Why National are performing so poorly against a self mutilating Labour and why capacity is the real issue for 2023

The truth of the polls at the moment, is that despite enormous self inflicted injuries, National are not soaring ahead.

It’s like National and Labour are playing Rugby and Labour are all on crutches with one arm tied behind their back while National are only 2 points ahead at half time.

3 Waters, co-governance, free speech, all needless fuck ups while the real mahi isn’t getting done. The Labour wonks and geeks seem to think rearranging the bureaucratic structure of services is how we win continued electoral support, rather than focusing on the end user experience for those services!

When you go to the Emergency Department, you don’t care that the back room has been centralised, all you care is that you will be seen in a short amount of time and your care is safe and will heal you.

Labour have spent far too much energy doing Sim city rebuilds of bureaucratic reform and and not nearly enough on dealing with people’s material well being.

‘Well Being’ for Labour seems to be a Māori sign language advert produced in Wellington with a diverse cast of actors.

We have ended up cheerleading esoteric issues like land rights for gay whales.

People are struggling and things are getting worse, not better. Structural problems that won’t be solved by rearranging the bureaucratic deckchairs on the Titanic!

DESPITE Labour being shit at getting things done, National can’t crack 40.

There are three reasons for that.

The first is that while many are angry at Labour’s failure to be transformative, we are still grateful that Labour stepped up and saved us from a Covid pandemic that could have been far more damaging to us. Yes, many of the things we had to do in the spur of the moment have had costs, but so would tens of thousands dead so playing the hindsight game and claiming these current problems somehow eclipse the public health emergency response.

The first responsibility of the State in a Democracy – protect the people.

Jacinda did that, she has earned another term and if that means eating some dead rats, so fucking be it!

The second reason National haven’t cracked 40 is the naked reality that all they are coasting on is the animosity towards Jacinda that Covid has provoked. National have no plans what so fucking ever to get us out of the crisis we are in.

All they have are putting ankle bracelets on children, punitive welfare reform, mass immigration to pump up houses and ripping up everything Labour have achieved that will deal to the structural problems we face.

To wilfully destroy 6 years of Government with no real solutions to the problems that they were built to solve.

National have no vision, just ‘we hate Jacinda too’. That just isn’t good enough to justify winning power.

Our problems are too big for bullshit political theatre!

National have no solutions, only condemnations, that’s never going to get over 40%.

The third reason they can’t crack 40% is because of the intense polarisation of politics. ACT went from .7% in 2018 to 12% in 2022.

That level of political dislocation represents a radicalisation and polarisation of political debate in NZ. ACTs vision is hard right with a vastly  reduced  capacity of State.

And that is what this entire debate is really about.

What we saw during Covid was the desperate need for the State to have capacity to honestly deal with the problems we have.

The neoliberal experiment in NZ stripped the State down to its bare bones and the political Right have continued to strangle off revenue so people can’t expect the State to provide the basic services a liberal progressive democracy demands.

We need more capacity at our schools, our hospitals, our police force, our welfare infrastructure, our social housing even our armed forces!

We need MORE capacity, not less, and we need this extra capacity to be funded by a tax system that targets Banks, Corporates and speculators, which hilariously are always the biggest donors to the political right.

Capacity of the State to do the things we need it to do is the true political argument next year and the left keep fucking it up because they are too busy playing bureaucratic  semantics rather than making the argument to tax the mega rich to fund urgently needed  expansions of the State!

Why is the political debate in this country just so stunted and tiny?

The current debate is beneath the challenge in front of us.

 

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