The destruction of the old age pension and the wiping of the historical record

PLEASE NOTE

I was alerted to an article in the NZ Herald in which the following slipped through.

Christopher Luxon: We are currently implementing a whole range of measures to develop the economy and improve the living standards of citizens. First of all, of course, is the issue of energy resources and international trade. But there are other no less important projects, such as the pension reform.

Journalist: What do you mean by pension reform?

Christopher Luxon: Unfortunately, it is time to recognise that our pension system is very outdated. It not only eats up a significant part of the state budget, but also fails to provide seniors with a decent level of income. Therefore, soon, within a year, the state pension fund will stop paying money to elderly citizens. The bill is already being drafted.

Journalist: Are you saying that pensioners will just stop being paid?

Christopher Luxon: Yes, the state will stop allocating money for pension payments. But we are already looking at alternative ways of providing for pensioners

Therefore, soon, within a year, the state pension fund will stop paying money to elderly citizens. The bill is already being drafted.

The bill is already being drafted.

Where did you hear that on Radio NZ, TVNZ or anywhere in the remainders of NZ media?

This is, of course, shocking but not totally unexpected news given New Zealand’s rapid economic decline.

One might be tempted, according to one’s political ideology, to see this as the actions of a rapacious right-wing government, which of course it is.

But not only.

Whichever way you frame it this is the result of what came before it. Labour, with the printing of $71 billion of money during covid.

(All of the following headlines are from Bloomberg in 2023).

In addition, we had a burgening national debt as well as a fiscal deficit.

In other words, National inherited a poisoned chalice from the Labour government and have responded in the only way they know how - to stimulate the economy by ever more roadworks (complete with an army of orange cones), mining and drilling at ever more cost to a deteriorating environment and class warfare where all the costs are borne by ordinary working people who are squeezed ever more with every passing day.

Only idiots who spout New Economic Theory and believe that small countries can borrow into the stratosphere and print money without controls and that inflation comes only from “price- gouging” will believe that New Zealand’s troubles started with a government elected into office just under a year ago.

I am equally contemptuous of those who believe all our troubles somehow are peculiar to this country and politics and have nothing to do with what is happening internationally with covid and everything that brought with it, a world war that is bringing collapse to the United States and to the rest of the world that have tied their fortunes to the declining power of the US dollar, while the rest of the world (relatively -speaking) is in the ascendant.

Coming back to politics, it seems clear to me that Winston Peters is acting as some form of break on the worst actions of the National-ACT-NZF government. He could perhaps have been more effective in this had one Liz Gunn, Counterspin and the NZ Loyal Party not come in and acted as a wrecker and split an already very small opposition in half.

It was always a myth that Liz Gunn was going to have got anyone into parliament and if she had, achieve anything. Imagine if the opposition against the mandates had been united New Zealand First might have actually had the votes to force through some real change.

Something is always better than nothing.

The well-meaning , but politically-illiterate people who support NZ Loyal and scream that Winston “is doing nothing” know nothing of what can be achieved and what can not be.

To back this up I have it from a very reliable inside source that David Seymour and Winston are not on speaking terms.

Instead, we have a tiny, ragtag group of wannabe bolsheviks and keyboard warriors who think they are going to bring about some form of social revolution.

It is my contention that what we have today is the outcome of what came before and what happened yesterday was an outcome of what came before that.

A MULTI-GENERATIONAL DESTRUCTION OF A LOCAL ECONOMY

One example is the news of paper mills closing in the central North Island. This is the story of ongoing deprivation that started with the Rogernomics “reforms” in the 1980’s in a way that is reminiscent of the deprivation in northern English towns after the Thatcher years that has gone on to lead to the current conflicts we are seeing in Britain today.

The beginnings of this are told in the excellent 1996 documentary, Someone Else’s Country, below.

Someone Else's Country documentary

THE DESTRUCTION OF HISTORY

We need to throw out ideological prejudices and ‘what should be’ and look at ‘what is’. To do that we need to become historians and look at what came before.

That has been outside long periods of research at the National Library (assuming one knows what to look for), rendered impossible because the internet has been wiped clean of anything useful.

For example, a video of a 1970’s interview of Brian Talboys (the man who crossed the globe in the early 1970’s trying to find new markets for a country that previously had a guaranteed market for its primary products and a young Winston Peters that was on You Tube a year ago has been removed and I had to go to a TikTok post to find it.

Or go HERE

Here, Mr Talboys describes the situation much as I remember it.

He refers to the changing political and economic conditions in the world that affected New Zealand.

Britain has become part of the European Economic Community so the comfortable economic relationship we had is evaporating.

NZ has to find new markets, new associations with new economies such as Korea, with Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, that are bustling along.

NZ is battling against agricultural protectionism in the US, Japan and the EEC

But try the search engines and you will also come away empty-handed. Not only have interviews like the above been disappeared but, for instance, if I google “NZ Britain enters Common Market” all I get are encyclopedia items that are nothing more or less than a few paragraphs reflecting the current rewriting of New Zealand history such as the following:

Britain joins the EEC

Although New Zealand’s strong attachment to the UK had begun to weaken by the 1960s, it was still a shock to New Zealanders when in 1961 ‘mother Britain’ announced its intention to join the newly formed EEC. Until this time, Britain had not joined because of its trade agreements with Commonwealth countries. When European economies began to do better than the Commonwealth, British policy changed.

Britain’s farm

New Zealand was ‘an English farm in the Pacific,’¹ said Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister who began negotiations to join the EEC in the 1960s. New Zealand politicians agreed – Prime Minister Keith Holyoake had warned Macmillan that ‘New Zealand would be ruined’² when Britain joined the EEC if safeguards were not provided for its exports.

The British government acknowledged that New Zealand was the most vulnerable of its Commonwealth trading partners. Because of this, New Zealand was given what was effectively a veto over British membership of the EEC if it found the terms negotiated unacceptable. Instead, it chose to focus on achieving a favourable outcome for its exports under the Luxembourg agreement of 1971, under which the UK joined the EEC in 1973.

Butter or meat?

New Zealand concentrated on gaining adequate access for its dairy exports, at the expense of products such as sheep meat and wool. The result was special treatment for New Zealand butter exports, although these were required to drop to 71% of the pre-1971 level by 1977. Although the export of sheep meat was important for the New Zealand economy, the focus on dairy products meant that European tariffs on meat remained rather high at 20%.

https://teara.govt.nz/en/britain-europe-and-new-zealand/print

That is the sum of it all.

I tried looking for material on the 1998 Hikoi of Hope, which is a major part of our history and found only ONE item from a Maori source.

https://kurahautu.org/transform/hikoi-of-hope/

There are forces that want us to forget our real history (including notably, the Treaty of Waitangi) and are endeavouring to expunge our memory of the past.

In the absence of reliable sources I am forced to rely on my 50 year-old memory.