Saying you are implementing the cruelty you promised during the election isn’t ‘democracy’, it’s malicious spite!

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
33
1204

2023 wasn’t an election, it was a  grudge fuck against Labour by an embittered post Covid electorate who were economically insecure, alienated by woke dogma and heart broken that all Labour could do with a once in a generation MMP majority was ‘good first steps’ rather than transformational leaps.

It has resulted in a Hard Right Racist Government bound together only by a shared glee in bashing beneficiaries, workers, renters, prisoners, the environment, gang members, drug addicts and the disabled.

They all have a particular dislike for Māori and have used attempts at co-governance to fulfil the promise of the Treaty (which is our collective obligation) as a weapon with which to cement into place 19th Century White Settler Privilege and call that ‘democracy’.

Saying you are implementing the cruelty you promised during the election isn’t ‘democracy’, it’s malicious spite!

In a modern liberal democracy, you acknowledge the power imbalance created in society and you resource to ensure those power imbalances are compensated for!

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In a liberal progressive democracy, it doesn’t matter what role you play in the complex super structure of our society and economy.

It doesn’t matter of you are a garbage collector, a dr, a nurse, a drain layer, teacher or tradie – if you all stopped doing your jobs the system can’t work.

Everyone deserves to share the collective harvest of civil society with public services and policies focused on the public good enshrined in the intrinsic civil liberties each individual has.

Wealthy individuals who become mega rich thanks to the landscape generated by those values are required to pay more back into the system they have benefited from beyond the bare necessity of ruthless accountancy practices.

The Political Right are screaming that imposing Qanon talking points as social policy, destroying workers rights, Tobacco deaths for tax cuts and taking $555million from the poorest families are all acceptable because they have the Majority so fuck everyone else!

That’s why on the first day of the Government there were nationwide protests. That’s why in the first week of the new Government global headlines were attacking our u-turn on gas and oil exploration and smoking policy.

Dismantling the values of a liberal progressive democracy to cement into place 19th Century White Settler privilege using culture war vengeance as social policy IS NOT Democratic, it’s majoritarianism without any of the values of a true Democracy.

You can’t shit on Renters, Māori, the Environment, Workers, Beneficiaries and Prisoners while pretending to be democratic.

That’s the zeal of the Lynch mob, that’s not Democracy!

Majoritarianism is the whip of the autocrat masquerading as legitimacy. Is has none of the soul or wisdom that a Democracy requires to be meaningful.

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33 COMMENTS

    • Do you think maybe you and @MB could get a room? Bring Bryce the aggregator in chief along for a 3some. You really are becoming a bit tedious @CT. We know you’ve gone done paid your dues and aren’t really getting the attention you think you deserve but spare us please.

    • Isn’t it a bit early in the day to be hitting the wine cask snouter/trotter ,,, I meant trotter

      **********************************************************************

      Austerity, or the supposed need for it (TINA), is artificially created by right-wing Govt regulations + shadow banking/off-shore tax havens, and the top 100 corporations worldwide using these constructs to avoid paying tax on their huge revenues and profits…..

      Austerity is used to shrink Govt/social services ,,, and increase the role/revenue for the corporations/private sector.

      When Luxon did his bennie bash speech people need to know the basic numbers ,,,, to know he was engaging in Dirty Politics.

      Breaking it down ,,, out of every $10 the Dept of social welfare spends, roughly $6.60 ( and rising goes on pensions ) ,,,,

      Accommodation Allowance ( which is Govt welfare paid to Landlords so they can get higher rental income) ,,, and ‘working for familys’ tax credits (which is Govt welfare to employers to top up their low non-livable wages) ,,, Accommodation Allowance + Tax credits + the pension, accounts for approximately $7.50 out of every $10 spent by social welfare.

      ‘Fraud’ on the remaining $2.50 is estimated (by a bull-shitter whose own $52,000 accommodation rort/entitlement would rightly be called fraud if a Welfare recipient pulled the same stunt) ,,,, is estimated between 5%-10% ,,,,

      So Luxon was making a big song and dance about ‘going after’ the approximately 12cents to 25cents, out of every $10 the Dept of Social Welfare spends….. One has to ask, did he spend all his time as CEO of Air NZ trying to catch stewards and hostesses who may have been stealing sugar and coffee from the airline??? ,,, because that’s the equivalent leadership skills and priority’s.

      What do he,,, or Act,,, ever have to say about the untold and unpaid billions that we are missing, year in and year out, stiffed from our Govt revenue/income by the richest entities in the world….

      … Nothing, because that’s who they are really working for….. now have some austerity

      • “Accommodation Allowance ( which is Govt welfare paid to Landlords so they can get higher rental income) ”

        Now if the accommodation allowance was paid directly to landlords there would be transparency. The allowance could cut or capped or not increased like all those other public servants incomes, GPs, cops, nurses, teachers.

        It’s laughable that landlords think they are entrepreneurs running private enterprises.

    • That’s a stupid commemt but to phrase it better does becoming a property owner mean by the necessity of the property rights mean you are morally bankrupt and corrupt? No it doesn’t. You have to do way more dodgy shitnthan that like oh I don’t know cutbschool lunches from the budget to fund your tax cuts, moron.

      People have to be nice to eachother, work together, and in general be good individuals more than they act violent, cruel, or evil. If this wasn’t true, if people fought and were evil more then they were good and work together then there just wouldn’t be human civilization. Our evolution made us a social species, which means we have a stronger impulse to help eachother than to fight eachother.

    • Says the man who is pretty much the only left-wing blogger that hasn’t condemned the murder of thousands of Palestinian children in revenge for the Hamas terrorist attack, and who allows bullshit about Palestinian war crimes to go unchallenged on their blog site.

  4. The first two paras are 100% correct. I think it was forecast clearly by political roosters but you can’t get through to people who have turned their hearing aids off! I found this from the site discussing French savant de Tocqueville from which I also extracted a quote for 12 March Julian Assange’s post.

    No man can struggle with advantage against the spirit of his age and country; and, however powerful he may be supposed to be, he will find it difficult to make his contemporaries share in feelings and opinions which are repugnant to all their feelings and desires…sometimes they will even applaud him – but they do not follow him.,,

    Not only are the men of democracies not naturally desirous of revolutions, but they are afraid of them. All revolutions more or less threaten the tenure of property: but most of those who live in democratic countries are possessed of property – not only are they possessed of property, but they live in the condition of men who set the greatest store upon their property.

    If we attentively consider each of the classes of which society is composed, it is easy to see that the passions engendered by property are keenest and most tenacious amongst the middle classes. The poor often care but little for what they possess, because they suffer much more from the want of what they have not, than they enjoy the little they have. The rich have many other passions besides that of riches to satisfy; and, besides, the long and arduous enjoyment of a great fortune sometimes makes them in the end insensible to its charms. But the men who have a competency, alike removed from opulence and from penury, attach an enormous value to their possessions…
    https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch39.htm

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