The selection of Judith Collins by her colleagues as the new leader of New Zealand’s opposition National Party is a last minute throw of the political dice that might just save the Right from splintering at the upcoming election.

One of the problems of the political Left over the last 30 or so years is that it has been fragmented with voters under MMP choosing between Labour, Greens, TOP and Maori Party to name a few, along with NZ First as a centrist party. Whereas the Right has, until now, been solidly National with a much smaller ACT party.

The resignation of Todd Muller yesterday may see a number of traditional National Party voters move to ACT this election, but the selection of Judith Collins as leader will certainly do much stem that flow.

READ MORE: ‘Common goal – oust government’, says NZ’s new National leader Collins

While Judith Collins is a person with very different political views to my own I have to say she is a skilled politician and front-footed last night’s press conference in a way that immediately confirmed Muller’s own assessment of himself that he was not the right person for the job.

For me however there was one particularly revealing economic policy moment when she was posed a rare and intelligent and searching question very late in the gathering.

“What would be your general approach over the next three years?” the unseen journalist asked.

“ Would you borrow more? Would you cut the spending would you raise taxation. Would you try to pay the debt back or would you leave it to roll down through the generations?”

Tension-relieving joke
To which she responded with a tension-relieving joke before saying:

“It’s pretty obvious that the National Party is not the party of big taxes . We are the party of sensible spending, we’re a party of infrastructure, we’re a party that believes in investing. We’re not stupid with money because we always know that somebody has to pay it back and the last thing that we want is to leave a legacy for the next two generations to pay back on.

“These are the sorts of views that we are taking into this [election] and that’s where we are always better than the other people because we know that we have to pay it back.”

I’ll have more to say about the economic policies of all the political parties in the coming days but for now I offer just a quick reaction.

That statement by National’s new leader reflects a pre-covid mentality. It reveals a mindset that pretends the economic world has not dramatically changed, that we are not facing a major recession which may become a deep depression.

Why?

Because during the Great Depression years of the 1930s leaders like Franklin D Roosevelt and our own Michael Joseph Savage understood that in such times government spending is what saves an economy, not penny pinching or leaving it to business to decide .

New post-covid rules
The new rules of the post-covid economy are only just forming. The longer the pandemic runs the deeper our economic problems will become.

Yesterday’s thinking which pandered to the vested interests of the few at the expense of the many isn’t going to cut it .

As for “leaving a legacy of debt “for the next generations and being” a party of infrastructure” – I invite you to reflect on how our schools and hospitals were run down under the last National administration and how, in the 1990s, National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson cut the benefits – with the result that all the diseases of poverty which affect poor children the most all skyrocketed.

So in my view, last night the economic gauntlet has been thrown down .

Labour, Greens and all the others now have to pick it up and clearly state why their handling of our economy will be different from the continued neoliberal approach to running it that Judith Collins re-articulated last night.

Bryan Bruce is an independent New Zealand journalist and documentary maker with a progressive view on politics and economics. This commentary was first published on Facebook and has been republished here with permission.

Every time I wrote a sentence to describe the slow motion collision of social, economic and political forces that are simultaneously destroying and reshaping societies around the world, I would erase it .

Not “writer’s block” so much as “writer’s inadequacy” – feeling torn between using “revolution” or “evolution” to describe the events on my news feeds over the last few days.

READ MORE: Towards a global intifada

I tried writing a list. (An old trick I have when trying to find a pattern in an apparent chaos):

• America has an absentee President
• The murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter.
• Stock markets are on the rise.
• Peaceful Whitehouse protest attacked by police so Trump can hold up a Bible for a photo op.
• Houses are selling again – some below CV, some ridiculously above.
• Worldwide covid-19 is still killing thousands of people everyday .
• A second virus wave is a real fear so our borders are closed… except, entertainment is suddenly deemed an essential industry and Hollywood moguls get a free pass.
• Essential workers who helped keep us alive during the lockdown still receive the lowest pay.
• China is back to a 90 percent economy.
• America has the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.
• Locally there are a lot of empty shops, a sudden rash of “for lease signs” on office and warehouse properties, and evidence of a hotel industry in trouble.

The list doesn’t help.

For every positive sign I find suggesting a new more egalitarian post-covid-19 world will emerge, contra-indicators reveal the vested interests in the old order are still very much alive and kicking.

Another old trick
So I try another old trick. The History Review:

I ask myself is this moment unique? Have we been here before?

Answer? Yes and no.

Yes – in some societies there have been moments of very rapid social change when the existing social order has been suddenly overthrown. The French, American and Russian revolutions being three obvious examples.

No – because, this time, whatever is happening is a global phenomenon made possible by the invention of the internet and global air travel – two technologies that have transformed our mental and physical world so that Queen Street is now just around our mental corner from Wall Street and a virus born in Wuhan today can fly to Washington or Wellington and be living in us tomorrow.

So where are the words to describe what is happening ?

I turn to some old friends for help.

Charles Dickens:

“It was the best times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period.” (A Tale of Two Cities)

W.B. Yeats writing after the chaos of WW1:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” (The Second Coming)

Pandemics are not new.

Social chaos is not new.

The battle between Good and Evil is as old as human conscience.

Somehow, despite all our short comings as a species, we are still here.

Perhaps, in that, there is some hope.

Bryan Bruce is one of New Zealand’s most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed the NZ neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social problems. He blogs at The Daily Blog where this column was first published here. Republished with the author’s permission.

• New Zealand relaxes covid restrictions after ‘remarkable’ virus fight

Many newspapers betrayed their readers during the Great Depression and now some are doing so again during the coronavirus pandemic.

During the Depression, Australia’s major daily newspapers loudly resisted calls for economic stimulus to revive the economy. Even the tabloids – whose working class audiences were feeling the full brunt of unemployment – campaigned instead for government spending cuts that hit their readers hard.

Self-interest was behind this. The companies and individuals behind Australia’s most popular daily newspapers in the early 1930s were bondholders who had lent enormous sums of money to Australian governments before the Depression.

READ MORE: A matter of trust: coronavirus shows again why we value expertise when it comes to our health

So had banks, trustee and life insurance companies that were allied with newspaper owners, and also major newspaper advertisers.

If Australian governments had not made severe cuts to spending and instead injected money into the economy through welfare and job creation projects, they would not have been able to pay back their debts. Domestic bondholders would have lost millions in interest payments.

Now, we see some news outlets again betraying their readers by prioritising business over public health.

In the Murdoch News Corp/Fox Corporation stable in the US, Fox News downplayed the spread of the virus for as long as it could.

Its presenters ridiculed predictions about its impact as coming from “panic pushers” and liberals out to damage Trump, while the Wall Street Journal editorialised that shutdowns might be safeguarding public health but “at the cost of its economic health”.

Trump jumped on cue and began spouting the same shameful rhetoric that the cure might be worse than the disease because of its economic impact. He wanted Americans back to work by Easter.

Murdoch’s Sun in the UK represented shutdowns there with a bleak front page calling them “HOUSE ARREST” and showing a padlock over the Union Jack.

In the Murdoch outlets in Australia, these views are being faithfully reproduced by Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun and Sky News. Bolt’s column on March 30 was headed “Aussies should be back at work in two weeks”.

During the Great Depression, the mainstream press strongly reflected the economic conservatism of bankers, economists and business leaders. The most vehement outlets were the Argus and the Herald in Melbourne, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the Mercury in Hobart, and the Brisbane Telegraph and Brisbane Courier. They attacked the Scullin Labor government’s plan to reflate the economy through government stimulus as “economic insanity”, “a dangerous experiment”, “grotesque and menacing”.

But in a turn of phrase that even those papers might have found too hysterical, Bolt recently described economic stimulus packages during coronavirus as “Marxism”. This is despite the fact that economic stimulus is now so widely accepted as part of a mainstream economic toolkit that conservative politicians are using it in Australia, the UK and the US.

Sky News host Alan Jones has also downplayed the virus, saying “we are living in the age of hysteria” and that he wants to see the emphasis placed on protecting people “in nursing homes and hospitals instead of schools and football stadiums”.

Sky News video: ‘We are living in the age of hysteria.’

Right-wing commentators – presumably working from home themselves – are keen to get everyone back to work in the midst of a pandemic, even though the medical advice says otherwise.

The usual pretence that they are on the side of their audience falls away at a time of crisis. They are representing the interests of business – particularly their own.

Media companies that were already financially fragile are extremely worried about coronavirus. The sudden halt to business has meant the loss of advertising revenue, possibly for a long period, but also the loss of reader income. This means people have less to spend on media and on buying advertisers’ products.

Combined with this is the dramatic loss of sport (of vital importance to the struggling Foxtel, Kayo Sports and tabloid newspapers) and also the end of house auctions when real estate sections and real estate websites were one of the few remaining bright spots for the newspaper groups. The bread-and-butter events that newspapers cover, from entertainment and leisure to restaurant and movies, have stopped, and nobody knows for how long.

These are unprecedented and menacing threats to commercial media groups. At News Corp, there is the added pressure of a transition in leadership from the 89-year-old Rupert Murdoch to his son, Lachlan Murdoch, a less tested – and less trusted – leader who is unlikely to have the business nous of his father or even his grandfather, Keith Murdoch.

As a journalist and editor, Keith Murdoch was one of those who promoted business interests during the Depression. Rupert’s father was also a vehement conscriptionist during the first and second world wars. Although Keith never signed up for military service himself, he propagandised, almost obsessively, for conscription and called on other men to make a sacrifice for a greater cause.

We need to beware the media commentators of today, anti-science and anti-expertise armchair generals, who likewise call on their fellow citizens to do things they won’t do themselves.

By Sally Young, professor of the University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.