Four Three days to go and this election is going down to the wire! Turnout is absolutely vital. Don’t forget to remind your whanau and your friends that every vote is vital and if they want to have a say in the way our country is run in the future then they need to vote.
And if they are not currently on the roll then they can go to an early voting station and enrol and vote at the same time. But only until Friday evening. After that they have to already be on the roll to vote.
Last night’s debate was a frustrating event. Jacinda did not look like she was on top of things. Having Hosking making his personality the centre of the debate is a difficult thing to cope with.
And English continued in that really frustrating way of proclaiming that things were great and wonderful and here are the statistics to prove it.
I hope he has a long session booked in with his Parish Priest on Sunday morning. There are a number of transgressions against the eighth commandment he will need to seek atonement for.
The latest poll hurt. Even though it clearly shows that things are really unstable and the two blocks are neck and neck and anything is possible.
As we descend into the crunch time of this election, where legends will be born and winners are determined and losers are consigned to the rubbish bin of history it suddenly all gets real. Will there be a change of Government and what will this mean for New Zealand’s future?
Six weeks ago privately I would have said no way. At the time it looked like Labour was tanking. I might comment on the background post election. But Labour’s decline was real.
Then along came Jacinda. She has shaken up New Zealand politics in a way I have not seen before. Helen was great, the most accomplished and capable PM the country has ever had but had three years in the job as opposition leader. David Lange was brilliant and extraordinarily charismatic but had 18 months in the job as opposition leader before coming PM. Jacinda has had six weeks and is showing the same IQ as Helen and the same EQ as David. Perhaps she is the modern female version of Micky Savage, combining the compassion and the smarts of that most legendary of Labour leaders.
And she may be our Prime Minister in a week’s time. If she is it will be the most dramatic turn around in New Zealand’s modern political history.
Politics is generally a battle of compassion verses competence. National has created this perception of economic competence, even though the economy invariably does better under Labour. But most people believe that National with its cost accounting approach to the country’s books result in us being more prosperous and paying less tax.
On the other side Labour is the party of compassion, the party supporting the ordinary person, of acknowledging our country’s biculturalism and multi culturalism. The party that will do something serious about poverty, education, homelessness, and the myriad of threats that are appearing on our future.
It is meant to be a binary equation, National good for economy, bad for people, Labour compassionate but sucks at being managers.
The problem with this is that it is a whole lot of bumpkin, at least as far as National’s managerial competence is concerned.
Lets take a couple of examples. Like the security of Auckland’s fuel supply.
A few of us had a laugh when it was acknowledged that a Kauri Stump digger may have ruptured the only pipeline that transfers jet fuel from Whangarei to Auckland. We wondered jokingly if Oravida Kauri, now known as Kauri Ruakaka Limited, was involved.
The sense of irony would have been extreme. And a cruel blow to National. I was hoping for a fulsome response denying any responsibility so we could move on and discuss other things but so far crickets …
As Farmgeek put it in the most perfect tweet of the campaign …
But putting to one side how it happened the fact that National was invited to provide resilience into the system in 2012 but decided not to do so because of cost shows how a cost accounting state of mind dominates them. This is OK if you want to maximise investor return but sucks if you want to build a modern and resilient city or country.
And how about health. Every time Jonathan Coleman opens his mouth it is to either say that things are great and we are doing more elective surgeries than ever or it is to blame someone else for the current situation.
But we clearly have a system that is bulging at the seams where two of our largest hospitals have put up the full sign.
And poverty? National’s approach is that things are going to get better. But it appears to have only realised that child poverty is a thing this election despite the evidence being clear to see for years.
National’s basic problem is that it is competent in a cost accounting sort of way, able to cut expenses and terrorise employees. But the problem is that this causes long term damage. And after nine long years the signs are showing.
And such is National’s managerial competence they cannot even spell check properly.
National lack the compassion and basic humanity of the left. And its competence extends only to cost accounting 101, cutting a budget by an arbitrary amount and expecting to get the same result.
Vote them out.
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