SEYMOUR'S DIRE SPEECH

Or what the **** ?

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SEYMOUR’S DIRE SPEECH

Regular readers will know that Saturday is the day when I usually publish some links to YouTube programmes I’ve been watching in case you may be interested in some of them, but I just can’t let the speech ACT leader David Seymour delivered yesterday to go by without offering a comment or two.. or three… or maybe a few more.

He entitled it, The State Of The Nation -2025 Dire States.

Well, I agree with that last bit, the nation is in a dire state – thanks largely to his hard-nosed neoliberal ideology and his success in getting a wad of selfish legislation willingly accepted by Luxon and Peters in the coalition agreement.

He then talks nonsensically about their only being two tribes in New Zealand. One of which he calls “The Change Makers” who are to be celebrated and the other “The Majority for Mediocrity “ who are to be vilified.

That’s right, he offers a diatribe! A two tribe vision in which the few are promised untaxed spoils and the majority denounced as unworthy. It’s a thoroughly nasty speech peppered with divisive talk about Māori in words that amount to labelling them as lazy and in need of an ancestry bypass operation - his farcical argument that ancestry is irrelevant because we are all equal and therefore Māori should not have special privilges because of the Treaty.

Putting aside his dubious interpretation of the Māori version of Te Tiriti, what his sleight of mouth rhetoric argues is that inheritance of deprivation through land theft and other ill- treatment from broken promises doesn’t matter, while inheritance of wealth needs to be honoured and protected.

He really needs to read some of the works of economist Thomas Piketty on inequality which prove, what we all know intuitively to be true, that if your parents are wealthy and pass on their untaxed wealth to you then you will get a far better start in life than someone who has had poverty handed on to them by their ancestry. In short, we do not all start from an equal place in life and his conflating of equity with equality is a trick designed to fool the gullible.

“The state of our nation is that we’re at a tipping point , and what we do in the next few years will decide which way we go” stated Seymour.

I couldn’t agree more and the further we get away from his politics and economics of selfishness and move towards the politics of cooperation and the fair go the better.

He argued we should privatise the health system.

F*** no!

We are responsible for each other. Not irresponsible. Get a grip man!

When you recently came off your bike David people came forward and helped you up. They didn’t leave you lying there until a car ran over you. But you apparently learned nothing from their act of concern and kindness.

No that’s what society should be all about. Helping each other up in bad times. Everyone deserves free hospital care and affordable prescription medicines.

If we are all equal ,as you argue, then we all equally deserve the best medical care available when we need it. And we all have to pay our fair share in taxes to look after each other. Capesh?

Seymour wants to get rid of the RMA and dilute the influence and protections of the Treaty so that the right wing coalition of which he is a member can implement the agenda Luxon signalled in his State Of The Nation Speech – namely, bring in the Big Money from overseas and sell off our environmental heritage, a legacy that we should be continuing to hold in trust for future generations.

Frankly, just as Luxon’s speech reminded me of Humpty Dumpty who speaks in word salad sentences, so the grinning self- serving Seymour reminds me of the Cheshire Cat from Malice.. sorry... ALICE in Wonderland..

“The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

“Cheshire Puss,” she began, rather timidly, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

But of course it does matter and we should care where we go as a nation from here. We need to see through Seymour’s cheshire grin to see how his lips are operated by a set of ideological wires connected to the dark control box of the Atlas Network, if we want to create a fairer Aotearoa/New Zealand and preserve our environment for our children, our grandchildren and all future generations.

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