Curwen Rolinson

There’s nothing wrong with operating to the economic left of Labour. But it seems fairly patently obvious that that’s not what National are doing. If there’s any dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warriors out there in the audience, they may perhaps choose to disagree – but running a fairly broadly social-democrat economic policy is not supposed to substantially increase inequality by benefiting economic elites at the expense of just about everyone else.

I got quite annoyed on Tracey’s behalf with some of the media framing around her proposal. Airing comments by Steven Joyce suggesting that the extra cost of our scheme would run into the “billions of dollars” without pointing out that the true increased cost of the scheme is a mere few hundred million dollars over the extant (and wasteful) status quo, as Jo Moir has done over at Stuff, is just plain irresponsible journalism.

Earlier this week a number of media outlets started running stories about something called the “New Zealand People’s Party” – a new electoral vehicle apparently set up by members of the Indian and Chinese communities in a bid to ensure better representation for those communities’ interests in our politics.

Last week, retirement-savers from around the country were shocked to discover that their hard-earned investment funds were potentially going towards funding the invention, sale and distribution of land mines, cluster munitions, and other nefarious products. Nuclear weapons are also apparently on the portfolio-books.