There is a lot of pain on the Left at a sense Jacinda has failed us, that the transformative change passed us all by.
The screeds of minute extras that have been held up by Labour as evidence of their attempts all pale into nothing when the MSD, IRD and WINZ clawbacks are all taken out as inflation explodes.
Yes Jacinda saved us from the Covid War, but she’s losing the Covid Peace.
I think that most voters don’t understand how NZ politics work and they don’t understand how Jacinda is failing when Labour have an MMP majority.
They are legitimate questions and are valid ones, how can a Party with an unprecedented MMP majority still seem to do sweet fuck all on the big issues confronting us as a society, economy and culture.
It starts at the 2017 election.
In an act of desperation and true leadership, Andrew Little handed Jacinda the leadership months out from the 2017 election which was strategically designed to eliminate the Māori Party and United Future and on election night the specials and overseas vote weren’t counted leaving a deflated Jacinda to tell the country we hand’t won when in fact the specials and overseas vote were always going to go our way and I believed Winston was going to go with us.
The strategy of knocking out National support parties won us the 2017 election but because no one in the Labour leadership expected to win, there was no 100 day legislative agenda to ram through the moment you get into Parliament and if you don’t do that, the Wellington Bureaucracy will kill off any of your reform agenda for their own interests.
This is what most NZers don’t understand about NZ politics, winning power is VERY different from managing power. If you don’t arrive on day one with with a clear legislative agenda and enough mana to intimidate the Wellington Bureaucracy, you get nothing done.
Representative Democracy in NZ is a masquerade so that you will participate and give it legitimacy, the truth is that the Wellington Bureaucracy runs the country and their middle class neoliberal pandering decides policy implementation, not the feckless and easily manipulated Ministers.
Labour didn’t expect to win 2017 and they didn’t expect to win an MMP majority in 2020, so they’ve had no real 100 day legislative agenda to ram through and as such have been stymied ever step by the Wellington Bureaucracy.
Jacinda may be kind and she may really want transformative change, but if you don’t come to Wellington with a clear plan as to how to force the Bureaucracy to implement your manifesto, then transformative change becomes a virtue signal of aspiration rather than actual policy.
Kindness becomes Neo-Kindness that aggrieves rather than inspires.
The Greens must avoid this by clearly telling voters now what they will force Labour to pass in the first 100 days of a Labour/Green Government so that the Wellington Bureaucracy can be thwarted. Unfortunately the Greens are socially connected at the hip to the Wellington Bureaucracy and have all the offensive capacity of slow growing moss.
The last chance for Left progressive policy is a list of bottom line first 100 day laws to force Labour into being more Bernie Sanders than cautious Grant and Jacinda are confident to attempt.
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I think Labour are gone come 2023 so it’s all academic what the anti vote Greens think or do. Labour/Green/Maori combo are definitely not a vote winner.
So in 2017 the promises Labour made were empty words? Horse shit to be polite. And it is unforgivable in that case that all those years in opposition they did not ever study what it takes to be in government, even though they had the experience still there at the time to know exactly what it is like.
The trouble for Jacinda is she promised the earth in transformation in such a genuine inspirational way and not only didn’t deliver anything, especially when handed an absolute majority but then turned out to be yet another nothing politician keeping the seat warm for the next Prime Minister. I, as voter, feel very misled.
From that point on, last year I suggest, her credibility was shot and her brand similarly finished.
Its going to be a slow agonising end to this government.
So, what do you call the party that had 9 years in Opposition before 2017 to develop their plan AND 3 years in Government yet brought nothing to the table when they had an overwhelming expectation they would win after polls endorsed their mandate for Covid?
Wilful competence is just the starting point.
Amen to that! If a political party with years of experience can be thwarted at ‘the off,’ by the agenda of entrenched bureaucracy, then that party, whatever its stripe, doesn’t deserve to be in government. But hang on, if that be the case, what have all the repeated accusations on TDB about this Labour government simply being a neo-liberal clone of its National counterpart been about? Or is that the fault of the bureaucracy too?
Jacinda Aderne is a Blairist with a faux furrowed brow and a big enamel smile. And whatever Covid catastrophe we may have avoided due to her her, the cost, especially to those who Labour purports to represent, is going to be such that there may be little difference from what would have been if she hadn’t bothered.
We’re seriously in the shit then because the conservative blogs say National is just the same as Labour. It’s seems we are all aligned on that.
Who are the people that make up the Wellington Bureaucracy?
I agree. But why did Labour not expect to win these two elections? John Key had been in power for three terms. That is, nine years of increasing privatisation of our State assets, and reducing the budgets of health and education.
That is Labours failure not recognizing the fake princes bubble would burst and be ready when that happened. Health and education needed billions immediately they took power, the same amount under invested by Key whilst his friends made hay.
So what you’re actually saying is the health system today is worse than compared to that of Keys government that cut health funding.
My reply to that is yes the health system is worse than under key.
The greens must avoid this and have a 100 day agenda ? What for 2032? Certainly not for 2023. This governments over. Done.
You can tell it’s finished and even they know it because they are bringing back the hate speech legislation that they threw out because it was too unpopular.
They are going to ram through as much unpopular technocratic constitutional and social engineering reforms as possible because they know they’ve lost the election and can’t/won’t do anything on economic policy reforms.
One could even say they want to tank the govt on unpopular social policy simply do national gets elected and has to do deal with the economic fall out of COVID and securing the economic status quo for another decade which might not be secure under a labour green or labour green maori govt but will under a nat/act govt.
If labour thought they had a shot at a third term do you think they’d be pressing on with constitutional reforms that noone wants? No they’d be fighting to be competitive and offering alternatives to what national is offering. Instead they are doubling down in social engineering, anti democratic reforms noone wanted or voted and to what most of the country sees is an asset grab.
Vote labour for housing, working and Keynesian economic reforms. Get woke neoliberalism.
Tomorrow’s budget is their last chance if there’s no GST cut or living cost help to middle and working class. Good bye tofu pie.
Totally disagree Martyn.
The ideological Identity Politics raced out the gate and has been hammered home one after the other with no-one able to stop any of it. That is not a party without a plan. That is not being led by the Wellington bureaucracy. It is a wilful and arrogant position that says, “we cant change anything without a culture change and then all the other changes will just happen so much easier”. No pain, no gain – the little people will thank us for it later.
I will never vote again after voting for the liar in 2017.
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