I just picked up this message from my cousin. I’ve taken out all the family stuff. but I’ve left in her comments about the care my aunty received while she was at Auckland Hospital. I’m posting this because of all the unnecessary grief Papa Carl Perkins and his whanau went through while he was at Waikato Hospital.
First of all, why the Christ is this being called a ‘Paedophile village’? It immediately scares the living bejesus out of locals and sets the nation at unease. It suggests a malignant tumour of a community that must be treated with the same mercy as you treat cancer, i.e. none at all.
‘Paedophile village’ is the very worst of the mainstream media selling clickbait.
Why not call it ‘Utter-failure-of-social-policy village’? Because that is truly what this represents.
By applying Game theory, Nested games and the Prisoner’s Dilemma to current NZ politics, we can see that NZ First is playing the sharpest game; it’s triumphant in many policy and funding allocations. Meanwhile the Greens celebrate relatively small wins, with no real incentive to defect, playing the sucker in Labour and New Zealand First’s game.
The refusal to ever acknowledge that the 30 year neoliberal experiment in society, culture and economics has reaped a bitter harvest of mostly men who are so alienated from themselves that their loneliness and grief swamp the daybreak of the present.
This is a ticking time bomb now and the National Party MP either steps down themselves to end this or Bridges pushes ahead, outs the MP himself and then risks that MP hurting themselves.
Fresh from mutilating the free speech debate, martyring Don Brash and promoting crypto-fascists, the Woke Left descended upon the recent Justice Summit with all the nuance of a grenade going off in a kindergarten.
If nothing else, the experience will have shown Little what he is up against. The anger and hurt of Maori. The radical programmes with which the latter propose to empty the prisons of their disproportionate ethnic muster. The anxious attempts of the various state institutions tasked with managing crime and punishment to generate outcomes that meet the often contradictory expectations of their political masters. And last – but by no means least – the inescapable reality of “Middle New Zealand’s” veto: it’s indisputable power and its implacable determination to have the final say.
I did not really expect to enjoy the justice summit. Too many people, same old stories, probably not much more than a talkfest. But actually, I enjoyed it hugely and it gave me hope for the future. I believe in hope. It springs eternal. And it can move mountains. And maybe the mountains are ready to be moved.
The Justice Conference has wrapped up and it is a relief to see that the madness of our prison industrial complex is finally being challenged by some genuine political courage.
This is an area of social policy that I have been passionate about for a very long time. I do believe you judge a society on how they treat their least respected and the way we treat prisoners should be a national scandal.
Nothing seems to sum up the counter productive nature of our neoliberal welfare system quite as powerfully as the madness of this case…