Critical analysis breaking down New Zealand news coverage, media framing, and political narratives behind the headlines.
We now have a broken neoliberal welfare culture that is sadistic and utterly counter productive, the poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the sick and the disabled do everything in their power not to be needing assistance from these Government agencies, because these Government agencies don’t help, they only punish.
The very first thing a new Labour Government needs to embark upon is a vast purge of the public service staff who are as much part of the problem as the policy is.
Watch as the National Party dirty politics attack machine goes ballistic. The fictitious $11billion hole that doesn’t exist is just a taste of how vicious the rich and powerful get when they are suddenly threatened with losing power.
This is what 9 years of National has left us with, spiteful social policy drowned in stereotypes that have little basis in fact.
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.
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.