Many commenters regularly complain that National (and ACT) aren’t doing enough to oppose vaccine mandates. A recent poll from Colmar Brunton show why that is:
A new poll shows strong public support for vaccine mandates continues for certain workforces, even as protests emerge across the country.
The latest 1News Colmar Brunton Poll showed 74 per cent of those polled supported mandates currently in place for teachers, health care workers, port, border, and prison workers.
There were 20 per cent opposed and 6 per cent did not know.
It showed similar results to the Talbot Mills Research poll a month ago, which found 79 per cent of those polled agreed with a vaccine mandate for health workers, while 72 per cent agreed to one for teachers.
NZ Herald
It is electoral suicide for National to pursue a strategy that caters for just 25% of the voters. Until those numbers change there is no point in National dying in a ditch over them. It literally is a forlorn hope.
What you need to understand is this: while you may wish for that strategy, the reality is you are just 20% of the population. I’m one of those but I realise the actual, real-life political implications. No amount of wishing it weren’t so, will make it not so.
What National has to do is offer up soft solutions at the edge, that don’t appear fringe and looney. But they can only do that as those numbers start to change; otherwise they are wasting their breath. No one will listen until those numbers approach 50%.
Unfortunately, they just have to wait for the government to fall on its face and pick up the pieces. The numbers will change when the strategy fails. And it is failing:
As predicted, lockdown has been extraordinarily ineffective at controlling Delta. Auckland has been the sacrificial lamb in the government’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants strategy for “containing” and then “eliminating” Delta.
As more people realise that they are being held hostage by an out of touch and out of her depth Prime Minister, those numbers will change. Until the mandates bite and families lose jobs, livelihoods and businesses and pain starts to be felt personally, the numbers won’t change.
What you need to realise though is that those numbers are on a precipice. It won’t take much for a catastrophic drop to occur and that day is fast approaching as people feel locked up and locked in by this uncaring government.
What is happening on the ground in Auckland is not seen by politicians. They will see it when their poll numbers tank and they are staring down the barrel of losing Auckland electorally. On current polling there would be at least ten fewer Labour MPs in Auckland, and that number will grow as Labour’s poll numbers continue to slide.
They’ve already slid 10 points in the space of three months. Labour, though, think that they have all the answers and when they succeed in beating Delta they will be rewarded magnificently in the polls.
Of course they won’t beat Delta; no one in the world, with the exception of herd immunity Sweden and ivermectin-dosing Utter Pradesh and Japan has managed it. This government has no innovative methods of controlling this outbreak. They have followed precisely the path that other highly vaccinated countries have followed and will end up with the same results.
Then people will realise they’ve bought a pup, that the vaccines weren’t the salvation of us all, and then buyer’s remorse will set in and they will crash in a Hindenburg-like disaster. Trust will be destroyed along with lives, livelihoods and business, and they will never be allowed to forget it.
Even prime ministers who win wars get tossed from office. Winston Churchill won a war but lost the election once hostilities ceased. People wanted change. And so it will happen here: in two years time voters will have tired of Jacinda Ardern and her patronising demeanour, coupled with clear and obvious policy failures in child poverty, housing, transport and failed health reforms and the racist debacle of their He Puapua plans.
All National has to do is be ready to pick up the pieces of a shattered nation. But the polls need to change a bit more yet before people are willing to listen to their solutions. Stay the course; the slide of Labour is going to be epic.
Please share this article so others can discover The BFD.