Post
The corporatist policy that spins itself as being about a "free market", is and has always been about protecting friends of the regime from the competition that comes with actual free markets. It's about protecting and expanding the power to extract economic rents. The very thing that a free market is meant to be free of (according to Adam Smith and his anti-feudalist contemporaries).
(3/?)
...when Guyon Enspiner asks;
"So do you see yourself as part of that momentum, as part of an alternative like the one that [Zohran Mamdani] is offering?"
... Hipkins just dodges the question with a bunch of waffle about the differences between the US and NZ. Hipkins doesn't want to answer the question because the honest answer would be 'no'. The entire purpose of having an industry puppet like Hipkins as Labour leader is to make sure the party *can't* be part of that alternative.
(2/?)
"... Hipkins worked for the Industry Training Federation and Todd Energy."
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/482831/chris-hipkins-from-head-boy-to-prime-minister
That's right, Todd Energy. NZ's biggest privately owned fossil fool company. What was Hipkins' job there, some lowly grunt? Primary evidence has been hard to find. But Hipkins' Wikipedia article gives the job title as "training manager";
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hipkins
Which makes sense, given the ITF role.
EDIT: Removed Hollywood link, the site appears to be gambling spam, not a real magazine.
(3/?)
Hipkins represents and works for the political gaslighters of the same corporatist economic system they described to Guyon Espiner (quoted in OP). Just like Phil Goff did as Helen Clark's replacement.
Until NZ Labour replaces Hipkins with someone more like Mamdani, and less like Goff or their current UK Labour counterpart Sir Stammer, Labour cannot be an alternative to that system. They will be anchored on the centre-right by a leader for whom that's as far left as the centre gets.
(4/4)
"I think the profits that we're seeing from the banks, from the supermarkets, from the electricity companies, from some of the insurance companies, are a sign that NZ doesn't actually have what the free market is supposed to deliver us, a competitive economy."
#ChrisHipkins, 2025
https://www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/30-with-guyon-espiner?share=529f222f-cd18-45ae-9a52-39bfda42b320
Where do I start with this one?
(1/?)
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