It’s the old us-against-them again, Guv

A guest post from the pens of . .

 “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
- H.L. Mencken

The ACC debacle shows again what happens when politics and business mix: something called group-eat-group. Every good government-created crisis needs a scapegoat – and having found this particular crisis this government has set one group up to take the rap.

With the economic crisis it’s executive salaries chosen to take the heat off the real perpetrators. With the ACC crisis, it’s bikers who’ve been set up as targets.

The bikers about to bear the enormous increase in road and rego fees are quite justifiably aggrieved; so are the rest of us…um, but you’d never know it would ya? Aside from the usual New Zealand way of “lay down and take it good and hard” whenever government decides we deserve it, there is a more sinister back issue at work here, the issue being how successfully governments are at setting people against each other. Let me explain what I mean.

First, since the government owns the monopoly shambles known as ACC, it therefore has no interest in providing a quality & affordable product. We can’t just reject their services and go elsewhere is if we don’t like what they’ve offered,  I f we don’t like it, tough!

This being so, it gives the minister in charge at the time near absolute power to raise prices, reduce services, and have you and me foot the bill when the grey-ones of the bureaucracy mess things up – messing things up, on this occasion, the tune of 4 billion dollars. That’s a four with nine noughts after it (a long row of zeroes being a suitable symbol for the thinking involved here).

Now, in the interests of being seen to be fair, the minister will split the tab between everyone; but of course it’s never ‘fair’ is it? When a product and its price is set by government decree rather than a market’s voluntary supply/demand principle, there’s always a gain for one man at the expense of another.  Governments like this. In fact, there’s nothing they like better than the chance to play one group off against another.

So emerging out of this particular mess we see the likes of the bikers getting themselves together to protest the unfairness of the new increased tax. The problem of course is that they are not opposed to government monopoly insurance cover, their grizzle is only that they have to pay what they consider is unfair. But if they had not been the ones so hard hit, and the tax increase had have been put on another group, then you’d not have heard a murmur from them.

Where were they when the truckers’ road user charges were peremptorily whacked up last year?  First they came for the truckers, after which group was set upon group as they successfully picked off one at a time.

I expect they – i.e., the bikers, whose turn it is to get it in the neck – will mount a wee protest which will, as is normal for New Zealanders who work for a living, fizzle away in confusion as they lose hope, and everyone else forgets who really caused the mess and joins in bagging the selfish motorcyclists.

And in the unlikely event that they are successful to any degree, the government will simply shift accede to some of their demands (thus making themselves look like the heroes) and shift the cost to another group, or across all of us.

In a better world, one in which the bikers recognised the common cause and were the beginning of a principle-based protest against state profligacy, incompetence, & malfeasance - an “enough is enough” protest if you will - and we all got in behind them, and we stuck the course with them, then in a world like that the government would perhaps be forced to save itself by doing the right thing: which is winding up this government-created disgrace.

The battle, you see, is not us against each other, it’s us against them. It’s not against what is ‘unfair’ to one group or other, it is all of us against the nanny state! The battle, in other words, is one of principle. 

Let’s get to it.

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