It is a common theme world-wide. The left abandoned the economic needs of the masses, preferring the middle class issues of gender, climate, etc. The masses had no one on their side, so the right (outside NZ) captured their discontent and directed it to right wing populism. Hence MAGA. In NZ Jacinda talked about child poverty but did nothing about it despite her huge popularity at the start.
I've found it a challenge to get important issues discussed. I've been (for 10+ years) proposing a simple complete solution to the MMP wasted votes issue (Second choice of party vote). Despite support from the 2023 electoral review, 'nobody' in the commentator class will even talk about it in public. An idea not rejected, just ignored.
I wonder whether that's not just my problem. How does anyone get left wing economic ideas discussed in the present political commentary environment ?
So it was a pleasure to read your article Bryce, you had so many important points to make that I have not often heard expressed. We are fortunate that you are in a position to have your voice widely (but not widely enough) heard.
You have to bear in mind that the colonialist regime is intrinsically hostile to democracy. Always has been and always will be. That is why its actual Head of State and the symbolic figurehead of the colonialist regime is a non-elected foreign monarch. That is why we have the 5% threshold on entry to the MMP parliament. That is why Maori were denied the vote until they were massively outnumbered by immigrant colonists. That is why the regime denied the vote to working class Pakeha until it had perfected its means of control over them. That is why the regime is even now toying with the idea of taking away Maori representation.
The economic crisis of colonialism will not be solved until the political structure of colonialism is dismantled, and the condition of the working class will not improve until the entire regime is swept away.
The "wasted vote" phenomenon is a stunning indictment of colonialist pseudo-democracy. Yes, some kind of single transferable party vote would address the problem. As would abolishing (not just lowering) the 5% threshold.
However such steps would only address the problem without fully solving it.
In the Westminster system every vote which does not go to a winning candidate or party is in reality a wasted vote. The voters choose a representative, and their choice is denied through the electoral process. We say that the majority has prevailed, but it is not the majority and they have not prevailed. The majority of voters do not get the candidate or the party for whom they voted, and when their choice does appear to be reflected in the seating arrangements of Parliament, in most cases the actions of that Parliament and the government that it forms are not at all what they anticipated.
May I suggest that your experience of the past ten years does indeed show the futility of trying to reform the present system. A "new" system must be built by the people themselves. Not exactly from scratch, because we have the basic model already working in our hapu and marae rangatiratanga institutions. Self-determined non-uniform constituencies, continuous election and the open ballot. That is our way forward.
No, I don't think so. Wasted party votes arise because the threshold is a vote-discarding one. Just a design shortcut to suit major parties I think. A second choice of party vote is all that is needed to completely eliminate the neede for wasted votes.
What happened? We all a bought house to live in and became petit-bourgeois, aspiring to own one or two more to feel good 'hosting' tenants while we hope for unearned and untaxed capital gain. We embrace gender and ethnicity campaigns as substitutes for economic struggles and say 'whanau' and 'motu' instead of 'family' and 'country' because it feels 'progressive' yet none of it threatens our economic status quo. Recall the private-school students joining in the mass marches for 'Black Lives Matter' in 2020, a safely foreign cause that gave us all the warm sense of righteousness, yet threatened nothing. But expect us to march for real economic revolution in New Zealand? Get real!
The neoliberals love that pseudo-progressive talk, because it keeps the discussion away from the economic issues they'd rather not discuss. I liked the whanau, motu vs family, country comment.
Yes. We even say 'petit-bourgeois' and 'status quo' instead of 'lower middle class ' and 'current situation ' because it feels 'knowlegeable' or 'au currant'.
Until the public are disabused of the household analogy, and accept that a currency issuing govt is not funded by taxes or bond sales, the left will continue to be nobbled by the "how you going to pay for it" riposte, and austerity will seem sensible. We need fundamental changes to the Public Finance act. Govt should stop issuing bonds, we no longer have a gold std currency that needs to be supported. Govt expenditure is not income constrained but real resource constrained. Furthermore the Independent reserve bank and its single lever ( interest rates) is primarily a tool for disciplining the labour market, the intent of raising rates is to cause unemployment. Its effect on inflation has no empirical support.
Yes we have broken markets. Embarrassingly so across supermarkets, the building industry, banks and so on. Where is the Commerce Commission? And if they are not out to ensure competitive markets, then who the hell is? Meanwhile we all pay the rentier tax.
The working classes have been abandoned by the left. And not just abandoned. The left hold their noses when contemplating their benighted, racist, transphobic, xenophobic, … and uneducated, brethren.
So the majority of the populace sees the traditional managerial classes, of the left and the right, as distracted and not up to the job of governing? Hardly a surprise.
But this didn’t come from nowhere.
From where I sit I can see the Mangere Bridge. Along with the BNZ tower in Wellington, these are monuments to the strike power of the unions - primarily the boilermakers in this case. The rest of New Zealand, frustrated and in amazement, watched these strikes drag on literally for years. 2 1/2 and about 6 years respectively, in the mid to late 1970s. The wharfies had done the labour movement no favours either with their strikes and thieving. Here was power without strategy, except “bring on the revolution, bruvver”. There was a mandate to break them, and the Employment Contracts Act did just this.
But the baby went out with the bath water. Removing power with this sledgehammer made life easier for employers, but, imo, has bitten us all. The existence of cheap labour removes the pressure for productivity improvements. Over time this compounds and now we are low down the pecking list of OECD countries as regard capital employed per worker.
But the left looked aside as they grew enchanted with other forms of awfulness of power; of oppressors and oppressed, DEI and the treaty. Now there are xenophobes and transphobes and climate deniers and racists under the bed to be concerned about. “Oh dear, top up my Chardonnay before I have another fit of the vapours. I was exposed to violence, such violence, in the tweets I just read between two fascists!”
Meanwhile the right fell under the spell of unregulated markets, a crude neoliberalism. Not as fully as the left on their gallop up a blind alley, but enough to be captured by corporate interests and to be inexplicably blind to actual outcomes.
Populism is a resultant mechanistic treasure of our democracy. It is where individuals get to say ‘a pox on both their houses’. It is a vote against the traditional ruling classes that creates a space for something else to emerge into.
Another great read! I went to watch the panel on YouTube and really enjoyed. Got very excited when Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger got mentioned becase I just finished it and it’s one of the best book on politics that I’ve read 📚
Chris Hipkins has left it a bit bloody late to convince me (anyone?) that he will lead a better govt than the current lot. He's been missing in action for the last 4 years, and offered no real alternative. Between them both Labour & National have been on the Neo-Liberal Highway for the last 40 years ( not just the last 3 years) with the resulting NZ we now see - poverty, homelessness, struggling health system, potholed roads and so on and so on. Please, where is a real socialist left-wing party?
Take a look at today's Richard Murphy's substack, The Politics of Care. He has posted an infographic - "The Unreasonable Man". https://substack.com/home/post/p-211842441
The comfortable will not bother to change things - they are sorted. It is the unreasonable person who will instigate change, even in the face of opposition.
"Where is the left?" is the wrong question. The left is where it has always been, doing what it has always been doing. Trying to find a sweet spot in the center, writing increasingly abstruse philosophical articles, smoking a bit of weed, bagging each other for being pseudo-left or ultra-left or whatever. In a word, the left is busily avoiding reality.
The question that really needs to be asked is "Where are the people?" What are they doing? What are they not doing?
Nearly one in three are not voting. Among the younger generation that becomes nearly one in two. Why the young in particular? Because while the behavior of older generations is conditioned by the way things were, the young live in and perceive the present reality. They do not remember Holland, Savage, Fraser or Kirk or even Lange. They have never experienced public election meetings in the town hall. They have no memories of mass political parties or politicians who actually listen to what ordinary people are saying and feeling. All they know is slick, or not so slick, presentations on mass media by phony politicians, and at least half of them don't want any part of it.
What about those who have not yet dropped out of the voting class? They can see, or at least sense, the problem and that is why some of them are attracted to Opportunity.
New Zealand is going nowhere. It is like a cyclist sitting at the lights, constantly shifting weight from one side to the other, from left to right, just to maintain balance while not moving forward a bloody inch. The voters intuitively know that forward movement can provide balance. Any sort of forward movement sounds better than none, and Opportunity promises an end to the lurching, the "flip flops", or the "swings". How are they going to do that? Beats me. They themselves probably have no idea. But they have caught the mood of the nation which wants some kind of forward movement, and virtually any kind will do.
Look to the right (or if you like, the other parties of the right) as well. The right senses that the public is tired and distrustful of the social side of neo-liberalism. The world of the beautiful people, the Haight Ashbury world, has turned to squalor. We all know it. We could all see that only "authoritarian" Iran was able to stand up to the mad amoral blood-letting of the "Epstein class" of Netanyahu, Trump, Hegseth and Rubio, though we have yet to draw the obvious conclusions. Even if we haven't publicly acknowledged the fact, we all know in our hearts that social liberalism has turned into a chamber of horrors. Yet because the left cannot surrender its uncritical attachment to social liberalism, it leaves the door wide open to the mindless oppression and outright cruelty of the right.
The people will sort this one out. They can get there without the help of the left. If the left want to come along for the ride, that will be good (for the left). If the left want to stay behind smoking weed, swilling chardonnay and posting arcane articles on the web, the people are better off without them.
The left need a good slapping and the right need to get on and demand competition in their darling markets. Otherwise, get out of the way. The only thing I can imagine that would be worse is the Chardonnay sippers sitting at the boardroom tables with their neoliberal colleagues, accompanied by the iwi elites, chowing down. We might get real guillotines in downtown Auckland then.
Your thought about the people will sort this one out has me thinking that a spiritual leader who promised prosperity and stability could be a result if enough people support the idea. While NZ is secular the USA still has powerful religious voices so it wouldn't take much in the way of adverse events for the majority to start blaming a minority for their problems and to start insisting that they have the recipe for success. While I believe that the government should not be involved in supporting religion in any way because history and current theocratic governments around the world show that they are a disaster for human rights the old saying about history repeating would suggest that it could happen again under certain conditions.
"Minority" and "majority" are not very meaningful social categories, so I don't really know what you are getting at here. If you could be more precise, and talk about ethnic groups, socio-economic classes, or even religious or political persuasions it would be more helpful.
Apart from that, it seems that you have missed my point. "Theocratic" governments are not a disaster for human rights. One could just as well argue that secular governments have been. Take Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Trump's America (yes, the US is still a secular state despite the fact that religion remains a powerful influence upon American society).
We need to have an informed discussion on the proper or most appropriate relations between the political and the spiritual realms. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, large elements of the left had a more nuanced and profound understanding of how the spiritual related to the political. Take a look at the early leadership of the New Zealand Labour Party. You will find Catholics, Presbyterians, Salvation Army, other non-conformist Protestants and of course a smattering of Marxists and atheistic secularists. Now, when most if not all of them are of the atheist/secularist persuasion, the NZLP has completely lost its way.
Failure to relate intelligently to religion was also one of the prime causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet it seems the left has learned nothing from that experience.
Sorry for the late reply. I was trying to be brief in my comment on the theory that people are more likely to read it if it's not too long. I just want people to consider if there might be other answers to the issues in society.
I could have used peer pressure instead of majority and minority to explain that in almost any situation the loudest voices tend to get listened to and people are more likely to follow a confidant leader even if they have flaws over someone with humility who might have the truth.
Yes I should have included that secular states can be a disaster for human rights although I thought that most people know that already. I see the real danger coming from those who profess religion where they can justify all sorts of evil in the name of God, the dark ages is just one example of that. I am a conservative Christian so I believe that spiritual values should be considered in political decisions although Jesus also said that His kingdom was not of this world along with calling us to serve Him because we love him which is why I reject any idea that the government should be allowed to force any form of worship on the population. I take a historicist view of prophecy which explains that the final issue will be over true and false worship as a church state combination develops. I also take Jesus words in John 10:16 seriously as I believe that decent people are across all of society who need a revelation of the goodness of God and His eternal answers to the current existence of evil. With our secular society and promotion of evolution along with the failures in religions God is viewed as a tyrannical figure who wants to condemn us by most people so it's important that a true message of God and His plan of salvation is available so people can make informed choices regarding their future.
There is a lot to canvas in your comment. I concur that "spiritual values should be considered in political decisions" and my own understanding of the proper relationship between the spiritual and temporal/ church and state is that outlined in Genesis 4. That is to say that the civil authority (in the person of Cain) was under an obligation to keep or protect the spiritual authority (in the person of Abel). Cain, of course, took the opposite path. Thus the aggressively secular state seeks to suppress religion, to its cost, and a state which sets up a "state religion" or an "established religion" is really no different to the secular state which seeks to suppress religion, because by that very determination of an "approved religion", it circumscribes and seeks to dominate the spiritual side of humankind, intruding into a realm where it has no legitimate authority. The first duty of the civil authority is to protect the freedom of religion. It's second duty is to take account of spiritual teachings in the way that it administers the state. It must act with compassion and moral integrity, or, to a Christian, in accordance with the teachings of Christ.
If NZ doesn't get a left populist soon the right populist will be laughing all the way to the ballot box! Struggling kiwis will have already been captured by the right. Might be too late already.....
Iain is correct we also need to address the issue that cutting social programmes is a choice not a balancing of the books imperative, and we can fund those programmes in a much more efficient way.
The 1984 reforms are most notable for dissolving the bounded nation. The problem the left has is that they cannot ascribe any problem to "too many" or cultural incompatibility. Eg the Falkland Is have 2x GDP/ Capita of the UK. Add another 20,000 people and you lower living standards.
Likewise, NZ (last bus stop before Antarctica may have reached a peak in the 1960's but we kept adding people.
For the last 2 million years humans have lived in small tribal groups; there has been an us and a them. We admit them when it is a net benefit to us. When you break that, you break trust.
Labours universalist ideology favors defectors, such as, an export education industry that dangles work and residency to people from the overcrowded 3rd world and Harcourts Shanghai.
It is a common theme world-wide. The left abandoned the economic needs of the masses, preferring the middle class issues of gender, climate, etc. The masses had no one on their side, so the right (outside NZ) captured their discontent and directed it to right wing populism. Hence MAGA. In NZ Jacinda talked about child poverty but did nothing about it despite her huge popularity at the start.
I've found it a challenge to get important issues discussed. I've been (for 10+ years) proposing a simple complete solution to the MMP wasted votes issue (Second choice of party vote). Despite support from the 2023 electoral review, 'nobody' in the commentator class will even talk about it in public. An idea not rejected, just ignored.
I wonder whether that's not just my problem. How does anyone get left wing economic ideas discussed in the present political commentary environment ?
So it was a pleasure to read your article Bryce, you had so many important points to make that I have not often heard expressed. We are fortunate that you are in a position to have your voice widely (but not widely enough) heard.
You have to bear in mind that the colonialist regime is intrinsically hostile to democracy. Always has been and always will be. That is why its actual Head of State and the symbolic figurehead of the colonialist regime is a non-elected foreign monarch. That is why we have the 5% threshold on entry to the MMP parliament. That is why Maori were denied the vote until they were massively outnumbered by immigrant colonists. That is why the regime denied the vote to working class Pakeha until it had perfected its means of control over them. That is why the regime is even now toying with the idea of taking away Maori representation.
The economic crisis of colonialism will not be solved until the political structure of colonialism is dismantled, and the condition of the working class will not improve until the entire regime is swept away.
The "wasted vote" phenomenon is a stunning indictment of colonialist pseudo-democracy. Yes, some kind of single transferable party vote would address the problem. As would abolishing (not just lowering) the 5% threshold.
However such steps would only address the problem without fully solving it.
In the Westminster system every vote which does not go to a winning candidate or party is in reality a wasted vote. The voters choose a representative, and their choice is denied through the electoral process. We say that the majority has prevailed, but it is not the majority and they have not prevailed. The majority of voters do not get the candidate or the party for whom they voted, and when their choice does appear to be reflected in the seating arrangements of Parliament, in most cases the actions of that Parliament and the government that it forms are not at all what they anticipated.
May I suggest that your experience of the past ten years does indeed show the futility of trying to reform the present system. A "new" system must be built by the people themselves. Not exactly from scratch, because we have the basic model already working in our hapu and marae rangatiratanga institutions. Self-determined non-uniform constituencies, continuous election and the open ballot. That is our way forward.
No, I don't think so. Wasted party votes arise because the threshold is a vote-discarding one. Just a design shortcut to suit major parties I think. A second choice of party vote is all that is needed to completely eliminate the neede for wasted votes.
https://onthethreshold.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/211756869?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fpublished
The link you gave is to a "private page" which I have not been able to access. Can you explain exactly how "a second choice of party vote" would work?
Thank you for your reply. I am still getting my head around how substack works.
Go to ott.nz
Try this link.
https://onthethreshold.substack.com/p/a-solution-to-two-mmp-design-issues?r=l6v8c
Please let me know if it works
What happened? We all a bought house to live in and became petit-bourgeois, aspiring to own one or two more to feel good 'hosting' tenants while we hope for unearned and untaxed capital gain. We embrace gender and ethnicity campaigns as substitutes for economic struggles and say 'whanau' and 'motu' instead of 'family' and 'country' because it feels 'progressive' yet none of it threatens our economic status quo. Recall the private-school students joining in the mass marches for 'Black Lives Matter' in 2020, a safely foreign cause that gave us all the warm sense of righteousness, yet threatened nothing. But expect us to march for real economic revolution in New Zealand? Get real!
The neoliberals love that pseudo-progressive talk, because it keeps the discussion away from the economic issues they'd rather not discuss. I liked the whanau, motu vs family, country comment.
Yes. We even say 'petit-bourgeois' and 'status quo' instead of 'lower middle class ' and 'current situation ' because it feels 'knowlegeable' or 'au currant'.
But yet you Bryce Edward's are hypocritical in your criticism, because you also will not touch the money system issue.
Until the public are disabused of the household analogy, and accept that a currency issuing govt is not funded by taxes or bond sales, the left will continue to be nobbled by the "how you going to pay for it" riposte, and austerity will seem sensible. We need fundamental changes to the Public Finance act. Govt should stop issuing bonds, we no longer have a gold std currency that needs to be supported. Govt expenditure is not income constrained but real resource constrained. Furthermore the Independent reserve bank and its single lever ( interest rates) is primarily a tool for disciplining the labour market, the intent of raising rates is to cause unemployment. Its effect on inflation has no empirical support.
Hi Bryce
Yes we have broken markets. Embarrassingly so across supermarkets, the building industry, banks and so on. Where is the Commerce Commission? And if they are not out to ensure competitive markets, then who the hell is? Meanwhile we all pay the rentier tax.
The working classes have been abandoned by the left. And not just abandoned. The left hold their noses when contemplating their benighted, racist, transphobic, xenophobic, … and uneducated, brethren.
So the majority of the populace sees the traditional managerial classes, of the left and the right, as distracted and not up to the job of governing? Hardly a surprise.
But this didn’t come from nowhere.
From where I sit I can see the Mangere Bridge. Along with the BNZ tower in Wellington, these are monuments to the strike power of the unions - primarily the boilermakers in this case. The rest of New Zealand, frustrated and in amazement, watched these strikes drag on literally for years. 2 1/2 and about 6 years respectively, in the mid to late 1970s. The wharfies had done the labour movement no favours either with their strikes and thieving. Here was power without strategy, except “bring on the revolution, bruvver”. There was a mandate to break them, and the Employment Contracts Act did just this.
But the baby went out with the bath water. Removing power with this sledgehammer made life easier for employers, but, imo, has bitten us all. The existence of cheap labour removes the pressure for productivity improvements. Over time this compounds and now we are low down the pecking list of OECD countries as regard capital employed per worker.
But the left looked aside as they grew enchanted with other forms of awfulness of power; of oppressors and oppressed, DEI and the treaty. Now there are xenophobes and transphobes and climate deniers and racists under the bed to be concerned about. “Oh dear, top up my Chardonnay before I have another fit of the vapours. I was exposed to violence, such violence, in the tweets I just read between two fascists!”
Meanwhile the right fell under the spell of unregulated markets, a crude neoliberalism. Not as fully as the left on their gallop up a blind alley, but enough to be captured by corporate interests and to be inexplicably blind to actual outcomes.
Populism is a resultant mechanistic treasure of our democracy. It is where individuals get to say ‘a pox on both their houses’. It is a vote against the traditional ruling classes that creates a space for something else to emerge into.
Another great read! I went to watch the panel on YouTube and really enjoyed. Got very excited when Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger got mentioned becase I just finished it and it’s one of the best book on politics that I’ve read 📚
Chris Hipkins has left it a bit bloody late to convince me (anyone?) that he will lead a better govt than the current lot. He's been missing in action for the last 4 years, and offered no real alternative. Between them both Labour & National have been on the Neo-Liberal Highway for the last 40 years ( not just the last 3 years) with the resulting NZ we now see - poverty, homelessness, struggling health system, potholed roads and so on and so on. Please, where is a real socialist left-wing party?
Take a look at today's Richard Murphy's substack, The Politics of Care. He has posted an infographic - "The Unreasonable Man". https://substack.com/home/post/p-211842441
The comfortable will not bother to change things - they are sorted. It is the unreasonable person who will instigate change, even in the face of opposition.
Excellent discussion starter Bryce. Yes to the focus on getting all those kiwi who are not on a roll on the Electoral Roll
"Where is the left?" is the wrong question. The left is where it has always been, doing what it has always been doing. Trying to find a sweet spot in the center, writing increasingly abstruse philosophical articles, smoking a bit of weed, bagging each other for being pseudo-left or ultra-left or whatever. In a word, the left is busily avoiding reality.
The question that really needs to be asked is "Where are the people?" What are they doing? What are they not doing?
Nearly one in three are not voting. Among the younger generation that becomes nearly one in two. Why the young in particular? Because while the behavior of older generations is conditioned by the way things were, the young live in and perceive the present reality. They do not remember Holland, Savage, Fraser or Kirk or even Lange. They have never experienced public election meetings in the town hall. They have no memories of mass political parties or politicians who actually listen to what ordinary people are saying and feeling. All they know is slick, or not so slick, presentations on mass media by phony politicians, and at least half of them don't want any part of it.
What about those who have not yet dropped out of the voting class? They can see, or at least sense, the problem and that is why some of them are attracted to Opportunity.
New Zealand is going nowhere. It is like a cyclist sitting at the lights, constantly shifting weight from one side to the other, from left to right, just to maintain balance while not moving forward a bloody inch. The voters intuitively know that forward movement can provide balance. Any sort of forward movement sounds better than none, and Opportunity promises an end to the lurching, the "flip flops", or the "swings". How are they going to do that? Beats me. They themselves probably have no idea. But they have caught the mood of the nation which wants some kind of forward movement, and virtually any kind will do.
Look to the right (or if you like, the other parties of the right) as well. The right senses that the public is tired and distrustful of the social side of neo-liberalism. The world of the beautiful people, the Haight Ashbury world, has turned to squalor. We all know it. We could all see that only "authoritarian" Iran was able to stand up to the mad amoral blood-letting of the "Epstein class" of Netanyahu, Trump, Hegseth and Rubio, though we have yet to draw the obvious conclusions. Even if we haven't publicly acknowledged the fact, we all know in our hearts that social liberalism has turned into a chamber of horrors. Yet because the left cannot surrender its uncritical attachment to social liberalism, it leaves the door wide open to the mindless oppression and outright cruelty of the right.
The people will sort this one out. They can get there without the help of the left. If the left want to come along for the ride, that will be good (for the left). If the left want to stay behind smoking weed, swilling chardonnay and posting arcane articles on the web, the people are better off without them.
The left need a good slapping and the right need to get on and demand competition in their darling markets. Otherwise, get out of the way. The only thing I can imagine that would be worse is the Chardonnay sippers sitting at the boardroom tables with their neoliberal colleagues, accompanied by the iwi elites, chowing down. We might get real guillotines in downtown Auckland then.
Your thought about the people will sort this one out has me thinking that a spiritual leader who promised prosperity and stability could be a result if enough people support the idea. While NZ is secular the USA still has powerful religious voices so it wouldn't take much in the way of adverse events for the majority to start blaming a minority for their problems and to start insisting that they have the recipe for success. While I believe that the government should not be involved in supporting religion in any way because history and current theocratic governments around the world show that they are a disaster for human rights the old saying about history repeating would suggest that it could happen again under certain conditions.
"Minority" and "majority" are not very meaningful social categories, so I don't really know what you are getting at here. If you could be more precise, and talk about ethnic groups, socio-economic classes, or even religious or political persuasions it would be more helpful.
Apart from that, it seems that you have missed my point. "Theocratic" governments are not a disaster for human rights. One could just as well argue that secular governments have been. Take Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Trump's America (yes, the US is still a secular state despite the fact that religion remains a powerful influence upon American society).
We need to have an informed discussion on the proper or most appropriate relations between the political and the spiritual realms. Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, large elements of the left had a more nuanced and profound understanding of how the spiritual related to the political. Take a look at the early leadership of the New Zealand Labour Party. You will find Catholics, Presbyterians, Salvation Army, other non-conformist Protestants and of course a smattering of Marxists and atheistic secularists. Now, when most if not all of them are of the atheist/secularist persuasion, the NZLP has completely lost its way.
Failure to relate intelligently to religion was also one of the prime causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet it seems the left has learned nothing from that experience.
Sorry for the late reply. I was trying to be brief in my comment on the theory that people are more likely to read it if it's not too long. I just want people to consider if there might be other answers to the issues in society.
I could have used peer pressure instead of majority and minority to explain that in almost any situation the loudest voices tend to get listened to and people are more likely to follow a confidant leader even if they have flaws over someone with humility who might have the truth.
Yes I should have included that secular states can be a disaster for human rights although I thought that most people know that already. I see the real danger coming from those who profess religion where they can justify all sorts of evil in the name of God, the dark ages is just one example of that. I am a conservative Christian so I believe that spiritual values should be considered in political decisions although Jesus also said that His kingdom was not of this world along with calling us to serve Him because we love him which is why I reject any idea that the government should be allowed to force any form of worship on the population. I take a historicist view of prophecy which explains that the final issue will be over true and false worship as a church state combination develops. I also take Jesus words in John 10:16 seriously as I believe that decent people are across all of society who need a revelation of the goodness of God and His eternal answers to the current existence of evil. With our secular society and promotion of evolution along with the failures in religions God is viewed as a tyrannical figure who wants to condemn us by most people so it's important that a true message of God and His plan of salvation is available so people can make informed choices regarding their future.
Kia ora Clive
There is a lot to canvas in your comment. I concur that "spiritual values should be considered in political decisions" and my own understanding of the proper relationship between the spiritual and temporal/ church and state is that outlined in Genesis 4. That is to say that the civil authority (in the person of Cain) was under an obligation to keep or protect the spiritual authority (in the person of Abel). Cain, of course, took the opposite path. Thus the aggressively secular state seeks to suppress religion, to its cost, and a state which sets up a "state religion" or an "established religion" is really no different to the secular state which seeks to suppress religion, because by that very determination of an "approved religion", it circumscribes and seeks to dominate the spiritual side of humankind, intruding into a realm where it has no legitimate authority. The first duty of the civil authority is to protect the freedom of religion. It's second duty is to take account of spiritual teachings in the way that it administers the state. It must act with compassion and moral integrity, or, to a Christian, in accordance with the teachings of Christ.
If NZ doesn't get a left populist soon the right populist will be laughing all the way to the ballot box! Struggling kiwis will have already been captured by the right. Might be too late already.....
Iain is correct we also need to address the issue that cutting social programmes is a choice not a balancing of the books imperative, and we can fund those programmes in a much more efficient way.
The 1984 reforms are most notable for dissolving the bounded nation. The problem the left has is that they cannot ascribe any problem to "too many" or cultural incompatibility. Eg the Falkland Is have 2x GDP/ Capita of the UK. Add another 20,000 people and you lower living standards.
Likewise, NZ (last bus stop before Antarctica may have reached a peak in the 1960's but we kept adding people.
For the last 2 million years humans have lived in small tribal groups; there has been an us and a them. We admit them when it is a net benefit to us. When you break that, you break trust.
Labours universalist ideology favors defectors, such as, an export education industry that dangles work and residency to people from the overcrowded 3rd world and Harcourts Shanghai.
Rubbish to your claims about immigration concerns. You confuse proximate and distall causes.
https://youtu.be/pVmRZAcuvCM
Argue against Eric Kaufmann
https://youtu.be/Ckdzejrc0z8