At least six public polls have now shown that New Zealanders’ love affair with the Labour party appears to be over. The margins are small but show the ebbing tides of public favour for them. On two results in particular in the latest Newshub/Reid Research poll, Labour will struggle to reverse the prevailing narrative.
Those two things are the cost of living crisis, which Jacinda Ardern has only grudgingly acknowledged is real, and tax cuts.
… the latest Newshub-Reid Research poll shows Kiwis want the Government to do more on the cost of living.
It asked: ‘Do you think the Government has done enough to address the cost of living crisis?’
The results: 15.2 percent said yes, while 77 percent said no, and 7.8 percent didn’t know.
This is where it will sting for the Government: only just over a quarter – 26.6 percent – of Labour voters think they’ve done enough and 60.1 percent say no, the Government hasn’t done enough, while 13.3 percent didn’t know.
Newshub
This is a massive problem for the Labour Government. They have the next budget already locked in, and they have one more budget after that before the election. Almost all of their policy settings are baked in and are behind the massive inflationary pressures that have built up.
You can’t pile costs onto businesses, like more public holidays, increased leave entitlements and raising minimum wages which force businesses to raise other wages, without there being consequences in the form of price rises across the board.
Then when you add in their war against landlords by lumping huge costs onto them like the Healthy Homes policy and forcing landlords to pay tenancy fees, of course you are going to see those costs passed on by landlords when they renew tenancies and increase rents.
When the Government’s union-friendly Fair Pay Agreements start hitting home they will also be massively inflationary, because unions will be pointing to the worsening cost of living crisis and will want to ameliorate that, causing even more inflation.
When all that happens in a very short space of time, then of course inflation gets out of control, leading to the very real perception that there is a cost of living crisis.
The real problem for the Government is that this is one issue they can’t spend their way out of, much as they’d like to. The budget is pretty much set in stone and we will see billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on stupid things like climate change. There is literally nothing that they can do to significantly reduce the cost of living, other than cutting taxes.
The obvious solution – well, to sensible people – is broad-reaching tax cuts, especially as the high inflation will be massively increasing the tax take. But Labour really, really hate giving people their own money back. This is where they run into their next problem. Many people who think the Government hasn’t done enough to solve the cost of living crisis, are also wanting tax cuts in the next budget.
It asked: Do you think the Government should give New Zealanders a tax cut in the upcoming May Budget?
A clear majority – 68.7 percent – say yes, hand back over the cash, while only 23.7 percent said no. Even a majority of Labour voters – 54.2 percent – want a tax cut, with 35.7 percent saying no.
But it’s not going to happen.
“We do not agree that tax cuts that favour those who earn the most are the priority right now,” Robertson said in Parliament on Wednesday.
Newshub
3:1 in favour of tax cuts, and 3:1 saying the government hasn’t done enough to solve the cost of living crisis. Even Blind Freddy can see that those two issues are lethal for any incumbent government. On both issues, even a majority of Labour voters agree with both questions.
Labour hasn’t just lost the room, they’ve made the room leave and seek new premises.
But Labour would rather undergo brain surgery without an anaesthetic than give tax cuts, which would actually solve both issues.
People are going to be in for a shock when the budget comes out. Not only will Labour not be contemplating tax cuts in this budget, but they are actually going to deliver a tax hike on every single employee and employer in New Zealand. What?
Yep, they are going to smack the average family’s take home pay by $100 a month in order to fund Labour’s unemployment insurance scheme so people made redundant will get up to $400 a day for seven months. With rising prices on key staples like food and fuel, can any average family really afford to give up $1200 a year in order to fund unemployment insurance?
Labour thinks that they can. I’ll bet a dollar to a knob of goat poo that they’re wrong. If Labour thinks the polls are a bit worrying now, wait until they see them in a few short months.
The funny thing is, this crisis in confidence is entirely of their own making. When you add in the debacles caused by Trevor Mallard and the continued degradation of democracy as they force through more and more co-governance policies that steal assets from us all and gift 50% of those same assets to 15% of the population, based entirely on who their ancestors were, well, then you will get electoral annihilation.
The first inkling of that annihilation will come in the local body elections, where anyone standing with Labour on their signs will likely cop a shellacking.
Labour, when pushed back against a wall, always resort to the nasty. They aren’t known as the Nasty Party for nothing. Buckle up folks, things are going to get worse before they get better.
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