Let's get New Zealand working again (Patreon)

The National Party has a new refrain. "Let's get New Zealand working again." In his Ministerial Speech in parliament yesterday, Simon Bridges said a variation of it five times.

Finance Spokesman Paul Goldsmith even wrote an Op Ed with that as the title.

First off, it's a risky play having a slogan that bears even the slightest resemblance to Make America Great Again, but National will have considered that when someone in their comms team came up with the line.

But it is the "again" that I find most interesting.

For it to be "again" means there was a point prior to the COVID-19 outbreak where New Zealand was obviously working at a level that Simon Bridges was content with. But just when was that?

Given his constant complaining and negativity towards just about anything this Government did, we can assume that New Zealand hasn't been working since September 2017. So it must have been a period when John Key or Bill English was Prime Minister.

But for this to be true we need to disregard the unemployment rate, which this Government took from 4.7% and was at 4% in December. The previous Government inherited an unemployment rate of 4% strangely, but then got hit by the GFC almost instantly, when unemployment peaked at 6.7% in September 2012. It never again got down to 4% under the National-lead Government.

I suspect Bridges and his team haven't given this nearly as much thought as I have. What they'll be aiming for is to remind people that National are the best economic stewards, and Labour might have got us through a health crisis, but now the economic crisis is hitting and National is obviously the best party to navigate that.

Except there is just no proof that this is the case. By all the metrics that National considers important - employment, stupid surpluses, crown debt - this Government has overperformed National.

It's especially true of this National Party, which is pretty much a team of understudies pretending they're John Key, or Bill English, or even Steven Joyce.

Simon's impeccable judgement as Transport Minister saw him hoodwinked by a computer games company into thinking New Zealand could be a tech wonderland where bots ran our traffic management system. Frankly anyone who just buys whatever jargony filled bullshit as gospel and hands out contracts on that basis should not be near the levers of power. Especially when the levers that need pulling will be literally life or death to some people.

So I don't properly understand "Let's Get New Zealand working again". I don't think we're supposed to interrogate it too much. At its most basic level it would seem that Simon and the National Clown Car wants to see New Zealand businesses open their doors and let people in. Which seems precisely the wrong thing to do when we're trying to stamp out a virus that we seem to now be on top of.

If you clicked on the link to the Op Ed written by Paul Goldsmith above, you will have seen that he thought he was giving us a plan for getting us working again. It's not a plan at all. It basically boils down to BOY THE PRIVATE SECTOR IS SUPER COOL YOU GUYS.

Unless "Let's get New Zealand working again" means National is proposing a jobs guarantee scheme then I'm not interested in their platitudinal bullshit. And I don't want us to return to where we were. Even 5 weeks ago. I want a better version of the New Zealand we were. So let's not get New Zealand working again. Let's get New Zealand better than it ever was, for everyone.