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“How Government Lies, Media Complicity, and Libertarian Ideology Destroyed Public Services and Blamed Workers for Demanding Survival” - 23 October 2025

The Great Gaslighting

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

23 Oct 2025 — 17 min read

Kia ora Aotearoa,

The real issue, stated clearly so you understand without confusion: On October 23, 2025, over 100,000 public sector workers will walk off the job because a government led by millionaire Christopher Luxon has systematically starved public services, attacked worker protections, dismantled Māori legal protections, and then blamed workers for wanting to survive. RNZ’s article claiming Sir Brian Roche finds workers’ demands “a mystery” isn’t neutral reporting—it’s propaganda designed to make essential workers sound unreasonable while a government deliberately choosing poverty for nurses and teachers masquerades as fiscally responsible.

Introduction: Ko te Hui a te Pākeha Rangatira

Kia ora whānau. We live in an age of manufactured confusion where those in power tell outright lies and call it policy. On October 23, 2025, teachers, nurses, doctors, allied health workers, fire fighters, and support staff across Aotearoa will walk off the job—approximately 100,000 people rejecting underpayment and dangerous staffing levels. The response from government? Claim they don’t understand what workers want. The response from RNZ? Platform that lie without serious challenge.

This is not a mystery. The mystery is how a public broadcaster funded by whānau who rely on underpaid public sector workers can manufacture confusion about what those workers are demanding. This essay dismantles the RNZ article by tracing the ideological roots of this government, exposing Sir Brian Roche’s corporate capture, revealing how neoliberalism, libertarianism, and Christian nationalism work together to destroy public services, and showing how media complicity enables class warfare.

The heart of what’s happening is straightforward: a government pursuing libertarian ideology (through David Seymour’s ACT), neoliberal austerity (through National), and populist nationalism (through New Zealand First) has decided that essential workers should earn wages worth less than the actual cost of living they face. When workers say no, the government and its media amplifiers tell the public that workers are being unreasonable and politically motivated.

Part One: The Lie at the Centre—What Workers Actually Demanded

Let’s be precise about what Sir Brian Roche claimed was a “mystery.” According to RNZ, he said: “It’s a mystery to me...I did not have a clear understanding of what the non-negotiables were.”

This is a deliberate fabrication. Union demands were crystal clear and documented. The Post Primary Teachers Association demanded wages that kept pace with inflation and additional pastoral support for students. The government’s final offer: 2.5% now, then 2% twelve months later—totalling 2.5% cumulative, far below the current 3% annual inflation rate. Secondary teachers would face up to 24 months with no further pay rises after these two increases.

For nurses, the situation was more brutal. The government offered 2% this year and 1% next year—total 3%—plus two lump sum payments of $325, while inflation sat at 3%. A registered nurse on the highest step earning $106,739 would see their salary increase to $109,963 by June 2026—an increase of $3,224, or 3%. Meanwhile, electricity costs rose 11.3%—the highest since 1989, rates increased 12.2%, dairy and eggs rose 9.9%, and fruit and vegetables have surged, with 47.7% of New Zealanders now cutting back on fresh fruit and vegetables to survive.

Roche’s claim that demands were mysterious is therefore a lie. He negotiated with these unions. He knew their demands. Claiming confusion was a rhetorical tactic—a way to make workers sound unreasonable without actually addressing their claims.

And here’s the brutal truth Roche articulated that exposed the government’s real position: “It’s very difficult to always keep pace with inflation.” Translation: we don’t think workers deserve to have their living standards maintained. We think you should get poorer in real terms. That’s our policy, and we’re calling it “responsible.”rnz

Part Two: Who is Sir Brian Roche? Corporate Capture in Plain Sight

Understanding Roche is essential because his biography reveals the ideological capture of New Zealand’s public service. Roche is a business executive who spent 20 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) as a senior partner. He then served as CEO of New Zealand Post from 2010 to 2017. More recently, he was appointed Public Service Commissioner on November 4, 2024, a position he held previously from 2008 onwards in various forms.

This matters: Roche’s entire career has been within corporate and neoliberal frameworks. At PWC, he was trained in the logic of cost-cutting, “efficiency,” and profit maximization. He then applied that logic to New Zealand Post, overseeing a period when the service was degraded to make it “competitive” in neoliberal markets. His appointment as Public Service Commissioner—the person overseeing collective bargaining with essential workers—places a corporate ideologue in charge of deciding what workers deserve.

His position on wage bargaining reflects this perfectly. Roche sees wages as a “cost” to be managed, not as compensation for essential work that keeps people alive. When he says inflation is “only one way of measuring a deal,” he’s revealing the corporate mindset: numbers matter less than maintaining labor discipline. Workers should accept what employers offer because challenging that offer is “politically motivated.”

Part Three: The Ideological Architecture—How Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and Christian Nationalism Converge

Understanding this government requires understanding three converging ideologies, none of which are accidental:

Libertarianism and the War on Collective Rights

David Seymour’s ACT Party represents libertarian ideology taken to its logical extreme. Libertarianism, as articulated by Seymour in the select committee hearings on his Treaty Principles Bill, rejects the very concept of group rights. Seymour told the committee: “I want to be clear that my beliefs behind this bill and my belief in freedom under the law is a long-held and sincere belief. What we’ve witnessed in recent decades, as the courts and the Waitangi Tribunal have sought to define the principles of the treaty, is incompatible with freedom under the law, with a free society where each of us have equal rights.”

What does this mean translated into plain English? It means Seymour rejects the concept of collective recognition. There are only individuals in his worldview, and the state should treat everyone identically regardless of historical context, structural barriers, or group-based harm. Applied to worker rights, this becomes: unions shouldn’t exist, collective bargaining is illegitimate, and workers should negotiate individually with employers. Indeed, his government has already repealed the Fair Pay Agreements Act, which allowed unions and employer associations to bargain for minimum employment terms across entire industries.

This libertarian framework makes worker demands illegitimate by definition. You can’t make “collective” demands in libertarianism because collectives don’t exist in that ideology—only individuals do.

Neoliberalism and the Deliberate Starvation of Public Services

National’s Christopher Luxon and Finance Minister Nicola Willis represent neoliberal governance: the belief that public services are bloated, that markets are always better than government provision, and that fiscal restraint (cutting public spending) is a moral good regardless of consequences. The 2024 Budget under this government cut public spending aggressively, with particular focus on services for disadvantaged communities.

Nurses are struggling because Health New Zealand’s own figures show New Zealand’s hospitals were on average 587 nurses short every shift last year. This is not a mystery. It’s a policy choice. The government could fund safe staffing. It chooses not to. When workers strike over unsafe staffing levels combined with poverty wages, the government blames them for being “political.”

Christian Nationalism and the “One Law for All” Dog Whistle

New Zealand First’s Winston Peters represents populist nationalism that deploys anti-Māori rhetoric while serving corporate interests. Peters has repeatedly attacked co-governance, Te Ao Māori institutions, and attempts to address historical injustice using language borrowed from Christian nationalist movements: “one law for all,” opposition to “special treatment,” and claims that Māori rights represent “reverse racism.”

This rhetorical framework—which sounds secular—actually echoes Christian nationalist discourse about traditional hierarchies and individual responsibility. Don Brash’s infamous Orewa speech in 2004, which launched the modern version of this politics, criticized Treaty settlements for creating “a racially divided state”. The current government’s coalition agreements—particularly the push for the Treaty Principles Bill—directly echo Brash’s Orewa wishlist. What Brash couldn’t achieve through explicit racism in 2004, Seymour is achieving through libertarian ideology, with Peters providing the populist amplification.

The connection is crucial: this government is not just attacking workers. It’s simultaneously attacking Māori rights, worker rights, and public services. These aren’t separate issues. They’re expressions of the same ideological commitment: removing all collective protections in favor of pure market atomization (from ACT), cutting public investment (from National), and scapegoating Māori for inequality (from NZ First).

Part Four: Destroying RNZ’s False Neutrality

RNZ is not a neutral observer in this situation. The article platforms Roche’s claims about “mysteries” and workers being politically motivated without serious interrogation. This isn’t journalism—it’s stenography of power.

Consider the facts RNZ omitted or buried:

The government spent $8.9 billion servicing public debt in 2024—more than the combined budgets for Police, Corrections, Justice, Customs, and Defence. This debt accumulated because successive governments—both Labour and National—prioritized corporate tax cuts and corporate welfare over public investment.
More people blame the coalition government for New Zealand’s struggling economy than the previous Labour government, yet RNZ continues platforming government narratives as though they’re reasonable.
The government has actively run ads attacking the strike, which Labour called “unbelievable”. RNZ reported this but didn’t examine the remarkable fact that a government is using taxpayer money to attack workers demanding fair pay.

RNZ’s role in amplifying Roche without challenge serves power. When Roche claims confusion, RNZ reports it. When the government claims unions are “politically motivated,” RNZ repeats it. This is how manufactured consent works.

Part Five: The Hidden Connections—Follow the Money and Ideology

Tracing the connections reveals a coordinated system:

Luxon met with evangelical Christian leaders regularly and shows comfort with Christian right rhetoric.
David Seymour has worked with Christian right figures on specific policy issues and uses language—”freedom,” “individual responsibility,” “traditional values”—that resonates with Christian nationalist movements.
Winston Peters’ rhetoric about “race-based theory,” “co-governance,” and “special treatment” directly echoes Christian nationalist talking points about removing group-based legal protections.
The government simultaneously attacks worker protections (through repealing Fair Pay Agreements), Māori protections (through the Treaty Principles Bill), and women’s protections (through changing pay equity laws to make it harder for women to claim discrimination).

These aren’t separate policies. They’re expressions of a single ideological project: removing all collective protections so that power operates purely through markets and individual relationships where the wealthy always win.

Part Six: Exposing the Lies in Roche’s Own Words

Roche said: “It’s very difficult to always keep pace with inflation. It’s sort of ironic, if that’s how we peg everything, when inflation goes down, do you end up paying some of it back?”

This reveals the dishonesty. Inflation isn’t “coming down”—it’s 3% and rising. The government’s own projections expect it to break above 3% in September 2025. More importantly, Roche’s rhetorical question ignores the reality: when workers accept wages below inflation, they lose purchasing power. They get poorer. That’s not “ironic”—it’s deliberate wage theft.

Roche also claimed he had “absolutely no incentive to be clever or cute” in negotiations. This is laughable. His incentive is exactly what corporate executives always want: labor discipline. Keep workers desperate enough that they’ll accept whatever is offered. Don’t let them collectively demand their due. Make them grateful for scraps.

When Roche claimed the unions rejected offers “out of hand,” suggesting that they were being unreasonable, he was hiding the fact that the government’s final offer to secondary teachers was presented just 10 minutes before a meeting, with the condition it would lapse if strike action was notified. This wasn’t negotiation in good faith. It was a trap designed to make unions look unreasonable if they didn’t accept.

Part Seven: What This Means for Māori Whānau

This matters profoundly for Māori. Māori are overrepresented among public sector workers in nursing, teaching, and social services—the roles where they directly serve their whānau and hapū. Underpaying these roles systematically impoverishes Māori communities.

Simultaneously, the government attacks the legal frameworks protecting Māori from market predation. The Treaty Principles Bill would remove the legal effect of the Treaty in all law—the framework courts use to interpret every piece of legislation. This creates a pincer movement: starve Māori-serving public services while dismantling the legal protections preventing Māori from being fully exploited in markets.

Data shows that while income adequacy improved for Māori between 2018 and 2021, it has declined again since, with the percentage reporting adequate income dropping from 55.2% in 2021 to 53.9% in 2023. This isn’t coincidence. It’s policy.

Part Eight: What October 23 Means

Over 100,000 workers walked off the job saying: we will not participate in our own impoverishment. They knew they would be blamed as political agitators. They knew media would platform government lies without challenge. They did it anyway.

This represents rare clarity in a fog of manufactured confusion. Workers saw through the rhetoric and recognized that there’s no compatibility between accepting poverty wages and providing decent public services. Either the government funds services properly or it doesn’t. Either workers are paid fairly or they’re not. There’s no middle ground where “fiscal responsibility” means teachers choosing between heating and eating while the government borrows billions to service debt accumulated through corporate tax cuts.

The Call to Stay Strong

The mystery isn’t what workers want. It’s how a government can lie this brazenly and have a public broadcaster amplify those lies without serious challenge. RNZ has failed its fundamental duty: to inform the public truthfully about power and those who exercise it.

To every teacher working second jobs. To every nurse choosing between petrol and groceries. To every allied health worker arriving at workplaces they can no longer afford to live near. To every fire fighter, every support worker, every person keeping this country functioning despite deliberate underpayment: your demands are just. Your anger is righteous. The government’s choice to starve public services while attacking your right to collective bargaining is not mysterious. It’s clear. It’s deliberate. It’s wrong.

Stay strong. Your struggle is justice. The solidarity you showed on October 23—across sectors, across ethnicities, across professions—is what frightens those in power. That solidarity is what will ultimately break the spell of manufactured confusion that people like Roche and media outlets like RNZ work to maintain.

The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

Te Ao Māori has always known something liberal capitalism forgot: we survive through whānau, through collective care. October 23 reaffirmed that truth. The question now is whether that solidarity holds, grows, and ultimately transforms this system that treats essential workers as disposable.

Kia kaha. Kia mau ki ngā mea tika.

For those who found value in this analysis and wish to support the work of exposing misinformation, white supremacy, racism, and neoliberalism, the Māori Green Lantern welcomes your koha to: HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. These are tough economic times for whānau, so please only contribute if you have capacity to do so.

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