The perspective’s week almost began with a coronary. This, from the Taxpayers’ Union first thing Monday morning:
The Taxpayers’ Union is welcoming Finance Minister Barbara Edmonds’ comments over the weekend that she will prioritise fiscal consolidation and getting the government’s books back in order.
Eh? The thought flashed across my mind that maybe I’d just awoken from a coma during which the coalition had been voted out and the totalitarian party of Jacinda Jackboot had been returned – something roughly half of Kiwis are indeed sufficiently cretinous to crave.
In panic sufficient almost to match Wuhan hysteria I read on:
Taxpayers’ Union Spokesperson, Tory Relf, said:
“New Zealand can’t keep running the country on the credit card. It’s an encouraging sign to hear a possible future finance minister talking about balancing the books, but talk is the easy part.”
Oh! Phew!!
Future finance minister! Coronary averted. Just a Taxpayers’ Union Monday morning hangover!
The press release linked to an interview with Barbara Edmonds by Jack Tame on Q, sometimes known as Q & A, but now just Q, because only Q is allowed. Interviewee starts to answer a question but is immediately interrupted by interviewer and prevented from answering. Q & No A, or Q & B perhaps – Question and Badger!
Actually, Jack was more… tame than usual on this occasion, and his questions were… on the money. Here’s an extraordinary excerpt where they were discussing Labour’s proposed Capital Gains Tax.
That’s a head-scratcher, innit? At a time of crushing debt incurred by unscrupulous governments, take what revenue you might raise from this envy tax, and ring-fence it for doctors’ visits which five out of six people can afford to pay for themselves?! “Don’t ask for logic: that’s just the choice we’ve made – it is what it is! It’s what Sir Michael Joseph Savage would have wanted.” Somehow I doubt it – and he wasn’t SIR Michael, btw, but you wouldn’t expect a Labour Party DEI hire to know that. I suppose, in these Orwellian times, when two plus two equals five if Big Sister says so, we should be edified and gratified that both Woke Barbara and Woke Jack could agree that one plus five equals six!
Here’s the real deal, though: any talk by Labour of balancing the books fails to disclose that Labour will only ever attempt it by raising taxes, not cutting the spending of Other People’s Money. The hungover Taxpayers’ Union press release I began with was very clear-eyed when it went on to say:
It’s going to take line by line inspection throughout the budget, cutting programmes that aren’t delivering, and stopping the habit of throwing money at problems in the hope they go away to get back to surplus. With government debt now over $142,000 per household, more tax hikes are not the answer. Wellington finally needs to learn to live within its means.
I had a visit from a parliamentary insider over the weekend, who regaled me firsthand with how the bureaucracy controls the politicians, whoever is in power. The Deep State simply won't allow line by line inspection and cutting of programmes to occur. Ministers who request such things are met with a plethora of options couched in unintelligible bureaucratese. So now Finance Minister Willis simply asks the bureaucrats to come up with their own suggestions. Put the fox in charge of the henhouse. I say, the hell with line by line. If it’s a government department, abolish it, sight unseen. Ask questions later. If it’s a bastion of Woke Fascism such as the Human Wrongs Commissariat, ask no questions at all. If it’s a bureaucrat, fire they/them on the spot.
They/them are much more at home with Labour’s full-blown high-tax/big-spend agenda than with the coalition’s agenda, even though the latter is a piss-weak cop-out. For the quintessence of Labour, look no further than last week’s budget in Britonistan, where Labour’s Finance Minister, or Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves – another DEI hire – unleashed a tsunami of new and raised taxes and incentives for Jihadis intent on making Britain part of a world-wide Caliphate to breed.
- £26 billion in new or intensified taxes, pushing Britonistan’s tax burden to its highest level in decades.
- Envy writ large. Targeting wealth, property, investments. The budget introduced a “mansion tax” on properties over £2 million, raised taxes on dividends, rental income and savings, and tightened capital-gains and inheritance-tax. Barbara Edmonds, eat your heart out!
- New sin and “luxury” taxes: online gambling duty (casino, betting) to new levies on electric cars per mile, taxes on tourists. New Zealand Labour’s history of sin taxes goes back to Arnold Nordmeyer’s 1958 Black Budget, dramatically hiking taxes on tobacco, alcohol and petrol.
- Welfare galore, especially if you’re a Jihadi. Abolition of the “two-child benefit cap”. Increased welfare and social support as part of the government’s stated efforts to cushion cost-of-living pressures. What could possibly have caused those?!
This was not about compassion.
It was not about children.
It was certainly not about “lifting people out of poverty”.
It was about votes. From breed-like-rabbits welfare clients who overwhelmingly reside in sectors of British society that are the least British, such as no-go Sharia zones. Breed away, the benefit will flow!
Nigel Farage, likely next prime minister, though a snake who will not deport the breeders, nonetheless accurately depicted this disgusting Labour budget as the assault on the productive sector that it was.
Ah. Milano. Home of Il Duomo and La Scala, antithesis of Islamo-Marxism. Viva Milano!
Snake though he is, Nigel is evidently not appreciated as such by his fellow-snakes in the BBC, that bastion of impartiality and truth-seeking. So greatly does he offend their Woke sensibilities that they’ve taken to putting bodily fluids in his make-up. I kid you not! Dan Wooton takes up the story.
Bravo, Dan. And ditto, Television New Zealand, Q & B and Radio New Zealand, the Jerk-off, Stuffed, the New Zealand Ferald… Pravda propagandists one and all… Upon them and the BBC, and Rachel Reeves and Barbara Edmonds and their politics of envy and tyranny in the service of Islamo-Marxism, I bestow the bodily fluid projectile they all deserve: the Barf Award!
And by way of my customary musical finale, a celebration of their antithesis. While Britonistan’s chancellor incentivises barbarism – here, from Milan, the city of the Duomo, the city of La Scala – is what civilisation sounds like. Puccini. The apotheosis of love and beauty. Maria Callas. Giuseppe di Stefano. O soave fanciulla. Viva la bella Milano – and to hell with the barbarians!
Listen to the full episode of Perigo’s Perspective here.
This article was originally published by Reality Check Radio.
