Dave Stewart

I voted today. I’m not worried about anything that will change my mind. The coalition has to go.

I’m not going to focus on the negatives; opinion needs to be 300 words, not 300 pages.

So, I’m hoping to change the government, say goodbye to executive orders, lack of select committees, conflicts of interest, minor party leverage and rewarding donors.

All the things the National-led coalition enthusiasts remained silent about for the past three years.

But I’m not naive, I know that no matter who gets to form a government after November 7, the hard right will continue to undermine our democracy.

As I see it, we, the people, have a choice to make.

Are we going to let the hard right dictate the terms, or are we going to stand up and have our say?

After 2020 and the First Past the Post Labour government that election delivered, I have lost confidence in a Labour-led coalition being able to progress Labour policy without a broad movement in support.

The hard right and their machinery, will stop that. They are just so well organised.

To understand that concept, read Nicky Hager’s trilogy, particularly his latest best seller, Dirty Work.

So, how do we, the people, beat Team Billionaire?

Well, a couple of weeks ago I went to a work reunion.

It was for the 900 blokes who did their time at the Otahuhu Railway Workshops.

It was so much fun and as I was sitting there, enjoying the company of the people I spent 15 years working with 40 years ago, I was trying to understand why I felt so much joy just being there.

I was the union secretary there when we had to deal with the 1984 Labour government’s neoliberal attacks on public transport. I learned a lot.

I learned that to beat the buggers we needed to be united, that meant finding somewhere in the problems we faced that we could all agree on and fight for.

Nine hundred guys, 900 points of view. We disagreed. A lot. Sometimes our disagreements were sharp and our debates at times got heated. But we knew despite our disagreements we had to respond to the situation we were in. We needed to find ways to disagree and still work together.

And we did it.

We also found that just having a good argument wasn’t always enough, sometimes you needed to use your collective muscle.

And it worked.

But these 900 guys, we went through that together, even though we disagreed.

And 40 years later, we’re still mates.

We, the people, have lost that. We’ve lost the ability to disagree and work together. Our politics has become toxic, and nasty.

But the way forward isn’t fighting each other. The way forward is finding the way to get a properly funded public health system.

A solution to donor politics, a solution to our kids going into debt for a lifetime to get a degree that doesn’t result in a career. A lifetime of renting.

We are so being played by Team Billionaire and those of us who know it have a job to do.

We need to find the angry young folk who will lead the fightback to restore our birthright. Turn on the TV and you’ll see that globally, young people have sussed Team Billionaire and have found that the way to win is to unite and mobilise.

We are getting screwed royally by Team Billionaires’ lackies in The Taxpayers Union and we need to confront that very real threat.

I don’t know who you’re going to vote for on November 7, Team Billionaire or The Rest, but I know that after November 7 we are going to need to step up our fight with the ratbags.

We, of the generation that knew how to win, need to reach out to the angry and the left behind and find leaders to form a union of the people.

I hope that we, the people, give the National-led “Coalition of Chaos” their move-on order, but even if we do, we have a massive job to do to push back against The Taxpayer’s Union and their astroturf fronts.

The students of the world are in open conflict with the establishment as a result in the lie of neoliberalism.

More for them, means less for us.

So, vote for whoever has shmoozed you to vote for them, but regardless, the job ahead is a lot bigger than just changing the government.

We need to change the way we do politics. We need a union.

Dave Stewart