Do you want more family distress and even deeper child poverty? Vote ACT. Do you want the economy to contract drastically, foodbanks to be swamped with demand for food, hospitals unable to cope with third world diseases of cold and damp houses? Vote ACT.
Do you believe that all people need is an incentive to work and if taxes are cut jobs will magically appear? Vote ACT.
Treasure modelling shows that Child poverty is on the rise in the COVID-19 crisis. But instead of increased spending on welfare ACT would cut incomes of those with children severely. That’s right, ACT propose deeply contractionary policies at the bottom of the worse recession since the Great Depression.
Among a raft of austerity measures that surely no sane economist would endorse ACT would.
Abolish Winter Energy Payment $505 m
Abolish BestStart $477m
Abolish $25 benefit increase $ 672m
Abolish WFF changes $510m
Abolish benefits changes in Families package $220m. ACT would take $2.4 billion from families living on income already beneath the breadline. Overall cuts to government spending exceed $7 billion.
The bogey of debt one day crippling our children appears to justify the most severe cuts to families already drowning today.
While taxes will be cut, government spending will be cut far further so that the budget is balanced or in surplus and debt repaid. Ruth Richardson tried this in 1991 and the deficit doubled because the economy shrank so much.
The policies are so ill conceived it is perhaps a bad idea to give them any air-time. But voters who are disillusioned with National appear to be flocking to ACT. They need to take a hard look at their disastrously contractionary recipes for poverty that are exactly the opposite of what is needed.
What’s a shattered economy and a Ruth Richardson attack on the most vulnerable?
When the gun lovers are snuggled up in bed with their weapons of choice all will be well with the world.
People scoffed at Trump harnessing the ignorance of yokels with his various hate and division mantras. In essence that’s Seymour and the gun brigade.
Exactly.
To them all that matters is their multi-round holdings guns nothing else matters.
Something always flows into a vacuum. Into the expanding vacuum the National party has created, something like ACT, or the Tamaki party, or the mutant party of JLRoss and Billy TK – or something even more bizarre concocted from them all, could be slouching towards us to be born again.
I’m on the fence of voting for ACT or Labour. Both have a lot of recommend them (there is a lot of cherry picking here, which is of course fair enough for a left-wing blog site). I wasn’t going to vote at all, but the two referendum questions are getting me out there anyway so might as well.
Its been the same throughout history. The rich take all the wealth for themselves which means that the poor (Who are pretty much the people who produce everything that the society needs) can’t afford to reproduce and thus we end up with not enough people as there aren’t enough births and people are leaving and/or simply dying from malnutrition and other diseases of poverty.
The end result is the total collapse of society.
Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?
We need to challenge the myth that the rich are specially-talented wealth creators
Are those puppets in that image? They don’t look real, but very cleverly made.
ACT is looking at a ‘shitted’ economy now and was before Covid-19, surely they don’t want to shatter it and leave a very untidy stinking pile?
But hey that’s ACT – the meaning behind the acronym is not well-based, and when it comes to wells they always poison them.
The only liberal-type thing they have done that I concur with is enabling people who are already dying to go earlier before the unconscious finally gives up the ghost, and save themselves and their loved ones the experience of much physical and mental pain.
Voting ACT so that you can have your voice heard on firearm laws and ignoring the devastation that will be wrought by giving ACT any support whatsoever when your a liberal at heart but want to send a message is selfishness in the extreme.
Shooting is a sport, a hobby, a past time, an obsession even, but to elevate it to the importance you are particularly with all the pressing issues facing us is ridiculous.
Jack agree- this is not about gun law or referenda on end of life choice it is about asking people to look carefully at the impact of the economic policies they espouse before entrusting them with a vote.
We never thought we would get the bad policies we got thirty years ago under Ruth
It’s about whatever people feel important not what the battery thinkers of the left decide.
And Labour run the same economic system as ACT, they brought it in of course. The Greens signed off water bottling to China in Chch. But ACT baaad.
And ACT are not likely to make government, why is the left so scared of what they have created here? At least they don’t lie about what they stand for.
“At least they don’t lie about what they stand for.”
The battery thinking right wing think ACT and National don’t lie, try again, actually, try thinking full stop!
If the election was held today there is a high chance I’d vote Labour – may the baby Jesus help me!
Seymour was in Queenstown the other day and made a comment that as far as he is concerned the home owners there should be able to sell their properties to whomever they want to – including the Chinese – it was reported in the Otago Daily Times facebook page and hasn’t gone down well with the readers and has cost him votes
Lets face it-ACT has no real support in Aotearoa except for a few alt-right tories and those David Seymour panders to, to curry votes. If National stood up for their beliefs and values in Epsom and behaved honestly instead of Johnnymandering, ACT would be euthanized on November 19.
Exactly Rodel, where is Nationals “personal responsibility ” in all of this. Trying to gerrymander an election is akin to corruption . Normal practice National party?
The real issue with fascist organisations such as act isn’t their inane economic ideas, it is that if such a gang of unfeeling humans ever does attain power here in Aotearoa, their innate belief in the validity of illogical, driven by some superstition ( animism, xtian, islam – makes zero difference) imaginings, soon to become beliefs then ultimately fact, causes small brains to believe that because they imagine right is on their side, man-made laws can never apply to them.
Next thing you know these fascists see control of a state as being achievable, So then they chuck away the rule book.
Next begins cheating directed at getting some of our least loyal/selfish citizens to assist them to corrupt the justice institutions – esp the already compromised police, plus ensure media lies are published and incite easily condemned kayfabe which have occurred so often, people begin to accept that is situation normal.
Do not believe? Pick up a copy of “The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich” by William Shirer, or, “Mussolini ’s Italy”, authored by R.J.B. Bosworth to get a handle on what right, right, wing political movements get up to once a tiny cadre of elites has given them the imprimatur . . . and the money of course, to enable elite rule. Always corrupt, inevitably illegal and unflinchingly cruel.
“Mr Seymour is an mp, our mp’s don’t do things like that.”
“yeah right whatever”.
ACT is rising on the gun legislation paranoia and people are willing to cut off their noses in spite of their faces by voting ACT to protect their gun rights. The fact is that their rights to own guns are not being taken away, but the spin would have you believe that it is heading in that direction. It is a play straight out of the NRA handbook.
Lost your right to silence or presumption of innocence lately?
Ability for police to criminalize without legal process and confiscate with no compensation?
Sounds like you have no idea what is being done to kiwi gun owners, or worse you know and are lying.
Which is it?
“Sounds like you have no idea what is being done to kiwi gun owners, or worse you know and are lying.”
Well you clearly have no idea, or if you pretend you do, you are lying.
How old are you bert?
Read tranche 2 and the court finding against COLFO that ammunition confiscation is now lawful and come back to us.
It’s not necessarily a simple dichotomous question. Maybe there is a third answer to ‘You don’t know what’s being done or you’re lying’.. Maybe it’s ‘you know what’s being done and you’re telling the truth’.
Every time I see David Seymour albeit on telly or in the tabloid NZ herald I think to myself as to what next will this Village Idiot that is Seymour come up with?
He just doesn’t do it i.e merit a vote; from me. He is a nothing. He is just an opportunistic and self serving person who would rather prance around on a stage than actually do anything effective for New Zealanders.
I look upon him as being the Village Idiot that just so happens to side with National no matter how stupid both National and him look to the world.. Not exactly a great combination when that is all considered.
Let me say a lot older in both age and maturity. May I suggest you head to Christchurch and interview any one of the mosque shooting victims whanau for a whole different perspective. Have you ever been personally affected by gun murder?
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