Joanne McNeill: Another sign of neglect from PM

Joanne McNeill.

What the world needs now is a new pair of socks is the title of a Mike Rudd song from Spectrum's legendary (in some quarters) 1972 double album Milesago.

The line resurfaced when the Government recently contributed $4 million to Whangarei's Hundertwasser Gallery and Wairau Art Centre.

Another $6 million is required; which is where the socks come in. We all need them eventually.

Since Frederick Hundertwasser famously wore odd socks - and anyway why should sock colours always match? - I propose a fundraising odd socks campaign to cover the shortfall.

All it would require is seeding capital to buy bulk socks, design a label, run an advertising campaign and employ staff to mix, repackage and distribute. After all, red socks worked perfectly well for Team New Zealand.

While government crumbs are always welcome, if the announcement was a pre-election ploy, it probably won't wrest the formerly National-held Northland seat from Winston Peters' cheeky grip (any more than did National's threat to replace our quaint one-way bridges).

Government ministers spend such scant time in the lovely wilds of the north possibly they are unaware Whangarei is not in the Northland electorate, and that lingering pique in Kawakawa (aka Hundertwasser Central) about the Whangarei project means the gift might actually alienate Northland-electorate voters.

Chronic government neglect of the north was further underlined by Prime Minister John Key's no-show at Waitangi.

The annual tradition of elected representatives facing the discordant music on the ground at Te Tii is a proud and wonderful symbol of uniquely democratic nationhood.

Clearly though, this PM would rather dismiss the massive pre-Waitangi protests against signing the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement as 'rent a crowd' than front the ordinary New Zealanders for whom often he presumes to speak.

This is offensive to anyone who took to the streets last week on the reasonable grounds that free trade has been a disaster for local manufacturing since it was introduced by new-right economic ideologues in the 1980s.

Tariffs existed to protect strategic local self-sufficient production.

Without them, production is outsourced to lower-wage, Third World economies with non-existent environmental protections.

Here, the result has been nationwide industry closures, low wage growth, a widening income gap, markets flooded with cheap rubbish racking up carbon miles, loss of skills and meaningful employment, and economic dependence on immigration, tobacco taxes, short-term wholesale export ofprimary produce (until thedairy price collapsed) and now tourism, featuring theme-park New Zealand serviced by smiling local minions; and in those Third World low-wage economies which make everything on which we dependdaily now, locals in sweat shops must wear masks to survive grotesque industrial pollution.
It's a global disaster.

To my mind, spreading our former egalitarian standard of living would have been preferable to importing Third World suffering here.

Should future governments with economic policies aimed at the good of the many rather than the few ever win power, TPPA disputes procedures will allow global corporates to sue.

This indeed constitutes an assault on our sovereign democracy.

And in the meantime, thanks to free trade, we have the ridiculous situation where even if my brilliant odd sock Hundertwasser funding campaign were adopted, locally manufactured socks are no longer obtainable.