If Don Brash is mainstream, then we are in serious trouble
Normally I believe in keeping positive, but today I am feeling like I need to express myself in a different way.

The reason for this is the fact that a lot of people seem to believe in a thing called a "tax cut."

A tax cut when offered by someone like Don Brash is a simple concept.

What it means is that millionaires and corporate managers will receive huge amounts of money back, and people on moderate incomes will receive small amounts of money back.

In exchange, public health services are slashed, student fees skyrocket, social welfare declines and crime grows as people become desperate, children grow up in poverty, the gap between the mega-rich and the ultra-poor widens, and we generally get to exist in a squalid, selfish, fearful and brutal system while the big money is siphoned off to the global corporations who now own everything.

What a great tradeoff.

And who is the visionary behind this scheme, the leader who will forge the path to the promised land?

I have come across this product of the comfortable post-war welfare state before.

Don Brash came along to my journalism class one day. A man whose idea of heaven would be . . . low inflation.

Let's remember that, strangely enough despite his attacks on public servants, Brash was a highly paid bureaucrat himself – insulated from the harsh realities of the free market that he wishes to drop on the rest of us.

My question is, for New Zealanders:

What do you not understand about Don Brash?

These people simply DO NOT CARE is hundreds of thousands of people miss out on the basic standards of a decent life.

They believe in a world of where profits come first, a small wealthy elite live in ostentatious privilege, and the working people learn their place as hard working cogs in the machine, scared to put a foot wrong in case they lose even the little they have.

Do people not remember what has happened in this country over the last twenty years – or do they not know?

The people of New Zealand have been fleeced. We are slowly turning back to a dark past where inequality and injustice was how it was – something that the human race has slowly been pulling itself out of as working people have slowly gained the right to live as human beings rather than as drudges.

Brash is a hyprocrite of the worst kind, pandering to ignorance and fear simply to gain votes. Whip up racism against refugees fleeing from torture and brutality. Whip up hatred against anyone who doesn't fit into his square box view of reality.
Whip up hatred against trade unions who protect low paid workers. Whip up hatred against the people whose land you stole and funnily enough wonder if they can have a little bit of compensation. Whip up hatred against the people you import as cheap labour for factories but who are no longer required by the system. Whip up the narrow-mindedness, the blame, the hate, the fear, the anger, against the sick, the marginalized, the struggling.

The funny thing is, I guess I fit the format of the "mainstream New Zealander" Brash must want to appeal to.

I'm white, male, straight, university educated, on a reasonable income, and have a short haircut. Yet I absolutely despise everything he stands for. The pinched, self-righteous moralism. His obvious narrow experience of life, where he feels comfortable in denouncing and harrassing people whose struggle for existence he simply would not be able to comprehend.

It is a vision of reality that goes back to the nineteenth century.

Let's face it – that is what the National Party, at heart, is all about. They were formed in the 1930s to keep the working people down. They are motivated by the basic tenets of selfishness, fear and social snobbery. Their mission in life is to "keep us in our place."

But the people who Brash attacks can unite and advance our plan for the future: a world where everyone has a place, where everyone is entitled to dignity and a good standard of living, and where we are valued as human beings not as money-making units for corporations.

That is why we should get active and fight for a better society – and why I am standing for the Alliance Party.
- posted by Victor @ 10:14 AM