More Childcare, Bank review and Wealth Tax – why are Labour more conservative than what people are calling for?

This is going to be a weird election.

National are making inroads on Early Childcare and a demand to review Banks while tax surveys show people wanting wealth taxes to rebuild the country…

Government-commissioned survey suggests replacing fuel tax with wealth tax – and people love it

A Government-commissioned paper into replacing petrol taxes and road user charges has thrown up some politically awkward suggestions: wealth taxes, pollution levies, and charging malls and airports.

The reason for this awkwardness is that the Government has ruled out nearly all of these new taxes to various extents – and the Opposition doesn’t want to implement them either.

More awkward still is that the research paper shows that those new taxes, even the wealth tax, were widely supported by people questioned – although the sample used for the survey is small (436) and is not representative of the wider population like a poll, making it less useful as a measure of what the country thinks.

…you can’t call it ‘Socialism by Stealth’ if the whole country is screaming for it!

It’s this weird situation where the Labour Government is again flat footed because their own achievements in Welfare amount to nothing more than ‘it’s-a-first-great-step’ level press release from a Wellington Union.

Now let’s be clear, National’s child support and Banking inquiry won’t provide any off the real solutions the problems demand, but they are gaining political traction because Labour has done sweet fuck all in being transformative.

If Labour are to win this election, they also have to be pushing against the status quo they have managed for half a decade.

Jacinda and Grant were great in a crisis, but politically cautious domestically and that cation has seen us not live up to the promise of being transformative.

Chippy dumped the ideology for delivery, but he can’t ignore vision, and right now, Labour has very little vision and that is why they are open to attack on issues that are brand and butter Labour.

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