The 40 Year Neoliberal Experiment in New Zealand

This year marks the 40 year Neoliberal Experiment in New Zealand.

What many in NZ do not understand is the way this neoliberal experiment has tainted and poisoned so much of our experience and doomed so many into debt servitude.

Many NZers forget what we were as an egalitarian country.

Many middle class activists by focusing on Identity over Class have left Millennials and the wider left with no tools to challenge the neoliberal hegemonic structure, favouring instead Free the nipple mummy blogger vegan cycling protests instead.

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 40 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.

25 000 on the social housing wait list, 600000 needing food banks monthly and a suicide rate that we always ignore.

The 40 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’

• • 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.

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.