When covid hit we heard plenty of naive talk about nations and corporations coming together to find a solution to this problem which affected us all. Now it's crystal clear that nothing has changed. Corporations took subsidies and used cheap debt to continue their share buybacks and executive excess, working people in rich countries paid the price, poor nations suffered the most. Covid remains a problem for all nations, because as long as so many poor people are not protected, new variants are created and affect everyone.

Distracted by these covid-driven changes in our everyday lives, we haven't been paying attention to the growing reach, complexity and power of global corporate influence. As we exit covid containment, enter a recession and experience climate change, we need to refocus on how globalisation is reshaping our world. I wish I could summarise that whole story here, or point you to some comprehensive Websites or books, but critical analysis seems harder to find today. Investigative journalism has been bulldozed aside by advertising-driven search engines and social media platforms, advocacy groups are too specialised, books tend to explain problems in retrospect.

But the biggest problem is there's just far too much money slushing around at the top, funding the many well-paid layers of spruiking between us and corporate reality. So, this is a more personal take on trying to understand globalisation today and its impact on New Zealand. I've made do with the sources I have, my limited time, and focused on those parts of the story where I have personal experience and where the trends are most disturbing.

Globalisation Is (Mostly) In Retreat

First, a definition. Globalisation includes higher volumes of trade, capital flows, migration flows and the increased political and social influence of global corporations. Briefly, the key drivers and trends. The expansive era of modern globalisation resulted from two major changes. First, trade opening measures integrated areas with cheap labour into global markets - China and others in Asia, Eastern Europe and Mexico. Second, technological breakthroughs, particularly containerisation and information technology (IT) integration, supported the geographical dispersion of production processes. The largest corporations were able to minimise costs by spreading their supply chains globally.

But this rise of global production and distribution chains had peaked by 2008, encouraged by the growth of high-tech, high-profit sectors and a growing awareness of the long-term risks which came with offshore production (rising wages, disruption to just-in-time supply chains, loss of intellectual property, political interference and instability).

All conventional measures of globalisation confirm that peak around 14 years ago - global trade as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), foreign direct investment, the ratio of gross foreign assets to GDP, global or national migrant flows in relation to total population. But that reversal in where production is sited did not stop the growing market share of global corporations, or the growing wealth of their investors, executives and their layers of supporting experts. Visible but less easy to quantify is the continued growth of the global elite's political influence.

Then the covid pandemic created a "perfect storm" which hit developing economies particularly hard. Besides covid-19 deaths and disruption, they faced other shocks from abroad (debt, defensive trade restrictions, falling export income, unemployment, tourism, commodity prices). The result was a worldwide rise in public and private debt, with 2020 seeing the largest one-year global debt surge since World War II according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Now, rising interest rates on debt are pushing the most vulnerable nations into crisis.

Crises - This Time Is Really Different

The first big question for me when covid appeared was how come the share-market kept going up. How is that possible when the disruption to supply chains was obvious? I looked at a few business Websites I'd used in previous crashes, but the rise of Internet paywalls got in the way. So, I bit the bullet and paid for a cut-price subscription to the UK's daily business paper the Financial Times ($75 for three months).

The answer wasn't hard to find. With governments around the world setting a floor of near-zero interest rates, cheap private debt (bonds) was on offer too, and companies loaded up. Imagine getting long term credit for nothing - all your problems are pushed down the road. Better yet, chief executive officers (CEOs) used their new loans for that old chestnut, buying back their own shares to push up prices and bonuses. These were happy times for the rich.

Now, I was born in the 1950s, started work in the 1970s, and have lived through plenty of recessions. Employment and wages went down, then profits went up, there was media discussion about the excesses of the rich, then we had strikes and wages went up. Everyone gets their share. Today is different. Today, the rich take more than their share in good times and bad. Since the 1980s, charts showing trends in the comparative share of productive income paid out to capital and labour show mirror images, with capital's share increasing at labour's expense. This trend reversed briefly during covid, but that's just State-funded stimulus paying wages while production shrinks, not a long-term reversal.

Global Average Labour Share (Guerriero, Asian Development Bank Working Paper 920)

And even in recessions, there's less downside for the rich today. Governments are expected to bail them out and pass the cost to taxpayers with "whatever it takes"; nobody pushes to cut executive packages to fund an increased share to their struggling workforce. As an example, the Institute for Policy Studies' "2022 Executive Excess" report surveyed 300 US corporations with the lowest median pay. In one year from 2021 to 2022, average salaries of their CEOs increased by $US2.5 million to an average of $US10.6 million. The average worker got $US23,968, earning just $US1 for every $US670 given to the CEO. That's the human story.

An earlier Harvard/Cornell Universities study found US public companies paid more than 10% of nett total earnings to their top five executives between 2001 to 2003, up from 5% between 1993 to 1995. 10%! (Bebchuk & Grinstein, 2005). Sorry, no recent figures can be found, they would be too embarrassing. On top of that comes the higher shareholder payouts, the financialisation (sell-off) of assets for short term gains. That's today's business story. How do corporations make a profit with that level of extraction? Easy. They take it from the workers.

Ultra-Right Patriarchal Politics

Instead of this excess fuelling Left militancy, the nationalist Right is becoming more organised and active, and nowhere more so than in the home of corporate power, the United States of America. Where do you start, when looking at the rise of ultra-Right politics in the US? It's everywhere. Topical right now is Trump's loading of the Supreme Court with friendly political operatives who lied in their pre-appointment testimony to gain membership of the US's ultimate interpreter of the law.

Out is the right to terminate pregnancies, the rights of Indigenous tribes to enforce law on their lands, the power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon emissions; in are limitations on the states' rights to regulate carrying firearms and Christian prayer in schools. And they're just getting started; they're in there for life.

Behind today's changes are decades of privately funded contributions aimed at reshaping public debate. According to the Intercept, the best source I've found on corruption in the US, Charles Koch* is perhaps the most important of these hidden influencers. Koch Industries makes more than half its money from fossil fuels and is the second-largest privately owned company in the US. Koch has funnelled some of his personal fortune into a huge network of political front groups, lobbying efforts, think tanks, and activist networks that aim to stifle climate action.

Koch-funded groups were among the first climate denialists, flatly lying about the well-documented planetary trend of global warming and then schooling lawmakers on the alternate reality they had crafted. Koch also pioneered the attack on Republicans from the Right, pushing the Party into its current extremism. *See Jeremy Agar's review of "Dark Money" in Watchdog 144, May 2017, Ed.

Three of the extremist judges who joined the (EPA) decision - Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh - wound up on the Supreme Court in large part because of Koch's activism and contributions. The case itself can also be tied directly to Koch. The challengers are 27 Republican attorneys general, who were supported by the Koch-funded Republican Attorneys General Association.

One of Koch's most effective policy creations is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Right-wing activist network that drafts model state legislation, which is then introduced around the country. "'Koch funded ALEC to do stuff like deregulate the utilities industry,' according to Christopher Leonard, author of "Kochland". 'But what animated ALEC was anti-abortion laws.' The grassroots network Koch created took up the issue even as he himself was indifferent about it".

Less publicly obvious but maybe even more worrying were the Intercept's revelations from the Blue Leaks, documents hacked from 251 US Police Websites. Following the post-9/11 establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, 80 "fusion centers" have spread across the country to share "intelligence" between local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and private businesses.

After the police killing of George Floyd led to large protests, "federal law enforcement relied on fusion centers to stoke fears about 'antifa' and 'black racially motivated violent extremists.' When California was ravaged by wildfires last summer, documents disseminated through fusion centers revealed law enforcement had long fixated on the baseless speculation that 'forest jihadis' may engage in arson attacks. And fusion centers regularly received intelligence prepared by private industry partners - including some monitoring environmental journalists".

The internal documents show a tendency to categorise standard protest behaviour as a threat to police, to categorise Indigenous and environmental rights activists as "terrorists", and to underestimate the risk from far-Right activists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provided personnel to oversee the team's work, provided police with fake online identities to infiltrate groups, and paid $US27.6 million for 5,000 social media surveillance software licenses.

Trump's Attempted Coup

This is just part of the background to Trump's attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. If you haven't seen the first testimony from a Trump insider, Cassidy Hutchinson, you can find that on the Intercept site too. Her story makes clear how close Trump came to joining and further inciting his supporters' storming of the Capitol (he argued with, then lunged at his Secret Service driver when he refused to drive him there). Trump-friendly lawyer John Eastman had concocted an unlikely legal theory that the Vice President could unilaterally overturn the election result but VP Mike Pence refused. Encouraged by Trump, the mob had built a mock wooden gallows and were chanting "Hang Mike Pence".

The Secret Service has emerged as a key player in the Congressional hearings on Trump's role in the storming of the Capitol. When rioters entered the building, the Secret Service tried to whisk Pence away from the scene but he refused. "I'm not getting in the car," Pence reportedly told the Secret Service detail on January 6. "If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off". Had Pence entered the Vice Presidential limo, he would have been taken to a secure location where he would have been unable to certify the Presidential election results.

"'People need to understand that if Pence had listened to the Secret Service and fled the Capitol, this could have turned out a whole lot worse', a Congressional official not authorised to speak publicly told the Intercept. 'It could've been a successful coup, not just an attempted one'. Tony Ornato, a Secret Service agent whom Trump had appointed as his Deputy White House Chief of Staff in 2019, reportedly informed Pence's National Security Adviser, Keith Kellogg, on January 6 that agents would relocate the Vice-President to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. 'You can't do that, Tony', Kellogg reportedly told Ornato. 'Leave him where he's at. He's got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You'll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don't do it'".

The Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 Committee, claiming they were lost as a result of a "device-replacement program". Literally, unbelievable.

The Virtual Patriarchy

Beyond the politically funded Internet advocacy referred to above, there's a whole suite of self-reinforcing and addictive online virtual realities. Dating apps which encourage "pick-up artists", violent gaming apps, men's rights and incel forums, public and hidden forums for the ultra-Right, porn sites - all of these are a breeding ground for misogyny, which bolsters the alt-Right.

And all are reinforced by search engine algorithms which intentionally push users away from their search intentions towards longer content to increase side-bar advertising revenue. This hidden bias lends itself to manipulation by unscrupulous business and political players. Today's aptly named "followers" are led on and actively groomed by alt-Right activists through social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, Gab, Rumble, MeWe, etc. There are even mercenary online trolls who amplify messaging for payments (see Greg's review of "Men Who Hate Women", elsewhere in this issue. Ed.).

Gab, one online space popular with white supremacists and extremists, was hacked in February 2022. They had four million accounts/users, including, for example, QAnon-believing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene with 217,000 followers. Most accounts aren't active posters, they just receive content. The most popular forums are, in descending order, The Donald, Trump, News, QAnon, WeLoveTrump, Conservative News, Stop The Steal. User numbers spiked radically after Trump's near-insurrection.

Battle Of The Bucks, From Democracy To Dynasty

Next, let's catch up on new developments in US "democracy". Here again, that Financial Times subscription was illuminating. Huge money is spent for public spin and hidden Internet push-promotion. Here's a recent example from the Financial Times but this is just everyday stuff in the US edition, there are many similar stories: Based on spending just to select the Republican candidate, the Illinois race for State Governor is likely to be most expensive ever according to OpenSecrets, an organisation which tracks money in US politics.

The main contenders/spenders were: Darren Bailey, a Right-wing State Senator endorsed by Donald Trump and financially backed by shipping supplies magnate Richard Uihlein, one of the Party's richest donors; and Richard Irvin, Mayor of Illinois' second-largest city Aurora, backed by $US50m from Ken Griffin, chief executive of transnational hedge fund Citadel. Not forgetting, the Democrats also spent money supporting Republican Bailey, believing him an easier candidate to beat.

Uihlein has emerged in recent years as the largest Republican donor, contributing more to the Party's candidates in the 2022 electoral cycle than any other person/corporation. He became prominent as a staunch Trump backer and was one of the biggest funders of the January 6, 2021, rally that preceded the deadly Capitol Hill riot. Bailey won the Republican nomination, underlining Uihlein's power within the Party and bolstering Trump's position. Next, Bailey competes to outspend billionaire JB Pritzker, the Democrats' incumbent Mayor and fortunate heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune. Bailey has already raised $US9m from Uihlein, while Pritzker has spent $US125m of his own money on his campaign.

So really, US politics is a contest for the spoils of victory, a battle between rival blocs of the rich. Since the 2010 Citizens United ruling, billionaire donors have poured nearly 40 times more money into federal elections - upping their spending from $US31 million in 2010 to $US1.2 billion in 2020 - and the number of dark money funds and groups has exploded.

The totally corrupt and deceptive wing of corporates are happy to back the US into an ultra-Right future which includes intrusive internal security, tolerance of armed local militias and forced pregnancies; while other corporates pretend to support democracy to avoid excessive social and economic instability, while still expecting "whatever it takes" to maximise their wealth.

Then I saw this marvel of modern political entrepreneurship: "SPAC" or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, are referred to as "blank check" funds because they have no underlying assets or business model, relying instead on the sponsor endorsements of promised expertise and acquisition of a shell company to bypass the scrutiny of public listing. In 2020, they accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed US companies.

Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, sponsored an oil-and-gas focused SPAC which announced plans to raise $US300 million in 2020 and announced plans to merge with private equity firm Grey Rock Investment with a valuation of $US1.3 billion in 2022. Prominent sponsors get a guaranteed cut of all money coming, often 20%. This is innovative stuff, offering a new way for corporate buddies to reward public representatives. Researchers Klausner, Ohlrogge, and Ruan took a dimmer view of SPACs after analysing their performance during 2019 and 2020, concluding that, although the creators of SPACs were doing well, their investors were not.

Pine Island Acquisition Corp. is another recent SPAC involving elite former Government officials Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin. Blinken and Austin left the fund shortly before being confirmed as the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, respectively, under current President Joe Biden. But hey, there's money to be made, so the Central Intelligence Agency high-ups are in there too. The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, has launched its own Cayman Islands-registered "blank check" fund to boost the fortunes of current and retired intelligence officials through board membership and equity shares.

"In-Q-Tel was founded by the CIA in the late '90s to spur private sector innovation and bring the latest technology support for covert national security operations. In addition to a budget provided by the Department of Defense and CIA, In-Q-Tel earns revenue by selling equity in start-ups it acquires. Its recent portfolio includes firms involved in social media surveillance, artificial intelligence, and autonomous drones' (Intercept).

Chain Bridge I filed a public offering seeking to raise $US200 million to purchase a defence contractor that is, according to the firm's annual report, "poised to benefit" from Government spending on national security. So, this is how the US government works. These are the cronies, crooks and con artists which dominate the rules-setting for our "rules-based world order", much touted by Jacinda Ardern, and set the framework under which the majority of the world's largest corporations work.

Closing Up The Global Shop

Russia's justification for the invasion of Ukraine looks as weak as the US/UK invasion of Iraq from where I sit, but the consequences will be worlds apart. The US is pushing the world towards economic segregation of Russia backed by increased military spending. The role of US experts and funding in pushing Russia into premature privatisation of its' State enterprises for peanuts in 1991, and accepting the break-up of the nation in exchange for promises of future gains in global markets, is conveniently forgotten.

The long-term intent of that intervention was to turn State assets into private businesses which could eventually be bought up by global corporations. In recent years it has become very clear that this was definitely one step too far for Putin, and understandably so. The oligarchs got those companies for nothing, and their sell-off would leave Russia without significant economic assets.

None of this was inevitable. Helping Russia into a slower transition more like the process for prospective new European Union (EU) members could have led to a very different result. Or maybe not - there's no doubt the Russian Army and security services are among the worst in the world. But there's no time for reflection today, we're told.

Russia has now settled into the second phase of its war on the Ukraine, after failing to take Kyiv and install a puppet Government. The military strategy has shifted to long term attrition, shelling and bombing cities into undefendable ruins with the probable aim of permanently cutting off Ukraine from its main export pathway, the Black Sea.

Internally, the Russian government has submitted a draft law forcing businesses to take on military contracts and making overtime compulsory to "temporarily concentrate efforts" supporting the State. Internal suppression has extended, even to former allies of Putin who emphasised growing productive capacity, education and health over militarisation. Recently, Vladimir Mau, a member of Gazprom's Board of Directors and one of the most senior advisors to the Government, was put under house arrest.

The same day, Putin nationalised Sakhalin-2, a Gazprom joint venture in the Pacific with Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi. The EU is discussing increased military spending within an expanded NATO, but is this needed? Russia's military spending in 2021 was $US66 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The US was spending $US801 billion a year then, and other NATO members about $US363 billion.

Not only is Russia ejected from world markets, it seems the US has its sights set on China next. The strategic struggle between China's State and foreign capitalist corporations has certainly sharpened in recent years. China is trying to grow a mix of State enterprises in key sectors and locally-owned for-profit enterprises which might one day compete globally. Compared to Russia's capitalist debacle, which took ten years off the life expectancy of ordinary Russians, this is clearly a good plan for the Chinese workers, who suffered enormous disruption during the transition from communism to their current mixed economy.

Most of China's private companies are still small by world standards and don't have the established supply chains to threaten US global dominance. Perhaps this is strategic posturing from the US side, threatening China's access to world markets to protect its offshore production inside China from excessive State interference and theft of technologies. There is corruption and repression on both sides of this strategic battle, and New Zealand should stay independent.

Free Markets In Tiny Countries

And down here in little New Zealand, faithful follower of the US free market recipe since 1984, life is about to go from bad to worse. First, we lost ground against the Australian economy and the promised efficiency dividend never arrived. Real wages flatlined. That should have been a giant red flag. Then we watched house prices rise and rise, because we didn't have a capital gains tax. We added fuel to the fire with high migration. Today, home ownership has fallen to 52%, the lowest rate since the 1950s, and just 32% for Māori. In 1991, 61% of people aged 25-29 lived in an owner-occupied home. By 2018 this had dropped to 44%. That's really bad - and the future is worse.

Increasingly we hear it's impossible to purchase a first home without the help of wealthy parents. We're heading for a future where the majority of workers will rent for life, including retirement. And with house prices high and plateauing, investors now have to get their return in cash, not capital gains. Future rents will be much higher than today's, which are already unbearable for many.

This is the result of Government policies, and today in New Zealand, the media channels us to blame the Government for everything. This is working very nicely for business. But it's Big Business which pushed to cut benefits and restrain unions in the 1980s. It's businesses which want to import cheap skilled migrants and skip local training. It's property investors who made millions in past capital gains but still think it's fair to charge unaffordable rents today, and mounted campaigns against tax changes. Unfortunately, the same Internet forces which shaped the American disaster are at work here. Instead of strikes, we had the alt-Right occupying Parliament grounds.

For sure, there are some pretty big flaws in our Government. Returning from Oz, I found my last job as a senior analyst was better paid here, and duplicated round all the regions when it should be a centralised role. In simpler times, way back before computers, perhaps our distributed national and local government was more knowledge-based and appropriate. That time has long gone. Democracy is not many elected local committees struggling to advise many inefficient local government and health services.

And, of course, the layers of overpaid private management have spread to the public service; this new class of movers who have mastered process, language and career advancement, but not the business. Another job I looked at had this telling staff comment on Website Glassdoor: "Lots of fun work, but beware the hidden politics". Well, of course, there's lots of politicking when there's plum jobs to protect. For all that, research has clearly shown that larger governments are correlated with economic growth, and ours is hardly the worst. Government is certainly not the main villain in our story.

Export Your Best And Brightest

Globalisation includes the idea that free global labour markets benefit all nations, a belief that is also part of the current Labour government's policy. The result has been a rapid transition to become one of the most diverse countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -27% born overseas - just below Luxembourg, Switzerland, then Australia.

Diversity is great but the problems with such a big change include house price inflation (estimated at 7.5% for a 1% migration shock), high migration of New Zealanders as wages are held down (averaging over 1.5% per year since the 1980s), and infrastructure overload. If high migration continues, we will head into uncharted territory, with less of our population remaining in their own country of birth than any other OECD nation except Luxembourg, a tiny Western European tax haven.

Rising inequality is driving ever-higher levels of migration as people abandon struggling economies, a process which advantages migrants but disadvantages their home countries. The biggest winners will always be the rich. We still have a choice between a planned and balanced path, and a business-driven agenda of endless growth and profits before people. Currently, the World Bank rates New Zealand the most business-friendly country in the world.

10% In Unions Is Not Enough

I'm also sceptical of the long-term impact of Labour's proposed Fair Pay Agreements Bill, though it may be a useful step along the way. This new legislation proposes that 10% of workers can enforce collective bargaining across a sector, with the option of binding expert arbitration for settlements - a law that would be immediately removed or undermined under National. That leaves unions dependent on keeping the Labour Party in office, instead of regaining the strength they desperately need to fight back against corporate excess.

According to the OECD and AIAS (2021), collective bargaining coverage here was 18% in 2018 (up from 16% in 2016), placing the country towards the bottom of the OECD. New Zealand also has one of the greatest levels of decline in collective bargaining coverage since the 1970s among industrialised countries. Some EU comparisons: Italy 100%, France 98%, Germany 52%, Ireland 34%, Romania 15%, Estonia 6% - so we're in poor company, literally.

We need to relearn how to strike for wages, with unions working together. This is how I look at it. We could have three types of labour market: this low wage, no employer training, high migration model; we can lift wages but still transfer too much to overpaid managers who protect their boss; or we can create highly skilled unionised workplaces and strip back that luxury layer.

The European Union recently introduced very different legislation aiming to ensure adequate minimum wages and strengthen collective bargaining. Article 4(2) obliges member states with less than 80% collective-bargaining coverage to take measures to increase it, including national action plans which contain a clear timeline and concrete measures progressively to increase the degree of coverage. These plans are to be developed in cooperation with the social partners, regularly reviewed and updated at least every five years.

A second Labour proposal is for social unemployment insurance. Like ACC this would be funded by employer levies to guarantee redundancy payments. Again, this creates Labour Party dependency for workers, rather than union-based strength to negotiate. If the future is just a cycle of fighting to get Labour elected, and the gains are undermined every time it goes out, we are again following the downhill path of the United States.

Saving The Planet?

I heard a recent Radio New Zealand interview with a well-intentioned researcher trying to estimate how long it would take to bring back natural diversity if we overshot the global 20C target, but caught up later. Are you kidding? If we give in to corrupt corporates and governments and under-deliver this time, we will keep under-delivering. I was reminded of the HSBC bank executive's unguarded climate comment: "Who cares if Miami is six metres underwater in 100 years?"

And in another recent RNZ interview, a paid advocate for pine plantations explained how good they are as carbon sinks. It took two retired lecturers to later point out the real facts. The Government's official tables which underpin current investment in carbon credits are wrong for native trees, which are more advantageous over the long term.

This is so typical of the modern world. Paid advocates spruik and it takes unaligned retirees to tell the truth. I'm not optimistic. There's always hope that young people will rebel again for real, but theirs is a hard world today. Studying their way into debt, renting instead of owning, leaving family and friends behind to enter the global career scramble, working in servile entry-level jobs to get ahead.

Life In The Free (Market) World

So, here we are, following an economic and political path which has delivered nothing to average citizens in the world's richest country, on a small island in the South Pacific. More of us can't afford to buy or to rent housing, many can't afford to eat properly. We work longer hours, so day-care replaces parenting. Increasingly, we can't afford children so birth rates are falling. Youth depression is rising sharply, a trend New Zealand shares with the globalised Western world.

Economists call this the service economy, but to me it looks more like the servant economy. With all those wealthy investors and executives, those overpaid experts living their lifestyles, they need more people to do the work that's beneath them, holding them up. Pretend to be their friend as barista, care for their children and clean their homes, offer the right wine with the right story, pay for their housing portfolio as tenants, pay for your own training and, most of all, support their excess with your low wages.

Extreme inequality allows the rich to avoid seeing the consequences of their greed and focus on their self-entitlement. The angry poor live far away and only the compliant will get close through employment. In a small town like Whangarei where I live, it's simpler. The working poor are part of our community, not segregated away in the poor suburbs. We see, hear and share in their stories. There is still lots to love about Aotearoa but if we keep getting these big policies wrong, the future we are sleep-walking towards looks grim.