Engaging on TOP’s Discussion Boards

The rules for engagement on TOP’s various online channels are really easy. Be civil and your comment &/or query will be respected. Don’t and you will get whatever you served up, back with interest. And after 3 opportunities you’ll simply be banned. That has been made clear from Day One. Pity Rodney Hide still doesn’t get it – that what he, Don Brash, and ACT represent is repulsive to most New Zealanders and there’s no way their nutty extremism will not be met with fire on our channels.

Let there be no misunderstanding – our political enemies are NZ’s Far Right and its Regressive Conservatives. The former are just ghastly and don’t give a stuff about other people, have no idea what free markets are, praise oligarchs and other forms of concentrated market and political power. They gave free market economics (as economists define them) a terrible name in the 1980’s and the damage lingers – no trickle down, nowhere.

The ideological mantra of “I’m okay Jack, pull up the ladder” which ACTs various forms have tried to promote was repulsive not only to John Key’s National but every other New Zealander. Hide, Brash, Collins and Co just don’t accept that.

So it comes as no surprise to me that Hide is feeling a bit bruised now that The Opportunities Party stands for everything he doesn’t. So long as he and his fellow trolls think they can engage on our channels without an evidence base, without any justification but just by spewing an ideology, and most of the time without civility, they’ll be treated with contempt and in the end banned as lowlifes. Hide can always resurrect his own failed Far Right vehicle of course – good luck with that, bring it on.

Then we come to the Regressive Conservatives – those who have a number of apologists operating as shock jock media “stars”. It’s time their underlying agenda was exposed as well, which I won’t hesitate to do if confronted by the sort of bile that Paul Henry launched at me the other day. These twits just don’t seem to care that inequality has opened up dramatically in New Zealand, that the whole idea of a fair society has gone down the toilet because of tax and other privileges afforded their cohort, that their lives of privilege are not fully awarded on merit actually, that the deck is stacked their way so they can tread over others on their path to greatness.

Roger Douglas – before he lost the plot – declared back in the 1980’s that he was against privilege, and for equality of opportunity. So am I – I recognise that outcomes will be different simply because talent is not equally distributed, but what I can’t stand is people who have benefitted from privilege having the gall to say all they’ve got is due to their own “hard work”. As though others don’t work hard – who do these free loaders think they are?

It is for New Zealanders to stand up and assert our values – this should be the land of the fair go. By making New Zealand fair again, TOP will achieve a more prosperous society that far more New Zealanders have a chance to be part of.

Sorry Rodney, take your ACT philosophy and shove it.