Every election, we are told, is decided by "middle New Zealand". And depending on your outlet, this either means those who consider themself 'middle class', or the even worse, "centrists".
Today I want to talk about the middle class. What I'm about to say is not a new idea, in fact it's a significant tenet of Marxism, but under the nomenclature "Petite bourgeoisie".
There is no such thing as a middle class. It's made up. It's hard to pinpoint where, when, and by whom the term was coined, but it doesn't matter.
Do you know who is best served by the perceived existence of the middle class? The capital owning classes.
Previously we knew these people as the monarchy, the nobility, etc. It's the oligarchs. Bezos, Gates, Musk. But it's way more than that. It's the mega wealthy who don't 'earn' their money in the sense that it's not what they are personally doing or creating that's bringing in their wealth. It's the labour and wealth of others. Landlords fit under this category.
In reality, only two classes of people receive 'pay': those who work for their money and sell their labour, and those who get money from others' labour.
This is all to say that you are either working class or in the capital owning class.
And I'm 90% sure if you're reading this you're a worker.
I am a business owner, but I am still a worker (yes I have had staff in the past where the business has made money from their labour, but we're back down to the two co-owners). However, I have been tricked into thinking I am "middle class" because "working class" is such a loaded term. It's a tradie or someone in a role the middle class sees as 'below' them. We are the professional class who look down our noses at the workers.
The outcome is that instead of an overwhelming critical mass of working-class people versus capital owners, we have been divided.
This is how the perception of the leftist elite has been able to take such a firm hold. Because so many of us on the left don't want to be seen as being the grubby working classes, so we sit above them, tut tutting at the poor life they must be leading, while treating their existence as an intellectual exercise where decisions must be doled out for them.
We are the unwitting servants of the capital owning classes. Causing those who are comfortable being working class to hate us rather than both of us hating the capital owners.
We fucked up fam. We need to stop and think about what sort of world we want. Many people are comfortable where they are in the middle class, so they don't want to rock the boat to jeopardise that. If we genuinely started agitating, we fear we'd lose the trappings of our middle classness and slide down the scale to joining the working class—ewww yuck.
But fuck that. As people often say, you are far closer to being homeless than you are a billionaire, so stop supporting these fucking people as though they care about you. Or as though you're going to end up one of them. Bezos has just said that the once vaunted Washington Post will only print right-wing opinion pieces. A new major shareholder of NZME is a Canadian guy alleged to have previously funded Chantelle Baker. This is not going to help anyone but the capital owning classes.
After Luigi Mangione gunned down the insurance CEO in the US, right wing dickhead Ben Shapiro did a video criticising Luigi for it. Many of Ben's fans, MAGA folk, wrote that Ben was wrong on this one. That Luigi was not the villain in this story. One guy said "this is not a left-right issue Ben, it's a top-bottom issue". And look, aside from the queer undertones of that, it's the best distillation I've heard—some folk on the left need to grab that and run with it hard. It looked like real class consciousness might erupt in the US for a moment, but that seems to have fallen apart.
So all of this is to say that if we leftists want actual shit to change, we need to stop pretending that we know better than the "working class". We are the fucking working class. By continuing this charade of an imaginary middle class, we perpetuate a system that fucks over everyone except the capital owners. It's what helps them stay conquerors. Because after all, words matter.
So every summer, all the political nerds have nothing to nerd about, so they nudge each other and say that 'BBQ season is in full swing'. This is a suggestion that political parties will be off having their wee cliquey BBQs where leadership spills be plotted.
This is usually a fabrication and wishful thinking than anything else. We need that drama to spice it up during the lazy period from Gallery Party - Rātana. Very few spulls get discussed over this period; however the BBQ season 2024/25 may be a bit different.
First, it's usually the opposition that these BBQs are supposed to be happening at - and a few pundits have been saying that Hipkins needs to be rolled. I'll have some views on that later, but for now, he is safe. I have spoken to several folks in Labour, and nobody has given any inkling that there are coups afoot. Of course, it's helped by the fact that just about the only person who I think could be a good replacement has repeatedly ruled himself out of the running at this point in time and has also been given a role for the campaign that will see him busied.
But over at National, things may be different. There is an increasing view that the PM is not performing as well as he might be. There's a lot of internal angst and concern that polling numbers are heading in the wrong direction, that he's failing to resonate with the public, and that he doesn't listen to advice.
The vibes coming from National MPs are off. Now you might go "how the fuck would you know Dave? You're a lefty, they wouldn't talk to you". And you'd mainly be correct, but I hear stuff. People say the odd word to me.
The noise and vibes are that Waitangi weekend is the first major moment for Luxo and that if he causes "embarrassment" for National, then numbers will be counted. I don't know what that means. He's already said he's not going to Waitangi for Waitangi Day, but I guess if he gets overall negative coverage?
I don't think this is massively likely, however. It's still pretty early in National's term, and they have plenty of time to try and milk the recovery that is being promised (though forecasts are becoming increasingly anaemic, suggesting that the spirit of recovery is more likely to be more of a shart than a full-blown diarrhoea episode.
It also raises who might replace him. There are really only two viable candidates in National: Nicola Willis and Erica Stanford.
Nicola has often been touted as the heir apparent, and in fact prior to the election, many business leaders in Auckland were openly asking her to roll Luxo then. However, since the election, she has had a run of ... not victories. Some were self-administered, some administered by Winston, and some even handed to her by Luxo. I'm not sure if she's done damage to her brand, though I don't really know what her brand is like outside of Wellington. And it ain't flash here.
She, of course, lost her electorate race to Greg O'Connor, in an election that saw National sweep heretofore unwinnable electorates. She is also still not fully trusted in caucus (alongside Bish) for being part of the Muller coup that really didn't go well.
Stanford is an interesting choice. She hasn't gone in search of exposure or runs on the board, which suggests either a lack of ambition, a lack of confidence in ambition, or a cunningness in excess of most of her peers. She's been widely praised for her handling of the education portfolio - typically a poisoned chalice for National - even by educators. She's also Auckland, and seen as liberal which would be helpful if National was to retain the same voter base it grew massively in 2023. That said she's a bit unknown, and a bit inexperienced.
The other big rumour that keeps swirling is we may have a new Minister of Health shortly. The names I keep hearing are Collins and Simeon Brown. But I would be surprised if either of them got it. I say that education has been the historic poison chalice portfolio: health is as bad as it gets. It, for my mind, is where Labour should be going absolutely ham on the government. Whoever gets it will have a hell of a fight on their hands. And it's often one that's unwinnable as you can never spend enough, or pour enough resource, into health. There will always be a sick person who has waited too long to be seen, or someone give birth on a road because there was no room at the inn, or equivalent story.
I think we'll see how worried/cunning Luxo is if there is a new Minister with who gets it. If he is concerned about BBQs, and if Stanford is seen as a threat, then he may biff health at her. After all, Bolger did the same to Shipley in 1993. Didn't go great for him though, did it.
All of this is to say, there has been far more hubbub and excitement this bbq season than any I can remember. And while it may all come to nought, it may also take on a life of its own and become self-fullfilling. I guess we'll find out.
That US election was a shocker eh? All the vibes, all the mood, all the media, it all pointed to a Harris win. Some of the polling did too, but it really gave the Dems a Romney-2012 experience where he felt it in his bones that he was going to win.
I haven't really read any of the longer-form "why the Dems lost" pieces because I think it's way too early to be able to analyse that correctly, but what I have seen popping up a lot from pundits, reporters, and folks online, is this idea that the Dems went too hard on identity politics; that they focused too much on human rights for the trans community, that going so hard on abortion, a predominantly women's issue, was a mistake because it alienated young men. And so they need to bro it up and go on Joe Rogan. They need to stop being so goddamn woke.
This idea is fucking terrible. If you are a leftist in any way, then you cannot in good conscience argue for the above. It would help if you articulated how providing proper human rights, equity and outcomes for minority groups is good for the collective of workers. That class consciousness cannot exist without intersectionality. The fight for the rights of women, the rights of the trans community, the rights of anyone from the rainbow community, and the rights of people of colour all has to be fought and won. It's about acknowledging the differences in the way that others experience the world to just white men. And then it's articulating a world where you can say, "Hey, white bros, your inability to afford groceries, buy a house, pay the rent, is experienced more by other minority groups than it is the capital-owning classes. If you fight for the rights of them, you also fight for the rights of you, minority groups are not hurting you".
I think one of the most significant barriers to this use of class warfare is that the right wing is always going to be the party of capital-owning classes. And so many of us, perhaps even the majority of us workers, aspire to be capital owners. We want what they have. This means so many vote as if tomorrow they'll wake up flushed with capital—the temporarily embarrassed billionaire. But my guys, your billionaire friends are not going to help you. They want your vote and will discard you until the next election rolls around.
There are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them. And so we gather all of us who are hurt by capitalism and inequality - in all of its guises - and work to improve it for every one of us. We don't discard the fight for the rights of minorities because we think it hurts us electorally. That is such a morally bankrupt way to look at it. We fight alongside them, we fight for them, we fight to win for them. They are more my kin than Elon fucking Musk or Jeff Bezos ever will be.
So if you think the Democrats lost cos they went too woke, or the same here in NZ, that National/Act/NZFirst won because they courted the bigot vote then you are just further proving the adage that you scratch a centrist and find a fascist underneath.
There's an article in the Herald today about an older woman living in Karori who is leading the "revolt" against the rate increases in Wellington. And look, I get it. I live in Wellington, too, and yes, the rate increases have been a lot and made it harder to get by.
But...
The woman's rage is focused on the wrong people. It's not the current council's fault. It's not even the last council's fault; rather, it's been pretty much every council's fault since the late 1970s.
Boring history part
Hayek's economics gave birth to Milton Friedman's Chicago School of economics, which started to replace Keynesianism in most Western democracies in the late 1970s/80s. Everyone associates it primarily with Reagan, Thatcher, and, here in NZ, Roger Douglas.
Those of us on the left shorthand this theory to trickle down - make life cheaper for the rich, and the money they don't have to pay in taxes will trickle down like an inflamed prostate impacted piss all over the rest of us.
And so, low taxation became the mantra for nearly all governments in that era. Not just right-wing ones, either. French socialists implemented a form of Chicago School due to a deteriorating financial situation. The 1970s were shit for most places. Mainly due to the oil crisis, but many variables were at play.
And as with politics, whenever there are many varied problems, we find an overly simplistic silver bullet and fire it.
So for the last 45-odd years, particularly at the local government level, most candidates have run on a "we'll keep your rates low" campaign. And people have backed that approach. And the direct result of that is under-investment in infrastructure. Particularly, in Wellington's case, pipes. Because pipes ain't a sexy vote-winning thing to invest in. We can't see the pipes. We only even know about them when they are fucking out. As they are now. But for those running in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and even 2010s, not really a problem.
So we are seeing a direct result of a shitty low-tax political ideology from 45 years ago, showing up now because that'd be about how long you'd expect ageing infrastructure to last if it's not constantly being worked on.
So it's not that the recent rate increases are out of proportion and unfair; it's that rates have been artificially low for 40 years. And it just so happens that it's all fallen apart in the last two trienniums. It's taken more courage for this council to say, "We need to increase rates a fuckload because shit's expensive, yo" than it has for the previous councils not to make the hard calls.
This doesn't change how hard it is for the individual to cope with, and that's the hard part. This is not helped by the fact that we seem to only get media stories about ZOMG CYCLE LANES BAD instead of "this council actually ran on a platform, got elected on that platform, and is delivering on it—but also there's this other stuff that it turns out we haven't been paying for and actually need to, and it's about making hard calls."
This is true of so much of life. We in the West all benefit from fuckery in other places, like if you really dug into how much your TV should truly cost based on what's needed to make it and what a fair wage would be for the labour required to do it, we should be paying thousands more. But we don't. We're not. And we just quietly don't talk about it.
I said on Twitter the other day that I thought there should be a complete CGT that captures all profit on capital, including that of a family home. And in among all the shit-head replies I got, there were so many who said that 'you don't make people wealthy by taxing them more', and I think we've been tricked into thinking about what "being wealthy" means. Because for me, if I'm paying more tax, and as a result we have a proper fully funded health system, and a functioning public transport network that's free, and all the other things that high taxation should bring, then yeah, I'd feel pretty wealthy. But the prevailing individualism around "fuck you, I got mine" is so insidious and widespread that I don't know how to shift minds on it.
So yeah, Chicago School + campaigning on low taxation + nearly 5 decades, and this is what you get. Don't blame Tory Whanau. Blame tory doctrine.
Mainly by Gen Xers who love to define themselves as so chill and laid back. Not about 1990s music it seems.
But that line is also very tongue-in-cheek. For example, OK Computer is in my top five albums of all time; Slipknot's self-titled debut (1999) is also an incredibly influential album on me, it started my love of metal. There are plenty of perfectly adequate albums from the 1990s.
But music, eh? It's a funny thing. I think it's the greatest invention of humankind. We learnt to make a series of notes that tickle our aural sense and bring people together in a brand new community every time. I don't know if there is anything like it.
You know that moment at a live gig, where the band/singer players a song you love, and you look across the dance floor and catch the eye of some stranger who also loves that song, and you have a moment. There is real human connection that is forged in music that is dissolved by the cold light of silence.
I have used music as an escape for years. As a teenager, I was probably happiest (happiest? most content probably) lying on my bed, listening to a brand-new CD from beginning to end. It's one of my old-man gripes about streaming music. Getting an LP or CD meant you often found your favourite song wasn't the single that was getting all the airplay but some random song buried at track 11 that you could then brag about because other people didn't know that one and aren't you cool for liking the obscure track?
I suppose there are people who may do this with streaming albums. But I don't.
Anyway, this was all a roundabout, beginning to talk about sad music. I mentioned OK Computer above. Exit Music (For a Film) is my absolute go-to sad anthem. Angsty Dave, who was diagnosed with bipolar at age 16 (it was still "manic depression" back then), would sit on his bed, wistfully staring out the window and listening to that song on repeat.
I find beauty in sad music. I know some people who just straight-up don't listen to it at all. And that's fine. I love it. I also love listening to it when I'm not feeling sad too. Sometimes it's just nice to have on.
Usually, a song is sad/happy/whatever, because we attach an emotional event to it. So, for me, Coldplay's Yellow and Love Is All Around by Wet Wet Wet (shut up) are very tied to a breakup I went through as a 16-year-old (in my defence, they were on some Now...That's What I Call Music equivalent CD that I had just bought when the breakup happened so I stumbled into them). And so now, over 20 years past that breakup, where I don't feel anything at all about it, where I haven't even thought of the girl in most of that time, if I hear those songs, I'm immediately taken back to my angsty teenage days where I would sit and pen angsty teenage poetry (committing to rhyming poetry, especially the one that talked about "suicide" rhyming it with "on my bike I'll ride".
I don't think there are many things that immediately drag me back to a moment in time, an age, an era of my life, or a feeling I once felt.
And there are other songs that I view as inherently sad. I mentioned Exit Music above. There is no specific event tagged to that song for me. It just sounds fucking sad (no, the end credits of Romeo and Juliet was not a triggering event for me).
But these things are different for every person, aren't they? I don't think there is a song that is objectively sad (maybe Exit Music or something by Leonard Cohen), actually I'm not sure you can claim any emotional response has an objectivity. That's what objectivity is, Dave you egg.
Many years ago, when writing under the Ruminator pseudonym, I'd do these curated Twitter playlists where I'd ask people to submit a song to add, and there'd be a new theme every time, so I'd produce Spotify playlists like Worms for the Ear, and Music to Pump You Up.
I thought that might be fun to do again.
And because my mental health has been in the toilet in just about every facet of my life, work, play, family, etc (probably still is but I'm working on it)(I'll eventually work up the courage to write it all out), I wanted sad songs. So why not ask the people foolish enough to follow me on that godforsaken platform.
I've taken a very light-touch approach to deleting songs - only if they're obviously not in keeping with the theme (thus, I'm dictating that there is an objectively not-sad genre?), but why a song is sad to you is not for me to know or understand.
There are songs on that list that I absolutely do not consider sad. In fact the highlight of these is that someone put Nick Cave's Into My Arms as a sad song. Which I can totally see why. But I have a very happy association with it.
It's the song that Kim walked down the aisle to for our wedding.
For me, that's a happy song. For the person who added it, it's sad. And that's ok with me. Unless it was Kim that added it, in which case we may be having an awkward chat at some point in the near future.
Through this process, I have discovered so much new music, which is hard when you're my age. Other than this playlist, the music I've found in recent months came via a dear friend who works with me and is much more youth-adjacent. They played Chappell Roan, Cobrah, and Charli XCX's new album, brat for me. But this playlist has taken me to some wild places.
John Grant. Heard of him? I hadn't. Incredible musician. Incredible range of songs. There's one in particular I've been thrashing: Queen of Denmark. To give you a flavour of me, I can't work out if I love that song because it sounds like Queen, or a bit of Muse, or it sounds like it might come from a musical, but I love it.
So the meandering point of this post is that I'd like you to keep building out this playlist with your sad songs. I know of one friend who has used this playlist to have a cathartic cry in the shower. And that might sound bleak and awful. But sad is just as valid an emotion to feel and express as any other.
My age was taught that we should always strive to be happy. But the world forces too many negative externalities on us, and also it's just not healthy or possible to be happy all the time. So have a cry in the shower listening to Sharon Van Etten's Every Time the Sun Comes Up. Sit on your crisply made bed staring out the window listening to Another Love by Tom Odell. Drive about 10kph under the speed limit belting out Everybody Hurts by REM*.
Go, add to the sadness. Enjoy the sadness. Be happy with your sadness. Sing along with your sadness.
Whenever an event of political significance occurs, pundits spring forth. They are there, afterall, to help us make sense of what just happened. Or rather we are there to help you make sense. Because through my various media engagements I consider myself as having pun-did.
I can recall vividly doing Newshub Nation. And John Key had done a pre-recorded interview with Lisa Owen. Following the interview we three chucklefucks who made up that days panel wandered the short walk from the fruit platter in the green room to the buzzing neon of the studio.
We all sat round the table. People fiddled with our microphones. I tried to sit in a way that looked engaged but like I should be there. Maybe tuck my shirt in a bit more if one of my stomachs was in portrait mode for the camera. And as we leant forward to spouse our take on the very banal interview that had aired 4 minutes ago it dawned on me that I was adding nothing. I possessed no special insight that could help the viewers, who had watched the interview now 5 minutes before, make relevant whatever soundbites Key had said. I didn't suddenly draw Key's malapropisms and blue sky thinking down to the people of suburbia, of Ruatoria, of Queenstown, of anywhere. I was adding content.
And of course it was all content about how people would react to it. And that's what we pundidded. Oh this event happened, and we expect that the people of New Zealand would react in this particular way. But who are we pundits, if not the they? Why do we divorce ourselves of the voters and project a different reaction as though we are elevated and different? The they are below us. The they will have watched Key speak, and they will be confused because the they is not us. We work in politics. We know the real meaning and thus we know how the they will react. Listen to us, they, for we are the magi of political discourse. And other pundits? Why your framing of Key's interview is now done by us. You will write column inches that will also tell how the they will react. And your theys may be different to my theys, but deep down, we all know they must be told how to react. We are the people in cars, complaining in concert of the traffic jam.
And so it is that the attempted assassination of Trump has brought forth the mecca of pundidding. So many people of pundit classes, telling everyone how the they will react.
Most seem to think the they will rally behind Trump. That the image of him, fist aloft, Star Spangled Banner fluttering as though posed for a moon landing behind him, bloodied ear like a Trojan Hero, will give people the strong man they crave.
And I mean sure. It might. But it also might scare the hell out of a lot of theys. I know it scares me. And when I'm scared do I want a leader who promotes scary words? Maybe I want the kindness and gentleness of the softly spoken other guy. Who is neither kind, nor gentle, but is in comparison.
Maybe it doesn't actually make a difference. That my views of the candidates are baked in. Or maybe I don't care. Is Trump being shot at good? No. Does it help me with affording food, or my job, or putting shoes on my kids feet? Also no.
So much of politics is how things feel to pundits who tell they how they'll interpret it. And so much faith has been lost in our political systems. Because politics is no longer of the people, but of the vibes. Trust me. I know.
I've been involved in some super intense and heavy work for the last 5 1/2 months, which has pretty much eaten up all my time. I am genuinely sorry and should have been writing more - if not for anything else than my mental health, which has taken a battering.
I'll write in more detail about that another time; but today I want to talk about framing.
So I'm a PR and communications guy (not a lobbyist despite what many would have you think)(which isn't to say I don't do any work that might be considered "lobbying "; it's just a tiny portion of what I do).
But when I tell people I work in PR or communications, they immediately think I'm some slimy spin doctor. Sure, there is an element of that. But I think that people in my industry ironically don't talk about what we do very well.
When you want to communicate with someone, you usually think of only what you will say. Where I come in is I help make your audience understand what you want them to say.
Saying stuff and having your audience parse/understand/feel/think in response are often very different things. And when you're communicating to try and change behaviour, this is very, very important.
As people, we are driven by emotions more than facts and logic. Facts don't win arguments. Feelings do.
So if we want people to do something, we must tap into an emotion. In the media training I do for clients, I talk about this and how in the political context, most politicians are rat shit at talking about something that pulls at heartstrings. Politicians talk about policies a lot, but then they don't get to the outcome of those policies - and the outcomes make us feel. And the most powerful feel of all? Hope.
As part of that training, I talk about how, in the 2016 US election, Donald Trump was actually the candidate of hope. For just enough people in the Appalachian regions, he convinced them that he could bring back their coal mining jobs, factory jobs, and various other blue-collar jobs that foreigners had taken. He made those people hope. Whereas on the left, we tend to get all technocratic and explain our policies in great detail, as though that resonates.
This is all a very long-winded intro to talking about climate change. For as long as I can remember climate change getting consistent mainstream coverage, we've used the language of fear to talk about it. Painted pictures of floods and fires and devastation. Surely our political class and our citizens would be too terrified of such a future that they'd just course to avoid it. And ... not really.
Fear is an interesting one. Because it is an emotion, but it's also not very good at driving long-term behavioural change. If you are old enough, you'll remember the 1990s drink-driving ads (if you drink and drive, you're a bloody idiot). They were all filled with smashed cars and flying corpses etc. But then they did a lot of research into what's called 'social marketing' and found that fear can drive behaviour change. But only in the immediate term. This means if you were going out that night and saw that ad just before you left then sure, you might not drink that night. However this wouldn't last and you might be drinking and driving next week.
What does drive behaviour change, though, is that word hope. And aspiration. So that's why those ads are now primarily "if you don't drink and drive you're a legend", because while fear stops us from doing something that instant, hoping to become a legend gives us something to aim for. It lasts longer.
So if we apply that to climate change, instead of focusing on the potential disastrous environment we're facing; what's the positive of acting? What is the future state we can hope for if we only do XYZ? Is it children swimming in pristine rivers with their parents? Grandparents taking their families for a walk through densely populated forests? People living great and wealthy lives by working in the clean tech industries? We have the tools for this, we're just not using them.
But the biggest problem here is that this doesn't actually address the root cause of climate change. Which is profit and capitalism. At the moment, it's still more profitable for big polluting companies to continue to pollute. And what those companies have managed to do is individualise the problem. So we turn on each other for driving an ICE car, or not taking public transport, or using a plastic bag at the supermarket, or flying somewhere.
So while there is still a lot that our politicians and citizenry can do about climate change, there is far more that those corporations can be doing (or not doing). And so how do we get them to do that? Well we can either make it so that being clean makes them more money than polluting does. Or I'll make an exception and we'll allow fear. We need them to fear us. And the way we get them to do that? Why we show just how well fed all the people of a country will be if they just eat the CEO of ExxonMobil. I sure do hope there's enough food to go round.
I find it really sad. Golriz is a friend of mine so this one is personal too. What she is accused of doing is definitely bad, and it is definitely not behaviour we expect from MPs.
I don't want to relitigate this specific incident, other than to say that I think the Greens, and Aotearoa's parliament is worse off for not having Golriz involved anymore.
But I want to ask if we are doing politics the right way.
I've done a bunch of reading about how western political theatre is set up in a way to benefit men (or rather the way we socialise men), in that it's adversarial, fighty, punishing, etc.
Dame Jacinda said she wanted to bring kindness back into politics and it worked to an extent. But then she was on the receiving end of probably some of the worst vitriol and abuse any NZ politician has faced.
Golriz would be the only one who would be within coo-ee of the amount of threats Jacinda faced. Ever since she got in to Parliament Golriz has faced death threats, sexual violence threats, racism, etc. She's had to get security protection due to the credible nature of those threats. There is no way that being exposed to that sort of abuse regularly wouldn't have an impact.
Before that there was the unreal harassment that Metiria faced too, for admitting she had to commit a crime to feed her whānau.
This ain't it.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, I did an interview with the Guardian where I said the following:
"A huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold"*
Smug old me thought that NZ had managed to avoid the worst excesses of American politics, and I thought that was because we had a media that, by global standards, was pretty solid, and straight up and down.
It turns out we hadn't avoided it. We were just a few years behind.
The way that politics seems to take good people, chew them up, and spit them out just ain't it. It means that the people who do get into politics will need to be a very specific type of person to survive and thrive, and I don't think that homogeneity of politicans is healthy for a democracy. It's supposed to be representative. There are plenty of kind, decent, softer people in New Zealand. And Parliament just doesn't seem like it's designed for them.
It's become increasingly acceptable to talk about the mental health burdens we face - I've spoken about my own battles with anxiety frequently - and I think we should commend MPs for being open and frank about it. Todd Muller, Kiri Allan, and now Golriz in recent times.
But we also need to ask why are MPs facing these sorts of crises - does politics attract the sort of person who is vulnerable to mental health issues, or is politics something that exacerbates, or creates, those issues?
I don't really have a solution. But I think we need to think long and hard about it. Yes I know that politicians earn a lot of money (relatively speaking), and so one may argue that they are paid to weather it, but other than maybe sport, there is no other vocation where it seems ok to bay for blood and demand someone resign/be fired like we do for politicans (and I've been guilty of this myself). What's that going to do to your sense of self when you are individually being attacked constantly?
Social media certainly has a role to play - it has enabled people to have a direct line to politicians who are silly enough to be on platforms like X or Instagram (note to politicians, get off social media. No good comes of it). But I don't think this is the root cause of the problem, it's just a way of making it worse.
I hope that Golriz is ok. I hope she's looking after herself. I hope she's surrounded by good people. I hope that the rest of the public give her space to get better. And I hope we figure out a better way to do politics. Because the current system seems like it's failing most of us.
*that quote is probably the most successful thing I'll ever do in my career. It absolutely took off and went viral all round the world. Steve Kerr (coach of the Lakers [edit: it's the Warriors, not the Lakers]) tweeted it out, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about it on a live-stream she did on Twitch, it was massive. It ended up being paraphrased and erroneuously attributed to Jacinda Ardern which was hilarious (there is even a Snopes article debunking that it was JA who said it!). It still periodically shows up on Twitter, usually attributed to Jacinda. Sorry!
This has taken a while. I have wanted to say something on the Israel/Palestine situation since October 7, but I have been afraid, and unclear of my own feelings.
For context, I'm Jewish. Insofar as my mother is Jewish, and if that's the case then you're locked in the club for life. I don't observe anything to do with the Jewish faith. I am probably considered an ethnic Jew in that my bloodlines go back through Jewish people.
I'm 11 years old. We have Sky News at home, and I see Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. I don't know why, but I'm very upset by this. I have no perception of the importance Rabin played in the peace process. I don't even know what the peace process is. I understand very little of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
I'm a teenager. Every time there is news about conflict between Israel and Palestine I arbitrarily side with Israel. I think it's because I'm aware that I'm Jewish, but I do not practice anything in the Jewish faith. I understand very little of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
I'm at university, I've learned a wee bit about Israel through talking to some fellow Jews. They often speak proudly of the homeland and their right of return. Many have done a trip back and done military training with the IDF. My politics are nowhere near fully formed, I still supported Labour for Pete’s sake. I understand very little of the Israel/Palestine conflict,
Into my mid-twenties and I try to learn and understand more. I feel some kind of emotional tie to Israel, but I don't know why. I assume it's because I'm aware I'm Jewish. I often wonder if I'd feel that tie if I didn't know I was Jewish. Is there something hardcoded into my DNA to feel attached to Israel? Or is it purely an arbitrary association because I've been told I'm Jewish? I do not know. I continue to understand very little of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
It's 2011. We're planning for my wedding. My mother asks if we'll stamp on a wine glass. I say no. She is hurt. She thinks we should as a nod to my Jewish heritage. I don't want to for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I feel like it'd be more disrespectful to do it because I don't observe any other Jewish ritual or faith-based activity and it felt tokenistic to do just one thing. And secondly, my wife comes from an Anglican background, and we'd already agreed we wouldn't have any Jesus in the ceremony. I couldn't very well sneak in some Jewish shenanigans.
It's 2019. My grandma passes away aged 99. I'm in my mid-thirties. We fly to Melbourne for the Levayah. Except it's not a Levayah. We don't sit with grandma's body. We don't follow many of the rituals associated with death in a Jewish family. What even is Jewish faith if not to be observed? I wear a kippah for the service. The rabbi says the El Male Rachamim. I feel nothing.
It's 2022. Anti-semitism has definitely been on the rise. I keep my Twitter DMs open in case people want help or to share something with me and I don't follow them. I get a DM that I read while I'm stopped at a red light somewhere on SH1 as I drove to Auckland. The DM said that they were making a list of prominent Jews in New Zealand and that I was on it and that they'd find me. I had to pull over to recover. I feel scared.
It's October 7, 2023. Hamas has launched an horrific attack against Israel. Over 1000 civilians are murdered in the terrorist attack. I feel sad and confused. I still do not understand the Israel/Palestine conflict.
But I know one or two things. I know that events do not occur in a vacuum. I know that 1000 non-combatants being murdered is horrendous. I know that several hundred Israeli civilians being kidnapped is awful. I also know that Israel is not going to lie down and let that happen. Despite the fact that so many Palestinians have been taken and held. For decades.
Someone from Israel says that this is their 9/11 and I think they are far more accurate than they realised. That like 9/11 a bunch of innocents have died because of long-standing government policy. That Israel has marginalised and kept captive millions of Palestinians and displaced them from their homes for decades. I know that people don't just let that happen. I know that Netanyahu is a bad man and that the murder of over 1000 Israeli innocents will not go unpunished. I know that there is no justification for the murder of innocents. Just like there was no justification for the death of 2,977 in 9/11. But I know there is a reason why Hamas attacked, like I know the reason Al Qaeda attacked.
I also know that like 9/11, Israel had a choice in how it responded. That the US chose to overreact and attack countries that had little to do with the attacks. Despite the main funding of 9/11 coming from Saudi Arabia, it was Afghanistan and Iraq that were on the receiving end of the US' wrath. That millions of people died over 20 years to satisfy a bloodlust that didn't bring any of the 2,977 people back, and it destabilized a region seemingly forever.
Even Joe Biden said that Israel should learn from the mistakes the US made following 9/11. Israel has chosen not to. I have read that the bulk of the leadership of Hamas live in Qatar. Israel is bombing the fuck out of Gaza. An effective camp where millions of people are trapped (I see this described as Palestinians being kept in a "prison", but a prison suggests that the people who live in it are guilty of something. I don't believe the Palestinians are guilty of anything).
The hospital became something I obsessed over. I felt like I needed to know who did it. I initially assumed it was the IDF. They have form. I remember the journalist who was sniped last year. The IDF denied it happened, then said if it did happen, it must've been a Palestinian who did it, then several months later they conceded they did it. Surely this must've been them again. But then I saw people who I thought were independent posting pretty compelling evidence for how it must've been a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Jihadist group. I saw people from both sides being absolutely certain who did it. I didn't know how they could be so certain. I have never seen propaganda play out in real time like this. I was confused. I felt disoriented. I have never experienced a confusion like that. Was it because I'm Jewish that I wasn't just wholly sure it was the IDF who had blown up the hospital? I kept asking myself why. I didn't have the answer. Why did it matter so much who did it? Dead innocents are dead innocents no matter which side. I was obsessed.
Then I would read news stories about some wild anti-semitic attack. The plane attack in Dagestan scared the fuck out of me. It felt like bad-faith actors were using this outpouring of support for the people of Palestine to drum up anti-semitism. Being anti-Israel's government is not the same as anti-semitism and we need people to stop pretending it is.
I have never been concerned about anti-semitism in New Zealand, but now I am.
I feel scared.
I have tweeted my support for the Palestinian people. I have also tweeted out my fear for anti-Zionist Jews who are being attacked too. I have been attacked by both sides of this for not being "enough" on one side or the other. I have been told that some of my comments have made people in the Jewish community "sad". I don't really know why. Am I supposed to give a full-throated defence of the death of thousands of innocents because a terrorist organisation attacked a group of people that I have a connection to through lineage?
I see western governments all saying they stand with Israel. And that Israel has a right to defend itself. But this seems to imply that Palestine doesn't have a right to defend itself? I know that the Hamas attack on October 7 is terrible, and people must be held to account. But thousands of innocent lives? Refugee camps? Hospitals? They should not be targets. Even if Hamas is using "human shields" like Israel claims.
If someone broke into your house and took your child hostage, then the police showed up with their guns drawn but the hostage taker wouldn't release your child and the police just shot your child so they could get at the hostage taker, you'd be pretty upset. If the police just shrugged and said "sorry, he was using your kid as a human shield, that's why we did it". It wouldn't really placate you, would it? It's not a fucking reason to kill innocent people.
There are marches in the street. Both sides are mobilising. For what, I do not know. The world feels so fragile. I am scared for the world. I am scared for oppressed people. I am scared for my people. I am scared for my family.
I understand very little of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and it seems like most don't.
This piece has been written by my colleague and dear friend, Tasmin Prichard. It's pretty good. If you like it, I might invite them to write other pieces. If you don't, I still might because fuck you it's my Patreon.
An election is the government’s way of focus-grouping itself. Every three years it asks: how should we run this country? Every three years, we tell ‘em how we think it should run. But where do our beliefs come from?
Let’s start with voting itself. Yes, it’s the only real way one person can influence how the state affects us. No, this isn’t me pressuring you to enrol. We already have increasingly chaotic incarnations of the Orange Dude doing that. But all of politics, all of the noise, drama, spectacle, comes down to voting. It’s the act of describing - and aligning - our collective identity with our ideal society.
That’s because a few months before the election, out of all the party machinery comes a whole bunch of ideas thrown our way: free dental care, tax cuts for mum and dad investors, more school lunches for kids. Some ideas are good, some are shit. They all say: “this is what is important.” Ideas all tightly bound up in finely tuned political messaging. Which ones appeal to us? What sounds good? Which appeal to our sense of identity?
Bad news though. Those ideas don’t matter too much. Because unfortunately for ideas, we’re more attuned to people.
We vote for the person on the TV that appeals to us the most. And not just how they look on camera, but by closely taking in who they are, their background, and what they stand for. Where they stumble or sound a bit meek, and when calm, authoritative, stern, tough, funny, or irreverent. When they seem like someone you could have a drink with. At least some of our politics comes from our gut-biome-litmus-test-vibes-check on who’s most likeable.
More widely it doesn’t usually pay to get into the whole psychoanalytic underbelly of what sort of leader-avatar we prefer - a kind auntie, a stern old man, a cool girlie, a wise elder. But I must say picking between two middle-aged pākehā men named Chris feels like the panopticon, where we’re all being carefully studied by one omnipresent prison guard called the Electoral Commission.
Imagine a farming family from Southland. Long history of two proud blue ticks. That’s the environment. But artsy daughter moves to Wellington from Winton, dyes her hair, meets a cute girl at uni, comes out, and votes Green? Her sister moves to Invercargill to work, meets a handsome man, opens a small business, volunteers for the Sallies, and votes National? That’s politics, baby. That’s identity, culture, and politics all rolled into one.
Similarly, while we often hear stories of young people moving their politics to the left, especially during university, it’s not a one-way road. A centre-left, Labour/Greens voting family might produce a pro-small govt, ACT-voting commerce graduate. Either way, it’s clear that politics begins in the family. We might have a Greens-voting father or a National-voting mother. Then we grow, we learn, we move out. Once we’re 18 and election year rolls around, we make a choice: stick with what we’re told, or rebel? At 18, we are imbued with the rights of an adult. That means our political identity - our vote - suddenly means something. Our ideas about the world are suddenly valuable. Democracy is weird.
But still. What dictates our vibe? Where do our politics come from? The answer is that we actually *do politics* all the time. We do politics by filtering our identity through the world and seeing what sticks. What do we accept? What do we abhor? What do our mates say? Our partners, our parents? All of that filtering lead to choices about our discussions, arguments, friends, enemies - plus our hairstyles, dress sense, hobbies, music taste, and pretty much everything else. It’s a swirling, oily mass of identity like a blue-purple-gold oil stain in the supermarket carpark. That is to say, messy, ugly, beautiful.
So even if you’re not ‘about’ politics, politics is about you. It’s made up of your identity, your environment, and your subsequent choices. Voting is making a statement: this is how I think the world is. This is how I think the world should be. And the process of surveying everyone’s politics on a national scale? That’s what an election is. Asking a country how it thinks it should be. And the answer is based on our individual and shared identities, which are evolving and changing every year - every month, day, even minute. Politics is a crystallisation of our whole life, and casting a vote is a flash of light, reflecting colour.
TV3 hyping its poll as a game changer suggests it will show National is going to need NZF and ACT to govern, which will be a shit show. But also, is NZF really going to support repealing of the foreign buyers ban? Noted lover of pro immigrants, Winston Peters?
Without the repeal of that, National's tax plan is even more farcical and has even less chance of happening.
Which means no tax cuts.
Which means Nicola Willis has to resign.
Jesus wept if that is the government configuration then it is going to be so fucked.
After Debbie and Marama's show of cooperation in the minor leaders' debate, Labour, Greens and TPM should be doing joint events to show how they get along. Cos ACT and NZF sure as hell don't.
edit: I AM A DUMB DUMB. I READ TAX PLAN AS FISCAL PLAN.
That said, they haven't released the modeling behind the tax plan either. So it sorta stands.
---- A while back, National said this:
Well PREFU has been and gone. Even Paul Goldsmith got his fiscal plan out within 2 days of PREFU last election. Willis is just being made into a liar.
This election is actually a joke. There is zero accountability for horrendous policies, lies, and racism. I have never seen such a deeply depressing set of politicians set out to do fuck all. And I've never seen such an apathetic electorate where they just accept they're going to get bullshitted or shafted by whomever is in charge but they'll vote for a punch in the dick cos they are sick of the current lot.
Last night we all lost. It wasn't even a debate. It was two men who seem to think the same just answering questions. If you're going to have a debate then do what Lange and Muldoon did and have them sit at a table and actually argue points with one another. That would be worth something to the viewer.
Or, and hear me out here, we stop pretending there are only two parties and we recognise we have an MMP parliament. Have all the leaders sit round a table, let them argue among themselves with an MC to only jump in if things are getting racist/out of hand/long winded.
Instead we've co-opted this US presidential style which is dumb, because we don't elect Prime Ministers, we elect parties who elect Prime Ministers. And these quick-fire rounds are so dumb, where we bully individuals into making commitments that aren't necessarily party policy but bloody well become so.
The format is so flawed. And also it was boring. Luxon probably won by virtue of not shitting his pants on stage. Chippy needed to go after him. He had his best parts when he started going after Luxo on his weird views around the Māori Health Authority. Even Jess Mutch McKay had a crack at Luxo on this point, asking whether winding back the Māori Health Authority was just a waste of money. But it's actually one of two things: racist, or ignorant. Chippy focused on it being ignorant but I think he should have just gone at him and called him racist. That would've grabbed the headlines: "Christopher, New Zealanders aren't racist, so stopped peddling your racist crap". Something like that. Would've been what people talked about.
There was a part where they were asked if they trusted the other, Luxo said he did trust Chippy, Chippy said he didn't trust Luxo's numbers. But fuck that. Just say you don't trust him because he lies and he hides things.
Labour is losing. So they are the ones who need to do something to upend the status quo and Chippy missed just about every opportunity to do so last night.
But my point about MMP stands. Get Seymour, James Shaw or Marama, and Rawiri or Debbie. Yes it's unlikely one of them will become PM at this election, but if we keep entrenching the status quo that will never change. Show people they have a real choice of who to vote for, instead of milquetoast white men in suits. It was so bad that there was analysis of the ties they were wearing as though that said something. God help us.
---
If any TV production companies are reading, I pitch myself to MC a debate with all leaders. Get them all sitting in a conversational pit, I'll have an oversized gong that I'll use sparingly. And then I decide who won and give them a hug (consent pending).
Every time National says anything. Anything. A torrent of experts come rushing out of the woodwork to discredit it. It's not even Labour or the Greens that are doing the attacking. It's actual experts.
Today's example in a long list, is economists Michael Reddell (very right wing/conservative Christian) and Sam Warburton (says he's left and loves to be indignant on Twitter) that have tried to do the modelling National used to enable them to earn over half a billion dollars from their foreign buyers' tax. Except they couldn't. Not even by half.
National's policies don't stand up. They're not evidence based. They're just an approximation of right-wing policies.
And yet this is doing nothing to help Labour. Because Labour seems unwilling to help Labour. Every day they should be hammering how unfit for office Luxon is. And yet ... crickets.
At the last election, Paul Goldsmith had National's fiscal plan out two days after PREFU (and yes it had a big ol' fiscal hole which dented National's credibility). National hasn't indicated when it will release its fiscal plan despite PREFU having been and gone.
Why isn't Labour repeating that "National has nothing to offer except tax cuts it can't afford and a secret fiscal plan. What is National hiding from you?"
I genuinely do not understand what sort of campaign Labour is trying to run. It's not an inspirational one. It's not a policy heavy one. It's not a cult of personality. It's just an insipid slow walk to defeat. At least fight to win, could you?
This is all very disheartening for those of us who are Green or TPM supporters. The Greens in particular have run a really good campaign. There's been a steady release of policies that are actual thoughtful policies that try to address long-term systemic issues facing the country. And this would be the election where the Greens would be able to wield real influence if they were to get into government. And yet Labour is absolutely not holding up its end.
Hipkins is not a natural showman, and that's fine because neither is Luxon, and yet National is using him judiciously. Labour does however have stacks of talent it could be rolling out. Where's Grant? Barb Edmonds? Kieran McAnulty? These are all smart, high-calibre politicians that are popular. And yet we haven't seen shit.
I get that Labour is probably trying to get people to draw a comparison directly between Hipkins and Luxon, and they'll only do this if they are limited to seeing Hipkins and Luxon, but that hasn't worked so far so maybe try something different?
It could well be that the "phone is off" as they say, and that nothing Labour does matters anymore because the country has tired of them. But if that's the case then go absolute hail mary on it. Do something. Anything. Because at the moment it just feels like you don't care. And despite protests from Hooton that a Luxon-led government will be just as insipid and unable to do anything as this crew, there's also the chance that NZ tacks really hard to the right.
Fair Pay Agreements is probably the best piece of legislation that Labour campaigned on and passed in its 6 years, and this will likely be undone by National. And that's a real fucking shame. So if you're not going to campaign for yourself, campaign for the bus drivers, and hospo staff, and retail workers, who don't stand to benefit as much from National's unaffordable tax cuts but will be hurt by the repealing of fair pay agreements.
---
Some personal news, as they say in the media biz: my column at the Post was the victim of its recent financial woes. After the editor who brought me on, chose to leave instead of applying to be the editor of the Post, the Sunday News, and the SST, I did think that I wouldn't be long for that gig - and I was right. A bunch of us who got brought on at the same time also got culled. So stink buzz for me.
Also I'm taking some time out from Twitter because boy howdy it's so toxic at the moment. I did a tweet the other day about how it was all very well wanting to evict "troublesome" tenants from Kainga Ora houses but you're then making them houseless, and we need to consider that. And so many of the replies were just "good" etc. And what the hell happened to compassion? Since Musk took over, and since the right has been in the ascendancy in Aotearoa, Twitter has become horrendous. Also I think if you reach a critical mass of followers, you can't help but get a torrent of fuckheads every time you say anything. I think that happened around the 15,000 mark. I'm about 21,000 followers now and ugh.
So I'm on Bluesky and it seems a bit more chill. I'll get back to Twitter at some point, but not right now.
By nearly any metric, National had a shocking Sunday. And given Luxo’s predilection for all things fundy, this was possibly especially upsetting. Day of faith indeed.
It started with Luxo on Q+A where he got kinda destroyed by Jack Tame (side note: when Jack was announced as the new host of Q+A I was skeptical, but he’s proven to be one of the toughest interviewers on TV and has no fear or favour across the political spectrum; pissing off fans of all parties).
First up, Jack wanted to know if Luxo’s magical “downward pressures” on rent would mean that he’d lower the rents on his seven investment properties. Luxon floundered. Hard. I would’ve thought that you’d consider this ahead of an interview, but seemingly not.
Then Jack moved onto the biggest hole in National’s tax cut plan, the foreign home-buyer tax. Jack pointed out just how unlikely it would that enough houses would be sold over $2M every year to foreigners to get the amount of revenue that would allow National to fund its tax cuts. He asked Luxo to justify it. Once again Luxo could not.
Then this happened. Which… I don’t know what is going on.
And then on Newshub, the very impressive Jenna Lynch interviewed the even more impressive CTU’s Craig Renny. The CTU has been the best campaigner of this election. Renny claimed that the pool of money that National said would get cut from the public sector was fucking small, and that it would mean likely cuts to things like courts, passport processing, and even emergency management, which just goes to show you National’s perspective on climate change – when after the costliest cyclone in NZ’s history, followed by regular flooding of our biggest city, National still thinks that our emergency management agency should have its funding cut to pay for tax cuts.
Meanwhile ACT is also having a mare. With I think six(?) candidates now pulling out of the election for reasons both known and unknown and unprintable. Seymour has also thrown out there that he will potentially refuse a confidence and supply agreement with National should National not want to be as psychotically extreme as ACT wants to be.
For all Luxo’s claims of a “coalition of chaos”, it seems his own mate is likely to provide the most chaos in government. And potentially way more chaos in the lead-up to the election…
So all in all it’s been a rough old time for the right.
But…
The toxicity that the electorate seems to hold Labour in seems awfully sticky, if not baked in. So it may not even matter.
It may not matter that National’s plans are so full of holes that they’re a punchline. Or that ACT is proposing some genuinely terrifying policy ideas or that its candidates keep pulling out for increasingly bizarre reasons. National has a pretty healthy lead over Labour. And this is a fairly recent development. When Chippy took over as PM, Labour was ahead in the polls and on course for another term. But since then, yes inflation has bit, and yes, interest rates have gone up, but Labour has also expressed a desire to hurt itself over and over.
Once the public decides you’re too shit to govern, it’s a hard road back. There’s a month until the election proper, and only a handful of weeks before early voting begins so I’m not sure that Labour has enough time to turn this around.
Which sucks for the Greens. Because the Greens have run the best campaign that party has done for years. It helps when you haven’t done something bananas during the campaign that just surviving becomes your main focus.
But each week the Greens roll out a policy that is thoughtful, costed, and tries to solve long-term problems. Not just short-term populist sloganeering like our two biggest parties do. As Marama Davidson said at the launch of the Greens’ ocean protection plan, all National and Labour are doing is “bickering over inconsequential issues”. Which is bang on. The Green Party has always been ahead of the curve by about 10 years, proposing solutions to problems that get waved away before being recognised later as being actual problems that need solving.
Overall this election is very dispiriting. Neither party from which our Prime Minister is likely to come from is offering inspiring policies (barring maybe free dental for under 30s, love that). It’s just a gluey, muddy, state of inertia that has gripped New Zealand to some awful centrist governments for three decades now. And worst of all is the possibility that NZ First might get back. I don’t understand how there are people still buying Winston’s bullshit. Every campaign he makes a bunch of promises and commitments that he has no interest or desire in following through on and yet mugs still line up to support him. Give me strength. And take it from Winston.
*I will concede that vaccination targets are probs a very good idea, and having incentives to achieve them is not terrible either.
The last week was National's worst week in a very long time. And today brings more news that add insult to injury.
Apparently the party made the strategic decision to launch its tax policy earlier in the week to get ahead of whatever it was that Labour was announcing at its campaign launch. So then we got the tax policy of seemingly unceasing errors.
Initial reactions were all very positive with "election winning" being thrown around willy nilly. But then the holes started appearing. Labour's strategy of rolling out different Ministers to highlight those holes was the best piece of strategy I've seen from them since Andrew Little resigned and Jacinda Ardern stepped up.
Each hour seemingly brought a new cock-up in National's tax plan. The one that seems to have resonated is the breaching of double tax rules that prevent National from collecting tax from residents of many countries if they bought a house over $2M here - this was the biggest source of funds for its tax cut programme.
But there's also the cruelty. As Shane Te Pou noted in his herald column:
Most disabled people survive on less than $474 a week. Labour’s policies to remove the $5 prescription charge, reduce the price of public transport, and tie benefit increases to wages rather than inflation (so they go up faster) have been a big help for people with difficult lives. National’s plan of taking all that away just seems cruel.
National would bring back the $5 prescription tax on medicine, cut the rate that benefits increase by, and remove the public transport discount. All in exchange for a tax cut of as little as $2 a week for the typical disabled person.
Complete bastardry to be honest.
Then came Labour's campaign launch, and despite the best efforts of some cookers to disrupt it, it was a pretty big success. The free dentistry for under 30s didn't generate a tidal wave of excitement but it at last gave people something to vote for. Which has been sorely lacking from Labour's campaign to date.
And so all eyes (of political losers like me) turned to National's campaign launch. It was like a Republican/Democratic National Convention in the US. Loud pumping music, hyping each candidate as they ran in, having Luxo's kids introduce him. Bananas stuff. And then Luxo's big announcement was ... a postcard. After blowing their wad earlier in the week with the tax announcement, National had nothing to announce. Which meant all questions were focused on the tax policy, and whether or not it was workable - or even legal!
That is not a headline you want from your campaign launch.
Nicola Willis had gone on Q&A that morning to try and better explain the policy, but instead had it explained back to her better by Jack Tame. There were claims of legal advice that said it was workable, but then that emerged had only been sought on Friday, two days after they'd released the policy.
And then today there was the announcement that DIA is appealing to have SkyCity lose its casino license for breaching host guidelines. This is the same SkyCity that its been reported helped National design the online gambling portion of its tax increases.
None of this is to say that it will tilt the election one way or the other. National had a pretty healthy lead over Labour, and this might shift 1 or 2 points but that may not be enough. However, as is tradition, National tends to bleed out over election campaign periods, while Labour gains. And if that history repeats then it's likely to see Labour stumble over the line like 2005.
If that is the case, then you could mark this last week as the turning point.
ACT under scrutiny
The other interesting thing that's happened is that the ACT MPs and candidates have started coming under real scrutiny. We've seen candidates pulled from contention, others with ropey social media histories of climate change denial and MAGA support, but then there was yesterday's Q&A interview with ACT candidate Todd Stephenson who is #4 on their list and almost certainly likely to get into parliament (unless ACTs vote completely collapses due to ...whatever). I recommend you watch the whole thing, but the real psycho moment comes when Stephenson seems to advocate for eugenics when deciding who should get government funded treatment - if you are more able to provide to a nation's economy, then you should be ranked higher for getting treatment. That shit is fucking bananas.
We've seen ACT's vote drop a bit in the last couple of weeks, it has now fallen behind the Greens which could become very important come election night, given that Labour also has Te Pāti Māori to add to its overall total.
Yesterday National was cock-a-hoop. And you might think that was because of the succession of scandals and mistakes that Labour had been making over the last month or few. I mean everyone was talking about Labour's blunders. Nobody was talking about any of the bread-and-butter issues that Labour was desperate to talk about.
I'm told that Labour sees its numbers go up when it talks about bread and butter. But not so much when it's stuck talking about itself.
So Labour would very much prefer to talk about bread and/or butter.
And so National, aquiver with excitement, rushed out that they'd been leaked a central plank of Labour's tax policy for the election: that Labour would remove GST on fruit and veges.
And so now people are talking about Labour having a policy on removing GST on healthy food items. Which is very much a bread-and-butter issue.
And not only that, but it's a super popular policy. Beehive strategists have told me that this tests through the roof with focus groups. And it's easy to understand why. Because if I look at the price of cauliflower, I see that it's $5.00 at the moment. And that's fucking expensive. But then I hear that Labour has a policy to remove GST on it, and that would bring it down to $4.25. Roll that out to all fruit and vege and it becomes an attractive proposition.
In some ways it's even more tempting than an income tax cut, because the outcome of it is so clear cut - cheaper fruit and veges! I can afford to give my family fruit and veges instead of whatever microwaveable dietary abomination I had previously been able to afford.
National has fallen for the fallacy that Wellington political-nerd shit is the way to win elections. If it is truly Labour's policy then yeah, it's not great that it's being leaked, but in the end the leak doesn't matter as much as the popularity of the policy. And the policy leads the news last night. And now Labour will get a second bite of the (affordable) cherry if/when they do announce the policy. Just dumb-ass stuff from National, really naive rookie material.
They had options.
If they trusted the source of the leak, then they could have:
a) looked into a similar policy that was even better
b) announced that they were looking into removing GST from fruit and veges which would've meant Labour would've been unable to do it
c) teased that they'd been leaked something from Labour's tax policy and dragged the story out about disunity for far longer
And those are just off the top of my head now. So many better options than announcing a very popular opposition policy right when they're besieged by scandal.
I tell ya, just when I think Labour has completely fucked the dog and have no chance of getting back in, I forget that a National party blunder is just around the corner. So once again I remain deeply deeply confused as to who will win this election.
My column last week in the Post (which I'll republish in full below) was bleak. I was recovering from Covid when I wrote it, and feeling pretty down about the whole state of politics (the news this morning about Kiri Allan is awful and I really hope she's doing ok and surrounded by people who love her).
Both our major parties seem committed to doing nothing I like. Labour is running the small target strategy that everyone thought National would run, while Luxo is taking National on a merry walk off to the right, tacking to a place we haven't seen National go since Brash was in charge.
But then yesterday the Greens officially launched their campaign, and James Shaw's speech gave me a bit of hope again. The slogan is "The Time is Now", which is reminds me a lot of Captain Planet's "The Power is Yours", but that's fitting for the Greens...but back to the speech.
He started off setting the scene:
I think I speak on behalf of most New Zealanders, when I say that our political leaders owe us a conversation based on evidence.
I say that, because the fear and anxiety National and ACT have filled our headlines and social media feeds with, over the last 12 months, appalls me.
They are using fear as a motivator because they have nothing else.
No vision.
No courage.
No moral compass.
They know that the knee-jerk, back of an envelope ideas they are putting forward work for nothing other than getting a “tough” looking headline.
But that’s exactly the point.
It is a political tactic to win an election, not a meaningful response.
And the more they do it, the more an important question keeps getting obscured:
What exactly are we actually trying to achieve?
It speaks to the broader malaise affecting the public's attitude towards politicians:
Over the next few months, you are going to hear a lot about who is up and who is down in the polls.
Who is winning the race to be the preferred Prime Minister.
There will be TV debates, attempts at political point-scoring, big announcements.
Probably a mistake, or two.
And hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on advertising.
The campaign will probably feel trivial at times.
More focused on personalities than the issues that matter to your day-to-day lives.
And he articulates the awfulness of a possible Nat/ACT Government better than anyone else has so far:
When National and ACT are more interested in cutting taxes for the wealthiest few, than they are in guaranteeing everyone enough to live on and put food on the table, I can tell you, that they are not thinking about you.
Or your family.
When they are more interested in putting kids into prison cells than homes, I know for sure, they are not thinking about what’s best for your community.
When they are more interested in tearing up the legislation that is driving down carbon emissions across Aotearoa, I promise you, they have not given a second thought to the world your kids will grow up in.
And one thing he does that makes me so happy is he talks about the outcomes of the Green's policies. He doesn't just talk policy:
And today, we say that with a strong Green voice in the next government, we will introduce an Income Guarantee and a fairer tax system to pay for it.
So that 95 percent of New Zealanders will pay less income tax and no one will pay any tax at all on the first $10,000 they earn.
I've been weighing up where to give my party vote. I'm either voting Greens, or Te Pāti Māori. Reading James' speech, tilts me that way. But I'm still up for grabs.
Meanwhile a family somewhere in Northland had to decide between heating their home and eating dinner.
I went out for a drink with a prominent New Zealander. He got on it a bit much, and spent most of the evening shout-talking at me. Meanwhile a woman in Christchurch was packing her suitcase in terror to flee to a refuge to escape domestic violence.
A politician compared our inflation rate to the rest of the world. As though petty political point-scoring would make the prices at the supermarket go down for the young father who just wished he could afford nappies and formula.
“Young offenders will face more accountability for their crimes” bellowed a Beehive press release. While it circulated, a 13-year-old made a TikTok about a boy he had a crush on, before joining his mates at the playground to drink scrumpies and maybe get up to mischief.
Each of the above feature two clauses. The first clause is based on a story that the media has covered in the last week. The second clause is just the norm of what’s going on in Aotearoa at the moment.
Did you know that the unemployment rate in Aotearoa – at the last quarter’s reporting – was 3.4%? Historically this is staggeringly low. Did you also know that an unemployment rate of 3.4% means there are more than 100,000 human beings who want to find work but cannot?
One hundred thousand people. That’s a lot of people who want to be able to put food on their table. Or shoes on their kids’ feet. Or have enough for a beer, or go to a movie, or take a holiday.You may have heard that the world has just experienced the hottest seven-day period ever (at least since they had the instruments to record this in 1850). But did you know that there are wildfires burning out of control in Greece, Spain, and Italy?
That in California’s Death Valley it reached over 53 degrees? Last summer, in Europe, more than 60,000 died because of the heat. This summer it’s expected to be more.
Sixty thousand people. That’s half a Dunedin. Gone.
All of the above issues hurt the individual. The individuals they hurt tend to be those at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. And all of those issues have solutions that politicians all around the world actively choose to not do.
Which means all of those problems are a choice. We choose to let families go hungry. We choose to not divest from fossil fuels. We choose to allow capitalism to run unfettered, ruining huge numbers of lives as it makes a small number of people unfathomably and unnecessarily wealthy. We then choose to not tax them fairly.
I am writing this column from our spare bedroom as I recover from my second round of Covid.
Did you know that one of the best things we could do for Covid is provide proper ventilation for our schools’ classrooms? We choose not to do that either.
Instead we choose to tut-tut at the gangs who provide some kind of community for those who have been ignored by other communities.
We cry out for politicians to be “tough on crime!” instead of being “smart on poverty”, which would truly be smart on crime.
We choose to shake our heads in disappointment or mirth at our political figures for not knowing the exact CPI, or unemployment rate, or some other obscure figure when we should be shaking our heads at the inaction on helping those who most need it but are least likely to ask.
This year there is an election. That is one of the biggest choices we can make. Who is going to govern us for the next three years?
We’ll go into the voting booths, and we’ll choose which two boxes to tick.
And from there a government will be formed that will put in place a bunch of laws based on a watered down, flawed ideology.
And in the end, for most of us, that choice won’t matter.
Because it’s all just tinkering around the edges. It’s all just student politicians playing grown-ups. It’s all just so futile. To those whom the decisions truly matter, we barely listen.
If you're someone who votes Labour or National, you must be a sad panda.
My political awakening happened at the 1993 election when I was 9 years old. I distinctly remember Richard Prebble losing Auckland Central and that was apparently a Very Big Deal.
The first election I got to vote in was 2002 when I was 18. I voted Labour as my party vote, and Peter Dunne as my electorate MP (in my defence, he was a family friend).
Since then I've not voted for Labour (or National) since. My politics has been on a steady leftward drift as I've aged. Which is apparently the reverse of what happens.
My own theory on this is that traditionally people became more conservative as they got older as they accrued more assets. House, stock portfolio, boats, holiday homes. Whatever. That was what usually happened to middle-class Pākehā. Except the world has conspired against us and these things are no longer a birthright.
People are being locked out of the housing market. Born-to-rent. Trapped in a position where they can afford to pay for someone else to own a house, but for arbitrary reasons the bank demands a deposit of over $100K which is fucking impossible to save for when every penny you earn is going on someone else's mortgage and food.
So without the stability of owning your own home, you feel less inclined to have kids, you sure as heck aren't investing in shares, the boat is a pipe dream, and holiday homes? Ha!
All of this is to say that neither of the major parties have really offered solutions for what ails us. So it's no surprise to see ACT and the Greens creep up. But also, they're the only two parties actually offering policies and ideas.
National keeps chugging out dumb-arse policies that are just populist. Lock 'em up rubbish that gets almost instantly discredited because it's not costed. Labour can't talk about policies because they're too busy talking about the latest ministerial scandal (warranted or not) (pun).
Over the weekend the Greens released a rental policy that included rent ceilings. Now I'm not rent expert, but every time I've suggested rent controls I get shouted down by a bunch of economist-adjacent folk who tell me that rent controls never work. Could be true. Not sure. But at least the Greens are thinking about what the problems of society are and trying to fix them.
So far, the Greens have come out with a tax policy that broadens our ridiculously shallow tax base, and a housing policy, and now a rental policy.
Labour has given us free prescriptions.
Now I'm not for a second suggesting that free prescriptions are bad - on the contrary, it's great news! And also smart politics, because every time you visit a pharmacy to collect a script, you're reminded that Labour made it free (and National has committed to making you pay again).
But overall the two parties are a bit of a mess. There are talented bright spots in each. But we're in a situation where the people who want to become politicians probably shouldn't.
I've long had a thesis on this - that we created a career-path for politics, and it's been shit-housery ever since. This started at a local level - think back to even the 1990s (if you're old enough like me). People on the council were plumbers, lawyers, firefighters, teachers etc. They were folks from all vocations who were civic minded and helped out part-time, while continuing to do their job. Now being a councillor is a full-time gig. So instead of having a council filled with a variety of professions, we have a council full of councillors.
That malaise has extended to central politics now too. So many MPs follow the same path. Go to university, leave uni with maybe a law degree and some experience as a student politician. Get a job in a politician's office. Become a politician.
Even the ones we hold up as having had great life experience ... haven't. Luxon is touted as this phenomenal business guy. But I'm more a business guy than Luxon. He got a job at Unilever for years. Then at Air NZ. Now National His whole adult career has been well paid in the bosom of a large company. I set up a business 8 years ago where the ability to pay my mortgage or put food on the table was down to me. I couldn't rely on my business just paying me without going out and making it so.
This is not to say I'd be a better politician than Luxo (I would), or that I want to be one (I sure as hell don't), just that we are losing the quality life experiences and variety that made politicians in touch with the people they represent. Now it's mainly intellectual rather than lived.
This is not to diminish people who worked as student politicians (although come on...nerds), or those who worked in politicians' offices (guilty), but it's to say that we need more variety. MMP is to blame for this somewhat. The list function has reduced the need to impress your local community to get them to vote for you.
I don't want to go back to FPP, that shit was unfair as fuck. But MMP has been our form of Government for nearly 30 years now, and I don't think it's a great system.
I'm sure there are constitutional nerds who can come up with better systems than me, but surely there has to be something better? We are not well served.
I was thinking about writing this as my column for The Post. But decided to keep it to Patreon since the audience here is much smaller, and I'm worried that anything I write about NZ First just gives them attention, making it more likely they'll get back in.
I've spoken to key folk in National and Labour recently who have both expressed that there is a reasonable chance that NZ First will make it in again after the election. This is based on their own internal polling.
The National person I spoke to give it a >50% chance, while the Labour person wasn't as bullish but still thought it possible. Neither party had NZF above 5% at present in their internal polling, but said the trend was there.
This would be fucking disastrous.
Not just because NZ First would almost certainly go with National and (this may come as a surprise to you), I'm not that keen on a National-led Government, but also because NZ First is such a toxic stain on our politics.
I have written in the past that the party was a sort of benign bigot sponge. Winston would do a rallying cry for all the racists of society to vote for him, and then once in power he'd do nothing. Which, I argued, was better than the alternative, where some populist racist gets the votes and then does a racism with it.
But if we have the chance to kill off NZ First, we should! Because goddamn they're awful. The NZ First foundation scandal was bad man. And they only escaped punishment due to a loophole. They're also a handbrake on progress. And they're proud of that fact.
Winston has also weirdly made it clear he won't go with Labour; he doesn't like to make his coalition plans known pre-election so he can keep his options open. Except this time he knows that he'll cash in more on the anti-Government vote. It's why he embraced that anti-mandate protesters, and it's why he's trying to turn himself into an "anti-woke" crusader.
He'll definitely prop up a dreadful ACT-National government, and frankly the three of those parties together sounds like a hellscape.
Other than the Gold Card, what has Winston actually achieved? What policies has he done while being in government several times?
The only situation I could countenance a NZF vote would be if it was clear that Labour/Greens/TPM had no chance and I wanted to inflict a handbrake on National/ACT, but I don't think that's going to be the case this election. It could go either way.
I think that the left's acceptance of NZF after the 2017 election is one our biggest shames.
Anyway, if you want a single reason why NZF are a toxic mess to be avoided then I give you this, Shane Jones was recently at an Old Folks home giving his views on whatever, and there was someone who looked concerningly familiar in the crowd. Now it's not been confirmed that it's him, but boy oh boy this dude looks like Colin Craig.
(last i checked it wasn't behind a paywall, but that might change).
So what does that mean for my patreon? I'll still keep it going. And I'll use it to run the things I'd never get into a column. Unsubstantiated gossipy rumours, swears, smutty innuendo, that sort of thing.
If and when I do go behind the paywall, I might see if I can sneak my columns into this, provided you all don't tell anyone.
In among all the weird news of the last few weeks was a wee announcement from National that didn't garner much coverage.
Christopher Luxon announced that he would make getting a Free Trade Deal with India a major priority of his Government.
In speech at the India - New Zealand summit, Luxon couldn't wait more than three sentences before dropping this jewel:
As some of you know, before coming to politics two and a half years ago, I had a career in business, most recently as CEO of Air New Zealand but, before that, at Unilever.
I love it when joke MPs aren't in on the joke.
But within that context of having been CEO of Air NZ, and his time at Unilever, Luxon said he'd visited India several times and loved it.
Digression: Luxon also included this part early in his speech:
"I hope it’s not contentious for me to say at an India-New Zealand summit that, in my view, New Zealand is the best country on planet Earth."
And I always find it weird the way Luxon gets all American with his hyperbole. And also the way he keeps saying "planet Earth", and not just "Earth", or "the planet".
And there are other weird verbal tics in that speech that I won't dwell on, but will highlight:
"It’s a generalisation, of course, but the community of Indian New Zealanders are hard-working, self-reliant, and share many of the values of the National Party – reward for achievement, competitive enterprise, the importance of education, and taking personal responsibility seriously."
What? We're just stereotyping races now? Bold.
But on to my main point: Luxon's big ta da moment in this speech was the following:
Therefore, I’m pleased to announce to you today that under a National government I lead, reaching a trade agreement with India will be a major strategic priority.
You'd think a "major strategic priority" would merit some explanation. But there's not much in there. And you kind of get the impression that Luxon thinks he could just get on the blower to Modi and we'd have a free trade agreement done and dusted.
You might think that Luxon was just spouting shit because he was making a speech at the India - New Zealand summit, and this wasn't a serious policy. Except National then rushed out a press release which is equally scant on detail.
There's a certain naivety to Luxon's leadership. I think he genuinely believes that he'd be able to get an FTA with India done pretty quickly. He's that sort of leader/boss who thinks he can just say a thing and then minions will make it happen.
The thing with India is that it's pretty bloody protectionist. Especially with a nationalist like Modi in power. There's a massive reluctance to open up its markets to foreign goods and services.
India's agriculture sector is heavily subsidised, which makes it difficult for foreign farmers to compete on a level playing field. And when you look at what New Zealand likes to trade its beef, lamb, and milk (powder).
If there's one thing India is not interested in importing, it's cows. They're somewhat sacred over there. And not only are cows not eaten, but they sure do supply a lot of milk.
India's dairy sector is one of the largest in the world. There are more than 80 million dairy farms with about 300 million dairy animals. The sector is a major source of livelihood for millions of farmers and rural households, contributing significantly to India's economy. Does Luxon think India is going to give NZ's dairy sector free access to an Indian market that is sustained by its own dairy?
India actually produces more than 15% of the world's milk. Probs not that keen on letting in tariff-free New Zealand milk, eh?
One thing we could offer India is free access to New Zealand for students and tourists. But I'm not sure we're ready infrastructure-wise to do that are we?
Claiming India might be New Zealand's shining city on the hill of trade suggests that Luxon is not a serious politician.
Kieran McAnulty was given a hospital pass to end all hospital passes. After the Government had passed Three Waters, it still wanted it revamped because everyone hated it and National was successfully turning it into an election issue.
Kieran, as Minister for Local Government, had to go away and figure out a solution that would help. And by help I don't mean turn it into a vote winner, I think his job would've been considered wildly successful if he managed to take the heat out of it.
It's too early to call definitively, but I think he's done it.
Over the weekend, Kieran appeared on Newshub Nation, and Q&A, to talk over what the Government was now proposing and frankly he knocked it out of the park.
When Kieran got up to announce the changes last week, his opening line was "G'day everyone, so here's the guts of it..." then proceeded to explain the Government's case for its water reforms better than anyone has managed to date. Better than previous Ministers, Prime Ministers, better than the fancy-pants communications company that was paid to help message it. He just spoke about it using normal words. You can see the clip here, I particularly like the PM's response, chuckling behind Kieran. I recommend if you have time watching both the Nation and Q&A clips above. Kieran just uses normal words to explain stuff. It's so refreshing.
I had one journalist text me over the weekend after I tweeted out the Nation interview:
Labour has somewhat snookered the Opposition here. By making the case as well as they have, they've made it clear that reform is needed. And that through Labour's reforms the ratepayer will save money, without reform, local councils are going to have to send their rates into the stratosphere just to keep up with the infrastructure.
National's counterplan is basically the status quo. It has said it will repeal whatever Labour does, and give "control" back to local authorities. And it will force them to increase their debt to manage the infrastructure. So National's plan is to make it as expensive as it could possibly be for no gain.
Except in National's head there is a gain. Because the governance of the new entities will be determined by local councils and mana whenua. Because you know, that's what te tiriti says. Don't get confused here, the governance of the entities will not be done by mana whenua, but rather the board who does it will be appointed by both councils and mana whenua.
Seems a small price to pay to ensure that rates are affordable and local councils can manage the infrastructure investment and we adhere to te tiriti commitments. But because the Government lost the narrative war initially, it's starting on the back foot.
"You're ruining democracy!" people have cried. "One person, one vote!" others have moaned.
Except democracy isn't that cut and dried. At a basic level, we have representative democracy which means we don't make the decisions ourselves, we elect people to make decisions on our behalf. But then there is more nuance still. If you own property in more than one TLA, you get to vote in each TLA you have property in. That's not one person, one vote. That's basically 19th century patriarchy where only property owning men got to vote at all. Here landed gentry get more than one vote.
Now you can argue that they deserve more than one vote because they have an interest in different TLAs through their property so should get a say in how its governed.
And that's the fucking point of the co-governance angle of the water reforms.
Māori have a special interest in water. This was determined by the courts as part of the Crown signing te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Basically, National's counter-policy is for ratepayers to pay more for National's racism and commitment to breach its te tiriti obligations.
Because all you're getting that's different is fewer entities, and no mana whenua determination over who should sit on the Board of Governors for each water entity. And I tell you what, I'm a big fan of not racism, even more of a fan of not paying for racism. So you'll be shocked to learn that I think National's proposal is utterly embarrassing.
My hot take is that Kieran has successfully defused the tension around Labour's reforms, and now put the onus back on National to explain why they keep beating the anti-co-governance drum (hint: racism), and why people should have to pay more in rates for National's racism.
I mean come on people, if you are going to be racist, you don't need to pay for it. You can just go and listen to Sean Plunket for free and then read any subsequent Facebook comments.
Remember 2014? It was an eternity ago. But National had that ad with the rowers. It's lasting legacy would be that it used the Eminem-soundalike that saw National sued.
But the ad's message was that because National was a slick, streamlined unit, it would be a better Government than the shambolic coalition that was the alternative - as depicted by a bunch of losers in red and green unable to get their dinghy going in any direction.
Great ad. Very powerful. Probably unnecessary mind, Labour was led by Cunliffe that year. Things didn't go great.
But my point is, coming up to 2023, we're faced with the likelihood of of a National-led government with a very large ACT party bloc, or a Labour-led government with a very large Green party bloc (and a much smaller Te Pāti Māori bloc.
So at this point it's worth asking, who is going to be scarier/worse for NZ? A large ACT, or a large Green Party?
We have some data for the Greens. It was a confidence and supply partner for the 2017-2020 government. Which by all accounts did pretty well on most metrics. Unemployment down, the economy growing, child poverty down, etc etc. But we've never had a large ACT bloc in power.
Which means when ACT pumps out shit like this
we should be very afraid.
I think we can sum up ACT's list with:
Screw the workers.
Burn the environment.
Help the rich.
Help landlords.
Cut government services.
Give racists a better platform.
Ignore bill of rights
The quirk of this election is that we have National and Labour both desperately clambering into the middle, which is going to result in the most left-wing or right-wing government we've ever had.
Except that when the Greens get into power it becomes somewhat neutered. Despite NZFirst repeatedly forcing Labour to renegotiate policy after policy because Labour + Greens didn't equal more than 50%, the Greens never extracted the same concession despite Labour + NZF also not equaling more than 50%.
I expect ACT would be more like NZFirst than the Greens when it comes to extracting policy concessions. Already Seymour has demanded that a referendum on te Tiriti is held. Which is fucking bananas for a Party that supposedly loves contract law (I suspect they love contract law when it benefits white people).
Yes people gnash their teeth about some of the stuff that comes out of the Green Party, but it's proven itself a trusted and stable coalition partner. Probably the most stable of any coalition partner with more than one MP we've ever had (and the only support party to get more than 5% the election after being in Government)(and also increased its vote in an election that Labour hoovered up more than 50% of voters).
Labour and the Greens would do well to start carving out some united policies, and then painting a picture of the counter-factual: that National would need ACT and ACT is a bunch of a goddamn psychos.
But no doubt that won't happen, because left-wing parties are famously shit at boiling stuff down to simple terms and communicating them well. So, good luck I guess.
Anyway, the sum total of all this is don't vote National, because we'll get ACT, and if you look at that list above and think "Yes, I'll vote for that", then I don't know what to tell you, because those are some of the most vile, self-centred policies I've ever seen.
Chippy coming out and continuing to butcher Labour's policy programme isn't a surprise, but gosh it's cynical politics.
Everyone knew that National was planning a small-target strategy when it thought it would be going up against Jacinda Ardern, but now that's changed and it's Labour taking the small target path. This has left National with ... fuck all.
And you can tell they know they have fuck-all. After yesterday's burning of Labour policiy programme, and then the release of the Very Bad Poll for Luxon, National rushed out a press release; the main point was:
"My message to Chris Hipkins is stop spending, and cut taxes".
This despite the fact that tax cuts are very unpopular at the moment, and National had said it wasn't going to do them given they have an inflationary impact.
Poor ol' Nicola Willis has spent the past few months banging on about National having a plan for inflation (that didn't involve tax cuts), only to be undone because National is starting to panic after one Very Bad Poll.
And the poll was pretty bad. It gave National zero path to Government (National + ACT + TPM was 60 seats...not a Government). This is the first time that configuration has happend in a while. It also had a 1 in front of Luxo's preferred PM rating. And while PPM is a bullshit metric, it's problematic that Luxo is on the slide. Because he'll start dragging National's vote with him. Meanwhile Hipkins has had a steady rise in his PPM rating.
The irony of all this cynical politicking by both our majors is that it's going to result in either the most right-wing, or most left-wing government NZ has ever had. As Labour clamber for the centre, they're going to need the Greens and probably Te Pāti Māori. Hopefully TPM is better at extracting left-wing concessions than the Greens are*.
Kudos to the new Labour team. It's depressing that JA was such a drag on Labour's vote, but a phenomenal act of service that she recognised that and stood aside. And new Chief of Staff Andrew Kirton has made a big difference too, with his strong eye on the retail side of politics.
That said, I didn't think Labour could get any more centrist, and yet every day they do.
Beehive strategists that I talk to allowed themselves a small celebration last night that their strategy is working, but they're very conscious that this year is likely to bring shit economic times which doesn't usually favour an incumbent government, so they are taking nothing for granted.
Meanwhile National folk are greeting their slow demise with a shrug. A sort of "what can you do? If people don't like Luxon, they don't like him". And they don't. And now the poor bastard has Covid. You have to ask if his God is abandoning him.
*after Hipkins torched a bunch of climate policies yesterday, the Greens released a very tepid press release basically amounting to saying they were disappointed. Get some teeth Greens. It was fucking terrible to shelve so many climate policies. Fucking say so.
God I wish we stopped doing state of the nation speeches. They're no such thing and it's such a lame Americanism.
Anyway, Luxo had his moment in the sun (after postponing it twice due to shit weather). It was better than last year when he made up a communist family he'd never spoken with in Russia about the perils of communism, after the USSR had broken up. But still... Meh.
The childcare policy is... fine? I support anything that helps people with less get more. And it's not something that Luxo's rich mates can easily rort. So yay?
Except Labour also did a childcare policy at its conference last year and while the ceiling for earning is higher with National's policy, early analysis by Beehive strategists suggests Labour's policy is more generous than this one. Pretty awks when your tent pole announcement is shitter than one your opposition already made.
More awks when this was Luxo's response to Labour's childcare policy:
And then there were the fucking military academies. God the right has such a boner for authoritarianism. I'm yet to see any evidence of military academies being an effective tool. Except in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure where the threat of Military School was enough to make Bill and Ted ace their history project and form the Wyld Stallyns and save humanity. God I hope National based their policy off that.
If I was advising National (and we can all laugh at that), I'd have suggested a bold climate change policy. That would've been timely, cashing in on what's being talked about, and would have been surprising. But for that to happen National would need to believe in man made climate change and actually want to do something about it.
Or something that was overtly Pro-Māori. But good luck getting that past his caucus and his base and probably his weird church too.
So instead we get lazy centrist third way policies that I'm sure Labour will steal, or alter in some minor way. Our two biggest political parties basically fight elections over who can give what to Working for Families. Tony Blair has truly left a stain on political thinking.
Meanwhile everything is still fucking expensive, and weather events are ruining the world. Our political class shall fiddle while the world burns.
I'm going to be smug. In the last 6 or so months, nearly every "pundit" has said that National was going to canter to victory at the election. I have been one of two hold-outs that I know of. Just me and Matthew Hooton have said all along we thought Labour would win.
I was basing my assessment off the fact that the world is going to shit, and Labour could point to Jacinda Ardern and say "who do you want to get us through this turbulent time, Aotearoa? This incredible leader who has done it all, or that untried newbie over there who hates women's bodily autonomy?"
Obviously JA stood down, so that might've taken half my argument away, however we've now seen Labour bounce back quite dramatically suggesting that JA was more of a liability than I had realised.
That and Chris Hipkins has barely put a foot wrong when it comes to retail politics. Ideologically average, politically strong.
So now I think Labour can still make the case that they are the team to shepherd us through a crisis because the alternative is still Luxon, and people don't seem to like him.
This was magnified by a poll that came out yesterday. The Curia Tax Payers' Union Poll headline was that National/ACT could form a government with 61 seats. National and Labour were level pegging, but ACT was considerably ahead of the Greens hence why.
But when I dug into the numbers a bit more, a very bleak picture of Luxon's support started to emerge.
The TPU poll includes "favourability scores". This is measured by asking if you have a favourable or unfavourable view of someone, then doing some maths.
So in the table below you'll see that 46% said they had a favourable view of Chippy, while 20% said unfavourable, which is 46-20 = 27% net favourable. That's astoundingly high. JA's final net favourability was -1%. You can see below that Luxon's is -5%. That's a 32 point gap between him and Chippy.
The concern for team Luxon is that both Chippy and Luxon have very similar total recognition - Chippy had 34% of folks who didn't know/had no view, while Chris had 31%.
And this is a problem long in the making. Twelve months ago, Luxo was at the dizzying heights of 14% favourability (still 13 points behind what Chippy is now), and that number has been trending downwards ever since. It seems the more people get to know Luxo, the less they like him.
But the numbers I found most staggering in this poll was when each party's voter base had their favourabilities quizzed, so e.g. what do Labour voters think of Chippy, Luxo, Seymour etc.
You can see that National voters have Chippy's favourability at -4% (which is still better than Luxon's overall favourability!). Chippy has favourability of 78% with Labour voters, which is good - not great.
But then you get to Luxo and he's only at 66% favourability with National voters.
That suggests not just a lack of the populace like Luxo, but even his own base isn't terribly inspired or excited by him.
It's hard though, I'm not really sure what you could do to arrest this. Because trying to prove likeability or trustworthiness from opposition is next to impossible.
At this stage it feels like Luxo is going to slow walk National into a defeat. I know the headline numbers say a National/ACT victory, but the trend is not National's friend.
I could still be wrong, things could change. They always do. But as I've said in an earlier piece, given the fundamentals of everything that's going on, National should be miles ahead. The fact they are tied, and heading in the wrong direction should be causing massive alarm for them.
Well well well. Yesterday morning when both 1News and Newshub announced they were doing polls concurrently, I tweeted:
Given that both channels rushed out to poll immediately following the changeover to Chippy, I thought it would be too soon to have a marked difference.
I got my first inkling that I might have been wrong when I saw David Farrar had written a post in Kiwiblog about how new leaders usually see a bounce. This suggested to me that National's own internal polling had shown a Labour bounce, and Farrar was trying to set the scene.
And then the polls came out, and boy was my tweet wrong.
Labour had pulled ahead in both (by statistically insignificant amounts but still). This arrested a slide that had been happening for the past 12 months. In fact Labour hadn't been in the lead in a One News poll since January last year (summer NZ loves Labour?).
The similarities between both polls were staggering. Labour just ahead of National in both. ACT ahead of the Greens in both. A hung parliament in both.
All of that is fascinating, sure. But what I was interested in was preferred PM and a couple of other questions.
Preferred PM is mainly about brand recognition. People taking part in the poll are asked to name who they think should be PM. They aren't given options. So if you don't know who Chris Hipkins is, you won't say him. You won't have the opportunity to.
And yet Hipkins was ahead of Luxon immediately.
This is bad for brand Luxon as it means that either he's still an unknown quantity, or he's known but not liked.
Then TV3 included a question of trust in its polling, and it was also not good for Luxon.
Looking at those numbers, both Luxon and Hipkins had about 20% of "don't know" answers, but Chippy was considerably ahead of those who did have a view.
Luxon's trust rating is about the same as National's poll rating, whereas Chippy's trust rating was in excess of Labour's poll rating. This suggests Labour has more room to go up.
A lot of commentators have speculated that Luxon is a drag on National - despite National being ahead in the most recent polls. A while back, a now ex-National MP said to me that he thought Luxon would have a ceiling of 40% then just start to droop from there. He's been spot on.
I don't think National will be in panic stations. And nor should they be. They're still in a good position to form the next government. However it's not going to be as easy as they thought. And this poll could represent a turning point where all the momentum starts coming in behind Labour.
We may have already seen the highwater mark of a Luxon-led National Party.
An earlier version of this said JA had handed the election to Labour. I'm a chump. I meant National.
So I've been saying that I thought Labour would stumble over the line this year. There weren't many commentators predicting a Labour win, I think me and Matthew Hooton were it.
I'd predicted it off the back of the world going to shit, including us. And then Labour pointing to Jacinda and asking "who do you want to get us through this NZ? Someone who's stared down terrorism, volcanoes, and a pandemic? Or a walking LinkedIn post?"
And then JA went and quit.
My first reaction was she'd just handed the election to National. Andrea Vance rushed out a column saying the same thing.
But now I'm not so sure. Firstly, the leadership transition was the cleanest I've ever seen. Absolutely smooth. We don't know the internal machinations but externally it looks like everyone quickly coalesced around Hipkins.
I had one National MP message me to say that Chippy was the one they feared most*.
Labour people I've spoken to since it happened said that when JA told everyone the initial reaction was despair, but that's given way to optimism that they weren't expecting.
I've never seen a party so forcefully take control of the narrative at the beginning of the year. There has been no oxygen for anyone. Chippy is the shiny new toy and he's revelling in the glow.
I'm looking forward to the Cabinet reshuffle. This will give us a clue about who is on the rise and who might be on the way out.
I'd expect promotions for Kiritapu Allan and Kieran McAnulty. Those two are the rising stars of Labour. Barb Edmonds might find herself in cabinet and Camilla Belich can expect some more responsibility too.
Dr Verrall will probably become the full health minister but other than that I'm unsure.
The Greens also stand to gain. I think one of the issues with JA is that she became a bit of a rorschach test. She looked and sounded like a progressive so won a lot of those votes. Except she was always a small "c" conservative. Chippy is obviously not as progressive so the Greens should benefit. I also think Labour may feel more comfortable not having to be as progressive as people demanded.
Luxon is the biggest loser. National would have had a strategy for JA and now that's gone. They also would have expected some more coverage from their retreat but now it's all about Chippy. And Chippy can still run an experience vs naivety campaign given he's been there since 2008, and has been Minister of practically everything.
All in all this changes the emerging narrative that it was a fait accompli that National would win. But Labour still have a lot of work to do, because regardless of the leadership they're still the party that has not delivered as well as they should have. One chip does not a party make.
*I'm always aware that I could be being lied to in these situations, that I'm told this stuff to pass it on. Am I a useful idiot? Probably.
Ugh. I cannot believe we're back in an election year. Since Covid time has collapsed in on itself, so that everything is both flying past me, and moving incredibly slowly.
All the wise financial folk seem to think this year is going to be a shitter. Not just for Aotearoa, but for most of the world. The ways in which eonomists describe recessions always sound so erotic. It could be deep and long. Or soft. Or hard. Or V shaped.
When Covid disrupted everything, it gave us a chance to take a look at society and remake it in a different, more just and equitable way. So far no government around the world has taken that chance.
If the economists are to be believed* then we will no doubt be convinced that we need to "cut spending", and "manage the country's budget more carefully", which is just code for austerity. Which is further code for cuts. Which is just a way of making the poor poorer.
Solutions to economic global disruption seem to lack imagination. I'd like to see some properly left solutions. Not just centrist bullshit, but actual left-wing ideas put forward. More nationalised services; I've already said a state-owned supermarket would be a goer. Have it focus on selling NZ product so it's buying local and working for the country too. But there is electricity generation that could be re-nationalised after a failed experiment in partial privatisation.
The runaway inflation we've been facing seems to be at least partially created by runaway profits. It's time some of those industries were reeled in. Banking I'm looking at you.
Labour is in a hole, and it needs to climb out with actual solutions to the problems we're facing. Otherwise people are going to default to National just for "change", and folks let me tell you National is not offering anything better. A National Government would likely be much of what we've got but meaner. Meaner to those who can least afford to be on the receiving end. Someone in my middle class position is unlikely to be materially impacted by a Luxon-led Government, but I don't want my country to face that.
I'm still of the view that Labour will stumble over the line in a 2005 style victory. Most people seem to have written them off, but I think they'll do it. I think the whole planet is going to face a recession and things will look grim everywhere. And at that point Labour can hold up Jacinda Ardern and ask "who do you want to see us through this challenging period? Someone who got us through a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, and has been getting us through a global pandemic? Or do you want that bald LinkedIn post over there?"
And I think enough of the country will swing back to Labour to get a Labour/Greens/TPM coalition over the line. Goodness knows what that will look like, but it would be the most left wing government we've ever had. The alternative is a National/ACT coalition, and the most right-wing government we've ever had. Either way it's a scary time to be a centrist. Suck it.
*there was a quarterly GDP report out not long before Xmas that was something like 2%, when nearly every economist had predicted approx 0.9%. In economic world this is a huge miss. And it happens all the time. But it won't stop these same economists being platformed with their next set of predictions. Kids, if you want a job with seemingly zero accountability then punditry is your ideal scenario. Especially political punditry. But especially economic punditry.
