As the homeless start to freeze to death on the streets of our main cities, we must acknowledge the brutal murder and grim burial of egalitarian NZ. The middle classes have walked away from their traditional role of holding the worst elements of the right in check at the ballot box because this right wing Government have given them a decades worth of untaxed capital gains on their properties.
Grandad is on twitter again, this time Winston’s bizarre twitter storm against Metiria has to be read to be believed…
…pretending to be ‘slow’ on the housing crisis would suggest they weren’t aware that they were throwing thousands of state tenants onto the streets to be looked after by the ‘market’. The ‘market’ legitimised boarding house slum lords and helps explain why 1600 NZers die from the cold each year.
The tip line is running hot with rumours that right wing strategists and Dirty Politics hate speech merchants Cameron Slater and Simon Lusk are helping advise the NZ First campaign.
I was a little surprised when NZ First leader Winston Peters announced that a binding referendum on the abolition of the Maori seats and reducing the size of Parliament would be bottom line issues for him. It is impossible for Labour and the Greens to agree to these terms. That means NZ First is saying that they will only form a government with National – assuming they agree.
Winston is better than this I know he is proudly Maori and he has strong Maori advocates like Pita Paraone, Shane Jones and Ronnie Mark who will be giving him advice and counsel. I hope he listens to them. He needs to remember he’s chasing National voters, not trying to copy National Party policy.
Winston is showing us all that even when caught out by his own provincial pakeha fairytales about Maori, he’s so hell bent on being Prime Minister that he’ll tip the country into civil unrest to get it.
So entrenched is our hatred of the poor and beneficiaries that we can’t contextualise the position Metiria and tens of thousands of others are forced to undergo. We can’t help but hate beneficiaries for reminding us the system fails when we are so focused on celebrating individual success and wealth.
…the chronic underfunding of the social infrastructure of NZ so that National can gerrymander a surplus for tax cuts has to end if we want to be serious about education, hospitals, mental health, superannuation and inequality reduction programs.
This viciousness is not only seen in the spiteful policy of MSD but also in the mass surveillance powers they have given themselves to spy on beneficiaries. Which leads to an interesting question, because MSD spy on social media for welfare fraud, are they following the #IamMetiria social media campaign and will begin secretly investigating anyone who uses the tag?