15 weeks until 2023 Election: Greens, ACT & Maori Party ones to watch

The next election is 15 weeks away on Saturday, 14 October 2023.

So far, National and ACT have put together the most radical right wing policy platform since Rogernomics and Ruthanasia by promising an uncosted overcrowded prison system ripe for riot, a referendum on the Treaty that will force Māori to accept a new version of the Treaty (which will spark a race war), the right to throw tenants onto the streets while slashing tens of thousands of jobs in the public service all so National can tell you how many hip operations have been completed in 6 months.

Seems like a pretty shitty trade off.

Being able to definitively record every hip operation while the rest of the entire State burns to the fucking ground doesn’t seem like much of a policy win to me.

Oh and Chris Luxon will send you a receipt of information that is publicly available and apparently generated by Chatbot AI which will cost fuckloads for no point.

I’m not even making that last bit up.

While the Right bark endlessly racist shit in a never ending orchestra of rank bigotry and blame games that only manufacture vengeance as social policy, the Left offer glimpses of a different New Zealand that are worth fighting for.

The Greens  have finally dumped the woke alienating identity politics bullshit and are FINALLY talking about a wealth tax, building more homes and protecting renters from the obscene greed of the fucking Landlords! This is the solidarity inducing focus that has been utterly missing from the Greens for 3 years and is the reason they are barely getting what they gained in the last election. If they can just focus on the Broadchurch issues rather than alienating woke wank, they might be able to hold their ground.

Might. It’s the Greens after all and hapless self induced mutilations seems to be their kink these days.

The Māori Party are generating an online world of connection and shared political strategies that is identity building and working for them, but they will lose everything if the price for their Supply and Confidence isn’t Broadchurch enough. There is a sweet spot that the Maori Party could gain that would turn the entire result on its head. I call it the MMP G spot. If the Maori Party win 4 electorates and get 3.9% Party vote they would generate an overhang that would make it impossible for National and ACT to form a majority.

Oh the lols on election night that would create.

Meanwhile Chippy is wading through errant MPs and forced political errors that must be having him rolling his eyes daily and screaming, ‘Are you fucking kidding me’!!!!

Kiri Allan yelling at Wellington Bureaucrats made me smile however and promised hope for the future.

The NZ Herald Poll of Polls is saying a Labour led minority Government with supply and confidence from Māori Party, which is coincidentally what The Daily Blog has been saying for like a year now.

Folks, you can read it here first our wait for 12 months of conclusive hard data. I know, go with the second option.

Comrades we are 15 weeks out from the 2023 election, here is the current Election Battlefield 2023 as TDB sees it.

 

LABOUR: 35% on election night

What is frightening Right Wing Pundits is why and how Labour’s vote is defying political gravity. They gnash their teeth and cry to white blonde blue eyed Jesus, ‘Why proper Jesus, why is Labour still so high??? W-H-Y”, and then they go complain about poor children in their neighbourhood to feel good again.

The reason why Labour’s vote is so high, despite hourly denouncements on ZB and endless columns in the NZ Herald, is that the educated part of NZ view a National/ACT Government as a recipient for meltdown. This middle don’t give a fuck how many times Michael Wood was told to sell his shares and they don’t care that Kiri Allan shouted at Wellington Bureaucrats, they are staunchly voting Labour because the more unhinged the Right become with uncosted vengeance fantasies as social policy, the more determined they are to vote Labour.

Chippy will surprise everyone by being another level during the debates and I think he will beat the bejesus out of Luxon in a way that once seen can’t be unseen.

Chippy is the mustard and you fail to appreciate that at your own peril.

Labour had become bogged down in believing bureaucratic changes in the  background was a means of delivering outcomes rather than actually raising taxes and paying for more social infrastructure!

Now Chippy has burnt off all the unpopular woke policy, he has to actually deliver on free public transport, free dental, free breakfasts and lunches in schools and more tax from the rich.

The rebuild from the cyclone demands more than the usual, A Ministry of Green Works must be back on the agenda!

AAAP reports 120 000 kids are still living in homes who experience material hardship and CPAG once again point out that while they stats are damning, the truth is actually far worse…

“The trouble is, of the almost 9,000 households surveyed in this data, there was no inclusion of our most vulnerable families. Families living in motels and other emergency accommodation, as well as cars and other forms of homelessness were not included,” Prof Emeritus Asher said.

“The real picture is likely to be a lot more grim as anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers of families in these dire situations is on the increase.”

“We also know poverty is a driver of preventable hospitalisations, which is another reason to urgently address child poverty, for the sake of our overburdened health system.”

…the problem is that corporate consultants get in the ear of Governments and convince them to target welfare rather than provide left wing universalism because to fund left wing universalism you need to tax the rich.

Chris Trotter recently implored Grant consider the Financial Transaction Tax, you can’t build more capacity if we don’t have extra revenue streams to fund that capacity.

If all Chippy is offering is ‘let them eat sausage rolls’, how different is that from National’s ‘Let them eat cake’?

GET. BACK. IN. THE. GAME!

 

NATIONAL: 33% on election night, 30% if these two keep wearing hats

Embarrassingly couldn’t fill the Michael Fowler Center at the Election Year Conference…

…where Chris Luxon launched a whole range of kneejerk law and order policies that were ill thought out and stupid. I wrote at the time that within a week National would have walked back all this nonsense once journalists started asking actual questions of the policy to strip Judges of discretion, impose harsher sentences and somehow force prisoners on remand to complete rehabilitation programs.

Hilariously Chris was walking things back within 24 hours!

National claim the soft-on-crime-cuddle-a-crim Labour Party are fecklessly letting out 4000 prisoners while the crime rate soars. What they don’t understand is Labour lowered the prison population using National Party Prison policy that allowed for non violent offenders to apply for home detention while in prison. The only difference between National’s use of their policy and Labour’s is that Labour provided prisoners with help filling out the forms because most prisoners are illiterate.

If National don’t understand the current prison policy, how can they provide solutions?

National claimed they would get prisoners on remand to complete rehabilitation programs, but you can’t use any rehabilitation programs unless you accept your guilt. Why would prisoners on remand waiting trial admit guilt?

Do National actually know what they are talking about?

We had this surreal situation over the weekend where Journalists bombarded National for costing of this mass incarceration policy and they had no numbers. Asked what the cost of a NZer in prison per annum was, Paul Goldsmith and Chris Luxon said “$100,000,” when the actual cost is $193 000″.

How can a Party push extreme uncosted policy like this and pretend to be a Government in waiting?

My fear is that ACT and National can’t actually tell the difference between the Mongrel Mob, Headhunters, Hells Angels, Black Power or Comancheros and that’s an enormous problem because the gangs who flooded Opotiki to mourn the murder of their President and who freaked middle NZ out so much last week, are not the same as the sophisticated Cartel linked gangs who are making enormous profit from NZs meth trade.

How will banning gang patches prevent the 501 syndicates from importing south american cartel meth?

We ask Judges to be independent and use mercy in their decision making, National wants to rob Judges of that discretion and force them to impose heavy sentences even if there are mitigating circumstances.

Do National want justice or a lynch mob?

Those derided ‘cultural reports’ give Judges insight into the criminal to see ion there is anything redeemable here rather than the simply brutality off imprisonment!

WE. WANT. JUDGES. TO. HAVE. THIS. INSIGHT!!!!!!!

National don’t actually understand the Prison Empire they built when last in power, their solutions to remove discretion from Judges, impose harsher sentences while pretending rehabilitation programs (that can never and will never work in remand) are the silver bullets.

This isn’t a law and order debate, this is a right wing wet dream fantasy that has little basis in reality. None of the ‘solutions’ National are offering will do the things they say they are attempting to solve!

If anything, it will cause an explosion in the prison population which will ultimately lead to a full blown prison riot as the underfunded, over crowded, violent jail population (minus any of the joke rehabilitation National are promising) will event horizon into a black hole of misery and suffering!!!

So why is our crime rate soaring?

Well, we have to acknowledge the unprecedented importation of 501s bringing a culture of criminal violence far in excess of what was generated by our domestic gangs. Labour can’t be blamed for that!

We also have to acknowledge that dairy crime was far higher in 2016 when National were last in power than they are now!

What is generating the majority of the current crime wave however is the same thing that is generating crime waves throughout the post-covid Western World.

The same is happening in Australia,  UK, Canada and America.

Post covid societal and economic stresses causing crime waves at the same time there is 12.1% food inflation and a cost of living crisis while surviving the ongoing economic, cultural and social impacts of climate crisis storms and geopolitical shockwaves is as predictable as National having to walk something back 24 hours after Luxon says it!

Of course crime is exploding everywhere because the covid sacrifice was felt unevenly across our unequal society, pretending building more uncosted fucking prisons is a solution to all of that is sophistry at its most intellectually bankrupt.

People might be pissed off at Labour post Covid, but allowing Darth Vader and his Paramilitary Stormtroopers in to run the day care centre isn’t really the solution eh?

The Right are blind to how extreme their policy direction is and that’s why they don’t understand why Labour’s vote is holding up.

John Key was beating Labour by double digits 180 days out from his elections, Luxon has never managed that ever.

 

ACT: 17% + 2 Electorates 

Line up Labour policy to Green policy and it’s 90% the same.

Labour and National vote together 70% of the time.

National and ACT policy are a billion light years away from each other.

ACT are no longer a snide political protest gesture from those whose rage leaves them impotent any longer they are a bonafide Right Wing Values Party and its double digit polling shows an electorate incandescent with vengeance and ready to lay a terrible reckoning upon us with a policy platform that is to the right of Caligula.

ACT won political ammunition from the woke cancel culture tactics of middle class identity activists who idiotically attempted to strangle free speech.

In doing so to calm the hysteria of the snowflake triggered, the woke signed the Left up to a culture war there was no fucking way we could win because free speech is sacrosanct you millennial clowns and the political backlash your attempts to censor it for identity dogma is as alienating as a cup of cold sick.

Because social media is so ubiquitous in our lives, all our timelines are a never ending algorithmically driven addiction of outrage olympics all holding their wounds up as legitimacy in a cacophony of intersectionist competition for social hierarchy.

ACT have benefited from this and because National stand for nothing more than Corporate Farmers, Bankers, Chinese Business interests, Corporate Farmers, Socially Conservative Christians, property speculators and corporate farmers, the rest of the right wing have walked away from the Grand old Tent that Don Brash and John Key held in place, and are now an existential threat to National in the immediate term, the medium term and the long term.

In fact, if National doesn’t do something very shortly, they will be dead in a decade.

Part of this is a demographic issue, there are more Gen Xers and Millennials than Boomers as a numerical voting block and National voters are getting older and older.

Part of this is a gentrification of Auckland suburbs away from Grumpy Christianity.

Part of it is rural farmers feeling ripped off by the big boys in the industry, part of it is their weird fetish with guns, part of it is the fury many Aucklanders feel at being sacrificed for the good of the country during the last lockdown.

Part of this is the culture wars the woke activists have chained us to.

Part of this is a leader like David Seymour who is magnificent on the campaign trail, so much so, he will eclipse Luxon.

A lot of it is males who voted Labour in 2020, but have been angered by the Green Party war on cis white males and have literally no idea how extreme ACT Party policy actually is.

We will know if ACT really are flexing in Tamaki where Brooke has every chance of beating local God Botherer and National Party stooge whatshisface. Internals suggest they are neck and neck in the electorate which should wake National out of their complacency.

This all adds up to an existential threat to National.

Losing the white working poor farming vote and the suburban soccer dad is an incredible double blow for National.

Internal polling suggests 1 in 5 rural voters are considering voting ACT and one in 3 Auckland voters are considering voting ACT.

Those are numbers that rob National of authority and leaves it a hollowed out movement.

If voters on the Right sense Luxon can’t do it, there will be a late protest surge to ACT that will swell them beyond 15%, cannibalising enough National vote to rob them of a possible majority.

If National fail, Luxon will be removed and the internal fight over what National is will begin again, while ACT will start operating as the de facto opposition, (which they pretty much  do already).

While National staggers to define itself in any post election loss, ACT will ruthlessly exploit their weakness and look to actually over take the National vote in 2026, which will strip National out of the main cities and leave them a South Island Party pretending to be from Masterton.

By 2029 National would be relegated to the highlands of the South Island where the cream rises and become a weaponised Grey Power without the teeth.

The Chinese Business Interests that backed National will be disappointed with their return on investment while the Billionaire class will pile into ACT’s class war agenda with the gleeful abandon of billionaires in submarines.

Even if National and ACT win a majority and form a Government, Seymour is so much smarter than Luxon, he will get all of ACTs agenda through, and then some!

In power ACT would take even more energy off National.

National’s only counter strike that will preserve the status quo and at least buy some time to consider their next move is to give Shane Jones an Epsom cup of tea in Northland.

Dilute ACT by including a shot of Winston.

ACT are calling National out and are clear they intend to negotiate hard with Luxon because they are believers.

Fanatics to be more precise.

Luxon flips and flops on a good day. The pressure of a campaign is a unique moment and while there are a thousand reasons to hate Labour, they are still competitive and that’s astounding.

Luxon is still so green as an MP he hasn’t really ever had a figurative punch in the face and I think Chippy will unleash during the debates and Luxon will get his punch in the face live on TV and that once seen can’t be unseen. Luxon has a political glass jaw and he’ll drop like a sack of shit once Chippy connects in the first minutes of the debate.

Once right wing voters see that, they will cause a late last minute surge towards ACT.

So.

If National and ACT get in, ACT dominate Luxon and take votes off National and over take them in 2026.

If National and ACT don’t get in, ACT attack National openly and over take them in 2026.

Shane Jones might need a cuppa soon.

Nice to see someone woke up the Unions…

ACT’s contractor plan finds favour with BusinessNZ, but unions say it will worsen inequality 

…yes ACT are going to be terrible. Thanks for joining us.

 

GREENS: 8% (+ 2 electorates) on election night

Oh thank Christ the madness has ended!

The Greens have finally woken up to the fact that their bullshit alienating woke nonsense and white cis male culture war was not a vote winner.

Wealth Tax, Building more housing, Renters Rights – THESE are the issues that create Broadchurch solidarity rather than pure temple cults.

Will any of these things work, oh Fuck no, and their ability to implement any of it is a joke, but they are trying! And at this late stage of the game, it’s all we’ve got.

The Greens just have to hold their shit together and not alienate voters with their weird woke cult garbage.

They will get cut out of anything meaningful in the Labour led negotiations with the Maori Party because they’ve been insufferable for 3 years and deserve a slap!

Wake the fuck up and make Chloe the leader after the election for Christ’s sakes you morons.

Will win Auckland Central, Wellington Central and might be competitive in Rongotai.

They won’t win Ōhāriu.

 

Māori Party – 3.9% + 4 electorates

The more feral the anti-Māori rhetoric gets, the more votes the Māori Party gain. They have a real shot at 4 electorates this year and their staunch policy like GST off food and military neutrality have a lot that left wing Pakeha will party vote for. They have a real chance of being the Kingmaker can could generate an MMP overhang making out more difficult for ACT and National to get a majority. Watch the way JT and David Seymour squared off on The Working Group last week to see there is no love lost between the two.

Part of this surge in support is demographics, Māori are a decade younger than Pakeha, part of it is the reconnection with civics the vaccination drive provided and part is the grotesque racism spewed out over co-governance and 3 Waters.

Māori represent the highest proportion of non voters, and the race baiting rhetoric is dragging those non voters over to being engaged, something we haven’t seen in the past.

If the Maori Party gain 4 electorates and sub 4% party vote they generate an MMP overhang which would lift the majority needed to become Government.

If the Māori Party can hold up their Party vote they will become the King maker and the relationship between Māori Party President JT and Labour Māori Caucus leader Willie Jackson will become the most important one politically.

 

NZF 3% + Northland electorate

Winston’s State of the Nation was Aotearoa New Zealand (without the Aotearoa).

It was a good speech to the Party faithful in Howick, well attended. He can still draw a crowd.

He was funny, he was mischievous, he ranted against Māori elites, demanded an end to Government Departments using Māori names and made some jokes about identity.

Classic Winnie.

Problem was that it just seems very tired now.

If you really hate Māori aspiration, you are voting ACT because you know David Seymour means it when he says he will disband Māori Government Agencies.

Winston is selling a watered down Redneck brew. Is that enough in such polarised times with a far larger youth voting demographic?

I’m not sure to be honest.

What we actually needed from Winston was a back to basic focus on infrastructure in the provinces and a demand to rebuild using some big new ideas.

He should have been arguing for a new Ministry of Works.

He should have been arguing for a stronger foreign policy to counter Chinese and American influence.

He should have been talking about a Bank tax and making sure NZ Corporations who are benefiting are returning more back into the community.

We needed the fearless Winston who championed classic Think Big Muldoonism.

Instead we get Government Departments not using Māori names and a demand that we reclassify gangs as domestic terrorists so we can send the army in???

If your social policy idea is the suspension of human rights and effective implementation of martial law, you need a cup of tea and a lie down.

Thankfully the fear of the Left having actual power has terrified the big donors of the right and they are sinking cash into Shane Jones tilt in Northland because if he wins, NZ First sub 5% vote comes with him.

National are also waking up to the threat of ACT and might need a counter weight to David Seymour with a shot of Winston.

Watch for a Chris Luxon and Shane Jones cup of tea in Northland.

 

TOP – Ilam + list Coat tail

The Opportunities Party leader Raf Manji has a chance of winning Ilam now Gerry Brownlee has stood down. Sarah Pallett won the seat in 2020 during Labour’s red wave, but Manji was competitive against Gerry back in 2017. If Manji can steal the seat off Pallett and against a weak National newbie, TOP could enter Parliament AND bring in 2 MPs off the Party list.

Watch for the influence of the University vote.

TOP are talking about Housing and the political tax impasses that prevent Housing from being built, if they can convince the public that he can win in Ilam, then a vote for TOP isn’t wasted. If Labour were smart they would consider talking to TOP and offering them an Epsom deal in Ilam.

 

Sub 5% Feral Antivax God Squad vote – NOTHING!

The good news is that Brian’s current umbrella of Sue Grey’s antivaxxers and his Destiny Church QGod squad aren’t nearly enough to get over 5%. However if they added Matt King’s vanity project and the anti abortion New Conservatives, that cavalcade of political circus freaks could get over 5%.

Thankfully they are all toxic narcissists who couldn’t work together if their lives depended upon it, half of Matt King’s vanity project have quit, Leighton Barker lives so far up his own arse he’s named his political party after himself, and Antivax Grifter Liz Gunn is begging for a million bucks to start her own party up as well.

It’s just so glorious.

The rage of the impotent.

Keep fighting amongst yourselves feral Qanon dirt people.

 

 

SPECIALS:

I think you will have so many people voting who don’t normally vote that the specials will be huge on the day, this, along with the unpredictable overseas vote this election could throw any election night result out the window when the specials and overseas votes are counted.

 

OVERSEAS VOTE:

The MIQ over subscription by tens of thousands hints at the incandescent rage many of our diaspora felt trying to get back into their legal home country during the Covid lockout.

There is no way their torture won’t have political ramifications.

Last election Greens did poorly in their usually high overseas support vote because Ardern’s global stardom eclipsed the Greens, this election however the frustration is directly at the Left so it’s difficult to know where it might go now.

My guess is that our diaspora are far more motivated to vote in 2023 than we have ever considered and their anger at being locked out will be sharp.

DEMOGRAPHICS & HIGHER PARTICIPATION RATE:

This will be the first election in NZ history where Millennials and Gen Xers are a larger numerical voting block than Boomers, because lockdown impacted so many, I think people who normally sit voting out will have a real passion to make their voice heard, even if that voice is an anguished scream of fear and nonsense.

POLITICAL POLARISATION:

Because the Political spectrum is so hung and the polarisation so extreme, nothing is being collectively done to solve the myriad of problems we are facing post-Covid from crime, to cost of living crisis, to climate change, to inequality and poverty. No big ideas and no real solutions to the challenges we are collectively facing as New Zealanders.

Our focus is on hating the person who offended us on social media. I just don’t think we comprehend what a distortion of reality Social Media generates and the new subjective rage it manufactures.

We will end up with a result both sides will refuse to accept if they lose.

 

PREDICTION: 

 

 

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