Worried2Death
Contributor
How's early retirement going, you back from cruising the Greek Islands in your super yacht? I'm not jealous.Mmmm… fresh meat is so much better than frozen
Politics NZ Politics
- Thread starter wizard of Tauranga
- Start date
Politics. It is changing while they are in so it's a win. Even though nothing they have done in the last few months would do anything. Same thing if it was going the other way. The opposition would be saying they have mad it worse.
On the sacked ministers. Both main parties have a lack of talent. Labour took a while to sack them. The thing with both parties is do they have someone else to step up or do they overload the few ministers that can get things done.
First government I can remember where there’s been no honeymoon period from the public whatsoever. Right from the smoking debacle of pulling the wool over the public’s eyes and announcing something there wasn’t even a whisper about has left an impression on people. They’ve got a long way to earn many peoples trust againI’ll be honest guys, politics has bored me lately. We’re in the ‘getting on and doing it’ part of the election cycle where everything that’s happening was announced before the election.
No new policy. Just continually rehashing what was already voted for with a mandate at the election.
We do need to make cuts. But it does seem a bit extreme with some of them. To be honest I've been too busy and only seen the headlines of X people from this ministry or a % of this ministry need to go. It doesn't come off like there has been a lot of research into what headcounts are needed and how over staffed different ministries are. Some may be, but others may be understaffed.
As someone who works in IT and been involved with businesses who have been the recipient of a cyber attack. It is something we should be investing in. Yes the companies themselves also need to invest in protecting themselves. But a lot of the government ministries don't do things properly.
The diabetes and disabled carers come under health. An area after the pandemic we should be investing in. We don't want a repeat in 5-10 years if another virus hits and our health system can't cope as we haven't learnt from covid.
Diabetes is something all western countries are being hit with and it will get worse as more and more of the population become obese. That not only leads to diabetes but also other issues. We should be investing in the treatment but also aiming to get the health of the population improved. Having less people in danger of having limbs amputated is a good thing.
- Thread starter
- #8,405
I think you need a positive media strategy to control your public image and they have failed miserably in that respect.
Fighting with the media cost them a honeymoon period due to NZ First.
I wonder how different things would have been if it was only National/ Act?
Looking at acts numbers in that recent poll, they are trending downward too. Swarbrick overtaken Seymour as a preferred prime minister too, though low percentage for both
Last edited:
- Thread starter
- #8,407
Mate, I was away for 2 weeks and missed three games / 3 weekends.
Manly, Dragons and Titans. I came back expecting 3 wins… not the season on the ropes.
Reminds me of when I went on a 6 week contiki as a youngster. Left when we were about 6th coming into the finals and came back and missed we had played in the GF!
No, they need credible and less conglomerate-led policies. Sell-outs yet they talk like they know whats best for us. Talk about not being able to read the room
Or thinking we're like every right-wing country in the world.
No wonder Luxon's resume is that of a numptie. Seymour is a joke. Winnie is a fly on the rump of a cowpat.
Rant over.
They're bereft of workable policies that aren't carbon copies of countries far bigger, far richer, and more populated than we are.
Coalition's dirge of austerity and uncertainty is driving the economy into a deeper recession
Coalition's talk of fiscal mess, its funding freezes & state sector job cuts have reversed an initial revival in business and consumer confidence, extending & deepening 2023's recession into 2024
thekaka.substack.com
Worst poll result for a new Government in MMP history
Coalition slumps behind Opposition in poll after just 5 months in power; RBNZ warns banks on climate risk; Landlord building plans at record lows, while 80% plan rent hikes, despite tax reversal
thekaka.substack.com
Never thought I'd say it but don't go away again this year if that's the result
- Thread starter
- #8,412
Most of my current disinterest in politics is because I firmly believe we are still in the last stages of the covid period. The health crisis has finished but the economic and social crisis is lagging and still playing out this year.I’ll be honest guys, politics has bored me lately. We’re in the ‘getting on and doing it’ part of the election cycle where everything that’s happening was announced before the election.
No new policy. Just continually rehashing what was already voted for with a mandate at the election.
An economist has said the inflation bubble the world has been fighting is only due to the worldwide supply chain effects of covid and we will return to low inflation as the world economy gets back to normal. He’s actually said the whole battle (with raising interest rates, stalling the economy) has been irrelevant and we didn’t need to do any of it as it would correct itself naturally.
I see the same with crime, health, labour shortages and many other issues in the economy. It’s all out of our control in an abnormal period in our history and in 10 years time we will look back at now as still the last stages of covid. Just a cyclical reaction to the economic covid shock.
Which gets to politics. It’s pretty much irrelevant within the big picture, although we could come out better or worse with different political management. Yes they are tweaking around the edges, but there’s bigger world wide things happening in the real economy that need time to resolve.
Why not use this time to actually try and learn something of the subject matter?I’ll be honest guys, politics has bored me lately. We’re in the ‘getting on and doing it’ part of the election cycle where everything that’s happening was announced before the election.
No new policy. Just continually rehashing what was already voted for with a mandate at the election.
So, the government says that property managers don't need to be registered.... as if they all doing a great job. Rubbish!!!!
I was talking to a friend who is currently looking for a new property manager because his old one wasn't writing new reports after each inspection. His old tenants left just after Christmas so he took the time between them leaving and the new ones arriving to remove the wall paper through most of the house (it was over thirty years old and peeling in places), had the walls re-stopped and painted and the ceilings repainted. Then he got the inspection report last month which said the wall paper was peeling, ceiling paint was cracked and that repairs the property manager had done were still required.
This concerned him so he got out his old inspection reports and compared them. For the last three reports, all the Property Manager had done was copy and paste a pervious report and changed the date. The photos attached were at least new so they had done the inspections.
I was talking to a friend who is currently looking for a new property manager because his old one wasn't writing new reports after each inspection. His old tenants left just after Christmas so he took the time between them leaving and the new ones arriving to remove the wall paper through most of the house (it was over thirty years old and peeling in places), had the walls re-stopped and painted and the ceilings repainted. Then he got the inspection report last month which said the wall paper was peeling, ceiling paint was cracked and that repairs the property manager had done were still required.
This concerned him so he got out his old inspection reports and compared them. For the last three reports, all the Property Manager had done was copy and paste a pervious report and changed the date. The photos attached were at least new so they had done the inspections.
Many take 7 or 8% for doing nothing. Unless you have a very good one, they are not worth the cost.
When we moved here we got mail for a previous tenant, a local property manager for a big real estate company. There were quite a few bills which were not paid and she wasn't about to pay. I met my mechanic that way and at least he got to service my vehicles for 12 years as some consolation.
So according to your logic the covid period is to blame for all the woes we're in and not Labour, awesome. Here's a piece from someone who's journalism and opinion I resonate with - Gordon Campbell - https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2...ions-awful-not-good-very-bad-poll-results.htm
I think Wiz you'll find the coalition are far more destructive than their election promises. In fact they've introduced much more corruption and harm through a number of policies they didn't campaign on.
This government is rotton to the core.
Here's the text from the article:
On The Coalition’s Awful, Not Good, Very Bad Poll Results
Wednesday, 1 May 2024, 10:19 amArticle: Gordon Campbell
Over the past 36 hours, Christopher Luxon has been doing his best to portray the centre-right’s plummeting poll numbers as a mark of virtue. Allegedly, the negative verdicts are the result of hard economic times, and of a government bravely set out on a perilous rescue mission from which not all of its MPs will be coming back alive: “What we’re here to do isn’t always easy and nice, but we’re here to make the tough and necessary decisions...”
Right. Tough and necessary decisions like a $3 billion tax handout to landlords. Like cutting the access that hungry kids have to school lunches. Like raising the cost of public transport for children and young people etc etc.
Perhaps someone needs to tell Luxon that when poll numbers go bad, its not a good idea to suggest to people that they’re too fickle and soft to grasp the government’s higher mission. In reality, the fact that those bad poll numbers are coming so early in the government’s first term would suggest that the public grasps only too well what this government is doing, and is increasingly opposed to it.
None of this seems to be making a dent in Luxon’s superiority complex. Less than a year ago remember, Luxon was claiming that New Zealand had turned into a “negative, wet, whiny and inward looking country.” Basically, we’re not good enough for him. We really need to shake our ideas up, and stop whining to the pollsters.
Advertisement - scroll to continue reading
Are you getting our free newsletter?
Subscribe to Scoop’s 'The Catch Up' our free weekly newsletter sent to your inbox every Monday with stories from across our network.Email Address *
So far though, the public has been given plenty of reasons to complain. The Luxon government has shied away from making any tough and necessary decisions about the environment, about climate change, and the loss of bio-diversity. Instead, it has pandered to polluters, to the fossil fuel industry and to mining interests, which have been promised access to Crown land. It is promising to build more and bigger roads, while cutting access to electric vehicles.
In similar vein, the Luxon government has tilted the balance of power even further in the workplace and in the housing market, in favour of employers and landlords. So far, Luxon’s government has taken no “ hard” or “necessary” steps to address climate change, to make farmers pay their way on global warming and waterways pollution, or to reduce social inequality.
At the same time, it also doesn’t appear to have a single positive policy idea in its head. All it seems able to do is to scrap, cut, abolish, repeal, and defer - and hope that something or other will arise from the rubble. None of this gives the public any reason to think that this government is on its side, during these hard economic times. If anything as Bernard Hickey says, the government’s austerity policies are only serving to make the recession deeper, and longer lasting than in other comparable countries going through their own post Covid adjustments.
Luxon talks a lot about his government doing what it was elected to do. Yet it has a little or no mandate for the programme it has been pursuing for the past five months. During the election campaign, did anyone hear a peep about the scrapping of the smokefree legislation? That’s been the least of it.
Essentially....at the last election, the National Party sold the public a menu, but ever since it has proved itself incapable of making a meal. On social and economic policy, Luxon is following an agenda largely devised by the ACT Party, which won only 8.6% of the vote at the last election. On Treaty issues, Luxon is deferring to David Seymour and to Winston Peters, who seems obsessed with taking revenge on a Maori renaissance that left him behind 40 years ago.
Mind you, when National does make a substantive decision that’s all of their own making, you rather wish they wouldn’t. Long after this government is history, we will be regretting the day that Finance Minister Nicola Willis decided that second hand, unfit for purpose Cook Strait ferries would be good enough for this country’s most vital internal link for trade and tourism.
Finally....but National really knows how to run an economy, right? Not so much, actually. Nearly a decade ago, the rest of the world concluded that cutbacks to government spending and other forms of financial austerity were a road to nowhere. Today, the disastrous Tory government in the UK is the only other remaining true believer in the austerity gospel. This year, as our recession has deepened and unemployment is tipped to rise, Luxon, Willis and the rest of the Cabinet brains trust have decided that this is an ideal time to actively throw thousands more people out of work.
Worse probably lies in store. As this column recently pointed out, the NZ population is ageing rapidly, and developing chronic, multiple, and costly health needs. Yet rather than expand capacity, the government has imposed further cuts of $105 million on an already stretched public health system. It has frozen overtime and deferred signing contracts....thereby driving even more of our trained specialists and nursing staff overseas in search of more stable, and better paid options. All of this in order to finance a round of tax cuts and handouts to landlords that will deprive New Zealand of the revenue it needs to meet those rising health needs in future.
And so the coalition clown car careens onwards, full speed towards the May Budget.
Footnote One: Although this week’s poll was only one poll, there is little reason to think of it as an outlier. At this point, both ACT and New Zealand First must be mulling their options. Under MMP, junior parties commonly face a grim future if they remain yoked to an unpopular governing party.
From the outset, Seymour has been pursuing a path of critical independence from National - but this path will be al but extinguished in a year’s time, when Seymour officially steps into the role of deputy PM, and becomes more directly linked to the National Party programme. At that point, one survival option could be for Seymour to mount a take-over bid for the leadership of the centre-right.
If anything, the immediate outlook for New Zealand First is even worse. In a year’s time however, Peters will have more room to carve out a different path. He will have ceased to be the deputy PM. After the midpoint of 2025, Peters will be relatively free to blame the government’s unpopularity on the loss of his own wise counsel and stewardship. NZF’s survival will require it to run hard against National.
In sum, now is the easy part. Neither of the future survival plans of his junior partners bode all that well for Christopher Luxon. If his government occasionally looks dis-united at present, we – to quote Bachman Turner Overdrive – ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Footnote Two: Good to see that National’s no nonsense policies on crime have stopped ram raids.
Footnote Three : Reportedly, rents are rising at an annual rate of 8.3%. On Trade Me estimates, that’s an extra cost on average of about $2,600 a year. Roughly speaking, about half the population are renters. They would therefore need to get an extra $50 back in the tax cuts, merely to stand still with the rate of rent inflation alone, not to mention other cost of living impacts. Moreover, for many families living in metropolitan areas, the loss of transport discounts (for children and young people) will wipe out whatever they may stand to receive from the tax cuts.
Footnote Four. In a brief interview on Breakfast TV yesterday morning, Luxon five times mentioned the “mess” his government has allegedly inherited from the Labour government. Over the past 36 hours, Willis and other Cabinet ministers have repeated the same refrain. It is pure spin, warmed over from last year’s election campaign.
In reality last year, the international rating agencies maintained New Zealand’s sky high credit rating. Last August Fitch endorsed New Zealand’s AA+ credit rating, while praising the country’s “robust
governance standards”:
The 'AA+' ratings reflect our view that the [Labour] government's commitment to return to surplus will put gross government debt/GDP on a downward path in the medium term, despite more near-term fiscal expansion. Macro-financial risks arise from high household debt and a recent widening of the current account deficit, in the context of already-high net external debt, but the risks are manageable, given sound macro management.
Similarly, and in mid-October last year, Standard & Poors Global Ratings was reported as saying that the country's AA+ rating, which was upgraded in 2021, reflected the [Labour] government's handling of the pandemic, low debt, discipline and economic growth, and there was no reason to change. “New Zealand’s excellent institutions, wealthy economy, and moderate public indebtedness” would balance out any risks associated with the country’s current account deficit, high levels of external and private-sector debt and volatile property prices, over the next two years.”
All up, that isn’t a recipe for a “mess” or a rationale for resorting in panic to draconian austerity measures. Last year, we were doing better than most of our peers. S&P was forecasting that New Zealand’s deficit would narrow over the next three years, and that net general government debt would stabilise at a level that was “modest compared with that of most highly rated sovereign peers.”
Meaning :there is no evidence for Luxon’s claim that (under Labour management) the deficit, or public debt, or the borrowing programme was out of control. In fact, the rating agencies seemed far more worried that the cancellation of Three Waters would throw the costs of water infrastructure projects back onto local councils already saddled with sizeable debt burdens. The “inherited mess” excuse simply doesn’t stand up to the readily available evidence.
- Thread starter
- #8,418
To give Labour their dues they got a hospital pass with covid and most govts around the world got voted out after it.
But Labour should have abandoned their ambition to change the world and put NZ First (not the party). Few changes and supporting what we had providing stability. Instead they tried to bring in too many ideological changes when we needed stability. Eg who reimagines the hospital system in the middle of a pandemic? Who introduces a world leading tax that goes straight onto rent in a housing crisis?
Labour had their chance now its Nationals turn. I accept the election result and it bores me the continual bleating as each policy is changed as promised (except the smoking which I DGAF about). In all honesty I think Labour would have had to do a lot of similar changes (eg cutting the public service).
Just not passionate about politics at the moment as it’s all negative Labour when the focus should be on positive collaborative feedback towards the changes to make them better.
We’re in a long term recession with huge budget deficits and there should be no negative comments about reducing the public service and getting those people into the productive sector where they can make a real difference.
I’m just not interested in constant negativity for negative sake eg Hipkins ‘sack the broadcasting minister’ when it’s done ‘govt in chaos’… it’s all just a negative bore.
A manufactured recession. The public service is being slashed with no rhyme or reason or mandate other than a made up 7.5% haircut, resulting in widespread damage to already stretched agencies.
Productive sector? What productive sector is this? So health isn't productive? Policing? Mental health resourcing? Social services? Family support? Kids lunches?
And how about turning that migration tap off eh? Who is behind us allowing hundreds of thousands in unscrutinised and pushing up unemployment, at the same time the current government is screeching about those bludgers on the dole?
None of this makes sense unless you're stuck in failed ideology and beholden to your donors and backers. Which is exactly what this government is.
Now we're seeing this corruption and failure, you're choosing to stick your head in the sand.
- Thread starter
- #8,420
just no point in engaging with people that still long for a failed govt…Time to move on and embrace the necessary changes National are doing.
I would rather go back to the rockstar economy settings than Labours spend, borrow, failure of all social services and long term economic recession.
