Capitalist
The ACT party has fallen into the trap of being the junior National party due to their foolishness of campaigning to be ‘deputy’ rather than the big cheese. This week Christopher Luxon whacked the ACT referendum idea on the head making David Seymour look weak, silly, and ineffectual.
Unless I am very much mistaken, this will be the first of many good ideas the ACT party will proffer which the National party either ignores or rejects out of hand.
By spending a year and a half (or 25 and a half, depending on how you look at it) talking about “a National/ACT coalition” – and making it clear that ACT is the junior partner – they can hardly do anything about Luxon’s outright rejection this week. They just have to stand there and take it.
To launch a ‘National can get knotted, all bets are off’ or ‘National should enter into a coalition with Labour, their Siamese twin’ broadside (as you and I would do, dear reader) would look embarrassing after 18 months of “Free Press” newsletters saying the opposite. Sort of like a Bill Rowling high pitched, whiny ‘savaging’ of Rob Muldoon at Question Time circa 1980 – but not as hilarious to watch. Or at least one presumes it was funny, if for no other reason than Rowling possessed even less self-awareness than Ardern.
If the ACT party had spent the last 18 months sailing an independent course portraying itself as the only ‘Opposition’ party and only ‘alternative’ – criss-crossing New Zealand pointing out National’s subservient betrayal of its supporters and principles – they would give freedom lovers somebody to vote for. It would be a credible political party and major political heavyweight after the 2023 general election. Instead, they are muddled, unfocused, and easy to brush aside like a blow fly. A blow fly that keeps coming back again and again to the exact same spot until you spray them with Raid.
If the referendum proposal is now a dead duck, it causes one to speculate on what else the ACT people are going to stand there and take on the chin? Are tax cuts going to be ditched? What about 101 other socialist measures? I am genuinely sceptical that anything is going to change after 2023 if ACT rolls over on their big issue of the moment so easily.
After all, this is the same ACT party which voted to allow jackbooted Police to conduct searches and seizures without a warrant (to be a ‘team player’) a decade ago; an unnecessary law that disgraced both National and ACT and their (clearly false) claims to believe in freedom or the rule of law.
Is there any sort of ‘This is a line you will not cross’ (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan) at the ACT party? If you can’t see where this leads, folks, then you really need to cast your mind back ….oh…about a month or so ago.