John Key says Phil Goff needs to ‘focus on reality’; that there’s been a global recession and an earthquake.
Yet we went into his term of office with a big surplus and full employment. Which was rapidly spent on rewarding the wealthy – once that was gone, the reaction was to cut benefits, education, healthcare and anything else they could think of.
Unemployment has spiralled out of control, the rate of people leaving for Australia (a key election plank for National) has gone up dramatically, and the gap between the wealthy and those who do productive work has widened so dramatically that the poorest of New Zealand’s workers are now lining up at the food banks with beneficiaries. Even more so, the gap between wages here and in Australia has also worsened – another key election plank of National.
A socialist government would have got us through this recession, like Labour did for us in the 1930s.
So to me, this current government looks inept verging on larcenous.
But I think we should give John Key his due. He has largely succeeded and stayed true to form.
He was a successful man in his own right, with a massive personal fortune from currency speculation and trading – and that’s what people thought ‘we’ needed at the helm. Well, he has succeeded – Key has continued to stay wealthy despite the recession, despite the earthquake and despite the misery and depredation in the rest of the country. Well done. He’s the 1% you hear about. And far too many of the 99% voted the silly prick into office.
The mistake people made was in thinking that since Key could amass wealth for himself, he’d do the same for anyone else. He’s rewarded his class of greedy speculative arse holes, sure, and that was done quick-smart with an ill deserved tax cut for them almost immediately, but that’s a small proportion of the population of the country.
He’s done it by demonstratively widening the gap between them and everyone else – despite, or in spite of, the recession, which would have been a spur to action for anyone who actually cared about their country. Now his mates can get cheap labour they can fire when the fancy takes them – well done, John Key. They call this ‘labour force flexibility’.
The next step after that is called ‘slavery’.
It never ceases to amaze me that we teach our children to share and that greed is bad – and then we are upbraided as adults for knocking the ‘tall poppies’, who are inevitably those who have made it by being greedy and not sharing.
The tall poppies are taller than ever, towering over the masses, smiling smugly, congratulating themselves, and laughing at us behind their hands for giving them such a mandate.
These people are hardly patriots. Rather the opposite.
And we voted for it. And we’re about to do so again.
Promising New Zealand a blighter future.
God help us.