This government is not comfortable with a trade-off between COVID-19 and the economy or the environment and the economy. It’s either one extreme or the other with no meeting in the middle. One whiff of community spread and we will be sent back to lockdown, region by region. Most of us won’t do it.
Crossing our fingers while we wait for a vaccine as jobless numbers increase is losing the interest of the “team of five million”. No one will stand by and watch people starve to death.
Exactly the same mind set applies to climate change. Right from the get-go Jacinda Ardern said climate change was her nuclear moment, a political ploy to keep the Greens occupied and out of her hair. They obliged by obliterating the fossil fuel industry, tying farming up in knots and upsetting the hunting sector by culling tahr.
That the government cannot save the planet and the economy at the same time doesn’t bother Ardern because the Greens are the useful idiots in her socialist plan to destroy capitalism.
“Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.”
Why are we spending so much money on climate change then? Throwing away the economic benefits of the fossil fuel industry is all for nothing. Despite farmers being tied up in regulation and red tape, they support keeping nitrates and cow poo out of waterways. But the decision to cull tahr makes no sense at all.
“Tahr and chamois were introduced to New Zealand in the early days of European settlement for sport.
Both animals have found the Southern Alps of the South Island ideal habitat, but have become a major threat to the ecosystems in these alpine areas.
Tahr graze at high altitudes, in alpine grasslands and sub-alpine shrublands where they feed most intensively on tall snow tussock and can kill entire plants.”
Because of increasing costs, DOC stopped monitoring the tahr population in 2006 and in 2018 Eugenie Sage fixed her beady eye on culling half the estimated 35,000 tahrs. There was a huge backlash from the hunting community, who fundraised to pay for a court injunction, and the cull was reduced to 10,000 animals.
Why didn’t DOC liaise with the hunting community about the potentially highly lucrative international hunting industry before the numbers got beyond the government’s ability to maintain them?
It makes sense to boost hunting to local hunters and overseas paying customers rather than putting the financial burden totally on the taxpayer. The animals were introduced for sport. The lucrative industry could be used to protect areas of endangered tall snow tussock or whatever alpine plant is becoming endangered.
But how fast was Ardern to trade climate change for COVID-19? Its superior fear mongering was the drawcard. Ardern relished the power exhibited to keep us locked down and compliant; a gift from heaven for an ardent socialist. Even Karl Marx would be impressed.
Karl Marx didn’t live long enough to see what happens when capitalism is destroyed. The socialist/Marxist/communist theory of wealth redistribution to achieve equality does not work in practice. It’s too hard to remove the greed element, and greedy dictators replace greedy capitalists.
“Communist regimes produced the greatest ideological carnage in human history, killing more than a hundred million people in the last century. While some apologists claim it is unfair to Marx to blame him, the seeds of tyranny were there from the start.”
Ardern’s socialism and Eugenie Sage’s Green agenda mess with our economic future. Until these two can produce economic balance we should avoid their destructive policies like the plague.
“People who don’t have their own houses in order should be very careful about reorganising the world”
JORDAN PETERSON
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