The Government is being formed and the coalition agreements are now out for all to see.
To be frank I am not only shocked but also amazed. It feels like the policies were formulated by members of a Workingman’s club in the 1970s and negotiated over a few beers.
How else can you explain military training for young offenders, more reading and writing as if Teachers do not do this as is, less Te Reo and winding back smoking restrictions.
That last one is really hard to understand unless it is a revenue raising exercise. The changes mean that National will gain an extra $ 1 billion to help fill in the $2 billion gap caused by the cancellation of the foreign buyer surcharge. But who would have thought that the Government would plug for more lung cancer as a substitute for selling expensive houses to rich people overseas?
Making English an official language is to engage in the sort of mind fuck culture wars that blight our democracy and stop us talking about the really important issues like saving the planet from devastation caused by climate change. And talking about climate change is not something the parties appear to have spent much time doing. The word “climate” does not appear in the National Act agreement. It appears once in the National NZ First agreement in this policy:
Ensure that climate change policies are aligned and do not undermine national energy security.
I can hear the offshore drilling equipment getting revved up as I type this.
A lot of the policies are simple reversals of the last Government’s reforms with no thought about what to do about the issues the reforms were addressing. The word “repeal” appears 13 times in the two agreements and “reverse” four times. By comparison the word “poverty” is missing. This says much about the new Government’s priorities.
I am still perplexed at how this happened although Labour did not help itself.
It is not solely a local problem. Throughout the world recently there has been a swing against incumbents but also a swing to the right. For instance in Holland where for the first time the extreme right became the largest party in the recent election.
From the Guardian:
Until this week, no Dutch party associated with the far right had ever won more than 20% of the vote in a national election. In Europe’s most fragmented political landscape, it is an achievement for any party to cross that threshold. Yet Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) did it with ease in Wednesday’s snap poll, which was precipitated by the resignation of the outgoing prime minister, Mark Rutte, in the summer. This was a victory that threatens to take the normalisation of nativist populist politics in Europe to a dangerous new level.
Campaigning on a nakedly Islamophobic manifesto, which called for bans on mosques and the Qur’an, Mr Wilders won a quarter of the vote. His party has won 37 seats in the 150-seat house of representatives, 12 more than its closest rival and double its tally in the last election. The PVV’s other policies include rejecting all asylum claims, drastically reducing overall levels of immigration, rolling back climate legislation and holding a referendum on leaving the European Union. The party is also opposed to sending more arms to Ukraine. A veteran provocateur on the European stage, Mr Wilders is on the right of the radical right; the dial of Dutch politics has just shifted radically in his favour.
And in Argentina a Mick Jagger impersonating Trump wanna be TV celebrity has been elected President. From the Guardian:
Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.
With more than 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.69% of the vote compared with 44.3% for his rival, the centre-left finance minister Sergio Massa.
“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.
The issue for the left is to work out how to change the narrative. How do we get people talking about the real issues and avoiding the counter culture battles thrown up by well funded agents of evil?
In the meantime buckle down. This is going to be a hell of a ride where the Government picks at scabs to avoid attention on its failure to address the issues that are really important.
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