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.
Most mainstream media journalists are boomers with property enjoying the rock star economy that National have built, they can not comprehend the struggles, pains, hope and aspirations of Gen Xers, Millennials, renters, workers or beneficiaries.
The only reason National are so pro immigration is because it creates the false growth numbers they need, it props up middle class illusions of wealth via inflated property prices and because many NZ-Chinese migrants are huge supporters of National (The Blue Dragons) and because many senior National Party MPs are heavily invested in Chinese interests.
She was confident, she stood her ground, she sold her values. Bill on the other hand grinned inanely because he’s obviously been told to smile more by his media handlers.
When you consider that a poll in Whangarei had Labour on 37%, we could see a Labour Party taking a majority Government without needing any coalition partner.