Agri Lobby and Eco Activist share endangered species role after New York takeover of moral movement
New Zealand’s farm lobby Federated Farmers once enjoyed a visibility and even power equal to that of the nation’s two main political parties, the Labour Party and National Party.
The lobby’s leader was a household name, and their intervention in any issue affecting farmers to any degree at all was accompanied by fear and trembling on one side or the other.
Yet now that New Zealand’s underpinning economic activity, farming, faces an ideological version of the Great Depression, and is known to do so, the lobby is eerily quiet on the public pulpit.
In institutional ecological husbandry terms the position of Federated Farmers curiously resembles that of Greenpeace.
Greenpeace until quite recently had the final word on everything in its domain.
Then it found itself shouldered aside by the United Nations takeover of the climate business in much the same way as Federated Farmers in its turn found itself eclipsed by the effects of the same intervention.
Federated Farmers successfully managed several earlier panics.
It quietly managed the red meat scare.
It then deftly handled the Food Miles concocted angst.
The ideological climate one keeps slipping out of its grasp.
Federated Farmers is in good company. The National Party the farmers’ party for instance. National knows an ants nest when it sees one, and thus it administers the hysteria merely a gentle kick from time to time.
It knows as Federated Farmers knows that putting a stick into it will stimulate the soldier ants dwelling inside carrying their latest millennialist doomsday computer modelled forecasts.
Farmers sell through agents and brokers and thus their circles are limited to other farmers and this has allowed to arise a false sense of security about their medium term prospects as the major designated villain in the emissions political panic.
Farmers convince themselves of the reasonableness of the coalition government and thus they fail to see that a large chunk of it seeks to appeal not to domestic wealth creators, but to the United Nations and that this is the reason for all the exulting about being “the first” with the emissions regime
The two most trafficked words in the current political lexicon are conversation and explain.
So why does Federated Farmers fail to publicly “explain” itself in the “conversation?”
The short answer is that it fears its presence will serve merely to inflame a fervour that remains immune to anything but catastrophizing on the capacity of the nation’s ruminants to contribute to the reflective canopy that we are told bounces back the sun’s rays to the surface of planet Earth.
Federated Farmers president Katie Milne (pictured) has but one option and it is to fire up her own base, and all those who rely on it for their livelihood: the stock & station fraternity, the merchandising cooperatives, along with the wider supplier community.
Other avenues are closed off. Traditional media which proved so helpful in calming the red meat excitement has taken a collective oath of allegiance to the United Nations- line and this was demonstrated by the mainstream’s awkward effusiveness in adhering to the recent UN-sponsored climate week.
Localised social media obediently chimed in too thus sealing off the sector entirely.
Federated Farmers is unfashionable which is why it is being so pointedly scorned by whole categories which once leaped to do its bidding.
Its own party, National, shows signs of hanging onto the sides of the same electoral climate bandwagon, a tendency only curbed by the knowledge that such exuberance would spur the Green-Labour component of the governing coalition to seek to outpace it with still more supercharged enthusiasm.
In New Zealand politics it is now the fame and renown overseas that matters and especially so in climate cult strongholds as New York and Paris.
A publicly sidelined Federated Farmers must now activate its own substantial base and thus reveal that it recognises and confronts the existential threat to its members and thus the ability of the nation to thrive.
Curious as it sounds Federated Farmers and Greenpeace hew to not dissimilar pastoral principles especially in regard to preservation and development of animals.
The arrival of a top down intervention on the scale of the United Nations climate drive has left both organisations overtaken and in an unaccustomed shade. Even on the endangered species list.
Television 3 offers an opportunity for the productive sector to advance common sense
With the For Sale sign officially hoisted over New Zealand’s Television 3 channel an 11th hour remedy to the channel’s trouble emerges in the form of its presenters saying what they think, instead of what their polite society audience who do not watch television anyway, think that they should think.
When the middle class family group studio presentation formula began to evolve 50 years ago the average age of the population was 25 years old.
The average age of the average New Zealander is now nudging 40 years old i.e middle age.
Half the population is under middle age, and the other half middle aged.
Television Three allowed itself to be drawn into the slipstream suction of the government controlled broadcasting operation in quickly taking up the full slate of advanced idealistic doctrines formulated by the Guardian and then echo-chambered through the BBC and then relayed via Australia’s ABC.
The channel’s proprietor woke up to this last year and slewed around its talk radio channel from being the poor man’s version of Radio New Zealand.
Gone were the jokey, middle of the road types, with their rosy familial anecdotes, and in their place three presenters Sean Plunket, Peter Williams, and Ryan Bridge who now contrapuntally challenge the very type of ideology actively being propagated by the government broadcasting operation.
The advertising expenditure followed this focus re-adjustment as the listening audience found that presenters chimed with their point of view.
The channel’s key show, the AM Show, now gave the impression of seeking to straddle this very demographic which had been hiding in full sight for so long.
But it also gave the impression of being still partially hypnotised by the London ideology arbiters which are all entirely subsidised: the BBC by taxpayers, the Guardian by philanthropy, and the relay repeater the ABC by the Australian taxpayer.
So why does TV3 tacitly or deliberately follow their line?
Enter now, stage Left, the hidden persuaders, the advertising agencies. They are in the business of influencing the purchasing by one very identifiable segment which is those from 18 to their mid 30s and who are ideally women and ones with a university degree, and about to set up house.
As social media began to absorb more and more mainstream advertising, so the advertising agencies put their support behind the happy family collective platforming staffed with womenfolk if they didn’t actually have university degrees then looked as if they did.
This in turn was reinforced visually and verbally by the manifest iteration of university values which in turn are deemed to be the values of those who have money to spend, especially on big ticket things such as cars and domestic fitments. Today’s conformity is thus centred on contemporary university values.
The result is that as the mainstream broadcasting audience greys with the weight of the years so it is treated as if it were greening with the sap of idealism.
The happy family presentation platform sidesteps sensitive issues and if one seems to be looming or unavoidable, then family members segue on cue into familial chatter about docile spouses or wilful kiddies. The era of the standalone presenter had passed. Anyone still remember Paul Holmes?
It is not that long ago that Winston Peters declared that TV3 was “better” than the government version. TV3 in the event, and under pressure from the advertising agencies, began to take on the colours of its subsidised competitor and did so by looking and sounding more and more like it.
But the green shoots, this time of rebellion, are starting to show. Management, which has had the channel on the market for quite some time, must carefully nurture them now that the sale is public.
Curiously and nobody is talking about this for obvious reasons TV3/Mediaworks is a component of one of the world’s biggest pools of money. It is controlled by Brookfield Asset Management.
A fellow Brookfield stablemate is Westinghouse Electric Company, a nuclear reactor design and builder.
While industrial ownership of newspapers is now commonplace (think Amazon’s proprietorship of the Washington Post) it remains unusual in the broadcasting sector.
Brookfield shouldered the New Zealand broadcaster from Oaktree Capital Management an outfit specialising as a vulture fund acquiring businesses on the verge of liquidation.
There have been signs of fire and fury in TV3. The guest-hosting by former Republican senator and now ambassador Scott Brown was one.
The straight-to-camera editorialising to Winston Peters about Winston Peters by Mark Richardson still another.
Another industrial proprietor this time with a productivity base in New Zealand itself will be in a position to counter the London-originating point of view with some badly needed home truths, and steer the channel away from the media magnetic north of juvenilia and shrill identity issues..
Anticipating Hitler’s rise pre-war politician told family to get as far away from Germany as possible
The death in New Zealand’s Wairarapa Valley of Tony Haas (pictured) severs one of the closest human link’s with Germany’s Nazi era.
Haas was the grandson of Ludwig Haas the minister for Baden and member of the Reichstag for the German Democratic Party and a determined opponent of the National Socialists, the Nazi Party.
Ludwig Haas died unexpectedly in 1930.
He is often considered the only politician who, had he lived, could have foiled the rise of Hitler and thus averted World War 2.
On his deathbed Ludwig Haas, anticipating Hitler’s rise and what was to come and knowing he would be powerless to do anything about it told his son, Karl, father of Tony Haas, to move as far away from Germany as possible –and stay there.
The family did this, re-establishing in New Zealand.
Several years prior to his own death and by now much encouraged by the resurgence in Germany of interest surrounding his grandfather (pictured below), Tony Haas toured Karlsruhe, his grandfather’s constituency, and there he was given a warm and attentive official welcome.
In his final years and with the assistance of Berlin-based archivists Tony Haas the grandson occupied himself with compiling the official biography of his prescient grandfather
Anthony Roger Haas was born in 1944, and raised in his own words as a “farm boy” in Pahiatua in the remote Wairarapa Valley where his father in addition to changing hemispheres had also switched vocations becoming a farmer.
Tony Haas’ own long incubated 2015 autobiography Being Palangi – My Pacific Journey was launched in the Wairarapa Valley.
Tony Haas in retirement had returned to his New Zealand roots after a 50 year global journalistic career mainly devoted to covering the Pacific and its peoples.
Tony Haas is survived by his wife Dr Patricia Donnelly and their children.
Deluded diplomats are fed hopes of a vanishing Restoration
An enduring mystery in Anglosphere diplomatic corps is the way in which so many officials insist on believing that president Donald Trump is an imposter who will be washed away by impeachment proceedings prior to the 2020 presidential elections.
Two virtual diplomatic handbook periodicals proffering this point of view are The Economist and the Financial Times.
Most foreign affairs officials believe that these two publications are owned in Great Britain.
They are not.
The Economist is controlled by the Agnelli dynasty of Fiat fame.
The Financial Times is owned by the Japanese Nikkei company, famed for its Nikkei index, the counterpart of the FTSE index.
Both these organisations are committed to globalisation, the outstanding roadblock to which is president Trump.
Whitehall regards these two publications with a Delphic reverence and to the extent that even after the Trump victory in 2016 its diplomats, notably those in Washington, believed that the Trump ascension was an ephemera, and would somehow evaporate.
This belief was so solidly grounded that it took three dimensional form in the shape of sourced print-outs to this effect, widely circulated, and which, surprise, surprise, found their way to the Daily Mail.
The belief fanned by the two periodicals is that one of the revolving door impeachment actions against president Trump will somehow sink him.
To date they have had the opposite effect of the one intended and the current iteration of the impeachment attrition is another one in this genre.
President Trump has presided over the strongest economy in living memory. Unemployment is at record lows, inflation is nearly non-existent, and new jobs are being created at a startling pace. Anyone who studies presidential politics knows that strong economies are the most important factor driving support for the incumbent.
Here’s the rub. Horrified by free trade regime of the WTO, and the leverage it bestowed upon China, Trump wants managed trade that better supports U.S. economic aspirations.
It is this apostasy that the two tut-tutting once British owned publications cannot get past.
The Economist and the Financial Times have been allowed to bypass slews of history such as that the most controversial presidents tend to roll up the biggest reelection victories.
Also when a party takes the White House, they tend to stay there for at least eight years.
Casualties of this higher-level media indoctrination to date have included the Australian Labour Party which lost its unloseable general election after constructing it around the vaunted globalist IPCC playbook.
Hardly renowned for its world-view the Australian Labour Party might still have learned from France’s president Macron who squandered most of his electoral capital doing the same thing and ignited the yellow vest protests.
New Zealand’s outgoing National (conservative) government in 2016 allowed itself to be utterly persuaded that Donald Trump would be washed out of history and committed the country to the censure of Israel and a long term commitment to the Clinton Foundation.
How have these two periodicals been able to get away with their continuing dangerously misleading prophecies?
The answer is that they chime with exactly the viewpoint of their foreign service adherents to the effect that there will be a restoration of the globalism world order with all its attendant civilities.
The two publications express the yearnings of Gerard Araud, the French ambassador to Washington and who upon Donald Trump’s ascension tweeted his dismay at a collapsing world order.
"It is the end of an era, the era of neoliberalism. We don't yet know what will succeed it,"adding "After Brexit and this election anything is possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes. Vertigo.”
Dizzy diplomats fed by publications with a face value mercantile priority can now heed (two-term) president Clinton’s indelible and winning electioneering axiom “It’s the economy, stupid.”