The Case for the Left this Election (and the case against the Right)
With ACT’s attack on the mentally ill and drug addicts alongside their pledge to build a new prison empire for all the State Tenants that National are about to throw out onto the street plus Nationals plan to rob 2 year olds, public transport and climate funds to give rich landlords a $250 per fortnight tax cut is an affront to the very egalitarian meritocracy these right wing muppets claim to champion!
They want to take from the poor and give to the rich! It’s not trickle down, it’s trickle up!
They want right wing revenge fantasies as social policy FFS and voters seem more than happy to allow that because they can’t stop being angry at Jacinda and the Covid lockdown!
The crime debate is over who can put ankle bracelets on Children first, yet in the year ending June 2022, 175,573 family harm investigations were recorded and no one says a fucking word about that!
Ram raiding youth + 501 gang war violence and we are demanding new prisons, new patch banning powers and the desire to designate gang members as domestic terrorists but not a fucking word on the 175, 573 domestic violence cases ripping through our communities.
We are so fucking selective aren’t we?
The planet melts while ACT and National give their mates in the pollution industry another free pass to do nothing other than pay lip service.
We have 25000 people on the social housing wait list.
We spend a million a day keeping beneficiaries in motels.
In term four of last year, only 50.6 percent of students were regularly attending class
12% of children in NZ live in low-income households
55% of Kiwis are struggling financially
Home ownership is at its lowest rate in 70 years
We are facing the worst inflation in 30 years and there are 100 000 kiwis who are facing homelessness.
The Government’s borrowing requirement is set to dwarf pre-Covid levels. Westpac is now pointing to 6% OCR because of huge immigration pressures, that’s the umpteenth time in a row the economists have been wrong about an OCR peak.
Yes our economy has been malformed and warped by the Covid response, but all those screaming at those ramifications ignore why we had to take on that debt in the first place!
COVID!
It’s bizarre that Covid which has shaped all these symptoms in our economy and society, from debt to crime, is not mentioned at all!
It’s like it is Taboo to even speak of it!
This silence damages the Left because we are unable to explain why we are facing the symptoms of the cure we took to protect life in the first place!
We faced a once in a century novel pandemic. We had to make decisions that hurt and damaged many lives.
We all sacrificed for the greater good because that was the best means of dealing with a novel virus.
Were there mistakes?
Of course and there were consequences, and those consequences were worth the alternative which was tens of thousands of dead in a mass death event altho would have mutilated this nation.
Critics pointing at the lack of a mass death event as proof that there never was one ignores what we had to do to ensure that didn’t happen!
It’s the most idiotic argument!
The ease with which we rewrite the recent past, to determine with the luxury of hindsight that Covid was just a cold when it has killed tens of millions around the globe is sophistry.
3, 329 – NZ (population 5m)
24,738 – Sweden (population 10m)
9, 209 – Ireland (population 5m)
191, 586 – Italy (population 59m)
Those are the numbers.
That’s how many died from Covid and the population of each nation, compared to Ireland we are talking about 6000 lives difference.
That’s the price we sacrificed to protect as many people as we could, to leave no one behind.
There were sacrifices made that generated unequal consequences in an unequal society.
Labour’s mistake was believing society could just go back to how things were when things were so unequal, we needed the transformative change Jacinda promised but couldn’t deliver.
But the decisions made were courageous and righteous and saved 6000 NZers lives.
That’s a price that was worth paying then, and it is a price that any honourable leader would implement again if faced with the same situation!
Too often we ignore what was saved to rage against what went wrong.
Labour need to rouse that universal shared experience that was Covid and remind us all what we saved with those decisions and that the duty now is to see those challenges through.
New Zealanders leaned into Labour in crisis, because they see in Labour someone who wants to help them, where as in National and ACT they see someone who will kick them when they are down.
Chippy is likeable, Luxon wants you to like him.
Chippy and Grant will help you up on your feet and dust you off while Chris would lecture you about not falling over as David kicks you for being weak, however Grant and Chippy’s incrementalism musty be challenged by the radicalism of Greens and TPM if we are to meet the challenges in front of us!
These are the choices in front of us this election.
This election is becoming a grudge fuck election.
Voters are voting not on policy, but for malice, to hurt the ‘other side’ for all the imagined crimes of Covid, 3 waters and co-governance.
We are being tested this election on who we really are as a Nation.
One that fights for the people vs one that rules in the interests of the Banks, Corporate Farming and property speculators.
There are 3 weeks unto the 2023 Election.
If the Left Votes – The Left wins!
It ain’t over until the Fat Blogger sings.
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The best thing we can do for the NZ Labour party is to vote them out.
Re elected they will continue to to destroy the brand and give the finger to their base.
There is a chance they can reform but it could be a decade.
Yes it’s going to be bad, perhaps no worse than the Ruthenasia years but it needs to be done.
Accelerationism doesn’t even work in FPP democracies, look at the US electing Biden after 4 years of Trump and the UK about to elect Kier Starmer after 14 years of the Tories when both had the option of a true leftist in Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn… but it’s especially unnecessary here with MMP, if you don’t think Labour is left enough then vote Green or Te Pati Maori! Letting Luxon and Seymour come to power will not only cause a great deal more harm the next 3 years but it will make liberals supports so desperate that we could end up with a Labour government in 2026 that makes Jacinda look like Noam Chomsky
A new Third Party is the only way forward. The Parliamentary Labour Party have gerrymandered the leadership elections such that no insurgent candidate can ever win.
Accelerationism doesn’t even work in FPP democracies, look at the US electing Biden after 4 years of Trump and the UK about to elect Kier Starmer after 14 years of the tories when both had the option of a true leftist in Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, but with MMP it’s especially unnecessary as if you’re frustrated with Labour’s inaction you can vote for the Greens or Te Pati Maori.
Letting NACT win will not only cause so much more harm the next 3 years but will make liberals so desperate that we could end up with a Labour PM in 2026 or 2029 that makes Jacinda look like Noam Chomsky…
If the left vote, the left win!
I kind of like Chippy but he is doing the same as JA did and swallowing the cool aid of political spin doctors making himself more distant from what voters want to hear.
Attacking opposition before you mention a new policy in an interview is a negative positive. People will turn off quicker and not get to the positive. Start with the positive which people will hear first before possibly tuning out.
Also these lolly jar promises quite often from all parties fail one very important piece of information – when will they be up and running from/into what quarter/annual budget?
Labour seem to be promising a hell of a lot in bigger numbers now – I feel the PHARMAC and Dental will be this governments 100 Thousand Houses built but instead of Twyford it is Chippy.
Not sure the angry vote is as big as we’re told. Angry people make lots more noise than calm ones. I think there’s a solid central rump that just wanna see things done reasonably well, with proper oversight, by people who have spent careers becoming good skilled enough to do it. I’m not convinced that Luxon’s ‘rock solid’, ‘I’m confident’, ‘what I’m saying to you’ jibber jabber will wash for much longer. He’s clearly been well trained to obfuscate and avoid, and he’s expert at it, but heartland NZ don’t like flim flam operators. The Mike Hosking crowd are always going to vote for men in smart blue suits selling aspirational tickets to the car show, but there’s a central right wing part of NZ that’s reasonably asking Nact to make sense. They’ve got a few weeks ahead of themselves, they better start making some or they’re for the high jump. Oh. And. Welcome back Winnie – I could never vote your way, but hell I’m grateful to hear your voice in our polity.
Nicola Willis is so inept she will crash and burn our economy. Fortunately Robertson has such brilliance to help us through the toughest global economic times in our history. Clearly lost on those with little understanding of economics.
There has been some wasteful spending under Labour. And inflation did go up. But these two are not linked. Most inflation is imported, primarily in the high price of petrol. And much inflation was caused by the reserve bank propping up the economy in 2020-21, by putting in more money into it. These two main factors are out of the control of Labour. They were external factors. The Reserve bank and opec are independent entities.
Labour had some projects that never got started, and some that never got far enough, and that is what you have in a healthy democracy with a competition of ideas. It’s easy in hindsite to say what were good ideas and what were not, but democracy is the competition of ideas. If we were able to forcast which ideas were the best, then we would all be rich stock market investors, having never chosen a bad investment.
The competiton of ideas shows how democratic Labour is. The flipside is dictatorship.
But there are plenty of jobs advertised if people want to work.
NZs just don’t want to work, they’d rather be supported by the state.
Two well-worn phrases – sort of like a magic carpet that never wears thin because real people don’t tread on it, and it always is away from the gravity of real life and its myriad ruts that seem to have got deeper and harder to climb out of since the magic vehicle of commercial management has enfolded us in its choking fog.
Good analogies, similes whatever etc! Every right- or wrong thinking person must agree with me – because it is experienced by most of us, it’s true.
I was trying out my music tapes to see which still go. Just playing some Handel to widen my narrow musical palate. ‘Onmbra Mai Fu’ prompted me to look on Google for translation. And this wikepedia info is something to think on by us all in society floundering at the end of an era* – look for new ways to do things, improve on old ways, just don’t throw all away if it doesn’t work well – rework it and keep the good – just make it better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombra_mai_fu
…The opera was a commercial failure, lasting only five performances in London after its premiere. In the 19th century, however, the aria was rediscovered and became one of Handel’s best-known pieces. Handel adapted the aria from the setting by Giovanni Bononcini, who, in turn, adapted it from the setting by Francesco Cavalli.
All three composers had produced settings of the same opera libretto by Nicolò Minato. ..
“Ombra mai fu” (“Never was a shade…”), also known as “Largo from Xerxes” or “Handel’s Largo”, is the opening aria from the 1738 opera Serse by George Frideric Handel.
*End of an era : W.H.Auden wrote:
“Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth…”
https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
Nationals policies will be the death of us…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/133011480/auckland-transport-head-takes-swipe-at-national-leaders-on-speed-limits
Vote out light blue for royal blue. No matter what we get blue. NZ is doomed.
Winston and NZF are the only logical way forward this Election otherwise the lower socio-economic groups are going to get slaughtered the next three years by NACT.