost anywhere else in the U.S. Alliance. Other countries would actually debate issues such as infrastructure and living standards. The dumbed-down local yokels were instead told (repeatedly) that they were simply inferior wretches from a laughing-stock of a country — and that they forever deserved worse infrastructure and housing than the 1930’s, and a continuous collapse in living standards for over four decades.
The subsequent mass emigration became a kind of capitalist nirvana: let’s simply replace everyone that complains with cheap foreign labourers, who don’t know how bad things actually are, and have zero patriotic loyalty.
Everything’s broken
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pndhO5DcSI0
Honestly, what’s new? Granted, we’re most likely on the long slide.
The Labour government of Kirk stole the wealth of our nation and sold it cheap to overseas interests. The wealth had been built by the working class, was owned by the working class and provided employment for the working class.
We are now nearing the end of the worldwide Monopoly game. We know how it ends. The losers either walk away or they upset the Board and scatter the pieces. Two things happen. The world we have created is destroyed completely and the winners discover that in real life their wealth is as illusory as the little red plastic hotels they so proudly owned. Twenty people will discover that they don’t own half of the planet.
The end of the world we have built will not be good. We think we have problems now. We will soon discover this is a golden age even for the poorest among us.
“The Labour government of KIRK stole the wealth of our nation and sold it cheap to overseas interests.”
Facepalm.
Surely a typo.
Where’s Wally? It wasn’t Kirk so whom? Well ut wasn’t Lange though he made a few mistakes. If not Kirk who was the irk? And how come we don’t get tough with traitors to the people in NZ/AO. What do Maori think?
Are you people kidding?
Kirk wasn’t the architect of the sale of NZ commons, that came after Muldoon, ushered in by the 4th Labour Govt.
BIM bloody acronyms or ? again. BIM here is – Briefing Incoming Ministers.
BIM UK is Building Information Modelling
Actually the content is connected. Here is a vid about how the BIMs over there are not supplying and controlling the right information on good building techniques and ensuring they are put in place. Their buildings are failing within about 4 years, about the length of time of their elected governments.
See the connection? To know him (her) is to love him/them, but not after we find out he has feet of clay. But you probably need years on before you understand that saying.
Time for some light music. The Teddy Bears 1957-64 ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’.
(Too young at that time to know about feet of clay and possibly never found out. Weren’t they/we sweet and innocent). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIUf6dOGc1c
That was the sweet, now for the sour in this potage:
Further to the Building Information Modelling in UK. – How UK Housing Developers scam the public and how we might stop them. (The 900k&! flats that could collapse any minute)26m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sjFKDMyPuY
Evan Edinger – who’s interesting – USA in UK perhaps a fresh look.
Can we learn anything from this and other things, about how we can influence methods in this country for better – and perhaps stop a dictator-like emission from arising amongst us.
Edinger again –
*His Mum’s findings of the UK : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mmKqMGjLm0
*Is the British citizenship test getting too hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MNCraSgOpM
*2 years back 19.54 British NHS doctor reacts to American medical bills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0MBrfqwdEg
” We either attack the economic settings of this madness now and fight to retain our egalitarianism or we are doomed to live in the shadow of Capitalist greed ”
Bomber the last politician to fight for egalitarianism in this country was Jim Anderton when the hobbits were beginning to realise that life before 1984 and its well received benefits were gone for good.
Clark and Cullen were the last to argue for a fairer deal and talk about a shared vision but were constrained by how far they could go to roll things back.
Ever since we have only had governments that are status quo managers and we reached a point of no return IMHO when Key and English maintained a nine year rule to ensure that neo liberal policies are entrenched.
Those that control wealth here now are powerful and keep looking for ways to maintain that position. Governments come and go but the market economy prevails.
The big fights of the 80s and 90s are over and the egalitarian state finally died with the fall of the Clark government.
Most Kiwis are desensitized to the economic suffering around them and have accepted that its never going to change and that the unregulated market will do what it always does to survive and that is adapt and maintain its control.
none of it matters kiwis have a pearl clutching tantrum when metrics are published but revert to middle class indeference 5 mins later