Can we pause and consider what just happened to Metiria back there?
Metiria’s crime was not that she had told the truth about needing to game the draconian neoliberal welfare system, but that she had the audacity to tell her story with her chin up in defiance at the injustice of that system rather than the self-shaming we all demand from anything that is attached to the virgin sacrificing sacredness of ‘taxpayer money’.
In NZ we accept the dignity of the broken, but never the dignity of the resistant.
