What has that man done to deserve a knighthood? Was it the pulling of ponytails? Was it the flag referendum? Was it the lies about mass surveillance? Was it the hundreds of thousands of our kids he left in poverty? Was it the failure of the housing market? Was it the exponential rise in electricity prices? Was it for running down the public health system? Was it for underfunding education? Was it for screwing the poor?
The simple truth is that the bulk of high wage and salary earners, low-wage employers and parasitic landlords are National Party supporters. This is their budget.
All indications are National is about to outflank Labour on the left with its 2017 budget and leave the party that claims to represent working New Zealanders struggling to appear relevant.
In one of his first acts as Foreign Minister he has written to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to get our diplomatic relations “back on track” after Israel withdrew its ambassador to New Zealand last December following our co-sponsoring of a security council resolution which condemned Israel for continuing to build Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land.
ANZAC Day should be a time when we pledge to use every means possible to avoid war. It should be a time when we assert an independent foreign policy with New Zealand’s foremost role as peacemakers and peacekeepers.
Across the media Myers is being praised as a business leader and philanthropist yet he made money not through his own efforts but through using his massive inherited wealth to exploit the free-market economic policies he championed, as a leading light in the Business Roundtable, alongside the Labour Party of the 1980s. That wealth he gained was at the expense of middle and low-income New Zealanders who continue to struggle today to provide that triple lining to the pockets of the super wealthy.
The new Ministry should be called the Ministry for Roger Douglas’s Children because it was the brutal policies of Douglas and his Labour Party cohorts unleashed on New Zealand from 1984 which, several decades later, are continuing to devastate communities, families and children.
I think pitiful is the best single word to sum up this deal.
We should all feel a profound sense of shame.
As the government does its best to squirm its way out of holding any inquiry into the killing of civilians during an SAS-led raid on two villages in Afghanistan its worth looking back at why we were there in the first place – or better still – why we shouldn’t have been there in the first place.