A short history for the media of Stephen Joyce losing his cool

Joyce has lost his cool on social media by promising Housing NZ wouldn’t have to hand back the dividend they squeeze out of poor people.

He’s had to backtrack and mumble that it would be for future years.

It’s testament to how out of touch and desperate National have become. They know their internal polling is weak, they are under attack almost daily now as the creaking social infrastructure finally starts falling over after 8 years of cutbacks and their panicked ill thought out responses from Paula Bennett announcing $5000 1 way tickets to Key’s delusional belief the homeless can get a house by walking into WINZ.

The free market idealogical experiments to lower the cost of welfare and education are only going to ripen after the Government has really bulldozed the existing public services. These existing public services do themselves no favours when the standard of their care is so below par.

The sudden realisation by middle NZ that the Welfare State is in fact making things far worse for vulnerable people means that Stephen Joyce can smugly reel off as many budgets and programs as he likes and it still isn’t enough.

Getting so desperate that he announces a policy on text and then has to distance himself should be a canary in National’s col mine.

It’s not the first time Stephen Joyce has been under pressure.

Nicky Hager’s Hollow Men is damning of Joyce.

In the week of the 16-20 May 2005, Steven Joyce had a formal meeting with the exclusive brethren who were organizing their despicable advertising campaign and Joyce met quietly with other pro-National lobby organizations telling them the two crucial messages were “change”. Change was the main theme the Exclusive Brethren ended up using, remember National weren’t officially having these meetings with the Brethren and Joyce was the hollow brain behind this.

Joyce also saw the draft pamphlets and advertisements from the Exclusive Brethren before they went out, remember National initially pretended they knew nothing about the Exclusive Brethren.

When confronted with allegations that this was a stitch up job, Joyce’s ‘response’ was that Stephen Win (the contact person on the EB pamphlets and advertising) wasn’t a National Party guy and it certainly wasn’t a National-funded campaign – that of course is a twisting of the facts after meeting with the EB and providing input and viewing all material about to be released by the EB, we can see how hollow Joyce’s response really was.

In 2005 Joyce wrote to electoral campaign committees saying that “in this election National is planning to go close to its legal limit for Party Vote campaign expenditure (meaning $2,240,000), That has not happened previously”. Interestingly when the donation declarations were delivered to the Electoral Commission not one name from National’s largest financial backers were declared after their donations had been washed through the National Party launderette, the ‘Waitemata Trust’ so that their political influence through financial donations remained invisible. Interesting side note isn’t it, Winston was crucified in the media for something the Electoral Commission, the Serious Fraud Office and the Police cleared him on, has National’s funding ever been given that level of scrutiny?

Steven Joyce was credited in the last election by National Svengali Peter Keenan for keeping on Crosby/Texter, the Australian spin Doctors who were so good this election at spinning the ‘change’ and ‘moderation’ con job.

The Hollow Brain went to Australia to meet with Crosby/Texter and on October 19th 2004 prepared the con job they would use to try and spin the election on, it is incredible how much of that con job was so similar to the con job the Hollow Brain used to win this election, let’s go through them…

1: Stop us going down the path to rampant political correctness.
2: Put an end to the grievance industry.
3: Make our community safer by locking away violent criminals.
4: Ensure your hard-earned tax dollars are spent on Education and Health and not wasted on Labour’s pet projects and bureaucracy.
5: Put in place economic policies that will lift all our incomes closer to those of Australians.
6: Tighten up Welfare and ensure that everyone that can work does work.

Note, none of this is policy, just focus meeting tested bigotry.

Interesting to note that when Joyce was challenged on whether or not Crosby/Texter was giving National advice in 2005, Joyce said there was ‘some’ advice but National had no plans of bringing them to NZ, which was a clear twisting of the truth because Joyce had been to see them in 2004, when challenged again Joyce fudged the issue and pretended to not know the depth of any Crosby/Texter relationship and advised Don Brash to claim he only met them in passing.

…Joyce has played fast and loose with the rules since he entered Parliament. That he’s continuing it now should surprise no one.