Bullshit internal polling suggesting Labour are 51% are meaningless & why CTU welfare warnings must be listened to

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The Left seem to be getting terribly excited about a  bunch of internal polls suggesting National are crashing and Labour over 51%.

Only the most blind woke activist who was screaming in February that this pandemic was less dangerous than the flu and any criticism of China was racist would take such internal polling at face value.

The invisible Greens on 8%? Come on.

Jacinda has shown remarkable grace and powerful leadership by going hard and going fast and the stats prove that…

…but the second wave of this tsunami, now it is no longer a public health nightmare, is the economic meltdown.

Any glowing respect for Jacinda for dodging tens of thousands of needless deaths will melt like frost on a hot day when NZers are released from lockdown to no jobs.

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The Plan B Death Cult Capitalists are demanding herd immunity as a blood sacrifice to the neoliberal Gods so that the economy can get back up and running. What the Plan B Death Cult Capitalists fear is that the ongoing quarantine, border shut downs and intensive test-trace-track regimes will make the free market impossible to run.

And they are right to fear that.

As TDB has been pointing out from the beginning, the economy can’t get back to where it was until a vaccine is available and until that time (2 years away), the State will need to step in and directly employ people to keep the economy from collapsing and THAT is what the Plan B Death Cult Capitalists fear the most, it’s not ‘Socialism by Stealth’ when the entire country is screaming for it.

The 35 year neoliberal experiment is under threat and people will demand a State that protects them, not leaves them to the vagaries of the free market and this terrifies the Plan B Death Cult Capitalists.

To survive the next phase of this pandemic, the Labour Government MUST consider huge ideas to get us through the economic destruction until the vaccine is available.

A Left wing conference is needed to consider the following…

Agenda: NZ economy until a vaccine is ready
Mass State Housing Rebuild – The only way to force slumlord landlords to upgrade their slums is remove the desperation of the market. 30 000 new state houses would do that and create mass jobs while upgrading the entire housing stock.

Mass mixed forest replanting – we need this for climate change and mixed tree planting would create huge new jobs.

Ministry of Works – It’s time to stop managing and actually doing, recreate the Ministry of Works and put them to work building state houses and planting trees.

Nationalise Fletchers – This will be the bones of the new Ministry of Works.

Universal Union Membership – There has NEVER been a stronger case for Universal Union Membership, it has been the unions protecting essential workers, the unions arguing for their safety, the unions who have stepped in when bosses have ignored their obligations. Until a vaccine is available ALL workers should be members of Unions to ensure their rights are protected.

UBI – For the self employed a UBI will be the difference between surviving and not. We should have one until a vaccine is available. Labour looked at this during their ‘Future of Work’ conference before they got elected.

Extension of Benefits – Stop the toxic culture in WINZ, immediate reform so that those needing welfare can gain it immediately and lift the benefits minus the draconian punitive stuff until a vaccine is found.

Community Resilience & Whanau Ora – Vast increase of budget to community groups to directly build sustainability into their communities.

Taxation –

    • Financial transaction tax
    • Wealth tax
    • Multinational tax
    • Inheritance tax
    • Capital Gains Tax

…Labour must do something meaningful on the economic front because voters who applaud Jacinda today for protecting them from death that didn’t happen will be burning her tomorrow when there are no jobs.

One thing Labour urgently need to do right now though is reform WINZ and MSD from their toxic culture.

The CTU made this point this week that the Government must reform the purposely obtuse system of welfare. The CTUs point was that it is humanitarian to reform welfare, my point to Labour is that it is potentially political suicide if they don’t.

Look, WINZ and MSD are staffed by spite masters and sadists. They are purposely built to be as difficult as possible to deal with so as to turn desperate and vulnerable people away. The enormous economic collapse we are facing will put white working and middle class people into contact with the evil empire of WINZ and MSD for the first time in their lives and that experience is going to be potentially damaging for the Government.

These aren’t poor broken brown people who will remorsefully accept the shit WINZ and MSD force them to drink, these are Ok Karen Kiwis who will erupt on social media with furious anger the appalling manner in which WINZ and MSD staff are conditioned to punish the usual beneficiaries with.

Labour MUST reform WINZ and MSD to avoid the reality of their toxic cultures being experienced by the new wave of beneficiaries about to sign up for welfare.

To celebrate internal polls taken at the hight of gratitude for deaths that didn’t occur before voters return to no jobs seems David Cormack level dreadful.

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38 COMMENTS

  1. Any glowing respect for Jacinda for dodging tens of thousands of needless deaths

    Oh Martyn. Iceland isn’t and hasn’t been in lockdown. They’ve had 8 deaths. And they expect no new cases by the end of this month.

    I suspect there will be a lot of angry people at the economic impact of what is, for the most part, a short-lived virus affecting relatively few people. So, yes, those numbers showing how popular the Government is are meaningless.

    • Population of Iceland – 364,134 with 8 deaths. Population of NZ – 4,822,233 with 9 deaths with a possibility of few if any new cases by early next month. Sweden now in trouble as a result of permissive approach. Your point is?

      • Proportionately the death rate in iceland is equivalent to 120 deaths in NZ.

        We should also apply this to the graph in this article that shows NZ looking really good. With our population we were always going to look good compared to other countries. I’d like to see a graph that shows percentage of the population that has caught the virus – although how we do that on a exponential scale is a bit beyond my mathematical abilities.

        • We had a perfect storm before we ran into the Wuhan virus. There were staffing shortages across the economy. Hospitals, buildings, roads, bridges and other critical infrastructure had all been run down. There’s a reason why the government committed to kiwi build and state housing stocks are not optimal for isolation control and precarious funding Yknow under resourced, under staffed, inadequate stocks of health resources and poorly built homes and hospitals that need funding sontheyvcan be replaced before anyone can even think of easing restrictions in a coherent way.

    • No well if only 2 recommendations of a working group is implemented then you’re not really doing what should be done, rather what you think should be done. And that’s what got us in this mess in the first place.

  2. Remember when Trump had no chance, Brexit had no chance, and Scomo was dead in the water according to polling????

    Ahh.. polling is no longer reliable!!!

    And actually incorrect polling being used to lead the left to defeat, aiding their Blairite excitement of more corporate welfare for big business, more taxes for the working and middle class, more migrants for cheaper labour, ahh no I mean diversity, and more open markets without environmental and social regulation to avoid xenophobia. Sarcasm.
    (Funny enough China has been doing storm economically with both nationalistic, protectionist and xenophobic policy, the opposite of what everyone else is doing in the west).

    The more the leftie blairite/democrat woksters open their mouths with the above, the further to their doom they go, and their absolute surprise on election night, when they get beaten after the polls never predicted it!!!

    Jacinda is the darling of the Blairite/Democrats wokester international in crowd, but previous results suggest that that approach somehow keeps getting themselves elected out, and to their disbelief a bumbling right winger in their superior place gets voted in by the lazy, expensive, racist local workers! Sarcasm.

    • I agree. Polls is not a finale telly of votes.

      After Hillary, Trump, Corbyn, Scomo, Sanders, and even Jacinda. It’s so tragic why anyone would weaken themselves by gushing over popular polling results.

      Even I did with Sanders. I knew the never Sanders camp wouldn’t allow him to be the DNC nomination but the high polling over rode my natural instincts. We can’t allow that to happen.

      It’s about jobs, the economy, and policy policy policy.

        • Unless you’re proposing a government that doesn’t have policy, the one way to make sure it’s “about people not jobs and economy” is to devise policy that *makes* it about people, and try to convince political parties to make it their policy. So Sam is right, no amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth will make a jot of different to how this country works. The *only* way to change that is to refocus public debate away from scandal and puff and onto policy, policy, policy!

      • Internal polls are meaningless.

        However, this fallacy about the polls not being accurate, NZ polls are incredibly accurate apart from greens /nzf whose vote is never represented by the polls.

        The people who say polls failed to predict Trump are wrong (Hillary always polled within the margin of error and did win about 1.9% more than Trump the polls were neck and neck)

        Brexit polls switched nearly daily

        Corbyn? In the two weeks prior to the 2017 election the polls accurately predicted more or less the hung parliament.

        Aussie polls are pointless due to preference voting.

        NZ polls are crazy accurate, due to proportional voting look at the last week of polling for the last two elections and look at the actual result, apart from the greens getting less than polling and nzf getting more.

        But agree Sanders polled ten to fifteen % higher against Trump than HRC and polls are just a potential snap shot of a particular moment and are only useful for party insiders and us political geeks

          • This is a personal attack with no information value whatsoever. I really don’t know why the TDB mods approve comments like this. They severely degrade the signal-to-noise ratio of this forum.

    • “more migrants for cheaper labour, ahh no I mean diversity”

      Nailed it saveNZ. The fashionable silks of identity politics provide such dazzling finery for the neoliberal project. And both left and right are largely in denial about this dynamic, though Chris Trotter has drawn attention to it in some of his articles.

      I don’t believe the polling either.

    • SaveNZ:
      > more migrants for cheaper labour … Funny enough China has been doing storm economically with both nationalistic, protectionist and xenophobic policy, the opposite of what everyone else is doing in the west

      This is true in some respects, but not when it comes to allowing foreigners to take up jobs in China. My wife is one of millions of foreigners who are allowed to work in China when they have skills shortages, or identify roles in growth areas of their economy that their own workforce can’t fill. NZ immigration policy sets exactly the same limits on the importation of foreign labour, albeit with the difference that those allowed to immigrate are allowed to become permanent residents here – even citizens – while it’s almost impossible for foreigners to become permanent residents in China.

      The only “cheap labour” I’m aware of being imported into Aotearoa is for fruit picking and other rural seasonal work, which is becoming logistically impossible for kiwi workers to take up (due to low pay, WINZ rules, housing shortages etc). Yes, there are some who comes here as refugees, and find it difficult to pass the necessary hurdles to work in the professions for which they trained (the archetypal surgeons driving taxis), but their numbers are far too small to make any difference to our labour market.

      The only reason to scapegoat immigrants as the cause of our low wage economy is to let the managerial class who *choose* pay those low wages – and the investor class who pocket the different – off the hook. Which makes me wonder about the motives of those who both bang on about “neoliberalism” *and* scapegoat immigrants.

  3. Hi Ross, But very few go to Iceland right?

    Martyn well said there.
    “The Plan B Death Cult Capitalists are demanding herd immunity as a blood sacrifice to the neoliberal Gods so that the economy can get back up and running. What the Plan B Death Cult Capitalists fear is that the ongoing quarantine, border shut downs and intensive test-trace-track regimes will make the free market impossible to run.”
    Bussness will always use the plan that “The price of progress is the blood of the workers”

    We need a new form of “socialistic capitalism” as both had always had some merits on there own but need a combination of both to contibute to all active forms of our society.

  4. Agree with your post Martyn, but would add one main thing–an Emergency BI (Basic Income) needs to be instituted to bypass MSD for a few months at least, or the consequences for the Govt. and society will not be pleasant.

    The CTU should be providing strong working class leadership and concrete demands for the people to rally around right now–not just meekly monitoring the disbursement of taxpayer money to employers large and small. Middle income people, and those workers previously in receipt of WFF etc. are in for a shock when they roll up to WINZ/MSD and honestly declare relationships, assets and partners still working!…and expect to get some immediate assistance…

    • Tiger Mountain:
      > The CTU should be providing strong working class leadership

      We certainly need strong working class leadership, but that has to come from within the class itself. Despite its history, the CTU is no longer capable of this, because its dominant affiliates are middle class professional associations like the PSA, NZEI, PPTA, TEU, ASMS, EMAE, NZPFA, and so on ( https://stopwagetheft.org.nz/ctu-affiliates/ ). You might as well looks to Greenpeace, Forest and Bird, or the NZ Open Source Society, for working class leadership, or Federated Farmers for that matter (farmers work, right?).

      If working class leadership is going to come from any of our remaining unions, it will be those who represent the precariat, like Unite, MUNZ, Tramways, and the Posties. Even Actor’s Equity and the Writer’s Guild, whose more well known members may be middle class and comfortable, but most of its members struggle to make a living year around and their precarious incomes will be hit especially hard by the lockdown.

  5. Properly taxing big multi nationals should help but given the fact this crowd eagerly signed up to the CP-TPP, having made sounds pre election they opposed it, would suggest that possibility is unlikely. Hammering the middle classes with more tax, will simply see them collapse and then the fox is really in the hen house, as they hold society including govt together, always have.

    Whats left is a failed state and as history has shown that never ends well for anyone, at least in the short term. What is needed is Socialism, proper govt investment in restoration and growth. Its worked in the past and should work again. Neo liberalism has folded like a house of cards in this pandemic and continuing down that path will only lead to further ruin.

    So Labour and co have a decision to make. If they want to be re-elected they need to step up, be leaders and step away from neo liberalism. Failing that I see little hope for NZ. Its not economically as robust as Australia and what may happen if they fail is middle class people with marketable skills will simply move off shore.Who can blame them? No one’s going to hang around for their own economic funeral.

  6. We all saw the disastrous Kiwibuild project, the disastrous Tax reform Committee’s that just wasted taxpayer dollars…
    Labour need to remember that the public don’t have as shorter memories as they think we do. National were useless….but unfortunately Labour have built on top of that incompetence..
    Examples: We have more people living motels than ever, we have higher house prices & basic costs of living than ever, (A virus may see the end to that but don’t hold ya breath). We have rents higher than ever……on & on it goes…
    Now come September..( if they don’t move the election date)….if things are ‘worst than ever’……then many will feel why not give someone else a go….People who like business and realise business is critical to our economy & paying back those who the government has borrowed QE from!

    • …” People who like business and realise business is critical to our economy & paying back those who the government has borrowed QE from!”…

      Well I’m sure there are those that like car racing or fireworks events but they cant just go out en masse and do that as well… and I fear those who ‘like ‘ business will have to adjust somewhat as well.. because… consider this dead parrot as the economy post corona virus… and that the customer will need to have his ‘parrot’ replaced…

      Monty Python Dead Parrot
      https://youtu.be/vZw35VUBdzo?t=7

    • Ross, you are cherry-picking. No government gets 100% of its policy goals achieved, especially less than 3 years after being elected.

      > National were useless

      They were *worse* than useless. Their mismanagement of the GFC and the post-GFC recovery left us with a growing housing crisis and working families raising their children our of the back of a car. If Snapper Key had remained PM, their management of this pandemic would most likely have followed the Trump model (it’s not real, and if it is it’s not serious, and if it is is wasn’t my fault, and if it was you deserved it) and it would have been beyond disastrous. Hundreds or thousands of kiwis would most likely have died to protect “the economy” (ie private profits), followed by months spent in level 4 lockdown to try and get community transmission under control.

      I agree that Labour’s first term of government has been underwhelming. But you have to remember their post-election goals were to form a government with the Greens, or wait out a stumbling fourth term National government and try again this year. NZ First has hobbled most of their attempts to be truly transformative, like capital gains tax to redirect investment from housing speculation to the small businesses that create most of the jobs in NZ. But already they’ve made some small but meaningful changes – like computers at WINZ no longer getting to cut off people’s benefits without human oversight – and smart injections of public funding in the regions that will pay huge dividends in the longer term, like the Clean Energy Centre in Taranaki:
      https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government-invests-clean-energy-centre-help-power-new-zealand%E2%80%99s-economy

      I truly believe that most kiwis are smart enough to appreciate all this and vote accordingly, especially if the left restrain ourselves from mistaking political gossip for political news, and focus on envisiong and explaining transformational policy. Policy, policy, policy!

  7. Am interested to know how you would go about nationalising Fletchers. Do you simply turn up at the head office and put a commissionaire in there? And do you then simply go to their yards and place MOW stickers on their plant and equipment? Plant and Equipment has a substantial residual value (go past just one yard in say Drury and see the volume of cranes, pumps, dozers and diggers). What compensation (if any) will be offered to procure this plant and equipment.

    One needs to consider what vibes it sends through to the rest of the community if the state can simply turn up and nationalise private property. After all if the state can nationalise Fletcher’s what else will they nationalise; your family home? It is a huge lot of ammunition to present to an opposition party in parliament (if the government ever reassembles the peoples parliament).

    Will the old Fletcher’s staff be willing to work for the new MOW? Can they be forced to or can they choose to go on the dole?

    I think it is to simple to say nationalise Fletchers without a plan on how to do this.

    • I don’t know how Grant Robertson or Paul Goldsmith word do it, and yes I would expect Goldsmith would do the right things in the same situation. I don’t even know what legislation they’d use so let’s just assume Fletchers agrees to $4 per share buy out. Now dissolve the board and head office and promote one of the engineers as a commissioner because at this point there isn’t a big profit motive. The danger comes from corruption, kickbacks and bribes so it has to be an engineering challenge with a remit of maximising public space.

      If the economy is destroyed, less people will have money to buy stuff and businesses stop trading. Always trust a giant corporate company to make as much money as it can.

  8. NZ along with practically every other country in the world has grossly overreacted to this virus and once this comes to light, the respective Governments will be punished at the polls as many good people end up unemployed.
    The pathetic part of NZ’s situation is that Soimon pressured Adern into pulling the trigger and is not pressuring her into getting us out of lockdown earlier.
    Is he a hypocritical prick? Yes, of course he is – he is a politician after all.

  9. Just took a look at the greens offical party list who the fuck puts Julian Anne Genter and Chloe at 6 and 7. No one in there right mind would place them any lower that 4 and 5. First of all the Greens have to stay above 5% for all these bullshit calculations to work. These quoters are total wank.

      • Oh, well in that case bump Chloe up to 5th at least. What’s the 5% threshold equal like 6 MPs. I don’t think any one would put Chloe and Julian above 6th. And if they want a couple new people then they’ll have to bump Chloe and Julian down to 3rd and 4th and slot a couple new people in at 5 and 6. Or they can rely on that stupid fucken quoter system that the opposition can rig by stacking there list full of old white guys, that forces the greens quoter system to equalise there list across the whole 120 seat parliament. Anyway, you’ve got to have the force.

  10. So how does that if it was accurate translate into electorate seats? Arrrh it doesnt.Nats still 41 v Labours 29+7 Maori’s makes? A popular PM and thats it.

    • Special votes cast 2017 442,000 and 61,000 were overseas votes. The main beneficiary was the gweens. Labour targeting those overseas vote will definitely kill off the Gweens but still will come up short.

      • So, if this is Labour been aspirational in trying to ‘will’ themselves into going it alone and in the process taking out the Gweens and NZF in the process and most likely fail because of the high probability of failure. In the end, will they then be in a position to govern, partner up with ‘National!’ Allah forbid!!

        They both would ay, because theyre both that desperate?

  11. You are right about the people who will be going to WINZ. My time on a benefit left me with no respect for the staff who were bullies except for a couple and I can understand how beaten down the average person would be who was not articulate and white. I had one interview me with booze on his breath from a liquid lunch . When I said I was going to report him he started crying .There will be people who were in control of aircraft or large staff used to giving orders and being respected. They will be angry and frustrated and will stand up to these bullies in away they will not be used too.

  12. Ardern has done a good job controlling the virus but with a full lockdown. Australia is in virtually the same position with a lot of the economy still operating. Mining/Contruction etc. Questions will be asked, has Ardern gone too far or should she have followed Australia’s stage 3 restrictions.

  13. I do believe the polls right here right now.
    People are mostly emotive not rational creatures and not particularly politically aware – currently we are getting payed to mostly be unemployed, catch up on jobs at home spend some time with the kids, and “leading the world” with what we are doing who isn’t chuffed?

    And Jacinda on telly every day soothing us with what good citizens we are while opening the snitch line to dob your neighbours and feel the glow righteousness!
    More!
    And Siouxie the virologist from the spinoff who amazingly sounds just like a government broadcast, and she loves Jacinda too!
    More!

    Of course this honeymoon period of lockdown is destined to be short, as frustration and the reality of economic carnage lost jobs and businesses sinks in.
    And then we have to pay back our money they are loaning to “give” us.

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