Neither Labour nor National can weather the coming onslaught of corporate corruption and malfeasance as they both are keen to invite foreign money to 'invest' in Aotearoa
KC SHOEN
The Plausible Scenario
Imagine as a relatively small nation of 5 million people, that the new incoming government elected this October has already came into power and put forth a tough-on-crime policy for legislative approval. Assume also that a coalition plurality is strong enough in numbers for the prevailing party to support such intensive measures to become law.
Fast forward about 3 years, and suddenly 15-20% of that 5 million are incarcerated under these new draconian 'anti-crime' measures. You notice not only that the conviction, sentencing and incarceration rates skyrocketing simultaneously, but the the knock-on effect of prisons being built rise exponentially so as to facilitate and warehouse these newly-minted criminals. Of the incarcerated, you note astutely, that this expanded prison population mostly consists of people of colour (pacifica & maori) who make up about nearly 70% of the dominant demographic, with lower/working class Pākehā making up nearly the other 23-25%. As time gets on, and with these measures continued, you do note crime levels drop only slightly, except in two of the most critical areas needed for continuing a stable & just society: high theft & burglaries and violent crime, including mass shootings. You find that these are escalating at a harrowing rate unforeseen in New Zealand's history. They become more common, more frequent, and more destructive.
You notice that the the recidivism rates actually increased under the newer, more harsh anti-crime measures. Domestic violence, suicide rates, drug use are all rising faster than in previous years. In tandem to this excess, the government rescinds requirements regarding the levying of higher tax against corporations and the wealth accumulation of affluent individuals, specifically in regard to capital gains tax and revenue profit taking, as an attempt to curry favorable consideration of foreign investment throughout the country. This attempt actually exasperates two major dynamics already long-neglected in 2023: Corporate profit- taking driven inflation, which expanded class inequality via increased rentals and rent cost, health care, a steep rise in the rate of homelessness, and adding further insult, the affluent class in New Zealand pays nearly no taxes, as the general tax burden shifts downward to to the full-spectrum middle class to shoulder.
As you live in one of New Zealand's five-largest cities, you note your daily trek to work is littered with tents alongside busy footpaths. A sizable homeless population is now occupying green spaces meant originally as reserves for public enjoyment, having become makeshift outdoor emergency shelters for these swiftly-erected tent cities- 40% of which house low-income working families. The extreme class inequality is extraordinarily evident , and mortifying. Violent gangs and general thuggery now thrive in this space, as does other violent anti-social activity. The accelerated rise of single-parent families in poorer communities, in part from the expansion of the carceral state, has become both the new norm as well as the majority . An entire generation now is lost. As is your community, your city and your country...
If you gotten this far in to this article, you might find the entirety of this future-narrative a bit of a melodramatic dystopian exaggeration. Which is understandable, until you look northwest across the Pacific and become aware of the fact ( as laid before you in multiple links provided by the highlighted words within the sentence, below) that these near-apocalyptic scenarios are occurring, in real time. in a far away land about 11,000 kilometers from our shores....
A dying republic called the United States
The Two-Headed Chris, A village missing its idiot, and The Green bewilderedness
Chris Hipkins is essentially a left-over: the remnants of a once uber centralist-liberal dream that disintegrated, retreating back to its mediocre roots after outsized influence largely from it's response to Covid. And just like its charismatic orator and last benefactor, Jacinda Ardern, who pretended to be a democratic socialist, Labour pretends to be a robustly progressive tent, but these three collectively have always been centrist with corporate leanings. Left-over Hipkins, whose profile raised surreptitiously after advising folks to 'spread their legs ' during lockdown, saw his profile raised exponentially when Ardern split the scene to Cambridge, Massachusetts (to feast on fellowship monies provided by the American criminal corporate 1% through their one-time slave-owning ivy league university) , has been less than spectacular. This is not a dig on the ginger gent's lack of strong presence, but more on his lack of substance. 'In it for you;' has about as much sincerity as a campaign slogan as a gossip columnist swearing they don't engage in blackmail of their celebrity prey du jour, no matter how high the bounty. This is him trying to put some 'Hip" into his namesake, and appear authentic before his constituents. His releasing of Labour's 9 point pledge is a repackaging of what the party has already has historically backed, performed on , or promised previously, and does nothing to face expanding class inequality.
Hipkins himself, a product of New Zealand academia, has shown meddle as a man whom will fight for a cause he deems fit, such as when he was wrongfully arrested back in 1997 when protesting the Tertiary Review Green Bill at Parliament. He has shown striking tenacity and a steady hand both in the Auckland Anniversary weekend flooding of 2023 and Cyclone Gabriel. There is no question he is built for crisis, and can manage adeptly, unlike his counterpart, Auckland's mealy-mouthed, moribund and morally bankrupt mayor Wayne Brown who completely wilted in self-defensive postering when he couldn't manage his way through a paper bag, let alone a functional emergency response for a city under deluge.
But it's Hipkins' centrist position that is wholly destructive, as is it not guided by conditions on the ground, nor guided by the understanding of the world in which New Zealand resides in at current. Mental acuity to grasp the nature of what is causing the nation to fall further back socio- economically is not a strong suit he bares with any true command . A pragmatist always lacks peripheral vison to enable full-spectrum view, especially when its comes to matters of nascent corporate incongruity. Under his stead, the uber-criminal syndicate of Black Rock has been allowed to start sucking up capital for 'sustainable green projects', and has fortified its presence. For those sullied by my identifying BlackRock as a criminal organization as being capricious or conspiratorial , consider this: they are owners of an electric company in Maui, Hawaii, that mysteriously cut off power to Lahaina six hours before the horrific fire that leveled only the poorest housing and structures, and killing only the poorest residents in south Maui, sparing the multi-million dollar homes and hotels in the area . The same organization whom pushed Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron of France to forcibly raise the retirement age without an open referendum nor consideration of public debate which sparked month's long protests throughout the country. As further evidence of the monolithic chicanery this behemoth is involved in , just watch a certified recruiter from the company explain their global ambitions...
Hipkins lacks the global 'street smarts' in staving off vulture capitalists who are itching to buy thier way into New Zealand' s fragile market and wreck the place for their own profit. The allowance of BlackRock to come in and establish itself is profoundly telling of the putative naiveté that he himself, and many members of parliament have toward foreign investors intentions, particularly, American, British & Chinese hedge funders and investment firms that are completely self-benefitting and devoid of any ethical standard of 'fair play', no longer in service in creating new wealth for clients, but expanding wealth for themselves solely even if it means creating a language that communicates environmental concerns they have no intention of meaningfully participating in.
All the while, The Ardern/ Hipkins led Labour continued shutting out and down migrants during CoVid, and leaving them to return to unsafe ramparts of nefarious origins whilst allowing the likes of the DIA to manipulate away needed benefits they had temporarily been given unprecedented qualified access to receive, and allowing a toadie to run Immigration New Zealand into the ground.
As a consequence, Hipkins and Labour over the last 5 years have let the wolves into the parlour.
The other Chris, Mr. Luxon , former MP of Botany is a political- corporate creature unabashedly representing the interests of the managerial class. Having attain the heights of CEO of Unilever in Toronto, Canada by way of Chicago, U.S. at the tender age of 38. C-Lux's exposure the grand heights of capitalism during his time in North America left in him an indelible mark. Having been born into a Roman Catholic family where Dad was a sales exec for Johnson & Johnson and his mother a psychotherapist gave him the kind of access to better schooling and opportunities that only this background can offer through disparity of access via inequality that is the Capitalist Way: The Winners & Losers , of which he was on the winning side. In recent years, this attribute would express itself through his having no interest in allowing livable wages for workers during his time with Air New Zealand, and no care about curtailing malfeasance from investor toxicity.
If any one government is ready to show BlackRock and other 'foreign investors' some love, it's Luxon- homelessness by suffocating housing unaffordability, rising food insecurity, wage deflation and recidivism be damned.... Cone on in boys! Lets Do This!
His continuous roll-out of embarrassing policies wholly lacking in self-awareness, such as the youth rental bond initiative, his pretentious defense that his tax deferment policy of the upper class will benefit the economy and curtail poverty, while leaving a $2 billion dollar hole to shore up fiscal appropriation, and his sallow, vague pulp being the National Party 8 point plan is a strong showing of what an empty suit he is. C-Lux's refusal to consider capital gains and luxury tax, in turn a blatant refusal to make the upper 10% pay their share, is demonstrative of his obtuse self-interest and inane indifference to the current state of iniquity being experienced by the middle and lower working class in New Zealand. A view that Hipkins also holds , expressing his own naive lack of vision, backbone, and passivity in the matter
The debate that took place between these two bricks of the establishment wall on the 19th of September in Auckland for mass media consumption and soundbytes, only further fomented that both are actually the same: neo-liberal centrists with no handle on the inequality that both their parties contribute due to ineffectual policies. The Ardern/ Hipkins camp, although brilliantly guiding the nation through the first 18 months of the pandemic, have done little else, being nothing more than mere custodians of polity for oncoming corporate interest heading into the country. Chris Luxon's post-Key National Party was the party who single-handedly allowed New Zealand's credit rating with Standard and Poor's and Fitch Group to fall through the floor during their last reign. The same National Party always willing to cut the social safety net away from the most vulnerable to appease their criminal foreign investor friends, which in turn, set in motion the current landscape of intense disparity the likes this country has not seen.
Although Hipkins did mop up the floor with Luxon's face using confirmed facts and figures verses Luxons shallow and repetitive use of sloganeering masquerading as legitimate expression of policy, the debate was as hollow as wingbone: light and breezy, pseudo substantive and inflective performative theatre. A mere artifice of placative entertainment not meant to put genuine resolve into action. The more dangerous bits was Luxon's commitment to ban gang patches ( a form of censorship) and the allowance of expansion of large tech companies into New Zealand , a problematic proposition given their dubious history
Further concerning was both candidates commitment to criminalizing 'hate speech', another form of censorship which part of a much larger issue involving global oligarchical control over the masses.
ACT's David Seymour has been reduced to just being comedy relief, and while I could prattle on as to the wonderment of his vacuous existence, and the ACT party being the mirror of the violent, empty heads that occupy American House Freedom Caucus as well, I'll let John Campbell 'hold the mic and spit this' as his 'bars are phat'. I will say his misinformed and boisterous musings make for great entertainment. My favourite moment of anti-intellectual rumblings was when he was debating Chloe Swarbrick on NewsHub AM about how to best approach the uptick in criminal activity since CoVID. While she was coherently laying her argument against harsher penalties for young offenders with verified facts and figures in relation to a solution that can be effective , he could only bellow superlative hyperbole " We just need strong sentencing!! New Zealand has become a third world country!!". Somewhere out amongst the countryside, a village is truly missing its idiot...
And this idiot and his party might have enough to get the 61 seats necessary to make a majority coalition with National...
The Greens, outside of Chloe Swarbrick, however, are hyper-focused on environmental impacts like climate change initiatives, de-carbonization, implementation of alternative fuels, and overall improvement to food and water purity. They do not, however, address class inequality.
A green bewilderment.
Not addressing class inequality as the primary crisis makes other 'green initiatives' absolutely unattainable and without solid structural base to enact. Put simply, if people are too broke to manage sustaining what they need to live properly, they will not have time nor care to meaningfully pursue these matters with any brevity. Without the leverage of equality, the environment will continue to suffer. Being participatory in the facade of 'green initiatives' enacted by multinational corporations is not only naive in itself, but is also superficial as such entities only care about profit, and will sell a captive audience anything they wish to hear, so as to continue raping foreign lands globally of resources unencumbered. The Greens are the one party that can cease this activity in totality. They need to discontinue the mixed-messaging and focus first on driving back Capitalism-induced poverty, pay disparity, and the speculatory-driven housing prices and rents . No other party in Aotearoa can or will do it. They should also force Labour's hand to start moving in that space from a policy context
This is assuming Labour even comes back to majority or coalition rule in parliament . They may not...
New Zealand voters collectively are moving toward a "Lesser of Two Evils" approach this cycle, one that does not work. I know this intimately because I am American by birthright, and I have seen this movie before. Voting alone will not yield the change of course of class inequality. It will worsen, and as a result recidivism will rise in tandem with criminal activity, especially among the young. Gang membership , collectively at around 8,900 strong in New Zealand, is growing faster in membership than the rate of newly hired and trained police officers, which currently stand at around 10,000 . Illicit activity will draft new recruits into the gangs as other assessable resources are reduced and curtailment of upward mobility continues to exert pressure and the most vulnerable- the working lower class/ unemployed poor.
One Last Point...
Labour, National, ACT, and NZ First are complete centrist garbage as a collective. Green Party is ineffective unless it has majority coalition with itself at the lead, and this is would only be erstwhile if Ms. Swarbrick can get the other enviro-obsessed members to start focusing on class inequality, as that is where 'all the bodies are buried'.
There is no danger of the Greens forming a new majority coalition government in October according to the current poles. I have a better chance at winning the lotto
New Zealande voters themselves need to take stock in their neighbours wellbeing, irrespective of differing political leanings. We are part of the 'rest of the world' in the severity of the circumstances we find ourselves in. If you need any evidence to suggest the plausible outcome of not bettering our neighbours and ourselves to a more equal footing through living wage and reasonable cost of living, if you still view Capitalism as all good, and becoming wealthy off the backs of others means your 'special', I would like to re-direct your attention as evidence to this place 11,000km northwest of here..
A dying republic called the United States
