2011 and 2014 was dirty politics using Cameron Slater and David Farrar as the delivery vehicles, 2017 it’s dirty politics via the power of incumbency.
National are fighting this election by lying about Labour & playing to the pettiest bigotries of their rump vote – bootcamps for delinquents, benefit cuts for druggie beneficiaries & human rights erosion for gang members.
Mediaworks sacked John Campbell for politically motivated reasons because of John’s attacks on John Key, Steven Joyce used to own the company and the National Government once gave Mediaworks a sweetheart finance deal on license fees they couldn’t obtain from the open market.
All of that history helped Bill English win the second debate, it’s up to the voters to decide if a foreign owned media company should be able to frame them up as easily as they framed Jacinda up.
How the hell this Party can still gain over 40% support is the question that should be troubling most of us, if National Party voters can still vote for these criminals after all the damage they have caused, then those National Party voters are part of the problem.
One of the things I’ve tried to work on over the last decade is getting Labour+Green Party over 51% without the need of including Winston and NZ First so that a genuinely left wing Government could actually implement the kind of truely progressive policy we desperately need.
Labour need to continue the momentum but the biggest story is that with Maori Party and MANA still in this game, NZ First could lose their Kingmaker status.
National’s boast today that they wish to implement new powers against gangs that will ‘stretch’ human rights is another ghastly attack on the common good by floating ill thought out laws and using them to bait petty hates.
The mostly white male privileged broadcasters cried out that we have been tricked into a no policy debate. Tim Watkins, Barry Soper, Mark Jennings and Toby Manhire, names no one should know, have all clambered aboard tsk tsking with the lack of real debate.
It seems to me that the elite media opinion that the first debate’s civility was boring are just more out of touch comments by pundits lost by Jacinda’s rise and frantically flailing around for a narrative their cynicism doesn’t understand.
Day after day they take the real lived experiences of beneficiaries desperately attempting to live under our brutal neoliberal welfare state and they put them to artists drawings of the beneficiaries.