Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
Maybe, the real problem is that privileged Young Nats have bought into the myth of meritocracy, believing that they own their successes and, by extension, the poor should own their failures.
This cruel point of view completely disregards the cognitive ability and the circumstances that people are born into and the fact that most children born poor will remain poor and most people born rich will remain rich.
THE BIG QUESTION confronting progressive voters in this election is: how do they elect a genuine centre-left government? Is this best achieved by abandoning the Greens and delivering the entire progressive vote to Labour? Or, should at least some progressive voters step off the Jacinda Train and re-board the Greens – thereby delivering Labour a reliable and ideologically compatible coalition partner?
Unless progressive voters maximise Green Party support. In the current political situation only the Green Party has a realistic chance of dragging the neo-liberal Labour Party significantly to the left in a post-election government. Without the Greens Labour will tinker here and tinker there while leaving the free market to run a country bitterly divided by poverty and inequality.
I call upon ACT Leader, David Seymour, to publicly announce that his party will be putting forward legislation to ban low-income families from having children. He can advise the public how much people must earn before the State will issue a permit to breed.
I got a lead on a major party poll that had just been done in the Wairarapa, and which basically confirmed what I’d been saying. It ranked the contenders for the seat both in terms of their support out there in the electorate (i.e. how many folk were likely to vote for them) – but also in terms of their ‘likeability’, relatability, recognizability and such.
In 1965, Israel passed its Planning and Building Law, which caused 100,000 Bedouin to be removed to ‘townships’ where they…
THE FIRST SIGN that Jacinda Ardern’s would be a very different sort of Labour Government came early.
The Nats most magnificent troll
Said: “I’ve just found a fiscal black hole
so impossibly big
that Grant cannot dig
Labour out before the next poll!”
I’m not sure how widespread it is for government ministers to refuse attendance at public meetings when they are asked to front for unpopular policies but in the case of Minister of Social Housing Amy Adams it is certainly true.
If they can convince the waverers; the voters on the point of climbing aboard the “Jacinda Train”; that Labour’s numbers just don’t add up. If they can make them feel that if they’re not very careful, then a bunch of so-called “experts” are going to advise Labour to tax their land, their batch, their business, their petrol, their water, their financial transactions, and even their inheritance. If they can inflame suspicion and build mistrust, then – dammit – they just might win.