John McLean: Pity The Young

The category conspicuously absent from Woke’s hierarchy of victimhood

Youth doesn’t feature in Woke’s whacky matrix of discrimination and privilege, victimhood and oppression. Which says it all about the analytic uselessness of Woke Intersectionality. Because in the Western Word, and in New Zealand in particular, young people are as hard done by as any other group.

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A significant underlying driver of New Zealand’s neglect of younger people’s particular interests is that - like it or not - the minimum voting age is 18. That voting age means under-18s are simply not a constituency that political parties seek to please for ballot box support.

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government kept the Auckland region in COVID lockdown for more than three and a half months from mid-August until December 2021. That authoritarian action had many deleterious effects, including cutting off economically deprived Northland from the rest of New Zealand. The main reason for the COVIDtariat keeping Auckland in lockdown and cutting off Northland was to cajole young people into getting the COVID jab, ostensibly in order to increase vaccination rates and help protect COVID-vulnerable people (basically, old people and others likely to die within a couple of years of something other than COVID).

To put the Governmental COVID incarceration in chronological context, from mid-2021 Ardern’s Government knew full well that the risks to young people’s hearts from COVID vaccination far exceed the negligible risks that children and youths face from the virus itself. But regardless of those risks, the Government coerced vaccination of young people in order (apparently) to protect others. This represents a clear, deliberate and egregious transgression of Medical Ethics 101 – don’t force experimental medication on kids for the supposed benefit of others.

But the “jab the kids to protect the kuia” is just one example of how New Zealand has neglected, and continues to neglect, the interests of its children and young people.

COVID lockdowns caused New Zealand youths disproportionate harm in myriad other ways. It socially isolated them and harmed their education, at crucial stages of their development. It saddled future generations with national debt that is now costing New Zealand about $10 billion per year in interest, just to service. That’s money that could otherwise be spent on improving the prospects of New Zealand’s young’uns (education, mental health support, housing and accommodation etc.)

To compound youngsters’ distress, teachers indoctrinate their students with unscientific climate change catastrophisation and environmental alarmism, together with divisive Woke notions of white privilege and brown-skinned victimhood.

But it’s of course not only teachers who are trying to scare New Zealand’s adolescents. Chief among the Catastrophists is former Prime Minister, Calamity Clark. Helen Clark’s latest catastrophizing is to lie that New Zealanders, including young people, are at imminent peril from an outbreak of a rat-spread disease on a small cruise ship, and a re-emergence in the UnDemocratic Republic of Congo of the Ebola virus, a disease only spreadable by intimate physical contact and body fluids. Calm the Farm, Harridan Helen.

In the mid-70s, New Zealand inexplicably abandoned phonics as a trusted and proven method of teaching children to read. Phonics involves teaching students to recognise letters and the distinct sound each letter creates, in order to sound out the letters into words they already recognize. All eminently logical and effective. I still remember the exhilaration of learning to read that way.

Phonics was ditched in favour of a “whole language” approach under which children were expected to miraculously learn how to read by simply enjoying a “language rich environment”, looking at pictures with words and having books in the classroom. This crazy experiment, which continued for almost 50 years until the 2020s, left hordes of New Zealanders functionally unable to read and write i.e., illiterate.

The architect of this prolonged educational disaster was Dame Marie Mildred Clay, who completed a PhD at Auckland University in 1966, with her doctoral thesis entitled Emergent reading behaviour.

Clay’s crazy illiteracy cult spread as far as the United States, where it has had the same disastrous effects. In 2022, the University of Delaware’s Centre for Research in Education and Social Policy presented the results of a study on the long-term effects of “whole language” teaching, concluding that the “long-term impact estimates were significant and negative”. Someone should do a doctorate on how Clay’s zealous charlatanism was allowed to infect New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, for almost half a century.

Meanwhile, at the other end of human lifespans, New Zealand continues to pay universal, unaffordable national superannuation to everyone over the age of 65, including millionaires and old-ish-ies with continuing lucrative careers. The public purse and burgeoning national debt continues to fund all 65+ers, currently to the tune of about $24 billion annually. This is all money that isn’t helping New Zealand’s up-and-comers - welfare for myriad well-off oldies, when New Zealand is insolvent and having to borrow simply to service the interest cost of its debt.

To the extent youths have deficiencies, it’s overwhelmingly adults who are guilty of making them what they are. Helicopter mothers with their ever present EpiPens and the suffocating Nanny State have denuded young people of personal agency. Successive Governments have imbued citizens, from their youth, with a sense of entitlement that the State must provide, we are supplicant to The Man, we are all just defenseless and deserving dependents.

By wrapping the country in bureaucratic red-tape, making Safe & Conformity a new religion and neglecting (or being actively hostile towards) entrepreneurial businesses that produce genuine wealth, successive Governments for the last half century have failed to create job opportunities to stop aspiring young New Zealanders leaving for brighter futures in foreign lands.

The education system continues to gaslight children with the patently crazy notion that New Zealand’s secret to success lies in nine tatty historic sheets of paper - the Treaty of Waitangi.

What can be done to improve the parlous position and prospects of New Zealand’s young?

First, drastically reduce electricity prices, which will ignite credible economic activity (old fashioned manufacturing and the like) and drastically reduce the cost of living for everyone, including the young. Construct a nuclear power plant at Huntly within a decade and small modular reactors (SMRs) at other appropriate sites around New Zealand e.g. Northland. Subsidize roof-top solar panels. Build more hydroelectric dams.

As a collective, New Zealand must crush Woke Identitarianism and promote national unity by actively encouraging patriotic nationalism and discouraging the divisive Te Tiriti/Tangata Whenua/Tangata Tiriti twaddle.

The Government should write off chunks of student debt for New Zealanders who remain in New Zealand. (Most student debt is unrecoverable.)

Means testing national superannuation will save money and send a powerful symbolic message that New Zealand cares about its up-and-comers.

Let’s legislate to allow living wills for dementia, such that competent adults can elect to be put out of their vegetative misery, if and when that time comes. That’ll save billions, for re-allocation to the young thrusters, including to vocational training (not vacuous University degrees).

New Zealand must settle with Northland’s Ngapuhi tribe, resolve all other current Maori land claims and, once done, have a massive national day of celebration, focused on New Zealand’s bright future. Then abolish the Waitangi Tribunal.

Lastly, my unsolicited advice for the Opportunity Party and its leader Qiulae Wong...remodel OP as a party solely dedicated to serving the interests of New Zealanders under 35 years of age. Cut the OP’s Labour adjacency. Doing so would give OP a reasonable chance of getting over the 5% MMP threshold at the November election, and achieving Parliamentary power to genuinely serve the vital interests of younger New Zealanders.

John McLean is a citizen typist and enthusiastic amateur who blogs at John's Substack where this article was sourced