It looks like we are going to have a policy free election campaign from the Labour party, and that just isn’t good enough.
It’s lazy and it’s arrogant.
Perhaps they’ve decided that policy runs the risk of actually having to do something.
The Prime Minister has said that they are going to fight the election on the basis that they did a good job during the Chinese Plague.
She also made a bizarre reference to a Netflix show in launching her campaign.
But did they?
That’s why they are scare-mongering on community transmission and masks.
Their poor performance on past promises is also why they don’t want to campaign on their achievements.
There are precious few of those.
Sadly, the media are letting Jacinda Ardern get away with it all.
And with her army of Covid Karens telling off anyone who dares criticise we are fast losing any semblance of robust political debate.
That’s why we ask the hard questions and draw your attention to the yawning gap between Labour’s slogans and promises and their actual delivery.
I’m Cam Slater and this is Insight politics.
Why the Flip Flop on Masks?
This week both Chris Hipkins and Ashley Bloomfield gave ominous warnings of being prepared for a second wave of the Chinese plague.
Amongst their recent pronouncements was both giving advice on citizens stockpiling masks at home and how to wear masks.
Ashley Bloomfield even gave us a demonstration video of him talking about masks and how to wear them and even how to make them..
Either they are aware of something that they haven’t shared with us about community transmission or it is just scare tactics.
Either way it is in stark contrast with what both Bloomfield and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern were telling us in May.
1News reported that “masks will not be required to be worn by members of the public when the country moves to Level 2” on May 12.
“For the general public, what I can say is we’re neither recommending nor requiring masks,”
“However, if you do choose to use a mask, that’s fine, and just make sure you know how to use it safely so you reduce the risk to yourself and others”.
“We will keep watching, but at the moment, we’re not requiring or recommending that the general public use masks”, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the Director-General of Health, said in an announcement on May 11.
He was backed up by the Prime Minister who said that people should take precautions if they choose to wear masks, noting that surgical masks should be changed up to three times an hour.
“When you’re changing it, you need to be very careful that you’re not making any contact with the mask and ultimately, that you’re not allowing it to become damp through the entire period you’re wearing it,” she said.
“Making sure that it’s worn properly, I think, is one of the reasons evidence really can often fall on either side when you’re asking those outside of the health profession to wear them.”
So what’s changed?
Why all the talk of possibly requiring masks?
Are we about to get locked down again?
These numpties take everything WHO says as gospel. No one yet has held them to account for being China’s mouthpiece in the early stages.
And while our government is tugging their forelock in obedience to WHO, public health officials in Denmark, Holland, and beyond say they have no intention of recommending face coverings, saying the science does not support it.
Coen Berends, spokesman for the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment said “Face masks in public places are not necessary, based on all the current evidence,”
And;
“There is no benefit and there may even be negative impact.”
So, who do we believe?
But if we do now need masks then that raises some interesting questions the media are failing to ask.
If it is the case that there will be community transmission then clearly the “stamp it out and eliminate” strategy that the Prime Minister has been claiming as a personal victory has failed.
So too has their border and quarantine strategy.
They can’t have it both ways, either they’ve done as they claimed and eliminated the virus or they’ve failed and we have community transmission again.
I’ll just bet that we go to Level two 24 hours after the sentencing of the Aussie scumbag and the resulting headlines and hugging photos such is the craven personal publicity agenda of one of the most shallow prime ministers in living history.
At their campaign launch Ardern made it official, that they aren’t going to campaign on policy, they are going to campaign on their response to the Chinese Plague, thereby ignoring all their policy failures and broken promises from the last election.
“Know Us By Our deeds”
Which means they are going to essentially bore us to death by telling us all how they went hard and they went early.
As I wrote on Sunday, Jacinda Ardern has famously claimed that we will “know us by our deeds”.
I examined their deeds in housing, and they were found wanting.
But the Prime Minister wants us to ignore all their policy failings and instead focus on their deeds during the Chinese Plague response.
Well, one of their first deeds was to lock us all down.
And we now know that deed was also illegal.
So their first action in response to the Chinese Plague, was to break the law, suspend and ignore civil rights and then pass new laws under urgency or by Orders in Council to correct their deficiencies.
Another deed was to borrow billions of dollars that makes John Key’s borrowing, which Labour criticised roundly at the time, pale into obscurity.
We now have a mountain of debt and a barely functioning economy.
On top of that their deeds in response to the plague has caused tens of thousands more people become unemployed.
And that mountain of debt used to pay wage subsidies has also conveniently postponed further redundancies until after the election.
Labour have mortgaged your kids future to win themselves reelection.
Sadly, it might just work.
They are banking on being able to fix everything in time for the following election.
But given their lack of achievement in the past three years that is highly unlikely.
We know them by their deeds…and their deeds have seen a tripling of the waiting list for state housing instead of a lowering like they promised.
If housing was a crisis before Labour came in then surely that crisis is now three times worse.
Rents have increased, costs and compliance to landlords has seen a mass exodus.
Kiwibuild was supposed to have delivered 16,000 homes by now, it’s delivered just 450.
By any measure you care to choose housing under Labour has gotten worse.
Labour promised light rail to the airport by 2021 yet not one millimetre of track has been built.
That’s another spectacular failure by Phil Twyford, whose mouth cashed cheques his government couldn’t deliver.
Again, if we know them by their deeds they’ve failed.
Child poverty, the Prime Ministers own portfolio, and also the reason she stated for being in politics, has gone backwards.
In 2017, the prime minister claimed she wanted New Zealand to be ‘the best place in the world to be a child’ and promised to halve child poverty.
However, three years on, that promise has proven to be nothing more than a hollow slogan as there are now 4,000 more children living in poverty under her watch.
Seven out of nine child poverty indicators have worsened and there are now 15,000 more children growing up in benefit dependent homes since Labour took office.
In the last financial year $480 million was paid out in hardship grants.
Know them by their deeds. Another failure.
Labour can’t avoid being held to account, but it up to the National party to call them out as a party whose only deeds have been to make things worse in almost every respect.
All they have are slogans, there is no policy depth to back up those slogans.
And the results are what a technocrat would describe as sub par.
Their stars are waning and over worked and the rest of them are what a banker would call poorly performing assets.
If Labour wins a majority they’ll have even more of those poorly performing assets on the back bench.
Labour wants us to re-elect them based on what they’ve done, and from where I’m looking at it from, they’ve done three fifths of five eights of stuff all.
Will the voters realise that in time?
Stranger Things
Stranger Things (Extended) · Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
The Prime Minister launched Labour’s re-election campaign on Saturday in a Town hall decked out like it was from the depths of hell itself.
It certainly looked like it was set up as some sort of religious ceremony, in a Satanic Church kind of way.
Then again Labour has become a religion of sorts with people seeking to beatify its leader as some sort of amazing miracle worker.
That’s certainly how the Media party have treated her, especially the foreign media that she always has time for.
She even believes all her own spin, but one day she’s going to step out on some water and find out she can’t walk on it.
Ardern started her campaign with the strangest comment imaginable.
“If you had told me then that our launch in 2020 would be in the midst of a global pandemic with our borders closed, I would have found that very hard to fathom,” she said.
“If you’d told me that Clarke (Gayford) and I would have a toddler, I wouldn’t have believed we would have been so lucky.”
“If you’d told me that we would have just completed a term in Government with both New Zealand First and the Greens, I’d assume you’d been watching excessive amounts of ‘Stranger Things’ – and yet here we are.”
And here we are, with the Prime Minister talking about Stranger Things.
For those of you who don’t know what Stranger Things was about it is a Netflix show set in the 80s, where a secret Soviet laboratory under the local shopping mall seeks to open a gateway to the “Upside Down”, allowing the entities from the “Upside Down” to possess people in the towns and creating a new horror to deal with.
The lead character is a girl called Eleven who gets a blood nose every time she uses her powers.
Does Jacinda Ardern get a blood nose every time she uses her powers like the main character Eleven?
Has New Zealand become “The Upside Down” under her Government?
Do we have to start calling her Eleven now?
Or even funnier is Clarke Gayford Billy?
Or is it because Stranger Things was set in the 80s and she has a hankering for stroppy unions, massive state subsidies, and tariffs and government control over every aspect of our lives?
Is she the new Muldoon, who controlled New Zealand with an iron fist in the 70s and 80s.
She sure as hell won’t be Thinking Big such is the timidity of her leadership and the paucity of her thinking.
Though she may have “Somethink Big” to say, and that will be talking about the massive debt monster she has lumped us all with…oh wait, just like the 70s and 80s.
Maybe it’s the big hair and shoulder pads she is hankering for?
But the “Upside Down” has a massive evil monster with tentacles looking over the town, and smaller dog-like creatures called demogorgons marauding and devouring locals.
Are the demogorgons the Chinese plague?
Is the looming evil over the town the massive debt monster?
In any case it was a weird thing to begin your election campaign.
I suppose we’ve seen a lot of strange things in the past three years….like a Prime Minister who seems to have enough time on her hands to watch three seasons of Stranger Things on Netflix.
Victoria’s New Police State
Get a load of this from Victoria’s top cop:
Sounds very Corona-fascist, not dissimilar to the threats we had here.
It would surprise no one that this senior Australian policeman dressed from head to toe in black as he delivered his police state view of the world.
As James Delingpole sad, “this is not a scene from a prequel to Mad Max where Australia gets taken over by fascists. This is actually happening right now in the Australian state of Victoria, under the regime of power-crazed, hard left premier Daniel Andrews. (Or ‘Kim Jong Dan’, as he is known locally.”
Given the warning this past week from both Chris Hipkins and Ashley Bloomfield, how far away are we from seeing our own Police Commissioner say the same things.
And given the last lockdown was on seriously dodgy legal grounds it makes you wonder if we aren’t being softened up again for a lockdown shortly after the Aussie terrorist is locked away for life.
Summary
The Prime Minister is going to campaign on her response to the Chinese plague.
She claims to have saved us all as do her Covid Karen Army.
But she forgets that she was the Prime Minister, it was literally her job.
Blithe statements about leading the response ignore the fact that any government was going to lead the response.
The opposition could literally do nothing, and any way any approaches to help were rejected out of hand.
The old political saying that politicians should never waste a good crisis has never been truer than today.
So Labour and the Prime Minister are going to campaign on steady as she goes.
They can hardly campaign on their achievements, can they?
The left-wing will try to portray Judith Collins as a mean girl.
But it isn’t being mean to be competent, an it isn’t kindness to let hundreds of thousands languish on the dole.
This country needs more than hugs and cuddles.
It needs competence.
And I’m sorry, but Labour doesn’t fill me with confidence despite the claims of their army of Covid Karens.
Just look at the fools who have quit, been sacked or demoted.
Know them by their deeds.
Curran, Davis, Clark, Whaitiri, Twyford.
Sacked, Inept, Useless, Punchy and Grandiloquent.
Four political pygmies in a caucus of equally useless MPs.
Labour has just three people doing any work, Robertson, Woods and Faafoi.
With Jacinda playing the fairy princess and uttering word soup and bumper sticker slogans.
I’m sick of hearing hard and early, team of 5 million.
Last I looked there is no I in team, and I’m certainly not playing on their team either.
We need a proper campaign, one where leaders treat us like adults, not like naughty kids with the ever present threat that Mother Ardern will send us to our rooms if we don’t comply.
We live in a democracy, we deserve a proper election campaign.
I’m Cam Slater and this was Insight: Politics.