Tis Christmas time. When MPs and political commentators go on holiday, recharge their batteries and make plans for the next year.
Unless your name is Matt King in which case you scour the papers for evidence of extreme left wing propaganda and then allege that the voices of the right are being suppressed.
Yes, this is exactly what he did recently.
The offending article, written by Lana Hart in Stuff is well written and I found myself agreeing with her every paragraph. I guess this would be Exhibit A for King and his claim of left wing bias.
The theme of the article is the level and extent of neglect that the change of Government has unearthed.
Like in Health:
Middlemore Hospital was the poster child for chronic under-resourcing, but it was far from the only hospital in the country with asbestos and mould, earthquake-prone and leaky buildings, and entire departments that had stumbled along for years with facilities not acceptable in First World countries.
And the alarming increase in child poverty:
From social welfare benefits that hadn’t kept pace with cost of living and the wearing down of services that directly affected children, such as mental health and education funding, to a housing crisis created mostly by a belief that the free market could provide for everyone, kids in our country suffered disproportionately by government responsibilities left undone. The government’s role of protecting the most vulnerable members of our country from the crush of poverty had been largely ignored.
And even the most mundane aspects of the Government’s responsibility to regulate in the public good:
The NZ Transport Agency had for several years reneged on its regulatory function to monitor companies that certify vehicles for road safety.
Due to what the transport minister described as “process failures and under-resourcing over the last decade”, cars and trucks with meaningless warrants of fitness are now on the road, with one estimate of the number of potentially unsafe vehicles at 150,000. Unlikely that will help improve our road toll this year.
Or how about the last Government overseeing the use of private investigators to spy on us like goddam totalitarian thugs?
It’s not OK, we’ve learned, for insurance companies to use private investigators engaged by government departments to record our conversations about personal interests such as property or environmental views. We don’t like it when we are forced to unleash a flood of personal information to someone working in a government agency or to comply with government regulations that may have seemed important to the policy wonk who wrote them in 1984, but now seem onerous and irrelevant.
I thought her conclusion was very apt:
Surely this – enabling people to live good lives – is the role of all governments, whether local or national. They should exert some influence over us with legitimate rules without getting in the way of our individual rights to autonomy and free choice. Since some of us need more help than others, governments also need to step in to even out the inequalities that life throws at us.
After a few years looking after what Kiwis have collectively built, it will probably be time for the current Government to move out. Hopefully they will leave the public house in a better condition than when they first arrived.
Drawing on real life examples she formed a conclusion about the overall direction the last Government took us in. And concluded, rightfully in my opinion, that it was the wrong direction.
The comments were interesting. It seems to me that National must have a whole army of old men shaking their fists at clouds ready to fill comments sessions with their bile. Like this one from Sherbert2:
Lana must have had her head in the sand if she thought all the problems she mentioned came to light after the election.They were invented by Labour pre-election.Remember the 80,000 kiddies living in poverty ? where are they now ? The homeless that were on our screens day in and day have been forgotten because it was all staged by the most honest, transparent, and caring govt ever .Give me a break.
Mr F Dagg had a rant:
it’s amazing the blinded bitterness the socialists still cling to… if you take a deep breath & look at the numbers you’ll find that clark/cullen under-funded core services cv to the relative generosity of national… the latter had a few fiscal issues to deal with on the few resources they were left, yet managed to relatively over-fund core services whilst carving an economy the envy of the oecd world…
what you clearly overlook is that all public services are money sinks, no matter how much money you throw at them they’ll always want more… the greed from striking public servants this year is clear proof of that…<
#socialismisaracetothebottom
And Flintstone:
well the writer of this opinion piece does highlight the fact that more needs to be spent on mental health!
And Beachboy:
What a load of dribble, firstly Middlemore had no leaks or mould, secondly the Minister does not do Warrant of Fitness inspections or run the companies which do them, thirdly the previous govt had put aside $20 plus billion to do its 17 roads of National Significance. All this govt has done is cancelled those so the roads are again delayed so they can re allocate the money to their pet projects. They have been great at reannouncing like all the homes being built by the previous govt as their own.
This government needs to take ownership of its stuff ups and there have been many of those with its KiwiJoke, lack of transparency, secretly signing the UN MOU on Migration, stopping oil and gas exploration, just to name a few.
Most people do not want government to interfere with their lives and we don’t want waffle and continual b*&(sh&^ with outright lies and mis truths. The general population can see through the waffle that nothing is being done except lots of non productive meetings
And Fisherman:
Its interesting that even 15 months into its term, this government and its deciples continue you place blame for everything that is supposedly still wrong in NZ at the feet of the Key/English administration. At some point the blame game is going to have to cease and this rabble will have to actually become accountable. The PM in particular will at some stage have to front and provide some proper leadership.
And Annon:
It was completely unnecessary to start something about government control in our lives with an attack on the previous government and their supposed lack of funding. They only had so much to spend after auntie helen squandered it and they had to deal with several natural disasters during their time in power and still managed to leave money in the bank to be squandered by this government.
BTW labour are notorious for wanting to control people’s lives. They walk the extremely fine line between socialism and communism and history has shown that NEITHER of these work – even China has headed towards capitalism given the growth in their economy.
There were a number of anti Government comments, verging from slightly to considerably nutty.
It looks like a couple of comments got through but were deleted by the moderator. One response to a deleted comment was this:
You are a sad person wishing poor people who aren’t as fortunate as you are not to breed. The fact that your comments have got past the Moderator surprises me. You see my parents were poor, my siblings and I changed that through hard work. My family are successful Business people now. If your comments were enacted by a previous Government my family wouldn’t be here. Good luck to you I hope no misfortune happens to you or your family which reduces you or them to being poor.
The deleted comment must have been pretty extreme in a eugenics sort of way.
But Matt King was having nothing of this:
Responses were interesting:
And it looks like SnarkyMcSnark had a screen shot of the deleted comment:
I think that Matt should set out publicly what comments he had made which Stuff did not publish. They should be allowed the light of day to shine strongly on them so we can either revel in their magnificence or laugh at their stupidity.
But for a National MP to claim there is some sort of conspiracy to suppress right wing views in the media is bizarre. Right wing voices are incredibly loud and vociferous. To suggest otherwise is the sort of Trumpesque nuttiness that America sees far too much of.
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