It’s been a year of the new Government. How have Labour, NZ First and the Greens fared? What have they achieved? Have they managed to live up to the excitement of the win or have they become tripped up by their own inexperience and short comings?
The inability of the Government to force real compromise from the neoliberal bureaucracy and the Wellington elites means sweet fuck all has really changed for the poorest and weakest amongst us, and while there is truth to the argument that it will take a few terms to counter the under funding of National’s 9 years in power, that can only stay true for so long.
How the living Christ can these people be trusted to solve a major social issue like cannabis reform if they’ve never smoked it or it’s some dim memory from their distant past?
It’s like asking the Pope for sex advice!
The need to catch a #MeToo villain has led the mainstream media to legitimise anonymous sources of the kind Newsroom used and in the cultural frenzy to denounce toxic interpersonal patriarchy, has blinded them to the far larger issues of China buying influence and the possibility now that an MP was sectioned by their own Party just as he was about to drop a large amount of dirt on them.
…the use of anonymous sources by Newsroom to smear in the age of #MeToo where accusation is the new evidential threshold and due process is dead was bad enough, to suggest that the full story of National Party complicity in sectioning JLR using leverage from that anonymous smear hit job is breath taking in its audacity and malignant cruelty.
By simply under writing the Parties with tax dollars we immediately remove domestic and international influence so they can do and make policy that is genuinely for the betterment of the country as awhile rather than selfish vested interests.
The irony is that the same people who were using anonymous sourced accusations to crucify JLR are the same ones demanding no questions now he’s been sectioned – this is so Kafkaesque it’s Orwellian.
…soooooooo in light of recent events shouldn’t we be rethinking our relationship with the Saudis? I get the line that is trotted out by MFAT Goons, ‘if we only traded with people we agreed with, we wouldn’t trade with anyone’, and I appreciate the need to build up trade, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut….
National’s economic ‘plan’ was based on rebuilding from natural disasters, massive levels of immigration, dairy intensification to China and a speculative property bubble that conned the middle classes into thinking they were paper millionaires. This fake growth required a subset of workers who were more exploitable than the domestic labour market would provide, hence all these bullshit education programs tied into employment exploitation.
No one is coming out of this unscathed but it has cemented into place Jacinda’s call for a politics of kindness, because the politics of anger and spite serves no master other than discord and implosion.