With the SFO now investigating NZ First and its slush fund, the reality is that NZ First are very likely to be ripped to pieces by the Press Gallery as their collective eyes roll into the backs of their heads, spinning in their death roll.
The Press Gallery smell blood and this is becoming a feeding frenzy.
Look at the media coverage of Winston Vs National’s SFO troubles:
So it’s bye bye Winston.
Plunging to 3% 6 months out from the election means Jacinda needs to cut the great Winston free before he starts sinking her waka as well.
That means the real possibility of a National-ACT Government.
Unless.
Unless Labour + Greens can beat National + ACT, but seeing as the Greens have spent almost 3 years alienating the electorate, that’s a big ask.
One convulsion of the math is a Labour+Green+Māori Party.
If the Māori Party can field very strong candidates in just a couple of key Māori electorates with a tiny surge in their Party vote they could provide the extra 1 MP Labour+Greens need to be the majority.
The Māori Party position would be that Labour aren’t listening enough to their own Māori Caucus and a couple off extra voices would ensure Jacinda and Grant actually listened.
That strategic manoeuvre is already under way…
Māori Party candidate says Simon Bridges’ leadership preventing a deal
Māori Party candidate, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has indicated the National Party’s veering to the right under the current leader is partly to blame for the parties breaking ties.
Māori Party President Che Wilson has expressed his preference to work with Labour, if the party gets a foothold this election.
The party had supported National until it endured a crushing defeat in the 2017 election.
Te Tai Hauāuru candiate Ngarewa-Packer told RNZ political reporter Charlie Dreaver National has changed in recent years.
…NZ First has been constantly held up as the reason why truly progressive change didn’t occur in the last term, imagine what a Labour/Green/Māori Party could achieve?
Watch for the Tamaki Makaurau Māori Party candidate announcement next month.
If it’s ‘bye, bye Winston’, then perhaps Bridges’ announcing the nats won’t form a coalition with NZF will give the nats the numbers they need? Bit of a worry, eh?
Jacinda is weak and will not do anythink about Winston. She has not shown any backbone re her own ministers that should have been demoted. Dispite this Labour could well get back into power . If this happens I can see
House prices continue ue to rise and this would get worse under the COL you suggest. Those left in the rental market who are waiting for a change of government will sell up as thinks get tougher .Small business will suffer as wages are pushed up but growth is held back by petty regulations . There would be more land taken without compensation like on the West Coast under Minister Sage for the DOC estate shrinking the rates that small rural councils can collect. More refugees allowed in to make Jacinda look good at the UN while local poor continue to go without homes . Areas suffer with no water but dams are not allowed . Free speech will be lost.
The poor went without homes under national Trev pull the other one, national sold at least 2 thousand state homes and land devolving there responsibility. And we saw unprecedented homelessness, and begging, increased prison numbers and they (national) were gonna build a billion dollar prison to fill up with the tangata whenua. Then we had hospitals, what hospitals? run down and underfunded schools. Huge immigration to appease the business people and cook the books. You must be living on planet key or is it planet Trev.
I am sure you know as well as I do many of these houses were sold to community housing providers so the occupants were still under the social service. It was a different approach to a housing problem. I will agree there were not enough houses built but Labour have met many of the same problems with the RMA and council holdups. Many people do not want social housing in their area as it attracts some of the less desirable members of society.
If the prison had been built perhaps there would be less double bunking and more effort could have been made to turn their lives around.
Re immegration industry needs a workforce so if locals do not step up then they need to be brought in
I live on plant hopeful and a as the election results look more positive for National my hope for NZ grows
Yes this can be done we don’t need to vote for people high on the list Epsom takes advantage of MMP many giving see- more their electoral vote and the national their party vote and the media don’t highlight this as much as they should as why should one area have so much power. This is the downside of MMP.
“NZ First has been constantly held up as the reason why truly progressive change didn’t occur in the last term”
Yes they have, but it’s all bs. Labour and the Greens are tied to neoliberalism as much as the Nats are. They have no interest in changing the status quo, no matter how much they tell their supporters they are. Ardern and co promised to be “transformational”. Its a cop out to blame Winston for Ardern and Shaws inability to do the job we elected them for. Ardern especially is weak as piss and not a leaders arsehole. She would rather throw in the towel whilst sitting on the corner stool, than stand up and throw a few punches first. Wake upto reality!
AO/NZ politics is a funny little circus isn’t it? Minus the ‘funny’ of course.
Unless one thinks it funny to sit at a certain vegetarian cafe on Great North Road eating their fabulous food and sipping their beautiful coffee while watching a side walk presentation of Les Miserables performed by The Victims of Neoliberal Criminals Playhouse shuffle past in wretched dis-ease and miserably sad hopelessness. If one were a Natzo, it’d all seem hilarious.
Sun Tzu wrote something like ” Know your enemy…”
The curse that’s often referred to as ‘neoliberalism’ studied its enemy very well long before it went from an egg of an idea to a maggot. It groomed them, cajoled them, lured them with bold and grand promises. The Curse used state of the art marketing and confusing jargon to dissuade any inquiry or deep investigation by an already shoved-off-balance media softened up by bullying freaks like muldoon.
douglas, quigley, moore, prebble, richardson, shipley et al came to know their enemies weaknesses very, very well. Tender weaknesses, gentle dispositions, caring professionals, gentle people being gentlepeople on lands that can now only be described as arguably the Last True Paradise left on Earth, all things considered.
And it’s become infested by parasitical blood suckers who now occupy every office in our parliament and who delight in biting hard to spread their diseases from North Cape to The Bluff and East to West.
I can remember the warm, clover-hay fields summers of the early 1970’s and I’ve watched on aghast as the Parasitic Curse has laid waste to our beautiful AO/NZ and has seen people like you and me and those simply less lucky driven into the street to fight it out bare knuckled with their addictions, mental illnesses, general medical sicknesses and sundry other diseases of the heart, body and soul given them, through no fault of their own by The Parasitic Curse. The vile practitioners who profit off neoliberalism.
And we must keep reminding ourselves, the disease that is the parasitic neoliberal curse is pan political. It’s everywhere. It’s on every farm and in every office.
Every day we wake up to Paradise but it’s tainted with the stink of greed, ego and narcissism and it’s payback is desperation, loss and misery for everyone with a conscience, and ‘good coin’ for the soulless.
So? What’re you going to do about that then?
Vote? You’re fucking kidding, right?
There needs to be something brand spanking new.
A New Day. A new Dawn. All for one. One for all.
Shoulder to shoulder. Man/woman/Child/Adult/LGBTQI/Maori/Non-Maori/Farmer/Urban worker/Uni Students/The Creatives…
That which we have in our parliament isn’t human. The collective political element that’s in there now, at this moment, isn’t an extension of the collective ‘Us’ by ‘Us’ for ‘Us’.
Could it be something like this?
The Guardian.
Meet Mike Bloomberg?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/18/michael-bloomberg-election-spending-spree-tells-an-ugly-story-billionaire-president
P.S. While I don’t always agree with you @ MB thank you for bringing this platform to us to give us a voice.
And get a fucking AO/NZ bank account so you can nett some conscience-cash.
I mean… really…?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/businessnews/audio/2018733784/asb-posts-600-million-half-year-profit
I’ll admit I have only recently stopped hissing at the Maori party Everytime they are mentioned due to them going with National. They honestly shouldn’t have gone with national in 2014, national/act/uf would have had 62 seats and considering all the resignations, retirements etc it would have been a fun chaotic time and I believe Maori party would still be here if they didn’t in that last term.
Still their more recent leftward movement is promising and it’d be preferable to nzf as mp are a party of the left.
The greens and Maori party should both announce publicly funded election campaigns banning anonymous donations and limiting donations to $500 per person per quarter, I think the public would support this more than political parties would!
You think the public aregoing to support these parties using taxpayers money for their election campaigns? Hahahaha, good one.
A Labour & Maori party Coalition Government would be better. The Gweens need timeout.
No, the greens need to disappear along with Winnie.
Labour greens would be worse than the current combo because Winnie has stopped them going full retard with their woke shit.
Is this helpful to the body politic? Or hubris and an ambivalent feeling towards Labour and a ‘Perhaps we’ll get a better alliance with the Right” Strategic planning is necessary to progress, even looking at who is clear-sighted on one;s own side.
Just because there is a welcoming air to Parliament shown to young secondary/tertiary pupils of the right stuff, – Youth Parliament etc – it doesn’t mean that there is any great substance in it. Probably it is just seen as a fillip for the parents. Our class society probably has politician near the top of the career list, and a bit of early practice may lead to big thingslater – look at Trump.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/409870/teenage-greens-candidate-to-challenge-jacinda-ardern-s-mt-albert-electorate
Even the Nat supporters commenting here care about getting people properly housed. So what policy would any of us put forward if we were candidates in the coming election? Here’s a few ideas:
* make the new public housing department responsible for housing all people on benefits, at a fixed proportion of their benefits (unemployment, sickness, student allowances, super etc), by providing public housing and bulk renting from the private market to make up the shortfall. That stops private landlords from hoovering up any increases to benefits for themselves. Plus, the housing department will have a better chance of negotiating fair compensation rates with landlords than individual beneficiaries. Hand the income support functions of paying benefits (minus rent) over the IRD (reverse taxation), and WINZ can focus on the work brokering stuff.
* allow for modular house building, both temporary and permanent, using designs like the WikiHouse, so that people can build out or shrink their home as their needs change.
* allow land that it’s the process of being replanted in native bush or food forests to be used as tiny house communities by the people doing the replanting, with the areas they park their houses on planted last.
* set up an Innovative Housing Fund, to help groups of people doing housing in news ways, like cohousing and tiny house communities, doing things like developing effective shared governance, appropriate legal forms and recognized pathways in regulatory processes. Funded by …
* Capital Gains Tax (a no-brainer, and for the record, it was clearly NZF that blocked it because both Labour and Greens campaigned on it, and a Labour/ Greens majority would have delivered it)
This is a politics blog, yes? Then how come we don’t do more discussion of policy here? I just read this piece by Bomber and the entire comment thread, where were all the comments about what policy might actually solve problems we all agree we are concerned about? That’s how we defeat dirty politics. Policy, policy, policy!
Many of us Danyl despair at policy ever being discussed by the public again. The voting public have become like reef fish with the advent of neo-liberalism. Allergic to thinking and afraid to make any decision that is against the majority .Your ideas are great for an ongoing discussion however the methods of the first Labour government worked well and were relatively simple. A state advances corporation, state insurance and state housing department need to rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. Fuck the markets! Remove the reserve bank Act and print the money we need. Pity Labour has no spine no cojones and no vision.
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