Many on the Left feel shell shocked.
The political damage caused by Labour’s incremental nothings to hurt voters alongside the culture war battles our middle class woke activists embarked upon combined with Post Covid bitterness have regurgitated a hard right racist climate denying Government who are bound together by a shared glee in bashing beneficiaries, Māori, Renters, Workers and Environmentalists.
The privatisation agenda that is being pushed is because National need a billion each year to fund tax cuts to their rich donor mates.
13 000 kids will be pushed into poverty to help fund this tax cut for the rich.
$2300 per year will be taken off those on the disabled benefit to fund tax cuts for wealthy landlords.
Conservation land is being opened for Trans National Mining Interests and Dr Pork, Shane Jones, will be given fast track powers for those Trans National Mining Interests.
The Treaty Principles Referendum Bill will kill off the obligation for the State to work with Māori just when the Government want to ram through more Mining interests.
The Atlas Network, funded by American Dark Money, is influencing extremist Free Market policy here.
This blitzkrieg of Hard Right legislation stripping Māori of their mana, attacking workers and renters, bashing beneficiaries and the disabled has to be resisted because the very foundations of our Egalitarianism are now being attacked and degraded.
TDB warned voters that a National, ACT, NZ First Alliance of Arseholes would unleash a hard right policy mix of free market privatisation, donor related industry deregulation and implementing culture war revenge fantasies as social policy.
In barely 5 months, this Government has proved TDB right.
The Right Wing agenda at play is far more damaging than many have assumed and the Left must work together to find Broadchurch policy to unite as a response or this extremism will get cemented into place.
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The voters should hang their heads in shame .
I felt proud of NZ seeing the damage 6 years of Labour had done and voted them out.
Well you shouldn’t feel proud. What is all this damage? I mean actual examples, not the bullshit throw away Luxon/Willis remarks.
I am sure you will find examples, but the problem is this government will accelerate the damage. Child poverty being one.
Are you proud smokes will be cheaper? Why on earth would they repeal a reduction in nicotine levels? That’s got nothing to do with a sodding black market
Trev is an immigrant , I noticed life was good enough during their 6 years to stay, so really he’s just another typical whinging pome, a Margaret Thatcher protégé.
Care to back your rhetoric up with some evidence even once Trevor? You spout glib one liners, but you don’t seem to be able to back any of it up, ever.
There’s no “I” in team, sums you up best Trev.
We are disgusted by this arrogant corrupt government that is dismantling all the fantastic work Labour did for kiwis, you are a naturalised citizen pomme Trev aren’t you?
Yes I am a naturalized pom.
If Labour had done such fantastic work why were they voted out .I would suggest many were disappointed in the lack of any growth .
Labour lost their way .Jacinda saw this and bailed out leaving them with a weak leader and no positive achievements to promote another 3 years
What damage are you referring to? Redistributing wealth a smidgen? That has all been rolled back by your right wing fuckwit mates!
As Mao said… “to investigate a problem is to solve it…” it is of course one thing to analyse what is happening, the next step is to organise and take action.
Several things need to happen asap in this long narrow, sparsely populated–apart from Auckland–country. There is wealth galore in Aotearoa NZ but it is locked up by a tiny elite–international and local comprador capital and Finance capital, and the greedy, nasty, farming sector. There is no reason for one person here to be homeless or hungry apart from the neo liberal state that has persisted for almost 40 years.
• NZCTU needs a shake up and a class left leadership installed. The 1991 union busting ECA decimated private sector union density and handed the say to public sector unions. PSA and others have prevented a shift to a more active CTU happening previously, perhaps mass sackings will change their “political neutrality”. The working class, no matter how much it has changed in form during the 00s, needs to take on the parasite class.
• NZ Labour, Greens and TPM need to unite on an agreed platform of the pro working class list that regularly features here at TDB. This WILL require NZ Labour to finally recant Rogernomics and Ruthanasia–there is no other avenue.
• Direct action campaigns on many issues need to be undertaken–the Atlas driven vandals are not pissing around and neither should any of us. Ciggies, AR15s, union busting, collapsing Māori Health initiatives?
• Gangs should be supported on the “snatch the patch” law on the basis of freedom of assembly, speech and expression. What will be banned next…union badges, red flags, GreenPeace banners, rainbow T shirts?
Māori should be supported by tau iwi and Pākehā. Communities should support each other on the basics–food, shelter, transport, solidarity. Look after each other and fight back.
Everyone knew this was what needed to happen back in 1991. The policy platform could have been one sentence: “Roll back all post-1984 policies.” Without winning that fight, any other single-issue campaigns were essentially useless.
The reason your idea didn’t happen nine years ago is because the ‘Corbyn-istas’ and ‘Bernie Bros.’, who originally supported Cunliffe, never started local branches of Momentum and Ken Loach’s Left Unity. There weren’t regular delegations going to visit J.L. Mélenchon, Die Linke or the Bolivarian Alliance. Even the most basic union organising — such as working with the M.U.A. and the C.F.M.E.U. — apparently wasn’t happening.
Well the ending of the Federation of Labour led by Jim Knox to form the amalgamated CTU with private and public sector unions in 1987 was a major class error of the late 20th century, which is why we need a class left fighting central labour organisation now–to lead–not lurk in backrooms making media releases.
NZ Labour expelled or lost most of its old school lefties post ’84 due to the Backbone Club, Prebble and Bassett etc. Even Jim Anderton, once President, a middle of the road social democrat left! So there were few to push for retiring the neo liberal state. But that time is surely now.
NZ is now a country of chain smoking gun toting rednecks
… or driving Tesla’s they purchased with help of the former EV subsidy. Or they’re sitting in cafes on the waterfront. What you see depends on where you are.
Ok…low emissions versus tobacco deaths and “lead in the air”. Gee that’s comparable
We are living under a dictatorship regime now.
Not wrong Gus. Compared to the previous regime, same same but different.
No this LOT are 100 times worse.
Māori will always have mana. It is a inherent part of whakapapa. Government can NOT remove mana. Māori are being stripped of their “rights.”
“The privatisation agenda that is being pushed is because National need a billion each year to fund tax cuts to their rich donor mates.”
It’s the other way around.
Privatisation is the primary objective. Tax cuts are a tool. Cuts starve the public sector of the ability to function properly, then their failure is used as justification to privatise the sector.
Yes, Richard and once they starve the public sector and run it down, they look to privatise saying to will create more competition like they did with our power companies. Fucken mongrels.
Yes, JAY and when there is an epidemic/pandemic we will be fucked like the UK and USA too much privatisation, asset selling and contracting out social services to private companies who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Why did so many people die from Covid in the UK and USA two very rich countries yet so many died, not good enough and not acceptable in this day and age.
Breaking. The poorest members of our community had their fixed electricity charges capped at 30c a day $10 a month. They have just received a letter telling them that the government is making the charge “Fair & Equitable” the charge is going up to 90c a day $30 a month. However it is still going to be capped and electricity providers won’t be making any additional profit. I guess that means a subsidy for the poorest is being miracled into a tax cut for the richest.
We said, our 100 day program. Never won the election, others, needed to do, our hundred days, and, those two, agreed.
Totalatarian, continue.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2402/S00041/trussonomics-at-cpac.htm
Wednesday, 28 February 2024, 1:41 pm
Article: Binoy Kampmark
This piece from a Scoop article fits here I think -on Liz Truss and fellow pollie
…Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, with whom she had taken a wrecking ball to the UK economy and the British pound. With Kwarteng, she had previously authored a dotty pamphlet “Britannia Unchained”, warning that Britain should not emulate the economic model of southern European countries, saddled with poor productivity and growth, along with hefty and inefficient public services.
The Economist tasted the irony of it all, seeing Trussonomics as typical of “Britaly”, a country “of political instability, low growth and subordination to bond markets.” A further irony was that the horrified market reaction to Truss suggested her inability to understand the very forces she prefers unleashed over the wickedness of big government and bureaucratic interference. Live by the free market; die by the free market.
What, then, to tell her New World colleagues? At first blush, nothing new. In April 2023, she had already made it across the Atlantic to speak to the Heritage Foundation, where she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture (sic). Monumental failure can undergo changes in transatlantic journey, and the conservative think tank omitted mentioning her spell of prime ministerial lunacy, impressed, instead, by her “long-standing” advocacy “for limited government, low taxes, and freedom, both at home and the UK and around the world”…
…The speech is not entirely nonsensical, though Truss misses the significance of any pertinent observations. “What has happened in Britain over the past 30 years is power that used to be in the hands of politicians has been moved to quangos and bureaucrats and lawyers so what you find is a democratically elected government actually unable to enact policies.” While the estrangement of the elected from the elector, aided and abetted by unelected bureaucracies, is hard to deny, Truss is merely implying that an unaccountable dictatorship would surely be far better and representative…
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.
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