It’s funny watching the Left struggling to comprehend the TVNZ Poll drop for Labour.
After all the identity politics virtue signals and focusing on issues that impact .1% using intersectionist justifications, the Left are suddenly surprised that the smelly Lumpenproletariat we spent 3 weeks screaming Nazi at don’t want to vote for us.
It’s embarrassing that the Middle Class Marxists in Wellington are doing well while the poor get poorer.
It’s embarrassing that Labour oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth to the richest ever.
It’s embarrassing that we have been less transformative and more working from home privilege.
It’s funny watching the parties and their proxies scramble to drop the alienating woke identity politics pure temple crap and struggle to be politically relevant beyond pronoun pandering and hashtag activism.
Maori Party with gst off food, Green Party with free public transport, Labour with band aids over haemorrhaging wounds, it’s exciting to see them all popped out of their echo chambers for once and having to try and win people over rather than cancel them!
The solution to the woke identity politics alienation and the cost of living crisis are universals.
Rather than die in ditches for tribal pure temple dogma, the Political Left actually have to make people’s lives materially better!
Banning Gay Conversion Therapy is lovely, but it don’t put food on the table or a roof over anyone’s head!
Universal provision of free well funded services is our solution.
Look at the Labour Government’s relief package, a straight 25cent cut to petrol and halving public transport fares. No fucking around with WINZ or MSD! Any benefit raise there is clawed back by the bureaucracy, Labour instead set the change where people would feel it immediately, their pocket!
Labour need to bypass the neoliberal State more often to stop the bureaucracy from stealing it!
Make Public Transport free!
Free school lunches and breakfasts!
GST off fresh fruit and vegetables!
A 30% Government owned Supermarket chain that would permanently reduce food costs.
We look to the State to provide market regulation and a pooling of resources for the best outcome.
Universal provision of well funded public services scares the bejesus out of the Right and the neoliberal public service who prefer to manage contracts than actually do the mahi.
Universal provision of well funded social services is the harvest we all share in a democracy!
If we provide real ways to reduce peoples living costs we can get everyone to buy into the system because for the first time in their lives they see a State focused on reducing their costs not increasing them in an economic system that is rigged for the rich.
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Free public transport is a fine idea but there are countless areas in NZ don’t have any public transport and there are others that have it paid by the ratepayers. Why should they subsidise the city’s that do ?
True that some places you won’t see public transport, but in rural areas the low population density just doesn’t warrant it.
Every town/city of at least 30,000 – Size of Gisbourne – should have some kind of FREE or low cost public transport network, even if it’s just a few electricity-powered bus lines that converge in the city centre & radiate out from there.
Centres of more than 100,000 should have work start ASAP on mass transit spines too (heavy or light rail) – Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga, Napier/Hastings (Regular mass transit between the bay cities!), Dunedin…
I’d even be tempted to add Palmerston North into the mix there too (even though it’s under 100,000 population), as any trains there could “plug in” to a regular, electrified twin-track Wellington-Palmerston North service, and feed in from Manawatu satellite-towns as well.
Now the Roads of National Significance (set up under John Key) are nearly finished, time for Public Transport of National Significance!
One more obvious universal move that working class people need would be free Wifi nationwide. COVID showed the cruel digital divide amongst school kids in different areas.
And it is not too late to introduce a basic income of several hundred dollars paid via IRD to all citizens. When people start earning substantially (heh yeah right) IRD can take some of it back.
The neo liberal state has to be rolled back for the majority in this country to have a reasonable life.
Rather like a below average student studying for their final exam at the very last minute, its too late for Labour now.
Are you thinking of hologram Rimmer, such an unwilling thinker, address Red Dwarf.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le1ajH32U-k
or longer, beautiful study of procrastination by (Ethelread the Unready?).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5mqbKs1PoI
a straight 25cent cut to petrol and halting public transport.
Guessing that means “halving”.
No fucking around with WINZ or MSD! Any benefit raise there is clawed back by the bureaucracy
Yep. Eg, “winter electricity payments” helpful for sure, but then inevitably the power companies raise their prices.
set the change where people would feel it immediately, their pocket!
and in their immediate, daily LIVES. Such change is really the only thing that registers at the moment.
Regarding electricity billing – a regressive (as in backwards, stupid, and harmful) – step was taken recently, by allowing the end of “low user fixed rates”. The changes are about to come into force – just in time for another freezing winter. HEARTLESS!!
https://www.consumer.org.nz/articles/low-power-users-to-be-hit-hardest-by-changes
“At least 40 percent of Kiwi households are likely to see a jump in their power bills next month as the industry does away with low-use plans. ”
Those whose power use is very low will be hardest hit. As part of the phasing out, power companies have permission to double the daily fixed rate for low users from 30c a day to 60c a day, which works out to an increase of around $110 over the next year.
And the pain won’t end there. For those consumers currently on low fixed charge rates, prices will continue to rise each year for the next four years. A consumer currently paying 30c a day ($110 a year) for lines charges can expect to be paying $1.80 a day (around $660 a year) in 2026.
Households with gas connections, who therefore don’t use as much electricity, are being hit doubly hard – with their bills already expected to jump by an average of $55 a year over the next four years.
We’ve had dozens of people contact us after power companies started sending out notices telling customers of the hike last week. Full article at the link
Universalism is fine, so long as everyone pays their share of tax on all their income, especially all capital gains.
Its like Bomber met Roger Douglas in an 80s timewarp. I think it’s cool
One thing is certain: The right wing will not let a good crisis go to waste.
If elected National and Act will wield the sword of austerity to claw back COVID spending, the like of which we won’t have been seen since the late 1980s and early 90s.
The resulting devastation will be paralleled only by the great depression.
Yes, let’s give them a third term in the hope that they will be everything they weren’t in the first two… Ardern and her government have blown it, it’s over for them now. When people stop believing your rhetoric, they don’t give you the chance for future results.
Already universalism is keeping the real NZ afloat in our lifeboats tied together in the big world’s ocean. Without money of a reasonable sum paid to old age beneficiaries, there would be a blizzard of bad press about elderly tragedies, starvation and mummified corpses in closet apartments, in this lovely, friendly, compassionate country. Their money gets into the everyday cash level and provides a majority of the jobs for the young stuck in semi-skilled or lower levels by the paucity of higher-ranking jobs due to free market substitution with sophisticated manufacturing of look good, short life consumer attractive goodies.
Our political parrots only have to have a button pushed and they squawk 67 years for retirement age, but survival mode kicks in and the present universalism reigns okay! Hooray say weary older people being egged to get more hours so they can manage till they turn 65. Pension (superannuation) money generally flows in NZ although the retired are great travellers overseas, in cruise ships especially, (in the old days you had to earn your o.e. travel by being an active exporter or the like) but the oldies now have it easy. Look at them laughing their heads off in their pristine rooms in the daily brochures and promotions for retirement homes.
It’s embarrassing that Labour oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth to the richest ever.
Labour should be embarrassed about this because IT appears to be the transformation they have been bleating about. The Labour party were ambushed by neolibs in 1984 (Douglas, Prebble etc) and this appears to be happening again (Robertson) and Ardern’s team of 5M being ‘nice’ to one another, simply won’t cut it.
Maybe the proverbial pigeons are coming home to roost because “he who forgets his past is doomed to repeat it”.
Too little too late. We hate them and our votes will go somewhere else next year.
Your votes never went remotely Labour’s way Andrew.
Hmm, Bomber say’s “Labour instead set the change where people would feel it immediately, their pocket!”
Don’t tax cuts work like that too? Maybe they should just lift the brackets or make the first $50K earned tax free?
In Aus, the first $20k or so is tax free.
https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior-years/
We should be doing that here, if there is any hope whatsoever in reducing the horrendous inequality gap!
(Tho’ I realise Yeti may be on the ‘other side’.)
The next election will be decided on the single issue of Maori co governance: all the rest is irrelevant noise.
Ahich means Act will be powerful in the coalition.
“…all the rest is irrelevant noise.”
Mmmn ,,, not entirely Robbie. In the big picture where will all those swing voters from the last election put their TWO ticks? But maybe you’e right. Maori co-governance is pretty radical, a constitutional matter, right?
A third term of any left wing govt anywhere in the world is extraordinarily rare. In NZ only one leader ,Helen Clark has ever won three consecutive elections and even that was close, apart from the first and fifth labour govt only the fourth and sixth have been given even a second term. In the UK only one labour govt in history has done two consecutive full terms. In Australia labor hasn’t one two terms since hawk and Keatings day. (They lost the popular vote in 2010).
A third term is historically speaking, wishful thinking. NZ is a economically center right, it’s hard for a lot of people to grasp this but NZ is the second most deregulated economically right wing nation on earth after Singapore. We have overdosed on neoliberalism. In that context, this government actually is the most progressive govt NZ has had since Kirk but the bar is low. Even remotely stepping out of the neoliberal orthodoxy of NZ is heresy.
Most people I speak to think that poll was fair for a fifth year govt mid term facing a clusterfuck of epic proportions from the pandemic, to excessive media hate to the venomous hate thrown at it I’ve never seen in NZ before, to the inflation crisis , to energy crisis, COVID fatigue, global supply chain shortages and all the existing problems added to mega money being spent on attacking it. Thats actually a decent poll
I think labour can win a third term but historically speaking, always bet on national. Center left govts are rare.
I think it’s done a bit more than just tweaking in the grand scheme of how right wing NZ really is economically, but it needs to do more. Honestly I think it needs to focus the rest of this term on legacy projects and absolutely pick a war with the supermarket barons.
Labour should run the next election on universal dental in the grand scheme of things it’s not that expensive and insanely popular and anyone who has had dental problems would be hard pressed to vote against it.
Universalism is the key. It always has been for the left.
However the reason I’m a lefty is because of social and economic justice, you can’t have one without the other. MLK was a legend because he was for both.
I want to point out for a great many people in this country conversion therapy being banned was a big deal. Banning torture is progressive.
Being LGBT does not make one woke or upper middle class indeed many many many LGBT people are thrown away by their families and bullied so brutally at high school they drop out of high school and have no qualifications and are working class for life.
In my experience the big virtue signaling woke cancel culture types aren’t LGBT they are hetero “allies” who think they get points for defend LGBT people and often say crazy bullshit online. I kinda get a bit miffed when people act like gay conversion therapy meant nothing, LGBT people and our friends and family are s significant percentage of the population and by large agree with the economic left.
There doesn’t have to be a battle between social and economic justice indeed true lefty’s support both, without one you can’t do the other.
So in closing this rant, I completely agree with universalism and labour needing to spending the rest of this term doing more, but this govt hasn’t been the waste of time many think it has, one of the issues with the left is we never defend the left, if Bernie Sanders had of been elected I believe he’d be getting brutally attacked by the left and it’s a major reason why the left is usually out of office.
Second term labour govts are rare, anywhere. Third terms are damn near impossible. Historically speaking the odds are against a third term. It’d take a hell of an effort from labour and the greens and a unified front from the left to not just bash the left but remember our true enemies the right and all the planets aligning.
Can it be done yes. Will it be done. Who knows.
Hopefully Australia elects old socialist Albo next month so poor kiwis can piss off to Australia as a plan b if nat/act get in and wreak ruthenasia 2.0 on nz next year… Nicola Willis is wearing Ruth Richardsons old clothes
Cos millennials and gen z should really piss off out the country if NZ goes back to the undiluted brutalism of the 80s and 90s that we avoided in 08-17 cos key was too centerist and never needed acts votes.
Nat / act scares the fuck out of me and most sane people, my entire generation should piss off and let the people who wanted it deal with if it if it happens.
As tempting as it is and I know how tempting it is, to bash labour…. I feel like 24/7 the horror of a nat act coalition should be on display by anyone left of center with any platform.
Because second term labour govts are rare (infact labour didn’t even win the first time around so in some ways this is a first term lab govt) and third term govts are damned impossible.
Buckle up.
Corey H What a well considered rant. Now I’m considering my attitude and possible intentions again. I think the bigcompass chamge frpm now on is to swing away from ideology and theoories as first step, and discuss the outcomes each person in a group considers important, and who will be affected how, and what about the rest, and what methods will be employed. Labour couldn’t have thought originally as to what the displaced persons were going to work at. They went for the theory like children with a new toy.
I saw the mention of Oz politician ALBO, (Anthony Albanese, Australian Labour Party Leader) so looked him up. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/albo-m01.html
…The lionising of Albanese is revealing. With the deeply unpopular Liberal-National Coalition government wracked by infighting, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s approval ratings sinking further into negative territory and an election looming by May, key elements in the ruling class, both in Australia and the United States, are looking to a Labor government under conditions of an escalating war in Europe, the ongoing pandemic disaster, staggering social inequality and declining real wages…
Greber [Jacob Greber, Australian Financial Review journalist] highlighted Albanese’s plan to emulate the supposed “consensus” politics of the 1983 to 1996 Hawke and Keating Labor governments, which worked closely with the trade unions to ruthlessly restructure the economy along pro-market lines at the expense of working-class jobs, conditions and basic rights.
“I’m comfortable in the boardrooms as well as the pub,” Albanese told Greber, and repeated his previous statement that Labor was “seeking renewal, not revolution.” This points to the key role to be assigned by the boardrooms to any incoming Labor government: to suppress working-class discontent and prevent it from turning in a socialist direction against capitalist rule…
“Historically speaking the odds are against a third term”
You’re not wrong! Labour and their coalition allies will have their work cut out to keep the swing voters. Watch for Luxton to gracefully step aside and Nicola Willis to take the helm. It worked for Labour and no reason it won’t work for those in the blue corner. Steady as she goes in stormy seas. Just what middle NZ wants. Won’t even need ACT!
You may be onto something there, Boz.
Willis is already prepping, and if numbers tank they could just try the ole switcheroo.
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