OPINION: Two things happened this week that could signal the beginning of the end of John Key and his government.

Firstly, Finance Minister Bill English made the reckless comment at a Federated Farmers meeting that there was a cohort of Kiwis who couldn't get a licence "because they are illiterate and don't look to be employable" and added insult to injury and bad grammar by saying that the unemployed were "pretty damned hopeless" and couldn't read or write properly.

After eight years in the saddle, to have English admit that under National's watch the Government was turning out people who were illiterate and had trouble reading and writing, was an admission that the Government's education policy has failed the country.

Believing he was speaking to the party faithful (the Feds) whom he imagined might like to feel less guilty about employing immigrants over Kiwis to do poorly paid work and put up with lousy work conditions, English sounded like a 17th century absentee English landowner slinging off at his Irish tenants.

The gap between rich and poor is now so wide that the Government feels comfortable writing off the unemployed and washing their hands of any part in their increasing demise.

This cavalier marginalisation of the unemployed will not go down well with parents across every demographic who anguish over their children struggling to find employment – with or without an education, and to the thousands of workers who have been made redundant and are busting their guts to find any sort of work.

Secondly, the leader of the smug third term Government got very defensive about revelations that little old New Zealand has become 'that country', a place where rich foreigners can feel free to stash their loot to escape paying taxes back home.

John Key's own personal lawyer had marketed New Zealand as a foreign trust destination, and we are known in the world of high-powered lawyers and international financiers as a tax neutral regime.

I don't know about you but I don't feel "comfortable", to use a key Key word, about the filthy rich thinking it's perfectly OK to shirk paying their taxes while double-dipping and enjoying the benefits of tax-payer funded roads, hospitals, schools etc.

For Key to be so cavalier about the operation of foreign trusts in New Zealand and to boast that there is nothing illegal about it shows just how out of touch he is with a country who believes in an unalienable right that we are a nation who prides itself on fairness and fair play. It's part of our identity, which is why we don't like it when English picks on the unemployed, kicks our own men and women when they're down and out.

To have and to have not has become the great divide, made so by the language of our betters who now brazenly and openly have the audacity to write off a section of us. It's like Wellington City Council toying with the notion of making the homeless illegal.

The beggars are already in the gutter so why not take them down a further peg or two and make them non people. Let's strip them of any remaining pride and identity they have and put a plague on their homelessness and call them 'illegals'.

Foreign trusts operating in New Zealand might be legal now but they can't remain so by the time we get to the next election. Fair-minded Kiwis already feel that we are becoming tenants in our own country and that New Zealand is turning into a rich man's playground.

We are supposed to get on board with the new reality that tourism is our number one industry, which it has become only by default now that the white gold rush is over. If we can tap into tourism and play host to the rich, the myth is that we can all enjoy the benefits when the reality is that we will become like Bali, selling foreigners a hair plait and a massage while they lie under our sun.

Soon the only degree worth having will be one in hospitality where small children will be taught in schools how to become the perfect servant, how to wait on tables, do hospital corners, and make the perfect flat white.

No disrespect to hospitality workers – I've been a dishwasher, a kitchen hand, a barmaid and a waitress, but I'd rather down tools and join the homeless on the street than become the servant class in my own country. That's why I loathed Bali and shy away from travelling to India where the class divide is so pronounced and there is a class actually called the untouchables.

Here the untouchables are the wealthy and their friends in high places helping them out with tax avoidance. Let's kick them out.

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