David Seymour says the Public Service is Left wing, bullshit!
If only this was true!
The Wellington Bureaucracy isn’t left wing! It’s a self interested Professional Managerial Class who use identity politics to mask their neoliberal hands-off-do-nothing-but-build-glass-palaces fiefdoms.
Oh they do the reo, and expose their pronouns and militantly ride bikes, they are effortless in their use of inclusion as a means to dominate and control the narrative, but they are a middle class clique, not left wing egalitarianism.
The Wellington Bureaucracy is a culture war of woke middle class Identity Politics aspirations backed with State funding, they may aesthetically be Left but they sure as fuck aren’t economically Left.
To brand the Public Service as ‘Left’ misdiagnoses the disease, symptom and patient!
The real power struggle in NZ isn’t Left vs Right, it’s between the Professional Managerial Class Corporate Consultants who influence policy to maintain their dominance and profit margins vs the self serving Public Service wanting to spend taxpayer money on their latest glass palace.
The Politicians are merely a masquerade of democracy to ensure participation that generates legitimacy, but the real power is between the Corporate Consultants who influence all policy to keep NZ deregulated and the self serving Public Service who are in it for their own fiefdoms.
The only chance any truly progressive movement gets in NZ politics is to ram your changes through in the first 100 days of any new Government.
That stops the self serving Public Service from stymieing your agenda and it stops the corporates from influencing it.
If we want true progressive policy to tax the rich and remove costs from peoples lives, it needs to be rammed through in the first 100 days or it won’t happen.
That’s why Labour have been so feckless and useless, they had no 100 day plan in 2017 and they didn’t expect to win an MMP majority in 2020.
They effectively became captured by the self serving Public Service and the Corporate Consultants.
The self serving Public Service is not our friend
The fundamental difference between Labour and National is that National MPs are all management psychopaths who excel at bullying others for results where as Labour wants to give everyone a cuddle at a hui with a vegan menu in Te Reo and side-order of pronouns.
The public service fear National, they don’t fear Labour and so when Labour pour billions into the Wellington Bureaucracy, they laugh and use it for more glass palaces.
The vast chunk of Labour/Green activists are placed and work within the Wellington Bureaucracy either with NGOs, Unions or State Agencies and their own sense of righteousness never allows them to consider if they are the baddies.
If we are to pour billions more into the Public Service, we must ensure these neoliberal managers don’t divert it for their own fiefdoms and pet projects.
The Right’s never ending march to amputate and slice down the State is so that the people don’t get used to a well functioning public service and so will politically agree to starve it of funds via tax cuts.
Global free market capitalism is dead, hyper regionalism is here. We need a bigger State with actual capacity rather than the threadbare barely regulated joke that it currently is.
We shouldn’t agree to cutting public services, we should fund their capacity and infrastructure rebuild while making the working conditions for those there a better quality!
Where should we get that money? Windfall taxes on the corporations and banks!
We need better conditions for those workers and the values of working 4 day weeks, extra holidays and housing solutions are aimed at making better working conditions as opposed to never ending inflationary wage pressures.
We need a sustainable bureaucracy rather than 7 figure technocrats who see their own fiefdoms and glass palaces as the measure of public policy achievements.
Grant was the ultimate Bureaucratic Insider, his relationship with the self-serving Public Service allowed Labour to not ask hard questions of its agenda to simply re-arrange the Bureaucratic structures as opposed to expanding the capacity of State.
A new relationship with the self-serving public service is required. They are gatekeepers and to force real change requires a Left wing that already has the policy ready to push through in the first 100 days.
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The only chance for any truly progressive movement in NZ politics is a Renters party.
I think you mean a Ranters Party don’t you!
I agree with the parts about the self-serving Wellington public servants.
But isn’t the real power struggle in NZ between the elderly and the youngish?
The power struggle is seen clearest around planning for new housing, and also that housing capital gains are untaxed (benefiting the older home owners), but working Kiwis pay tax from the first dollar of their wages.
Whose benefits are means tested and whose benefits are paid irrespective of wealth?
“Professional Managerial Class Corporate Consultants who influence policy to maintain their dominance and profit margins vs the self serving Public Service wanting to spend taxpayer money on their latest glass palace.”
Neither of whom are woke then are they? Except perhaps the public service who are just pretending.
I remember the days when I was helping public servants become proficient in developing their computer skills internally so as not to depend on consultants. They were able people dedicated to their own department. In those days those public servants could rise up in their department to eventually lead their department. I know of two who did that. Shame that has all changed.
Absolutely!
The days of GCS (that was flogged off), and MWD’s VCC. Not just virtually given away to ticket clippers and privateers, but the content and intellectual property that was held in various databases.
Hahahahahahahaha hilarious assumption that the left will need to be ready with a 100 day agenda to push through…you think the left will win the next election??? No chance! It’ll take at least 3 terms to fix Labour and Jacinda’s disasters. More and more cocktail ups coming out every day….
“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both”. Niccolo Machiavelli
He died almost 500 years ago & no sign of a resurrection so how did that work out for him?
Same as what works for us. It’s timeless advice ‘capisce’! Hai capito?
Yes they are left wing. How does Wellington vote time after time?
Everywhere in NZ swung to the right last October, except Wellington which swung ever further left, it’s like they’re on another planet.
Wellington is most definitely another planet,look at their Mayor and the havoc she has wreaked.
Oh Bob please stand for some political position as we need your sort of practical get up and go that cuts to the chase!
does your vote reflect your job bg? or are you making the kind of sweeping generalisation so beloved of the platform viewer..just because wton is what you erroniously call ‘left’ is no indication how any particular individual votes
the problem with apparatchiks is that they are apparatchicks
Apparatchiks – that sounds a really vibrant name for young people’s trendy wear – need boots and chunky short jackets and gel-spiked hair, long mascared eyelashes and contrasting stripes etc. Just the things for transpeople, while they are finding out who they are, they can have fun exploring each other’s persona, so to speak. Perhaps it would take off in Wellington seeing it is said there are so many of them there.
‘They may aesthetically be left but’. That is a bit like I used to feel when I saw long-haired men in the 1970s. I had the idea that it meant that these guys were thoughtful well-rounded men with friendly, co-operative mutual relations with the community as their mindset, rather leftish. (I was influenced I think by populist pictures of Jesus.) However I believe that most grew up into stockbrokers, or entered financial houses, and major business where they changed back to their family’s and class’ default position of competition and capital accretion.
“Oh they do the reo, and expose their pronouns and militantly ride bikes, they are effortless in their use of inclusion…”
Yep, that sounds an awful lot like the contemporary left. In fact it sounds an awful lot like the government we just voted out.
“How the Wellington Self-serving Public Service is a threat to the Political Left and why Grant leaving could be so important”
Ah..? What Left? The thing that’s masquerading as ‘Left’ is still the rogernome tumour that just keeps metastasising. Surely, before we can resist the enemy we must first identify the enemy. Calling the absurdity of the thing that labels itself as Labour is not helping. In fact, it’s dangerously misleading.
If we keep thinking that somehow the thing that we think of as Labour is, in fact, ‘Labour’ we’re just going to keep getting fucked by the real power within our lives and worlds, an autocratic fascism with the smell of greed on its breath. [It] also means that we have no politic which should scare the be-Jesus out of everyone with a heart and mind. We’re in the deepest shit right now and sinking fast and not even the fabulous Martyn Bradbury, characterised here by his own omissions, understands that. Martyn Bradbury was ten years old in 1984 and like all of those who were at about that age or younger, they have no real idea of what it was like to live in AO/NZ prior to roger douglas and his cronies before they started to disassemble AO/NZ to feed the greed. A clue, surely, is that AO/NZ’s relative affulance built the inforstructure that the 14 multi-billionairs and the 3118 multi-millionairs stole off us then sold to build their fortunes which are, in reality land, our fortunes.
Martyn. There is no Labour alive. Labour, per se, is dead.
What we have now is a population of meandering lost souls exploited by a small room, full of psychopaths.
We need help. We’re done for. We need Crown intervention. Or aliens, or Godzilla. I was going to say farmers but they’re too fucking stupid to see past the gleam coming of luxon’s head. Anything at all is better than what’s about to be dropped on us if we don’t fucking wake up to see what’s coming.
I can assure you they are overwhelmingly progressive oppressive left, Any staff who are not have long left the building.
I often wonder whether or not The Standard – posters and commenters alike is comprised of supposedly “Left”
senior management public servants (retirees or otherwise), PMC academia, and supposedly “left” (NOT) ‘consultants’.
Good that it’s there admittedly, but I doubt I’d ever be able to emulate their really gorgeous egos in order to make a comment ever again.
That is a great description of the current political reality.
What to do? Roger and David wrote the book. Adopt the revolutionary tactics of Leninism, get everything off balance and keep them that way.
I’d recommend in first week suspend the SIS and heads of defense for total review, reverse Reserve Bank Act to prior status, add capital controls to stop capital flight. Do same with all acts and statutes relating to public service
reverting to pre1984 model.
Ban lobbyists and “think tanks” unless they explicitly declare their donors.
All I’m suggesting is that the pre1984 model is still a better fit for democracy. Won’t happen though.
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