Neoliberal whizz-kid: Aotearoa New Zealand PM John Key in 1987
"A 1987 video has been unearthed featuring a 25-year-old squash-playing, accountancy graduate John Key. The bright-eyed Mr Key features in an early Close-Up story called Big Dealers. The 'portrait of 80s job du jour: foreign exchange dealer', shows the now Prime Minister in 'the pit' (trading room) as a senior forex dealer. 'Forex dealing is a work hard, play hard world with an image of rich brats who wreck restaurants but always somewhere else,' says the reporter. 'I am not denying that, that has happened and I guess that will happen again in the future but I personally perform in that way,' Mr Key responded."
(Deanna Harris, 02 Sep 2010, MediaWorks TV)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
David Harvey: The Crises of Capitalism
"Radical sociologist David Harvey asks: is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?"
(Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Phillip Blond: Rise of the red Tories
"We live in a time of crisis. In such times humans retreat to safety, and build bulwarks against the future. The financial emergency is having this effect on Britain's governing class. Labour has withdrawn to the safety of the sheltering state, and the comforts of its first income tax rise since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be proposing a repeat of Thatcherite austerity in the face of economic catastrophe. But this crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a disintegration of the idea of the 'market state' and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years. A fresh analysis of the ruling ideological orthodoxy is required.
...
On a deeper level, the present moment is a challenge to conservatism itself. The Conservatives are still viewed as the party of the free market, an idea that has collapsed into monopoly finance, big business and deregulated global capitalism. Tory social thinking has genuinely evolved, but the party's economic thinking is still poised between repetition and renewal. As late as August 2008 David Cameron said: 'I'm going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer,' and that 'radical social reform is what this country needs right now.' He is right about society, but against the backdrop of collapsing markets and without a macro-economic alternative, Thatcherite economics has been wrongfooted by events."
(Phillip Blond, Prospect Magazine February 2009 issue 155)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Regionalisation: Educational Reform In New Zealand
Peter Roberts (School of Education, University of Auckland, NZ)
Teachers, Boards of Trustees and tertiary administrators have been held accountable for decisions relating to the day-to-day running of educational establishments, yet the parameters for undertaking these duties have been defined elsewhere. The market has been the seen as the ideal model on which to base educational arrangements. Competition between students, staff and institutions has been encouraged. Students have been redefined as 'consumers', and tertiary education institutions have become 'providers'. Bureaucrats now talk of 'inputs', 'outputs' and 'throughputs' in the education system. Any notion of educational processes serving a form of collective public good has all but disappeared; instead, participation in tertiary education is now regarded as a form of private investment.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
