[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. Welcome along to this month's episode of Dispatches with Dewa. Don't forget, if you enjoy this free to air episode and you want to hear part two, go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a patron with $5 or more per month and you will get to hear Monday's patrons only episode. If you become a five dollar monthly patron, then you also get access to our daily, that's right, every single day, Monday to Friday daily episode of the Dispatches podcast where we engage with current affairs and cultural issues. So if that's something that you're interested in, make sure you go to patreon.com leftfootmedia and become a five dollar monthly patron. In the meantime, enjoy this free to air episode of Dispatches with Dewa.
Welcome to Dispatches with Dewa, the monthly episode of the Dispatches podcast where we talk with political commentator Dewa de Boer about exactly what is going on in the world of New Zealand politics, and we discuss and dissect everything that's trending globally as well. Dewa de Boer is a political commentator who runs conservative think tank right minds New Zealand. He also writes a column for the BFD and he has a Friday morning radio show on reality czech radio. He advocates for a return to tradition, is optimistic about the future, and he lives in Auckland with his wife and their three kids. So without any further ado, let's get into this episode of Dispatches with Dewa.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Run out loud, better run on, run all day till you can't be found. Run out loud.
Keep on running till the sun goes down.
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Dewa. Welcome back. It is great to have you with us again for another episode. And holy moly, we've got two chock full episodes this month, one today, free to air for all of our podcast listeners, and then on Monday for our patrons only. We've got so much to talk about.
How have you been? Before we jump into things, Amy's on.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: A little trip overseas to help out family. My sister is moving house and, you know, she's got three kids now and her husband. So yeah, I'm basically. I'm looking after the kids all by myself.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: So you haven't burned the house down then yet?
[00:02:25] Speaker C: No, no, the house is. The house is fine. I'm fine.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Well, I can tell you a story about the time my wife went away. I think was one of the first times she went away. And I thought, I'm going to prove to everyone what an awesome modern husband I can be. And I'll try and come up with some really cool dessert recipe for my kids. And I don't know how it happened, but basically I managed to destroy a plate in a microwave. Like, it literally exploded in the microwave. And I thought, yeah, okay, well, that's enough of that foolishness.
Back to your jam. Jam on bread, kids.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: No, no, I'm doing great so far. So far, I fed the kids the cake that Amy baked, the jelly that Amy made, the dinner that she pre prepared and put in the freezer. So we're doing really great.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, let's jump into it, folks. You'll have to forgive me, I've got a little bit of a sinusy, cold thing going on, so it's nothing major, but it just means my voice sounds a little bit different than usual. So we'll struggle our way through. Have a good old struggle session, Dewa.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: I thought that's what we were doing anyway.
Isn't that the point of the dispatches?
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Speaking of right wing struggle sessions, Darlene Tana has been sacked from the Greens. There's so much to talk about. This seems like a pretty sort of basic kind of decision, but in actual fact, there's a whole lot tied up in this. But let's just start with the decision.
They came out the other night on the news, said it's all over Red Rover, kind of as much as it can be in parliament. What do you think? How do you feel about what's happened here?
[00:04:02] Speaker C: I think it is one a month that we are doing at the moment. One Green MP a month bleeding out of parliament.
So far.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Consistent.
[00:04:16] Speaker C: They're very consistent.
The Darlene Tama case is a little bit unique, perhaps in the case that it's a migrant exploitation issue. And, of course, the Green party is supposed to be pro migrant, friendly to migrants or, you know, everyone can come here and be part of the glorious New Zealand society. And then they've got this MP here whose husband's business was, you know, exploiting them. Slave labor, essentially. You know, threatening. Threatening to withhold passports or make employment complaints. I think she's. She threatened to sue one of the employees for defamation if he went and complained to the employment tribunal. And that's what she was doing, you know, to kind of. It's not. She can't just say, oh, this was my husband's business. That's what she was doing. And she hid all of that from the Green Party as well. She refused to comply with the investigation. And the Greens, basically, they were forced to kick her out. It looked like they put up quite a strong front, a united front. And Chloe Schwarberg looked quite impressive at her press conference to pull the trigger on kicking her out. But they have a big problem in that they have opposed the waka jumping bill, the waka jumping legislation now, and that would enable them to remove her from parliament completely. And that's what it was for, really. But the Greens opposed it because they were worried that MP's would be forced to vote the way that their party votes. And so they didn't want to do that.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: You're right about the consistency problem here. And it seems to me too that you've got this situation where I can't help but sense that maybe it's this sort of misguided, naive, what would you call it, the progressivism and the fact that they, they don't, they're very utopian, so they don't really grapple well with human nature. And that you could be being lied to by these people who say all the right political things but actually might be scoundrels underneath it all. Because in your mind it's like, no, no, no, that can't be true. That can't possibly be true. You know, they're one of us, they're one of the good guys. And so clearly they've got a problem here with people coming into their ranks who are, well, moral character seems to be in short supply within this party.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: So politics has that problem and that all people attracted to politics. Why say all people? But more likely people who are more narcissistic, people who think that they can get away with things, who want to be powerful and have power. Those are the kinds of people you're attracting into political parties, into being MP's. So you've already got a higher level or an attraction for scoundrels.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Can I say that's kind of troubling because you've been in a party and people constantly say to me, Brendan, when are you going into politics? I'm like, what? I'm not one of those people.
[00:07:04] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there are great people in politics. I've met great people in politics. But the thing that's always happening is that at least this was my experience, is every time it wasn't that I had dealt with a lot of bad people, but every time it like, ah, it would be great to have better people even, you know, it would be great to have like, these people would be ideal. And they're the ones that don't come in, you know, that's very different. I say that myself as well. Kind of like, if I'm, you know, if I'm, if I'm in here, it's sort of like, oh, I actually want people who are better than me.
Like, where are those people?
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Things are desperate if we're on the front lines of politics.
[00:07:43] Speaker C: That's what it felt like a little bit. You know, you're working with these great people and you're like, oh, wow, man, it's great, great people. But, like, where are the, where are the even greater people? And this is not really just because of the way that politics runs, the way that, and this goes with all aspects of, I think, organizations as well that are not political parties, but organizations tend to get political. And often within large organizations, you end up with the same problems where the people who are attracted to the kind of political side of any activity, it's not that all people involved in it are bad, but just that you're more likely to attract the bad eggs. And especially if you're the Green party, then you're like triple as liar, quadruple, ten times more likely to attract the bad eggs.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: You mentioned Chloe. I have to say, for me, she actually, we'll talk about this in just a second because there is a bit of a sort of damocles in all of this. But she did look pretty prime ministerial, I actually have to say. Clearly taking a leaf out of Dern's playbook. You just talk and talk and talk and explain as much as you possibly can. And she really did do that. She looked confident. It was pretty clear and concise. And they made a real. One of the key points for me was that she made a point of precisely highlighting the timeline when they found out about it, the release of the report, the fact that they wanted to release it, but they couldn't release it because there's privacy issues. But if they had their way, they would, and they're trying to get it out there. So clearly they've obviously learned a bit, I think, or she has anyway, probably one of the more astute Green members has learned a bit from the goal Rez Garamon scandal, I'd say, where it was like the exact opposite.
But yes, she did look a lot more prime ministerial than even Luxon does of late. How did you rate her performance overall?
[00:09:35] Speaker C: I think she's had the advantage of having had a few scandals appear just before she came on, on the scene. And so the Green party has sort of had to tighten up its processes in terms of how it deals with these scandals. So she was well, well positioned to get the kind of the perfect situation where they had learned all the tips and tricks and realized that their mp's were just going to stonewall them and not tell them the truth. And so they get into this position where they're your mp, but they're really the enemy in the sense that they've given up and they're just trying to minimize damage to themselves. So she was able to play that really, really well, had that advantage. I think. She has been someone who, like Ardern, has gone into politics from the day she turned 18. Basically, she's been been involved, even though she likes to say, oh, I'm so reluctant to politics. And she's been doing this her whole life. Essentially, she's been trained to do this just like Jacinda Ardern was.
I don't know about what you say when someone looks or sounds prime ministerial to me, that's not really something that I see, like, even in Jacinda Odern, I see when people like, oh, wow, Jacinda Dunn seems so. Prime ministerial just seems horrifying to me. So it's kind of like, if this.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Is, to be fair, the bar is kind of low in that regard, like you were talking about before. It's, you know, where are the better people? So if someone can communicate with, clearly, I'm like, oh, that's pretty prime ministerial.
[00:11:00] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And, yeah, obviously, like, Luxon doesn't impress anyone. I think he's just, as I've said before, the perfect manager for a managerial system. And we don't have prime ministers, we have managers. And he does a good job of that.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Have you seen that movie office space, maybe decades old film. And Mike Judge, who did Beavis and butt, he'd created it, but really became a cult classic because it nailed that whole managerial thing. And there's a character in that who's just the perfect manager, who is just. He doesn't really care about his employees. He talks at them rather than to them. And he's just, you know, he turns up in people's cubicles and he's like, yeah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday and fill out all those TPS reports that you didn't get done. He just. He doesn't care what you have to say. And I have to say, unfortunately, I see a bit of that with Luxon. You know, it's the management speak. It's sort of, you think, how did that guy get into this role?
There's no inspiring leadership underneath it.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: All, no, no, there's no vision. And in fact, if we get into the political tracker, we'll get back to this. But no real vision in terms of what the National Party wants to achieve and very much in danger of just kind of plotting along. And in fact, the coalition agreement's probably the only thing that's actually going to basically force them to actually do something. Otherwise they would do absolutely nothing.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Well, speaking of the Greens, before we get into the political tracker, I mentioned there's a sort of Damocles in all of this. There is. You've already talked about the Walker jumping legislation, so effectively, she could stay in parliament. And to be fair, if you're going to get paid for another couple of years, a really handsome salary for doing nothing, then you can see why your ordinary person is going to be tempted just to stay in parliament so that this could actually become this ongoing reminder. So what happens here with the Greens, do you think?
[00:13:01] Speaker C: Well, what can happen if they basically, there are supposed to be three provisions in the walkie jumping legislation that trigger, and the first one is supposed to trigger automatically, is if the person is no longer a member of the, the political party, they're supposed to automatically get kicked out of parliament. But that, that provision seems to have been sort of ignored in terms of parliamentary procedure. So there's two other provisions, and these seem to be the only ones that are accepted is that if the parliamentary leader sends a letter to the speaker to say that a particular person is no longer a member of the caucus, that person is then expelled from parliament. And the other one is if the person themselves sends a letter to the speaker saying, I am now an independent mp, then that person is instantly expelled from parliament as well. So as long as nobody sends a letter to the speaker, then the person may remain in parliament. The MP remains in parliament. So it's that bizarre situation where she can claim in public that she's an independent MP, essentially, but as long as nobody formally informs the speaker that she is no longer part of the Greens, she can just stay in parliament until.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: The next election, which, quite frankly, is just embarrassing. It's banana republic stuff as far as I'm concerned. I'm old fashioned like that. I think you should be a man or a woman of your word, and it should be honest and clear, not this absolute baloney of a sort of falsehood. But the other sort of Damocles aspect to this is, and I do have concerns about this, the Greens initially looked very strong and clear. And, yeah, you know, we've booted her and she's out and all the rest of it because of what we see in this report. But then they conclude by saying, no, there's nothing that actually needs to go to the police in this report. To which I say, and I think Darlene Taner is making this point, hey, hold on a minute. That's not how the processes of natural justice actually work. So serious. Like, if it's serious enough to sack me, surely it would be serious enough to go to the police. They're not saying that. So what initially looks like a really good show of strength could actually turn out to be a bit of a problem for them if they can't back it up with some sort of substance that the New Zealand public are going to get behind and say, yeah, that person really shouldn't be there because they, what they did was just so immoral and illegal and wrong. If you can't show that, then, holy moly, this thing could turn into a prolonged public trial where the Greens are put on trial for their lack of basic principles of natural justice rather than what's actually happened.
[00:15:21] Speaker C: Well, the first thing I would say is that everybody knows that the exploitation that went on was real and that she was part of it. So I think regardless of what happens in terms of the police and natural justice, people know that she was involved in it because that seems to have been quite public in the past.
Once you connect her name to her husband's name into his business, it's been in the news a few times in the past few years. So that part of it is real. But obviously, yeah, you do have this real problem where she sort of can play the victim. And it's interesting that you say that she's gone. This angle of saying, how is this just. I noticed that she also said, and perhaps it was a journalist who were trying to defend her, basically said, you're just picking on her because she's Mori.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: I saw that.
[00:16:04] Speaker C: Like, you're racist. So it's fun to see them play the race card. Like, no, no, the Green party is just racist.
And to that I say, amen.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Yeah, they're all going around in circles right now trying to figure out which ladder on the victim hierarchy and oppression hierarchy they should all be sitting at. So I'd imagine there's some hurried committee meetings just to talk about that.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Debbie Toyota Diwa. That music we just heard there is our political tree tracker. Sorry, I was going to say tree, it's not so political tracker theme song, but this is going to be the world's shortest political tracker moment, which is okay because we've got so much else to talk about. But let me ask you anyway, what's been going on? How is the coalition tracking? And it sounds like the no news might be the news.
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Yes, it has been a little bit shorter than normal, I believe only three weeks since the last episode because we had to push that one out. And I went back through eight pages of press releases and I didn't find anything that looked like it fit into it, solved any of the coalition agreements. So I did a bit of an odd take to think, hey, they haven't actually done anything in the last three weeks. That's what it seems like. They have announced their new set of targets, which is a lot of this is law and order police stuff and I think a lot of that. Maybe, if I'm being generous, it's probably part of the National Party hundred point plan that they had that I'm not tracking. I'm just purely tracking, you know, the agreements between the three parties, not the. The National Party's own silly little tigers that they've set for themselves that don't mean much. And yet we've had eight pages of press releases that are just ministers putting out various promotionals about themselves and what they're doing to. But they're not actually achieving any changes in terms of progress towards the goals and the political tracker. So we've got basically 24% delivered, at least that I've said are delivered, 12% in progress and another 65% they still have to start.
And I'm not comfortable putting any of the other items based on what I've seen in the last three weeks and I'm not going to put anything else in the progress basket.
Maybe the biggest thing that's changed is some more progress towards building roads, but it's very hard to quantify how well those get done because the road they're planning to build a dozen roads in the next ten years and kind of at some stage you'll have to say, okay, they've put all of those projects on track, but that's Simeon Brown's up Simeon Brown's alley and I know that he'll probably get it done. He's one of the more productive members of parliament.
But yeah, as far as all of the other commitments go, don't see much. I'm tempted to put one of them on fail, which is the COVID mandates. There's one item that I've been keeping an eye on for ages that they're supposed to stop the COVID mandates, the jab, sorry, the COVID vaccine mandates. And there's several positions in various government departments that still require you to have the COVID vaccination as a requirement to have the job or have particular procedures. And it's in the coalition agreement to get rid of those and it still hasn't been done. And it says immediately. Immediately.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:19:25] Speaker C: Who's in charge of that one?
[00:19:26] Speaker A: The dirty old Covid bureaucracy. And I shudder every time I think about it. And I increasingly get the feeling that there are still, well, not the feeling, I guess it seems pretty obvious there are still bureaucrats around the globe who got a taste of power and they just want to let it go just in case. Just in case they might need to use that mechanism for their good and altruistic cause. Let's not get rid of it too quickly. I can't help but worry about that kind of thing.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: And there's a few other items like renaming government departments to English. I've seen reports, several government ministers have basically openly said, oh no, I'm happy for my department to keep doing what it's, what it wants to do. And they've sent those memos around internally. So it'll be interesting to see if, say, Winston Peters decides to chase those up in the future. A few of them have, have changed their names, a few of them have changed their communications. But it's clear that there are liberal progressive elements of the national party who are not happy. Same thing goes with the sports, the gender, sex and sports and the relationship and sexuality education in schools. All of those things, the ones that social conservatives will be looking at closely, you can see that the progressives in the national party have done all they can to block those. And as far as I, you know, you think those are all easy ones to get done, easy wins and they're not being picked up. And a lot of the other easy wins in the coalition agreement have been completed. But there's the socially conservative easy wins. They're not easy.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Well, based on things, too. I saw today the report about what's going on in the Ministry of Education and I can't help but wonder if certain bureaucrats are starting to flex their bureaucratic sort of rather, what would you call it, the tentacle like appendages. They're extremely hard to pin down and they just sort of try and wait out the government and. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Bob and accounting will deal with that. Oh no, surely over in administrative reporting will be dealing with that later and nothing gets done. And clearly there's, within the Ministry of Education. There's some sort of coup like behaviours, it seems, going on.
[00:21:30] Speaker C: That one's the worst of all of the. Of all of the departments. That one's the most captured by progressive ideology and they've put a lot of effort into capturing that, pinning it down.
And obviously David Seymour is sort of in charge of cleaning that up a little bit and I think he's serious about it. So I would expect to see him make some breakthroughs. But you can clearly tell, like I said, they're trying to wait him out. They're trying to hope that he doesn't quite make it and he's not around in two and a half years. And then they can strike back.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: The Empire strikes back, the indoctrination department. They don't want to let that one go.
Dee Wa that music, once again means that we've come to the end of our political tracker. There was some substance there, to be fair, but we'll see. I guess we'll wait with bated breath now to see what happens between now and next month. And over the next couple of months, they've started to settle into their business. But speaking of, we have got a controversial bill on the table and this raises some very interesting questions for me, and that's the fair digital news bargaining bill. So just give us the quick, before we even talk about it and give any commentary on it, tell me just a Reader's Digest version for our listeners. What is the substance of this bill? Like, what is it that's got people so upset about this bill in particular? What does it actually do?
[00:23:04] Speaker C: Well, the name is very clunky. Definitely don't like the name. And like all good government bills, the name is the opposite of what it does.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: That's how you get a good.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: The unfair digital news not bargaining bills.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So the. The gist of what it's supposed to do is make social media companies pay local, traditional. They call them traditional, mainstream or legacy media. I prefer the term legacy. And so the social media company should pay the legacy media companies for using their news in their apps. So at the moment, say a Facebook or Google or any of these other giants prints their headlines in the news, in their apps, then people read them in there and they don't go through to the websites of the companies, you know, like the stuffs and the New Zealand Heralds, and then they don't get their extra ad revenue. So the claim is the this so called fair digital news bargaining bill will make Facebook and Google and Twitter pay local companies what happens in practice? Because we've seen this everywhere, that these have been implemented basically in Australia and in Canada, the government, the social media companies just say, okay, we're going to stop using your news, and they just block the news from those websites and then nobody reads it.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: Kind of makes sense as a business decision, right? Like, oh, so we don't need to pay you if we just stop doing this thing. Okay, well, then let's save some money.
[00:24:36] Speaker C: That seems to be the easier way out. And that's what they've done in Australia. They basically had to get the government to do some kind of special negotiation like that, to get the government to go back to these companies and beg them for money. So some stuff happened there in Australia, but especially New Zealand. Very small, even compared to Australia, much smaller than Australia. I think those social media companies likely would pull the plug.
That seems to be it. Unless, as I said, there's some backroom, some backroom deals where the government promises the social media company something else in return for money for the legacy media. Like a money laundering kind of situation.
[00:25:17] Speaker A: It's not a balanced bill either, is it? There's nothing fair in a sense, about it. I know some of the smaller local independent news outlets were saying, hey, hold on a minute.
I've seen commentary saying, look, this is worse than the Public Interest journalism fund. Like, if it would actually work, let alone we've talked about why it's likely to fail, but if it was to work, it does create an imbalanced playing field. Right.
[00:25:39] Speaker C: Willie Jackson specifically introduced this bill to be the successor to the Public Interest Journalism fund. So this is the PIJF 2.0. And the millions of dollars that the government was giving to these legacy media companies directly, obviously that's bad pr for the government, bad pr for the journalists. So they, like I said, it's kind of, in a sense, a money laundering operation. Like, great, we'll just get the social media giants to pay you that same amount of money instead. And of course, the social media giants will probably say, no, thanks, and the government may broker a backroom deal with the social media giants where it's kind of, you know, well, what if we were to give you the money to give to them? Kind of situation like, that's what may end up happening. So you may end up getting the same.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: You buy packets of advertising, right, as a government department. That's.
[00:26:24] Speaker C: That's exactly. They could, they could make era. It could be. It could be a deal like that. You've already solved the problem for them. You know, you bring up Mark Zuckerberg and hey, we'll buy some more ads, or hey, we'll stop buying ads if you stop doing this. And it'll be x amount of money. And so you're cheaper for you to go and cheaper for you to go and do what we want. So that's the kind of thing that could happen.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Does this make sense now of the Melissa Lee sacking? Because I would imagine that she wouldn't have wanted to have had a bar of this and then all of a sudden she's gone very quickly and next thing you know, within a matter of weeks, this bill was on the table.
[00:26:58] Speaker C: Correct. She was on the record in parliament opposing this bill. She made several speeches against that bill when it was Willie Jackson's bill under the previous labor government. And I don't think she handled the situation particularly well, which is, you know, when she got sacked, like, she didn't really speak out about what she wanted to do. She sort of looked a bit like a deer in the headlights when the media kept questioning her.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: And she's probably basically, I would say, too kind a person, really. That's.
[00:27:26] Speaker C: And that's what must have. Because I thought, this is what, you know, she's. She seems. She almost seemed like. She did almost seem incompetent to me. But I realize now she probably had Luxon and Goldsmith behind the scenes saying, you need to push this bill. And she didn't want to say, she couldn't say, no, I'm not pushing the bill, because then she would lose her job and she couldn't say, yes, I am pushing the bill, because then she. She'd rather stand down, I guess. So they just removed her completely and that's the only explanation.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Well, it also seems to me there seems to be a pattern of behaviour forming with Luxon and some of his close allies within the party. It certainly seems looking in as an outsider where he big notes himself by putting others in their place. It seems, as I said, I'm an outsider looking in, but it certainly seems like there is a quite a little iron curtain type regime going on there and you do what you're told or the very kind hearted liberals will punish you.
[00:28:23] Speaker C: And we know they are very, very good at doing that. And so, yeah, it seems to be always the more conservative National MP's that get targeted in this way.
My criticism to them is they should speak up more. That would probably get them kicked out sooner, but I would just say they should make more noise and if they get kicked out, then so what? Because eventually they're going to come for you anyway.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and I think this is the sort of stuff that will tank the party because I think national does have, they've got some good people in there, but what they do have is those people are not really being given the rightful respect, I think, and positioning they deserve within the leadership machinery of the party. And so they've got a crisis of depth, just like a lot of these other parties do. A lot of experienced people have left and they're left with what they really have got, the bereft of depth and leadership and things like that. And this bill here, it seems to me like, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because I think this looks like a very serious mistake for National. I mean, not just the content of the bill, not just the fact that it's likely to fail and, you know, its supposed primary mechanism, but because we've seen that overseas already, like you're bringing a lame duck policy that's failed everywhere else to, you know, you're supposed to be the new guys doing fresh thinking. And then on top of that, they've aligned themselves with Willie Jackson. So, you know, this does not in any way work for their key supporter base. I would have thought that they need to actually keep on side.
[00:29:48] Speaker C: No. And it doesn't work with the media either. Obviously, the media will still hate them, and if it fails, the media will hate them more. Whatever they'll get, they can get blamed for it.
This is just a big mistake.
And clearly someone is pushing for this behind the scenes of we can't really see what's going on, but there's a piece of the puzzle, I think, that we're missing that we don't have access to because it doesn't make any sense at all. And it will come back to bite them if they push ahead with it.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: If you're listening and you know what that piece of the puzzle is and you want to contact us anonymously, you can do that. You can get in touch with me. If you want to do a voice cloaked interview about and you can actually verify that it's legit, we'll happily let the public know what's going on because this is what accountability is all about. Dee. Well, we've got one more episode. Sorry, one more episode. One more. It is a bit of an episode, too, actually. One issue to talk about to wrap us up for this free to air episode. But, folks, if you want to hear part two, which is available only to our patrons, you have to become a five dollar monthly
[email protected] leftfootmedia the link is in today's show notes. And if you do, it's another doozy of an episode. We're gonna be unpacking the Trump Biden. I couldn't remember his name. We had a Biden moment.
So we're gonna be unpacking. I was gonna say, come on, man, we're gonna be unpacking the Trump Biden debate. There's a whole lot to talk about there. We're also gonna be talking about this new Supreme Court ruling. We've got people claiming that Trump has just been made Hitler.
And then of course, France. Holy guacamole. And one other story from the states, which really sort of highlights of problems they're dealing with with the immigration crisis.
But if you want to hear all of that, patreon.com leftfootmedia become a five dollar monthly patron. The link is in today's show notes. Dewa final issue to talk about in this free to air episode, the motherland had an election. The United Kingdom, the fatherland.
Everyone was initially certainly on the left, they're all crowing about what a great and glorious victory this is for. Yeah, the left, oh, look, we're resisting the right wing fascists. But really, this is, this is a Potemkin village of victory, isn't it? And yeah, this is not what it seems at all. As much, hey, as the media, like, if you, all you've done is listen to the mainstream media reports, you're one of those kind of people, you probably think, oh, yeah, they've had a big swing to the left, but if you're probably everyone else who's just done a little bit of reading around this or listening to actual commentary which tells you the numbers, you realize that's not what's happened. Right? At all.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: I was pretty happy with this result. I think it could have been much better if the UK Conservatives had gotten zero seats. I would have been much happier. Unfortunately, they got like 120 seats.
But as you mentioned on the numbers, in terms of where the voters went, you had a 2% swing to the Labour party, 3% swing to the Labour party. So they only got 30 something percent of the vote, 33 34.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Well, let's give some more context around that, too. This is, I think, one of their lowest voter turnouts in general in years. And so on top of a lower voter turnout, Labour's total vote dropped from last election that they lost.
[00:33:14] Speaker C: You're right, they did.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: Bizarre, right?
[00:33:16] Speaker C: Fewer, millions of fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn got. And Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn got expelled from the Labour party for being an anti semite, and then he won his local seat. So he defeated the Labour party in his own area, and they lost five of their inner city seats to radical Islamists. So the Labour party was not radical enough. They lost a whole bunch of seats across to that have basically just. And I've mentioned this a few times now since I first heard this from Martin Selner and he quoted it from somebody else. I can't remember who the original source was, but the. If you have these multiracial constituencies, they turn into ethnic head counts. And you can see that a large number of constituencies in the United Kingdom are turning into ethnic headcounts and the Labour party is losing those they used to be. Who cares about all of these ethnic minorities? Because they all vote for Labour. The more ethnic minorities we get, the greater the vote is for labor. Well, suddenly when the ethnic minority becomes an ethnic majority, they're no longer part of the labor party. They're pushing for their own agenda.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Oh, surprise, surprise.
I notice also, too, that, like, the Conservatives obviously have a big problem here. We'll talk about Ukip in just a minute. Or not. Sorry, not Ukip.
[00:34:30] Speaker C: You're stuck in the past 20 years. You're showing your age.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: Welcome to the real world. Brennan, get with the Times, pal. Yeah, letting me get up my BlackBerry and google that. So, yeah, it is the Reform party, Nigel Farage, which is. We'll talk about that in just a second. But also the Lib Dems, rights, the other party, they've taken seats off the Conservatives. They've played the Liberal national party game, basically, and they've taken, like, Cameron's seat, which he had all that majority in. I can't see some of those seats going back to the Conservatives now because the Lib Dems are just like this milk toast middle safe option that you'd always just keep voting for.
[00:35:08] Speaker C: It's a little bit like what you're seeing with the ACT party almost, but they're a little. They're not the same as the ACt party, but it's this case of if you see the act party gaining seats off national, if you see the Greens gaining seats off labor and so on, you're kind of seeing that some of these parties are positioning themselves in a way to pinch off the ultra liberal inner city voters. And the Lib Dems, especially in the south of England, Cornwall area, even, they're picking up a lot of seats. It's very geographically focused, and they're targeting that urban liberal crowd and they've done a very good job of it. They're almost non existent in the rest of the country because they got 12% of the vote, I believe, and 60 something seats, and then Nigel Farage and reform got 15% of the vote in five seats. So you can see just how carefully targeted the Lib Dem vote is and how well they've crafted it, that their message is completely toxic in every other part of the country.
But in these southern, inner city liberal areas in the United Kingdom, they do very, very well. If you look at reform, they are doing very, very well in the northeast of England, working class areas.
Farragism, as we could call it, is very popular there. And I think he's well positioned to pick up 100 and something seats next time around. No problem.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: Well, his, I mean, this was a monumental what he did because he went from what, only a few short weeks ago, zero campaign, not even in the race, to here he is winning seats and picking up support and a ton of votes.
So they are well positioned, it seems, moving forward.
But clearly there's been a shift in England. Things like, as I said, I can't see the conservatives ever being like, they've squandered effectively what was like, England was the one safe, traditionally conservative safe, what would you call it, demographic electorate, if you like, area. And it seemed the people like, as long as you had good governance, that it worked. Right. But then they just, they slipped right off the conservative philosophy into all sorts of other stuff. And then on top of that, we saw the managerial incompetence.
And then also the worst of the worst in the sense that you get these people who are like, yeah, well, I'm just like the paws, you know, mummy and daddy used to take me to the movies, too. You know, it's like, oh, my gosh, this is just unbelievable. But I can't see them. Like, how do you get back from that?
[00:37:41] Speaker C: I don't see a situation in which the Tories ever really recover as like a majority party in the United Kingdom. As long as Farage is around.
I just do not see a way back for them unless they listen to Suella Braverman, who was in the Americas recently. And just this week, actually, at Natcon four, the national conservative conference, and she got up on stage and gave a speech basically saying, we failed the voters. We didn't listen to them, we betrayed our voters. That's why we lost. Which is the opposite message of what you're hearing from the, her party establishment. So whether or not she gets kicked out. I don't know. But I believe that she is supposed to be a leadership contender. She's potentially someone who can take on Rishi Sunak, who, surprisingly, is sticking around. That's the other disturbing thing.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: I'm sorry I failed you, but I am going to stay.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Well, I've achieved my mission, so I now get rewarded by staying, I guess.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:44] Speaker C: And.
Yeah, but there's no good. I mean, even we talk about replacements for him, like Suella Braverman, I don't really see her bringing it back to what it was before. Like, it has been properly destroyed. And it was David Cameron who. Who kind of started this, really, if you think about it.
You know, the moment David Cameron got the leadership of the party, it was dead. And we're just seeing the. The final effects of that now. It is going to be very hard for it to be killed off completely. I thought it would be easier. That's why I said the one disappointment for the election for me was the fact that it didn't get killed off because there was just no way for it to be. Be rescued.
But we'll have to wait and see. The next five years in the UK will be very, very interesting, especially with Tony Blair back in charge. Who knows what could happen?
[00:39:38] Speaker A: Well, there's money in power still in the old conservative coffers. That's probably why they're able to hold on with the Haganales.
[00:39:46] Speaker C: So it's just. It's just incredibly hard, as people have pointed out, they've survived. They're the oldest political party in the world in terms, in a democratic sense, so they've survived just about everything. They survived, you know, what, five, six wars by now. They've survived destroying their empire, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and so it looks like they'll survive basically, just completely destroying their own country. They may very well survive that, too.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Well, speaking of what lies ahead, I've got a couple of quick little questions to wrap this up before we close out the episode. But I don't know if you saw. But I think if I was a betting man, I'd say Carl Benjamin, known to online youtubers as Sargon of Akkadd, is right now laying the groundwork for his entry into politics and I'm guessing, for the reform. I don't know if you saw on Great Britain, Britain news yesterday, I think it was their time. He did like a 45 minutes episode, like a. Quite a long form episode, where he was agreed to be interviewed so that he could publicly apologise to. I can't remember her name now. There was that lady back in 2018. Oh, it might have been 2016, he made that rather crass joke and he talked about. He came out and he apologized for it and he said, I'm happy to meet with her personally and apologise. And I think the political discourse has collapsed really badly. I'm a bit older and wiser now. I should not have said that he was actually very charitable, very christian and virtuous, what he actually did, and people were criticising him for it, but it was one of those things where he genuinely, I think, did the right thing. But clearly the rest of the conversation was about the state of politics. And look, I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, yeah, he also, on Twitter just a couple of days ago, came out and said, here's my letter. They've sacked me from the conservative party, I've been kicked out. So I have a feeling he might be someone who's perhaps prepping.
[00:41:40] Speaker C: Yes, it will be interesting. So, the next hurdle, like I said, the first hurdle. But the next hurdle for him would be Nigel Farage himself. So Nigel Farage has publicly denounced him in the past because he was involved with Ukip. And basically Nigel said, no, I'm not going back to Ukip because of those clowns like Carl Benjamin. So, you know. But, hey, they may.
It's what you're suggesting may be entirely possible. I think the big thing that Carl Benjamin has done is created the Lotus Eaters podcast, which has turned into the largest independent media organization in the United Kingdom in twelve months. Basically, they run podcasts every single day. I watched their election livestream, which had more viewers than any of the mainstream media in terms of online viewership. I think they were getting 50,000 viewers while they were streaming in the middle of the night about the UK election. In the whole way through the night. Obviously, they don't have a tv presence, not like GB News does, but in terms of independent news, independent podcasts, they are the big names in Britain right now. And he definitely has a very bright future. And he's undergone a bit of a journey towards faith. He was an arch liberal, in a sense that he was, as you mentioned, when he was making these crass remarks in the past, and he's really changed his mind a lot. And he speaks very positively about religion now. He doesn't consider himself a Christian, but I know that he speaks very positively about Christianity, something that he's very interested in. He's since gotten married, he's got kids of his own. Now. And he's, I think, very, you know, potentially the next Nigel Farage for the United Kingdom, which is great to see because you want that continuity, right? If you've got an older gentleman who's the face of the, of the movement, you know, at some point you want to be able to see younger men stepping, stepping up, then you can say, oh, great, the next generation are going to be able to see him as a stable, trustworthy person. And he definitely comes across like that now.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm kind of in awe of what they've done with Lotus eaters, actually. You're right. It's great stuff on there. And also they go for depth as well, which I love, rather than just reaction.
[00:43:59] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I just. Yeah. Hours of very detailed political philosophy and every subject you can think of. The interviews they do are all very, very serious. In fact, recently they interviewed Liz Truss, former prime minister, and she spoke about how basically the bank of England launched a coup against her when she was prime minister, and she revealed all of that on the podcast there.
People would laugh at Liz Truss, how she didn't last as the prime minister that long. But you can see when she lays it out, the kidde, she makes her case that it was a coup that was launched against her by the bankers and by the Liberals and her party. They colluded together to get rid of her in record time and she just didn't see it coming. You could say she was perhaps a bit naive, not intelligent enough or well prepared enough to see that coup coming. But the fact that they were just, you know, the conservative party members voted for her to be prime minister, the choice of the people in her party, and then to have the banks and the liberal elite say, nope.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Yeah, well, fascinates the real power behind the throne. And just before we go to our last little question here, I have for you, I think it's clear to me, too, that there has been quite a clever strategy with the likes of Lotus eaters. Paul Joseph Watson, the Reform Party, they utilized social media, they didn't align themselves directly, but they were clearly promoting Reform party. And the strategy is build, which they've done and then build again for the next election. And it seems pretty clear that there's been a clever little sort of, I think, a process here of figuring out, I mean, this just looks far too coordinated to be coincidental.
They set the reform up amongst particularly younger voters, as Nigel Farage is your man. He's the new punk rock, and they did a very good job of that.
[00:46:01] Speaker C: I absolutely agree with you. I have nothing really to add to that other than to say they've been very, very clever and very well targeted for the next generation. Because that's sort of the way that conservatism is like, oh, that's just the boomers. That's the boomers. It's just the boomers. And that's what happened with the Tories, basically. It was just the boomers voting for the Tories. And they've really found a way to get young people voting for conservative values and thinking about right wing ideas and anti liberal ideas and bring them in. And they're doing a really, really good job of that. And that's probably more important than politics is being in control of the information that the next generation is receiving, because the left have almost had a monopoly on that for, who knows, 50, 60.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: 70 years before we go behind the paywall. Dewa, first past the post.
Look, we've got problems with MMP, but you look at this election, you think, gosh, first past the post. I'm glad we don't have that.
Does it have a future in the UK? It seems it might hold on with a bit of nuggety determination, because people, it'll be in their own interests, some power brokers to keep it. But what do you think about that question?
[00:47:14] Speaker C: Yeah, there's no reason that either Labour or the Tories have to change first past the post, so it's not going to change. That's the simple way to put it. In New Zealand, it changed because there was a lot of pressure on the parties to change it. It's possible that reform may get to the point where it's providing that pressure. So if you get to a situation where reform, like, in five years, a reform gets like 20, 30% of the the vote and still almost no seats, then you'll know. But I just don't see that happening. I think if they get 20, 30% of the vote, they're clocking in 100, 200 seats or whatever. Still, they may. Yeah, but first past the post is really designed to stop newcomers. It's really designed to favor the establishment, but, yeah, and there's no condition for that to be changed in the UK at the moment. And part of that being, like I mentioned already, the ethnic enclaves that they have, they have like five Hamas MP's and the UK parliament. Now, if you were to switch away from first past the post, you wouldn't get rid of those guys. They would also be able to set up their own MMP party as well. The Netherlands has its own muslim party as well. And they have a few seats in parliament. So it's got to the point where, yeah, I think things are broken to the point where the electoral system doesn't matter. There are more fundamental things in society that are broken and it's not the electoral system.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Dewa, thank you again for coming on the episode, folks. We're about to go behind the paywall. Well, if you're listening on Friday, you won't be able to tune in until Monday. But if you want to get access to the next episode, as I said, we're going to break down the Trump Biden debate. Lots to talk about there, a lot of juicy stuff there. We're going to be talking about this new Supreme Court ruling that makes the president Hitler, apparently. We're going to be talking about Le Pen and France and one other story that has not been talked about that I've seen anywhere in New Zealand media about some problems at the border in America. Yeah, lots and lots, lots of stuff to talk about in the next episode. Become a $5 monthly
[email protected] leftfootmedia the link is in today's show notes. If you want to join us there on Monday, or if you're listening on Monday and you want to carry on with part two, then go and become a five dollar monthly patron. Dewa, for those who are leaving us now, how do they follow your awesome work?
[00:49:22] Speaker C: So you can listen to my RCR show weekly on Friday at 01:00 p.m. on reality czech radio. You can go to my twitter account, imindsnz, or you can go to my telegram account, ewa de Boer. And those are the main areas where you can remain informed as to what I do. And as always, thanks for having me on the podcast. And I absolutely recommend that people subscribe to the dispatchers. They go to your Patreon and they become Patreons. Absolutely worth it for people. And this goes with everything. Support your independent media. They need money, whatever it is, make sure you're giving, make sure you're paying some kind of subscription to some kind of conservative media in New Zealand, please. If it's one thing that you do, that's, that would make the biggest difference.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: Dewa, thank you very much for those kind words of endorsement. We've got a new live stream monthly livestream show coming soon too that you'll enjoy for those who want to put a few pennies in the coffer. And next Friday, folks, our free to air episode is an interview with Jonathan ailing from the free speech union about a particular. Actually, a couple of issues going on in New Zealand that I wanted to talk to him about. In the meantime, don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And we'll see you next time on the dispatches with Diva.
[00:50:36] Speaker B: When I was young, my dad keep on running until the sun goes down.
You can outrun the devil, but you ain't gonna outrun me.
