BACK TO THE FUTURE

Chris Trotter has recently been using his fortnightly column in the Sunday Star Times to praise Labour and cane National and he has continued down this road this week.

He castigates Key and the National Party for offering tax cuts but, in the same column, he says it’s just fine for Labour to do exactly the same thing.

He also says that National has no plan to combat the economic crisis presently descending on New Zealand. This may be true – but Labour is offering nothing either.

Indeed both parties are serving up more of the same failed neo-liberal economic policies and expecting us to ‘trust them’.

What are needed are policies that take us beyond the stagnant free market swamp we are in.

There may well be an economic crisis but there is also a political crisis. We lack a major political party or movement that can break us free from the neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Trotter isn’t offering any solutions. Having dismissed the working class as a spent political force and socialism as some kind of historical anachronism, Trotter has been marching rightwards at a fair old rate of knots for several years now.

The brave new future is more of Helen Clark, Michael Cullen, Phil Goff and Clayton Cosgrove? Give me a break….