English’s bland assertion that “government actually with a good record on addressing, in fact, some of the toughest social issues” is at variance with actual, real, mounting socio-economic problems in this country.
This blogger previously reported how Statistics NZ recently implemented a so-called “revision” which would materially affect how unemployment stats were counted and reported;
A person job-searching using the internet was “not actively seeking work“. Predictably, at the stroke of a pen, unemployment “fell” over-night from 5.7% to 5.2%.
TV3’s The Nation on 2 July was probably the most incisive investigative journalism this blogger has seen for a long time. The only “fault” is that The Nation is ‘buried’ at the ghetto time-slot of early Saturday (and repeated early Sunday morning). Mediaworks is wasting a tremendous opportunity to use their current affairs journalistic team as a critical lynch-pin of their broadcasting line-up.
At the stroke of a pen, unemployment fell from 5.7% to 5.2%. Simply because if a person was job-searching using the internet they were “not actively seeking work“. Which beggars belief as the majority of jobseekers will be using the internet. It is the 21st century – what else would they be using?
This government has done what few other Western democracies have achieved; a state of Orwellianism that Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and other dictatorships required unrelenting brute force to achieve.
So by the numbers, for this year;
As I have pointed out in previous blogposts, when threatened with bad headlines or a scandal of some description, National’s automatic defense is generally to default to one of three* deflections;
Blame previous the Labour government
Release story on ‘welfare abuse’
Blame Global Financial Crisis or similar overseas event
There are plenty of past instances of this kind of strategy.