This deadlock we’ve reached in the Polls is the truth of who we are – we are a nation in desperate need of an argument

We have mistaken being a small country as an integrated one.

The truth is we are a gated culture, separated and alienated from one another.

This deadlock we’ve reached in the Polls is the truth of who we are – we are a nation in desperate need of an argument.

The ‘Kiwi way of life’ is a low imagination horizon anti intellectualism based on exploitation of confiscated indigenous resources where ignorance & malice is celebrated by the rural volk while middle class attention is engulfed between school rankings & property speculation.

• A country with 295 000 kids in poverty, 40 000  homeless, 668 suicides per year making it one of the highest rates in the world and an appalling domestic violence rate;
• A country with generations locked out of home ownership and job security on deunionised wage levels that lock us into insecurity, desperation and subservience
• A country undermined by exploited migrant labour and speculation where primary industries get to pollute and rape the environment without remorse or punishment
• A country that refused to feed the kids because it was ‘the parents fault’ and who re-lected Key despite dirty politics, abuse of political power and mass surveillance lies
• A country that could only apologise for the atrocity at Parihaka 140 years after it happened
• A country with social services who chase and hound beneficiaries to death and persecute them
• A country whose bloated private prison complex locks up as many people as America and we release men back into the community more damaged than when they went in
• A country whose politics are owned by vested big business interests and petty corruptions

This is a country where The Project and Seven Sharp are considered current affairs with all the intellectual curiosity of the ZM and Edge Breakfast shows. The things that matter don’t get debated and we live in bubbles as different as the two poll results suggest.

I don’t think these Poll results are an anomaly, the different methodologies reflect the growing tribalism and disconnection of modern democracy.