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Salient. Victoria University Students' Newspaper. Volume 39, Issue 10. 24 May 1976

Salient Worker Defends Editorial

Salient Worker Defends Editorial

Dear John,

I might have expected reaction to my editorial such as given by S.P. Mark in last weeks issue. Here is a perfect example my friends, of the type of person that allows a authoritarian reactionary like Muldoon to remain as leader of our country.

I agree that New Zealand has incurred a large overseas debt (which is the problem which S.P. Mark attributes to Labours irresponsibility). This is due to the dilemma of New Zealand as a capitalist/welfare state, This has been taking place for many years now not just since 1972 as my misinformed friend would have you think.

You accuse Muldoon of speaking the truth. This truth is his truth - it is the truth of the bourgeois class that he comes from. Muldoons kind can see the 'New Zealand the way they want it' slipping away, and his supposedly tough measures are just a desperate attempt to recapture the prosperity they once knew.

I repeat for your benefit, S-P. Mark, whoever you are; Muldoon is a dangerous man who uses the promise of a mandate to fix up the country to bash unions, bash the working classes down even further and then have the outright audacity to blame the country's problems on (and I quote) 'communists in unions, the Socialist Unity Party, British trade unionist importing suicidal class conflict, churchmen, the Labour Party, Hart bikies, Islanders etc., etc.

Muldoon knows every political trick in the book, my friend, from scapegoating, to his economic policy which is duplicated from the books of Milton Friedman and the boys at the University of Chicago. When Muldoon does crumble, S.P. Mark and all his kind can have a big laugh I only hope that by that time, not too much irreparable damage will have been done to New Zealand.

Yours etc. A Salient Worker.

ps. My guest editorial was a solo effort and does not necessarily reflect editorial policy.