Jacinda’s neokindness is a cautionary political failure of obscene proportions
Jacinda’s aspiration doesn’t meet the reality and in her interview with Jack Tame a month ago had the audacity to call any criticism of her aspiration unfair by arguing it was better that she had high aspirations rather than not having any at all.
That’s her argument, sure we aren’t doing anything meaningful or transformative, but it’s important she has high hopes.
That’s neokindness.
At the end of 2017, 108 people said they lived in cars and John Key’s Government was torched for that.
Last month there were 480 people living in their vehicles.
A Million dollars a day is spent on motels for vulnerable people causing enormous social carnage with no real wrap around support services present (as we saw on TVNZs Sunday) and 27 000 are on emergency waiting lists – we can’t solve those problems apparently but the Government can spend a billion dollars on consultants each year?
$1bn spend on consultants each year
“Labour’s spending on contractors and consultants has climbed to nearly $1bn a year, despite Labour coming to power suggesting that they would rein in this use of the private sector. Much of this is spent on the “Big Four” contractor firms – Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst and Young.”
What the hell has happened to left wing transformative change?
Since becoming the Associate Minister for Housing, Maram Davidson has issued just eight press releases and introduced no new laws, if Labour are missing in action, where the hell are the Greens?
You can not spend a billion dollars a year on the professional managerial class in consulting while 150 499 children live in extreme poverty, while we hand out 100 000 food packages each month while our suicide rates soar.
You can’t spend a billion dollars a year on consultants while so many are in material hardship.
Jacinda’s neokindness isn’t enough, if you aren’t forcing the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite into radical reform, they play you and stymie your agenda.
Jacinda’s neo-kindness is a cautionary political failure of obscene proportions.
To paraphrase Tennessee Ernie Ford,
You work 16 hours, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt St. Jacinda, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the the company store
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What a mess.
Labour are stuffed. There’s no escaping the enormity of the housing catastrophe in this country, and worse, the social housing crisis. Did our PM and Labours brain trust really think house prices could just keep rising and there would be no collateral damage? Did they think Nationals social housing policy would do? Did they think wasting hundreds of millions of dollars annually on motels was even moral, let alone a policy worth pursuing?
Labour have 3 big problems they cannot spin their way out of.
1. They’ve run out of time.
2. They have no plan.
3. And this is the worst, they now have this horror story as a permanent legacy to attach to their/Labours collective CV’s.
Who’d have thought a political party could single handedly ruin a city, a tourism gem like Rotorua and one who is apparently socially responsible like Labour was supposed to be but hey, I’ve seen it all now.
Predictably this is what will happen. Labour will announce a funding increase to Kainga Ora, who will be told this start buying up large off the private market. There will be no discipline here, it will need headless chicken policy. They will announce an end date to motels so far off in the future it will involve Mr Spock. And it is possible a Minister will be thrown under the nearest bus as a sacrifice!
But honestly, who wants to be remembered for their tenure in a government for this catastrophe? Not a good thing to go off to, to represent the UN now is it?
Here is a link to the Rotorua program. Great effort by Kristin Hall and the team.
https://youtu.be/dHtQ8ZN55l4
“2. They have no plan.”
This housing crisis – all political parties and the general public agree there is a housing crisis and kids should not be living in motels. (Or ideally anywhere they can’t play cricket and football on the back lawn).
Crisis response is required. There are 26,000 homeless. Identify 10,000 ghost houses, flats and apartments and let those 26,000 homeless people live there. Offer the ghost house owners 3 months to get in touch to negotiate an average rent. If they fail to be community minded in a housing crisis their property gets requisitioned by the government, a homeless family moves in, the property owner gets paid 25% of the families income direct from the government. The property owner still owns the property they just no longer have the right to manage the tenancy.
The trouble with politicians like Adern and Robertson is that they have spent their whole working life in politics.
They have no experience outside of parliament. You can probably pretty much guarantee that nearly all their advisors are the same. That is why the businessmen who tried to help the government during Covid fell out with them.
Ardern is successful because the media love her and her aspirations. To Ardern announcements are mission accomplished. If the MSM held her accountable and actually tried to verify what she has achieved things would be very different.
One example $88 million spent on truancy advertising encouraging kids to go to school. Problem solved because they are doing something. It is all complete virtue signalling.
But what sort of society would we be if consultants weren’t fed and housed and showered with praise?
So true, we’re not savages. I think what Jacinda is trying to express at the podium is we should instead strive to be change agents for the liberal class, at the very least we should give corporate welfare a chance. For the rest of us, just be happy with our capitalism and our kindness and our dreamy dreams.
Wrap around services for the rich + austerity for the poor = Big Socialism
In agreement usually with the likes of @Tiger Mountain, @ Xray, @Grey and of course @CB when he’s being charitable, the more the days pass, the more I think we might have to just accept things are going to have to get worse before they can get better.
Which shouldn’t mean Greens/TPM, and perhaps TOP don’t get a room and get their bottom lines together – they should.
Yet another example this morning of Labour’s complete “faith” in their officials. NEVER admit you might have been wrong, and NEVER apologise. Apparently they still believe it’s better to throw a few more spin doctors and spin at it.
Fuck it’s pathetic, but sort of amusing to watch – but that’s probably because I have the luxury of NO debt, I’ve divested myself of most assets to the next generation and I have an escape hatch if and when things really turn to shit.
So…………. ultimately ……….. , the PMC and Labour politicians it seems are going to have to get learnings the hard way (in this space, going forward) Even the best and brightest of them seem to have been captured
This is why the left must take notice when the working class hits the streets.
Having so-called liberals hiss and jeer and make wild claims about the far-right and wild conspiracy theories means the people actually being affected have no support.
These were the people on at the cutting edge. A razor edge – the pain is real and the blood is not special effects.
The middle class hysterically parroted their lines like a bunch of performing seals.
I’d not heard of ‘neokindness’ until just now. Ardern was silly to ever use the words ‘nice’ and ‘kindness.’ Too many can’t handle them.
We’re in a world where if a parent says they’re going to be a good, kind, nice parent and they then discipline their child, not allow them to do something or stop them from doing something, they get slammed for not being nice.
Ardern says we should be kind and nice to each other. Someone is a total arsehole and says or does totally shithouse things, Ardern says they shouldn’t have done whatever she is lambasted for not being nice and being a hypocrite because she suggested people ‘be nice.’
She has only ‘sort of’ told it like it is because she hasn’t actually said how the observed attitudes and behaviours of the people are ratshit and they are acting like arseholes.
I thing pretending to be nice is the problem.
“She has only ‘sort of’ told it like it is because she hasn’t actually said how the observed attitudes and behaviours of the people are ratshit and they are acting like arseholes.”
No but Bob, Cabbage and xbentX fall into that category.
Right here… right now NZ needs Winston Peters… he’s the only one left who knows how NZ was, should and could be.
“Winston Peters… he’s the only one left who knows how NZ was, should and could be.”
Too true. NZ was a fairer place with a mixed economy.
?