Two days after two hikoi of 579 pairs of shoes (each) set off simultaneously from Cape Reinga and Bluff, bound for Parliament’s hallowed steps, the Chief Coroner announced the latest suicide figures for the 2017 financial year: 606.
Bill English and Paula Bennett admitted the new powers would stretch human rights laws, but would only apply to serious criminals who had ‘fewer human rights than others’ anyway, clearly misunderstanding human rights. We should be wary when the Prime Minister and his Deputy are prepared to trade off these rights as a pawn in desperate election politics.
Seven years on, Environment Canterbury (Ecan) is yet to return to full democracy but surely its chief executive Bill Bayfield can at least pretend democracy matters by not rejecting an artistic expression of a legitimate protest.
Labour need to continue the momentum but the biggest story is that with Maori Party and MANA still in this game, NZ First could lose their Kingmaker status.
National’s boast today that they wish to implement new powers against gangs that will ‘stretch’ human rights is another ghastly attack on the common good by floating ill thought out laws and using them to bait petty hates.
The mostly white male privileged broadcasters cried out that we have been tricked into a no policy debate. Tim Watkins, Barry Soper, Mark Jennings and Toby Manhire, names no one should know, have all clambered aboard tsk tsking with the lack of real debate.
It seems to me that the elite media opinion that the first debate’s civility was boring are just more out of touch comments by pundits lost by Jacinda’s rise and frantically flailing around for a narrative their cynicism doesn’t understand.
Day after day they take the real lived experiences of beneficiaries desperately attempting to live under our brutal neoliberal welfare state and they put them to artists drawings of the beneficiaries.
Most mainstream media journalists are boomers with property enjoying the rock star economy that National have built, they can not comprehend the struggles, pains, hope and aspirations of Gen Xers, Millennials, renters, workers or beneficiaries.
This clear popular endorsement of Ardern’s political tactics places the media in a difficult position. What social and political influence it retains is based largely on its representation of itself as the public’s first and most reliable line of defence against the banality, venality and downright stupidity of elected politicians. Without us, say the media, there would be no one to protect you from all this despicable trickery and all these terrible lies. You may not like us, but, by God, you need us!