Over on the website Politikiwi they are tracking the government’s election promises. The website was launched eight months ago and its existence was announced on Reddit. It began as a personal project for 19-year-old software engineer Robert Calvert’s portfolio.

Introducing Politikiwi – A polling aggregation and politician popularity tracking site for New Zealand politics.[…] Politikiwi (portmanteau of “political” and “kiwi”) is a one-of-a-kind-in-New-Zealand web-app which offers:

reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/bkt3nt/introducing_politikiwi
  • an aggregate of recent opinion polls.
  • a political values test which tells users their ideology and suggests aligned political parties.
  • a custom party leader popularity tracker which, using thousands of tweets and the power of natural language processing, measures the popularity of New Zealand’s political party leaders by day, week and month.

According to the site the following promises about the economy have not been kept so far:

  • Make multinationals pay their fair share. (Not started).
  • Abolish 90-day trial periods. (Compromised).
  • Overhaul the welfare system, ensure access to entitlements, remove excessive sanctions and review Working For Families. (Compromised).
  • Act on the recommendations of the Tax Working Group. (Broken promise).

Promises that are currently in progress are:

  • Labour will run a surplus and pay down debt.
  • Introduce industry-wide fair pay agreements.
  • Implement a $3 billion regional development fund.

Promises that have been kept are:

  • End secondary tax.
  • Raise the minimum wage.
  • Introduce a Regional Development Fund.
  • Boost Working for Families to all those who currently receive it and extend it to 30,000 more families.
  • Introduce a Best Start payment to help families with costs in a child’s early years.
  • Introduce a Winter Energy Payment for people receiving superannuation or a main benefit.
  • Resume contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund.
  • Make substantial progress to eliminate the gender pay gap in the core public sector.

A contribution from The BFD staff.