ASSIMILATION BY AGREEMENT

The assimilation of New Zealand is just about complete.  

Trekkies will remember “The Borg”; that fictional race of aliens that moved throughout the Galaxy sucking dry every planet in their path.  

Every species they came across were transformed into cybernetic organisms to become drones in a hive mind called the Collective.  
Long after the series ended, The Borg continued as a cultural archetype when describing the futility of resisting a juggernaut – which brings us to the TPPA.

New Zealand's government is highly unlikely to vote against signing this agreement since it has been the one pushing it from the start. 

The TPPA was built on the framework of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, or P4 agreement between Brunei, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand completed in 2005.  That agreement was an expansion of the P3 (Pacific Three Closer Economic Partnership) begun by Helen Clark during the 2002 APEC meeting at Los Cabos.  And P3 was simply an expansion of the 2001 trade agreement between New Zealand and Singapore. 

The road to TPPA is just the latest in a series of political scrums, rucks and mauls in which New Zealand governments have played the role of number 8.  In this age of manufactured consent and delivered constituencies, the current government is very unlikely to change sides one meter from touch. 

Negotiated in secret, this agreement, more than six thousand pages long (and that’s without the supporting documents), has implications for all New Zealanders that will resonate far beyond what might be expected in a trade deal.  And we, the people, will not be given the opportunity to vote on it.  Instead we will be given “Bread and Circuses”.

Taken from the Latin: panem et circenses, ‘bread and circuses’ is a metaphor for superficially satisfying people with diversions, in order to distract them from the big issues of their day. 

In politics, the phrase is used to describe how governments generate public approval and acceptance, not through excellent services or policies, but through diverting us with ‘bread’ and distracting us with ‘circuses’. 

So in typical ‘Bread and Circuses’ fashion the Key government is diverting us with the illusion of choice by mailing out the first in a series of referenda about our flag.   

It beggars belief that we can be so easily distracted by the symbols of our culture, while its unique substance is traded for a global identity that threatens our very existence.

On November 5^th 2015 (Guy Fawkes Day) the full text of the TPPA was finally released simultaneously in the nations of all the signatories.  It reminded me of Star Trek and the collective audio message that the fictional Borgs always sent simultaneously to every nation on each planet just before their conquest and assimilation: 

“We are the Borg.  Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.  Resistance is futile.”