Radio New Zealand led this morning with dramatic news – the government has “pulled off”  a “strike-breaking” deal with the PPTA. Since dawn they have been using the term “strike breaking” when they mean ‘strike-ending’. Would the brave founders of the Labour Party ever believe that their own organ – State Radio – could be exquisitely insensitive to that fundamental difference?

I guess we should welcome this evidence of ignorance. Clearly, when even the well-read Sean Plunket is unaware of the clanger, the baton of establishment influence has passed from the generation that base their politics on a recovered memory of class struggle. The reactionaries ruling under Labour colours are exclusively middle class and university opportunists. They try to disguise their hi-jack of the working class inheritance by parading union jargon as if they’d lived through the struggle. 

Perhaps Radio New Zealand will now report a lefty rapprochement with Mike Moore. Chris Trotter thinks Moore’s a scab  (traitorous strikebreaker). Radio New Zealand could think that was an Aussie term of endearment.