Deborah Coddington: Middle-class moaners miss irony of 'movement'

The Occupy Auckland protesters are a mixed bunch without a clear agenda. Photo / Amos Chapple

If the anti-capitalist protesters' behaviour in each country reflects the culture of their nation, then I think New Zealanders should be proud of the occupiers camped out in Auckland and Wellington. That is, if they haven't already given up and gone home to their middle-class comforts.

Their Facebook page outs them as sweetly jumbled. Some call for "cupcake baker volunteers"; another says not to stand outside the stock exchange - the staff are "mostly under 25 and earning under 25K a year".

Meanwhile in Rome, Italians set fire to cars and buildings and smashed shop windows. In Athens, it was "no business as usual" while Parliament voted for austerity measures. Londoners, lacking a native hero, dredged up yesterday's man, Julian Assange, to address a rally.

But in Aotearoa, it's more of a carnival. Like a fringe festival for the Rugby World Cup. I can see why they don't like being called protesters, or demonstrators, since there is such confusion over what they want. An end to the gap between rich and poor?

They object that in New Zealand the top 1 per cent own 16 per cent of the nation's wealth. They call this corporate greed and inequality. I presume they want some of this wealth, this "greed".

This is where it gets confusing - it's greed when someone else has the wealth but not greed when it's dished out to the occupiers. Also - and I'm never good with figures - but this doesn't mean if 1 per cent of the population has 16 per cent of the riches, the other 99 per cent is owned by the occupiers, who number a mere few hundred at most.

Where I do agree with them, though, is that capitalism and the free market is failing. Too right it is. That's one of the reasons the world's economies, particularly Europe and the United States, are in doggy doo.

Cast your mind back a few years, when the property market was booming and we considered it every New Zealanders' "right" to own their own home or three - house, apartment and beach pad.

You could buy the first home with minimal deposit, finance the apartment on the first home and so on. Lending standards were relaxed and no one (save the prudent and frugal) believed the money supply would dry up.

Then the stupid bundled up their borrowings (the car, the mortgages, the credit cards) which would be on-sold to other lenders.

As I've written before, we were a nation of people buying stuff we didn't need with money we didn't have to impress people who didn't care.

Then the party ended. The loans fell due.

But instead of governments allowing companies to go belly up, they bailed out some of them with taxpayers' money. That is not free-market capitalism. That is cronyism.

Borrowers would have lost their homes and their possessions, but you have to be cruel to teach people harsh lessons about credit.

I know, because I've been there. I had to waitress, cook and write my way out.

Occupiers don't get the point that governments can't fix this - only hard work by individuals will. I think they want governments to meddle further in the markets. The only good that government can do is ensure tough legislation is there to prosecute those who make false or misleading statements when persuading people to invest; hold them accountable through the courts.

Meanwhile, these happy campers are ever so amusing, manipulated as they are by mega-rich, fantastically successful Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter. Because apparently that's how the movement began, with just one tweet to arms. They tweet that if they're arrested, they are "political prisoners".

The ultimate irony, however, totally missed by these bold eschewers of capitalist tools - while they communicate via Twitter and Facebook, and photos (Hipstamatic, man!) from iPhones - was that, simultaneously, another silent vigil was being held in Cuba.

Last Saturday, Cuba's Laura Pollan died. She was the leader of Ladies in White, one of the island's foremost dissidents who fought for liberty, opposed communism and marched every Sunday for the release of - ahem - political prisoners.

The campers in Aotea Square should occupy Cuba. They might find capitalism and free markets aren't so bad after all.