I was overjoyed this week by the news that former New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger finally did something decent and died. Predictably, the hagiographies have already begun to flow, the most absurd of which claiming that he was a champion of the underdog. I want to state the viewpoint from the bottom of society.
I was nine years old in 1990, when Bolger came to power. I supported National in that election because their logo was blue, and blue was my favourite colour. Some of my family voted for him because the television told them to. We soon regretted it.
Because my family was working-class, we were impacted heavily by the reforms of the Fourth National Government. My father abandoned our family when I was two, and so my mother had to raise my brother and I on welfare. This wasn’t much. When Bolger and the Fourth National got in, they gave us Ruthanasia. This involved cutting welfare support, including the Family Support, which was the difference between our family making it and not making it. The stress of balancing the household budget drove my mother into a mental institution a few months after the cuts.
The stress of my mother being in a mental institution caused my own latent psychiatric problems to break out as insomnia. This was at age nine and my nervous system is yet to recover at age 44. There are thousands – perhaps tens of thousands – of us whose lives were destroyed in such ways by Bolger and his government of neglect.
Bolger personified everything evil about Anglos in general and New Zealand in particular: titanic greed mixed with indifference to human suffering. His Fourth National Government taught me that National voters and supporters get off on cruelty. Like a child pulling the wings off a fly, causing harm to the vulnerable makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they do it and will keep doing it.
I do not hate Bolger completely, however, because he taught me a lot of valuable lessons.
The most valuable lesson I learned was my value to New Zealand’s ruling class, which was nil. The Fourth National Government’s utter indifference to the poor, like we were an inconvenience the country would be better off without, is something I never forgot. Thus I have always done what I felt like in my life, with little consideration for wider society. This has not been criminal, but only because I did not want to be a criminal. Many other people I know from families that got Ruthanasiaed (including my own) became criminals. They, like me, reasoned that they don’t live in a society, just a big snake pit, so why not put their own needs above everyone else’s?
Schooling and media, together with government, create the impression that we’re all on one great team, and therefore sacrifices you make for the collective will be repaid by the collective. But in reality we’re cattle on one great tax farm. The system tolerates you as long as you’re paying in, but, when you need a payout, the system would rather you disappeared.
Many people read about events like World War One, and read about how working-class men were fed to enemy machine guns, and assume that things are different now and that no such thing could happen again. Thanks to Jim Bolger, I am aware that the contempt of the ruling class for the working classes is a permanent fixture of politics. The ruling class truly do hate the poor. They would feed us to machine guns tomorrow if they thought they would profit from it.
Thanks to these lessons, I have not been surprised by the actions of other National Party governments. I was not surprised when John Key slashed funding to mental health care, consigning hundreds of Kiwis to deaths by suicide and thousands of others to lives of despair. Neither was it any shock to me when Judith Collins forced the other National MPs to bloc vote against cannabis law reform at the referendum. I knew that the harm caused to medicinal cannabis users was a feature, not a flaw, of cannabis prohibition. And when Luxon got in and cut benefits under urgency, shovelling billions into the pockets of wealthy landlords, it was about what I expected.
Because of my opposition to mass Third World immigration, I am often pegged as right-wing. But, because of Jim Bolger, I have never voted for a right-wing party in my life, and I never will. I will never even vote for a centrist party that I suspect might support National (such as New Zealand First). I may or may not vote for the mainstream left either, but they aren’t automatically ruled out like National and co. are. The thought that my vote might help another Fourth National Government come to power evokes horror.
There is a wave of dark nihilism passing through New Zealand because of Jim Bolger. Many of the under-40s feel that society doesn’t exist, and that life is every man for himself. These people are essentially psychopathic in orientation, and the blame for this lies on Bolger and the harm he caused to this country. These youngsters have just internalised the selfishness of their elders.
*
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!
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2023
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2022
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2021
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2020
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018
Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017
*
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!