MEDIAWATCH: Exactly as TDB warned – the extreme ideology of this Government is running policy – not the common good

ByMartyn Bradbury

Exactly as TDB warned – the extreme ideology of this Government is running policy – not the common good!

We have warned you about Nicola Willis coming from the hard right think tank NZ Initiative!

We have warned you about the hard right international think tank Atlas Network.

We have warned you that National traded in any actual values for donor interests.

We warned you ACT would attempt to introduce privatisation and champion corporate power.

We warned you that all of this would happen because of far right ideology, but because most News Producers in NZ shit their pants at having to use a award like ideology because they believe you as the viewer is too stupid for that word, we get a Government of far right free market extremists destroying the common good for their corporate right wing masters – don’t believe The Daily Blog?

Read it and weep clowns…

The core reason why the coalition is failing

Robert MacCulloch is the Matthew S Abel Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Auckland. He blogs at Down to Earth Kiwi.

OPINION: About 10 years ago, when ACT was on 0.2% of the vote with turmoil in the party, and on the back of the departure of its leader, John Banks, who was being prosecuted over Kim Dotcom’s donations, a friend who worked in ACT’s office in Auckland asked me to present at its meetings and help rehabilitate it.

The party was under threat of extinction. Two other folks about my age, Jamie Whyte, who became president, and David Seymour, back from Canada, were amongst others of the new generation (non-Don Brash, non-John Banks) who the party drafted in and bet its future on.

About that time Roger Partridge and Oliver Hartwich became chair and executive director of the NZ Initiative, which arose from the defunct Business Roundtable. I attended their meetings on behalf of a founder of the Roundtable.

Christopher Luxon also attended, as chief executive of Air New Zealand. I remember him presenting a proposal for a bed tax on foreign tourists. The news in 2016 read “Tourism leader [Luxon] calls for bed tax”. Later, in 2023 the news read “Luxon doubles down on bed tax opposition”.

Why is this history important? Because decisions made then underlie a gaping weakness in the coalition and explain why it is behind in the polls today when it should be miles ahead.

During those post-John Banks times, I got to know Jamie. He had a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University in the UK. His interest was in applying “libertarian” and “classically liberal” philosophies to real-life politics.

David Seymour also held a philosophy degree, from Auckland. He was similarly attracted to those philosophies. I was not.

When Jamie gave me a lecture one day about the difference between “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism”, telling me off for calling ACT libertarian when he said it was instead classically liberal, my eyes glazed over. A rift developed between me and them.

ACT was founded to provide practical economic solutions, often, but not always, using the power of competitive markets to promote prosperity for all. It was never meant to be a party for the wealthy who wanted the top rate of tax to be cut and their big business interests protected. Quite the opposite; ACT began as the Association of Consumers & Taxpayers. Promoting abstract philosophies like “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism” had nothing to do with its formation.

Now here’s the thing. As time wore on, a transformation occurred. David discovered taking sides on non-economic moral issues, like euthanasia, freedom to have guns, legalisation of drugs, and race, all with a libertarian bent, gave ACT more publicity and attracted enough votes to push it over 5%, compared to rolling out more boring economic reform plans of the type folks like me had been doing.

But ACT’s (and National’s) pre-election budgets became lame. They could be summarised in a line: cut what they labelled as “waste” and use the cuts to reduce taxes. As if 3000 years of economics could be summarised in one sentence.

Libertarianism and classical liberalism, which mean nothing to the average Kiwi, also gained traction with National, but behind the scenes. PM Luxon’s economic adviser, Matt Burgess, who worked at the NZ Initiative, adheres to these philosophies, as do Luxon’s other advisers, Oliver Hartwich and Roger Partridge.

And there you have it. National and ACT (and so now the whole New Zealand Government, bar NZ First) acquired an empty, non-economic growth policy stance which has little to do with economics and everything to do with philosophy.

It is why Finance Minister Willis is lost, with no answers to the nation’s stagnation. It is why she has no plan. It is why she ran to Business NZ last week asking them what to do. It is why she runs to the NZ Initiative asking them what to do. It is why the PM runs to his economic adviser Burgess asking what to do. It is why they get no practical answers.

…New Zealanders do not understand just how economically extremist this Government really is with their Austerity Budget that borrowed billions for tax cuts while hollowing out public service budgets.

Here’s the kicker from Robert MacCulloch…

So we’re left with a National-ACT coalition that is giving free, competitive markets a bad name; which sides with big business and wants to give it freedom to do what it likes; which doesn’t support sensible savings policies that necessarily require some compulsion, since a market failure exists around setting aside funds rather than consuming them now.

On health care the coalition is also lost, since the solution involves a mix of government funding – redistribution being a requirement to help those who cannot afford to pay themselves – but combined with public and private provision of services in competition with one another.

This current group of National-ACT politicians lack imagination. They’re devotees of taking an impractical, pre-reformation, philosophical, religious, doctrinal approach to economics – one nobody who studies the modern subject relates to.

…TDB warned you right wing libertarian free market acolytes were taking over the Government.

You didn’t;t believe us, well here is a person who set ACT up highlighting all of this as true.

Comrades, you can read it first here on TDB or wait for the mainstream media to read it first on TDB and then attempt to copy it.

This Government is led economically by free market fanatics, at some stage as voters you are going to have to wake up to this reality!

Why are you living on your knees for corporations?

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23 Comments

  1. Why? Because a burgeoning cost of living crisis, with utilities like electricity now such a major family budget component, with both nutritious and crap food for families obscenely expensive, with a long dumbed down education system and a more dumbed down legacy media, and with the pc workplace being a ridiculous sanity-challenging experience, people may be too pre-occupied with the job of living to step back and see that the “ haves” are cunning, and chopping us down, that’s why.

    And if an illness strikes , and they’re plunged into the wrecked national health system, they’re not asking how it all happened, they’re focused on trying to put things right for themselves, hopefully with a little bit of help from their friends.

    Neoliberalism has helped both Labour and National implement a socially divisive society. Most days in Parliament inept or absurd politicians perform in way that would previously have had them kicked out of any high school classroom, and they should be booted off down Bowen Street, although legless Luxon may prefer to travel in a shiny Mercedes, because, after all, he’s sorted, and entitled.

      2. I’ve always thought it a joke we were so high on that index. Other countries must be shockingly bad that we were rated least corrupt.

        In the next index release we should plummet given the current Coalition of Corruption.

        1. The only reason we were so high is because it is not a measure of corruption but a measure of “perception” of corruption.
          It is really just a measure of how naive kiwis are, and the main reason we are probably the most corrupt developed country in the world.
          If we actually classify as a developed country any longer.

  2. Watching Luxon and Willis claim they have been responsible for inflation coming down ( ignoring the tradeable element) is laughable. Forget left or right they are just not up to it. Rising unemployment, everything is still f’ing expensive, and more borrowing than the last government. These are actual facts. Facts that have nothing to do with trans people, brown people, or relatively benign environmental regulations. Now wanker Jones is trying to put the cost of cleaning up the inevitable mess from mining and drilling on the tax payer. These people need to go.

  4. It’s hilarious to watch NZ fall for the same old, same old, same old bullshit and expect different results. All Nats policy has been tried before and failed. All Nats policy is to advance the wealthy – and even foreigners now with their visa policy! – over NZers. They may be socially bankrupt, but NZers voted them in, so it seems us as citizens are as bankrupt as them? I certianly hope not. I’d love to see some REAL policy offered by Lab or Greens to help shunt NZ into a future beyond the dinosaur mentality that seems to be dragging us backwards into a feudal past!

  5. Willis is an abject failure .She could not even buy two ferries that were pre ordered and a deposit paid for .How does she expect to increase growth when the world economy is going backwards .We are on a steep free fall due to her hate for the working class Kiwis she needs to drive the economy .With 200k not working or under employed and another 100k having fled else where there are now 300 k kiwis less to drive the false growth dream .The only plan she has is to let in more overseas people and allow them to spend $5 million on realestate .

    1. 100% Gordon. Just to add that as each day goes by our economy get’s worse, not on the road to recovery at all.

  6. Could anyone grasp what Robin Shaw was saying on Sunday 9 Feb Q&A about tax settings? It’s one of the many elephants in the room it seems. Tax Consultants are imv hardly the most trustworthy of institutions – hands in the pot and vested interests – so I count quite gather if his comments were balanced, simply stating the state of affairs as a uninterested professional, personally and/or on behalf of the firm’s or if it was all a bit one-sided. No surprise that tax policy is contentious. There was alot to take in: the mix of gst, the roll of company tax, whether NZ continues to aim for equity but is all the poorer for it as a nation (according to Shaw), or if the policy paradigm needs to change big time. Quite scary really. But I think what Shaw was saying it’s a hard decision that needs to me made. Does it? Simply a right wing mouthpiece? Or is he shooting from the hip?

  7. Is not capitalism, like three physicians agreeing on their perceived thought, yet with all differing outcome, or like three economists, who could not agree, on the time of day.
    I am enjoying, this three wheeled trike, as day after day, month after month, their wheels hit the pot holes they have created, and some gone flat in the puddles of their minds depth.
    However, hope, is always for those that truth, humanity and social care resides.

  8. There’s a long history of Labour governments having to rescue the economy after National economic mismanagement. It started with Arnold Nordmeyer’s ‘black budget’ in the early 1960s, followed by the clean-up after Muldoon essentially bankrupted the country in the late 1980s, and the return to prosperity under Helen Clark’s Labour government in the early 2000s.
    National’s self-proclaimed economic management skill is a myth.
    Also, Willis has already borrowed more than Labour did in their term and yet there is nothing to show for it.

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