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Paul Le Comte 🇳🇿🇨🇦📷 @paullecomtephoto.nz · 15/10/2026

Reposted by Kent Duston

As a kid who grew up in poverty, this hits fucking hard.

A woman looking for food in an empty cupboard for food, weeping. The kid saying to his mother 'Don't Cry mum'

"survey finds, one in three households struggling for food" News

https://www.nzfoodnetwork.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/NZFN-Hunger-Monitor-2025-Digital.pdf

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Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 13h

And this is our periodic reminder that billionaires serve no useful economic, social, or cultural function. If billionaires didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be the slightest negative impact on our country or our people #nzpol

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Don't Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about t…

The longer we pretend this is "capitalism" the more we obscure the problem and its solutions. The first port of call is Anat Shenker-Osorio's @anatosaurus.bsky.social Don't Buy It, which talks about how economic language sets the agenda www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...

goodreads.com

After everything that’s happened, how is it possible th…

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The first and most important item is that language matters. The trope is that we are living in a capitalist society, but this is plainly untrue: we are living in a neo-feudal oligopoly society, characterised by corruption and mercantilism

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To end up in a society that values the lives of kids with cancer over the size of the Crown deficit, we must replace the system – because we cannot get there from here. /end of rant (for today)

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And this is the political problem facing us: we cannot make the changes we need through incrementalism. As George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social has eloquently noted, "the plural of incremental change is not systemic change; the plural of incremental change is failure"

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This is why Labour is a political dead-end: it is pretending that a slightly softer and humane version of neoliberalism is somehow workable. But there is no negotiating, and we will still end up in the same place of oligopoly and oligarchy, just at a marginally slower pace

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People sense this: they know the system is working against them, but they think it can perhaps be adjusted or made to work a bit better, so they don't have to go to the food bank and their kids can get jobs. Dear reader, these are false hopes. We can't negotiate with neoliberalism

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As Professor Beer said, the system is working exactly as designed; if you want a different outcome, you must design a different system. Again: neoliberalism cannot be negotiated with; it cannot be "adjusted" or "improved" to produce better results. It must be torn out and entirely replaced

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As Professor Stafford Beer stated: the purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of neoliberalism is the economic and social and environmental impoverishment of the entire planet, in order to make the billionaires inconceivably rich. That's empirically what it does

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This has been pure divide-and-conquer: every single person on the planet who is not a billionaire has common cause against neoliberalism. But the illusion of "it doesn't affect my family or my tribe" is now breaking down, and it's obvious that no class will ever be safe

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Because it's unrolled slowly over the last 40 years, each class has been able to pretend that neoliberalism is only happening to other people; the salary class could pretend that neoliberalism didn't affect them because house prices went up and the labour cost of getting a latte went down

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Neoliberalism cannot be negotiated with. It won't respond to cries of fairness or equity or common cause or anything else; it is designed to result in a very small group of exceptionally rich people, with the rest of society reduced to a subservient under-class

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Neoliberalism steadily marches towards oligopoly and oligarchy, towards corruption and fascism. As Upton Sinclair said, fascism is just capitalism plus murder. This is the journey we're all on

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Societal failure in the form kids avoidably dying of cancer because National refuses to fund nurses is an expected outcome of the system: should the kids of the 0.1% get cancer, they think they will be able to purchase a solution to that problem, so public hospitals are only for poor people

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It doesn't matter how well qualified we are, or how much experience we have, or our skills and capabilities; we are all disposable workers. If society stumbles and comes apart at the seams, that's no concern for the 0.1% of people on the planet who think their money insulates them

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The point is, neoliberalism is about concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of a small elite. It works that way by design, and so the shifting of previously secure ways of making a living into a precarious form of debt slavery is the intended outcome of the system

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Third wave neoliberalism is now coming for the salaried and knowledge classes, fueled by the myth of AI – which is just a coded way of downsizing the corporate and public bureaucracies, and turning them into a low-security contracted-out precariat

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Second wave neoliberalism attacked the small business sector by deliberately fostering oligopolies, effectively dismantling the security of owning and running your own business and removing the political power of the proprietor class, such as traditionally enjoyed by National

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First wave neoliberalism destroyed wage-class jobs: offshoring, union busting, zero-hours contracts, the Employment Contracts Act, wage suppression, monetarism, and all the other machinery of raising unemployment whilst removing security and stability from waged work

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Neoliberalism means that every single one of us, plus everyone we know and care about, will sooner or later join the precariat. The system is working as designed to create economic serfdom at every level of society #nzpol

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The purpose of the hard right isn't to run the government, it's to irretrievably break the government for the benefit of for-profit companies

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‘It’s pretty obvious we can’t keep wages low by creating jobs, so let’s not do that!’ #nzpol

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Two dull grey men shadow-boxing with one another to no effect

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If any more evidence was needed that this government cares about money more than it cares about people, this is it #nzpol

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Another banger review by Steve Braunias: “It was a shocker. It was awful. It was scheduled to run for 90 minutes but it felt like 900 million years, an epoch of boring TV that recorded the slow, slow end of a political era.” #nzpol

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I’m sure it will be better once we get to know him

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If you build it, they will come

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He mis-spoke … what he meant to say is that he’s utterly incapable of dealing with Ministers from other political parties

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Shout it from the rooftops, people #nzpol

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National’s problem is even more severe because the hard-core nutcase vote is being hoovered up by NZF … leaving a rump of habitual National voters who are aging out. It’s hard to see how the party survives

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Back on track. It’s brilliant we’ve got the party of business in charge #nzpol

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‘We are a group of honest and hard-working MPs who are diligently striving for the common good, so you should believe us when we say these things’

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‘Once we’re back in government we promise to undo all the shit things we did while we were in government’

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In fact, the sole function of their form of government is to be as crap as humanly possible at the job of running the country, whilst shoveling as much money as they can in the direction of their donors

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If only we had a Foreign Minster and a Prime Minister with the basic numeracy skills to be able to come up with a simple answer to a simple question

It’s not just a policy bought and paid for by property developers, it’s an entire political party purchased outright

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Men of Aotearoa! This is also a reminder to attend to your prostate health, so that in due course we can undertake our collective micturating duties on the final resting place of Ruth Rchardson

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Happy ‘Remembering Margaret Thatcher By Pissing On Her Grave Day’ for all those who celebrate

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Collectively we now have a very flexible attitude to the type of cannon used

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I'm a big fan of Simplicity for good returns and low fees and NZ-focused investment, but I use their app rather than calling so I'm not sure how good their in-person customer service is

Muldoon was a functioning alcoholic, for at least some definitions of functioning

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Another perfectly-aimed bullseye from Mr Body #nzpol

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It's just a crying shame these right wing parties don't support free speech

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New policies for you and your billionaire friends can be purchased direct from the NZ First online store! Be sure to use the discount coupon COALITION10 for your special price!

Yet another reason - if yet another reason is needed - to not vote for these sociopathic ghouls. Remember, friends don’t let friends vote for Act #nzpol

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Truly excellent reporting on an important issue, Marc