…The Dark Art of politics now is not in the proposal and debate of ideas, it is the promotion of anger as policy which is communicated to potential voters based on the outrage it generates amongst identifiable tribal protagonists.
Our under funded social infrastructure, our ‘me first’ consumerism, our 30 years of neoliberal mythology, our disconnection from one another, our untreated pain, our lack of hope from grinding poverty in a first world country, our damaged masculinity, the intergenerational consequences of colonialism, our unspoken rage culture, our inability to express emotion beyond anger – all of this demands questions we don’t want to hear as a society and the shame of suicide continues to hide and smother any healing.
It’s time to start rethinking our support for Dairy, Tourism and the fraud that is international education. Unfortunately the political power each of those industries have mean any Government is too frightened to challenge them.
When you think about it, the privacy breach at the Ministry of Culture and Heritage for the 250th year of James Cook sailing around NZ is actually all part of the colonial experience.
You would’ve thought after the UN conspiracy theory that inspired a white supremacist terrorist, National would shy away from this sort of crank alt-right stuff.
No one has yet tied these threads together however to make sense of what is happening, so here is what is happening and here is how National win the 2020 election.
Being old school, Winston carries grudges. He is hateful towards those National Party MPs he holds accountable for leaking his Super over payment.
When Ihumātao suddenly went from a benign protest few were paying attention to into a cultural flash point utilising social media in a way that was in the full glare of the national and international media in the space of a week, Labour were stunned.
Because Labour didn’t think they were going to win in 2017, they had no plan to reform the neoliberal public services and we are seeing the price of that lack of a plan as those same vested interests strangle off the weak reform programme Labour have attempted.
Babies clambering all over him for photo ops is fine, but young people stand and sing a song in support of ongoing injustice against Māori and he trespasses them from their democratic seat of power for a year.