Labour’s political sins can only be forgiven by a radical 100 day Labour/Green/Māori Party manifesto
The horror of what has been revealed by the Sunday TVNZ program is incredibly dangerous to the Government who seem to be oblivious to the minefield they’ve bumbled into.
Rotorua’s Golden Mile obscenity is becoming Labour’s ‘Key’s kids in cars’ political moment and they don’t get it yet.
We know Labour don’t get it because the feckless Megan Woods is still speaking and trying to defend this.
If you are in trouble and Megan is still talking, you are really in trouble.
Labour’s bullshit neokindness which is all aspiration and not actual doing anything has its origins in Labour’s spineless attempt to get their agenda past the Wellington Bureaucratic Elites in 2017 and 2020.
Those mistakes can not be allowed to stand!
Labour have been overtly cautious and has refused to make transformative change because the Wellington Bureaucratic Elite refuse point blank to allow that, well with a Labour/Green/Māori Party, there are no internal checks to stop a genuinely populist Left wing agenda akin to Corbyn or Sanders from taking shape.
The Greens and the Māori Party should be meeting at the end of the year to decide a shared platform going into the 2023 election that they can force Labour to adopt.
This could be the greatest outcome for progressive politics since Savage.
While I am sickened by the lack of transformative change under a cautious Jacinda and Grant, the possibility of what they could be forced to agree to demands the Left once more rally to cause in 2023.
The most important political lesson I’ve ever learned in NZ Politics is from the Laila Harre School of change.
Back when she was in Alliance, she had to force Labour at gun point to agree to maternity leave.
Can you remember and imagine that?
Having to force Labour to give maternity leave.
Laila teaches us that if we ever want the fucking Labour Party to actually serve the people and not the vested interests of the Professional Managerial Class, then you need to smash Labour’s head against a wall, pout a gun to their head and scream ‘do it’.
That’s the only way Labour will act in the interests of the people, if you put a gun to their head.
There’s no point raising benefits, MSD and WINZ and IRD claw back not of that so the beneficiary is left with the empty promise of transformation, a better way to avoid the State clawing back anything we give poor people is to fully fund universal services.
Here’s what a Labour/Green/Maori Party Government should be committed to passing in the first 100 days of the 2023 election…
1: Feed every kid in NZ a free nutritious and healthy breakfast and lunch at every school using local product and school gardens with parents paid to come in and help. The slow incrementalism touted by favourite public sector for dragger apologist Max Rashbrooke isn’t good enough because the lower middle classes are feeling the same pinch thanks to mortgage rises and universal school lunches and breakfasts would help them as well.
2: 50 000 State Homes for life built using the best environmental and social architecture standards using the public works act to seize land and immediately start building satellite towns using upgraded public transport hubs plus Renter Rights – (rent freezes, end accomodation payments, long term tenancy arrangements)
3: Free public transport plus vast infrastructure upgrade for climate crisis.
4: 30% stake holder in a new Government backed supermarket operation run to provide lower food prices for kiwism better prices for supplies and better conditions for workers.
5: GST off fresh fruit and vegetables and essentials like tampons, toilet paper, condoms, oral health plus a sugar tax.
6: Free Dental services for everyone through public health.
7: Fair Pay Agreements that allow unionisation and real collective bargaining power for workers outside the tiny public service clique they currently cover.
8: Taxation focused on corporations and banks like financial transaction taxand first $20 000.
9: Offer nurses, teachers and Drs free education and living allowances in return for bonded time in our health and eduction systems.
10: Properly funded public broadcasting with TVNZ advert free and merged with RNZ alongside properly funded journalism through NZ on Air with more money for the Arts and Science. If you can’t have good public journalism, the right wing media will destroy these other 9 advances.
11: Refund night schools – One of the worst things Key did when he entered Office was destroy Helen Clark’s night school budgets. Sure that Italian Cooking class wasn’t generating Chefs, but the free night school classes allowed lonely disconnected people to have a social life. It allowed Schools to be used as community hubs and if well designed could become social health hubs and distribution points for community health outreach. We urgently need our people to have places where they can mix and mingle and engage because isolation sends them down fucking rabbit holes.
12: Legal Cannabis market to fund meth rehabilitation and create 5000 jobs and create quarter of a billion in revenue for the State plus remove cannbis crime from the Courts and Prison.
…Kiwis have to see a progressive Government ACTUALLY doing shit in the first 100 days or they won’t believe any change is coming and when you consider the economic maelstrom we are entering, the most vulnerable amongst us will be screaming for real change.
If we on the Left don’t offer voters real solutions to their material problems and instead prefer to micro aggression police the latest middle class virtue signals of hate speech, militant pronoun demands and screaming everyone is racist, we are fucked politically in 2023.
Labour’s political sins can only be forgiven by a radical 100 day Labour/Green/Māori Party manifesto
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As a matter of fact, free lunches were part of their 2017 manifesto, along with all the other stuff they’ve failed to deliver on.
As a welfare kid in the 1960’s in England I received free lunches. It was a big help for my mum and I certainly appreciated the food, but there was a bit of a stigma attached to it among the kids.
Renationalise the power industry and get rid of the remoras attached to it.
Remoras – that’s a good image Kiwij. Hangers-on cleaning up the droppings and getting a living keeping the body sleek and ready to go aren’t they?
Thank you for your outrage and positive ideas. I would like to add:
1. Free hearing aids – an expense, but a great help to so many, especially older people.
2. Free GP appointments and prescriptions.
3. Place all utilities under public ownership, and run with strong worker involvement.
4. Make worker shares and involvement a mandatory part of every business structure.
5. Repeal the Employment Contracts Act – that costs nothing.
To stop poverty in NZ – raise Wages!!!!!!! Saw this today,
“There are over 890 roles advertised on Trademe in the Waikato at the moment paying $50k and less. I know times are tough for business but team we have to find a better solution than barely minimum wage for skilled employees!”
Hang on, aren’t they crying out for workers there??? But not enough to actually pay rates like Australia!
It has been estimated that a family of four needs over double $50k, so no wonder more and more people are in poverty. Then we have the rest of NZ topping up the incomes of all these low end jobs and poorly paying but often highly profitable employers. Literally the jobs are poverty jobs not real jobs where people can long term survive on them.
The left abandoned NZ workers in NZ decades ago and like any Ponzi, we are seeing the results with massive increase in poverty and crime and less and less professional and talented people wanting to live in NZ.
NZ voted 2nd worst place to live by migrants! But probably top of the list of people to move too, for those who have problems (terrorists & crims & financial and health welfare for foreign pensioners) and need a country to look after them.
You don’t get prosecuted when you kill illegal workers here, and if found with them it’s a mere $2000 fine.
No wonder work quality is so low here for so many industries, and companies keep doing bust. Nobody can compete with near free workers who government turn a blind eye to.
Compare that to Finland.
Finland deported unusually many foreigners last year, writes YLE
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/17335-finland-deported-unusually-many-foreigners-last-year-writes-yle.html
Martyn, your dreaming these woke wankers in Labour won’t or can’t put together any decent plan for 1 day let alone 100 – afraid the Nat/Act mongrels will walk the next election.
For 1.2 billion they could have built 2400 $500K homes already or many more medium density three storey apartments
Admittedly there is a sea of negative outcomes for this government but…
A milestone of 50000 apprenticeships have been reached under a booster program.
The awful Steven Joyce created monster, the Public Transport Operating Model, of which cost savings were carried by bus drivers, has been scrapped.
There is at least a hint of light in the gloom.
Plenty of low paid jobs in NZ like apprenticeships that everyone else has to subsidise. Growth industry. Once they graduate, they leave for OZ, to get real wages. But construction in NZ is addicted to trainee, unskilled and illegal labour.
From employing 14yo’s to illegal workers. Then we now have pay more and more insurance payments for these operators.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/129802299/roofing-firm-to-pay-65000-after-worker-falls-through-brittle-skylight
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/illegally-working-overstayer-dies-on-the-job-acc-payment-made-to-widow-in-china/OWADEJMGCUYM36WLF6YNKUA2SE/
(Note they fine the firm employing the 14yo but not bother with the people who killed the migrant worker, as the government agencies seem to want to encourage illegal workers and immigration scams to continue in NZ).
It is properly paid jobs and working conditions that seem to be declining in NZ.
Thus leading to less and less people wanting to work here and more people on benefits and low wages.
Having been an apprentice and a tradey, we don’t all go, in fact most do not.
Not according to the people braying for more migrants at bottom of the barrel wages driving people out of NZ on higher wages. Tradies who are injured stay in NZ….
“The Immigration Minister is defending the decision to pay skilled migrant workers less than the new median wage requirement.
The median wage is $27 an hour.
Some of the new agreements with the struggling sectors could bring that down to between $24 and $26 an hour.”
https://www.indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/7/20431/new-zealand/government-backs-move-to-lower-pay-for-migrants-this-is-actually-a-positive-pol
Agreed X-ray. I did 5 years in Oz, and hated it. The money was great, but everything else was… meh.
A Labour / Green / Māori Party coalition would be comparable to a sinking boat made out of ‘all natural’ banana leaves with only a Maori allowed at the helm.
Co governance.
Maybe also the government could work out why crime seems to be increasing but police seem to hope it isn’t.
NZ’s Finest.
Body in burnt-out car for two days: Police told passerby it was a sheep
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/body-in-burnt-out-car-for-two-days-police-told-passerby-it-was-a-sheep/AICHYIXYOJDGCOQYHEQVYPK4TQ/
Martin, your list is essentially free food, free housing, free medical, free education, free transport, free, free free. Put this together with suburbs with high addiction to lotto and pokie, we get the picture of a society that expects all things for free, getting without putting honest effort. We just raise a society of underachievers. This essentially increases crime.
People who have lived life getting things for free have low self esteem, low self confidence, low self respect, and end up on the wrong side of the ledger. Their children will learn from them and continue the same cycle.
Free may he easy but is not healthy for the society. People only appreciate something when they have put honest effort to achieve it.
Socialism does not uplift human, it just makes them weak. Capitalism believes in survival of the fittest. Neither are successful strategies on their own.
+1 Benny. A good society helps those in need – in particular those who are disabled, sick, youth and the elderly, those abused.
A sick society wants to create a nation of need, helplessness, individuality and poverty for everyone, minimising those that harm others, while attacking those who are not in need as being bad.
There is a middle ground between socialism and capitalism. NZ seems to have a strange soco-capitalism, aka NeoKindness that is not working out.
There’s a difference between knowing how to do something and doing it.