Labour will join the Muppets

Labour will join the Muppets

Chippie has read the room, done the numbers and now announced he will happily join with the Maori Party and the Greens to form a government if he needs to get the numbers.

He looks to me like a drowning man clutching at straws trying to stay alive, particularly as Winston Peters has stated that his NZ First Party would not go into any coalition government with a Labour party led by Chippie.

Sounds to me like chickens coming home to roost as the old saying goes.

Maybe Winston remembers how he and his party were treated and led astray by Labour the last time they were supposed to work together; when he was not privy to information that Labour wanted to keep from public knowledge as well as from his party (He Puapua ring any bells).

Chippie has on many occasions referred to the current government as a coalition of chaos so I wonder how he will refer to his own menagerie of Muppets if they get to form a government.

God help us!

We will have Labour; the party that led a simple majority government and took us to the very brink of penury, the Maori party which is blatantly racist and wants Maori to be the controlling party in NZ and the Greens whose alternative budget will definitely put most of us in to bankruptcy trying to pay for their grandiose schemes.

Definitely a frightening thought.

Labour under Jacinda Ardern and Chippie took us from a position of relative wealth as a country to one where we are ranked in the last places of the OECD countries.

Under Labour our public service grew by approximately 30% whilst also increasing spending on consultants which grew to approximately $1.7 billion in 2022.  Prior to the 2023 election the IMF's GDP growth figures ranked New Zealand as 180th out of 189 nations, an appalling ranking.

Some of the worst statistics are shown below and these are the issues that the coalition government inherited from Labour in 2023.

• 30,000 more people on surgery wait list than when Labour came into power.
• 25,000 on Kāinga Ora’s wait list currently without a house, tripling in size since 2017.
• Over the past 2 years, the average mortgage has increased by $1000 per month.

• 12.5% increase in the cost of food in the year to June 2023.
• August 2023: Number of children waiting longer than 4 months for hospital treatment has jumped by 600%.

• In 2016, retail crime was 25,000 per year, in the 3 months to the end of April 2023, there were 45,046 retail crimes reported (equates to 180,000 per year) = a 620% increase. 70% of the crimes are not even being reported. In 2016, police attended 1 in every 2 crimes compared to only 1 in 10 now. In 2016 the arrests were 20 times higher, now the arrests are only 2.3% meaning that over 97% get away with it. Police retail crimes unit only has 8 staff.
• 2023: NZ hospitals are short of 7136 full time workers, Auckland alone needs 1128.

• 140% increase in serious assaults on what it was in 2017, 60% increase in metal health crisis callouts, 70% increase in gang membership, over 500% increase in ram raids and aggravated robberies, record levels of assaults on police.
• 10,000 school-aged kids are not even enrolled at a school.

• 211,000 kids living in benefit dependent homes, 39,000 more than 6 years ago.

• 3,500 families live in motels paid by the tax payer, and over 400 families live in cars.

• Net debt has gone from $5.4 billion in 2019, to $78.7 billion in 2023 (1357% increase).
• Climate Change commitments which leave us exposed to a bill of $24 Billion dollars if we fail to reach our emissions targets which is most likely to happen.

The Maori Party which is nothing more than a racist party promoting division based on ethnicity and preaching Apartheid with examples of their policies being:

• Establish a Maori Parliament
• Implement all Matike Mai recommendations for constitutional transformation
• Remove the British Royal Family as Head of State
• Recognise Aotearoa as the country’s official name
• Replace all Pakeha place names, cities and towns to original Maori names by 2026.
• Return the foreshore and seabed to mana whenua
• Return all central and local government land to mana whenua
• Return all conservation land to mana whenua
• Introduce a first right of refusal policy for mana whenua on all private land
• Make all Waitangi Tribunal recommendations binding on the Crown
• Abolish ‘full and final’ settlement policies
• Entrench the Maori electorates
• Legislate for all councils to have both Maori wards and mana whenua representation.”

And the Green Party which has proposed an alternative Budget which contains things that include the following:

• Enabling the economy to incorporate the true cost of environmental damage into the cost of doing business in Aotearoa New Zealand.
• Substantially increasing government revenue and expenditure as a proportion of GDP.
• Enabling greater government borrowing.
• Expanding the progressive tax system to equitably tax wealth and all forms of income, such as through capital gains, land, wealth, and inheritance taxes.
• Developing Tiriti-based Public-Commons Partnerships that provide for collective management of, and equitable access to, shared resources.

The Greens promise that they will provide a basic income for everyone; student, sick disabled, unemployed or whatever they will guarantee an income of $375 per week and how are they going to fund it?

By taxes! A 2.5% wealth tax on all assets over $2Million dollars; but they have also realized that there are over 400,000 family trusts in NZ and they are going to tax them all at 1.5% of their net worth each year.

Whilst some of those trusts are run as a business producing income many of them solely contain the family home to provide protection but under the Greens every trust will have to pay 1.5% a minimum of $15,000 per year in additional taxes.

The Greens in my opinion clearly resemble that saying (build it and they will come) only their version is “you earn, save for retirement and we will come to tax it”.

Chippie told the house that Labour the Greens and the Maori Party will work together for the wellbeing of all; well good luck with making that happen.

Labour will, judged on their past performances, spend like a drunken sailor on shore leave; the Greens will take from those that earn and give it to those who mostly wouldn’t work in an iron lung and the Maori Party just want to take everything for those with a miniscule spot of Maori ancestry and leave the rest of us to pay for it.

I fear for the civil unrest, financial ruin and racial disharmony that they would leave for our children and grandchildren.

Whilst their Muppet show may provide some entertainment it will certainly not provide any betterment for the NZ public.