Waatea News Column: Why Labour are slumping?
After saving NZ from the worst impacts of Covid, Labour have slumped in the most recent TVNZ Poll.
Why?
Firstly, this is the second Poll that shows National overtaking Labour, the Roy Morgan Poll had come out a week before the TVNZ one showing the same trend of National beating Labour so we can’t pretend the TVNZ Poll is a rogue poll.
Secondly, the TVNZ Poll attempts to counter the landline bias many polls suffer from by taking 500 cell phones so we can’t play the old ‘problems with methodology’ game either.
So what is actually happening?
Research suggests that Labour’s Covid response saved almost 3000 lives over 2 years so why the sudden change in popularity?
The Poll also asked if voters supported Labour’s actions on Parliament’s lawns against the protestors and a staggering 43% said no!
People may not have liked the protestors, but the right to protest is entrenched in our core values and Trevor Mallard’s extraordinary childish stunts didn’t help.
Add in Covid response fatigue and inflation eating into people’s wallets and you have a perfect storm of resentment against Jacinda.
I have said a thousand times that if the Left didn’t want the protestor’s economic pain to be manipulated by the Right then the Left should have done something transformative about those Parliamentary Lawn protestors’ economic pain!
Labour haven’t done anything meaningful about poor people’s economic pain.
Sure, Jacinda will list a whole bunch of tinkerings around tax credits and extra assistance but that presupposes all beneficiaries and working class people are certified tax accountants who are filing their paperwork monthly.
They aren’t.
The cost of living is skyrocketing and Labour have done nothing transformative in terms of housing, poverty and inequality.
In their anger and frustration, the poor have turned to a former CEO with 7 properties in the belief he will hear their pain.
If Labour wants to win back voters, they just have to live up to their 2017 promises in 2023.
First published on Waatea News.
They’re sliding as people are realising that they’ve lied to us for two years.
Closing the borders did save lives but what else did Labour do, or not do?
They failed to plan, anticipate or think about what might be coming down the pike. They went on holiday, literally went on holiday as Omicron was exploding across the globe. Then they realised they’d messed up so stole the property of others (RATs) to attempt to cover their failure.
As more and more people catch and then recover from what for most is a seasonal cold, they’re looking around and asking what was the last two years all for? Why did we drive our economy into the shitter, why did we cancel thousands of medical procedures, why are we forcing people to have invasive and novel medical treatment, etc.
Labour have no answers any more. I’m not sure they did before COVID. In fact, if it hadn’t been for COVID I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Labour would have been a one term failure and old mate Simon would be running the show.
Is it more that now the disruption of COVID has almost passed, the electorate is rightly recognising that this current woke, empathy driven and utterly impracticable bunch of student politicians are inept and that it’s time for the other lot to clean up the mess?
The other lot and what lot is that Yeti? Is it the lot that promised the low paid a $2.15 per week or 3.50 per week. Your other lot does not sound very promising.
Aa I go about my daily jobs, I am increasingly meeting people who volunteer their opinion on politics and so many express a visceral hatred of this Labour government, even some who voted Labour in the last election. That’s quite a turnaround!
Sure high taxes, high inflation and poorly targetted spending might get a mention in passing but what really gets people going is the blatantly racist direction the country is taking under this government.
Andrew this country was founded on racisms, colonisation equals assimilation equal racisms and discrimination can you get that into your pommy git head
Racism works both ways . There are plenty of reasons for Maori not to like European but we are here to stay so an effort to get on needs to work both ways and then we will all improve our standard of living .No one in this country should need special funding in education or health to move ahead
Were the lives saved lives of National voters?
My reckons are that there is something more fundamental at play (as well as all the above).
It’s that people are sick to death of being told one thing by the spin meisters and spin merchants when they are clearly witnessing and experiencing something completely different. The POLS and Meerkating people advising politicians and those ‘officials’. And when you couple that with those same folk NEVER ever admitting they may have got something wrong, the natives start to get very restless.
It was refreshing to see Nanaia Mahuta break from this tradition when she admitted she got a couple of things wrong with 3 Waters. Just as refreshing to see Tracey Martin being brutally honest over the weekend just gone.
They need to legalise and tax cannabis and soft drugs, putting the revenue raised and the millions saved on enforcing idiotic policy of prohibition straight into housing, child poverty, mental health and addiction services.
Decriminalize hard drugs and sell a safer regulated version (eg: swap meth for a Ritalin energy drink) via big pharma/doctor similar to how the methadone program is run. Dose taken at chemist in liquid form orally. Super strict regulation. Take the profit out of crime and gangs and offer broke gangsters well paid jobs growing, processing and smoking (testing) legal weed.
The higher funded mental health and addiction services thanks to legal weed will help prevent future child poverty.
Then we can all focus on climate change.
+1 Jimmy jazz
It’s fairly simple.
You, (Labour), said housing was a crisis and you had a plan to address it. You haven’t, you’ve fiddled and tinkered and it’s substantially worse 4 years later. Worse than that you now pretend it’s not a problem anymore and must utterances, (the few there are), make you appear hopelessly out of touch. And to this day you are still ignoring this growing herd of elephants in the room.
You said you’d build light rail, as part of an expanding network to Mt Roskill by 2021 to improve public transport in Auckland and as part of a greater drive to address climate change. You did nothing and it’s now 2022, and not a single millimetre had been constructed but you have instead come up with a horrifically expensive plan that looks precisely like the whole promise had been set up to fail. No one believes it will happen!
There are plenty of others.
You can’t campaign on big issues, then give up and pretend everything is ka pai! It isn’t! That’s why you are sinking and will continue to slip ever further down until you wake up and deliver!
All good. But, on one point it’s a YeahNah.
I think you’re misreading the poll result on government’s handling of the Parliamentary lawn protest. Yes about 40% disapproved but other polls suggest that’s because about half of that 40% thought the response was too SOFT. This is the faction that wanted ‘Cuddles Coster’ to send in the riot squad with batons and tear gas to follow. The other half, i.e. about 18% according to another poll, are the anti-vaxxers along with their fellow travellers of confused middle class mums and ‘stick it to the Man’ alternative lifers.