Oh New Zealand, what have you done?
Roger Douglas on election night
fantasising about the mandate he thinks he has:
We have to make some changes and there’s going to be a lot of hurt for a lot of people.
What a cheek, coming from the scoundrel who lied his way into government in the eighties, unleashing an economic revolution without a democratic mandate, selling off New Zealand’s resources and devastating our democracy by stripping away government control over the flow of capital, effectively handing over the keys of democracy to private investors who can choose at any time to sink the country’s economy by moving capital out of the country if government policy is not conducive to their “business needs.”
In a
representative democracy it’s not democracy’s purpose to produce good government but to produce representative government. While I don’t expect much in the way of democracy from representative democracy
enough New Zealanders voted against their interests on Saturday to elect into government a multimillionaire merchant banker Prime Minister and his self-interested fat cat accomplices, including some of those who wreaked havoc on the New Zealand economy in the eighties and nineties. As a result New Zealanders can expect, amongst other things, a nastier society, a less fair society, more crime, more prisons, lower wages, more involvement in futile and immoral wars, a decline in the environment and less democracy. Garbage in, garbage out.
As you can tell, I’m over the moon that enough New Zealanders had, shall we say, the confidence to vote National (and ACT!) on Saturday. They must have missed my memo.
Notes:
There are a myriad of reasons I hope you don’t vote National this Saturday, such as their record on selling off the country or their keenness to send Kiwi kids off to get killed in illegal wars to curry favour, but if there’s just one reason it’s this: our democracy.
National wants to take away one of the things I’m most proud of about our country, our proportional electoral system, MMP.
“Representative democracy,” to my eyes, is a contradiction in terms and one day I hope we put this little stepping stone behind us and move onto the greener pastures of participatory democracy, but in the mean time a representative one is what we have and the move to MMP has made it enormously more effective as a democracy and given many more people a rightful say in the running of the country.
It’s something to be proud of and something I’ve really missed while living here in Britain. I have no doubt that if Britain and the U.S. had proportional voting systems, such as MMP, the Bush/Blair gang would never have been able to launch a war of aggression—the “supreme war crime“—against Iraq. And they may even have avoided the deregulation that led to the credit crunch.
If National gets their way we’ll go back to an undemocratic system where people who manage to gain power in parties like Labour and National can impose their narrow agendas on the rest of us at our expense. All the other really important things such as the economy, the environment and peace will cease to be matters up for debate. This is why the matter of democracy is so important.
You know what to do. Keep New Zealand democracy safe on Saturday, vote for somebody else.
I enjoy watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show but sometimes the confines of his liberal naivety drives me nuts.
Ian Sinclair on the problem with Jon Stewart:
Stewart is surely right to state the mainstream news media in the US is “hurting America”, as he did during a heated exchange on CNN’s now-defunct Crossfire in 2004. However, as a programme that is adversarial but always within very strict ideological boundaries, surely it is also true The Daily Show has its own role to play in what US dissident Noam Chomsky calls ‘the manufacture of consent’: “Thus far and no further”.
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