When National won the New Zealand election in 2023, one of the first to congratulate Luxon was tech-billionaire and entrepreneur extraordinaire Elon Musk.
And last year, after Luxon posted a video about a trip to Malaysia, Musk came forward again to heap praise on Christopher:
So it was perhaps par for the course that NZ Herald’s Jamie Ensor positioned an article last year as "Christopher Luxon’s tips for Elon Musk as Donald Trump announces role for Tesla, X chief."
In that gem of a piece (extreme /s), Luxon offers this advice to the world’s richest man - and a man who appears to be showing signs of a mental breakdown. Luxon says to Musk:
“I just say stay focused on outcomes, make sure you are getting good value for money and that every dollar is counting to improving the daily lives of your citizenry.”
Thanks Chris.
Not to be outdone on the puff, Thomas Coughlan (NZME / NZ Herald) helped this week with a Nicola Willis PR article - portraying Willis with sympathetic overtones, and repeating, verbatim, Willis’s excuses and PR messsages.
According to Coughlan, Nicola Willis just “couldn’t win.” He allows Willis to present - unchallenged - her usual blame game, refusing to take responsibility for her austerity budget and damaging fiscal policies that have pushed NZ to dire economic results (another 1% GDP drop in the Sep 2024 quarter) and poor prognosis/outlook.
The only time Coughlan deems it appropriate to provide analysis is when he backs up Nicola Willis’s usual PR line that her operating deficit was smaller than Labour’s.
Coughlan writes:
That is all true. Labour went to the election promising new operating spending of $3.5 billion in 2024, $3.25b in 2025 and $3b in 2026.
Willis delivered new spending of $3.2b in Budget 2024
No mention from Coughlin that the Luxon government deliberately underfunded Health NZ to the tune of $1.4bn or that the price of Willis’s austerity budget is counted in human lives & breaking our long built up infrastructure/talent pools
Willis’s agenda is the seeming endless and short sighted cuts to our health services and frontline positions, the refusal to fund the extra $1.4b for future proof, rail enabled ferries, significantly weakening our employment sector - not only in Wellington but around the country - 27,000 more unemployed last Xmas, 11,000 job losses in construction from actions such as axing 60% of Kainga Ora builds and putting thousands of KO projects around the country on hold due to nothing more than corporate, neoliberal ideology and destroying most of our environmental protections and progress.
The list goes on.
And, extremely damaging is our record loss of working talent as the country contines to spiral under austerity, corporate driven ideology: 55,000 net citizens gone as at the Sep 2024 quarter, with almost 80,000 citizens leaving our country and that number expected to increase - at a time when our country needs a robust working population to support the aging demographic.
It’s projected that one in four New Zealanders will be aged over 65 years by 2040.
The aging population in New Zealand is expected to have long-term implications, including a significant financial burden and changes to housing futures. These are well known facts and should be realistically addressed by a government that claims its serious about governing.
Instead, Willis and National appear more focused on laying waste to our healthcare system: delaying and downgrading hospital builds around the country (Dunedin, Whangarei, Nelson), collapsing entire obstetrics units, stopping bowel cancer surveillance in Manawatū-Whanganui, stopping Māori and Pacific bowel cancer screening pilot programs, continuing to refuse to stump up for Luxon’s bowel cancer election promise, and proposing to get rid of the only 2 palliative care policy staff - despite NZ being one of the few advanced countries without a national palliative care service.
Professor Frank Frizelle, a medical adviser at Bowel Cancer NZ, said of the government’s decisions around bowel cancer:
"With bowel cancer, the earlier you find it, the more likely you are to survive. But also, practically, the cheaper it is to treat."
That’s the rub with these decisions - it is cheaper to implement preventative care, and to take care of the population before a more serious diagnosis transpires.
It’s cheaper to keep and pay good staff than it is to lose them and try to make up for it.
As a result of losing all its obstetrics specialists, Health NZ changed Whakatāne Hospital to a primary birthing centre only - which means complex or high risk births will have to travel 3 hours through busy traffic to Tauranga. Hospital staff are “devastated” and Bay of Plenty Mayors say it’s “devastating and unacceptable”.
The Mayors say folks found out about the decision on social media with Ōpōtiki Mayor David Moore noting:
"Our mothers and babies are our most vulnerable. Babies come when they are ready, not following anyone else's schedule so the time delay is just not acceptable."
It’s also been estimated that in the case of Dunedin hospital, every 3 month delay costs taxpayers $10m. And the government is today accused of "blatant disregard for transparency" as it continues to play games around the future of Dunedin hospital.
My guess is they are trying to find a private partnership deal for it while Chris Bishop buries government Dunedin hospital cost reports that were found to be inaccurate.
But again, no mention of any of this by Coughlan, who last year optimistically proclaimed that a “rock star economy” could be back under the new crowd:
And the upshot of his Willis interview is, as I said many months ago, more economic and social pain is coming for us all, thanks to the gormless Nicola Willis, David Seymour, Chris Bishop and Christopher Luxon, et.al.
Back to Musk - besides being head Efficiency Czar and Power Extraordinaire under Donald Trump, Musk has also been busy lambasting outgoing Canadian PM Justin Trudeau as an “insufferable fool” - after Trudeau expressed support for Kamala Harris,.
He’s called for America to “liberate the people of Britain” from Keir Starmer’s Labour government, advocated support for far right extremist Tommy Robinson, supported NZ’s Chris Luxon who is also regularly praised in Rupert Murdoch press, and boosted Germany’s far right, neo-Nazi Afd Party.
This week, Musk also spent time blaming Los Angeles’s devastating fires on “woke” policies, women, DEI (diversity and inclusion), and promoted Alex Jones’s idea that the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot” to cause the collapse of the United States.
Another Republican, Congressman Warren Davidson of Ohio, suggested that no federal disaster relief should be given to California unless the state reforms its forestry management practices first.
Viva-America - where fellow Americans matter…no more. [The movie “Civil War”, starring Kirsten Dunst, examines this change in painstaking imagery and is worth a watch for observers of that great nation]
This week also saw Mark Zuckerberg eliminating its DEI policies and blasting Joe Biden & his administration on the Joe Rogan podcast, after Zuckerberg met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
The point is this: what these richest men and their favourite politicians are doing is changing our culture: more misinformation, more insanity, more alt-right content and methods.
Last week I profiled Wayne Wright Junior and Sean Plunket from The Platform for an important reason - culture is king.
Our ways of thinking, relating, what is acceptable, and what aren’t norms, permeate every part of our way of lives: our thinking, our economic models, social customs, standards of education, and also political fortunes.
And it’s important we know who these people are - and what their motivations might be.
As with Musk, when lies and alt-right misinformation goes mainstream, and extreme events or simple situations are unduly politicised and mischaracterised, we all suffer the effects of that cultural change.
And it never seems to be the people that truly benefit.
Alt-right politics is easy politics, in my view- predicated primarily on anger, fear, and division, and borne on the seeds of easy generalisations, and unexamined assumptions, but NZ needs to stand firm and stand tall amidst it all.
What can we do? We can control our minds, our lives, our realm. Make choices in life that re-affirm the ideals of community, self-empowerment, knowledge and awareness. It means to not lose hope, and to retain faith in who we are - and who we hold as friends and alliances. It means disallowing the narratives of the lies, fear and the hysteria to run our lives and minds.
Perhaps it sounds too simple but until we found balance again in the world, it can be our only mainstay.
Act, speak, do, share - but seek balance and joy amidst it all - as much as each can muster.
Hell, finding out musk likes you, is kinda wrist slashing stuff for anybody with any moral and/or ethical values.
The only way I personally can object to these oligarchs is to be very careful where I spend my money. No Facebook, no xcrement, no Amazon, no tesla. The same as I behave with foreign owned organisation's in nz.
😱 Haven't time to read & absorb right now, BUT QuelonMu$kRat saying nice things about Luxon says it all eh⁉️ I'm in post-Submission fatigue & playing catchup with what I put aside for them, so will read more fully later 👍