And then there’s the media.
Tuesday night was a classic case. Nicky Hager has written a book. There are no advance copies, but we all know it’s a so-called exposé of the Taxpayers’ Union. Nobody in the media has the courage to think that Nicky Hager’s books make no difference to election outcomes – especially in 2014 when the “Dirty Politics” book came out – and that the accusations he made against the New Zealand Defence Force in the book called “Hit and Run” were found to be not true by an independent inquiry comprising a former judge and a former Labour Prime Minister.
But the TV news still had to do live reports and then follow it up with a three-minute report on Wednesday night. To be fair, the Taxpayers’ Union did itself no favours by not fronting for the reporter Simon Mercep, one of the few old-school and fair-minded journalists still going round in the industry. Just putting up statements denying the allegations made in the book and having a very haggard-looking Hager on camera making extraordinary allegations, especially about the Three Waters campaign, gave the left another free hit.
Anyway, Hager will quickly become yesterday’s news and his book of untruths may well turn out to be the biggest fundraiser the Taxpayers’ Union has ever had.
But let’s make one thing absolutely clear. The Taxpayers’ Union has a vitally important role to play in the weeks remaining to 7 November.
The prospect of a left-wing government led by Labour having to be in coalition with the loony policies proposed by the Greens, Maori Party and Opportunity is just too frightening to contemplate.
When I think about what could happen under that scenario, you really do start thinking about life in another country. I don’t know which one, but any country that continues to develop race- and ethnicity-based legislation, one which will have the state trying to run a supermarket business and one which will tax you more just because you happen to own some property, is not a country I want to live in.
Yet that’s what Labour’s potential coalition partners want. These are the sort of headline facts that their political opponents in National, NZ First and ACT must campaign hard against in the next six weeks, and the Taxpayers’ Union, as a registered political activist group, is entitled to campaign hard as well.
Politics is supposed to be a contest of ideas – and let’s face it, both sides of the political divide have put up some pretty stupid ones in the last few months – but politics is at its best when it is about ideas and debate. When it’s reduced to slurs and unfounded allegations, then sorry, but those making the slurs have lost the argument.
And talking of silly ideas – what is this nonsense of the government interfering in the supermarket industry?
We all know that the price of supermarket goods is higher than it used to be, and I don’t profess to know that much about how a supermarket business works. But I know for sure that having more competition is by itself not going to lower prices.
Where I live, the nearest towns have at least two supermarkets, usually one from Foodstuffs and one from Woolworths. In the bigger cities there are also specialist food retailers like greengrocers, some old-fashioned butchers and the newish food store brands like Farro Fresh for the gentry of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.
As David Seymour asks, how much competition do you need? I’d suggest one of the key drivers of supermarket price increases, especially where I live in Central Otago, is the cost of fuel to get the supplies to shelves on the back of a truck from Christchurch or Dunedin. I’m certain that when I left for overseas on August 20th, the price of diesel at discounted rates was under two dollars a litre. A month later it’s over three dollars, even with every discount card I can lay my hands on. Has any party perhaps considered that reducing fuel tax, especially the carbon charge, might help reduce the cost of groceries?
The reaction to all the proposed political intervention into the supermarket industry has been, among those with any element of a logical brain, one of incredulity.
The Greens’ Kiwimart is just plain bonkers. The government can’t run a competitive bank or an efficient courier service, so why could it possibly run a supermarket chain offering lower prices and lower profits – if any at all?
The Labour Party goes on about “price gouging” without any definition, but at least its idea of breaking up the wholesalers and the retailers makes way more sense than the completely bonkers idea from National of splitting Pak’nSave from New World and Four Square.
And then there was Maori Party just deciding that the government should give away 8 weeks of free food if you make under $60,000 a year.
The ACT Party has just sat back and laughed at these nonsensical proposals. They have a Four Square owner, Janelle Hocking, as their candidate in West Coast-Tasman and at number 15 on the list. If she makes it to Parliament, she’ll be able to bring some sanity back to the conversation.
On current polling, ACT will struggle to get 15 MPs, but my fervent hope is that come the day, those of a right-leaning persuasion will put their party vote the way of NZ First or ACT while stacking the Parliament with National electorate MPs.
This surely is the best way to ensure a right-leaning coalition after 7 November. If the Nats can win 40 electorates but have only 30% of the party vote, there’ll be a four-seat overhang. If they have 42 electorate seats – and they currently have 49 – but only 28% of the party vote, and therefore an entitlement to only 34 seats, there’ll be an overhang of eight.
But if National collapses on the day to 28, not far from where they’re currently polling, the ACT and NZ First party votes will both be well into double figures, meaning more Cabinet positions for those parties and therefore more influence in policy direction.
No National list MPs means the Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, won’t be in the next Parliament. I don’t actually think that’s any great loss. I think she’s been a very poor watchdog over the country’s finances.
My pick for the job would be NZ First’s Craig Stobo. Sure, he’ll be a rookie MP, but he has more first-hand finance knowledge and vast experience working with governments of both persuasions on finance policy than anybody else who’ll be in Parliament. He was, for instance, the man who gave us the PIE system for investing, the Portfolio Investment Entity, which makes your KiwiSaver and managed funds far more tax-efficient than they would have been otherwise.
And if that seems like an extraordinarily fast rise to power, just look at the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Never a politician before he stood for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Carney’s first role in politics was as Prime Minister, mainly because of his economics background. So why not Stobo for the Finance Minister’s role in our next Parliament?
It would be even sweeter if he won the Botany electorate off Chris Luxon – but that might be a wish too far.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - This article was sourced HERE
But the TV news still had to do live reports and then follow it up with a three-minute report on Wednesday night. To be fair, the Taxpayers’ Union did itself no favours by not fronting for the reporter Simon Mercep, one of the few old-school and fair-minded journalists still going round in the industry. Just putting up statements denying the allegations made in the book and having a very haggard-looking Hager on camera making extraordinary allegations, especially about the Three Waters campaign, gave the left another free hit.
Anyway, Hager will quickly become yesterday’s news and his book of untruths may well turn out to be the biggest fundraiser the Taxpayers’ Union has ever had.
But let’s make one thing absolutely clear. The Taxpayers’ Union has a vitally important role to play in the weeks remaining to 7 November.
The prospect of a left-wing government led by Labour having to be in coalition with the loony policies proposed by the Greens, Maori Party and Opportunity is just too frightening to contemplate.
When I think about what could happen under that scenario, you really do start thinking about life in another country. I don’t know which one, but any country that continues to develop race- and ethnicity-based legislation, one which will have the state trying to run a supermarket business and one which will tax you more just because you happen to own some property, is not a country I want to live in.
Yet that’s what Labour’s potential coalition partners want. These are the sort of headline facts that their political opponents in National, NZ First and ACT must campaign hard against in the next six weeks, and the Taxpayers’ Union, as a registered political activist group, is entitled to campaign hard as well.
Politics is supposed to be a contest of ideas – and let’s face it, both sides of the political divide have put up some pretty stupid ones in the last few months – but politics is at its best when it is about ideas and debate. When it’s reduced to slurs and unfounded allegations, then sorry, but those making the slurs have lost the argument.
And talking of silly ideas – what is this nonsense of the government interfering in the supermarket industry?
We all know that the price of supermarket goods is higher than it used to be, and I don’t profess to know that much about how a supermarket business works. But I know for sure that having more competition is by itself not going to lower prices.
Where I live, the nearest towns have at least two supermarkets, usually one from Foodstuffs and one from Woolworths. In the bigger cities there are also specialist food retailers like greengrocers, some old-fashioned butchers and the newish food store brands like Farro Fresh for the gentry of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.
As David Seymour asks, how much competition do you need? I’d suggest one of the key drivers of supermarket price increases, especially where I live in Central Otago, is the cost of fuel to get the supplies to shelves on the back of a truck from Christchurch or Dunedin. I’m certain that when I left for overseas on August 20th, the price of diesel at discounted rates was under two dollars a litre. A month later it’s over three dollars, even with every discount card I can lay my hands on. Has any party perhaps considered that reducing fuel tax, especially the carbon charge, might help reduce the cost of groceries?
The reaction to all the proposed political intervention into the supermarket industry has been, among those with any element of a logical brain, one of incredulity.
The Greens’ Kiwimart is just plain bonkers. The government can’t run a competitive bank or an efficient courier service, so why could it possibly run a supermarket chain offering lower prices and lower profits – if any at all?
The Labour Party goes on about “price gouging” without any definition, but at least its idea of breaking up the wholesalers and the retailers makes way more sense than the completely bonkers idea from National of splitting Pak’nSave from New World and Four Square.
And then there was Maori Party just deciding that the government should give away 8 weeks of free food if you make under $60,000 a year.
The ACT Party has just sat back and laughed at these nonsensical proposals. They have a Four Square owner, Janelle Hocking, as their candidate in West Coast-Tasman and at number 15 on the list. If she makes it to Parliament, she’ll be able to bring some sanity back to the conversation.
On current polling, ACT will struggle to get 15 MPs, but my fervent hope is that come the day, those of a right-leaning persuasion will put their party vote the way of NZ First or ACT while stacking the Parliament with National electorate MPs.
This surely is the best way to ensure a right-leaning coalition after 7 November. If the Nats can win 40 electorates but have only 30% of the party vote, there’ll be a four-seat overhang. If they have 42 electorate seats – and they currently have 49 – but only 28% of the party vote, and therefore an entitlement to only 34 seats, there’ll be an overhang of eight.
But if National collapses on the day to 28, not far from where they’re currently polling, the ACT and NZ First party votes will both be well into double figures, meaning more Cabinet positions for those parties and therefore more influence in policy direction.
No National list MPs means the Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, won’t be in the next Parliament. I don’t actually think that’s any great loss. I think she’s been a very poor watchdog over the country’s finances.
My pick for the job would be NZ First’s Craig Stobo. Sure, he’ll be a rookie MP, but he has more first-hand finance knowledge and vast experience working with governments of both persuasions on finance policy than anybody else who’ll be in Parliament. He was, for instance, the man who gave us the PIE system for investing, the Portfolio Investment Entity, which makes your KiwiSaver and managed funds far more tax-efficient than they would have been otherwise.
And if that seems like an extraordinarily fast rise to power, just look at the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Never a politician before he stood for the leadership of the Liberal Party, Carney’s first role in politics was as Prime Minister, mainly because of his economics background. So why not Stobo for the Finance Minister’s role in our next Parliament?
It would be even sweeter if he won the Botany electorate off Chris Luxon – but that might be a wish too far.
Peter Williams was a writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines. Peter blogs regularly on Peter’s Substack - This article was sourced HERE
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