How A Coronavirus Pandemic Could Win Jacinda Ardern The Election

This September’s election promises to be very close. Opinion polls suggest that either of a National-ACT or Labour-New Zealand First-Greens coalition could easily take power in the aftermath. The actual winner will be determined by a number of factors. One of those factors, as this essay will discuss, is the effect of COVID-19 on the demographic makeup of the nation.

One striking feature of this particular form of coronavirus is its death rate among old people. The death rate for people aged 80 and over who contract it is believed to be over 14%. For people aged between 70 and 79 it appears to be 8.0%, and 3.6% for people aged between 60 and 69. Corona-Chan is the Scourge of the Aged.

The death rate among young people, by contrast, is extremely low. No-one aged under 10 is known to have died of COVID-19 yet, and the death rate for those under 40 appears to be no more than 0.2%, i.e. barely different to regular bouts of influenza. Corona-Chan is merciful upon the young.

This great differential in danger across age brackets may have electoral consequences.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there are very strong correlations between being old and voting Conservative or National. In 2017, the correlation between being aged 65+ and voting Conservative was 0.39, and between being aged 65+ and voting National it was 0.62. At the other end of the scale, the correlation between being aged 20-29 and voting Labour in 2017 was 0.34, and with voting Greens it was 0.60.

0.62 is a strong enough correlation to suggest that the vast majority of people over 65 will vote National, and much of the remainder will vote Conservative. Meanwhile, the correlation of -0.35 between being aged 20-29 and voting National in 2017 tells us that few young people will vote for them in September.

Put these two things together, and it becomes apparent that COVID-19 is likely to kill off a significant proportion of National and Conservative voters.

There were over 711,000 people in New Zealand aged 65 or over at the end of 2016. It might be closer to 800,000 by now. If COVID-19 kills off 10% of people over 65 before September 19, that will approach 80,000 deaths, and if 75% of those people were National or Conservative voters, that suggests that they could well lose 60,000 voters – 20,000 more than Labour, Greens or New Zealand First would lose.

At the 2017 General Election, National, ACT and Conservatives got 1,171,403 votes between them out of a total of 2,591,896, a proportion of 45.2%. If they would lose 60,000 voters from coronavirus deaths, as per the scenario outlined in the above paragraph, they would end up with 1,111,403 votes out of a total of 2,511,896 – a proportion of 44.2%.

A loss of one percent might not sound like much, but the effect of COVID-19 in suppressing right-wing voters is not limited to deaths.

If there are 60,000 deaths among National and Conservative voters, there will be at least this many incapacitated by the illness. The overseas experience has shows that COVID-19 often means a few weeks confined to an artificial respirator. If the pandemic is at or near its peak in New Zealand at the time of the election, there could be a large number of old people unable to vote because coronavirus has left them physically incapable of doing so.

A further factor is that some old people might decide to stay away from polling booths on Election Day out of the fear of contracting coronavirus. As COVID-19’s greater threat to the elderly is widely known by now, a significant number of those elderly might be persuaded to stay away from the polling booths altogether. A majority of the population will pass through the nation’s polling booths on September 19, so standing in line at one for half an hour is asking for trouble.

Adding together deaths, incapacitations and discouragements, the right wing appears likely to lose several tens of thousands of voters before September 19.

All of this is moot if Jacinda Ardern suspends the election. There is presently no hard indication that she is prepared to do this, but mayoral elections due for May have already been suspended for 12 months in London, and Ardern must have felt the temptation. New Zealand has already been in chimpout mode for the past year and this coronavirus pandemic has made it three times worse.

Assuming the election goes ahead as planned though, there is a small but realistic chance that what would have been a National-ACT victory is transformed into a loss by the effects of COVID-19. The balance is so fine that a nudge the size of a coronavirus pandemic could tip it over.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Let It Die – We’ll Build A New One On The Ashes Of The Old

As stockmarkets plummet across the globe, many fear that the end of the world is upon us. It may well be – but this is no reason to be afraid. Much better to embrace this new destiny. It’s time to let the old order die; it’s time for good people to step into the light of the new century. Let the old order die so that we can build a new one!

Panic spreads as the stockmarkets collapse. Emergency measures have been taken to halt trading. Let the stockmarkets collapse! They measure nothing but how much wealth can be wrung out of the sweat of the nation’s workers. Let them collapse, then demolish the buildings they were run out of, break the rubble into gravel and turn the empty lots into gardens.

Will globalism survive the coronavirus? Who cares – let it die! Globalism sees the common man worked to breakdown and then chucked on the garbage heap, his productivity siphoned away to fund the importation of his replacements. Good riddance to the global economy! Good riddance to globalism!

Let the world die – its current order is worth less than nothing anyway. In its stead, let’s build a system where productivity is rewarded more than dumb ownership, and where the objective is to spread the wealth, not to extract it. Let’s build a system where the fundamental basis of solidarity is being raised on the same soil, drinking the same water, breathing the same air, under the same Sun.

Today’s system is rotten to the very core. The only way to advance is to lie and cheat, or to fasten one’s fangs into the back of some working-class man target and to suck wealth from them. Rent-seekers are lionised; truth-tellers are shunned. Lottery winners and inheritors of fortunes are prized as highly as great entrepreneurs and inventors.

Let it die!

Instead of hailing the financial swindlers, the planet rapers, the producers of stupefying drugs and those most adept at slithering up the greasy pole of politics, in the New Century we will hail those whose effort brings a reduction to the suffering of other sentient beings. Those who meet other people’s needs for food, for medicine, for shelter, for companionship, for knowledge and for entertainment will be our heroes!

Some argue that the Internet needs to be regulated on account of that “the proliferation of fake news” has led to people losing faith in the mainstream media. Let the public lose faith in the mass media and in the political institutions! Since forever the mass media have been paid propagandists for the Establishment, surpassed only in wretchedness by politicians. Let this be known by all!

Since forever the political institutions have pushed honest people away and promoted liars, grifters, horse-traders, palm-greasers and teleprompter-readers of all stripes. The political institutions are happy to promote people of any race, creed, sex or sexual orientation, so long as they maintain strict adherence to the one moral truth: money is God.

Corona-Chan can take the whole wretched system! Let a new one arise – one in which the truth is valued, and where statesmen are hired to do a job for the people, not to them. Let a culture arise in which tellers of truth are no longer ridiculed but admired. Let the liars be shunned!

Most ridiculous of all are the lamentations of the impotent old fools and superstitious cowards who think that appeasing the God of Abraham in this world will grant them an absence of suffering in the worlds to come, and that our loss of faith in this miserable slave doctrine is the reason for our current woes. These execrable weaklings have it that all suffering in the world comes from a failure to grovel obsequiously enough before the priests of this slave ideology.

Let the public lose faith in religion!

Our “Judeo-Christian” heritage is worth less than nothing; at best a safety blanket for resentful egomaniacs, at worst an intoxicating set of delusions that rot the soul. There’s no reason for Westerners today to follow a book that tells them to kill non-believers and homosexuals in the hope of spending eternity with the rabbi in the sky.

Let it get flushed down the S-bend of history.

In the New Century, women stand alongside men as interdependent forces that work together to reduce the suffering of everyone. No longer shall any filthy book of hate cause violence and discord between natural allies. No-one is to be killed unless they unrepentantly cause suffering to other sentient beings.

We will build a new world, one based upon an honest and real connection to God. Let the Abrahamist piss his pants at the thought of spiritual sacraments like cannabis, psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine – we will consume them all, at the same time! In our new world, knowledge of the divine and the sacraments that reconnect us to it will be common.

There is no fear that the collapse of the rotten old order means that we will rush blindly into the unknown. Those who have long hated that order have thought for many years about a better one.

It’s time for an order that puts the elimination of human suffering first. Not profit, not equality, not adherence to the twisted moral tenets of an inhuman desert cult but the elimination of actual human suffering – directly, not in the abstract.

Let us have a system that feeds rather than starves, which heals rather than sickens, which enlightens people instead of making them more ignorant. Let the coronavirus destroy the stockmarkets so that the whole filthy charade finally ends. Let the old world die, so that we can get to work building a new!

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VJMP Waitangi Day Address 2020

As another Grievance Day dawns on these sleepy isles, the division and hatred between all of society’s components is set to intensify. Today’s newspapers and television broadcasts will tell us all how we hate each other, and how our national history is one of theft, murder and rape. Grifters, shysters and con artists of all descriptions will crawl out of every hole to exploit these grievances. It promises to be a sad and depressing spectacle.

The good news is that all of this discord is destined to end. It will end once New Zealand accepts its inevitable, inescapable destiny – to be united with Australia as a single Anzac Empire.

We are only separated by historical fluke. In 1901, the six separate colonies of Australia agreed to join in union. An offer to join this federation was extended to New Zealand, but it was declined. The reasoning at the time was that over a thousand miles separated the two lands – several days’ voyage by steamer. In the era before aeroplanes, the Tasman Sea was a yawning expanse.

This unwillingness to unite as a single people may have seemed reasonable at the time, given that the British Empire was then at its peak. European supremacy, in the last days of Victoria’s reign, seemed the natural order of things. As no threat to British control of the seas appeared possible, there appeared to be no great need for unity on the part of her subjects Down Under. Our only rivals were each other.

By 2020, given the rise of great Asian powers such as China, India, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, the decision to strike it alone seems, in hindsight, an error. Impulsively made, with inadequate consideration given to the long-term consequences, this mistake has cast New Zealand adrift from our true course for 120 years.

It’s time to revisit that decision in the light of a new century.

The reality is that New Zealanders and Australians are one people, with one destiny.

Both Australia and New Zealand were brought into existence by the same wide-sweeping act of creation. Over the last quarter of a millennium, British settlement transformed this part of the world from a Stone Age backwater, forgotten by God, into one that has won more Nobel Prizes than either India or China.

Our paths of development since then have been the same. Ever since those earliest days of settlement, trans-Tasman immigration has been more intense than immigration within many other countries. New Zealand’s greatest ever Prime Minister, Michael Joseph Savage, was born in Victoria and did not move to New Zealand until his mid-30s. We grew up together.

We also reached manhood together, in the artillery fire of the Gallipoli landings and later in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Our combined struggles in all of these conflicts saw the rest of the world see our kind as one: tough, determined, unrepentant killers and pisstakers. Bloody-minded larrikins, fearless to a fault, who you’re much better to have on your side than against you.

Today, New Zealand streets, workplaces, schools and sportsfields are all but indistinguishable from Australian ones. The streets bear the same names, the flags bear the same stars, the footballs are the same shape. Offshore investment agencies bundle Aussie and Kiwi shares up into Australasian packages, their purchasers often unaware that the two are technically different countries.

Kiwis regularly move to Australia for work, then back to New Zealand for a spell, then back to Australia again. Over 2% of the population of each country was born in the other. Rates of intermarriage between New Zealanders and Australians are extremely high. Not only are we similar in kind, but the degree of intermingling ensures that we can never become much different in the future.

Seen from a global perspective, and not merely from the myopic perspective of a monoglot who considered the British Empire to be the world, there is no meaningful difference between New Zealanders and Australians. There never was. It weighs on us, then, to put an end to the charade of being different. It’s weighs on us to formalise this unity of blood, minds and souls.

We’re impelled to do this by the great difference between us and everyone else.

The thirty million souls belonging to the Anzac Empire occupy a very distinct and very clearly delineated part of the world. To the East of us, there is nothing but the Pacific Ocean. To the West of us, there is nothing but the Indian Ocean. To the South of us, there is nothing but the Southern Ocean.

Our only natural border is to the North, and here we have something very real: a sea that separates us from two hundred million people with very different mentalities and ways of life. The cultural border between Northern Australia and Asia is as hard as any cultural border anywhere.

But no cultural border exists on the Tasman Sea.

Anzac culture can assert its own space on the world stage, distinct to other Anglo cultures. Although we share the outdoors, barbeque, cricket-and-rugby culture with the South Africans, the pioneering mentality with the North Americans and a linguistic heritage with the British, other things, perhaps more subtle things, are not shared. Other Westerners tend to be uptight, rule-bound, humourless and meek. Anzacs are none of those things.

Our Anzac Empire would not only be capable of standing proud intellectually and culturally, but it could also do so in terms of hard power.

Anzacistan would have, at time of writing, a nominal GDP of close to USD1,600,000,000,000, making it the world’s 13th largest economy. An economy the size of Russia’s, with a land area half that of Russia’s, would allow for a self-defence program sufficient to safeguard our liberties. It’s fate that this nation, so open to the sea, would one day command a formidable navy, perhaps a fleet of nuclear submarines.

Perhaps most important of all, its future would be secured by the fact that the high standard of living would always make it an attractive destination for the best class of immigrant. The Anzac nation, despite a heavily British base, is today a composite of many of the world’s most industrious and intelligent people. Maintaining this into the future will ensure that we have the human capital necessary to remain prosperous.

The Spear of Destiny continues to move ever-Westward. It has resided in America for some time, but now appears set to cross the great Pacific Ocean. Most of the world expects it to go to China, the Middle Kingdom clearly being the ascendant power of the last quarter century. Some expect it to go to Japan. It’s possible, however, that the Great Magnet of the World comes to reside in the Anzac Lands.

The fate of Australasia is to become a great power – this is guaranteed by her vast size, of some eight million square kilometres. The Will of God is apparent to all on this subject. The only question is whether we shall become the great power. The Southern Stars this century will rise, and rise, and rise, and several of the old Northern powers will exhaust themselves and begin to wane.

New Zealand shall be as the Britain to the Europe of Australia – a moderating and guiding force. Uniting as one Anzac nation, Australia shall provide the clay and iron, and both countries the silver, but New Zealand’s great contribution to this nation shall be the gold of spiritual leadership. Australia can be the shield and armour; New Zealand can be the sword.

It’s time for the Anzac nation to recognise the call of destiny. Unite, and let our people take their rightful place as a great power upon the world stage. Unite, and let Britain become to us as Rome and Greece are to the West. It’s our time. The Southern Sun shines for us!

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Why The New Conservatives Could Get 5% In September

Following overseas trends, it’s apparent that an intense degree of discontentment exists among Western voters. There are protests all over the West – some violent, most confined to the ballot boxes for now. This article explores the possibility that discontentment in New Zealand could see the New Conservative Party get 5% of the vote in this year’s election.

It’s all but official that the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats are the most popular party in Sweden now. Five opinion polls in a row, all from different polling companies, have established that the Sweden Democrats have more current support than any other party. A moving average of recent polls suggests that their support is at least 25%.

The Sweden Democrats might be the most aggressive of the European alt-right parties, having been founded by former Waffen-SS members. Although it’s not an official position, prominent elements within their membership speak of repatriating everyone of a non-Swedish background. They are taking full advantage of the fact that support for the Social Democrats is at its lowest ever level.

In France, opinion polls suggest that the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen, long decried as an extremist, is threatening to win the French Presidential election in 2022. She is polling equal to Emmanuel Macron on the first round, and is polling at 45% to his 55% on the second. This is well up from Le Pen’s 33% result in the second round of the previous Presidential election.

In Germany, the Alternative fuer Deutschland is polling at around 15%. In the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy is the second-strongest party right now, having briefly been the strongest earlier this year. In Italy, the nationalist Lega Nord is now dominant. In Spain, the right-wing populist bloc is now polling at 17%, up from 10% in the general election less than a year ago.

The mainstream New Zealand media will never report on any of this.

The reason for all this discontent is the increasingly apparent failure of the Establishment to manage the Western World in a way that reduces the suffering of the Western people. The ruling class of the West transparently stopped giving a fuck about their people’s suffering many years ago, and the ensuing resentment has become bitter.

The mass immigration to Europe of Muslims and Africans over recent decades has heavily lowered the standard of living of the average European citizen. On the flipside, however, it has generated immense profits for those who benefit from this suffering. Those with an interest in hiring cheap labour, selling accommodation to the highest bidder or profiting from ethnic strife and division have seen their stocks rise handsomely.

This oversupply of cheap labour has made it all but impossible for young, working-class people to get into a position where they own a home suitable to raise a family in. Young people in New Zealand have less than 40% of the house-buying power that their parents had, and it’s getting worse. Most aggravating of all, the Western Establishment has shown no interest in changing this state of affairs.

This refusal to change course, when the current course only benefits 5-10% of the population, is the ultimate reason for most of the current discontent in the Western World. We can conclude from the examples in Europe that any party taking a meaningful stand against the New Zealand Establishment has the potential to win up to 25% of the vote.

The New Conservatives are the most prominent of the parties on the right that oppose the Establishment. Therefore, they are the only party appealing to the Kiwi equivalents of the Sweden Democrats, National Rally, Liga Nord etc. voters. Their constituency is angry, white, rural and male – the same demographic that won the World Wars.

It’s obvious to most by now that there is no meaningful difference between National and Labour, both being business-as-usual neoliberals whose overriding concern is keeping the economy going at full tilt.

The big problem is that there’s no meaningful difference between these two parties and any of the Greens, ACT or New Zealand First. The Greens are even more globalist than Labour, and ACT are even more globalist than National. For anyone who opposes globalism the traditional choice has been New Zealand First, but their close co-operation with Labour and the Greens has now made clear to all that they are as globalist as the rest.

In the minds of most dissenters, this leaves few options. Leftist discontents have been fond of throwing a vote towards the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, and no doubt many who turn out for the cannabis referendum will do so again this year. Most of the discontent at the moment, however, is inspired by right-wing sentiments, and people motivated by this tend to despise cannabis users and consider them subhuman.

For the right-wing discontents, the realistic options are ACT and New Conservative.

As this column has previously argued, ACT could get 5% if they were willing to step into the alt-right niche, instead of merely following puppy-like behind the National Party. However, they are clearly not willing. ACT is perfectly comfortable being the party of big-money corporate neoliberals, because that ensures that they get plenty of funding. David Seymour flirts with anti-Establishment positions, but his heart isn’t in it.

For this reason, the New Conservatives are the only party that are primed to take advantage of the wave of discontent that is sweeping the West.

At the time of the most recent poll, the New Conservatives apparently had less than 1% support. However, that poll was almost two months ago. Since then, several things have happened, and all of them follow the general trend of stoking discontentment towards the Establishment. If they keep happening – if that great wave of populist discontent reaches New Zealand – the New Conservatives might rise all the way to 5% before September 19.

As Dan McGlashan showed in Understanding New Zealand, there is a very strong correlation between voting Conservative and voting National (0.77), and therefore a strong New Conservative vote is likely to significantly weaken the National vote. If it does, it will not shift the balance of power in 2020. In fact, it could even strengthen Labour’s position if the New Conservatives get less than 5%, thereby causing the votes of many people who would otherwise have voted National to be wasted.

The far-right populists have shown in Europe that, in times of high discontentment, it’s possible for them to attract voters from otherwise left-wing demographics. New Conservative will attract anti-Establishment voters from National, but they could also attract a significant number of voters from those who would otherwise have cast their lot in with Labour, New Zealand First or ACT. If they succeed at this, New Zealand could be in for an electoral surprise in September.

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