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Early voting has started, so I'm running out of time to make my triennial pre-election post.
It's been a very rough election season for some candidates, not necessarily due to the politics themselves but to the dog-whistling some parties have been doing they have been doing to try and pander to the ... anti-social ... fringe element which emerged during and after the Covid lockdowns, which seems to have encouraged a minority of that minority to feel that they can take matters literally into their own hands ...
The Greens have really run a strong campaign this year, on the front foot on policy. If they were able to fully implement their Income Guarantee that would be worth over $200 to our household, mostly just from treating D. like she is her actual own person and not just some sort of appendage to a "properly productive" member of society.
Labour has simply discarded the courage and political capital they gained as a result of how they, led by Jacinda Ardern, managed Covid and the resulting shock to the economy. Despite a lot of significant achievements and progress over the last two terms they've somehow handed National control of the narrative, which means that all we are hearing are the falsehoods that Labour somehow did badly handling Covid and subsequent economic fallout (rather than that we somehow avoided an extra estimated 10,000 deaths and a recession), and that Labour is totally responsible for current inflation (when in fact we've been following exactly the same track as seen overseas). (Not /helped/ by our "at arms length from the politicians" Reserve bank, which insists on clinging to the outdated notion that some amount of pain and suffering on the part of the underclass is /required/ to keep the economy moving, but they would have acted exactly the same under National.)
Things /have/ continued to get worse for a lot of people under this Labour government, just less quickly that they would under a National government, and sadly I do not actually see that trajectory changing if a predominantly Labour government somehow comes out of this election. Labour are still a conservative party at heart, and they do not have any appetite for structural change.
National as always want to squeeze the already crushed lower classes even more for rent and someone-else's share of taxes, which they will personally indirectly pocket as much of as they can get away with. (That's a lot less that in many countries, but it is still a thing). They're not even pretending that that they are not the party of landlords, except they somehow hold up the facade that this includes small landlords. They're also not going to be able to form a predominantly National government, despite the stated intentions of their necessary partners to screw them over the metaphorical barrel as much as possible.
According to their tax calculator - which currently seems to be down - National's tax plans would be worth about $30 a week to our household, and $0 to many "non-earning" households I know. We'd promptly lose a big chunk of that again with the reinstatement of prescription charges.
ACT is raking in the racists and elitists. I had to take several deep breaths when I first saw one of their billboards boldly proclaiming "End Division By Race". (Someone has since vandalised it to cross out the word "End"). These people /know/ that NZ can be broadly divided into the "haves", who are mostly white or white-acting, like them, and the "have-nots", which includes most of the brown people, and they desperately want it stay that way. Actually giving the brown people a voice at the table (which has been quietly happening for decades over multiple National and Labour governments) feels like an existential threat to them, and this time they've somehow managed to make enough of a bogey-man out of "co-governance" to get some momentum.
The only benefit of Winston Peters making a late play for the same extremist demographics as ACT is that it makes a vote for any of the three parties (N/A/NZF) look like a vote for an utter shambles of a government and possibly another election in short order. Unfortunately all this is likely to mean is more centrist people not bothering to vote at all rather than actually voting against the possibility.
I'm going to end with a bit of a round up of relevant links I've shared recently while I calm down again...
I'm the 'deserving poor' and you could easily become me
(Our family is at the very top end of this demographic. If something happened to myself or the kids' dad which meant we were unable to work or find work .... this is the stuff of sleepless nights.)
John Campbell: Poulton, poverty and the real way to get tough on crime
What would the different parties’ policies mean for disabled people?
Did National really just simply sell off state houses?
Christopher Luxon knows the truth about mediocrity
Make voting sexy again: Why so many don’t make an election choice
It's been a very rough election season for some candidates, not necessarily due to the politics themselves but to the dog-whistling some parties have been doing they have been doing to try and pander to the ... anti-social ... fringe element which emerged during and after the Covid lockdowns, which seems to have encouraged a minority of that minority to feel that they can take matters literally into their own hands ...
The Greens have really run a strong campaign this year, on the front foot on policy. If they were able to fully implement their Income Guarantee that would be worth over $200 to our household, mostly just from treating D. like she is her actual own person and not just some sort of appendage to a "properly productive" member of society.
Labour has simply discarded the courage and political capital they gained as a result of how they, led by Jacinda Ardern, managed Covid and the resulting shock to the economy. Despite a lot of significant achievements and progress over the last two terms they've somehow handed National control of the narrative, which means that all we are hearing are the falsehoods that Labour somehow did badly handling Covid and subsequent economic fallout (rather than that we somehow avoided an extra estimated 10,000 deaths and a recession), and that Labour is totally responsible for current inflation (when in fact we've been following exactly the same track as seen overseas). (Not /helped/ by our "at arms length from the politicians" Reserve bank, which insists on clinging to the outdated notion that some amount of pain and suffering on the part of the underclass is /required/ to keep the economy moving, but they would have acted exactly the same under National.)
Things /have/ continued to get worse for a lot of people under this Labour government, just less quickly that they would under a National government, and sadly I do not actually see that trajectory changing if a predominantly Labour government somehow comes out of this election. Labour are still a conservative party at heart, and they do not have any appetite for structural change.
National as always want to squeeze the already crushed lower classes even more for rent and someone-else's share of taxes, which they will personally indirectly pocket as much of as they can get away with. (That's a lot less that in many countries, but it is still a thing). They're not even pretending that that they are not the party of landlords, except they somehow hold up the facade that this includes small landlords. They're also not going to be able to form a predominantly National government, despite the stated intentions of their necessary partners to screw them over the metaphorical barrel as much as possible.
According to their tax calculator - which currently seems to be down - National's tax plans would be worth about $30 a week to our household, and $0 to many "non-earning" households I know. We'd promptly lose a big chunk of that again with the reinstatement of prescription charges.
ACT is raking in the racists and elitists. I had to take several deep breaths when I first saw one of their billboards boldly proclaiming "End Division By Race". (Someone has since vandalised it to cross out the word "End"). These people /know/ that NZ can be broadly divided into the "haves", who are mostly white or white-acting, like them, and the "have-nots", which includes most of the brown people, and they desperately want it stay that way. Actually giving the brown people a voice at the table (which has been quietly happening for decades over multiple National and Labour governments) feels like an existential threat to them, and this time they've somehow managed to make enough of a bogey-man out of "co-governance" to get some momentum.
The only benefit of Winston Peters making a late play for the same extremist demographics as ACT is that it makes a vote for any of the three parties (N/A/NZF) look like a vote for an utter shambles of a government and possibly another election in short order. Unfortunately all this is likely to mean is more centrist people not bothering to vote at all rather than actually voting against the possibility.
I'm going to end with a bit of a round up of relevant links I've shared recently while I calm down again...
I'm the 'deserving poor' and you could easily become me
We’ve been talking a lot about the election and how bloody brutal it is on anyone who gets Government support. There’s also been a lot of talk about ‘the deserving poor’. Helen wrote about what it feels like to be the one who is being talked about, and the one whose life is at the mercy of political parties that loathe anyone who seeks Government aide.
(Our family is at the very top end of this demographic. If something happened to myself or the kids' dad which meant we were unable to work or find work .... this is the stuff of sleepless nights.)
John Campbell: Poulton, poverty and the real way to get tough on crime
Anyone familiar with Richie Poulton knows his capacity to describe the science of Dunedin’s longitudinal study in terms that are richly human. But on that August afternoon he was making it political, too.
“This is where my research enters the personal fray,” he said. “This election is not going to be focused on children in poverty, because we're bored of that. We're tired of that. We're sick of that. We've tried that, haven't we? Have we tried that?”
What would the different parties’ policies mean for disabled people?
Prejudice and ignorance are laid bare for all to see. I feel as though I have been living in a parallel universe. Who are these people who would abolish the very government organisations we depend on to get justice for disabled whānau? As a volunteer disability advocate, I have used the Office of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to drag a simple apology from a school protecting a teacher who thought it was OK to denigrate a disabled child in front of his classmates. The disability community constantly uses the HRC to check on how disabled people are being treated, the legislation that needs to be updated, our rights.
Looking at the key planned policies that are lifelines for disabled people – we will lose a number that make life bearable.
Did National really just simply sell off state houses?
It has become a truth universally acknowledged, at least on the left, that the last time National was in power, its only interest in state houses lay in selling them off. But did it really?
For a long time, the actual facts were obscured by a fog of data uncertainty. You’d think public housing numbers would be a simple matter: either the state owns a specific home or it doesn’t. But dwellings can be tenanted or empty, rented at subsidised or market rates, transferred to charities to run or kept firmly within the state. They can be sold, bought, demolished or leased.
...
Many of the sales, though, were to the community housing providers – charities like Tauranga’s Accessible Properties – that National believed were superior to state agency Kāinga Ora. The charities were, crucially, given access to Income-Related Rent Subsidies (IRRS), which set rents at 25% of income. This effectively put some charities’ tenants on the same financial footing as Kāinga Ora’s, and brought them into the “state” or “public” housing sector.
...
That would leave National with a net loss, from 2009 to 2018, of just 340 homes.
Not so bad, then. But the amount of state housing matters less than the proportion it represents of all dwellings. A state-housing stock that stays static while the population grows is accommodating less of the public, and providing a reduced service.
The figure below shows how many extra government dwellings would have been needed to maintain the 1991 level of provision, when state houses made up 5.35% of all homes. The destruction of the Bolger years comes into sharper focus: National left, on this measure, 20,000 fewer places than it inherited. Clark did no more than halt the losses, which – in the final analysis – mounted again under Key and English, worsening the shortfall by another 14,000 homes.
Christopher Luxon knows the truth about mediocrity
In the interview the reporter points out that parents taking their children out of school before and after the school holidays is a contributing factor to the ‘truancy’ rates. Luxon scoffs, and says ‘go see some decile one and two schools’.
He says, as they say, ‘the quiet part out loud’.
We’re not talking about families like mine. We’re talking about ‘bottom feeders’.
Make voting sexy again: Why so many don’t make an election choice
Ultimately, this is the reason my son votes, despite his underlying apathy. “Not voting is like not fighting at all. It’s like giving up without trying. And that’s actually what politicians want, because then they get to keep their power. It’s important to me to know that if I got the chance, I took it. You don’t fold without playing your hand. No matter how slim the chance, we’ve got to take it. It’s my last fuck you to the whole thing.”
