Like many others who think that mouthing Carville’s bon mot is equivalent to a solution, Luxon’s National caucus should probably look more intelligently at our country’s issues, in particular at Carville’s third point.
It is true that New Zealand’s economy has been holed beneath the water line. (It is also probably true that the likes of Adrian Orr and his fan boys will be hoping that this situation can soon be laid at the door of the US President who is now, unusually for a politician, carrying out his election promises, thus giving Orr et al the perfect opportunity to say it was nothing ever to do with them.)
It’s no surprise that the Prime Minister’s business background should focus on spreadsheets but is this the real hot button issue? And has there ever really been a golden age of prosperity, for the nation or for each of us individually that we can hope for again?
Certainly we have all experienced the too brief satisfaction of the credit card debt dismissed, the student loan repaid, or the mortgage got rid of. We are gratified if we get a pay rise, a legacy or win a bit on Powerball. There may be brief rejoicing when the Reserve Bank unexpectedly fails to hike the interest rate but that will not mean we go out and buy a thank you card to send to Christian Hawkesby.
The reason all these mood upswings are ephemeral is that, with the exception of tech billionaires and other lucky rogues, most of us never have quite enough money. Or at least enough to never worry about it. There’s always a roof that leaks, a root canal that needs seeing to or a kid that needs bailing out.
The corollary of this is that we never truthfully expect good economic news. The economic levers are for most of us too arcane and complicated to grasp - evidence the competing theories held by economists themselves. Alert readers will recall the economic experts who agreed in large numbers that printing money during covid and hosing it around indiscriminately would have no ill effects.
And while I accept that if you’re living in your car and you’ve applied for thirty jobs with no luck – probably because you don’t tick enough diversity boxes - that an economic upswing offering you material benefit would be amazing, that’s not the majority of us.
Put another way, economic improvement that all of us experience is jam tomorrow.
More than 80,000 NZ nationals left our country in the year ended June 2024. It’s unknowable how many of these are permanent escapees but social media tell us their reasons overwhelmingly include racial division, identity politics and a sense of alienation that means our land no longer feels like home.
The mythical Treaty principles have now slithered into all corners of our lives resulting in a groundswell of support for a referendum, a clarifying Principles Bill, anything really, to explain an issue that is a stone in our collective shoe. And it was a groundswell of support for such clarification, no matter what scurrilous methods were used to gerrymander the counting of submissions supporting Seymour’s Bill.
That public discourse has been so stifled by vested interests can only be confirmation that the majority of our nation’s people do not support the undemocratic racial division of the shape-shifting Treaty principles that increasingly seek to make them second tier citizens.
So, the heffalump kicking off in the corner of the chamber? It ain’t the economy, mate.
Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.
It is true that New Zealand’s economy has been holed beneath the water line. (It is also probably true that the likes of Adrian Orr and his fan boys will be hoping that this situation can soon be laid at the door of the US President who is now, unusually for a politician, carrying out his election promises, thus giving Orr et al the perfect opportunity to say it was nothing ever to do with them.)
It’s no surprise that the Prime Minister’s business background should focus on spreadsheets but is this the real hot button issue? And has there ever really been a golden age of prosperity, for the nation or for each of us individually that we can hope for again?
Certainly we have all experienced the too brief satisfaction of the credit card debt dismissed, the student loan repaid, or the mortgage got rid of. We are gratified if we get a pay rise, a legacy or win a bit on Powerball. There may be brief rejoicing when the Reserve Bank unexpectedly fails to hike the interest rate but that will not mean we go out and buy a thank you card to send to Christian Hawkesby.
The reason all these mood upswings are ephemeral is that, with the exception of tech billionaires and other lucky rogues, most of us never have quite enough money. Or at least enough to never worry about it. There’s always a roof that leaks, a root canal that needs seeing to or a kid that needs bailing out.
The corollary of this is that we never truthfully expect good economic news. The economic levers are for most of us too arcane and complicated to grasp - evidence the competing theories held by economists themselves. Alert readers will recall the economic experts who agreed in large numbers that printing money during covid and hosing it around indiscriminately would have no ill effects.
And while I accept that if you’re living in your car and you’ve applied for thirty jobs with no luck – probably because you don’t tick enough diversity boxes - that an economic upswing offering you material benefit would be amazing, that’s not the majority of us.
Put another way, economic improvement that all of us experience is jam tomorrow.
More than 80,000 NZ nationals left our country in the year ended June 2024. It’s unknowable how many of these are permanent escapees but social media tell us their reasons overwhelmingly include racial division, identity politics and a sense of alienation that means our land no longer feels like home.
The mythical Treaty principles have now slithered into all corners of our lives resulting in a groundswell of support for a referendum, a clarifying Principles Bill, anything really, to explain an issue that is a stone in our collective shoe. And it was a groundswell of support for such clarification, no matter what scurrilous methods were used to gerrymander the counting of submissions supporting Seymour’s Bill.
That public discourse has been so stifled by vested interests can only be confirmation that the majority of our nation’s people do not support the undemocratic racial division of the shape-shifting Treaty principles that increasingly seek to make them second tier citizens.
So, the heffalump kicking off in the corner of the chamber? It ain’t the economy, mate.
Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.
14 comments:
Why oh why are our elected representatives still doing nothing of substance in this area?
I know that without genuine meaningful change I will be following my own kids overseas as soon as they hit university age. I won’t allow them to stay and live as second class citizens while being force fed the utter garbage of the Māori wonderfulness and treaty principles.
Now there is a new low uncovered - forced on us by councils, the areas of Māori significance. A council sanctioned means for local iwi’s to extract graft from, mostly, businesses operating on land that they claim their ancestors once hunted/ fished/ shat on. (We’re looking at you Hutt Kapiti New Plymouth).
It must stop!
But Luxon still naively believes the economy is all he and his shackled ministers need concentrate on. If he isn’t prepared to address the never ending Waitangi Tribunal debacle and associated laws giving preferential treatment to so called Māori, he may find he won’t be PM at the 2026 election, just a minor coalition partner.
Well written Penn, and I couldn't agree more.
Exactly right. The economy is not the problem, race relations are. There is no point having a booming economy if we have created a class of overlords who suck the country dry. I believe they are doing this already. There is so much money being channelled into reparations, so much land being artfully taken from its rightful owners, so many inane cultural organisations being financed and so much 'koha' being paid before projects can be commenced.
New Zealand, as most of us knew it, has all but disappeared.
It is now a society built on guilt and envy. A strange sort of guilt, which anybody who reads our genuine history, will verify is absolutely not deserved. An envy of those who are successful by working hard, by those who have perfected an entitlement complex.
If we keep voting for politicians who perpetuate these unsatisfactory traits, nothing will change. It all starts at the top and filters down.
I agree it is not the economy mate. It was the Treaty Principle Bill referendum that would have given NZers direction , but National tried to humiliate the proposer through tampering with the select committee process, and just not appearing in reality at the second reading . As for Potaka's cremation comment, that will keep.
Why has the PM got time for Keir Stammer over in Britain and NOT time to tell NZ what he didnt like about the TPM?. What on earth can NZ gain from Britain now that it is overrun with immigrants and graced by the NZ PM muddled logic
Or is he just escaping for easter in UK and away from. REALITY
OK, so I read Penn Raine on how it's not the economy, but discontent with race relations that is concerning people. And hey, if you're homeless and can't get a job, it's because of DEI... That is after I'd read Clive Bibby to the effect that it's Maori radicals who risk damaging NZ's reputation as a stable and reliable international partner. My conclusion is that both are indulging in wishful thinking: they want race relations to be the crisis that explains everything, rather than having evidence that it is. Race relations are the major priority of writers on this site - but it's basically a silo. For the majority, economic conditions are more important, and the recent international chaos is unlikely to lead to other countries zoning in on da dastardly Maori as NZ's weakness.
Anon 9:44.
Open your eyes and ears and realize that it really is " da dastardly Maori as NZ's weakness. "
Of that there is no question that Maori issues, grievances, and lack of achievement are dragging NZ into being even more of a Third World country.
The “heffalump” in the other western empire-controlled countries is the “open boarders/ immigration agenda”.
Talk to the citizens of those countries and you will find out what their most pressing concern is, and it ain’t the economy mate, even though their economy sucks.
You've nailed it, Penn, as there's none so deaf and blind as those that will not listen and see. Any improvement Luxon manages to make to the economy will be sucked out of us by that ever-expanding maorification vacuum. The cost of that to the economy has been in the $billions for decades and that is only going to grow and further divide our country unless it is addressed.
National and NZF are big on talk and very short on actual delivery. Goldsmith's recent remarks were just weasel words, dripping with do nothing other than appeasement. He refers to Maori as the tangata whenua when they clearly are not. As the Te Tirirti records, they are the "tangata maori" and perhaps he can explain why their own folklore refers to others that were here before them and why there’s so much secrecy regarding the findings and radiocarbon dating in the Waipoua forest and why is access always challenged and what of the several other instances of archaeological skeletal finds that have been wilfully obscured from publicity and inquiry? And, when he reaffirms the unsubstantiated claim “that the settlement payments reflect only a fraction of what was lost” perhaps he might like to explain precisely what and where, and how come so many full and final settlements were revisited? No, he and his leader are invertebrates who perpetuate mistruths and are not prepared to address the elephant in the room. And that elephant, no matter how well it’s fed and tended, is only growing more aggressive and more demanding in its requirements until we are truly torn asunder.
Not at all. The increase in rhetoric about Maori issues has arisen from Labour's mishandling of 3 Waters, and the self-interested activity of people like Julian Batchelor and especially ACT. David Seymour is all about getting ACT votes, nothing else. Not that I'm a great fan of Maori activists, but the recent stuff opposing them has been generated by people wanting to upset older pakeha NZers for their votes. I know some upset people, but the obsession with the issue is not especially widespread. Cost of living is still the biggie.
Separatism is already accepted and advanced by this Luxon led National with its constant reference to 'the Maori economy'. Will we start to see references to the Asian, Indian, Pacifica and Pakeha economies?
Nevertheless, after the TP Bill, the election campaign messages are starting:
i)Luxon is better than anyone else for the economy - so give him space
ii)the Left must be kept out of govt at any cost as they would ruin the economy again
iii) National voters moving to ACT ( due to the race relations issue) would be dividing the Right vote.
This may spook ordinary apathic voters who respond to an economic message not a social one.
Race relations may not be the prime cause of economic downturn but certainly a disproportionate contributor. Persons displaced in employment weigh their options. Many consider emigrating. A country ruled by maori, with maori favoured for positions, drawing excessively on the tax take, organised mass violence as response to any laws not especially favourable to them, others all second class citizens, schoolchildren brain washed with re imagined treaty and history, obsolete te reo at every turn, does not compare well, so off many go, leaving a house behind. The construction industry collapses further and creates more candidates for departure. It is absurd that teaching stone age te reo to remove persons from main stream, and then re-educating immersion students for the real world are major industries. To compound potential future race problems we have brought in large numbers whose religion precludes significant intergration.
You are right there, Robert.
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