Information
Opinion
There are very few occasions in history when you can pinpoint a precise moment when significant changes took place.
For well over a century New Zealand had been an affluent, rather pleasant nation at the edge of the British empire. Our standard of living had always been quite high, and our economy was underpinned by exporting various commodities to the world. We’d had our ups and downs, but what was created here was an outstanding success, and our “ordinary folk” were far better off than their counterparts abroad. Our rural sector called the shots and everyone knew their place – as nature intended.
This all came crashing down 38 years ago today on election day 1984. You can watch the video of it happening and lament the foolishness of it all.
Various ideologues and their insane (and provably false) view of the world gained control of New Zealand and set about ripping the guts out of a once great nation. Practical commonsense, traditional values, social cohesion, honesty, integrity were out; the age of the slimy wide boy, welfarism, corruption, division, and numerous other horrors were in. These crazed ideologues sought to settle a large number of scores with people they simply didn’t like – and they did; all under the guise of “freedom” and being “modern”.
Any sandcastle these lunatics didn’t like was kicked over purely out of spite and replaced with an endless series of horrors which destroyed all the “good” and replaced it with the “bad” every single time.
The demonisation of “goodness” and anything morally pure was the order of the day.
What fools everybody were to vote for it and then swallow the Kool-Aid for the subsequent four decades – despite all the evidence to the contrary. There are people out there, dear reader, who quite genuinely believe the Big Lies the “Rogernomics Propaganda Machine” has been feeding them for years; I swear I am not making this up.
A good example of what I mean is the July 1984 large inventory of wool. Instead of engaging in something ‘logical’ – we sold it and pocketed the proceeds – this wool inventory is seen, in Emperor’s New Clothes fashion, as proof something was wrong with New Zealand and why drastic reforms were needed. Vigorous head nodding from the Kool-Aid drinkers resulted. Truly bizarre. (Don’t worry, nobody else ever understood the Douglas obsession with the wool – or his lack of logical thought – either)
Even worse than the economic and social destruction (just go to any news site and count the murders occurring today to see how well it’s all worked out), was the disastrous foreign policy; the anti-nuclear ships twaddle. Despite being just 11 when Lange started his treasonous nonsense I – seemingly alone in New Zealand – was strongly in favour of nukes and wished we had some.
In short (for the benefit of the woefully ignorant): the US Navy would never send a warship with nukes this far south and this far from base. The reason? In case of mutiny or piracy and the risk of some nutter getting his hands on a nuclear arsenal. As usual, the socialist claims were a pack of lies. All pretty straightforward. There was no need for virtue signalling and show-off behaviour.
So it’s been 38 years. What occurred was mostly unnecessary and disastrous. One wonders if 1984 Labour-voting grandparents feel ashamed of themselves for letting the genie out of the lamp?
