by Susanne Kemp
The Metiria Turei case certainly brought a lot of mean-spirited people with double standards out of the woodwork. People who vigorously defended John Key’s electoral fraud and Bill English’s rorting of the public purse for the polticians’ equivalent of accommodation supplement mounted their moral high horse to condemn Metiria Turei.
Unfortunately, people with these kinds of double standards have the power to inflict them on (more…)
by Don Franks (Rewrite of Blind Alfred Reed song)
There was never a time when everything was cheap
But these days the cost of living is so steep
If you’re stuck on a benefit
You just know that you’ll be hit
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Meritia used her platform for the poor
Like Oliver Twist, please sir, we want some more
The bourgeoisie wouldn’t let that ride
She was duly crucified
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Not so long ago , Labour was little lead
Now everywhere you look is blazing red
Well, you can believe the dazzling spin
Just remember what class you’re in
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Now in a few more days, we all get to vote
They say that means we’re all in the same boat
parliaments for the smug well dressed
Its not there for the dispossessed
Tell me – how can the poor folks stand such times and live?
Cartoon: Tom Scott/DominionPost
by Phil Duncan
Late this afternoon Green MP and party co-leader Metiria Turei announced that she was stepping down from the co-leader post and would be resigning as an MP as of the end of the current parliamentary term in a few weeks.
She said that the media intrusion and, in effect, harassment of whanau members had become too much and, in order to protect them from further media harassment, she was resigning. She also said that the Greens’ campaign against poverty was being undermined by the focus on her and so she was taking herself out of the equation.
Middle class loathing of the poor
Turei has been the victim of a sustained campaign of what is essentially class loathing on the part of chunks of the middle class towards the poorest sections of the working class, especially the brown working class poor. There has been a sustained campaign in the media, engineered by middle class pundits and commentators, people who predominantly would see themselves as “liberals”.
And Turei’s great sin? At the (more…)
Epitomising sanctimonious bourgeois respectability
by Phil Duncan
Labour is, politically, a respectable bourgeois party.
Sociologically, it is peopled largely by respectable liberal middle class people. Just take a look at the backgrounds of Labour MPs, the party’s top managers and new folks on the Labour party list for September.
They are overwhelmingly people who are thoroughly removed from the reality of poverty and people struggling to make ends meet.
They want all the poor people – people struggling to survive on the smell of an oily rag – to be respectably bourgeois like themselves. Such well-behaved poor people can then be grateful supplicants, looked after by the patronising Labour do-gooders.
And poor people who help themselves – like to a few extra bucks to feed their kids, as Metiria Turei did – are to be roundly condemned by respectable bourgeois like Jacinda Ardern and her idiot fan club.
Reminds me of the (more…)
Serious anti-capitalists – as opposed to people who are merely anti-Tory – don’t have illusions in the Labour Party of today. But it’s important to understand that today’s Labour Party is the logical development of the Labour Party of earlier days.
Take Labour’s last couple of years of racist campaigning against immigrants, especially those with “Chinese-sounding surnames”.
Labour, in its very first years, was at the forefront of a racist campaign to strengthen the White New Zealand policy directed against impoverished Chinese migrants. They were keen to make common cause with the Liberal and Reform parties against the Chinese. In fact, they were even keen to make common cause with Andrew Russell, the head of Massey’s Cossacks against the Chinese. See: Labour’s racist roots.
While the party’s racism was directed mainly at the Chinese, anti-Semitism was present as well. The first Labour government, for instance, wanted ‘Aryan’ immigrants rather than Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis.
by Daphna Whitmore
For Labour’s 34 MPs the odds of becoming leader are quite high. Yesterday, for the fifth time in nine years, the party dipped into its talent puddle to present a new saviour. It was Jacinda Ardern’s turn to work some magic. 
In the press gallery expectations were not high as Jacinda stepped up for her first press conference as leader. The reporters seemed genuinely amazed when Jacinda showed she could speak fluently about nothing much, and could even inject humour into the void.
Four months ago she was elected to be Labour’s shiny new deputy leader. With her face beaming down from the hoardings alongside the last leader, what’s-his-name, she was to bring some X-factor. Somehow the magic didn’t happen and the polls fell further. That was yesterday; today Labour is optimistic.
Labour is the most optimistic (more…)
by Phil Duncan
Well, according to the media – and there seems to be quite a consensus – the answer to the question above is a resounding ‘yes’. According to Tim Murphy, co-editor of Newsroom, policies adopted at last weekend’s Green Party AGM have “placed the Greens on the risky side of radical. Probably just where they want to be.”
According to TV1 political editor Corin Dann, the Greens have made “a bold statement on social justice”. On Spin-Off, Simon Wilson suggested, “For the left, which was looking like it was going to watch another election slide by, it was the most impressive statement of the year.” Columnist Stacey Kirk argues, Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei, is “counting on New Zealanders to not only voice concern over inequality, but to collectively do something about it that may go against the nature of their very core.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the most hyperbolic response has come from (more…)
