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Opinion
About twenty years ago a silly book was published called What’s The Matter With Kansas? Boiled down, it claimed that Kansas was stagnating economically and expressed astonishment the people living there didn’t want handouts from the government. The fact that Kansans had ‘self-help’ values and a work ethic and couldn’t be bought off with a welfare payment – for which they would vote Democrat in gratitude – simply did not compute with the left-wing elitists.
That anybody would see a work ethic, solving your own problems, not making a fuss, not being a ‘victim’, as constituting ‘bad’, as constituting something actually quite sinister, is a bit odd and further proof the left wingers are not interesting in doing anything particularly worthwhile during their periods in government. The way left wingers see the world, anybody struggling in life merely wants the government to throw money at them – there is clearly something wrong with you if you don’t.
This mindset is ubiquitous within the current socialist Labour Government, and also a significant contributing factor to their eventual departure – as evidenced by the recent rhetoric of Grant Robertson. The way they see it, the coronavirus pandemic provided the golden opportunity to ramp up government spending; Robertson cannot get through an entire sentence without pointing out his ‘record level of spending’. He’s quite proud of this. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the spending is required or not, spent well or not, value for money or not; the mere fact of spending is all he cares about.
Except, like the people of Kansas, there is a large part of the New Zealand population who view this sort of thing with a sense of unease – or even horror. The large and rising percentage of the population who think NZ is ‘heading in the wrong direction’ is the clearest proof of this concern.
And the response from Robertson is incomprehension. He seems bewildered the Socialist Government isn’t around 20 per cent ahead in the opinion polls heading into election year. Why are they so ungrateful? Don’t they know we just want to help them? This is – you know – money we’re giving them?? seems to be his response; he gets quite ratty at question time when challenged, not to mention his embarrassing We’ve “absolutely” made life better for New Zealanders – as food, petrol, rents, electricity, clothing and numerous other items have soared in price.
Having lived a cosseted, unproductive life and insulated from actually meeting most types of people, he genuinely cannot understand why he cannot ‘buy’ a permanent socialist electoral majority. Robertson’s lack of awareness – not just of himself but of how most people think – is amusingly summed up by an incident he once recounted that I just happened to witness.
In 1994 he led a student protest against fees (or something) in Dunedin. In order to prove how ‘right on’ he was, young Grant was poncing about with a loud hailer down George and Princes streets leading his merry band of no-hopers. I witnessed this and saw that the people standing around me were contemptuous of the protest and students in general.
Grant, however, saw it as a huge victory, proof of his ‘student leader’ bona fides. Then, in typical fashion, (he claims) he was detained by the police but not actually arrested or charged. Any ‘real’ lefty protester would be happy to have such a conviction on their CV, but not Grant. Even then he didn’t really mean it: ’twas all for show.
