The toothlessness of Labour (Patreon)

Every time National says anything. Anything. A torrent of experts come rushing out of the woodwork to discredit it. It's not even Labour or the Greens that are doing the attacking. It's actual experts.

Today's example in a long list, is economists Michael Reddell (very right wing/conservative Christian) and Sam Warburton (says he's left and loves to be indignant on Twitter) that have tried to do the modelling National used to enable them to earn over half a billion dollars from their foreign buyers' tax. Except they couldn't. Not even by half.

National's policies don't stand up. They're not evidence based. They're just an approximation of right-wing policies.

And yet this is doing nothing to help Labour. Because Labour seems unwilling to help Labour. Every day they should be hammering how unfit for office Luxon is. And yet ... crickets.

At the last election, Paul Goldsmith had National's fiscal plan out two days after PREFU (and yes it had a big ol' fiscal hole which dented National's credibility). National hasn't indicated when it will release its fiscal plan despite PREFU having been and gone.

Why isn't Labour repeating that "National has nothing to offer except tax cuts it can't afford and a secret fiscal plan. What is National hiding from you?"

I genuinely do not understand what sort of campaign Labour is trying to run. It's not an inspirational one. It's not a policy heavy one. It's not a cult of personality. It's just an insipid slow walk to defeat. At least fight to win, could you?

This is all very disheartening for those of us who are Green or TPM supporters. The Greens in particular have run a really good campaign. There's been a steady release of policies that are actual thoughtful policies that try to address long-term systemic issues facing the country. And this would be the election where the Greens would be able to wield real influence if they were to get into government. And yet Labour is absolutely not holding up its end.

Hipkins is not a natural showman, and that's fine because neither is Luxon, and yet National is using him judiciously. Labour does however have stacks of talent it could be rolling out. Where's Grant? Barb Edmonds? Kieran McAnulty? These are all smart, high-calibre politicians that are popular. And yet we haven't seen shit.

I get that Labour is probably trying to get people to draw a comparison directly between Hipkins and Luxon, and they'll only do this if they are limited to seeing Hipkins and Luxon, but that hasn't worked so far so maybe try something different?

It could well be that the "phone is off" as they say, and that nothing Labour does matters anymore because the country has tired of them. But if that's the case then go absolute hail mary on it. Do something. Anything. Because at the moment it just feels like you don't care. And despite protests from Hooton that a Luxon-led government will be just as insipid and unable to do anything as this crew, there's also the chance that NZ tacks really hard to the right.

Fair Pay Agreements is probably the best piece of legislation that Labour campaigned on and passed in its 6 years, and this will likely be undone by National. And that's a real fucking shame. So if you're not going to campaign for yourself, campaign for the bus drivers, and hospo staff, and retail workers, who don't stand to benefit as much from National's unaffordable tax cuts but will be hurt by the repealing of fair pay agreements.

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Some personal news, as they say in the media biz: my column at the Post was the victim of its recent financial woes. After the editor who brought me on, chose to leave instead of applying to be the editor of the Post, the Sunday News, and the SST, I did think that I wouldn't be long for that gig - and I was right. A bunch of us who got brought on at the same time also got culled. So stink buzz for me.

Also I'm taking some time out from Twitter because boy howdy it's so toxic at the moment. I did a tweet the other day about how it was all very well wanting to evict "troublesome" tenants from Kainga Ora houses but you're then making them houseless, and we need to consider that. And so many of the replies were just "good" etc. And what the hell happened to compassion? Since Musk took over, and since the right has been in the ascendancy in Aotearoa, Twitter has become horrendous. Also I think if you reach a critical mass of followers, you can't help but get a torrent of fuckheads every time you say anything. I think that happened around the 15,000 mark. I'm about 21,000 followers now and ugh.

So I'm on Bluesky and it seems a bit more chill. I'll get back to Twitter at some point, but not right now.