NATIONAL CRITICISES LABOUR FOR NEGATIVE LUXON MEME by Liz Allen
National is fighting back on Labour's attack ad, one of the few the Labour party have posted. In a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black, National are claiming that the government should be spending their time more productively. Given National has spent every day since Luxon took on the leadership undermining the government response to covid, the economy, poverty, climate change and tackling inflation instead of coming up with alternative policies and ideas, I suggest they are also wasting their time.
Most of their commentary and memes have been inaccurate using cherry picked data and outright lies. Nowhere have they posited any real ideas or workable policies to tackle any of the key issues facing the country. What they're trying to do, and being fairly effective in doing it, is to cast doubt in the minds of voters as to the ability of the current government to govern. This is a well-worn track of right-wing opposition parties. As a result, they're never called to account for their lack of policies, their lack of anything that would solve our problems and given a free ride by the media who pick up on the criticism and run with it, rather than asking "what would you do if you were in government?"
The underlying message in all this posturing is that National would somehow do better and voters are thus conned into voting against their best interests. If National do get to form a government next year, they will need ACT. If voters were smart, they would go online and read ACT's dystopian plan for providing tax cuts to the well off and cutting services for everyone else. As afficionado's of Ayn Rand's blueprint for neoliberalism, Atlas Shrugged, Seymour and his followers are a dangerous threat to our democracy and to the social fabric of this country.
What the current government is attempting with its wellbeing budgets is to put the wellbeing of people and the planet at the heart of every policy. Recognising that gross domestic product as a measure of wellbeing is unfit for that purpose, the current government has changed that to measure other things. The call for economic growth as shorthand for an improvement in wellbeing has come to be seen as increasingly unsatisfactory given a range of social, distributional, and environmental ills that have emerged despite relatively continuous economic expansion.
By changing the focus from growth to wellbeing, including the wellbeing of the planet, the government has tramped on the toes of neoliberal capitalists and they're fighting back. The fight is dirty, and it is all about power and control. Those of us who believe in equality, in providing a safety net for the vulnerable, for helping them to believe in themselves and that they have value is important, can see through the negative rhetoric.
Luxon keeps talking about demonstrable outcomes for policies. What he fails to do is allow for the fact that changing course takes time. Reversing decades of inaction, of not keeping statistics on things like poverty, of using false measures for accountability like counting people on benefits but not measuring their contribution to society such as parenting or volunteering, the things that Marilyn Waring highlighted in her book Counting for Nothing, gives a skewed picture of the worth of people and of their contribution. We must stay this course otherwise poverty, homelessness and the sustainability of the planet will continue to worsen. A NACT government will ensure that this is the case.