New Zealand is falling to pieces, we need a radical rethink of our neoliberal experiment Part 1
Child poverty stats have stalled, 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’
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- 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.
- $608 million in housing equity was made by landlords
- 9.6% increase in rent for tenants
- 18.4% of children live in households earning less than half the median income after housing costs
- $5.5 billion in profit made by ANZ, BNZ, ASB and Westpac
and the Top 1% own 25% of wealth while the Bottom 50% owns 2% of wealth
If you think the worst inflation in 30 years is bad now, wait until the impact of the Ukrainian war and broken supply chains in China hit.
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.
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I’d like to see people try and live in a world without modern technology because many production processes require a pretty large scale.
But for me, one of the dumbest fringe economic theories (aside from the huge pile of crazy lefty ideas to return to the stone age) would have to be the Ladder Effect which basically states that the best way to gather taxes is to raise them for middle and lower incomes while reducing them for the higher ones. That way, investment was supposed to be encouraged and while still getting enough tax income. Or rather, more than before because there are far more modest incomes. I don’t think that I’ll have to go into detail why it doesn’t work.
We seem to be in a doom-laden post-malthus dystopia.
Clothing prices are up because a third of cotton growing Pakistan is under water. Fruit prices are up because a third of Hawkes Bay has been underwater. And banks are failing due to the climate. https://eand.co/why-were-headed-for-the-mother-of-all-financial-crises-72eadac215c5
Dystopia – we now live in a frightening unregulated unethical Skynet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMjGgaqsYMU&list=PLOwOW6XTDFPtaPLbhZuMgExEkBWqZXKa0&index=61
The suns is out have a great weekend.
Vote Winston Peters and out an end to pc nuttiness, the contagion of pronouns, sexually devious public servants and Green politicians; send simpering MSM hacks packing, slash food and electricity costs, enable parents to spend more time with their young children, get a New Zealand bank, and put a moratorium on selling crucial stuff to rich foreigners while obscenely exploiting the poor ones and permanently safeguard the Commissioner for Children.
The perennial racist raising his head again, barking at car tyres ?
You often supply interesting numbers and statistics.
However, being without inclusion of citation information, they are consequently useless should you expect them to be propagated beyond your immediate readership. What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Please include sources.
@Richard +Christie,
Plenty of references available for the world’s richest but not so for ownership of world’s wealth.
Corporations though are a different matter.
ps://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/list-of-top-20-richest-
https://financialpost.com/investing/a-20-trillion-blackrock-vanguard
Corporate power rather more scary.
The system is by design by the few at the top in power who lobby to keep the status quo. We will need a generation for those who have control to pass and then maybe ideas at the top will change with a generation. .
It’s all very well blaming the political class but ask yourself who elects them. NZ voters love to talk up their concern for housing, poverty and climate change but will scream blue murder at anything that looks like a policy to address any of them. The biggest and most obvious issue is our regressive tax system which is entirely reliant on worker and business income and acts like a punishment on productivity and basic every day consumption.
Suggest anything but tax cuts in an election and you won’t get near the treasury benches ensuring a permanent and ongoing decline in state capacity to deliver anything but the bare minimum – eventually our state will be so anemic even that won’t be possible.
Government and state intervention has been so derided since the 80’s that politicians are terrified of doing anything other than facilitate private capitals take over of public services. If there isn’t an investor making a killing it ain’t worth doing and this mantra is sung by every economic commentator and news reader in the country day in and day out. (the pay walled Bernard Hickey being the only notable exception).
I suspect things will need to get much, much worse then they are now – 25% unemployment, tens of thousands homeless and completely inaccessible basic health care – before there is real change.
The only population with the brains and guts to fight back are the French, who will burn down their own cities before they’ll let neo-liberal dogma impoverish them and their children’s future.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Out-of-Spoons-Only-Knives-Left-by-Transgender-NZ/76439393.VL7OD.XYZ
certainly not gender minorities. Look at their merchendise.
Thunk – the ongoing mass movement of refugees in the world is an echo of the movements of early humans trying to survive climate exigencies – looking for green pastures or at least survivable conditions. That is where we have sunk too (sic).
Part of NZ/Ao problem is that we have embraced mechanical, hard scientific changes which are worshipped, and the heights and understanding of the mind and worship of the idea of creation that brings all living matter including ourselves into being and then our minds that create our own heaven and hell are dismissed and we turn from Humanities to the building of physical forms. Perhaps that is what is behind the wrapping of large iconic buildings by the artists Christo and Jeanne Claude https://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/wrapped-public-buildings/. And very symbolically they were wrapped in plastic, our modern discovery and which may be our death knell!
And there seems to be no pausing in the forward push of the ambitious destroyers of the earth, all for an ephemeral thing called money and finance that we make up in our minds ourselves providing for our needs and desires and excesses. We need something different, an exchange token that limits flights of fancy? Well it isn’t simple if you try I have tried Green dollars and there are economic rules that apply, it can’t be developed in a careless manner. But we need to trade to communicate, to barter, to survive, and all be involved in our domestic exchange market while we keep involved carefully in international finance to keep the financial wolves at bay. The wolves are wary of fire so we must keep up our ahi ka.
Here we go –
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias
The title “Ozymandias” refers to an alternate name of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. In the poem, Shelley describes a crumbling statue of Ozymandias as a way to portray the transience of political power and to praise art’s ability to preserve the past.
Ozymandias Summary & Analysis by Percy Bysshe Shelley
LitCharts https://www.litcharts.com › poetry › ozymand
Too many worries about trivial and marginal stuff that is taking over government focus, media and funding.
Not enough focus on real issues that totally disrupt people’s lives like poor education, crime, abuse and injury.
OT spends a fortune trying to remove an abused kid from a stable family due to apparently ‘cultural’ concerns that arose from when one of their case workers somehow thought that the child victim was very close to a grandmother who had died years earlier. No concerns then over the ability of those at OT and actual jail time for those writing reports that are completely wrong. Meanwhile kids are being abused and murdered while OT thinks it’s all ok. Apparently when a non relative, co accused of meth, gets custody of a special needs child (and $700 p/w welfare payment) there is no need to investigate or worry about cultural and whanau ties when they try to find out whether the child is safe!
Murdered Malachi Subecz’s family call for mandatory reporting of child abuse
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/486620/murdered-malachi-subecz-s-family-call-for-mandatory-reporting-of-child-abuse
Schools in NZ and the census is now obsessed with transgender propaganda while so many teenagers are so violent that they are putting others into permanent state of care or death. No interest in teaching kids not to knock out others in fights then and anger management – more interested worrying about their gender issues.
The ‘miracle’ coward punch victim who had his life support turned off and survived
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/131595673/the-miracle-coward-punch-victim-who-had-his-life-support-turned-off-and-survived
Beach Haven road rage, fatal knife attack: Police charge two teens with murder
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/beach-haven-fatal-knife-attack-police-charged-two-teens-with-murder/GEHNQI6G6BA5HIZWCQLPS7WJBM/
Woke never sue the immigration minister over the terrorists Tarrant and Samsudeen. Terrorism is ok in NZ for the woke, but letting a woman’s rights campaigner in, is not.
Woke rainbow seem to be enabled to sue the immigration minister – next health minister – pretty clear who has too much time on their hands and too much money and completely entitled that the government has to do what they say, when they want it.
Auckland professor separated from husband suing Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/125829707/auckland-professor-separated-from-husband-suing-immigration-minister-kris-faafoi
Immigration Minister’s Failure To Act Challenged In High Court By Rainbow Organisations
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2023/03/24/immigration-ministers-failure-to-act-challenged-in-high-court-by-rainbow-organisations/
Who are more dangerous, terrorists or woman’s right moment organisers? Remember the woke thinks that Don Brash is such a dangerous racist he should not be able to speak at Massey University! Freedom of speech is now absent in NZ!
What is next they start locking Don Brash and woman’s right, feminists, for their different view points?
NZ is starting to get scary how bad it’s got for freedom here. Can see why ACT is up in the polls while Woke card carrying Rainbow Greens in decline. Sadly the environment is the victim in NZ identity engulfing Green Party.
Free speech, easy target in NZ.
Herald beats super-injunction: Inside the ‘Kafkaesque’ free speech battle in secret investigation case
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/herald-beats-super-injunction-nside-the-kafkaesque-free-speech-battle-in-secret-investigation-case/OCB5PGPXYFBPZM3SFJZOH2IS4Q/
This election is going to be like 87 all over again. Vote Nuclear Free and you get the neoliberal shaft. Vote Free Speech and you get the ultra neoliberal shaft. If only there was an option to spread some free speech on your bread and butter.
It’s clear we need to have a reform sooner or later, so long as any politicians campaigning on it see this as ‘Not an oppotunity to turn the clock back, but to get the country back ON track.”
Mince on Toast. If either NZ First or the Nats can get the education system back on track, then that could be an important first step. TOP have some good ideas and smart people but not the numbers; Labour has acquiesced not just in the dumbing down of the school system, but in messing around with kiddies’ identities too, with no mandate or justification for doing so. Normal parents want children to gain real life skills, we all benefit when they do, and it’s a constructive positive focus, rather than the usual sort of scaremongering.
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Neoliberlism didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s a moneyed-class, constructed policy, put in place by a political class beholding to said moneyed class. The world today is by design, the crises before us is by design… long story short… the moneyed class is thee greatest threat to humanity today, about time we realized this and about time we gave their two most important tools of change – the mainstream media and the political class, the skepticism they so deserve.
It was the ‘radical rethink’ that has made NZ run off the tracks.
We don’t have a cost of living crisis. We have a cost of production crisis, whereby we have turned into nation of don’t give a shit of nimbyistic f**ktards who are more focused on whether we stand or sit to take a whizz or the shade and tone of our skin colour. There is no respect or pride in doing a days graft. All types of professions/businesses are screaming out for competent employees and there just seems to be no one out there. The results are that businesses are scaling back, for example the garage that might of employed 4 mechanics are now down to 2 including the owner who’s now on the tools, thus creating longer wait times for customers, not only is this playing out in the trades/professions but is affecting our exports, in NZ/AO’s ability to supply a quality product that we have/had a reputation for.
We seem to have forgotten that we are but a skid mark nation on the globe and not really of any significance to any one in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t help when a proportion of our leadership, be it political, business or social behaves in a way not befitting there elevated statuses and are seemingly rewarded for their shenanigans.
We desperately need a JFK leadership moment in that famous….Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country….so we can all start paddling the waka the same way on a course of prosperity for all, instead of splashing and fumbling around in ever decreasing circles until we sink in our own self imposed shit.