GUEST BLOG: Tadhg Stopford – The Luxon regime is looting the nation, but awakening the people

By all appearances, Christopher Luxon’s government of losers is winning. These villains have ridden to power on a wave of donor money and division. They’ve passed radical bills and plastered the word “delivery” across every press release. But beneath the PR polish, their agenda is riddled with corruption, contradictions, and a strategic incoherence so profound it may yet spark the very revolution they fear.

This government claims to champion “hardworking Kiwis” — yet their policies punish them. They say they’re about “fiscal responsibility” — while giving billions in tax cuts to landlords and overseas investors, funded by slashing school lunches and public health. They talk “common sense” — while tearing up Treaty obligations, ignoring environmental collapse, and rewarding extractive industries. If this is victory, why does it look and feel so much like theft?

For a so-called ‘conservative’ government, it’s remarkable that all they seem willing to conserve is the wealth of corporations and the investor class — not the security or prosperity of the nation. None of them seem fit to babysit our kids, let alone steward our collective wealth. Look at them — feeding the banks while starving the economy. Financial parasites gorging on public lifeblood.

The contradiction is clear: you cannot govern for the many while serving the few. And when the few grow too fat, the many start to notice. Luxon’s “coalition of the willing” — ACT, National, and NZ First — has become a coalition of betrayal.

Their economic policies widen inequality. Their cultural policies fan division. Their environmental policies border on nihilism. They have no vision for national development. They are not delivering prosperity — they are delivering the public to profiteers, like livestock to the meatworks.

But in their arrogance, they may yet spark the very revolution they fear. Not with violence — but with memory. With clarity. With coordinated refusal. They have made Treaty principles a national conversation again — but framed it in fear. They have reminded workers that tax cuts for the wealthy mean hospital beds for the poor go empty. They have revealed themselves for what they are: the polished front of an extractive machine.

History teaches us something vital: when legitimacy fails, sovereignty returns to the people. Not with permission — but with purpose. The people are not the servants of government. We are the source of its power. The law must serve the people — not enslave them.

Natural law predates Parliament. It transcends party manifestos. It holds that all human beings possess dignity, and that governments exist to protect life, liberty, and the wellbeing of future generations. When a government violates this deliberately and persistently — it loses moral authority. At that point, resistance is not optional. It is a sacred obligation.

This is not protest theatre. It is political history repeating itself — and moral law asserting itself. This is the foundation of all legitimate revolt in history — from the Declaration of Arbroath, to Te Whiti o Rongomai, from the American Revolution to Hōne Heke. Revolt does not always wear the mask of violence. It wears the mantle of truth. It lives in refusal, in reorganisation, in the birth of new law rooted in older justice.

This government, with ACT and NZ First in tow, is not merely wrongheaded. It is actively unmaking the social contract. It is looting the commons. It is elevating private profit over public good. It is deliberately sowing division to mask extraction. And the so-called “losers” of this agenda — Māori, renters, teachers, young people, elders, the working poor — are in fact the backbone of this country. They are the people upon whom every genuine democracy must be built.

Labour, sadly, offers little that is wildly different. They started the fraud in 84, and show no sign of substantive change.

So, the task now is not to critique parties, but to displace their false framing with truth. To assert our sovereignty. To begin the next phase of our nation’s journey: the creation of a living constitution.

A constitution that binds the powerful and protects the powerless. That honours Te Tiriti not as checkbox but as foundation. That enshrines economic dignity, ecological regeneration, and public wealth as rights — not privileges. That declares: we are not here to be farmed by capital, but to live, flourish, protect, and build.

Labour is not the solution. As long as they repeat the lie that “there is no magic money tree” or that “government finances are like household budgets,” they too are complicit — controlled opposition under another name.

Each one teach one. Learn. Share. Organise.
We have a magic money tree — it’s called the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. And it has been locked away from public purpose since 1989.[1]

Unlock it. Invest in ourselves. Rebuild our nation.
Everything we need is already ours.

[1] Reserve Bank Act 1989 — established operational independence for inflation-targeting, removing public credit from democratic control. See: https://www.rbnz.govt.nz/about-us/our-history