West’s Dependence on Russia Oil and Gas accelerated after Georgia and Crimea Invasions
Russia’s attempt to annex the entire Ukraine centres on president Putin’s determination to appease his own population by containing food prices. Ukraine has the world’s highest concentration of black soil and it is the major repository of Europe’s arable production.
President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was precipitated by increasing indications that Ukraine would secede entirely from the Moscow sphere of influence and into the hands of the Washington concensus.
Western disinformation has created an impression that president Putin launched his invasion because he is a power-crazed tyrant.
Yet it was the West which in such recent times consistently if indirectly signalled to Moscow that the time was right to retake Russia’s one time exclusively owned foodstore, Ukraine.
United States inspired ideologies empowered Russia in the invasion of Ukraine. The campaign against fossil fuels created the energy shortages in the United States itself and in Europe that gave Russia the sinews of war.
This was in the form of its energy exports revenues notably to the United States itself and also Germany.
Incredibly, Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and gas grew to an even greater dependence after Russia’s invasions of Georgia and Crimea.
These invoked embargoes which created food shortages.
These shortages still further accelerated the proportion of Russian household incomes devoted to buying food which rose to 50 percent. This is around five times as much as the proportion spent in most Western nations
The hesitancy about exiling Russia from international banking money clearances has much to do with maintaining Europe and the United States current and continuing dependence on Russian oil and gas.
Germany where anti fossil fuel ideologies first became transformed into a political movement led the way in Europe where almost half its energy requirements derive from Russia.
As a one-time Communist Party enforcer president Putin understands how prone the western intelligentsia is to its own ideologies.
Few doubt that the high profile calamities attendant upon the evacuation of Kabul operation were due to a diverting preoccupation at the time within the military of implementing the White House’s new race theories.
Moscow correctly saw that the United States singularity of purpose had become dissipated through the political need to adhere to voter-friendly ideologies.
Former United States senator-turned-broadcaster Scott Brown commented on this whole attitude at the outset of the invasion of the Ukraine.
He noted an atmosphere of “dilly dallying” in the highest places characterised by president Biden departing for a vacation at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
This corresponded with the situation during the Kabul evacuation when it later became evident that key people in Britain and the United States were on holiday at the time.
Canada and New Zealand see fade out in projecting cherished idealism
The anti-government protest convoy that in succession jammed the parliamentary centres of Canada and New Zealand also jammed the resonance from these two capitals of a globe girdling priority on defeating race-based social justice and imposed victimhood.
How was it that these two ultra-progressive governments were hosts to the turning point in public protests in which class imperatives replaced cultural motivation?
Neither of the left leaning governments the one in Wellington and the one in Ottawa could ascribe the convoy action to a cultural conflict. The acid test came in Wellington where in a cat-barks-at-dog display university students lodged formal protest against convoy participants for blockading their access to their own Victoria University.
The convoy action smeared the reputations of Canada prime minister Justin Trudeau who was forced to expel the protesters by invoking extreme wartime emergency measures.
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern whose motto is “Be Kind,” found herself subject to unparalleled personal invective while touring the nation’s South Island, usually a place of tranquillity in any public debate in anything at all.
One answer for the about face might be that the culture wars are considered to sap the sinew of a real war.
For example there is now a solid body of evidence that the United States high command was in fact so preoccupied by identitarian issues, notably critical race theory, that it was diverted from the operational reality of the evacuation of Kabul.
On the climate front we find that Russia has much of Europe in an energy supply stranglehold which came about as EU nations used net zero and other such slogans as an excuse not to invest in their own energy sources.
Similarly climatism in the form of the massively promoted COP26 in Glasgow became an inconclusive sideshow in spite of its heavyweight proponent British premier Boris Johnson, a climate convert through marriage, investing so much political capital in it.
These elements became compounded when John Kerry the United States special envoy on climate remonstrated against Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine on the grounds of its negative effect on emissions.
A dutiful mainstream media already terrified to probe into the pandemic’s origins now deliberately failed to see that the invasion followed in the immediate aftermath of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a keystone of China’s own internal propaganda even if it failed to grasp the imagination of the rest of the world.
The convoys attracted from the two leaders a certain undergraduate pique. In full graduate flight Justin Trudeau described his occupiers as misogynists and racists and science-deniers as a 'fringe minority' who 'hold unacceptable views,' and as 'a few people shouting and waving swastikas reinforcing this with accusations 'antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia'.
Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern was much milder and her sternest word was “disgraceful” and this was only employed after agitators among the occupiers had in short order dealt police hospital-grade injuries, caused a motor vehicle to be driven threateningly into law enforcement, and cast offensive matter.
This series of events was reported by Al Jazeera, an important globalist trends indicator, and this severely damaged Miss Ardern’s ambition of presenting New Zealand as the ultimate global model for social justice.
Worse still there were intimations from these same proclaimed anti vaccination agitators that the new agribusiness lobby Groundswell would be following in the footsteps of their own convoy.
Miss Ardern is similarly determined to present New Zealand as the ultimate example of global climate conformity .
Faced with having vast tracts of high productivity grazing land forested over in order to reach pre-determined carbon dioxide targets Groundswell has taken careful note of the way in which the convey camp around Parliament has focussed the minds of politicians and public.
Typically Groundswell has taken over from the more genteel Federated Farmers which is still content to discuss with Miss Ardern’s government the various fractions of a decimal involved in the nation’s supposed contribution to world emissions.
Ottawa police chief Peter Slole resigned after criticism that he had failed to act decisively against the convoy crowd.
His counterparts in Wellington have been similarly criticised. Yet they know as does everyone else in any position of constituted authority at all that whatever happens or does not happen there can be no martyrs.
This concept was perfected by the police during the anti apartheid Springbok riots and it holds true today. Bones cannot be broken.
Canada and New Zealand Premiers Hyped expectations and Over-Promised
Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern are the Commonwealth’s joint viceroys of virtue signalling. Yet a protest convoy from prime Minister Trudeau’s Ottawa fetched up a world away in prime minister Ardern’s Wellington causing it to become paralysed also.
How could these two leaders, the most accomplished and demonstrative cultural warriors, have become so effectively targeted by a protest that began in the bailiwick of one, and then ground to a disruptive halt in the capital of the other, Wellington?
At the height of their powers both these leaders could have appeared on a balcony and through the force of their mere presence have quieted the throng by intoning words to the effect that they felt its pain.
The soothed and hitherto unruly gathering thus implored would have quietly dispersed absolved and purified.
Mr Trudeau is often described as the “wizard of woke,” yet so serious was the threat in his capital, Ottawa, that he had to be spirited away to a place of safety.
The convoy protest conducted as it was on a widely dispersed global axis has introduced a new appraisal of the mechanics of the culture wars as a political instrument.
The Ottawa-Wellington mob scenes represent the clearest indication yet that the exponents of virtue signalling must be seen in themselves to be flawless, the personification of perfection.
In Wellington for example the demonstrators were drawn from precisely the same demographic that Miss Ardern pledges to protect and enhance.
At first Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the pandemic dramatically boosted her standing. Government health agencies successfully cauterised early outbreaks by what was described as cluster management.
Ever the politician Miss Ardern fed what became in the mainstream media an attitude toward her of unrestrained mystical reverence. One that was unsustainable.
She introduced each official broadcast clinician medical briefing with a demonstrably political and long winded monologue in which New Zealand’s progress in containing the pandemic was compared with the more sluggish performance of the rest of the world.
For Justin Trudeau the unravelling of the seamless cloak of perfection picked up speed after the release of a series of photographs showing him in fancy dress black and white minstrel mode. The hysterical reaction to this within Canada baffled the rest of the world.
After all he was a former drama teacher known to have an extensive repertoire of national costumes the better to demonstrate his own willingness to blend with ethnic communities and their aspirations.
Both countries share an underlying separatism made manifest by an emphasis on dual languages.
Both countries share a dominant issue in placating and appeasing separatist fissures. Both nations share the pandemic the containment regulations surrounding which provided the convoy movement its face value purpose.
There were lockdowns. Yet still the virus twisting and turning in its mutations defied orderly and methodical standard medical practice. Miss Ardern now rationed her podium exposure.
In both Ottawa and Wellington the motorised insurgents clamour to be recognised as victims of the government imposed measures to contain and eliminate the virus.
The premiers of both countries decline to “engage” with them. Both premiers can be described as socialists. Usually the insurgents would be the exact group category that the two premiers would wish to “engage” with in order to flaunt their common touch.
The two prime ministers share something else. Canada and New Zealand have the most biddable, the least excitable populations in the Anglosphere if not the world.
For Miss Ardern the most worrisome element of the horde surrounding and blockading parliament buildings is this. A media as recently two years ago in a state of thrall under her tutelage seems now to be conceding that the protesting throng might just have a point.
Both premiers became dazzled if not blinded by the way in which in foreign media they were consistently portrayed as secular saints.
Foolishly they failed to understand that this sanctification is in pursuit of the highbrow media’s own requirement to lock in and expand its own privileged audience as much as it is to enshrine any colonial prime ministerial save the worldliness.
The Ottawa and Wellington experiences shed a new light on what until even a few weeks even days ago was viewed institutionally as the unchallengeable formula for political pre-eminence which was to follow the approved globalist rule book of Reset.
We can now start to see that this formula works only if its proponents are themselves viewed as all seeing and all-knowing practitioners of stately virtue. Avatars of human perfection in other words.
As it is both these prime ministerial fallen angels, doctrinaires of diversity, have about them now the aura of being all too human.
Goldsmith Dynasty caused Carrie Johnson to emulate NZ climate Best in Show ambition for UK
Boris Johnson’s sudden conversion to climate extremism followed his marriage to his wife Carrie whose first job was working for Zac Goldsmith, now Lord Goldsmith.
Zac Goldsmith with his uncle the late Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith was instrumental in starting New Zealand’s Pacific Ecologist magazine.
The late Teddy Goldsmith, married to a New Zealander, donated to the nation’s Green Party and became an activist in a number of green causes there.
Zac Goldsmith was his uncle’s right hand man in starting and sustaining the Ecologist magazine franchise. He went on to become a British Member of Parliament and it was in this capacity that he gave Carrie Symonds her first job.
The Goldsmiths were among the first to see New Zealand in an international context as the nation that more than any other pointed the way to an idealised ultimate eco country, now often described as the Best in Show syndrome.
The Johnson premiership is now recognised as being conducted under the United States presidential model with Carrie Johnson acting as First Lady in a Clintonesque co-presidency.
It is in this process that Boris Johnson swung to extreme climatism following the New Zealand model in which conformity to global climate desiderata overrules all other considerations, notably economic ones.
Zac Goldsmith’s connections with New Zealand were massively restored when as Lord Goldsmith he was made Minister of State with special responsibility for the Pacific.
Boris Johnson’s conversion to the climate cult is the most radical in the developed world because it is so all encompassing seeking for example a 20 percent reduction in meat and dairy consumption in the next eight years.
His climate radicalism is the real cause of disaffection among the Tories, the ones in his parliamentary party and also the rank and file backbone in the shires.
His omnibus scheme for the greening of Britain involves the elimination of coal and gas and petrol cars in the medium term, cutbacks in airports, and shipping and the saturation introduction of devices such as heat pumps.
This follows on the heels of the current New Zealand ban on oil and natural gas exploration, even though natural gas is vital to the nation’s main export of milk products. Domestic coal suppression virtue signalling means in fact relying on increasing volumes of coal imports from nations such as Indonesia.
Carrie Johnson’s eco influence became notable in the priority during the evacuation of Kabul of an entire dogs home complete with staff.
Australasians viewing Mr Johnson’s ascent to power are baffled by someone who on the eve of the crucial general election in 2019 left his “long suffering” wife Marina as the UK press always described her, the mother of four of his children, and then took up with Carrie with whom he has had two additional children.
How could anyone so distracted cope with winning an election and then running a country?
There are several reasons. A by-product of Britain’s class system is that certain people have immense social licence. Such individuals understand that what applies to other people does not apply to them. Mr Johnson is at best merely a theatrically embellished member of the upper class. His faux aristocratic blustering bravura demeanour is an accepted put on.
His jocular manner and aura of fun-to-be-around converted into hard political capital when in his two terms he kept the progressive left out of London’s mayoralty and then in the 2019 general election gave the Tories an 80-seat majority in parliament.
How could this have happened, Australasians ask, when any such domestic upheavals, even the whisper of them, would have disqualified at the outset one of their own prime ministerial candidates?
The reason is Margaret Thatcher. She purged British politics of prurience about the private life of its politicians. It was their ability to do the job that mattered she insisted.
It was this still largely unseen element of Thatcherism that gave Boris Johnson his singular immunity in skating over domestic upheavals that would have sunk his counterparts anywhere else in the Commonwealth.
Mr Johnson’s most obvious ideological counterpart in the Commonwealth remains Malcolm Turnbull, a much longer term yet equally ardent proponent of the progressive extreme climate cause, the overarching cause of causes, having been elected also as leader of a conservative government.
Mr Johnson terrifies Tories because his rapid conversion to progressive politics was so sudden, and so Damascene. Nobody saw it coming.
In contrast in Australia there is a cottage industry among commentators in turning out evidence to the effect that Mr Turnbull’s heart all along had been with the progressives.
Mr Johnson is a biographer of Winston Churchill and has candidly modelled himself on the wartime leader of whom he writes in his book The Churchill Factor……..
“The case against him is that he was not only the greatest man of modern British history but also, in his own sweet way, something of a tosser in his treatment of others.
“…….he behaved like a spoilt child; and we must accept that he was used to getting his way…”
Shakedowns for Prince’s Uncles Edward Duke of Windsor and George Duke of Kent
The Duke of Windsor was blackmailed at least twice and the Duke of Kent was also blackmailed. In all these instances no money was paid out.
The current civil action against their great nephew Prince Andrew introduces new facets to an historical theme.
No money can be paid out because it is known that it will create a precedent in which others will step forward claiming their payments.
No civil action in fact can be brought against a child of the monarch.
No matter what action is brought and on whatever grounds no child of the monarch can be apprehended while in a royal palace.
Any action from New York has to cross a high wall of jurisdiction rendered more impenetrable if the action involves New York’s own by-laws.
The validity of the action involving as it does cohorts of operatives extends bar practice contingency validity to the point at which it will likely fail to be recognised in the United Kingdom.
Manoeuvring in the United States New York jurisdiction now devolves on smoking out Prince Andrew so that he forsakes the United Kingdom to face in person his challengers on United States soil.
In a curious dynamic the various elements of the case intensify in hysteria as they make landfall in the United Kingdom.
The United States is in the throes of one of its 20 year-cycle moral convulsions and in this fervour the pressure on Prince Andrew grows to confront face-to-face allegations at their source.
Of a temperate nature Prince Andrew has already sought to confront his accusers directly. As he himself in his candid gun deck manner might now concede the result was that he was holed below the waterline.
This was in the scene-setting BBC interview. The Royal Family all evidence to the contrary continues to view the BBC from a 1950s standpoint. Ground rules were certainly laid out and these appear to have included the treatment centred on the prince’s proness or otherwise to human perspiration or sweat as it was deliberately and disdainfully described.
The scheme appears to have been to allow the prince to touch upon his valiant service as a Royal Navy pilot in the Falklands war in which he deliberately acted as decoy target for incoming missiles.
What was not perceived was that the putting of one’s neck on the line for one’s country no longer counts as a virtue.
The episode was a master class for any law school in the folly of anyone under challenge being allowed to put across their side of the story free-form.
Hook after hook after hook flew from the encounter like sparks and it these that continue to fuel the audience-hungry legacy media’s carefully concocted indignation in the Anglosphere.
This compounding shock-horror barrage feeds on itself. If it shows any sign of flagging it is quickly fired up from New York by the operatives driving the action against Andrew.
This takes the form of Prince Andrew’s opponents squeezing into the frame behind a bank of microphones in a triumphalist show boating crowd photo-op.
Curiously, even given the de-skilling of the mainstream, this is received at its destination which is the other side of the Atlantic, the UK, as yet another nail in the prince’s coffin.
Neither has there been anything more than a hushed outline of the ways in which the royal bloodline has long been protected from civil actions.
Prince Andrew has never pretended to be something that he is not. When he served as UK Trade and Investment’s ambassador at large he found it hard to find enthusiasm for the quotidian run of the mill transactions, but visibly got fired up over defence trade opportunities.
.Prince Andrew, a fellow of adventurous spirit, has always laid himself vulnerable to a shakedown.
His advisers tend to bend to his strong personality. They need to remind their client that it is up to his accusers to build their case and without any unintentional help from him.
So would citing the various cases involving Andrew’s ducal great uncles (pictured above) Edward Duke of Windsor and George Duke of Kent serve to remind an excitable legacy media of an inevitability surrounding such actions.
Beijing Hollywood Hegemony in movies and network news
Beijing’s penetration of Hollywood means that the Dalai Lama and Tibet have been squeezed out of the global human rights discourse.
The Tibet issue is viewed by Beijing as the most sensitive of all its human rights liabilities.
Its new Hollywood hegemony has given Beijing this leverage because studios and network news broadcasting organisations are amalgamating. In this structure there is also print media.
Beijing’s silent yet effective control over the world box office was greatly aided by Hollywood’s unquestioning adhesion to international global cooperation organisations actually under the control of China.
The takeover also came about while the United States was distracted by other Beijing strategies such as the one to control the metals needed for the English-speaking zone’s Green “revolution.”
The rules of engagement between the Chinese Communist Party and Western entertainment and broadcast media is that Tibet is out of bounds, off-limits.
Twenty years ago the most storied figure in Hollywood was the exiled Dalai Lama celebrated in such blockbusters Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun.
Nowadays anything related to the Dalai Lama and the annexed Tibet is quietly spiked.
How did Washington allow China to steal such a march on it in such a key industry?
After all, it was known that China was following the pattern of its Far East neighbour Japan in targeting industrial sectors in order to dominate them.
This resource focussing had allowed Japan to take over in succession shipbuilding and then the automotive sector.
The curtain only in very recent times has gone up on China’s determination to be the world’s pre-eminent box office operator.
China has seeded thousands of movie theatres throughout its provinces, the better for its populace to appreciate China’s own output of patriotic movies and also to view Hollywood’s output providing that the content and those involved with making it meet approved standards.
Richard Gere (pictured with the Dalai Lama) was among the first to encounter this kind of disapproval especially when he publicly observed that the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics signalled approval for the regime’s human rights record.
He also signalled the way in which Hollywood was becoming dependent on China in terms of distribution and also finance.
The fade out for the Dalai Lama in Hollywood and thus in United States can be dated from the mergers and acquisitions which saw the television channels, studios, and print media starting to share the same holding companies.
Hollywood’s view of China remains the bumper sticker notion that its ruling CCP lifted a quarter of the world’s population out of poverty and without any probing to the effect that it was the CCP that put them there in the first place.
This same CCP’s plan to mobilise this same proportion of the world’s population into the commanding movie market hid in plain sight.
The integration of movie making and television news broadcasting allied with global finance has made vulnerable the entire sector to China policies as the blackout on the Dalai Lama has revealed.
The Dalai Lama insists on describing himself a “simple monk,” and deliberately remains open on the matter of his being the last of this line of theocrats.
The line in fact relies upon the Panchen Lama who is his designated selector for the next Dalai Lama. It is the Panchen Lama who evaluates the portents that identify the next in the line of Dalai Lama.
The problem is that the Panchen Lama disappeared days after he was selected by the Dalai Lama and is thought to be in China, adding weight to the assertion that the next in the line of succession will be chosen there too.
The CCP targeting of movie entertainment is now revealed as a keystone of another objective which is to boost consumer spending within China by flooding provincial district with movie theatres.
Articles of faith cross Tasman Sea and embed in General Election run up
In 2017 Scott Morrison brandished a lump of coal in Australia’s Federal Parliament.
Nowadays the prime minister might prefer instead to wave a cup of baby’s blood in front of the assembled legislators.
In 2019 as children and adults at an Oceania conference wallowed up to their waists in pools of water Mr Morrison was on the receiving end of an admonition from New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern to “explain himself” in regard to climate warming.
A few years before such a thinly veiled scolding would have had panjandrums in Wellington and in Canberra scurrying back and forth uttering sentences beginning with “What she really meant to say was……..”
This time there was no such fluttering. The comment was allowed to stand where it was, as it was, with no backsliding.
So what happened in the brief time when as Federal treasurer Scott Morrison waved his chunk of anthracite and that moment two years later when as prime minister he the senior trans Tasman partner received from his junior partner in the arrangement a condescending ticking-off?
In the intervening two years which saw Mr Morrison achieve his “miraculous” and “impossible” general election victory there occurred a societal shift, a tipping point traversed.
In this now recognisable turn of the ethical tide there emerged now a knowledge worker urban service sector craving to occupy the international ideological high mountain tops, the ones on which to display a passion for the betterment of the world as a whole.
In Australia the first to grasp the new puritanism was Malcolm Turnbull who as prime minister was responsible in 2016 for Australia’s retro-fitted French nuclear submarines.
As zany as the decision seemed at the time, and even more so later, Mr Turnbull saw that the nuclear-as-evil electoral talisman had crossed the Tasman and become firmly wedged in Australia’s own progressive psyche, the one dedicated to republicanism and other such stagey modernisms.
Scott Morrison similarly saw this mutation to what had hitherto been known as the environmental movement. But he realised that in its climate format and that however fashionable it was becoming the Australia middle class was still worried by the cost of it.
So filling the gap left by a captivated Labour Party he put price tags on the progressive zeal and won the impossible election.
The ideological waves from New Zealand breaking on Australia’s shores have now eroded this pocket-book approach.
In economic terms these progressive waves have become inelastic. Price does not matter. The elites want the product which New Zealand has taught them is globalist prestige and recognition. Progressivism had entered the economic zone of premium pricing. The greater the cost. The greater the appeal and perceived benefit.
This is why Mr Morrison now talks of his Labour opposition’s Big Government threat. He cannot be seen to denigrate and demean anything on the climate-social justice axis. The urban activist electorate will turn on him avenging the desecration of their recently acquired belief systems.
Back now to Tuvalu.
It’s symbolism as a political hinge was missed at the time because along with everyone else in Australia Mr Morrison failed to see that the New Zealand prime ministerial remarks were aimed at prestige-conferring globalist institutions as much as the locals.
In the event this unseen yet pivotal episode in Australian electoral progressivism was itself drowned out in an ensuing media-political comedy. Broadcaster Alan Jones said Mr Morrison should "shove a sock down her throat”, following Ms Ardern's critique.
Mr Morrison never adept with abstract altruistic issues now instead chided Mr Jones.
The straight-taking broadcaster was described by Mr Morrison as being "very disappointing" and "way out of line".
Also missed at the time was the way in which Mr Morrison had allowed himself also to be slickly backed into the social justice corner, as well as the climate “crisis” one.
He was told that he had failed to do his “bit” for the population of these said to be submerging islands.
Mr Morrison by way of further explanation reminded everyone on the atoll that he had two daughters and in this paternal capacity was necessarily involved in sea levels in the Pacific.
In the event Mr Jones personified the turning point in Australia’s ideological balance
It was a changing of the guard utterly unobserved at the time.
In came an imploring, dewy-eyed era of global sensitivity and collective loftily visible self-sacrifice.
Out went the winner-take-all era of bluntly stated sports metaphor performance targets along with the ruggedly expressed emphasis on method and order and individuality.
Malcolm Turnbull, the first to discern the way in which New Zealand’s ideology centrepieces such as no-nuclear had penetrated Australian electoral politics, now also put his boot into Mr Jones describing the broadcaster as an "appalling misogynist."
The backwash continues to break on Australian shores. In the last few months News Corp in a carefully planned about-face suddenly converted and became a climate change believer and advocate. Swept away too was Alan Jones.
New leader pledges to win back National Party’s culture wars deserters
Christopher Luxon’s declaration in his leadership acceptance speech that he intends to return to the National Party fold precisely 413,000 absconding devotees rates as the most candid party political disclosure in memory.
This is because the majority of people in the politico-media sphere know exactly who these disaffected voters are.
They are middle class well-to-do females living in the nicer suburbs of the main urban centres.
They deserted the National Party because National itself became a casualty of the culture wars, overwhelmed even.
This entire disaffected segment of the National Party had hitherto been estimated at 300,000.
Mr Luxon’s disclosure of the much greater 413,000 number of absentees, truants, from his party’s ranks explains why his predecessor Judith Collins always seemed so tongue-tied on the matter of the culture wars.
This especially applied to the flagship climate cause and its costs which remain the underpinning worry for National’s traditional base of farmers.
If we estimate that there are approximately 100,000 family farm proprietors, ones that the National Party has always relied on for its bedrock vote, we can understand exactly why Mrs Collins was unable to challenge even the most extravagant of climate doctrines.
Any such direct challenge to the climate industry’s saintly intentions might win over one ACT-prone farmer. But it would harden the resolve of four suburban defectors to continue their self-imposed exile in Labour-Green land.
Given this 1:4 ratio against her it is small wonder that Mrs Collins had to bite her lip in the matter of the culture wars in general and the climate skirmishing in particular.
Mr Luxon in military terms has before him operationally the task of creating a pincer movement.
One pincer must convince the productive sector, the wealth-generating one, that he can at least contain the internationalist culture wars with minimum damage to the local economy.
Simultaneously he must persuade his missing 413,000 former adherents that their abject adhesion to these same doctrines will undercut the very prosperity that confers on them the privilege of their high mindedness and noble aspirations.
Between Mr Luxon and these two widely divergent, diverse, voting blocs, flocks, there remains a formidable barrier.
Broadcasters and daily newspaper practitioners are spellbound by the culture wars. They hold up the mirror in which the straying 413,000 can with a sense of regard see themselves fashionably and virtuously reflected.
Mr Luxon will have to communicate directly with his renegades. He can use things like Twitter and Facebook, and the rest. But this is already conquered territory overrun in the culture wars.
To win back the affections of the 413,000 absentees he must deal with them on their own terms which means using conventional media.
There are recent signs that this mirror may be cracking in his favour.
The first was when the Listener revealed the cost to the taxpayer of the government’s climate induced ban on oil and gas.
Without getting mired in oil depletion allowance minutiae the Listener piece explained the consequences of this political theatre.
It showed how in pulling out the rug from underneath the oil and gas sector the Labour government is now well on its way to achieving the 28 billion dollar economic loss forecast for the nation by the NZIER consultancy.
The Listener breakthrough now seismically cracked even wider.
The article now appeared in the New Zealand Herald. It was handled gingerly by the Auckland daily. Up for barely a day on the paper’s internet version and securely behind a paywall. It was though a start.
Mr Luxon’s upwardly revised new figures on the alienated National Party voters is an astounding revelation. The numbers reveal that whatever he does do or does not do that he can no longer continue a policy of triangulating, taking bets each way on the climate front of the culture wars.
If he does he will generate an even worse ratio, this time of 4:0. This is because the farmer constituency will jump as a body into the ACT fold. He still wont have the missing 413,000 and he wont have any farmers either.
He has to find a formula by pass around this simple arithmetic.
Labour has dominated the culture war battlefield by grabbing the high ground on each and every engagement in the campaigns. It successfully frames its opponents as unfashionable, out of touch, coarse, unfeeling, unimaginative and selfish, insensitive and above all, insular
Mr Luxon a man of a philosophical turn of mind knows that the longest journey in the world begins with a single step.
Psephologists and others who seek meaning in voting patterns might point him in the direction of the Listener for this stepping off point of departure.
The weekly’s enduring historic catchment embraces each one of those earnest yet politically flighty quondam National Party followers so recently become daughters of Aquarius and now so very definably and publicly AWOL.
Cultural truths from USA via UK all enforced Down Under
No question quite so absorbs conservative and establishment category gatherings in places such as Sydney, Adelaide, Auckland, and Wellington as this one. Why do the newspapers and broadcasting channels all share identical points of view?
The reason for this singularity of community of interest is usually attributed to the self-selection of the people involved in putting out newspapers and broadcasts.
This blends with a corresponding uniformity of background. The provenance of these individuals tends to be the same. They are all from urban and privileged backgrounds.
Another factor underpinning this choral approach to current affairs is that the songs being so ardently sung all originate overseas and also from easily mapped and pinpointed geographical areas.
In Australasia this is hard to swallow because of the pioneering era long cherished conviction that these countries are ruggedly independent when it comes to thought and belief. Indeed that their fresh no nonsense unvarnished individualism is a world removed from the cosseted and elitist salons of places such as London, New York, and Los Angeles.
In common with most myths in these southerly latitudes the truth can be discovered simply by an evaluation of the direct opposite of the contemporary mythology.
Newspaper and broadcast opinions in Australasia actually originate in the West Coast of the United States, are refined in the East Coast and arrive in London. Then after some additional tailoring in the London BBC clearing house these viewpoints are transmitted for rediffusion in Australasia.
Upon arrival none of these moulded beliefs are open for debate. The extended transmission pipeline has hardened them along the way to the point at which they have materialised as no-go zones that are required to be accepted as articles of faith.
The most obvious of these transmitted collective industry stereotypes was and is of course the belief that Donald Trump is the original bad hombre and that anything he caused or causes to happen radiates evil.
In contrast anything emanating from New York’s globalist organisations becomes as treasured as Motherhood was until a few years ago. These include all declarations on climate warming.
Forbidden is any expressed scepticism on the reality of the climate “crisis” and its consecrated rating as an imminent “catastrophe” and its unimpeachable ascendancy over any other crisis and especially the current and actual virus one that these same globalist institutions failed in their duty to protect the world from.
The West Coast -Hollywood-origin subset of no-go zones focuses meanwhile on human characteristics known as identity ones.
In earlier stages this took the form of political correctness a process in which minority classifications began to assume majority influence requiring in coverage exquisitely exaggerated politesse. In Australasia all this is now grouped under the cultural safety banner.
Ideological costume changes amid the media mean that its taboos are crystallised collectively and so become institutionalised very quickly.
China oddly enough in the context of the last two years is one such beneficiary of this institutionalised group-think. There remains for example little enthusiasm in anyone covering any correlation between the severity of virus outbreaks in Melbourne and Milan and the presence of these mercantile centres as their countries’ hubs of China’s Belt & Road Initiative common market scheme.
Then there is the uniformity in the fervency of the take up now of an issue that pre-dated political correctness. Unmentioned in any coverage of Australasian defence via the ANZAC or Five Eyes pact category is the immovable don’t mention of New Zealand’s utter ban on anything nuclear.
The sanctity of this as an engrained cult taboo and one which might just interfere with the successful conduct of any mutual defence arrangements is always sidestepped in a collective media illusion as was let us say the vulnerability of the Maginot Line before World War 2.
The mainstream wraps around itself increasing layers of moral fervour. Much of the interlarded sackcloth and ashes enclosed in this is about a pioneering past now labelled under the shared guilt transfer as a “colonial” past.
In Australasia some believe that this eagerly expressed state of wretchedness and shame is a substitute for the melting away of organised religion, especially that of Roman Catholicism which once held such sway among media types.
Another theory draws on the cane toad (pictured), the rabbit, prickly pear and gorse bush and other introduced species that proliferated in their new antipodean environment.
This viewpoint contends that the West Coast of the United States cultural imperative to dominate any collectively-rated moral high ground, and above all, to be seen to be doing so, found a new and virgin habitat in the South Seas.
We can conclude therefore that the symmetry in this community of interest is organic and exotic. In its long journey from the West Coast of the USA through the globalist filters of New York and then via Commonwealth public broadcasting relay boosters this pasteurised coverage took firm root.
It has exploded like a giant orchid in a region in which there are no natural predators that might put forward any dissenting point of view to the trans-Atlantic gospel.
New Hebrides Dual Systems era recalled as race-based separatism evolves in Aotearoa
Unbeknownst to most of its inhabitants an Oceania nation is transforming itself into the world’s newest condominium a rare form of governance in which sovereignty is shared by two legally defined categories.
In New Zealand’s case the two categories are Maori and non-Maori.
This transition is incremental and the change is imperceptible to all but the political activists driving the split governance scheme.
This imminence of it was reinforced by the New Zealand government serving notice that it intended to nationalise municipal water.
This followed the announcement of a centralising of public health currently run by 20 elected boards centred on district local hospitals.
In both these shakeups there is scheduled to be in both outcomes a substantial if not dominant role for those claiming Maori heritage.
Maori electoral districts known as wards are being shunted through for local government authorities.
State broadcasting channels are ramrodding through the Maori language at every and any opportunity.
In this whole evolving framework the government taps into a deep-seated craving for New Zealand to achieve recognition on the world stage wherever progressive values command the agenda.
This is variously described as “holding our head high,” or more colloquially and more famously “punching above our weight.”
The Labour government is acutely conscious of this yearning to be seen to be leading any social advance. It now sees what amounts to condominium government as its instrument for attaining its international “best in class” status, as it sees it.
It knows it has the power to implement a condominium bipartite or two system governance because its polls still continue to tell it that it has the allegiance of the commanding blocs of the electorate.
These voting blocs include the entire education system, anything to do with the media-arts along with most of the other public institutions
In contrast this leaves its National Party opposition holding only the property and real estate sector and clinging with an increasingly tenuous grip to its traditional agribusiness base.
As a condominium looms for the nation it is salutary to examine the last one in Oceania. This was the New Hebrides before it achieved independence in 1980 and became Vanuatu.
Governance was shared between Britain and France. Everything existed in mirrored pairs. There were for example separate British and French governments, which meant two immigration policies, and two corporation laws.
There are signs that the New Hebrides condominium experience has been studied by the local condominium governance architects. This is because language in practical terms became in the New Hebrides era the most serious impediment to smooth running because anything official at all had to be interpreted and then re-interpreted into French and English.
The condominium scheme, the new one for New Zealand, is well under way. So anticipating the same New Hebrides language operational obstacle government agencies daily increase their double up of Maori and English in announcements as well as in correspondence and documents.
Officials in any capacity understand that their career prospects will be much enhanced should they use every opportunity and at the expense of effective communication to apply Maori and ideally whole phrases or better still entire sentences.
In the old New Hebrides condominium inhabitants were given the choice of which government they wanted to be ruled by. The French one or the English one. This is the evolving pattern in the New Zealand scheme.
Matiu Rata (above) was the Minister of Maori Affairs in the nation’s third Labour government and he was renowned for bluntly yet concisely summarising any state of affairs as he saw it.
On one occasion he was asked who exactly was a Maori?
“You are a Maori if you think you are a Maori,” he declared.
As New Zealand incrementally but so purposefully moves toward condominium governance Matiu Rata’s yardstick like the New Hebrides experience demands earnest evaluation.
So does the taxpayer funded report known as He Puapua which has surfaced and which sets out the scheme for the dual governance.
He puapua means a petal. The ministerial working group that compiled the report translates it instead as “a break” meaning a sudden change.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242