Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
This is an island where even those of us who have borne witness to massive citizen marches up Queen Street more times than we can count in the interests of fairness, justice and a nuclear free New Zealand, are admitting to battle fatigue.
By the end of Monday morning at the coffee shop, several long-time island colleagues had admitted they were ducking out of the entire news cycle entirely, for their own sanity in these present times. To be honest, the very thought was eerily peaceful.
Albeit that the respite was short-lived, since, regretfully, I then missed – by 15 minutes – the deadline for making a submission against David Seymour’s Regulatory Standards Bill, our ideologically challenged acting prime minister’s latest right-wing adventure into disturbingly ideological legislation.
Pouf. Public submissions closed on the dot. Nothing to see here. Nobody understands zero-sum politics anyway.
Well, except that brazen corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, (played by Michael Douglas) who summed it up pretty clearly for millions of viewers in the 1987 Oliver Stone classic Wall Street.
“It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero-sum game: somebody wins, somebody loses”, Douglas grated, winning an Oscar for his performance and fixing his character as the embodiment of individual excess; someone whose motivations go beyond rational self-interest, to encompass the mentality that in order to succeed others must fail.
It’s probably not something a kiwi politician should bandy around in full view of runaway inflation on household costs and food, cut price emergency school lunches, child poverty, boot camps and tax cuts for the rich.
Or when an earlier, two-month consultation on the bill timed during the Christmas/New Year holidays, had drawn 23,000 public submissions, approximately 88 percent of them opposed to legislation that would come with an un-elected board, hand-picked by – and under – Seymour’s Ministry of Regulation.
Shades of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiencies, the infamous and unbridled DOGE, accords with our own ACT party’s right-wing agenda to slim down government.
The bill had popped up, unsuccessfully, in three earlier ACT Party legislative attempts since 2006 and had its roots in the Multilateral Agreement On Investment (MAI) in the 1990s that was secretly negotiated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and provoked intense international uproar when nations read the fine print that sought to give foreign investors one important advantage.
One of the prime concerns with this bill is that it seems to again bestow on corporations the power to sue for compensation, not simply for the taking of land or buildings, but “impairment” of profit expectations as well. Alarmingly, this recompense would be sought first from the prime beneficiaries of the relevant laws or regulations with a chilling effect on iwi or environmental groups. Ultimately, the aggrieved ‘owner’ could also sue the government for this spurious compensation.
Waiheke – never the unsophisticated backwater that Aucklanders liked to think us – contributed to the furore in the 1990s and could rightly be sceptical again at the waste of parliamentary time when there are real hardships ahead and a zero-sum class war to be averted.
So the Guardian Weekly now records that New Zealand under this coalition government is a hard-right nation. How the mighty have fallen.
In a Listener interview with Daniel McLauchlan last month, Seymour, as ACT leader, said “the only thing that’s truly worth fighting for is human freedom.” That, he said, leads you to a concept of government, because there’s some things that it must do to protect people and each other from harm, etc, etc
Would it be that simple and the world has moved on.
The end game for liberalism (or neo liberalism or capitalism or ’the market’) has always been monopoly and extracted wealth, anyway. Global trade, greed, monopoly banks, hyper-profitable offshore supermarkets, land-banked housing and a financial services economy were weeds that grew and grew while a pall of austerity and inequality overwhelmed human decency.
The money tree is set on a blasted heath. Cold as charity.
And there are dozens of words that would create a more generous, productive, grateful, equal and kind citizenry.
Individual freedom requires that everyone has enough. Everywhere. Proper housing, means of production for communities, education, health, contribution, respect, creativity. All the things that David Seymour (and I) grew up with.
Before most of us were shunted into wage-slavery. By Rogernomics and its ACT party, mostly.
As a global tribe, we seem to be able to track the trillions of dollars in the accounts of maybe 3000 joyless billionaires and corporations that have sequestered great fortunes over centuries.
The technology is there to fund, over time, a universal basic income or a guaranteed minimum income and to extinguish the iniquitous legacy debt on developing nations. From here to the Amazon and back. Enough to rebuild a planet of interconnected, thriving cities and unique nations and communities.
GDP stats would be through the roof.
And we would genuinely have freedom.
• Liz Waters
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
