This need to keep the business community pacified with austerity vs the realities of needing to borrow more to repair the vast social damage 9 years of National has generated is the real friction point in the new Government.
Last week Statistics NZ released the National Accounts for the year to March 2017, which revealed that working people are receiving only 48.7% of the national pie compared to a peak of 58.7% in 1981.
The general results have been catastrophic for those committed to public sphere principles. Newsrooms contracted, news content thinned out, and current affairs journalism disappeared from prime time television. We have here an over bearing convergence of finance, political and media culture which obscures the issues of media ownership.
Brash’s comments criticising the use of the Maori language on Radio New Zealand are childish and pathetic. And that’s before we get to the underlying oppressive racism.
We discovered less than a week ago that MFAT is hosting ‘consultations’ around the country, with David Parker, this week on the TPPA-11. It appeared to be a last-minute decision to do something before Xmas, and somehow they forgot to send invitations to critics who have attended previous ‘consultations’. Presumably the business sector was given priority notice. There is no information on the MFAT website, but we know at least about these:
Sunshine and happiness are great. And Jacinda should be championing that style of progressive democracy, but someone has got to stand up and start punching back!
The new Government has got to start assembling their hit team.
Don Brash also overlooked the historical and contemporary diversity, and complexity of New Zealand, saying ‘New Zealand values are British values’, and that a lot of socio-economic deprivation among Maori is because they ‘don’t speak English properly’.
When we discuss poverty, the two extremes seem to fall in two categories: beneficiaries and the uber rich. The “middle class” seems to be an amorphous blob which fills the gap between the two, and (according to the law of post-90s politics) is the demographic which politicians have to appeal for votes.
It seems deeply sad and ugly that a gift like Te Reo can be attacked in this manner, we are beyond this and all I hear in Brash and Edwards are the roar of tired dinosaurs who don’t appreciate they are extinct already.
TO ACCUSE POLITICIANS of being part of a “tax and spend” government is just another way of calling them social-democrats. By the same token, politicians who explicitly renounce the policies of tax and spend are signalling that they are anything but social-democrats.