The on-going and recent scandals (Judith Collins & Oravida, Maurice Williamson & Donghua Lui, John Key & Dirty Politics....) in New Zealand that have swirled around the neo-liberal National Party government of Key, supported by the discredited political parties of ACT and United Futures, with a combined total of 18000 nation wide, and the Maori Party did not prevent their re-election in the September election. The result is still being analysed and the fall-out worried over by those on the Left of the political spectrum. However, I think that this article in The Guardian best explains why, despite the National Party offering no visible policy direction for New Zealand except for a "steady as she goes...don't rock the boat" campaign which, late in the campaign, held out the possibility of tax cuts in 2017 the electorate cast their Party vote for National.
The description of the personality that dominates the Neo-Liberal society is an exact description of those, like Key, Joyce, Collins, and Bennett, who are now stitching up deals with the "support parties" like ACT and United Futures to consolidate the striping of the State we have seen since 2008.
Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us
An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities
'We are forever
told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever
before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is
limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate
from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic
practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a
profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities.
Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have
taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become
normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple
statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality
traits and penalises others.
There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career
today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many
people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies
to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.
It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as
you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience
under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later,
people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that
they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can
lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take
responsibility for your own behaviour.
On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the
lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky
behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the
pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy
checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.
This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. (Hardly, sounds exactly like those at the head of the NZ National Party.)
Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level
(for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a
neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive
luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation
always being to extract more profit from the situation than your
competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional
commitment to the enterprise or organisation.
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature
of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting
their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced
aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance
anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a
growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in
what the sociologist Richard Sennett
has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults
display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities
(“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to
deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of
revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from
thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.
More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s
self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we
receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have
shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main
question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing
group of people, the answer is: no one.
Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just
try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting
increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An
increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and
ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of
our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the
success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to
be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.
A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends
on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely
with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom
as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale
of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the
pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise
freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom
we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of
this day and age.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman
neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so
free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before,
in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new
laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we
like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any
significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on
the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a
bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are
regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban
poultry-keeping.
Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be
successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to
look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting
before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who
turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as
crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who
wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she
should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary
school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?
There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and
values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and
essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed.
And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects
changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic
system is bringing out the worst in us.
These two graphics are clear demonstrations of the public debt under Key & English and where the wealth of nations concentrate when governments have no policy apart from tax cuts for the affluent and selling off the country's assets.
The public debt under the money speculator- "merchant banker"
Where the wealth accumulates with tax cuts and asset sales policies.
"And, as I said before, I will govern, I will dictate, I will do as I want..... you will obey."
As predicted John, PinoKeyo, Key has resorted to the last bastion of the desperate in his demonstration of his total disregard for political democracy in New Zealand by announcing the date of the referendum on his Asset Stripping policies to fall at the end of the parliamentary year with the results to be announced after Parliament has risen for the year and well after he has launched or completed much of his fire sale to his foreign asset stripping cronies activity.
PinoKeyo's attitude to democracy in New Zealand.
In conspiring to thwart and frustrate the will of the people Key has revealed his true nature- arrogant, cynical, politically corrupt and ignorant of the nature of democracy.
Mind you, his pronouncements on the nature of MMP and coalition governments have not inspired confidence in his comprehension of constitutional matters either as these comments in the NZ Herald demonstrate.
Nats look to 2014 governing options
Prime Minister John Key is mulling his options to form a Government
after 2014 following this morning’s spill in the Maori Party, including
claiming the largest party would have the “moral mandate” to govern. …
National’s support parties all have problems, with ACT in decline,
UnitedFuture deregistered and the Maori Party struggling after being
beaten into third place in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti by-election on Saturday.
That has led to speculation National may have to rely on NZ First to
govern after the next election. Key said …”But it’s been a funny thing. Ever since we’ve had MMP in
1996 the public have had a way of finding the Government that they want.
“It’s always been formed with the largest political party, so all of
those things might not hold true in 2014 but they equally might. “It’s not impossible we get 50 per cent [of the vote], it’s not
impossible we get a couple of partners we work with, it’s not impossible
political parties abstain. That is always possible to allow the largest
party to run a minority government. Key said the largest party had the
“moral mandate” to govern.
Here, Key argues, using the sort of spin we have come to expect from the Crosby-Textor manipulators, that any coalition that gains the majority in the House and can, therefore, form a Government would not be legitimate if National-ACT were to be the largest single opposition party in Parliament as the National-ACT bloc would have, not a legal or constitutional right to govern, but a "moral mandate". Which is arrant rubbish and political nonsense based on both arrogance and ignorance.
PS: The usual reliable sources have let slip that PinoKeyo, not helped by the slipping popularity of the National-ACT party in recent polls and internal polling indicating that his personal following has swung from a positive perception to one that is more obviously negative, was very hurt and was sporting a very burised ego at his last caucus when one of the members of the opposing camps (the ABC and ABJs) asked about the description of him as a"galloping colonial clot" by the large circulation conservative newspaper - The Daily Mail - when its journalist reported on his weekend overnighter with the Windsors of Balmoral. Even his attempt (no doubt on advice from Crosby-Textor) to make light of the accuracy of the observation was not received with the usual syncophantic applause he had been expecting.
This photograph and the quotation with it serves to remind John PinoKeyo of the source of his "Trust me, I'm the PM" mantra as he tried to hard sell his legalised spy on NZers legislation to the news papers and public.
