Cam Slater in his latest podcast, toward the end of the interview with Chris Trotter, asked about Deborah Russell’s heartless comment that intimated that New Zealand small businesses, not surviving lockdown deserved to go under. Deborah refused to apologise, sticking to her theory that those businesses were the authors of their own misfortune.
This following is a partial transcript of Chris Trotter’s replies to Cam Slater in his Political Podcast No 3 for Insight Politics Magazine beginning at 56.4.
“Deborah Russell is a highly competent woman, I mean she’s got a good track record, I won’t detract from her in any way in relation to her competence and her credentials.
But what she represents is one of the really big problems facing all labour parties and even social democratic parties around the world, which is that they have become very much the parties of the educated middle class.
The world inhabited by the Deborah Russells is a very different world from the one inhabited by 80, 90 percent of the rest of humanity.
When she speaks in the way she did at the committee, when, you know she was just delivering a little tutorial about fundamental economics and the perennial weakness of small business being its undercapitalised character, the fact that small businesses by and large fail within the first one to two years – this is just a statistical fact.
All of that, the whole tone, just reinforces the gulf between that professional managerial class and the rest of us .
it was like Hillary Clinton’s infamous comment about some supporters representing a basket of deplorables, It just highlights the gulf.
Right back at the start of our discussion Labour expects the person in the factory, the guy with the Chorus van, the shop assistant, all of those people are expected to vote Labour.
Because, well… because! You know, not because they any longer genuinely represent their interests, but because… the policy programme Labour is presenting has been compiled with those people in mind. And indeed, compiled because those people got together collectively and put it on the agenda.
No, no, those people are expected to vote… well because grandad did and dad did and it’s your job to vote labour too – and you don’t ask questions of your betters – and we are your betters because look at the degree I’ve got.”
Chris’s description of the huge gulf between Labour leaders and their support base highlights problems Labour has inflicted on a largely unwitting audience.
- They have built a new class of society – Labour is not striving for a classless society, instead, they have introduced a new one. Our English ancestors left to escape a society where money determined class but this new class is academia driven supported by a clueless media.
- Academia is always right even when they are proved wrong – yet to play out, the length of our lockdown comes at a substantially higher economic cost compared to minimal health gains.
- The Labour Elite know best and must not be challenged. Clueless media support the “we know best” academic argument by not asking the right questions to untruths delivered by “academic experts”.
If academics try to run things their lack of practical competence eventually becomes an issue. In any case, they would not start a new business. What Deborah and her ilk do not understand is that the practical elements business owners need are learned on the job. Some risks can be calculated and some are revealed in transit. To assume the single most important business risk is undercapitalisation comes from ignorance typical of an academic out of touch with reality.
The degree of anger coming from hard working New Zealanders is understandable. They have poured their lives and resources into building businesses and for an arrogant numpty who is partly responsible for their impending demise to tell them they should never have started is galling.
Most businesses would have never started if the owner had adopted a purely academic approach and they wouldn’t have lasted. Business owners can work for years for peanuts, which Deborah would regard as stupid, but not everyone wants to work for the government or someone else. Here in New Zealand, we like being our own boss. Some businesses survive and others do not but all owners have the right to make that decision themselves without government interference.