With apologies to Don Mclean
Long, long time ago, I can still remember
How I made the voters smile
And I knew I had a chance
To keep them all so entranced
And maybe they'd be happy for a while.
But then polls began to make me shiver,
With every failure to deliver,
Bad news in the media
Made my demise speedier
Each day I felt that I could scream
When I read about the loss of dreams
And the faults in all my schemes
The day my government died.
It is going several steps too far to say the government died on Tuesday.
The blow to its credibility with the debacle over its plan to impose GST on KwiiSaver management fees wasn't fatal but even before they mismanaged this, Mike Hosking was asking how badly will Labour lose?
. . .Name me one substantive thing that is going well for them.
The economy? Record inflation, record domestic inflation. In case you just answered: "Oh it's the war."
The number of people living in cars, we learned last week, has exploded, despite the promises to sort it.
Record levels of demand for social housing.
Massive dissent over Three Waters from dozens of councils, not to mention ratepayers over, 1, a poor idea, and 2, a poor idea badly handled.
A centralised polytech that's failed to get off the ground, has a deficit that's possibly more than $100 million, and a bloke who ran the place while not running the place, on full pay, until he quit.
A He Puapua programme that hasn't gone to Cabinet because the minister knows he can't get it past them because the Māori who have been consulted (the rest of us haven't been ) want something so radical he knows it's dead in the water.
A crime scenario that touches each and every one of us as gangs run rampant, as do kids who failed to go to school, and as a result decided driving cars through shop windows was their future.
An immigration policy that's letting next to no one in, so employers continue to scream at 1, the fact no one is arriving and therefore there are few if any to fill the ludicrous gaps in every sector of this country, and 2, pulling their hair out at the paperwork required and timeframe to even become accredited employers.
A health system that couldn't handle winter, and health staff in crisis the likes of which we haven't seen in years, despite the promises to address it, the backlog for elective surgery up more than 250 per cent. . .
A roading-come-climate-change-come-transport ideology that sees hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on projects that are late, over budget, and don't work even if they do get finished.
Central cities that aren't being frequented because of these polices and the ensuing businesses that suffer because of it.
Presumably, the opposition parties are totting up the myriad working groups and investigations that have been launched over the past five years that 1, haven't even reported back, and 2, those that have, that have changed what?
The Covid response that still pervades our daily life with masks and orange settings that few, if any, now follow, due to the realisation that so much of it was a panicked reaction early to a health system that couldn't cope, and two years on, as mentioned, still can't. . .
That's not even a comprehensive list of the government's failings and failures.
Then came Tuesday's u-turn:
. . . What it tells us, apart from the fact it's good news and we can take that money and actually save it, as opposed to giving it to the Government, is that the Labour Party has literally no idea what ordinary every day New Zealanders think.
And that's mainly because virtually none of them are remotely like the rest of us.
That is the danger of a political party that is stacked with wonks who have spent so little time in the real world. . .
What they clearly never anticipated, and this is the part that has undone them in so many ways, is the politics of it, the pub test part. The big question; what will New Zealanders thinks?
Will New Zealanders see this as a tax grab? Will New Zealanders see this as yet another broken promise? Will New Zealanders put another nail in the Labour Party credibility coffin, given it shows yet again how non-transparent, how dishonest and not open they really are.
Yes, yes, yes and yes a hundred times over, was the answer.
You ask us to save, you already tax us a fortune.
You up the tax on petrol, you change the rules around investment property and then you invent taxes on fees for our retirement.
What part of that wasn't going to get the reaction that rained down on them yesterday?
How is it you can be so blind not to see that coming? . .
How can they be so blind they not only can't see the problems in the policy in front of them but all the problems their policies are inflicting on us.
It is still far too soon to write the government off, but if, as I hope, it loses power next year, Tuesday's debacle could well be seen as the point of no return.
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