PROPAGANDA WARS

The Labour Party is different from the National Party in the same way that Marmite is different from Vegemite.

I see that everyone in the media are saying that Labour's opening television address on Friday night was far better than National's effort. But its hard to see how it could of been worse.

National were clearly trying to trade on Key's 'nice guy' image but having Key give prepared answers to prepared questions from a handpicked studio audience just didn't work. Key looked uncomfortable under the blaze of the studio lights and strangely wooden.

I tuned out about ten minutes in.

If Labour's opening television address is any indication, then Labour is going to be spending its entire election campaign denying what it really is and pretending its something else altogether.

Labour tried to conceal its neoliberal politics behind the smokescreen of its past. It hauled in Mickey Savage, Norm Kirk, David Lange and others to suggest that its a straight line from Savage to Goff and Labour's surrender to neoliberalism never happened.

Within this world where pink elephants float across the sky, Phil Goff was never a loyal lieutenant of Rogernomics. The smug and arrogant bastard I jeered at various protests in the eighties was apparently a figment of my imagination. It apparently wasn't Phil Goff who told me it was necessary to sell Telecom. It also wasn't Phil Goff who introduced users pays into education.

You will learn to love Big Phil. Repeat after me - 'Labour is a centre left party', 'Labour is a centre left party'.

Propaganda might be used to convince people that hell is paradise but in Labour's case its an attempt to create a fiction that it is different from National. It has no intention of disturbing the economic and power structures in this country and wants us to believe that a little tinkering with the neoliberal economy will produce a 'fairer society'.

There is no new vision. While the Occupy movement seeks to create a brand new world, both Labour and National want to keep us deep in the neoliberal mire. Anyone who says that this isn't acceptable is, according to Trevor Mallard (Labour's election 'strategist'), part of the 'loony left'.

Of course you can't expect anything approaching the truth from election propaganda but there's still something seedy about this politically bankrupt Labour Party trading on the names and achievements of the more principled Labour Party's of its social democratic era. It's especially odious since Goff is on record as saying that Labour's social democratic history is irrelevant. But he's more than happy to plunder the past if it'll garner him a few more votes.

Of course there are some clowns who'll believe any old rubbish that Labour serves up. So someone called 'The Sprout' on the Labour propaganda website The Standard declared Labour's opening address was 'the best piece of contemporary political television by a political party I can remember.'

My advice to 'The Sprout' is to stop talking goo and grow up.