Stealing out of need is different from stealing out of greed. I won’t ever damn a mother or father for doing that. That’s an indictment on the system, not on Metiria or the tens of thousands forced to do the same.
Metiria admitting she was forced to break the law to feed her child doesn’t make her a hate figure, it makes her a leader who has experienced the cruelty of spiteful social policy firsthand.
None of these male broadcasters have had to deal with the horror and cruelty of WINZ. None of them have had to crawl on their belly in a demeaning manner to just pay the bills. They have no idea of the life Metiria had to live, yet in they go with all the judgmental beneficiary bashing neoliberal cultural hate that has become the corner stone of most mainstream media.
The real madness, there wouldn’t be any synthetic cannabis issues if we legalised actual cannabis.
The truth is that while it’s poor brown people dying from synthetic cannabis sweet bugger all will be done. The second white middle class kids start dying, watch how quickly society will move.
Being on the State Broadcaster carries obligations to the taxpayers who have built that asset up, which means his salary should be transparent.
Kiwi’s don’t want the jobs, because as Helen Kelly pointed out, they are awful hideous jobs which are paid a pittance. Complaining as the farming industry does about NZers not wanting to be serfs in a rural feudal state doesn’t justify importing desperate and impoverished workers from other countries.
Every Election, there’s a seat or several whose outcomes are fantastically interesting to watch. This is because they are the ones that are actually balanced upon the knife-edge – where a few dozen votes one way or ‘tuther will actually help to determine the shape and course of our politics for years or even decades to come.
Thanks to my socioeconomic privilege, it is unlikely (not to say impossible) that I will ever end up as dependent on our corrupt welfare system as Metiria once was. And I don’t pretend to know exactly how that dependency felt for Metiria, because I can’t know. Maybe I can’t know, but I can guess. Because I can guess, I can empathise with her.
We had been preparing the story for weeks. A huge research project, a scholarly article in a good journal, a well-known charity behind us. It was our “I, Daniel Blake” story for New Zealand.
NZ First’s extraordinary claim that deciding the fate of the Maori electorates with a binding referendum is not only dog whistle politics at its worst, it’s also incredibly unfair and utterly unjust.