…We should be doing far more than criticising Israel, we should be kicking their embassy out and revoking their work visa status. Israel uses NZ as a safe holiday destination for their soldiers to chill out from all that oppression. We shouldn’t allow them to do that.
…when I look at the way NZ treats prisoners, beneficiaries and the mentally ill, I have zero confidence in any suggestion of state sanctioned euthanasia.
While Labour desperately work out how to sell the new prison build there to their activist base who are already disenchanted by the National lite Budget (I’ve suggested how Andrew Little should spin the new prison announcement here), we shouldn’t take our eye off the ball of what is happening in Christchurch Men’s Prison….
Our authority worship culture that is so intent on giving the Police any power to bash, chase and kill who ever they like just wouldn’t be acceptable in any other public policy field.
It’s like there is one rule for National and another rule for every other political Party, watching Duncan Garner chime in and support Simon Bridges in demanding no more political blame helps explain why this double standard is so endemic in NZ politics.
It has been a very long time since a New Zealand government has had an agenda of justice sector reform. In truth, justice has been run on the fuel of the agony of the victims of crime. It has been stoked by rage and fear. There has been little that is dispassionate or even that over-used phrase, evidence-based, about justice policy. To be honest, justice policy since about 1990 has been stark raving bonkers.
It’s appropriate that I give my view on our just released Budget. Already you have seen the misinformed and nonsensical views from the National and Māori Party on how ‘wonderful’ they were last time and how we ‘missed the boat’ this time. So let me tell you just how big the boat is that we have caught.
When the Leader of the Opposition can claim on TV that ‘trickle down’ works, you know we are a country still in the grip of neoliberal culture. The Left has become so distracted by Identity Politics they don’t have an economic class response to counter neoliberalism and Budget 2018 is the perfect example of this.
The government has decided to increase the building of state housing from their extremely modest target of 1000 a year to the still very modest target of 1600 a year over the next four years.
Housing NZ is not being given any extra money to do this.
They will have to borrow on private financial markets at higher rates than the government can borrow money for.
The cost to the government will be more as a result.
“Transformation” is a politically expedient and specifically misleading term. Labour knows the expectations are high and by describing it as the first of three budgets which will “transform” New Zealand, Labour is offering future hope from a government which has no intention of any transformation outside the rigid confines of neo-liberalism.