I have very little sympathy for members of parliament. I believe Billy Connelly's notion that the desire to become one should of itself be a disqualifying factor! He further emplores us not to vote for them, since it only encourages them. I have never held much store either with tales of opposition party members being friends, or believing that goodness resides in people who espouse abhorrent ideals.
In my view The Parliament should be a toxic environment. It should challenge with great force any member who attempts to introduce policies that harm others. For too long we have tolerated the idea that politics is a noble pursuit. It is nothing of the sort. Politics is murdering innocents across the face of this planet, every second of every minute, of every hour, each and every day of the year. And it’s not just bombs, bullets, and shrapnel doing the killing. These are just the visible extremes we are shown nightly on mass media. Innocents are being murdered daily by lack of access to medicine, fresh water, food, medical treatment. They are dying in their hundreds of thousands by the politics of oppression, denial, racism, homophobia, misogyny, religious intolerance, in fact they are being culled due to almost any political act that chooses to deliberately deny the distribution of resources in an equitable manner.
In Aotearoa we falsely believe we are a caring tolerant society when nothing could be further from the truth. Our current parliament illustrates this lie. We have parliamentarians who daily lie to the public that they have all New Zealanders interests at heart whilst enacting cuts to public services and denying workers an adequate wage for their contribution to the economy. A coalition who is taking money from those who can least afford it, by reintroducing prescription charges, putting up road user charges, eliminating free transport for school children, along with reducing access to free school lunches, and giving tax cut handouts to the already rich.
We have ministers of health who are reducing access to healthcare by slashing funding to hospitals and lie that it was a previous administrations fault. These same ministers are making it easier to buy products that are extremely harmful and will reduce life expectancy whilst lying that they are doing this to help people kick their addiction habits.
And we have a minister in Karen Chhour, who refuses point blank to recognise empirical evidence demonstrating ‘boot camps’ do not work, and worse still, evidence that they actually cause further violence to young people who have already suffered by the hands of whanau and/or care agencies.
Each of these acts are deliberate, mean-spirited, without any foundation in truth or reality and the outcomes of which are to increase the inequity and injustices of this society.
Māori in particular are vilified in this country unless they play the Pakeha game. A Te Pati Māori MP is challenged by a National member, not for what she has to say, but because she displays a Te Pati Māori sticker on her laptop. Meanwhile all ACT members wear their stickers as lapel badges and refuse to remove them. These same ACT members including Karen Chhour would like to completely rewrite Te Tiriti o Waitangi to suit their bigoted, outlier views and poor Karen cries crocodile tears when challenged for acting like the proverbial ‘Uncle Tom’.
Karen Chhour is the epitome of claimed victimhood. She along with her ACT acolytes would see Aotearoa transformed into a nasty self-centred society that offers simplistic answers to complex issues. A country that would strip away all pretence of a fairgo for all, whilst baldly lying that they have the common persons interest at heart.
I am glad that Karen Chhour has been reduced to reduced to tears. Her vile policies deserve to be called out for the destructive intent they represent. She deserves to be called out as the architect she is.
Those who seek to harm others deserve no sympathy, they deserve to be treated as the toxic people they are.
Wild and wonderfully well written, Mike. We currently have a worrying silence from our mainstream media with regard to the obvious cruel and shortsighted Tory/Atlas agenda that this crop of snide fools have foistered upon us in their short reign of terror. May it be bloody short. One term is too long. A louder and more strident rebuke of their daily clusterfuckery is warranted. Thank you for your insightful contribution.
I absolutely agree. It is shameful that the political and media establishment is bending the knee to this ridiculous counter-identity-politics tripe. It is very easy to easy to identify, but the journalists who work in this country are bad at writing and seeming not the sharpest sticks. If Chhour is reminded every day of the suffering she uses her constructed political identity to cosign then the world is a better place.