Hark the Robbers: Austerity and Lies
London is down, the media are following, and the left must call out the neoliberal agenda if we don't want to join them.
Who has stole my watch and chain,
Watch and chain, watch and chain;
Who has stole my watch and chain,
My fair lady?
Off to prison you must go,
You must go, you must go;
Off to prison you must go,
My fair lady.
Hark the Robbers - A 1898 variant of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, and also National’s Justice Policy
Yesterday, the 15th of August marked exactly one month since I made my first post on Substack. So it’s pretty cool that this newsletter also reached another big milestone on that same day, hitting 100 subscribers. That’s a lot of people!
I won’t picture it too hard or I’ll get stage fright.
I’m truly grateful to everyone who’s signed on, paid or free, and also to those of you who’ve helped me grow this substack by sharing, liking and restacking. It hasn’t been a very long time that I’ve been here (though I set myself a goal to write on most days so that made it feel like a long time) but I’ve come to enjoy the freedom of writing here, branching out into topics that catch my attention or that I think isn’t being covered or conversed about enough.
My first two posts on Substack provided a pretty good summary of what made me launch this newsletter after deciding not to only a month or so earlier.
Why Whaikaha Matters was my frustrated response to the removal of the disability support from the Ministry of Disability, now to be administered by MSD, and Lies, Lies, and Damned Lies, which I posted on the same day, was my second post but the first to be written.
Why Whaikaha Matters
The Ministry for Disabilities is lifesaving. It is life changing. And it is leagues better than any other system or organisation set up to provide social supports, except perhaps for ACC. Let’s look at why it’s important.
I’d written Lies, Lies, and Damned Lies before even setting up this substack, after receiving an OIA response from David Seymour’s office confirming his earlier claims on OneNews had been false and his statement that preschools were being prevented from teaching phonics couldn’t be supported.
It had just been a concern voiced to him by a member of the public.
A concern that he then went on the news and used to justify his decision to deregulate early childhood education.
It reminded me how the government had used similar near-lies earlier in the year to justify their decision to limit access to Whaikaha funding while describing it as “not a funding cut” despite OIA documents revealing it was deliberately done to save money after departmental overspending that the government refused to underwrite.
Austerity and lies. That’s all this government has given us since they got into power.
Austerity and lies.
I sometimes feel when reading the news that I’ve stepped into an alternate reality, a world where right-wing politicians both here and abroad can say whatever they like, on the news, on the campaign trail, even in the houses of Parliament, and there are zero repercussions for lying or making outrageous statements or doing and saying things against the public’s interest.
But very few seem to acknowledge this, and it’s a situation that’s only getting worse.
Not only is the media struggling to cover this appropriately and effectively, the media is struggling to survive full-stop and is shrinking rapidly under the combined weight of economic, political and digital pressures.
Without being hyperbolic, this is a huge concern for democracy. New Zealand has very few checks on Parliament and the media a crucial connection for almost all of them. The strongest and final check in a democracy is always, always the voting population, and if that population is uninformed about what the government is doing and if the government is undergoing little scrutiny from the public via the media then that mechanism becomes ineffective and meaningless.
Suffice to say, there’s a reason why this out-of-control executive wasn’t particularly keen on saving Newshub, and it’s not just that they prefer Simon Dallow as a presenter.
Meanwhile, the media that is most financially sustainable is right-wing media, with balanced and left-wing media barely keeping afloat. Stuff is lagging behind the paywalled Herald in views and presumably in profitability (despite being overwhelmingly the popular choice of news in Christchurch and Wellington — keep an eye out for the campaign to change that). RNZ is being threatened by an austerity government, as is the Spin-Off, OneNews, Maori TV news and many more sources that receive government funding to operate at the level they do.
All as Sean Plunkett’s right-wing The Platform is raking it in through sponsorships and ZB’s audience is depressingly huge because people are feeding off heightened controversy and outrage, creating a self-perpetuating cycle.
Mountain Tui wrote recently about how the UK austerity-caused council bankruptcies (of which London is only the latest) provide a grim premonition of our future.
This is what New Zealand will enjoy if we continue down the path of expecting our city councils to tax ratepayers as small organisations at 350% of their debt cap while we sit here as taxpayers of an entire national government with a GDP-to-debt-ratio of less than one. That is interest on dollars that WE as residents will have to pay for either way, and the bill will be entirely on our shoulders as ratepayers if it falls to local councils.
But central government, on the other hand, has many levers with which to recover money, including just taxing us and levying the lower interest rate that they can attract for their money with their excellent credit ratings and forecasted stable outlook (for an economic explainer on our debt leveraging options, see Bernard Hickey’s podcast for why bond brokers are falling over themselves to invest in our infrastructure crisis).
(And if you’re a smartypants who’s already read or listened to that, go read his article from 2016 on why councils should be able to issue bonds to get themselves out of their impending infrastructure crisis).
The Labour government had sought to take that debt burden from councils with Three Waters, but were opposed by National and Act who created that debate with controversy-stoking propaganda and campaigns and through their third-party activist groups like TPU and Democracy Action (both linked to Jordan Williams and David Farrar, by the way) while promising there would be no rates rises, they could share GST with councils, and so much more that has been backtracked on.
Now in power, neither party seem to care much about helping those councils actually pay for that water they worked so hard to give them, which makes you wonder if it was actually about making things better for New Zealanders or just another one of ACT’s attempts to sabotage the public system to make space for private companies?
Just kidding, I already know.
It’s the same racist campaign was launched by the TPU to “Stop Central Planning”, which is funny because central planning is obviously what we desperately, desperately need. But of course, there was a reason: it was the groundwork for the RMA reform that repealed the recommended two-body upgrade that Labour implemented off impartial advice and that this government are now making a hash of.
And I can’t help asking…
How does this get fixed?
There’s a political contract that’s been broken here. Our political systems have been so broken that at this point by our own parties that the only people voting National/ACT are those duped by their propaganda or those who are making bucketloads of cash of their policies at everyone else’s expense, and so are paying for that propaganda. The right has just swept into power and undone six years of left governing in six months, leaving two and a half years left still to ram through as many barely-supported changes as they can, locking us into racist neoliberal policies that they had no mandate for. The damage that they do in these three years will take decades to undo. If it ever can be. Because they lied.
This is a government making radical changes based on controversial issues, but unlike the government under COVID, unlike Muldoon and Labour in the 80s, there is no external threat, and no mandate for it: they are being as openly corrupt as they can via “think tanks” and “taxpayer groups” that are actually neoliberal mouthpieces, reversing changes around lobbying transparency and using sheer volume and shock-politics to hope that their supporters don’t listen to the left over how evil and dishonest and corrupt they’re being and middle New Zealand forgets this furore by the next election.
And they’re doing it in response to discord that they have stoked.
We can’t just continue pretending everything is normal.
Austerity and lies are why I joined substack. That, and Mountain Tui told me to.
Austerity and lies are also why this government needs to go, and to not come back.
Not in this form, anyway.
Tui would probably tell them that too.
I’ve been told that National were once a party that worked for the good of New Zealand. Sometimes when I read New Zealand history, I think maybe that could be true.
But it hasn’t been in my lifetime.
The lies about the austerity are the most frustrating to me. Lies about austerity being implemented, about why it’s needed, about who it’s affecting, about how it’s affecting them, about how much is being cut and from where, about who’s fault it is, about, about, about…
Marginalised communities and educated academics alike are railing at this government, begging them to listen, to explain, to pause, and all they can say in response is, “But you see, there’s this economic crisis that doesn’t exist.”
The entire regime of the right is dishonest. Globally. Nationally. Historically. The parties have pushed their way into power by deceiving New Zealanders so they can force through actions that are demonstrably not in our best interests because they’ve been wined and dined by people who’ve flattered their egos and paid their campaigns until it’s bought enough time with them that they can be convinced to cooperate in some small way that will profit them. That is being done over and over again, and it has created a corrupt, cronyist, neoliberal nightmare that can’t be stopped just by resuming the status quo.
(Or by announcing a modest capital gains tax, Chippie.)
And because the media have been a little too dogged in calling the right out, had a bit too much spine and chutzpah, the right-wing politicians in power are willing to let them drown in the market forces that ACT founder Roger Douglass himself created to do just that.
Even if he didn’t realise that’s why he was creating it.
This radical right shift doesn’t get undone without a radical left shift. We’re in a crash collision in all spheres: culturally; economically; in terms of infrastructure; our right-left schism; our council debt; and three National regimes in a row of increasingly unjustified austerity politics.
New Zealand cannot go on without acknowledging that we need political consensus on a new direction — we need political consensus on rejecting this direction.
And for that, you need a politician who’ll acknowledge that.
A common theme in Mountain Tui’s newsletters is a frustration that the right has so many advantages that the left doesn't: they are not just better funded, but better organised, always on the offensive, playing the game two steps ahead. Not to mention they have organisations with money and influence who exist for the sole purpose of seeding neoliberal propaganda to our politicians and to the public, and those organisations are fully responsible for the neoliberal economic situation we are in.
I think it’s a frustration we’ve all felt.
That system they created, that shift in our politics is what combined with MMP to give us the parties we have today: Neoliberal National, Neoliberal Labour, The Neoliberal Liberal Party, the Neoliberal Winston Peters Party, The Environment Party, and The Maori Party. Parliament is pretty convincingly closed to new entrants at this point, and the Waka-Jumping Bill severely restricts any ability to form new parties or to stand as independent MPs.
This status-quo neoliberal parliament has existed for 20 years (minus Peter Dunne now) and is another pre-MMP relic that has overstayed its welcome. Just as I’ve only ever known a neoliberal National Party, I’ve never known a Parliament that wasn’t… this. That is the perspective of younger voters today. It’s the only perspective we’ve ever had.
It’s a weird outcome to have occurred from MMP, and, in my opinion, not a good democratic solution. We need to revisit not just the past 40 years of neoliberal economics, but the constitutional and political-party stagnation that has resulted from that time too.
There are ways we can do this better. If this isn’t some sort of tipping point, I’m scared to imagine what we actually require to get us to change.
We have an opportunity to do what we did during COVID — we can learn from other countries who have struggled with these symptoms before us. New Zealand so often gets to live in a sheltered little bubble, and sure enough, we were late on board this neoliberalism nightmare train and also coincidentally have had the most protection from international neoliberal interests in our media, namely Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media empire.
Even though our media is struggling, it is far, far from too late to turn this around.
Someone needs to take the reigns and say the difficult, divisive things that the politicians all don’t want to say — and they must do so while offering a realistic promise of change.
But there are not all that many people in a position to make that happen.
The unity of the left, of the country, is hard to imagine when Labour are so weak on the issues and the Greens are too radical for most to swallow.
Any consensus they might establish over a single direction would almost have to happen pre-campaign; they would have to unite under something they have in common, some idea or philosophy or alliance that probably doesn’t even exist yet, something that they (or someone else) would have to create.
It is not just enough for them to be against National and ACT; they’ve spent twenty years being “against National and ACT”.
For political change, our politicians, but especially Labour, need to openly and loudly denounce neoliberalism, and they need to be ready to announce what will follow. And in doing that, they need to acknowledge the full scale of the crisis we’re in that they’ve created and allowed.
Because this crisis extends beyond Labour, beyond the Green-Labour-TPM left alliance that MMP has drawn, and is a serious disintegration of our country and constitutional standing that the influence of independent economic interests ushered in by our own politicians. By Labour’s own politician. By the founder of ACT.
Without denouncing what we have now, we cannot properly move on to what comes next.
But I’m not sure if anyone around at the moment is ready for that yet. Especially within Labour. That seems like a tough pill for them to swallow.
But anything else would be dishonest.
And you can’t campaign against lies whilst lying yourself.
Thank you again all for subscribing. I have a working laptop again and I hope this means that the number of typing errors will decrease significantly now I’m no longer writing entirely from my phone.
Posts I’ve got in the works include “Your Mental Health System: A User Review”, “Keith Hollyoake vs Rupert Murdoch: The Bill That Saved News” and “Is This Too Many Semi-Colons: Substack Statistics Seem To Suggest You Guys Like These Sort of Titles”.
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Congrats on a month sapphi!
Excellent work. Depressing but accurate. We need a stronger opposition team.