Political analysis and commentary shaping the progressive debate in Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on power, policy, and accountability.
TONIGHT’S REID RESEARCH POLL promises to be a shocker. Such a shocker that, like Santa Claus in the Christmas song, the journalists at TV3 are making a list of the awful numbers – and checking them twice. If the results of last night’s One News Colmar Brunton (ONCB) poll are confirmed, then Andrew Little’s future can only be described as bleak.
My question here is why is the theft of employer-owned property (the avocados) treated so differently to the theft of wages from workers? Why can stealing avocadoes get you a prison sentence of up to 10 years but stealing wages from workers gets barely a slap on the wrist?
WHERE DOES LABOUR go from here? Because their Big Plan is fluttering down to earth in flaming tatters – burned out of the sky by Metiria Turei and the Greens.
Labour’s Big Plan? What’s that?
The military forces of most UN member states conduct their training exercises away from heavily-populated areas and civilians are prohibited, for their own safety, from entering such areas. Israel is an exception to this norm. Where Israel has chosen to rule over a captive population, its military exercises are held in civilian areas.
From a 6-year Health Minister who only acknowledged the problem this month, to a Prime Minister who opposes the call for a full-scale review of the mental health system, the Government has been floundering on this life and death issue. Gluckman has been rolled out in an attempt to show – seven weeks out from the election – that some high-powered thinking is going into the issue.
The government has partially backed down from some changes to immigration policy that would have reduced the flow of cheap labour to New Zealand employers. The changes maintain the essence of the policy which was to keep access to cheap labour from abroad, and keep that labour vulnerable and easily exploited when here.
Either Espiner has forgotten the lessons of history, grimly recounted to him by former Prime Minister Jim Bolger – or he wilfully chose to ignore the dire circumstances that Metiria Turei, and thousands of other New Zealanders, found themselves in at the time.
For a distressingly long interval it appeared that the Greens had abandoned this revolutionary narrative for a kinder, gentler, more environmentally friendly iteration of the neoliberal programme. Thankfully, Metiria Turei’s promise to make a bonfire of the infrastructure of neoliberal oppression – most especially of its poverty traps – has extended the promise of a better and fairer future to Kiwis who had almost forgotten how to hope.
Every Election, there’s a seat or several whose outcomes are fantastically interesting to watch. This is because they are the ones that are actually balanced upon the knife-edge – where a few dozen votes one way or ‘tuther will actually help to determine the shape and course of our politics for years or even decades to come.
Thanks to my socioeconomic privilege, it is unlikely (not to say impossible) that I will ever end up as dependent on our corrupt welfare system as Metiria once was. And I don’t pretend to know exactly how that dependency felt for Metiria, because I can’t know. Maybe I can’t know, but I can guess. Because I can guess, I can empathise with her.
