GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – NZ is not poor. We are being plundered.

The neoliberal bamboozle. How it robs us, and how we build back our nation.

“People who have been bamboozled seldom break free of the bamboozle.”
— Carl Sagan

New Zealand is rich. Rich in land, water, minerals, forests, and human potential. Rich in history and innovation. Rich in cultural memory.

So why do we feel so poor?
Why do our children live with flatmates into their 30s, our public hospitals crumble, our wages stagnate, and our elders go without?

Why are we told we “can’t afford” homes, ferries, or healthcare — while offshore corporations grow fat on our power bills, bank fees, and supermarket margins?

The answer isn’t complicated.

But it is deeply uncomfortable.

We are being robbed, lied to, deceived, bamboozled. Betrayed.

Over the last 40 years, we New Zealanders have been systematically stripped of our collective wealth.

Not by war. Not by revolution. But by quiet political, regulatory, and legislative betrayal.

Perhaps some were merely incompetents, but at this stage I am in a hanging mood.

Our ports, power companies, rail lines, banks, forests — all sold off for a fraction of their value under the false promise of “efficiency.” The result? Higher costs, poorer service, and billions in profits shipped offshore. What a surprise!

But that’s just what we could see.

What few realise is that during this same era, we lost something even more vital.

The power to create money.

The power to issue credit for national development.

JP Morgan said, “Gold is money, everything else is credit”, and a famous line from the monetary debates of the 1920-30s goes “let me control the supply of money, and I care not who makes the laws”. Because the power of credit creation is the power to grow or suffocate an economy.

*Nb. While we cannot create gold, NZ is rich in it. But we give it away to Australian and

America multinationals for 2% royalties.

Thats 2% away from zero %, fyi.*

Meanwhile, re “credit” or (fiat) paper money, thst privilege has been given to private Australian banks. Which seems another bad idea. Because not only do they hoover that money overseas, but they don’t even create it for investing in the economy. They just farm us for mortgages. What a sweet gig for the underarm bowlers!

Most New Zealanders believe banks lend out existing money. But that’s a myth. As the Bank of England confirms:

“Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.”
— Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014

In plain terms: banks create credit — money — out of nothing.

And they charge compounding interest on it.

This means almost every dollar in circulation is someone’s debt. And almost every dollar carries a built-in obligation to extract more in return.

In summary. Aussie Banks create money from nothing, and turn us into debt slaves. Bleeding us and our economy, while doing near zero to grow it.

While, simultaneously, malevolent fools like Luxons losers (or labours neoliberals) tell us “the economy is like a household, there’s no money for investing in what our nation needs.

So sad. Let’s sell more silver”

That’s not a neutral system. It’s racket. It’s a wealth funnel — directing value upwards, eroding sovereignty from below; and then sending it overseas. Out of our economy, in a veritable economic bloodletting.

(Debt, fyi, means sin in many languages. Ie “Forgive us our debts”. But the book of jubilees, the murder of economic reformer Jesus, and the eventual corruption of Christianity into usury are tales for another day. But, history does indeed hold the answers. There’s not much new under the sun)

$93 Billion in a flash. But not for us.

During COVID, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand quietly created $93 billion in liquidity through its Large-Scale Asset Purchase programme.

No taxes were raised. No loans were taken. The money was simply created — digitally — and deployed.

As financial journalist Bernard Hickey wrote,

“The Reserve Bank is doing money printing on a massive scale, but we’re not even talking about how or why.”
— “Where’s Our Money Printing Debate?” – Newsroom, 2020

So when politicians say we “can’t afford” hospitals, homes, or public infrastructure; remember, we can afford it. They just prefer to hand our money to banks and markets, not invest it in our people or our nation.

This Isn’t Incompetence. It’s design. The system is working as intended. To extract our wealth. It’s a racket, and our rulers appear unfit for rule.

In his powerful parting work, Vincent Vickers, former director of the Bank of England and Armstrong Vickers Ltd munitions director/heir, wrote:

“The control of credit should not lie with private monopolies. It should be a national utility for development.”
— Economic Tribulation, 1941 (deathbed publication)

Nine years as a director of the Bank of England convinced Vickers of the damage done when private banking interests controlled public outcomes. He resigned in protest, nearly a century ago, at what was basically predatory class war on the nation.

What would he say about the fact that New Zealand’s money supply is now controlled primarily by foreign-owned banks, issuing credit in their own interest — not ours?

Norway. Singapore. We were them. Once.

Weslthy nations like Norway and Singapore kept control of their strategic assets and strategically reinvested in national wellbeing. That’s why they are wealthy.

We, on the other hand, were force-fed the neoliberalism of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia — and while many of us protested, the machinery of asset-stripping crushed us.
State assets were sold at fire-sale prices.

Our railways, banks, power companies, forests, and telecommunications infrastructure were handed over to private and often foreign interests, at far below market value, and without public mandate.

Our national wealth became someone else’s profit stream.

Politicians got international prestige and pay checks.

Neoliberals still parrot the line: “We should be more like Singapore.” But they rarely mention what makes Singapore successful.

Check this out. In Singapore, the state owns over 90% of the land, administered through the Urban Redevelopment Authority and Housing & Development Board.

80% of Singaporeans live in government-built housing, often long-term leaseholds.
The government holds stakes in hundreds of companies through Temasek Holdings and GIC, two of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world.

The government invests the equivalent of around 20% of GDP annually into infrastructure, housing, education, and economic development.

It maintains strict capital controls, public control over credit issuance, and no foreign ownership of residential property!!!!!!!!!!

That’s why they are wealthy.

Singapore didn’t succeed by deregulating and selling everything. It succeeded by planning strategically, investing heavily, and retaining ownership of the tools of national development.

We did the opposite

The original liberals, by the way, were what we would call today ’the 1%’. Today’s “neoliberals” are their heirs. Here to loot the commons and dispossess the public.

It really is that simple.

Our housing crisis. Our infrastructure collapse. Our low wages. Our deliberate underinvestment in what is important.

None of it is accidental.

It was built, policy by policy, to serve their greed — not our community.

What can we do?

We don’t need to invent utopia. We need to reclaim memory and restore sovereignty.

Imagine these things,

A publicly owned development bank issuing credit at 0% for housing, health, food, and energy security. We used to have a rbnz, BNZ and a development finance corporation for things like that. Have you heard of the state advances act? Or the first labour foreclosing program?

Royalties of 20–30% on our minerals, like Norway — not 2%. …Who negotiated that? Why are they not in prison?

Community-owned energy systems where profits stay local. …like Electricorp, if you’re old enough to remember.

Interest-free home loans for young families — just like the ones that built post-war New Zealand, via the state advances act.

These aren’t radical ideas. They’re common sense, and we’ve done them before.

Others still do them today. In nations where leaders care for the nation.

They’re what responsible nations do — when they’re not under the spell of asset-strippers, debt-lords, and captured politicians.

Let’s break the spell.

This is not about left or right. It’s about truth and sovereignty.

As Prof Michael Hudson has shown, financial capitalism is not productive — it’s extractive. It monetises the commons, turns citizens into tenants, and treats the economy as a harvest field for rent-seekers. But we can use our sovereign tools to invest in the industries, assets, infrastructure and services we need to build a future proof economy.

Or we can continue to slide.

As Prof Ha-Joon Chang has argued, development comes not from laissez-faire economics, but from deliberate national strategy. The ladder was pulled up on us — and we were told it never existed.

For this, I would like to see justice meted out.

Explore the work of Hudson & Chang:

Michael Hudson & Ha-Joon Chang – Sovereign Economics Playlist

We are not poor. We are plundered.

It’s time we rejected the lie of scarcity.

It’s time we reclaimed the tools of national renewal — starting with the power to issue credit for public good.

This is not ideology. It is competence.

This is not revolution. It is restoration.

Let the next generation say: We remembered who we were. And we rebuilt.

Each one teach one. Learn and share.

For sovereignty, truth, and the common good; in an age of polycrisis.

These are revolutionary times, whether you know it or not. Nz never ran out of money. We ran out of sovereignty. We were robbed. The Winebox was just the tip of the iceberg of the treacherous acts of our professional classes.

“Idiot” comes from the Greek ‘idios’, or private citizen. Those who stayed home and did not participate in the public assemblies.

It’s time to raise ourselves out of our sofas.

We have been idios, idiots, and chumps for far too long. Let’s get back on the field, and take our nation back from these backstabbing bastards.

 

Tadhg Stopford is a Teacher and Historian.