new zealand – Page 64

You Will Never Be Allowed Any Alternative to Neoliberalism

Workers and labourers were disappointed on Wednesday by the news that the Sixth Labour Government had ruled out a capital gains tax. Many working Kiwis felt it unfair that their labour continues to be taxed at such a high rate while unearned income remains untaxed, and felt that the Labour Party had betrayed them. As this essay will argue, they better get used to it, because New Zealanders will never be allowed an alternative to neoliberalism.

Jacinda Ardern had come to power with a promise that “neoliberalism had failed“, and gave every impression that the Labour Party would offer a new approach. The 35-year experiment of putting money above people had only delivered misery, and Ardern and her Labour Party had caused many to believe that their ascent to power would mark a change in attitude.

Like most utterances from politicians, this was total shit.

The reality is that Ardern and her Labour Party are just as much puppets of globalist industrial and finance interests as their National predecessors, and this is obvious if one looks at their actions in the 18 months they have been in power.

One of the first things Labour did was to double the refugee quota, increasing the flow of cheap labour into the country at the expense of New Zealand wage earners. As this newspaper has mentioned elsewhere, neoliberals love refugees, because they work for cheap and because they destroy the solidarity of the native working classes, thereby weakening their negotiating position.

Labour has also ignored cannabis law reform their whole time in power. While Andrew Little enthusiastically fast-tracks all kinds of laws to take Kiwi freedoms away, he lacks the courage even to say that cannabis is a medicine. Neoliberals are almost always materialists, and they fear cannabis because they fear that it will turn people away from the acquisitive greed that our economies are propped up by.

Perhaps the worst slap in the face, though, was when Labour ruled out a capital gains tax. Their refusal to tax the unearned income of property speculators meant that the burden of funding the government had to come from wage earners instead. Effectively, Jacinda Ardern chose to subsidise the unearned income of the rich with the labour of the poor.

The reality for New Zealand voters, who had cast the Fifth National Government out of power after nine years of neglect, is stark. There is no alternative to neoliberalism. It doesn’t matter how much suffering the Kiwi people have to endure; it doesn’t matter if you can never own a house on the average wage. We will never be allowed, within our current political system, to put our own people above money.

A reader might object here that voters could vote for a third party if they didn’t want neoliberalism, but the system is rigged so that only Labour and National can hold power.

Not only is there an electoral threshold of 5%, which has the effect of preventing any alternative to neoliberalism from getting a foothold in Parliament, but funding for electoral broadcasts is apportioned according to party size. Labour and National together get over half of all allocated electoral broadcast funding, which entrenches both these parties and the neoliberalism they represent.

There is no alternative, within our existing system, to neoliberalism. Everything Labour and National do benefits the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and especially the wealthy with no ties to the nation. Nothing they do will benefit the Kiwi worker whose hands build our roads, tend our crops and care for our sick.

Therefore, there is no alternative to skyrocketing rents, falling wages and the mass importation of cheap labour in the form of refugees. The only way that the Kiwi nation can ever get respite from this is revolution.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 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 2017 is also available.

Could Labour Win An Absolute Majority in 2020?

A new Reid Research poll has put the Labour Party on 49.6% support, with the National Party languishing well back on 41.3%. Although this no doubt reflects a polling boost from the Christchurch mosque attacks, it raises an interesting question: could Labour govern alone after 2020? Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, examines.

No party has won an absolute majority since the introduction of MMP in 1996. The closest any one party has come was the 59 seats won by John Key’s National in 2011. But yesterday’s Reid Research poll suggests that there’s a very good chance that Labour could win one after the 2020 General Election.

We can see a clear pattern over the last two electoral cycles. The Fifth Labour Government came into power in 1999 on a promise to repeal the cruel welfare reforms of Jim Bolger’s Fourth National Government, winning 38% of the vote. This they increased to 41% by the 2002 General Election, as people still remembered what it was like having Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley in charge. From there, it fell away until National defeated them in 2008.

The Fifth National Government, likewise, came into power in 2008 on a promise to repeal the excessive pandering and taxation of the Clark Government. They won 45% of the vote in 2008, which increased to 47% in 2011, as people still remembered the suffocating nanny state culture of Helengrad. From there, it fell away until Labour defeated them in 2017.

So there’s every reason to think that the Sixth Labour Government will get a boost of some kind in 2020, as people still remember the grinning indifference of their National Party predecessors. The swing of the electoral pendulum suggests that Labour should hit its peak support next year or shortly thereafter, before the public inevitably gets sick of them and National wins again in either 2023 or 2026.

All this might mean that they can stay up in the high 40s (in terms of support), but there are other indicators that suggest they could govern alone after the 2020 General Election with as little as 45% of the vote.

Labour’s support parties, New Zealand First and the Greens, have fallen well below the 5% threshold, and there are good reasons to think that both will crash out of Parliament in 2020. The Greens are only polling at 3.9%, and New Zealand First are doing even worse, at 2.3%.

The New Zealand First Party might as well have pissed in the faces of their supporters, such is the contempt they have shown them since taking power after 2017. Every New Zealand First MP voted against Chloe Swarbrick’s medicinal cannabis bill, despite the passionate support for it among their heavily Maori voting base. Then they signed the country up to the TPPA, despite campaigning against it when in opposition.

The Green Party are not doing much better. Far from presenting an educated, intelligent, left-wing alternative, the face of their party is now anti-white racists like Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman. The Greens lost ground in 2017 among people of European descent, and the sharp increase in authoritarian and anti-white rhetoric appears to have driven the centrist Greens back to Labour.

The Greens also have the double problem of defending their educated urban elite votes against The Opportunities Party, which looks set to run again, and Vernon Tava’s potential blue-green movement. Both of these latter vehicles will try to appeal to the same educated, urban 20-39 year old demographic as the Greens, meaning that competition will be extreme.

If both the New Zealand First and Green parties fail to get over 5% of the vote, then the composition of the next Parliament might be simply Labour, National and David Seymour. If this is the case, then 49% of the total electorate vote would likely entitle Labour to 65 seats or so, out of a 120-member Parliament.

Of course, the curious thing here is that if the Greens and New Zealand First do fall under the 5% threshold, and no other new party manages to get over it, one of either Labour or National is all but guaranteed to end up with an absolute majority. The only way it could not happen would be for David Seymour’s ACT, currently languishing at below one percent in the polls, to act as the tiebreaker.

This will be good news to some, and terrible news to others. As we have been reminded in recent years, we Kiwis have no absolute human rights, and Parliament is sovereign. Therefore, a party with an absolute Parliamentary majority can do absolutely whatever it wants to the New Zealand people, with no oversight. The only recourse the New Zealand people will have is the chance to vote them out again in 2023.

Considering that the Labour Government has already been very weak on protecting our rights to own firearms and our rights to free speech, there is good reason to be afraid of an absolute Labour majority. Andrew Little has already used the Christchurch mosque shootings to “fast-track” every piece of legislation he can think of, so who knows how far a Labour Party with an absolute majority in Parliament could go to reshape the world in their image?

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

The Case For Cannabis: Law Reform Would Bring Sense to Workplace Drug Testing

One of the worst things about cannabis prohibition is not that it gives people to opportunity to mistreat each other, but that it coerces them into doing so. The fact that cannabis is illegal means that people are essentially forced into taking particular measures when they come into contact with it. These measures often unfairly impact a number of people, which is another reason why the cannabis laws ought to be changed, as this article will examine.

Right now, in many places across the West, there is a common but extremely cruel phenomenon taking place. It is that of all of the people losing their jobs because of being forced to take a urine sample at work, and having it turn out positive for cannabis.

The logic goes like this. Many jobs, in particular those involving the operation of heavy machinery, cannot be performed safely by those under the influence of drugs. This goes for not only alcohol and cannabis but for many other substances. These jobs require a sober mind, because anyone not sober could easily kill themselves, someone else, or do millions of dollars worth of damage.

Fair enough. But because it’s not always possible to rely on a person to come to work sober, some insurance companies, as a condition of granting insurance, make it necessary for the company seeking insurance to perform drug tests on their employees so that they can remove the ones who are working under the influence of some drug, thereby making the workplace safer.

This is fair-ish, but where it truly crosses the line into unfairness is the fact that instead of testing for cannabis impairment, the urine tests test for the presence of certain metabolites that are present in the urine if the person has used cannabis at some point in the recent past, perhaps even 30 days (or more). So the urine test can only determine if you have used cannabis recently, not whether you’re impaired at the time of the test.

This means that “failing a drug test” has got little to do with whether or not your ability to do your job safely was impaired. Many people who get fired for failing a drug test are not even impaired at the time the test was taken. So a lot of people are getting discriminated against, unfairly, on account of cannabis use that probably isn’t even affecting their ability to perform their work duties safely.

In many cases, the employer is perfectly fine with this arrangement. Any employee who uses cannabis is more likely to be a freethinker and therefore disobedient, or more likely to demand a higher wage. A urine test that reveals both a tendency towards freethinking and evidence of having committed a crime is a perfect excuse to fire someone, but the option shouldn’t be available.

If cannabis became legal, some things would change with regards to this arrangement. Of course, cannabis law reform wouldn’t suddenly make it legal to go to work stoned. Every workplace would still be obliged to meet the same health and safety standards as before. The most likely difference is that it could become possible that any employer drug testing their staff was legally mandated to use swab tests to test for impairment, and not urine tests to test for the presence of metabolites indicating use within the past 30 days.

Generally employers prefer to do a urine sample because it’s cheaper, but if cannabis were legal, an employee might be able to bring a case for unfair dismissal to court if they were fired for the presence of metabolites in the urine. Such a case might well rule that, if cannabis is legal, such an action constitutes unfair dismissal, and therefore the employer is obliged to use a swab test to test for impairment instead.

It could be argued that employers would actually benefit from this policy as well. In the modern workplace, finding staff is harder than before on account of the increased need for training and education. If a person wants to work, there’s no reason why the fact that they smoked a bong two weeks ago should prevent them. The reality is that they’re probably safer than someone who is hungover.

It would be better for everyone for the law to change so that some sanity could be restored to the issue. If cannabis were legal, than the workplace standard would be a swab test for intoxication, not a urine test for the presence of metabolites. This would mean that it was possible to make a distinction between stoned people, who shouldn’t be in certain workplaces, and people who have used cannabis recently, who are no less safe than anyone else.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

The Great New Zealand Chimpout

New Zealanders have been used to thinking of ourselves as a passionless, even dour people, very calm, very sober and not prone to great emotional displays. Not for us singing at sports fixtures, crying in public or over-reacting to political events. This self-appraisal has been shattered by the events of the past fortnight. The last half of March 2019 will go down in history as the Great New Zealand Chimpout.

The first to chimp out was Branton Tarrant, shortly after lunchtime on March 15th. Driven insane by the ongoing collapse of Western Civilisation and the complicity of politicians, he chimped out with a semi-automatic rifle at the Al-Noor Mosque in Christchurch, to the tune of 51 dead. When the gunshots stopped, people were relieved, but little did New Zealand realise that the chimping out was just beginning.

For a sleepy nation at the bottom corner of the world, the New Zealand reaction was much like being awakened by having a bucket of cold water dumped over one’s head, as most Kiwis had truly believed that such a thing would never happen here. At first, there was the natural shock and horror that accompanies a mass murder, but these perfectly understandable feelings soon gave way to much uglier, cruder and more primitive sentiments. Many of the people holding these sentiments saw an opportunity in the tragedy.

Upon hearing that the shooter was white, leftists rejoiced. In the emotion of the moment, they felt they had a green light to abuse anyone who had ever uttered any misgivings about immigration for any reason. Maori radicals promptly joined in, using the occasion to demonise white people in general, and implicate all of them in collective guilt. Those who mentioned that Tarrant’s anti-immigrant invective was really very similar to the Maori radical anti-immigrant invective found the reaction like kicking a wasps’ nest.

Then the New Zealand Government decreed that our firearms laws were going to get changed. This they did without any consultation with the community – it was simply forced through, as if the emotion of the moment was enough to demand it. Few had the sense to speak out, as the prevailing uncertainly and fear caused most people to fall obediently behind the Government. It was then that the Great New Zealand Chimpout could be said to be hitting its peak.

Jacinda Ardern set the national tone, which was to be one of grovelling submission. She was pictured wearing a hijab, probably a signal to the massive Indonesian and Arab export markets to please not take this attack as an indication of wider anti-Muslim sentiment on the part of New Zealanders. What the nation needed was a signal to the New Zealand people to hold fast, to keep their shit together, but in the hysteria of the moment no-one was able to put order to the nation’s emotions.

In line with this grovelling, Massey academic Paul Spoonley was given a platform to spout off about how the name of the Crusaders rugby team was an example of white supremacy. At the peak of the chimpout, everything was decried as an example of white supremacy, and people were discussing the need to ban “online cesspools” such as 4chan. Most ISPs went as far as blocking a number of sites relating to Internet counterculture, including 4chan, 8chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica.

The chimping out wasn’t limited to just Government, academia and their followers. The corporate world decided to lose their minds as well, perhaps characterised best by Whitcoulls. Based on little other than pure panic and a vague sense of association between psychological science and far-right wing extremist terrorism, Whitcoulls made the decision to remove Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules For Life from their sales shelves (a decision since rescinded).

Perhaps the crescendo of the chimpout was the decision of the New Zealand Chief Censor Davis Shanks to ban Tarrant’s manifesto, which meant that anyone possessing a copy would be liable for a ridiculously draconian 10 years imprisonment. Like authoritarians and control freaks everywhere, Shanks has apparently never heard of the Streisand Effect: his action caused half of New Zealand to go on FaceBook to reference “the manifesto”, which got the other half curious in it.

Throughout this chimpout, the New Zealand media has played the role of the feces-thrower.

In a complete 180 from the usual narrative when Muslims are the perpetrators of terror attacks, they have cashed in as hard as possible, by running countless pieces demonising white people and attributing to them collective guilt for this attack, for colonialism and for all suffering in the world. There is good money in this – the Alexa ranking for one of the chief feces-throwers, The Spinoff, climbed from the low 60,000s to the high 50,000s in just a few weeks, suggesting a growth in brand value of some 50%.

Even today, almost two weeks after the shooting, rags like The Spinoff were openly discussing the need to eliminate free speech for the sake of protecting minorities, a sign that the country is still thinking with panicked emotions and not reason and logic. As any mainstream media boss could tell you, there’s money in hysteria and division: stoke it up and count the cash as it rolls in.

There’s no way to tell when the Great New Zealand Chimpout will end. Already today it’s possible to observe it running out of momentum, but there is still a trial to be had. There is every chance that Tarrant’s trial will be accompanied by some ridiculous anti-freedom measure, which will be intended to suppress dissent but which will be sold to the public as necessary to fight extremism.

At some point, there may be pushback from the ordinary New Zealander, once they regather their senses. Whether or not this happens, we ought to hope that it does, because the Government and the media both benefit from keeping New Zealanders as confused and afraid as possible, and they both have incentive to keep the chimpout going. Eventually, however, it will either run out of steam or be deliberately ended by civilised people.