Forget the Winter of Discontent – this is our Season of Entropy – why NZ is falling to pieces

There is a deep sense as we stumble into a deep recession that the entire system of late stage capitalism in NZ is failing.

That since the sacrifice of Covid, things have gone backwards.

That everything has stalled and falling backwards to the gravity of grim economics.

Forget the Winter of Discontent, this is our Season of Entropy.

Child poverty stats have frozen, public health and public education are in crisis, there is a cost of living crisis, a housing crisis, a poverty crisis and an environmental crisis.

TDB’s own Professor Wayne Hope calls it a ‘Polycrisis‘…

Everything seems to be going wrong, everywhere all at once—COVID-19, Ukraine, bank failures, inflation, extreme weather events.

Crisis afflicts the geopolitical system, global financial system, global climate system and global health system. The interconnectedness of different crises across overlapping systems has been termed a ‘polycrisis’. In these circumstances, governments confront multiple unfolding emergencies. Elaborations of the concept appear in the blogs of economic historian Adam Tooze and in research from the Cascade Institute.

Never-ending crises and emergencies disrupt the election cycle in different countries. Traditionally, popular governments, recently elected, serve two, maybe three terms before departing office. Before that point, mainstream political journalists and the commentariat declare that the incumbents are infighting/out of touch/losing credibility/tired/making mistakes/out of ideas. Public disquiet/anxiety/resentment with the government and ‘disappointing’ opinion poll results feed into each other. Meanwhile, the major opposition party, their leader (and coalition bloc under MMP) are deemed, implicitly as fit-to-govern – judgments which opinion poll trends seem to confirm.

…we are now in an age of consequences whereby the failure to act in the past has borne a harvest of spite we are all forced to bitterly pick from.

The problem is we are never allowed to ever reconsider the 35 year Neoliberal experiment of deregulation and privatisation that infects the NZ public service and State.

Our corporate led media and their Public Broadcasting quislings are there to enforce the fundamental lie of NZInc, that cut throat free market neoliberalism supersedes all else and that regulation is the filthy abortion of a stillborn egalitarianism that once held pretensions upon these far flung shores.

NZInc has become an interwoven tapestry of parochial self interest and corporate malfeasance, a warren of monopolies and duopolies endlessly molesting NZ for tino rangatiratanga rentals.

Right now the Australian Banks are exploiting billions annually from our us.

Right now the wealthy manipulate regulations to exploit our dependence upon them.

Right now politicians and consultants and a self interested public service manipulate legislation in order to give vast sums of public money to private interests and pretend that’s due process.

Right now under regulated markets are held hostage to the vested interests of the old boys club.

Right now the shopping Duopoly is milking a million per day in profits from hungry desperate NZers.

John Key sold 49% of our Hydro power using taxpayer sweeteners that triggered Māori water claims and created a $400million irrigation slush fund to Dairy intensify the South Island. Not only did he rob NZ of our hydro assets, his privatisation damaged our climate for private interests that left us geopolitically exposed to China.

This never ending molestation of the egalitarian pillars of our society has created the neoliberal wasteland of vulnerable people as ‘clients’ and a public service managerial class more focused on micro aggression policing contracts than doing the mahi.

 

 

We are not allowed to challenge the neoliberal dystopia that NZ has become despite its failure being everywhere all at once.

Gangs: Gang membership reached about 2,300 by 1980. It took nearly 35 years to reach just under 4,000 in 2014, but then only seven years before the numbers doubled again to 8,061 in 2021.

In electricity: Consumer electricity prices have risen 80% since 1990 (accounting for inflation), and since 2000, prices have risen faster than the OECD average. Productivity in the electricity and gas sector has fallen precipitously, in contrast to the economy as a whole.

Housing: A combination of record house prices and the limited further potential for growth makes this year the worst for first-home buyers since 1957, new research by economics consultancy Infometrics has found.

The 35 year neoliberal experiment has been a spectacular failure and we now have the data to prove it…

Human Rights Commissioner: NZ’s quality of life record ‘alarming’

• • New data shows New Zealand is failing on every social and economic human rights metric
  • The country is not delivering adequate rights to education, health, housing and work, based on what it could be achieving with the money available
  • When it comes to the right to food, New Zealand’s record is steadily declining
  • Māori, people with disabilities, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds are most likely to experience human rights violations

…The danger of woke middle class identity politics replacing class left analysis is that the politics devolve into a micro aggression deplatforming campaign that alienates rather than builds solidarity against free market capitalism.

The true demarcation of power in a democratic capitalist state is the 1% richest + their 9% enablers Vs the 90% rest of us.

Identity Politics simply cements into place a caste system of intersectionism alongside a terminal tribal affiliation to your skin colour, gender or identity.

There needs to be far more common ground and shared values.

The minefield of social justice and its never ending pure temple deplatforming of everything that triggers it will only drive people further from the Left in an intense economic downturn because you can’t eat virtue signalling aesthetics.

We need a new taxation and regulation model to stop the neoliberal rot. We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.

In 2010, the 388 richest individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth

By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals

In 2018, it was 42

In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.

And in 2021, 20 people owned more than 50% of the entire planet.

The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.

Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.

This isn’t progress.

Unfortunately the Left are culturally too busy micro aggression policing everyone under the rules of the new woke dogma while the Right are silently harvesting that alienation for more neoliberal exploitation.

A Left Yin and Right Yang of petty spite and broad malice locked in a death spiral on a melting planet.

We either attack the economic settings of this madness now and fight to retain our egalitarianism or we are doomed to live in the shadow of its greed.

We need to be kinder to individuals and crueller to corporations.

What is the point of Bread and Butter politics if people can’t afford bread or butter?

Short term the Government has to be focused on deflationary spending, mid term economically we need radical climate change adaptation, long term they need to start navigating  a post growth economy.

The enormity of the political gravity climate change adaptation and infrastructure resilience has created alongside the solidarity of a shared universal experience is materialising politically in a State that has to do things itself.

The 35 year neoliberal experiment in NZ cut the State back to the bone and the political project of the Right ever since is to tax-cut starve off revenue for the State so it can’t redistribute it in the first place.

What we saw with Covid and this latest weather event disaster is that you desperately need a State with capacity. So many of the problems we encountered was the shear slowness of an underfunded, under capacity public service.

With the economic recession, the geopolitical shockwaves and catastrophic climate change upon us, we must have a debate about the capacity of the State!

That is how the Left have to re frame 2023 – vote for the Right and get an amputation of the State, vote for the Left and build new capacity for the challenges ahead.

We need more Drs, more nurses, more teachers, more Police, more State houses, more infrastructure NOT LESS!

We need to debate for a bigger capacity State using the example Covid just gave us.

We need more Scientists, Drs, nurses, teachers, Police, more State houses and more infrastructure alongside policy that directly subsidises the cost of living like removing gst off food, free dental, free public transport, free food in schools and we will fund that extra increase through targeted new taxes to rebuild the capacity of the State.

The obviousness of our need for a Ministry of Works that actually builds shit is painfully clear to everyone by now.

Take Police in NZ, we have a pathetic 203 police per 100 000 NZers!

Compare that with 212 in England, 264 in Australia, 318 in Scotland, 349 in Germany, 422 in France, hell even Fiji at 227 has more Police per 100 000 than we do!

We don’t have the capacity to create a functioning State that lives up to our expectations in a liberal progressive democracy because we won’t tax the rich to find that infrastructure!

We need to actually sell the 2023 election in those explicit terms – vote Right and amputate the State, vote Left and rebuild the capacity to actually face the challenges ahead.

These new taxes will be a sugar tax for free dental, a financial transaction tax to lower GST on everything, a bank windfall profit tax to build more State houses, a social media journalism tax.

Taxes aimed at speculators and the wealthy to fund services for the egalitarian country we want NZ to be.

Let’s have the courage to actually argue and win over our fellow citizens for solution based policy that actually builds the capacity to have the extra drs, nurses, firemen, police, and teachers.

Let’s champion policies that subsidise people’s cost of living by redistributing from the few to the many.

The voters of NZ are still waiting for the Transformative change we promised them in 2017.

We need a Ministry of Works that actually builds the infrastructure we desperately need.

We need the State to do this because the Free Market has failed.

There has already been amazing work on the creation of a new Ministry of Green Works…

Rising To The Challenge: A Ministry Of Green Works For Aotearoa

Two of the biggest crises of our times – housing and climate change – could be the target of a new Ministry of Green Works that would integrate important responsibilities related to safeguarding Aotearoa’s future, according to a report released today by FIRST Union.

A Ministry of Green Works for Aotearoa New Zealand: An Ambitious Approach to Housing, Infrastructure, and Climate Change is a policy report commissioned by FIRST Union from co-authors Max Harris and Jacqueline Paul that considers Aotearoa’s systemic infrastructural problems and how they could be addressed by a new governmental entity that builds on the former Ministry of Works and integrates several key departmental responsibilities to future-proof the country for significant challenges to come.

“From our experience in workplaces, we know that contracting is a broken model that has driven down wages and led to massive inefficiencies in construction and infrastructure,” said Jared Abbott, FIRST Union Secretary for Transport, Logistics and Manufacturing.

“As the report describes, the private sector doesn’t have the capacity to deliver on large-scale housing projects and inevitably there are now worker shortages due to poor conditions in the sector.”

“Finally there is insufficient coordination to tackle climate change under the current model – the public sector has limited powers to ensure green building standards in housing and infrastructure, and it’s not equipped to respond to other unexpected challenges, like quickly building managed isolation facilities, for example.”

The report argues that the right response to these problems will be consistent with seven values: honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi; manaaki whenua, manaaki tangata; Indigenous innovation; collaboration and coordination; creativity; safety and accessibility; and transformation of our economic model. The authors note that any new Ministry of Green Works must learn from its historic namesake and considers twelve risks related to its establishment.

The report contains feedback and interviews with experts including Ganesh Nana, John Tookey, Rosslyn Noonan, Len Cook, Andre Brett, Matthew Scobie, Syd Keepa, Judith Aitken, Susan Krumdieck, Alexis Harris, Murray Parrish, Jen McArthur, Troy Brockbank, Brendon Harre, Joe Gallagher, Ben Schrader, James Muir, Patrick Cummuskey, Andre de Groot, Ben Ross, Huhana Hickey and Nick Collins.

The report is being launched as the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) begins in the United Kingdom over the upcoming weekend.

“Even with our best intentions to fix our housing, infrastructure and climate problems individually, we will miss the boat if we don’t consider their interrelatedness and set firm goals that integrate core functions of all agencies – this is where a Ministry of Green Works comes in,” said Mr Abbott.

“When the last Ministry of Works was cut up and sold off during the extreme ‘reforms’ of the 80s, we ended up a decade later with the leaky homes scandal and a lot of pressing questions – we can’t afford to wait for the consequences of climate change to set in before we act.”

…we have better solutions and we need a bigger State.

It is time to go beyond the neoliberal 30% GDP debt straitjacket and build a new State to build the infrastructure that a allows adaptation and resilience.

Bernard Hickey argues that even if we agree to the neoliberal Wellington Consensus of 30% GDP debt, we could still borrow $60Billion and remain within that absurd ideological economic straight jacket so where should that $60billion be spent on resilience and adaptation?

We need future proofing ideas, we need a Ministry of Works to do it, we need big ideas and we need big new taxes to fund those big ideas, we need to build in self sufficiency, we need mitigation and adaptation.

Unlike Covid, whose worst was avoided, this Cyclone damage is real world and physical. The magnitude of what is required from the State politically resets National and ACT’s small Government agenda.

No one wants to hear about amputating the State when they are running to the State for protection.

This was the exact same mistake the Right made last time with Covid.

The Rights usual slash and burn of the State simply isn’t sustainable in face of how invested the State is going to have to be in the rebuild.

 

Universal Left 

Let’s ensure taxation is targeted at the corporates and the wealthy while subsidising the costs of the poorest.

I present the 10 point Left wing Economic Justice Plan for Aotearoa New Zealand.

1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help.

2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs.

3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.

4: Doubling welfare payments and student allowances minus any bullshit claw backs from MSD plus Living Wage universally adopted as minimum working wage plus implementation of all WEAG recommendations.  

5: GST off food and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health.

6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.

7: Debt cancellation – student loans, welfare overpayments, beneficiary debt, easier debt cancellation.

8: Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements) 

9: Buy out houses that can’t be saved, look at universal insurance for climate change events to cover those with no insurance, survival packs in every home, solar panels on every roof, vast increase in Civil Defence equipment, social licence of essential service resilience.

10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances. 

Don’t tell me we can’t afford any of this because we can if the wealthy are taxed!

There are 14 Billionaires in NZ, and 3118 ultra-high net worth individuals, let’s start with them, then move onto the Banks, then the Property Speculators, the Climate Change polluters and big industry.

There’s no point making workers pay more to rebuild our resilience, tax the rich!

-Sugar Tax

-Inheritance Tax

-Wealth Tax

-Financial Transactions Tax

-New top tax rate on people earning over $250 000 per year.

-Capital Gains Tax

-Windfall profit taxes

-First $10 000 tax free

The Reserve Bank Governor is clearly telling us to raise taxes to pay for the rebuild, if Chippy’s Bread and Butter politics is to mean anything, he has to tax the rich to pay for the rebuild.

The reality is that climate change will force us to adapt whether we want it our not.

 

You understand that each year that passes now will get worse or remain as starkly bad as they are now right?

You get that it doesn’t go back to normal after this right?

The extreme weather will get worse and worse.

More extreme than these extremes now.

Consider this baseline extreme normal now.

Sure the war run Ukraine is hurting food prices, but that’s damage on the baseline reality of a mega drought that has interrupted the agricultural calendar of major food producers.

The radical adaptation required to get us ready for what’s coming will splinter the political spectrum whether we like it or not.

Why shouldn’t we have our own basic pharmaceutical industry?

Engineering industry?

Industrial industry?

The supply side shocks caused by Covid and war are not going away, and they are being compounded by catastrophic climate change.

Free Market Globalisation is dead, hyper regionalism is here. Supply chains in China are no longer safe and must be brought back to friendly supply chains which imports more inflation.

Radical adaptation and communal community resourcing alongside a Big State approach to lynchpin infrastructure for basic self-reliance as an Island country facing enormous economic shockwaves is the only means to build the muscle mass to respond to the ever intensifying external disruption of late stage capitalism.

The need to increase military spending to 3% alongside the new costs for this infrastructure must be funded via new taxes aimed at corporations and banks.

A financial transaction tax and windfall profit tax would take the yoke of taxation off working people and place it upon the shoulders of the wealthy.

National and ACT  see mass immigration as a means to create fake growth at a time when we should be focused on de-growth.

Climate Crisis is here and adaptation is now.

We need to start rethinking Isolationism as a strength and Think Big as Economic Sovereignty.

The geopolitical shock waves are only getting more intense.

If you think being carbon neutral by 2050 is the solution, you are the problem.

Post growth capitalism with true sustainability calls for Autarky on a burning planet that can’t take anymore globalism.

The tyranny of distance has always been our malaise but on a burning planet of constant external shocks the Shire of NZ is looking very good right now.

‘Build that wall’ will soon become ‘defend that moat’.

In 1980, the time between billion dollar climate destruction events was 3 months.

It’s now 18 days.

There is a point where the next destructive weather event strikes before you can rebuild from the last one.

Change is coming whether we want it or not.

 

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