Critical analysis breaking down New Zealand news coverage, media framing, and political narratives behind the headlines.
If only the NZ media put as much focus on China having a spy inside the National Party as they did when Metiria admitted having to stealing from Welfare to feed her kid huh?
2017 has been a year of swollen lies and political scandals. What was most concerning wasn’t that we didn’t have media who could unearth these outrageous abuses of power, but that we didn’t have a media who could spend the time to focus on them.
The middle class aspiration to make money out of property has erased their egalitarian values and it changes the political landscape. The new Government have to adapt to this reality and promote policy that helps those who aren’t property speculators because they won’t ever vote for Labour.
New Zealand’s first couple (is that what we call them?) have plans for a well deserved summer holiday, but I also think they need to re-invent a famous Labour Party tradition.
Self-assisted suicide – which is what we are really discussing here, not the far more sterilised ‘euthanasia’, will become a means to a neoliberal end in NZ.
If you are serious about changing welfare in NZ Carmel, then end the punitive debt and crushing punishment that is dealt out to those on Welfare. The bullshit need for the disabled to send in letters annually for disabilities that can’t be ‘cured’. The penalty interest rates put on welfare overpayments, the culture of fear that alienates and the staff who refuse to inform beneficiaries of what their actual rights and entitlements are.
The current Green Party are locked into middle class identity politics and middle class environmentalism while Labour are too frightened to use the power of the State to intervene well beyond the timid measures currently being proposed.
We have Police and Intelligence Agencies stepping well outside the law and not getting punished for it.
This is a great start, but to truly change we need a new Government who will use the looming economic meltdown as an opportunity to borrow and invest directly into the social infrastructure to handle the jump in poverty that economic recession will cause…
When I look at the horror our mental health system, prison system & welfare systems have become for the most vulnerable via chronic underfunding & indifferent staff – I fear how euthanasia will mutate in that cruel environment.