Critical analysis breaking down New Zealand news coverage, media framing, and political narratives behind the headlines.
The Greens are the only political party who are genuinely offering the largest chunk of the missing million voters – beneficiaries – meaningful policy of $180 each week increases in welfare.
Watching Steven Joyce doing the weekend current affairs circuit describing Labour’s water tax on farmers as economic self mutilation and denying criticisms that National have stolen and subsidised water for their Dairy Farmer mates is evidence of a Government too self interested to think outside their special interests.
Metiria’s crime was not that she had told the truth about needing to game the draconian neoliberal welfare system, but that she had the audacity to tell her story with her chin up in defiance at the injustice of that system rather than the self-shaming we all demand from anything that is attached to the virgin sacrificing sacredness of ‘taxpayer money’.
In NZ we accept the dignity of the broken, but never the dignity of the resistant.
You don’t get to pull the suicide bomber stance they took by publicly resigning and then try to come back in.
…Metiria’s real crime was to challenge neoliberal cultural mythology and promise hope to beneficiaries that someone who shared their experience would force change for them.
Rich, white, male broadcasters have had their witch hunt and we have lost a civil rights hero. NZ is a poorer political landscape for it.
If Labour continue to climb, and TOP can get Clendon or Graham, Gareth Morgan might be the Queenmaker, not Winston.
The Greens are reaching out to the weakest and poorest amongst us with a $180 per week increase in benefits, while I’m sure Jacinda will take back what the Greens recently gained, Metiria’s story resonated with many who have been cruelly treated by our neoliberal welfare state who don’t vote and may be motivated to vote.
Losing two grumpy old white men won’t hurt Green hopes of igniting that electorate.
Personality not only wins elections Bill, it forgives almost every possible sin by the voter, that’s why National voters have turned a blind eye to suicide, mental health, poverty, inequality and the way beneficiaries, prisoners and the vulnerable are treated by the state.
…the fact that Jacinda, she can announce a nothing Transport policy that promises something a decade earlier than the 30 years away that National are offering and be greeted with cheering crowds is the difference.
Jacinda’s announcement is of course a wasted opportunity because all Labour are doing here is gentrifying the public transport system faster than National will. It’ll go down like a drunk in a brewery with the train spotter anorak club at Greater Auckland but if all Labour are offering is a gentrified public transport system so Simon Wilson doesn’t have to have smelly poor people rubbing up against his corduroy jacket it’s a wasted opportunity.