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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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Who Is My Guru?

Recently I asked the readers and viewers of VJM Publishing material to ask me any question they liked, in the fields of psychology, politics or spirituality, and I would answer it. The question answered in this essay – and I apologise for not being able to remember who asked it! – is who my guru is.

There’s a very simple answer to that question: Socrates.

There were few positive male role models in my childhood environment. I was the son of a gang member, and various uncles were also gang members, drug dealers or junkies. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent grandfather, who taught me a basic sense of honour and decency, but my philosophical ambitions soon brought me beyond what my family could fulfill. I needed a guru.

My male teachers at school were generally decent men, typical of the high-trust society that was 20th Century Nelson. But they weren’t gurus. The pains of life etched in their faces were understandable even to a child. Clearly, they were struggling through life much like I was, and needed a guru much like I did.

In Classics class during my final year of high school, one assigned topic was the trial and execution of Socrates. We learned how Socrates brought wisdom to the ungrateful masses of Athens, who eventually voted to have him killed. His form of execution was to drink a deadly hemlock tea. As I first learned the story, I presumed that he would refuse to do this, but he did, reasoning that it was not only his duty but he wasn’t afraid of death anyway.

I was awestruck.

Soon I developed a total fascination with this feat. This equanimity in the face of death seemed superhuman to me. Everything I had believed – or been taught – about human nature suggested that death was the most terrifying thing possible, the darkest of all mysteries, the termination of all of one’s dreams.

Everyone around me behaved as if scared stupid of the subject, never speaking about it. Socrates’s example proved that man need not fear death, and not in the delusional, heroin-high manner of the Christians and other religious fanatics. It was possible to die without fearing death simply through philosophy.

About a decade after I finished high school, I had lived a full life. I had earned a couple of degrees, been around the world a few times, even been married and divorced. The problem of death still plagued me though. Haunted me. What was the point of any of this, if I was doomed to die and all of it would be forgotten?

Here Socrates still acted as the guru. It was through studying him, and his disciple in Plato, that I came to realise the role of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the philosophy of fearlessness in the face of death. These Mysteries were famous in ancient Greece for alleviating the participants’ fear of death; Plato and Cicero wrote about their effects, and Aristotle, Epictetus, Plutarch, Alcibiades, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar, Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Julian were known to have been initiated.

Through learning about these mysteries, I came upon psilocybin mushrooms – believed by Terence McKenna to be the main psychoactive ingredient of the kykeon drunk by all participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This led me to taking psilocybin mushrooms myself and undergoing a total spiritual transformation at age 27, something discussed at length on this website.

Later, when I came to think more about politics, Socrates was still the guru, being the hero of Republic and Plato’s explication of political reality. Socrates’s unsurpassed example of honest reason as a tool to uncover the truth of political questions, despite opposition from liars and fools, inspired me. Like Socrates, but to a lesser extent, I have also been banned, cancelled and suppressed. I am proud to have followed in Socrates’s example!

Even now, I can still gain great insight about the nature of the soul from reading Phaedo. Socrates’s description of philosophy as preparation for death sets my entire life into a perspective that makes sense and gives it meaning. I might be almost 30 years older now than when I first read about Socrates, but his example of assuaging fear of death through pure reason appeals to me just as much today.

Many people think I am crazy for turning my energies away from making money and turning them towards spirituality instead. They don’t understand why a person would meditate or do psychedelics at all, let alone do little else for over a decade. Why philosophise at all, when there is money to be made?

I do it because of the example of relentless pursuit of truth set by Socrates, who is to me the most admirable man of all. This has led me to the spiritual beliefs expressed in Elementalism and in the essays on this website.

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Fan Mail 23

This seething was caused by me taking the piss out of a pedo in Destiny Church’s youth leadership wing

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.

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!