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Simon Angelo
Editor, Wealth Morning
This article is general in nature and should not be construed as any financial or investment advice.
Did you complete your 2023 census?
Are you one of the ‘over 4 million’ thus far?
This year’s form seemed more invasive. More complex.
It annoyed some as it appeared to normalise gender ideology.
It annoyed others as it probed their income and wealth to a greater degree.
My main annoyance was that it took far too long. The necessity of some information was questionable.
Despite this census budget blowing out by $37 million, turnout was low.
Maybe another lockdown is needed to have everyone complete it?
We’ll get the results soon. The mainstream media will likely tell us how much we’ve changed.
We’re more diverse. More secular. More unequal. More rudderless.
As I run money for Wholesale and Eligible Investors, my main interest is prosperity. People having freedom and options to reach their life’s potential.
Sadly, what this census will likely reveal is a society at risk of decline.
Most of that decline risk comes down to demographics. We’re getting older. We don’t have enough workers. Pensions, health, and welfare affordability move ever closer to the cliff edge.
Losing faith?
The Pew Research Centre says that, around the world, being actively involved in a faith improves happiness. It also improves prosperity and life satisfaction.
Closer to home, the late Dr Valerie Grant did some work in this area. She taught at Auckland University’s School of Medicine for thirty-four years.
Her research considered anthropologists who set out to discover the impact of faith on society:
‘To everyone’s surprise they found that no society had survived without a religion.
‘If they had a religion they survived; if they did not have a religion, or if they had a religion and gave it up, they did not survive.
‘Anthropologists have yet to find a surviving society, past or present, that is or was not controlled by some form of religious guidelines.’
This suggests that having a religion provides an evolutionary advantage.
But last census and this census will probably show that New Zealand’s formative religion — Christianity — has been declining.
Are we, then, a society in danger of dying out in its current form?
The new Left
When I was growing up, the Left was ‘the working man’. The trade unions. Those who wanted a fairer slice of the pie.
In the faith vacuum, a new Left has emerged, with ideologies I can only describe as pseudo-religious.
I say this because, by definition, a religion is a view of life and death.
At the extreme, the new Left sees gender as potentially non-biological, climate change as an existential emergency, race as critical to every outcome, and privilege to be dismantled by wealth taxes.
I am not saying that there are not differences. That there are not problems with our environment. That there is not inequality.
But I am saying that turning such issues into a pseudo-religion — where any who opposes it must be cancelled without debate — is destructive to society and prosperity.
Unfortunately, some of the mainstream media that used to hold government to account and debate the issues have been converted to this new pseudo-religion.
The cliff edge
What I find compelling is that, as we approach the cliff edge of social and economic destruction, there is now a fight back.
Trust in mainstream media across the developed world sits at a record low.
In America, only 7% have a great deal of trust in mass media to report the news accurately.
Here in New Zealand, two events have permanently eroded trust:
- The aggressive Covid response and the unbalanced coverage of the protests that followed it.
- The incitement of a cancel mob at the Let Women Speak event in Auckland.
Fortunately, some good has come of this.
Determined individuals have created new media outlets to give the other side of the story and promote free speech. Here, we see the likes of The Platform and Reality Check Radio.
These outlets have become very popular, with more and more people gravitating away from mainstream media they no longer trust.
When someone on Twitter asked if one of these platforms was extreme or dangerous, the most liked response was, no, the most extreme and dangerous media was a well-known mainstream outlet. I’ll refrain from mentioning them here.
The world’s richest man — or perhaps now second-richest — has also weighed in with his ownership of Twitter. Apparently, he bought the business to provide ‘a platform for free speech around the globe — a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.’
Much to the consternation of media outlets like Radio New Zealand, he recently placed a warning on their accounts:
Source: Tina Tiler / The Spinoff
This now appears to have been taken off.
The implication was not entirely correct. But for the many who found reports from these media in lockstep with the left-wing government, the label was earned.
Before the Posie Parker event, I heard an interview which appeared as a hit job on the woman, as opposed to a balanced discussion.
Prosperity wins
There’s a saying in the US now: ‘Go woke, go broke’.
It does simplify things far too much. There is inequality. And there are legitimate grievances. But it does hit on the powerful force that the virtue-signalling Left has gone too far.
They do not represent the working people anymore. They are elite academics and career politicians, deep in the murk of Wellington or Washington D.C.
Of course, it is simplistic to say the Left is all bad.
Some of the economic policies have been quite good. Particularly the incentivising of home building. Though that too has faced a regulatory uphill battle.
Nor will the Right solve all our problems. Here in New Zealand, National’s immigration policy seems to promote population growth ahead of GDP growth. By definition, that leads to a decline in GDP per capita.
It’s up to each individual to stand for values that have stood the test of time.
And on that note, we are seeing a resurgence.
