The Harvester Judgement And How Much Has Been Stolen From Us

Mainstream media propaganda would have us all believe that the West has never been wealthier. Our glorious leaders have led us into an unparalleled age of prosperity. Never before have the lives of everyday Westerners overflowed with such abundance. Apparently, even the lowliest Westerner has easy access to luxuries that kings could not have dreamed of in ages past.

If you don’t agree, the media tells us, you’re a terrorist. A filthy, ungrateful reprobate whose resentment endangers the entire project of civilisation itself. How could a person not be grateful for the beneficence shown by our ruling classes? Just how?

As it turns out, anyone with a solid knowledge of history has reason to feel ripped off at their current treatment.

In 1907, the idea of a minimum wage was introduced in Australia. In a case relating to the Sunshine Harvester Company of Victoria, Justice Henry Higgins determined that a “fair and reasonable” wage for a manual labourer was that which could support a family of five. A skilled worker should receive even more. This was later known as the “Harvester Judgement“.

Because people higher up the social ladder would make more money than manual labourers, the Harvester Judgement created a floor underneath which no full-time worker could fall. It therefore ensured a decent quality of life for everyone in Australian society, not just the rich. This judgement became a core principle of Australian employment law and is one of the main reasons why the Australian worker’s standard of living has been so high until recently, and why Australia is known as “The Lucky Country”.

According to Grok, a family of five living in Auckland requires some $7,000 per month to meet housing, food, utilities, transportation and other costs. This means some $84,000 per year – after tax. Before tax, it’s $112,963 per year. Less than that means a family of five has to start going without some things.

This is the income necessary to have a similar quality of life to a labouring family in 1907. This means nothing extravagant – just basic housing, decent food, the lights on, the ability to get to work and visit some people etc. It doesn’t include luxury travel or building an investment portfolio.

Also according to Grok, fewer than 8% of New Zealand workers earn $112,000 or more. Because some 10% of the population has an honours degree or higher, this means the top 8% of the workforce will be mostly professionals and managers, i.e. highly qualified, highly experienced people. Those few in the top 8% without an honours degree or higher will mostly be top managers.

$112,000 is about 70% higher than the median New Zealand wage of $66,000. What’s more, that median wage figure itself includes those highly-paid professional and managerial jobs, which means that the median manual labourer’s wage is even lower still. The minimum wage in New Zealand is currently $23.15 per hour, which works out to $46,300 per annum if one works 50 weeks of 40 hours, and many manual labourers will be close to this.

In practice, therefore, almost none of the people working in manual labour positions in New Zealand are paid enough for their wage to be considered “fair and reasonable” under the Harvester Judgement. The entire idea that a wage ought to pay enough to raise a family has been abandoned, seemingly by the employees as well as the employers.

Our wages are now less than half of what is needed to support a family of five. But the quality of life promised by the Harvester Judgement has not simply been lost, it has been stolen from us.

It has been stolen from us in a number of ways, but the mass importation of cheap labour is the foremost of these. The explanation for how full-time manual labourer wages were decoupled from the requirement that they could support a family of five is simple: employers have undercut local workers by importing cheaper ones from overseas.

The Neoliberal Era normalised this practice, so that it become ideologically impossible to even object to the imports. Anyone who did so was smeared as a racist acting out of pure hate. Several decades of this allowed the employer class to drive wages down so far that they’re now about half of what they need to be, as per the Harvester Judgement.

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Why The Establishment Smashed The Vaccine Mandate Protesters But Supported The Hikoi Protesters

The hikoi protests to Wellington earlier this month were astonishing for several reasons. The foremost of these was the reaction of the political establishment, who came out in full support. Members of Parliament, media and academics all voiced support for the hikoi protests. This caused some to wonder why the Covid mandate protests of 2022 didn’t get the same treatment.

The hikoi protests had a lot in common with the Covid mandate protests of 2022 – and there were some major differences as well.

The commonalities were mostly on the surface.

Both protests attracted large numbers of people. The hikoi protests got 42,000 attendees, according to RNZ. The Covid mandate protests might not have got so many, perhaps closer to 1,000 at peak, but these attracted many of the same people on multiple days, for a cumulative total in five figures. Both protests were the biggest political event in the country at the time.

Both protests also attracted a diverse cross-section of the New Zealand public. The Covid mandate protests were decried as “white supremacist”, but in one poll 27.2% of them were found to be Maori. The hikoi protests were heavily Maori, but a high proportion of them were white. Both attracted a range of ages. Men and women were roughly equally present in both.

The differences went much deeper.

One of the primary differences was that the hikoi protests were against David Seymour in particular, who was seen as the figurehead behind the Treaty Principles Bill. The Covid mandate protests were against the Sixth Labour Government in general. Another major difference was that the hikoi protests were organised by The Maori Party, whereas the Covid mandate protests were organised in a grassroots manner.

Both of these feed into the most striking and obvious difference, which was how the Establishment reacted to the protests.

The Covid mandate protests were heavily opposed from the beginning. Even during the convoy phase, Establishment media figures decried the events, smearing the protesters as “cookers” and “white supremacists”. NPC spaces such as Reddit declared the protesters to be the enemies of the New Zealand people.

When the Covid mandate protesters got to Wellington, they were met by Trevor Mallard turning on the lawn sprinklers and blaring obnoxious music over loudspeakers. The propaganda campaign against them intensified, with news reports breathlessly accusing them of multiple property and violence crimes. A whirlwind of hate against them was whipped up by the mainstream media.

No sitting MPs met with the Covid mandate protesters (Winston Peters did, but he was not then an MP). The closest any of them came was watching from the Beehive. Eventually, the Establishment set the Police on the protesters, using violence to break up the encampment and arrest anyone remaining.

The hikoi protests, by contrast, were heavily supported. Smiling Police officers hongied with gang members on the hikoi. The mainstream media fell over itself to promote the hikoi in the most positive possible way. Hikoi organisers were given primetime slots and softball questions, and their opponents slandered.

This disparity in treatment can be readily explained by considering the agenda of the ruling class, which is principally to divide and conquer the masses.

The Covid mandate protests saw several sections of the New Zealand public come together to oppose the ruling class. Honest observers were astonished by how friendly the protesters were, and how little animosity there was between various groups. The intense feelings of solidarity at the Parliament lawn encampment was like nothing seen in New Zealand political space this century. Those present described it as being like a festival.

This is the last thing the Establishment wants.

The hikoi protests, by contrast, sought to divide New Zealand into two opposing groups: indigenous and settlers. The indigenous are the good guys, the settlers the bad guys. This narrative of division sows distrust and resentment.

This is exactly what the Establishment wants.

The New Zealand political establishment wants the New Zealand people at each other’s throats, too busy fighting each other to realise their common enemy. To that end, they will support any narrative that seeks to divide the New Zealand people into warring sub-groups, and will reject any narrative that seeks to bring the New Zealand people together.

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Why Oliver Jull Was Censored By New Plymouth Boys’ High School

The ongoing saga around New Plymouth Boys’ High School student Oliver Jull has depressed freedom-lovers all over New Zealand. Jull’s speech contained nothing objectionable enough to warrant censorship. But that doesn’t matter to the New Zealand school system, for reasons this essay will elaborate.

Jull wrote a speech for a school competition, but was barred from speaking in the finals of that competition on the grounds that his speech was likely to “upset” some listeners. This then became a drama involving The Platform and the Free Speech Union.

It transpires that NPBHS authorities then lied when they denied that Jull had been banned from speaking on the grounds of the content of his speech. According to the Free Speech Union, Jull recorded conversations with those authorities in which they explicitly stated that he would be permitted to continue to the finals if he changed the content of the speech.

Many observers find it incredible that a high school would go to the extent of censoring one of their own students and then lying about it. These observers are operating under the common, but naive and mistaken, assumption that schools are there to educate.

The role of the school, in reality, is to induce submission and obedience. The school system was created by the ruling class for a specific purpose: to churn out submissive, obedient workers and soldiers. The ruling class want to be obeyed when they order someone to work their whole life for a wage they can never buy a home on, or to charge a machinegun nest and kill everyone inside.

Central to the obedience-inducing process is brainwashing the student to believe that their ruling class is perfect.

One simply must believe that one’s rulers are the greatest rulers in history: the most just, the most wise, the most knowledgable, the most perfect in every way. As such, to doubt or to question them is outrageously antisocial. One simply must believe that one’s society is eternally and inexorably marching upwards. To suggest otherwise is to question the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of the ruling class.

The problem is that Jull’s speech criticised the ruling class.

Schools regiment the thinking of their students such that those students come to accept everything the ruling class tells them to think. This is why teachers love to assert that everything is better now than it ever has been. This is especially why educators love materialist science, which has marched ever-forward for a few centuries now, and why they don’t like classical studies, which dispel the myth of progress.

The last thing the ruling class want is a generation of young men who think for themselves. From the perspective of the ruling class, letting young men think for themselves is inherently a license for destabilisation. ‘Ignorance is Strength’, ran one of the three mottos of Big Brother, and it’s as true for us in Clown World today as it was for Winston Smith in Airstrip One.

Hence, Jull is not allowed to give a speech about the decline of Western civilisation.

A sentence such as “Mass immigration and multiculturalism have disrupted the very fabric of Western societies,” is outright forbidden. The globalists in charge of the West want all the cheap labour they can stuff in. To manufacture consent for doing this, they take measures to stifle any and all anti-immigration sentiment that arises. Immigration is how the rich get richer, thus it’s beyond criticism.

It’s also verboten to state, as Jull did, that “mass immigration has disrupted cultural continuity [and] increased violent crime.” The NZ Police monitor VJM Publishing social media for making comments exactly like that (see screenshot below). The fact that certain immigrant groups commit enormous amounts of crime, and others don’t, is a very touchy subject in the eyes of our ruling classes. If it were more widely known, there would be more opposition to mass immigration, and less immigration means less profit.

The ruling class, by contrast, has no such speech restrictions – they’re not even restricted to the truth. We lowly peasants don’t have the right to question our rulers: not regarding World War conscription, not regarding the War on Drugs, not regarding permission to give speeches. As the ruling class lied about the World Wars and the War on Drugs, without facing any sanction, they can lie to us about our rights too. Hence they lied about why Jull was not permitted to give his speech in the competition finals.

None of the NPBHS staff who lied to Jull will face any consequences – because they lied on behalf of the interests of the ruling class. As this column has previously written, everything is acceptable if it serves the interests of the ruling class.

In summary, Oliver Jull was silenced for the same reasons that VJM Publishing has been silenced over the years: speaking the truth in defiance of the interests of the ruling class.

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What El Salvador Could Teach New Zealand About Solving The Gang Problem

Nayib Bukele is the President of El Salvador, having won re-election earlier this year with almost 85% of the popular vote. Most of his popularity is a result of his security strategy, which has transformed El Salvador from an extremely dangerous country to a safe one. On X, Bukele describes himself as a “philosopher king”. His security philosophy might be applicable to other places plagued by gangs.

Bukele’s approval rating today is some 89%, making him arguably the most popular leader of any country. Understanding why he is so popular requires understanding the difference between the El Salvador before Bukele took power, and the El Salvador now.

El Salvador used to be the most violent country in the Western hemisphere. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs had reduced the country to a battleground. With everyday life under gang control, El Salvador was in danger in collapsing into Haiti-style anarchy. The homicide rate in 2015 was over 100 per 100,000 people.

Bukele came to power in 2019. The homicide rate had fallen from its peak since then, but was still extremely high. In March 2022 there was a spike in homicides due to MS-13, wherein 87 people were randomly murdered by the gang over a three-day period. This was apparently an attempt by MS-13 to intimidate the people of El Salvador into submission.

The response was a ‘War Against the Gangs‘, launched by Bukele that same month. He had described gangs as the metastases of a cancer that is killing Salvadorean society.

The crackdown saw the arrest of around 2% of the Salvadoran population and the construction of a 40,000-person maximum security prison, known as the “Terrorism Confinement Centre”. Since these measures were taken, El Salvador’s homicide rate has plummeted. In 2023 it was a mere 2.4 per 100,000 (c.f. Canada at 2.3).

Could a similar strategy work here?

For one thing, New Zealand gangs don’t cause as much damage as the gangs in El Salvador. The homicide rate in New Zealand is lower than even the 2023 rate there. New Zealand gangs might be feral by New Zealand standards, but by Latin American standards they’re standard-bearers of civilisation.

However, the general cancer metaphor is apt. As family members of gang members can tell you, the damage caused by gang members is not limited to crime. Immeasurable quality of life damage is caused by the constant threats, intimidation and antisocial behaviour that comes with the presence of gang culture.

Moreover, existing gangs could cause extreme damage in the future. The example of El Salvador shows that the homicide rate can increase manyfold in a short period if the economic and social environment permits. Given the ongoing economic collapse of the Anglosphere, anyone could confidently predict a rise in both volume and intensity of gang activity in coming years.

Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre has room for 40,000 people. New Zealand was known to have 8,300 gang members nationwide near the end of 2022. We could, therefore, build a much smaller prison – one that fit 10,000 people – and still have enough room to put every single gang member in it for life.

Other anti-gang measures could readily be adopted from El Salvador.

One of these is the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility, from 16 to 12. Having the age at 16 makes sense in a high-trust, high-social capital environment where most people want to do good. In a low-trust environment, however, tolerance and kindness just gets taken advantage of. Gangs exploit that tolerance and kindness by getting younger teenagers – too young to be charged – to commit crimes. This phenomenon also exists in the New Zealand gang scene, so we might benefit from a similar reduction in the age of criminal responsibility.

Of note is that one element of Bukele’s crackdown was banning media from expressing pro-gang sentiments. If implemented in New Zealand, this would prevent The New Zealand Herald offering a column to former Black Power pack rapist Denis O’Reilly. It would also prevent the numerous hagiographies about gang leaders doing community work.

Unfortunately, no measures will be taken to protect the New Zealand people from the gang menace as long as globalists are in power.

What New Zealand needs is a leader that cares about the New Zealand nation first and foremost.

Also of note is that the political philosophy of Bukele’s movement is explicitly anti-democratic. Bukele’s Vice-President, Felix Ulloa, has said “The democratic system that existed for years in El Salvador only benefited crooked politicians.” The system that exists in New Zealand also only benefits crooked politicians. That suggests that solving our leadership problems might require also solving the democracy problem.

All this might be too much for New Zealand for now – we are yet to see the Mongrel Mob, the Headhunters, Black Power or the Hell’s Angels murder random civilians in New Zealand to intimidate the Government. But the worse our gang problem becomes, the more we will need to consider the need for a Nayib Bukele-style crackdown.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
For even more of VJM’s ideas, buy one of his books!

If you enjoyed reading this piece, buy a compilation of our best pieces from previous years!

If you would like to support our work in other ways, make a donation to our Paypal! Even better, buy any one of our books!