NZF are toast. To be polling so low 6 months out from an election where they are facing SFO investigations and have been ruled out by National is the kiss of death.
You can see the panic has set in by Winston frantically attacking the Greens by pulling out of the Electric Car policy, blocking resolution at Ihumatao and playing for bloke votes by holding up the second stage of the new gun laws.
It’s all pretty worthless political theatre from a Party who have sung their last tune.
The mechanics of the election look like NZF falling beneath 5%, ACT hitting 3%+, National polling the highest, the Greens just holding on above the 5% threshold, Labour polling far higher than their 2017 election vote and the Māori Party winning back a seat and coat tailing in extra MPs off the Party list.
If there is a second term of this Labour led Government it will be Labour+Greens+Māori Party.
If that’s the case, progressives should be hitting them up now for real reforms:
- Raise minimum wage to $25
- Rent Freeze
- First $10 000 Tax free
- Lower voting age to 16
- Universal fully funded benefits for all tertiary students, job trainers & beneficiaries
- Feed the kids programs in all schools
- Free Public transport
- Real muscle for Unions
- Free dental services
- Mass state housing rebuild
NZF has always been the hand break for real reforms. If they are no longer in Parliament, there are no more excuses.
There’s something you’re likley to see regularly on The Daily Blog; Bomber snookering a bunch of amateurs again.
Good if they can figure it out.., you get valuable info 6 months before anyone else. Thats why you’re still reading. Next time you believe in BS news media, wait 6 months and see if it might come out. But it might not happen at all. That’s the media. So you could be waiting forever. Capish!?
Bomber would be wiser to never discount NZ First. 28 years of existence has proven that.
He likes to provoke debate…say no more
Exactly what happens every election… Winstons toothy grin and a speech saying that the media are out of touch by writing him off. HIs time is always over… but it never is. Jim Bolger put it succinctly with his utterance of “bugger the pollsters” I think ACT will do well out of this election because Seymour has been pragmatic and tenacious, just a shame he is with ACT. But they’ll do far better than the 2% seen in the picture. Goes to show how badly the left needs ‘a sleeves rolled up and get on with it party.’
First $10 000 Tax free
In Aus it is $18,200 Tax Free Threshold
The $18,200 tax-free threshold is equivalent to:
$350 a week
$700 a fortnight
$1,517 a month.
And, GST in Aus is just 10%. GST Rate ATO
As well, there is no GST on most basic foods, nor on many other essential products and services. GST Free Products and Services
GST and Food
GST Free Food
In Canada, too, most basic groceries are GST Free. GST Exempt Products
In the absence of a strong working class, multi ethnic, Parliamentary party in NZ, “Real Politik” is the reality one way or another until that changes.
A fourth term of Nashnull in 2017 would have been too much to bear for the working poor of this country. So, a “lesser evil” approach led to many tolerating, and even welcoming NZF’s part in helping form the current Govt. The provincial Growth Fund has seen a worthwhile flow of money to the provinces–but, the rub is the Govt. is not going to get a political pay back, quite the contrary, nor is NZF going to get a boost.
A Labour Green Govt. would obviously be the desirable way to go…and could have been in ’17 bar “Stevie’s Hole”–aka Nat Dirty Tricks–and the numbers will be the problem in 2020 if Labour does not try and grow the working class vote rather than continually appeasing red necks and middle class welfare recipients.
Agree Tiger Mountain,
Labour hasn’t needed the excuse of a populist like Peters to be useless. The 4th and 5th Labour govt proved that.
It is now part of the establishment that patronises its 1984 class base.
And all attempts to renounce neo-liberalism have seen weak leftists knifed and rolled by the sold out leadership.
So a split in Labour seems out of the question unless suddenly the missing million stand up and demand a program such as Bombers.
So either a new workers party rises up in the next sixth few months and Labour steals its program, or we are fucked unless we have some way of surviving climate change as if it were a long holiday.
But a decent program would have to include more than bread and butter welfare demands.
We would have to put up real answers to climate change to get to carbon zero by 2030:
* Kick out the big polluters and make them pay to restore the ecology. This means the whole fossil fuel industry has to be shut down, and the primary sector rebooted with worker/farmer/grower/fisher pacts against the big banks to sort out clean production, new sustainable crops etc.
* re-nationalise the asset stripped public assets in energy, transport, and
land-use and make them sustainable, under workers management.
* Replace the big four banks with one state bank and a state sovereign fund to invest in primary production and rebuild vital public infrastructure, energy and transport. Again managed by committees of those who work for them.
* Elect a workers government based on the big majority of those who work for a living, rather than those who live off money working for them, to bring about this electoral program.
I’m sure there is plenty more that needs to be said that explains and justifies such a program but it should be a discussion involving the missing million not the parasitic banks, landowners, corporates and bureaucrats.
I am an old commo from way back Dave, and while I support needed reforms, such as you, and Bomber, and myself have raised here–e.g. restoring power generation and supply to full public ownership etc. etc., am not of the reformist ideology.
Some people turn off if “fight for an International revolution–a fundamental shift in class power–as needed as it is, is all one says. So the day to day parliamentary level politics is where people can end up. All the marxist groups have basically collapsed into online forums and individual activists doing this or that. But all is not lost, there are always opportunities to make progress.
Post Colonial fall out, provincials sitting on stolen land, comprador capitalists, dog eat dog neo liberalism, dodgy leaderships, all have eroded working class confidence to fight but as at Ihumātao new leaders always appear and the struggle continues.
Oh fuck no! Not the fuck’n Gweens! Pleeeze! Hehehe!
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