The Collapse Of The Electoral Cycle And Its Consequences

Previous VJM Publishing articles have described something known as the electoral cycle. This is the process by which the right wing and the left wing of the ruling class take turns at ruling. In New Zealand, this is usually an 18- or 15-year cycle, and its continuation tends to bring political stability. But it’s starting to break down all over the Western World.

When the National/ACT/NZFirst coalition won the 2023 General Election, the expectation among most was that they would rule for their half of an electoral cycle, i.e. nine years. At the least, they would enjoy an extended honeymoon, as Jacinda Ardern, John Key and Helen Clark all did. The reality has been like a bucket of cold puke to the face.

Because of the electoral cycle, a New Zealand Government winning a second term has been a likelihood, and a third term very possible, ever since the end of World War II. But this can no longer be taken for granted. According to recent polling, the 2026 General Election will be very close. If New Zealand First dips below 5%, Labour would easily win that year.

If they do, the comfortable electoral cycle – which is ultimately based on trust and consensus – will have collapsed. Anyone could realistically fancy their chances for 2029: Labour again, National again, or anyone else.

The implications of an open field are tremendous.

For one thing, it could lead to the coming of a truly anti-Establishment force. Currently, anti-Establishment sentiments are channeled into New Zealand First, or absorbed into fringe movements like NZ Loyal and the ALCP. They don’t actually impact the Establishment or their operations.

If dissident voices felt like they actually had a chance to change things, on account of that the Labournational stranglehold was broken, they could enter the political stage in great numbers, and with great enthusiasm. A charismatic leader, backed by committed and competent people, could hope for 20% or more of the vote, as we have seen alternative movements achieve in some European countries.

For another thing, it will all but certainly lead to the further dissolution of support for mainstream politics. The strongest impetus for alternative politics is the sentiment that the Establishment doesn’t know what it’s doing. The political world is comprised of such sentiments. If (or when) the electoral cycle collapses, it would become widely realised that the masses no longer have much confidence in the Establishment. That would open the emotional floodgates to more support for alternative politics.

The collapse of this typical, conservative-to-social democrat electoral cycle has already been observed in some European countries. This has led directly to the 20%+ support for alternative politics mentioned above. In some cases there are multiple genuine alternatives. This is now the case in Germany, with the Alternative for Germany polling around 18% and the Sahra Wagenknecht movement polliing around 7%.

The ultimate theoretical implications of this collapse vary greatly. The Establishment’s Plan B would be to introduce a technocracy ruled directly by bankers, as they achieved in Italy under Mario Draghi. The intent of this plan would be to forestall the Establishment’s worst nightmare, which is that the people take their power back for themselves. A technocracy would avoid any real change.

Another possibility is a stagnation so deeply entrenched that it can only be overcome by a dictator. Once people stop supporting mainstream politics, many of them will stop supporting democracy. After all, the reasoning goes, if democracy only delivers us a choice between two wings of the Establishment, what good is it? If democracy led us to this, then what value is democracy?

If future polls suggest that Labour has a realistic chance of winning in 2026, then we can officially declare the comfortable post-World War II electoral cycle shattered, and the New Zealand political scene truly open for a change to the consensus – or at least a change to what the Establishment wants.

Where that might lead in practice is really anyone’s guess, but we can draw some reasonable conclusions from the examples of other Western countries, almost all of which share our dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment.

For one, it is likely to lead to a radical change to recent immigration policy. New Zealanders, like most Westerners, followed their mainstream media for decades when it told them that mass immigration would make us all wealthier. Now that the exact opposite has occurred, people are angry about having been lied to. Western rulers will be happy to blame outsiders if they can.

For another, it’s possible that it will lead to radical changes in housing policy. The Anglosphere has a tighter housing supply than other Western countries, which has led to the (intended) result of grossly inflated house prices. This has caused a commensurate amount of dissatisfaction among young people, who would love to redistribute some of the houses the Boomers have hoarded.

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VJMP Anzac Day Address 2024: The Common Enemies Of The Anzac Nation

It was recently shown in an IPSOS poll that populist sentiments are becoming common among New Zealanders. These sentiments are mostly shared by Australians as well. Both countries are suffering under a callously indifferent ruling class, who democracy seems only to entrench. One of the best arguments for the unity of the Anzac nation is that Australia and New Zealand have common enemies.

These common enemies are both external and internal.

Externally, the Anzac nation is beset by communists and capitalists, who have subjugated the West under their unholy alliance known as “globohomo”. This alliance is a globalist one. The people who make up the leadership of this alliance have no national home, but rather, like John Key, live wherever profits them the most at any given time.

The communists are a motley alliance of Western grifters, invariably middle-class, who have declared war on the working classes of Western nations on the excuse that those working classes refused to support globalist revolution. They are so lost in the labyrinths of their own ideology that they have lost touch with reality completely: they are willing to deny any science or history if doing so would further globalist revolution.

Communists, especially the brown communists, see Australia and New Zealand as settler nations, and therefore illegitimate constructs. If the lands cannot be handed back to the natives, then they must be converted into the common property of all of humankind. This means that infinite foreigners can be imported, and the Anzac people have no right to complain about it.

The global working class was prophecised to unite across national borders by Marx himself. This prophecy is being engineered by the world’s communists, who feel it their duty to destroy all national borders and all national consciousness, those being impediments to the rise of class consciousness.

The capitalists don’t care so much for ideology. They are chiefly concerned with the sober business of wealth extraction. Their main concern is keeping the immigration taps running on full bore, because that maximises rents and minimises wages. Because they own all the rental property, and because they hire all the workers, the capitalists are the major beneficiaries of mass immigration.

For this reason, the capitalists hate the nations: nations are icky things that tend to come together and form unions and enforce labour laws. Nations tend to care about their members not being able to afford housing. Nations tend to pass laws restricting cheap labour importation. Much better to break the nations up, the capitalists reason, into a mindless herd of individualised consumers, indifferent to each other’s suffering. More profit that way.

Both of these forces, both communist and capitalist, constitute a globalist alliance whose interests are implacably opposed to that of the Anzac nation. As globalists, they seek to disenfranchise and disempower the Anzac nation, to confuse us, to strike us ignorant of our history, and of the legacy our ancestors built with the intention that we would inherit it.

These forces couldn’t care less about the actual people with roots in the soil of the lands of the Southwestern Pacific. The actual Anzac nation. These forces have, in fact, done everything they could to impoverish and tyrannise us. Young Anzacs today have almost no chance of buying homes with money from their wages. Our younger generations today are worse off, in homeownership terms, than young people in countries that were Third World a few decades ago.

Qatar, by contrast to the Anzac countries, gives its citizens housing grants of up to 1,200,000 Qatari reals, about AUD500,000. There are no student loans in Qatar. The Qatari Government appears to operate on a logic similar to that of Scandinavian countries in the 1970s: that investing in their own people will produce great dividends in years to come.

We Anzacs, by contrast, are put to work for monkey wages that will never pay for houses. Forget housing grants – our ruling class imports hundreds of thousands of cheap labour units every year to compete with us for housing. Forget Scandinavian logic also. Investing in our people is considered a loss of profit for this quarter.

These external forces, however, would have very little influence had the Anzac nation not already been losing the battle to internal forces. These internal forces are spiritual ones. It’s as true for us as it was for Fight Club – our Great War is a spiritual war.

This spiritual war involves finding the right balance in all of the various realms of spiritual life. We must find the middle path between rashness and cowardice, between gluttony and melancholy, between pride and debasement. Finding that middle path has been difficult, because we have been pulled to and fro by the adharmic philosophies like Abrahamism and scientific materialism.

It’s time for the Anzac nation to forge our own spiritual path, and therefore our own moral path, through the morass of confusion that has befallen the West in the Post-Truth Age.

For anyone descended from the British, of course, our primary spiritual enemies are nihilism and greed.

The nihilism comes from the great void in the centre of our spiritual life. Young Anzacs are not interested in fables about Rabbi Yeshua, and the old myths about Wotan rising from the mist and fog are too distant for the warm lands of Anzac. The great Anzac spiritualities are yet to manifest; our gods are still, for now, dormant. When a true Anzac spiritual movement arises, and when the Anzac gods rise with it, this rising will banish nihilism from our souls.

The greed comes from the grandiosity that is the inheritance of the British Empire. As with all creations of the City of London, the Anzac countries are operated to turn a profit and not to help the Anzac nation meet their needs of life. A political revolution, on nationalist grounds, would allow us to assert a new set of values: one that puts our life quality higher than the mere generation of dollars.

The common enemies of the Anzac nation are not many, but they are powerful. Communists and capitalists, nihilism and greed provide both outer and inner enemies that we must wrestle with in coming decades. These are powerful foes, and their power incites us to come together, morally and spiritually, as one people.

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The Cruelty Is The Point

Many have been surprised by the decisions made by the Sixth National Government. Taking food away from hungry children and giving the money to landlords seems pointlessly cruel. So does ticking up an eleven-figure debt that our grandchildren will labour to settle, just for tax cuts. Perhaps the most egregious is maintaining cannabis prohibition in the face of the mountain of international evidence that it doesn’t work.

What motivates these decisions?

A cursory examination of New Zealand political history shows that previous National governments have also been motivated by cruelty. The Fifth National Government slashed the mental health system and continued to withhold medicinal cannabis. The Fourth National Government slashed the welfare system and destroyed unions. All of these measures were blamed on Labour at the time, but in reality were motivated by simple cruelty.

Cruelty is, in fact, one of the major human motivations. The rush of sadism can be one of the most powerful of all. Ted Bundy once said “When you feel the last bit of breath leaving their body, you’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” Similar feelings of grandeur flow through the National MP who cuts food programs for children.

It can be seen from the way that bullies abuse each other at school, psychopathic bosses abuse workers in the office and spouses abuse each other behind closed doors, cruelty and sadism are powerful motivators for action in many different times and places. People wired up this way readily find an outlet in National and ACT party politics.

Once the central motivating role of cruelty in National party psychology is realised, it’s much easier to understand National party policy.

This was seen most evidently during the cannabis referendum. National party supporters, who generally opposed law reform in this area, were not moved by arguments around the immense alleviation of human suffering that easy access to cannabis would allow. To the contrary – National voters, who seldom use cannabis themselves (preferring booze, painkillers and television), understood that cannabis prohibition usually destroyed Other People.

This also explains why National party voters were seldom moved by appeals to the fact that Maoris suffer more heavily than other races from cannabis prohibition. Given that National voters hate Maori people and want them to suffer, why would they then care about Maoris getting locked up because of cannabis prohibition? To the National mindset, that’s more of an argument to support prohibition.

John Ehrlichmann, Presidential Advisor under Richard Nixon, once said: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Same deal in New Zealand. Of course the National party and their lackeys like Mike Hosking and Bob McCoskrie know the science. The science has been established for decades: cannabis is medicinal, and any amount of misuse is less harmful than misuse of alcohol. But by lying about it, the National party can target their enemies. Not hippies and blacks, but hippies and Maoris.

National party policy cannot be understood unless it is appreciated that the intent of such policy is to destroy people the National party hates. This is primarily the poor. National hates Maori people more because they are poor than because they are Maori – proof for this assertion comes from the fact that National voters don’t seem to hate Asians.

The central motivating role of cruelty in National party policy can be seen in this year’s benefit cuts. The indexing of benefit increases to inflation instead of wages has cost the average beneficiary $6 per week, which saves the Government a pittance in comparison to what they’re paying out in landlord tax cuts. But it’s not the saving money that motivates such cuts – it’s tightening the stranglehold on beneficiaries.

Nietzsche wrote, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, to “distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful”. There was excellent reason for this. The impulse to punish is fuelled by resentment, which is the basis of slave morality. This impulse is referred to as a “justice boner” in modern Internet parlance, reflecting the fact that its ultimately motivated by pre-human, even reptilian, brain structure.

Unfortunately, the stupidity of Labour and the Greens means that the cruelty of National and ACT is something the rest of us must endure for as long as the two-party democratic system exists.

As long as democracy exists, it will appeal primarily to the lowest common denominator and thereby enable the most bestial and sadistic impulses of humanity. This is why the National and ACT parties have produced, and continue to produce, a parade of sadistic beasts: Shipley, Richardson, Prebble, Key, Brownlee, Bennett, Collins, van Velden et al., ad infinitum.

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The Maths On The UBI Argument

This week’s release of the Sora text-to-video engine has reignited a recent debate. It seems to most well-informed observers that artifical intelligence is going to make a large number of occupations obsolete in a short number of years. This has got people talking about a universal basic income again. So VJM Publishing does the maths.

Let’s say our putative UBI is $385 per week, across 52 weeks, making it just over $20,000 per year. $20,000 times 4 million eligible Kiwis equals $80 billion per year. Where to find that?

There’s one really obvious source of finding half of that money: the existing benefit system. According to budget.govt.nz, existing benefit expenses are some $40 billion per year. A UBI would mean that there was no longer any need to maintain the existing welfare system.

This would also mean that WINZ itself could be completely scrapped. The welfare bureaucracy would no longer have any reason to exist once a UBI was in place. That would save another $3 billion (also as per budget.govt.nz above).

Many will be astonished to hear that WINZ spends about three billion a year just administering benefits. But that is the price of not having a universal income. With no universal income, welfare benefits have to be gatekept to the “truly worthy”. This means at least one WINZ office, usually with dozens of staff, in every major built-up area in the country, to deter the supposed hordes of bludgers.

That’s $43 billion of the $80 billion.

A second area of savings comes from church tax. Although figures for New Zealand are unclear, it’s estimated that Australia is missing out on some AUD10,000,000,000 per annum from not having church taxes. Given that Australia is over five times larger than New Zealand, that suggests that we could bring in at least $2 billion from a church tax.

The only reason why churches are already untaxed in Australia and New Zealand is thanks to an antiquated pre-colonial British law written under the then-common delusion that the Christian religion adds value to society. Now that Christians are a minority in New Zealand, and in the wake of mass Christian opposition to the cannabis referendum, it’s neither necessary nor possible to continue with this delusion.

A $2 billion annual church tax would bring us to $45 billion.

A third area of savings comes from a Georgist-style tax on ground rents. The New Zealand Property Investor’s Federation believes that the total size of the “rental economy” is about $15 billion. That’s fifteen billion dollars earned through sheer extortion, a parasitic form of income-gathering that causes innumerable harms to wider society – and which is otherwise untaxed.

A Georgist-style 80% tax on ground rents would therefore bring in some $12 billion. Perhaps this can be adjusted down to $10 billion on the basis that some of the rental economy consists not only of simple ground rents, but also rent on improvements, which remains untouched by a land tax under Georgist philosophy.

That brings us to $55 billion.

Empty or otherwise landbanked properties comprise a fourth area of savings. According to the Empty Houses Report, there are some 95,000 empty homes in New Zealand. Some of these are being kept empty because of landbanking, some as holiday homes, some as second homes, some as vacant rentals. In any case, if the ground rents of these empty homes were, on average, $500 per week, and if these ground rents were taxed at 80% as per the Georgist principles above, that would bring in another $2 billion, taking our total to $57 billion.

Note that these land taxes entirely avoid taxes on family homes.

New Zealand is one of the only countries in the OECD to not have a capital gains tax, which is a fifth area of savings. The overall effect of this is to stratify society, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. The reasons for New Zealand not already having a capital gains tax are complicated, but they can be summarised as greed making the country a worse place to live.

According to the Tax Working Group, a capital gains tax in New Zealand would bring in some $6 billion per annum ten years after introduction. The vast majority of this money would otherwise be getting hoarded by the people who need it the least. Thus, with a capital gains tax we have accounted for $63 billion of the necessary $80 billion.

Then the rest of the cost of an UBI will be naturally clawed back by the tax system. If the median wage in New Zealand is $31.61 an hour, and if the average worker works 1,369 hours per annum, then the average already-employed person is bringing in some $43,274 per annum already.

Someone receiving $43,274 will pay $6,073 in PAYE, but someone receiving $63,274 will pay $12,002, almost $6,000 per annum more. So if a $20,000 UBI would raise the average worker’s income to $63,274, roughly $6,000 of that would immediately be taxed back. Multiply this by four million workers and you have an extra $24 billion in PAYE.

That would actually take us over the $80 billion by some margin, to $87 billion or so. For maximum efficiency, we might like to introduce a $20,000 tax-free threshold at this point – the logic being that if it costs $20,000 per annum to survive, taxing anyone making less than this is pointless, because it will have to come back to them in the form of government services anyway.

This would cost slightly over $10 billion, i.e. roughly $2,500 in foregone PAYE for each of the four million employed people.

The remaining shortfall can be accounted for by GST intake on increased spending. If the average person spends $5,000 extra per annum on account of their UBI, then some $750 of that will be recouped by the Government in the form of GST. Multiplied by four million workers makes for an extra $3 billion.

In summary, a $90 billion demand for a UBI plus a $20,000 tax-free threshold can be met by scrapping WINZ and the entire welfare system ($43 billion), a church tax ($2 billion), a land tax on the ground rents of rental property ($10 billion), a land tax on empty homes ($2 billion), a capital gains tax ($6 billion), naturally increased PAYE ($24 billion) and naturally increased GST ($3 billion). The numbers for a UBI in New Zealand add up.

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