Someone Else's Country

Serious Fun: The Life & Times of Alan Gibbs
Author: Paul Goldsmith
In this biography we are told how Alan made a $200 million dollar profit
from selling shares in Telecom (financed by a cheap Telecom loan) when he was a director. (There is a NZ Herald article on this).

I think this shows utter contempt for democracy and the tax payers of New Zealand.

And in 2012 here we go again. Key Government Mk1 refused to have Douglas in the Cabinet. Key Government Mk2 looks set to repeat Rogernomics ( as far as it can get away with it). We keep making the mistake of pointing the lens at the public spokespeople and forgetting to dig down to the puppet-masters, who must exist and who must straddle multiple elections and political structures. Did Don Brash wake up one morning and decide to roll his old mate Rodney? Where do the ideas come from? And are the NZ puppet-masters themselves merely puppets to some higher authority? That'd be the real story and it would be fascinating.

I'd like to think you're right that our values haven't changed, but actually I disagree: NZers may not consciously regard extremes of poverty and wealth as "normal and necessary", but in general they now ACCEPT them as "how it is"... and to a larger extent ignore the ramifications of the increasing rich/poor divide, and especially their part in contributing to it. in short, they're well on the way to a state of mind that does see this as "normal" - if not necessarily "necessary". Thank you Roger et al.

And the societal process of forgetting what changed and how it came about is part of the deliberate dumbing-down and disenfranchising of the ordinary citizen that is at the heart of the social engineering toolbox of the New Right: make people feel vaguely ashamed they were suckered into something they disagreed with and they will gladly ignore that it happened - that it is still happening.

It's like deja-vu - this is exactly what Australia went through under the Hawke/Keating government in the same time period.

What are the chances the same things happen to two completely different countries? It just goes to show you there are other people running things behind the scenes in probably most countries.