OPINION
JM White
Before 1985 we had a bi-cultural population which was heavily intermarried and we were well on the way to a unique way of life; so much so that in 1975 the United Nations sent an emissary to find out what we were doing that worked so well. There was no racism. We were all non-hyphenated Kiwis. We had a stable and truly egalitarian population, practically no crime, and we were one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We were debt free. We produced abundant food. Everyone could afford their own home. We slept behind unlocked doors and open windows. We made everything we needed – clothing, furniture, whiteware, even locomotives and rolling stock, and we had inherited a first-class apprentice system from England which ensured we could keep producing all those good things. And we did it all ourselves with fewer than 3 million people. No matter what you are told now, that is the truth. I was there.
In 1984 the 41st Government was elected in New Zealand. It was a Labour Government brimful of politicians who helped us onto the path we are now on. Helen Clark’s government sent all the wives to work and the tax rate was doubled but we never saw any benefit from it. Neither did our children who now transit from birth to public nursery, to pre-school and to school, always under the cold care of adults who have no interest in them other than as income. The villain of the piece, Roger Douglas, was there as well. He was another beneficiary of a state house and another one who, like Key and Bennett, pulled the ladder up after him. Douglas was the one who pushed us into neoliberal financialisation. He told us it would make our essential services even cheaper, our disposable income go even further, and our lives even more utopian – then he began the Great NZ Fire Sale. Everything went. We were not given a say and we never benefitted from it, but in those days we truly believed our politicians worked for us. We trusted them. I don’t think anyone does now.
Neoliberalism worked for Rog. He did what he did for a knighthood but I think he came dirt cheap. Given the duplicity required and the magnitude of the job of handing over the accumulated wealth of one hundred and fifty years worth of our labour to strangers I would have wanted much, much more than that. It’s thanks to Roger we now rent what we used to own and are paying whatever the new owners decide we must pay.
Today, only forty years since that 1984 election, we are a digital colony of America and an economic colony of China. We follow orders from political ideologues, who in turn follow orders from elderly lunatics like Schwab or his acolyte philosopher, Yuval Harari, or the ever gently smiling Bill Gates who keeps insisting the world population must be reduced by seven or eight billion people to save the planet. For sheer certifiable lunacy I don’t know which one creeps me out the most. Gates says that just by existing we are destroying the earth, but at the same time he worries about our health and injects a pot pourri of chemicals into us whenever he can to keep us safe. It appears that while Gates et.al. want several billion people to die, they want them to die in the best of health.
Politicians are now nothing more than overpaid busybodies who make everything worse. They interfere in the minutiae of our private lives always with the excuse of keeping us safe while the crime rate goes off the scale and families live in cars. They are anarcho-tyrants – incompetents who have brought governmental dysfunction to a point where they are hopeless at coping with large matters like the national debt, but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of small ones – particularly self-promotion and the worship of rainbows.
We must stop these people in their tracks. Stop believing them and stop listening to their mouthpiece media. We won’t get our old New Zealand back, but our lives will be much easier if we simply tell them to go to hell. We have to do it ourselves. Nobody is coming to help us. Remember, these people have no intention of going down the path to Carbon Zero with us. They have very different plans for themselves, and they are seriously dedicated to implementing them.