Crook Van Velden – Carrots for the bosses, sticks for the poor

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She thinks speaking slowly makes her seem less condescending. She's wrong.

There was a fascinating exchange between Jack Tame and Brooke Van Velden on Q+A over the weekend that actually deserves and demands closer inspection because it really does illuminate what ACT are truly are all about.

Brooke was fatuously claiming that Bosses are so frightened by WorkSafe that they dare not dream ever again in colour for fear of persecution, and because of this culture of fear, she was changing WorkSafe from punishment to cuddles (despite 70 people a year dying on the job plus almost a thousand who die from their work environments).

Her argument is that if we cuddle the bosses and provide carrots, the fear of sanction will lift and a workers utopia where family members can expect their loved ones to return safely from word each night will flourish.

Yet, as Jack so eloquently put to Brooke, ACT have pushed for vast punishment sanctions against beneficiaries, beneficiaries with children and state house tenants so why does the sanction and punishment system work for the poor, but ACT are changing it for the bosses?

When it’s the Bosses, it’s all cuddle and carrots, yet when it’s the poor, the beneficiaries, the disabled, the state tenants – it’s all punishment and sticks?

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Why is the culture of fear acceptable for the poor, but not the bosses?

ACT is a far right fringe libertarian cult who have manipulated culture war talking points to create a facade of free speech liberalism when they are the same old jack boot of the Billionaire club stamping on the face of the poor they’ve always been.

To quote Mike Hosking.

Happy Days.

 

 

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21 COMMENTS

  1. Because in the minds of far right libertarians the poor are undeserving; it’s the wealthy who are the movers and shakers. Despite the clear gains the thinking of some probably hasn’t changed much since Elizabethian times, the Middle Ages or even way back to Biblical times.and beyond.

    • Because in the minds of the Right, every person makes their own life decisions, and beneficiaries live off other peoples’ work and wealth.

      • Yes Ada, Brooke made her decision to be a prostitute to big business…good for her. Sounds like you are of the same mold.

      • Poor simple-minded Ada spreading the hot gospel of the do-nothings for others without fanfare or tax deductibility or obligation. The world is built on many people’s work, but those with most money have found Aladdin’s cave by concentrating on the task and not sharing, not being part of a circulating economy which fractures time available for personal advancement. It’s hard to understand and it takes a lot to change people from addled to something wiser. In the end it all gets narrowed down to basics hence ada.

      • Ada I think you meant, in the eyes of the right it’s ok to kill people in the course of their employment if it means saving a bit of cash.

  2. No doubt she will be appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

    As was Ruth Richardson just recently.

  3. Capitalism is imploding .What these people dont realize is as they continue to crush the working classes they are in fact diminishing their customer base .Labour governments negotiated free trade with China ,UK and EU which allowed farmers to sell milk butter cheese and beef along with lamb to a much bigger market .Just as well they can do that because the local customer is now becoming very rare and heading to extinction .National lead governments have decided the workers need to be crushed and forced to live in poverty on many levels .This in turn takes away end users of everything produced in NZ .The local customer is a person from the past now .I buy peanut butter made in India because it is under $3 compared to $6 for the cheapest local brand .Take away all the marketing bull shit it is 2x the price .We all know what is happening with butter and cheese .So Crooke and her mates are going to leave a hell of a mess and if the world continues to fall apart there will be a sudden over supply and the farmers that are creaming it now will expect the crushed workers to buy up to keep them afloat .No doubt the current government will slash health and education to give them a handout .

    • It’s over a hundred years ago Henry Ford discovered if he produced a cars but didn’t pay his workers enough to buy cars he lacked demand.

  4. Just like Seymour … she’s weird , fundamentally stupid..lacking any real knowledge combined with zero critical thinking….what a waste of taxpayer’s money they are!

    What they do have in spades, is their siloed ill conceived reckons based on…well, based on thin air.

    As the mask falls their vote has plummeted by 20%.
    Now …94% of the country can see the fraudsters for what they are…but they still can’t…

    That tells you everything you need to know!

  5. “What these people don’t realize is as they continue to crush the working classes they are in fact diminishing their customer base”

    Indeed. You hit the nail right on the head, Gordon.

  6. Too many professional MPs. Uni then MPs gopher then parliament. They talk about running the country like a family budget while never having had a family.

    • Yep Crook and Slymour are the result of never having had real job experience of which 91.5% of voters agree.

  7. Too many professional MPs. Uni then MPs gopher then parliament. They talk about running the country like a family budget while never having had a family.

  8. Brooke Van Velden is a narcissistic sociopath. The very worst thing anyone could do to her is to ignore her. She feasts on conflict and friction and has a plausible lie for every occasion.
    ACT are minions to big urban business who’ve been siphoning off farmer earned foreign exchange since the early 1900’s. Then things really stepped up a notch when two right Zing parties formed in 1936 to create the fascist entity that’s known as The National Party. Then, when national showed signs of wearing thin ACT was born out of those observing thatcher and regan who showed how clever the criminal mind can be. That gave rise to the stunted hog torturer, douglas, who sneered, plotted and bullied his way out of his pig pens to beguile terminal fools who are an inevitable bi-product of a free and open society who also happen to be in the majority needed to vote for the rogers neoliberal logical fallacy thinking we’re bedevilled with today. Allowing the masses free rein to do what ever their little minds fancy is never a good idea. The consuming-excreting Masses will be the architects of the end of all life on earth. They’ll breed, clump and chomp their way to oblivion and take the rest of us with them. While they espouse freedumbs an’ that they’ll never know that they’re in fact on the ends of the strings of their puppet masters which, in our case, are the banks which were once our banks but now owned by australia who are also our primary industry exports competitors. Funny that.
    ‘Idiocracy’. A prophecy. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=idiocracy
    End.

  9. “Carrots for the bosses and sticks for the poor” might look like a contradiction – but only if you approach it from the logical standpoint of how people respond to different incentives.
    But if you approach it from the standpoint of ACT party ideology, there is no contradiction. That’s because “sticks for the poor” are just another “carrot” for the rich. A cowed, desperate workforce will obviously be more likely to accept lower wages, worse conditions and lower H&S standards. Everything for ACT is about shovelling wealth upwards – all dressed up in the rhetoric of a totally empty notion of ‘freedom’.

  10. For the same reason we needed to create a whole new tier of benefits during the Covid lockdowns. The struggling ‘middle’ would have found that you cant actually live on the normal ones.

  11. my caucus made me do it – such a lightweight. came across her once, scuttling around the local supermarket – a weak looking individual with no riz – and Tame had it all on display. A brain in a tank.

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