How can we still be talking about tax rates, defence spending and free speech? Have we forgotten what happened a mere five years ago? I suppose forgetting is a superpower. After all, as the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said, “without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it.” If only Cioran could see 2026.
In case you need reminding, the entire world was shut down in 2020 over a pathetic bedtime story known as Covid-19. Fake as it was, it hurt us deeply. When people are shown that their entire life efforts can be stopped at will, and there is no consequence at all, they start to realise that they’re little more than useless serfs. Then they ask whose farm they live on. And either they don’t like the answer, collapse into apathy or enter a hyperreal world where they shrug and say, “yeah, never mind, back to normal.”
The truth is, whatever the world was before Covid is gone forever. No set of magic tricks or public rituals can resurrect the 1990s, or even the 2010s. You can’t turn on the television, listen to politicians talk about nice, safe topics like taxes or free speech and expect those issues to matter again. They don’t matter. They are entertainment, hyperreal, irrelevant. We long ago stepped onto the train of a strange, semi-human future, but you didn’t feel it moving because you were distracted by the soothing sounds of “politics as usual.” We don’t know how to talk about this new world, so we choose to have discussions that let us pretend we still live in the old one.
Take one example. So far, tax is the big topic in this election. National and ACT are promising no additional taxes; NZ First is proposing a large SME company-tax cut; Labour is adding a targeted property CGT while offering small-business concessions; the Green and Maori Parties want to shift taxation toward wealth, high incomes and larger businesses; and Opportunity wants a land tax/Citizen’s Income model.
This all sounds so ridiculous to those of us who remember what happened during Covid. Need I remind you that, starting in March 2020, the Reserve Bank has printed new money (“quantitative easing”) every month since. The borrowing has not ceased. This printing reached a high-water mark in December 2021, then fell to a lower rate in May 2024 (still higher than when it began in March 2020) before once again climbing back to levels similar to its peak in 2021. Despite what the Government says, the money printing has not stopped. And yet we’re still talking about taxes?
Let’s get serious. They don’t need your money if they can just print it. That’s the reality. I always get a little laugh out of people who think taxes help to pay for state expenditure. I picture a little office somewhere with civil servants counting each note and coin… as opposed to someone at the RBNZ typing another number on a spreadsheet, which is what happens. Tax is not about revenue generation; it is about stealing 33% of your income so you can’t rise in social class. It is about keeping you as a serf, which Covid proved to all of us that we most certainly are.
Then there’s the fiery talk about “free speech.” Again, have we forgotten Covid? The problem during those painful years wasn’t the lies uttered by officials. It wasn’t that the entire planet was shut down for months. It wasn’t that every government parroted the same focus-grouped talking points. It wasn’t that the various media platforms throttled, banned and censored any speech they didn’t like. No. The key fact we learned during Covid was that all conversations are ultimately controlled by the US.
By this, I do not mean the US government. Washington has its vampiric fingers in many pies, sure. But the major builders of narrative structure always come from places like Harvard, Yale, Hollywood, Wall Street, Fox News, CNN, BlackRock and Vanguard. Even YouTube, Substack, Facebook and X (Twitter). All these vectors of “information” are American-owned. And all of them deliver the same narratives that drown out local New Zealand narratives and, therefore, New Zealand ideas.
Worse, even if some local voices manage to rise above the American cacophony, they are still forced to use American-owned media platforms, which operate over American-owned internet cables, all of which reside on the American-owned internet. The entire information system in today’s abnormal world is American-owned. That’s a huge problem, and almost no one is talking about it.
Covid revealed that there is only one internet, one owner of that internet and only one narrative allowed: American, American and American. How can you have free speech when only one entity controls the pipes and platforms that deliver that speech? Politics as normal in such an environment is ridiculous.
Then there’s the New Zealand Defence Force, or what used to be called the military. Over the past few weeks, the NZDF has been complaining about a lack of staffing, low recruitment figures and aging equipment. Politicians have picked up these talking points and seem to agree that the NZDF needs a boost. Even my old think tank, the NZ Initiative, has hired a retired Major General as a senior fellow to lobby for a stronger NZDF.
But I have to ask: why? Why should New Zealand bother to have a military at all?
What threats does New Zealand face, exactly? Be specific. If the answer is China, then why is 5.3% of New Zealand’s population Chinese? Why are three Chinese people presently serving as MPs in our Parliament? Why are 47% of international students at New Zealand universities ethnically Chinese? Why are we sending 25% of our total goods exports to Chinese markets? This doesn’t sound like China is an enemy, let alone an adversary.
The entire existence of the NZDF is yet another example of ridiculous politics as usual. The truth is New Zealand is not threatened by any country. It is a joke, a 20th-century LARP. And this joke started long before Covid. The NZDF is a joke because the result of the WWII Nuremberg trials was to make warfare itself illegal.
War is the ultima ratio regum – the last argument of kings – a kind of lawsuit, made not before a judge, but before God, the lord of all battles. As such, war has always been the foundational prerogative of a sovereign country.
But after 1945, no country, except for the US, is allowed to conduct respectable war as a tool of sovereign politics. At most, a country can defend itself, which is why New Zealand has a “defence force” rather than a military. If any government wants to use its armed forces, it must not call it war, because that’s illegal. Instead, we now have dozens of euphemisms, such as a “special military operation,” or a “surgical strike.” I’m sure you’ve also heard of “peacekeeping,” “humanitarian intervention,” “counterterrorism,” or “international assistance.”
These euphemisms hide the reality that the US is the only country that can conduct war, and therefore the US is the sole sovereign nation. No one else is allowed to solve political problems with force, and the force we are allowed to deploy is always insufficient, which is why it never solves anything politically. We don’t have a real military because we don’t have a sovereign nation, and it has been this way for 81 years. How can we pretend that politics as usual has returned when this is the context?
It is absurd. It makes everyone look silly. But until someone has the guts to speak honestly about the real framework of the new world in which we now live, we will keep turning insane bit by bit, like water dripping on a rock.
Nathan Smith is a British-born New Zealand journalist, writer, and editor. This article was sourced HERE
The truth is, whatever the world was before Covid is gone forever. No set of magic tricks or public rituals can resurrect the 1990s, or even the 2010s. You can’t turn on the television, listen to politicians talk about nice, safe topics like taxes or free speech and expect those issues to matter again. They don’t matter. They are entertainment, hyperreal, irrelevant. We long ago stepped onto the train of a strange, semi-human future, but you didn’t feel it moving because you were distracted by the soothing sounds of “politics as usual.” We don’t know how to talk about this new world, so we choose to have discussions that let us pretend we still live in the old one.
Take one example. So far, tax is the big topic in this election. National and ACT are promising no additional taxes; NZ First is proposing a large SME company-tax cut; Labour is adding a targeted property CGT while offering small-business concessions; the Green and Maori Parties want to shift taxation toward wealth, high incomes and larger businesses; and Opportunity wants a land tax/Citizen’s Income model.
This all sounds so ridiculous to those of us who remember what happened during Covid. Need I remind you that, starting in March 2020, the Reserve Bank has printed new money (“quantitative easing”) every month since. The borrowing has not ceased. This printing reached a high-water mark in December 2021, then fell to a lower rate in May 2024 (still higher than when it began in March 2020) before once again climbing back to levels similar to its peak in 2021. Despite what the Government says, the money printing has not stopped. And yet we’re still talking about taxes?
Let’s get serious. They don’t need your money if they can just print it. That’s the reality. I always get a little laugh out of people who think taxes help to pay for state expenditure. I picture a little office somewhere with civil servants counting each note and coin… as opposed to someone at the RBNZ typing another number on a spreadsheet, which is what happens. Tax is not about revenue generation; it is about stealing 33% of your income so you can’t rise in social class. It is about keeping you as a serf, which Covid proved to all of us that we most certainly are.
Then there’s the fiery talk about “free speech.” Again, have we forgotten Covid? The problem during those painful years wasn’t the lies uttered by officials. It wasn’t that the entire planet was shut down for months. It wasn’t that every government parroted the same focus-grouped talking points. It wasn’t that the various media platforms throttled, banned and censored any speech they didn’t like. No. The key fact we learned during Covid was that all conversations are ultimately controlled by the US.
By this, I do not mean the US government. Washington has its vampiric fingers in many pies, sure. But the major builders of narrative structure always come from places like Harvard, Yale, Hollywood, Wall Street, Fox News, CNN, BlackRock and Vanguard. Even YouTube, Substack, Facebook and X (Twitter). All these vectors of “information” are American-owned. And all of them deliver the same narratives that drown out local New Zealand narratives and, therefore, New Zealand ideas.
Worse, even if some local voices manage to rise above the American cacophony, they are still forced to use American-owned media platforms, which operate over American-owned internet cables, all of which reside on the American-owned internet. The entire information system in today’s abnormal world is American-owned. That’s a huge problem, and almost no one is talking about it.
Covid revealed that there is only one internet, one owner of that internet and only one narrative allowed: American, American and American. How can you have free speech when only one entity controls the pipes and platforms that deliver that speech? Politics as normal in such an environment is ridiculous.
Then there’s the New Zealand Defence Force, or what used to be called the military. Over the past few weeks, the NZDF has been complaining about a lack of staffing, low recruitment figures and aging equipment. Politicians have picked up these talking points and seem to agree that the NZDF needs a boost. Even my old think tank, the NZ Initiative, has hired a retired Major General as a senior fellow to lobby for a stronger NZDF.
But I have to ask: why? Why should New Zealand bother to have a military at all?
What threats does New Zealand face, exactly? Be specific. If the answer is China, then why is 5.3% of New Zealand’s population Chinese? Why are three Chinese people presently serving as MPs in our Parliament? Why are 47% of international students at New Zealand universities ethnically Chinese? Why are we sending 25% of our total goods exports to Chinese markets? This doesn’t sound like China is an enemy, let alone an adversary.
The entire existence of the NZDF is yet another example of ridiculous politics as usual. The truth is New Zealand is not threatened by any country. It is a joke, a 20th-century LARP. And this joke started long before Covid. The NZDF is a joke because the result of the WWII Nuremberg trials was to make warfare itself illegal.
War is the ultima ratio regum – the last argument of kings – a kind of lawsuit, made not before a judge, but before God, the lord of all battles. As such, war has always been the foundational prerogative of a sovereign country.
But after 1945, no country, except for the US, is allowed to conduct respectable war as a tool of sovereign politics. At most, a country can defend itself, which is why New Zealand has a “defence force” rather than a military. If any government wants to use its armed forces, it must not call it war, because that’s illegal. Instead, we now have dozens of euphemisms, such as a “special military operation,” or a “surgical strike.” I’m sure you’ve also heard of “peacekeeping,” “humanitarian intervention,” “counterterrorism,” or “international assistance.”
These euphemisms hide the reality that the US is the only country that can conduct war, and therefore the US is the sole sovereign nation. No one else is allowed to solve political problems with force, and the force we are allowed to deploy is always insufficient, which is why it never solves anything politically. We don’t have a real military because we don’t have a sovereign nation, and it has been this way for 81 years. How can we pretend that politics as usual has returned when this is the context?
It is absurd. It makes everyone look silly. But until someone has the guts to speak honestly about the real framework of the new world in which we now live, we will keep turning insane bit by bit, like water dripping on a rock.
Nathan Smith is a British-born New Zealand journalist, writer, and editor. This article was sourced HERE
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