Guess what Australia, you are 30 years behind New Zealand!

A wave of shocked silence followed by jeers echos across the country…

Australians all angrily ask “What are we behind in?”

“Apart from Rugby Union and occasionally Netball we are not behind New Zealand!”

Only if it was so unimportant as sport, you might see whats really going on. You have been blinded by bread and circuses, or perhaps beer and footy.

Split Enz, from New Zealand in 1981, with a song written by Neil Finn, unfortunately history does repeat.

New Zealand, for decades, has been a social policy test tube for the western world. A small, largely isolated population that reeled from the Neo- con ‘shock doctrine’ of Chicago school economists.

Even more surprising was the fact that this hard core Neo-con agenda was run by the New Zealand’s Labour party, a political outfit more or less akin to the ALP in political ideology and electoral significance.

Well it would have been akin to the ALP, if it wasn’t for a few key individuals who drew inspiration from Thatcher and Regan who were in office at the time in UK and USA respectively.

Would  you like to look into a somewhat tame version of what is happening now in Australian Politics with the Abbott/Hockey budget?

Have a glance at these somewhat surreal crystal balls, telling you a potential future for Australia from New Zealand’s troubled past.

If you do not watch these films, you only have yourself to blame when further nasty surprises happen!

 

 

http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/someone-elses-country-1996

Its worth pointing out that despite this film being made more than 12 years after the neo- con ravage and upheaval in NZ, it was effectively banned from NZ television until 2003, nearly 20 years after the events it portrayed. You might ask why, and that’s the exact question the New Zealand Government didn’t want its citizens asking. Citizens who were now being treated as units of economic production.

http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/in-a-land-of-plenty-2002

Another film by the same director (Alistair Barry) about the same events from a slightly different and more enlightened perspective, explores how the Reserve Bank of New Zealand was behind many of the initiatives. Curiously the director said his main inspiration for making the movies was he had so much footage that simply made him angry, and he had to understand why it make him angry, and what was actually driving the economic and social carnage witnessed.

Both of the films heavily feature television archives, which many New Zealanders would have seen as part of news broadcasts at the time of the events, some clips appear in both films because of the significant to both stories and the political history described.

Split Enz I walk away; 1984,  from their last album.

Perhaps Split Enz saw the (economic) writing on the wall, splitting up in 1984 and temporarily moving to Los Angeles before morphing into ‘The Mullanes’ and finally ‘Crowded House’ and moving back ‘home’ to Australia.

The opening credits of this video sadly will not put to bed any lingering debate over whether Crowded House was Kiwi band or and Aussie band, as Hester had joined Split Enz before the remainder of Split Enz became ‘Crowded House’.

The best compromise to this sometimes confused friendly debate is best settled with this: Crowded House was a Melbourne band that formed in the USA from the remains of a New Zealand band.

Welcome to the confusion and dislocation of the shock doctrine and globalization.

And finally Crowded House ‘Weather with you’ from 1992. When the rapacious globalist corporations come, they bring the weather (and its not good weather).

If you don’t think it can happen here, this week should have been a wake up call, Chile was taken by surprise in 1973, as was New Zealand in 1984, will Australia wake up and get wise in 2014?

History does repeat.

What was once a purely New Zealand phenomenon can easily become completely ingrained in Australia, be it music or political ideology.

RIP Paul Hester