Marama’s train wreck AM Show interview
After shaking my head at the total lack of a media plan to boost the invisibility of the Green Party Welfare reforms, Marama has appeared on the AM Show and given a trainwreck of an interview.
Now firstly, I’ve detailed why no one on the progressive Left should ever appear on the AM Show or The Nation, it’s a tiny audience with one goal and one goal only, to use Gower Gotcha journalism to trip you up so a headline can be created for the 6pm news when there is an audience.
If you are going to appear you need to know it’s so you can be tripped up, so any political leader should be aware of that.
Apparently Marama wasn’t???
Duncan Garner destroys her once he realises she doesn’t seem to have any costings at all for the Welfare changes, which is bewildering.
Why wasn’t Marama briefed? Why didn’t Marama have the numbers? How on earth can you be in Government and not have the resources to be able to cost these things?
Time and time and time again the Greens seem utterly ill prepared for the way the mainstream media will trip them up, Marama should have been briefed, should have at least shadow boxed with her media people to work out how Duncan might trip her up and she should have been far more prepared than this.
Is this another example of incompetent staff or just blind stupidity?
Sigh – the Greens are great at virtue signalling on Twitter amongst their woke Twitter pile on clique but hopeless when trying to answer questions in the real world.
On the plus side, the Greens are only party who progressives can trust actually mean what they say.
How can they mean what they say if they don’t know the numbers?. Would you hire a builder who promised some fantastic work but fudged the actual costs? Or work for someone who had ‘vision’ but didn’t actually know the numbers?
they might ‘mean what they say’, so does the poor deranged guy who hangs round the library all day handing out his photocopied pamphlets, but how can they be trusted to deliver when they don’t actually know the details.
maybe they just employ woke lefties who don’t believe in figures??
Some of their so called friends on ‘the Standard’ seem more like ACT thinkers than Green thinkers, sabotage from the inside??
Seriously, if they have a policy at least price it…
In the Greens defence the things they ask for are fair and should be done, and are cost effective compared to policies like the winter energy payment and free tertiary education. it is not simple to cost each one as there are so many interacting effects– eg when they put up the benefits spending on hardship will fall. Joining the in work tax credit to the family tax credit will cost $450-500m pa– that ball park figure is well known. They did have their pre-election package costed.
We have a well paid WEAG to provide the costings of its final recommendations and how to pay for them depends on the TWG outcomes and priorities. But cost is not the main issue- the main issue is effectiveness in curing poverty.
If they’re educated its harder to exploit them. If theyre developing, education takes power away from arsholes. An educated mass is harder to brainwash than an uneducated mass. If you keep their goals, aspirations and knowledge simple then it allows you to control what they think to a large degree, it was how priests controlled people in the past before the English Bible, since only the rich could learn latin it made questioning the bible impossible.
Winter energy payments stop now, and I know many who used that extra bit to buy food rather than heat their home, as they would never have enough anyway.
This winter energy payment may have been well intended, but it falls well short of what is really needed.
“Marama should have been briefed”.
That is an utterly ridiculous as an excuse. If she had even an iota of competence, she should have already known everything she needed to say – it’s a simple core part of her job. Think about it for just a millisecond, and you’ll (hopefully) see why I’m right. She needs to be retired from any position requiring PR of any sort ASAP because she has lost all confidence at this stage.
Marama is one of the better ones, compared to most MPs, who has actually gone to WINZ branch ques on Auckland Action Against Poverty days when they provide advocates and get people their correct entitlements
Martyn is correct that the media are out to slaughter those that give them a millimetre of opportunity–Marama should know her costing projections and other basics such as the benefit poverty trap caused by ridiculously high abatement rates
really the line should be that in the face of precarious employment and AI, and the inability of society currently to provide work for all that want it…WINZ/MSD must be retired, moralistic witch hunts stopped, income splitting adopted, and some UBI/GMI seriously looked at–take the offensive
don’t buy into the “bennie bash” narrative any longer
Let us give the benefit of doubt to Marama. She forgot.
Ban one way plastic bags but allow emergency one way bags. Talk about electric cars but fail to realise the electricity generation would nearly collapse on the present day limited capacity, should all drivers switch to EVs tomorrow.
Next the Greens will start a campaign to hug a (loan)shark, as that will keep them from biting the vulnerable falling victim to them.
I am so ‘impressed’ by the present Green Party. Green Washing Party it should be called.
Re Marama: She obviously governs led by her ‘heart’, and hence money is not so important, it can just be printed and distributed, and all will be well. Problem is, teachers, ECE teachers, doctors, some other health service staff, police officers, various other public servants, and so forth, are all complaining, and demanding more money. Beneficiaries are ignored by most, they are ‘undeserving’.
Yet Marama wants to give them more, good from the heart, while Garner et al can see, the money cannot go where she wants it to go, it has to go to the public servants and so forth.
After nine years of tight purse strings and looking after the better off, the house of cards is collapsing. As I warned, this government, so desperate to take over the helm, fell for the temptation of power, and into a trap.
Labour and Greens should have let Nats gone with Winnie, case by case across the benches, and let the Nats govern into this disaster that is looming.
As they did not listen, they will get the blame for all falling apart, and will not get back in government for another three terms.