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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, January 23rd, 2017 - 10 comments
Categories: Daily review -
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The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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Oh boy. When politics seemed simpler. Love/Hate Muldoon.
Yep at least with him you knew where you were. Not like current politics where there are facts and alternative facts …
Dunno micky, he certainly saw an alternative reality to a lot of people.
I remember a lengthy stunned silence when we heard he’d outlawed inflation with his wage and price freeze. The people in the bar were a broad cross section of a large rural town and looking back it was pretty obvious Muldoon had lost the plot and there’d be a change of government at the next election.
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/cartoon/25623/the-wage-and-price-freeze-1982-1984
Well one thing that I think we could all agree on …. he was a handsome man.
With an emphasis on the “was”.
I remember that. It was early on during his PM days at his Hatfied Bach just north of Orewa. I’ll give him this… it was a very unpretentious bach.
Unpretentious it was. And Hatfield’s was a fairly unpretentious place. Not like Omaha, and even less like Hawaii.
Mainly though, it was close to the Orewa Rotary club where Rob could pop over the hill to make his speech. He probably thought about the speech while mowing the lawn – which looks pretty rank and long so it would take a while. Although I loathed him at the time, I realise now there must have been something good about him if Bob Jones hated him so much he created the “New Zillun” party to oust him. Seems like Rob kept National’s radical neoliberal right at bay – but then Labour gave them an opening after ’84
I wrote a vitriolic and unpublished piece of doggerel in rhyming couplets about Rob holidaying at Hatfield’s and speaking at Orewa. I was having to read tedious Augustans like Pope and Dryden at the time. Mercifully it is all forgotten except for:
“Rotarians in dinner suits
staggering on piss-splashed boots”
which sort of captures a sense of the boozy, white male privilege one associates with such events.
Labour gave them an opening after ’84
Well actually no. It was Muldoon himself who gave them the opening. He did so by dragging the country to the edge of a fiscal precipice with his ‘Think Big’ policies. That gave Douglas and co. the excuse to drag the country towards radical policy changes on the pretext they were “saving NZ from bankruptcy”. Because nobody had heard of neo-liberalism etc. we didn’t know what they were letting us in for. By the time the penny dropped it was too late. We were knee deep in the market forces mantra and could no longer extract ourselves. At least up until now.
There will be a post up on this soon, but for twitter people there is a twitter storm happening tonight to raise attention with MPs and Media to Stop Niki’s Eviction tomorrow from her state house home of 21 years.
Details here,
https://www.facebook.com/THISHOMEISOCCUPIED/posts/737462696410397
https://twitter.com/defendGI/status/823297362810417152
https://www.facebook.com/THISHOMEISOCCUPIED/photos/pb.312832585540079.-2207520000.1485152924./737459699744030/?type=3&theater
#NikisEviction
https://twitter.com/hashtag/NikisEviction?src=tren&data_id=tweet%3A823421413419692033
Great lawnmowers those, with the old 2-stroke Iron Horse engine. I still use one I bought second hand in 1990.