GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – 1984 = NZ’s Credit Coup

13 Comments

1. Many of us believe every word you say, in fact we have been saying it for years.
   But I can’t agree with this.
   “At no stage in our history have kiwis voted for…”
   If you have talked to people about these issues for near 2 decades, for me ever since John Key seized power, you will know that most steadfastly refuse to believe any of it.
   There is a whole generation of elderly who believe their wealth (generated by the housing ponzi) is a result of their superior work ethic and is nothing to do with living through the golden age followed by a scam guaranteed to make their wealth grow exponentially. Many of these people hate the younger generation and cannot see that it is their very voting that has created the situation where young people have no hope in this country. They even spend their wealth on $10 muffins and overseas trips to ensure their “greedy” and lazy offspring don’t inherit a cent.
   Why has no political party ever stood on a manifesto reflecting this reality. Why does someone like Bradbury praise the Labour Party for tinkering with the status quo.
   Pretty much everyone now days would be happier telling you that Campbells Chicken soup has no chicken in it than listen to an explanation of how NZ moved from a benevolent dictatorship model of governance to a malevolent tyranny.
   Until the property market collapses entirely the majority of voters will vote for oppression as long as their property price increases enough to compensate their loss of real earnings caused by doubling the money supply every 10 years through writing ever bigger mortgages for every increasing property prices.
   In fact, the simplest way to solve the issue is to put the cost of land, existing houses, and the cost of servicing a mortgage back in the CPI so property prices can never again grow exponentially as interest rates are held artificially low.

   1. I agree with you Rangi as I have noticed that older people believe that they have worked for their stuff and deserve to live in comfort now personally and probably help their family mainly. It is written in their persona bible and It is a shock to realise how fluid everything is, how we theorise, propose and follow through or change direction at will or with slyness. Things are never set in concrete, and to see the upward progress that was fought for over a century wiped on a narrow whim is unbearable for me after studying social policy for a while and reading about the past. We don’t have enough reading about life at school, and should have discussion sessions rather than lessons from above, then sport.

      That we have to constantly check ourselves to keep to our pretensions is a revelation. How could we cope with the advanced country Germany going mad and killing millions of people mostly Jews? Many of us probably have German Saxon blood in our veins, so we are fairly close. But we aren’t able to analyse and be objective about how good we are, or how bad we can get. Those of us who try have a big job seeking a way back on the path from present madness and meanness. Trying to be kind, to do a bit, plus write and discuss with others also trying. Gave Jason sitting on the pavement tonight a chicken roll and a coke, but refused the second ask. A Maori bloke older, don’t know his story but haven’t ability to adopt the task. Can we make it through, past obstacles – I see it as navigating. But our Wahine ship moment might come when we are overwhelmed. If we cam get rid of this present experimental government we should move up one or two rungs at least.

2. Filling their gobs, eating with their hands like ordinary peeps who arent suits. Carrying on the fish and chip tradition started by Labour. ‘Anything they can do, we can do better’ says Gnationattack.
   A Christmas performance of that, with the lady in a nice red dress suitable for Labour.
   From Annie Get Your Gun (not suggesting anything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0

3. Ummm…New Zealanders DID vote for 40 years of housing inflation.

   Both National and Labour party voters liked house price inflation and the untaxed capital gains, while the Greens loved anything that stopped housing developers getting rich. ACT voters are the housing developers – who loved their pre-sold developments benefiting from FOMO by the young first home buyers.

   1. You seem to be saying something rational Ada.

4. Tadhg, you are a wonderful inspiration. I finished reading your article and lost it. Why are you not in politics? NZ needs a leader/PM of your calibre – you make such sense and it gives me HOPE! And yes you are calling it correctly – it is Economic Treason and the Truth is Simple! The rot has to stop now. I’m old enough to remember the ‘good old days’ where my childhood was very happy. Life then didn’t revolve around money, possessions or power it revolved around good, kind, decent people with moral fibre and high principles. My father and two of our neighbours fought in WWII. I fear for our younger generation, including my grandies. Please New Zealanders step up – make it about your country not yourselves – united we can do it!

5. If it’s that simple why are we not doing it?

   1. If you are programmed to receive images look in the mirror

      1. Had a look Clive saw a handsome fellow.

         1. Time for another virus and corrupt disk check

6. Iain Parker

   Blogger Steven Cowan raised powerful points about Labour’s retreat into cautious technocracy, but there is one critical blind spot that continues to hobble the entire New Zealand left. The issue isn’t simply that Labour refuses to break with neoliberalism. It’s that Labour has forgotten the very economic mechanism that once made its reforms possible in the first place: public credit.

   Historically, the labour movement wasn’t founded on merely redistributing the proceeds of neoliberal capitalism. It was founded on the principle that the nation’s credit, the power to create money itself, should serve public purpose. This isn’t ideological fantasy; it’s precisely how the first Labour government governed after 1935.

   They financed the state housing programme using sovereign credit issued through Treasury-controlled channels. And it worked, until the private-banking establishment slammed the door on the experiment and reasserted control of monetary issuance.

   This is where today’s debate consistently falls short. We keep talking about nationalisation, redistribution, and public ownership of services while ignoring the private-bank-centric credit system that underwrites the entire economy. We still accept the myth that banks lend pre-existing money, rather than the reality confirmed by the Reserve Bank itself: private commercial banks create the majority of the nation’s money supply when they issue loans.

   That power now fuels a credit structure almost entirely oriented around land speculation rather than productive economic development. The central banks then pretend to fight inflation while deliberately excluding land and asset inflation from the consumer price measure used to set interest rates. It’s a policy that protects the same private credit machine Labour once sought to displace.

   This is the real Achilles heel of today’s Labour Party. They critique inequality but leave untouched the financial architecture that produces it. They celebrate the legacy of Savage while rejecting the mechanism that made Savage’s programme possible: Treasury-centric public credit. John A. Lee understood that economic democracy is impossible when the money supply itself is controlled by private balance sheets. His successors have forgotten it.

   Steven is right that Labour has chosen managerialism over transformation. But the deeper tragedy is that it has abandoned the very foundation of its own historical success.

   Public credit is not some fringe fantasy. It was the core ideology of the early labour movement, across the world and here at home. It was the engine of public housing. It was the tool that built the welfare state. And the moment Labour stopped using it, the private banking sector moved in, leveraged the nation’s housing market, and put the country in a chokehold of debt, rents, and extraction.

   Labour’s problem isn’t just that it won’t reject neoliberalism. It’s that it no longer understands the monetary system that makes neoliberalism possible. Until we confront the private control of credit issuance, the “back door central banking model” that neither Barbara Edmonds nor Nicola Willis ever openly explain, we are merely fighting symptoms. The crisis in housing, health, and wages didn’t fall from the sky. It is downstream from who controls the tap of money and credit.

   Labour once led the world in proving a different way was possible.

   Lee would be rolling in his grave to see how far the party has retreated from that knowledge. The choice now isn’t between right or left versions of the market economy. It’s between public credit serving democratic purpose, or private credit continuing to dictate national destiny.

   Until Labour rediscovers that, it isn’t just abandoning progress. It’s abandoning its own legacy.

7. Top contribution again – we are indeed “captured”, by greed and capital hoarding. Greedy hoarders should at least pay for the privilege.

8. Each one, teach one. Learn, and share.

   https://youtu.be/7O_3wR87yvo?si=csLfTt6X1NZcYybo

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