MEDIAWATCH: Dr Bryce Edwards vs the Gumboot King

Interesting fight between Dr Bryce Edwards and Mike King.

Bryce first published his criticism of the process King’s Gumboot Day got funding over a week ago, but it’s been recently reposted with the addition of King’s right of reply in which he goes for Bryce’s jugular.

My guess is a furious King threatened defamation if he didn’t get a right of reply.

Here’s my take on the funding process and the anger King generates.

Mike has become a favourite target to attack by the Left because we are angry he’s given National a media win by funding his suicide programmes.

I think attacking Mike is a mistake.

I’ve known Mike for about 20years. His passion and drive to respond meaningfully to the pandemic of suicide is breathtaking. The grief he wades through on a weekly basis from Whānau who reach out to him at their most raw and painful requires a strength and courage beyond my reckoning.

He is at the coalface of suicide and his voice matters. The systemic failures he sees are a reality that is constantly hidden by bureaucrats who desperately sanitize our suicide statistics.

Here was King in 2022…

…Mike is hated by the Wellington Bureaucracy for highlighting their incompetence and making them look like the callous wankers they are.

Mike is offering counselling services at a fraction of the price that the Wellington Bureaucracy offers and because he’s done such an excellent job of exposing their vested interests, he will never ever receive any money for his proposals because that’s what happens when you cross the Wellington Bureaucracy.

That’s where the friction point lies, Mike is offering a service cheaper than the State wants to fund with real world contact to help people talk the issues out before they get to the suicide flash point and as anyone attempting to access mental health services know, there is barely any functionality in the mental health area.

From the State’s point of view, half of those who commit suicide never reach out for help anyway so how on earth can they spend money attempting to save lives who don’t even bother to access services in the first instance.

For everyone else, that argument is callous.

Daniel McLauchlan is one of the greatest political columnists in New Zealand and his latest crusade on attacking the Wellington Professional Managerial Class raises important questions on how the State should regulate itself during Late Stage Capitalism that the Political Left need to look at…

Unjarndycing the State

The dogmatic political left invests its faith in the bureaucratic state; the dogmatic right trusts oligopolistic free markets – leaving New Zealand with crumbling infrastructure and corruption

…the Political Left have allowed the self-interested Public Service and the Professional Managerial Class to push self interested virtue signals rather than structural change and increased capacity of the State!

Daniel talks about the lack of actual competition to the self-serving Public Service and to that effect Māori Social Service Providers could easily become the competition the self serving Public Service needs while building State capacity with a Ministry of Green Works.

The lack of results from a self serving Public Service riddled with Corporate Consultants could finally be challenged by Māori Social Service Providers that treat everyone who comes, but in a Māori cultural setting.

That development can drive the self serving Public Service to be far more responsive and force actual results out of them.

It’s allowing regulated capitalism to inject the dynamic of competition while building State capacity.

Imagine a scenario where Iwi joined forces with the State to create a 3rd Supermarket Operator with a focus on lower costs to customers, better work conditions for workers and better prices for suppliers.

Or expanding existing community health groups that are open to the entire community but run within Kaupapa Māori.

Same with Māori schools.

You can generate the competitive friction Capitalism requires while building up the State, not denigrating it.

Mike King’s charity is an example of being able to create those competitive advantages that generate greater access for people needing counselling.

We may not like the way the Right have gerrymandered the process so they have a media coup to mask how awful the rest of their social policy is, but that’s politics over the end result and the end result is more people in need will get immediate access to counselling and when you consider how damaged the entire mental health infrastructure is, that is a win for those in immediate need.

The horror of our suicide rate gives us a glimpse behind the ‘she’ll be right’ facade of our culture and the dark torment of an alpha male macho mental landscape that is terribly fragile.

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.

In a society that has no religious faith and all the cultural maturity of a can of coke, the bonds which keep us attached are frail and disconnected. In our fetishisation of individualism we have lost the central part of the human condition –  connection.

We have traded in our interwoven threads of whanau, friendship and kin for a race where no one wins.

The reason we can’t talk about suicide is because we can’t stand to talk about the dark treacle of self hate and loneliness at the core of consumer culture. We don’t dare confront the hollowness of our existence on these far flung crags of rock for fear of what we will reveal about ourselves.

Damaged individuals competing for a self identity too fragile for the storms and tempests of life.

Thanks to neoliberalism, we are further from each other than ever before.

Look at the manner in which our suicide rates jumped after the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, where we moved away from the communal towards the individual…

…we huddle frightened on these lonely rocks at the end of the world and slowly one by one slip off into the swallowing dark. Until we are prepared to confront many of the individualism-over-all myths and rebuild our tattered communities, our suicide rate will remain reminding us of our whispered deceptions.

We refuse to ask the why of suicide because we are too frightened to know the answer is a reflection of the shallow and lonely community we have become. Instead we reel off a list of phone numbers whenever we dare mention suicide as if that means a fucking thing.

We are broken and no one wants to admit that.

Mike King swims in this pain constantly and it has hurt him as much as it has hurt us which explains his anger at the Wellington Bureaucracy.

Damn him for giving the Right a publicity win, damn the Right for a joke process but don’t damn his intentions and outcomes. Mike has stood beside too many coffins at too many funerals for too many suicides to denigrate his mana the way some on the left have embarked upon.

Cool your jets comrades, the bigger enemies are National’s donors, not their virtue signals towards suicide.

Don’t attack Mike King – attack a Government underfunding mental health.

 

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