Do they have the systems and the nouse to get any wins or gains for their voters in the next three years?

How well have we developed our MMP environment inside parliament? Or are we really still playing FPP? Because it looks that way.

Policy without practicality and the support of the public service plus NGOs is like floral prints on toilet paper. I don’t just want to know there’s money available, that it’s all been costed and it could happen. How will it really be done and delivered? What are the reliable feedback mechanisms? Not the great MSM?!

All you have to do to understand the cynicism is to look at how well the ‘policy’ of building social housing in Auckland has gone – less than half of the expected 14 000. Great policy: stink-poor delivery. And Labour’s no better, based on previous experience.

Labour also has a regrettable track record of throwing out working systems so they’re ‘politically correct’ and pleasing to their backers. All at once. Overnight – and it takes a long time for the waves to settle to calm in the tea cup. Wasted time.

It’s not their financial management that causes concern – it’s that meddling middle class paternalism and sheer lack of administrative competence. They cannot resist digging up the seeds to look for sprouts, or giving something their tender touch. And, despite all the years and university degrees – they still haven’t learned how to be decent figureheads and work with the back-room people.

So now Cunliffe and Little have gone to pastures new or wilderness. We can only hope those pests in the gang of ABC have finished. There’s no time left for clearing the Augean stables.

Tears before bedtime.

Little may indeed be a ‘decent man’ I don’t know and it is foolish to suggest that anyone outside his immediate circle of family & friends knows.

But that is irrelevant, I didn’t like the man’s politics which were neolib to the core and I really didn’t like the side of him revealed by his previous gig where the interests of the union as an organisation were always placed ahead the interest of the membership.
Worst of all he wasn’t that smart at it, I was talking to a senior longstanding member of the journos union over the weekend and he/she told me that when Little first approached them with an offer to join together, they, the journos thought “bloody good job now we can have a spokesperson for us like the way the police do it; someone who advances the interests of the membership through the media and yet isn’t perceived as as a typical trade union official. The guy seems smart and he should understand that we can help each other – he looks after us, we help him satisfy his rather obvious political ambitions’
But it didn’t work like that Little just couldn’t meld the advantage of having most of the journos in the country helping him get the message out to work for the journos or himself.

Of course membership has slipped since those days, the journos union now has record low coverage.

This is what happened as Labour leader too, yes it is hard to get heard above the noise of the government especially when a big mob on the politics beat are Nat toadies, but Little just didn’t have a clue how to utilise natural allies & contacts and lets face it that skill is a huge part of being a successful leader.

I am no more sanguine about the new leader and deputy. There has been no real effort by Labour to win back humanists since the Alliance imploded nearly two decades ago. Instead of mourning the loss of half of their former ‘broad church’ – not just a loss from the party but the political scene altogether, the neolib rump has been celebrating the fact that a huge chunk of membership plus more importantly, dedicated party activists have gone for good.
Yeah, I’m sure electorate meetings are much ‘easier’ without ‘the reds’ but those people that the neolibs so despise were responsible for a lot of Labour’s wins.

I just cannot think why anyone would vote Labour in 2017 for a change? What change? there is so little difference between Labour & the Nats that the Labour party has to embargo its policies before launch in case the Nats gazump them.

Nat-lite, who needs it when you can have the real thing with a lot less hassle?
There are a number of issues for less fortunate kiwis that will have the old Labourites rolling in their graves – the shortage of affordable accomodation is one such thing, but so is worker insecurity of tenure, the ‘on call’ bullshit, abolition of penalties and a host of other awful working conditions that keep kiwis locked in a poverty trap.

The health service is going down the gurgler – how many people do you know waiting months for ‘urgent’ tests to determine if they have the big C? I know 3 at the moment and that number will stay pretty consistent for a while as people get sick & die or get better. except that the number invariably creeps up – in a year or two it will be 4 no matter which neoliberal wins the chook raffle because the Labour Party has lost its imagination along with its courage.

Too much time worrying about the costing trap instead of confronting it
& saying “never you mind, we’ll find the money, why don’t you ask the nats where the money for their crazy corporate underwriting projects comes from?”

Ok I’ll stop now I could blather on for hours about how the Labour Party is a pallid shadow of a humanist political movement which stopped being socialist a very long time ago, now they aren’t even social democrats. Jacinta appears to be more concerned with people calling her rude names on FB, than she is about the parlous state many kiwis currently find themselves in.

“Neoliberals belong in either ACT or National these days.
Not Labour”

QFT

Indeed – “old gnat trout Boag”.
Sounds like the start of an old nursery rhyme designed to scare the kids 🙂

Good to see hope she keeps it up.

Red Buzzard, NZ First is no more a “left” party than that Orange Bigot in the White House. Your party’s insistence to re-legalise assault on children proves that.

You need to stop smoking whatever it is you’re imbibing, it’s messing with your head.

Never the less, Jacinda is all good. All the best and sunny days for her and hopefully for New Zealand too as the election quickly approaches.

They don’t like the workers’ rights types. Grant Robertson’s Chardonnay identity politics brigade with his deep ties to media including student media and young coniving Labour members rule the day. How sad.