Open Mike 04/09/25
Open Mike 04/09/25
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6:00 am, September 4th, 2025 - 37 comments
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Today's Posts (updated through the day):
The Figjam Prime Minister
So, New Zealand First Then?
New Posts up:
The Figjam Prime Minister
So, New Zealand First Then?
Links don't appear in the sidebar at the moment, so it's worth highlighting No Right Turn's latest post – we're right back in the days of Key's 'Rock Star' economy when people sleeping in cars was almost considered 'normal.'
Have we learned nothing?
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/search/label/Housing
More from the
Ministry of Lies and ObfuscationTe Whatu Ora/Health NZ.Nathalie Jaques of NZNO (Nurses Organisation) had requested information about staffing shortages
"..her request for information in April 2024 came at a time when Health NZ's finances were under intense scrutiny.
It's forecast $1.7b deficit was partly blamed on "over-recruiting" nurses ahead of budgeted numbers.
"The data didn't align with the public narrative – narrative around funding and staffing," Jacques said.
"The other thing was obviously we were in bargaining, and one of the factors in our bargaining with Te Whatu Ora – and the main issue that nurses are going on strike over tomorrow and Thursday – is safe staffing."
That is why TWO thinks the Care Capacity Demand Management is unfit for their purposes, because it shows the nurses are correct.
Makes a mockery of the lie Lester Levy was peddling a year or so ago.
As it turns out "…more than half of all day shifts and more than a third of evening shifts between January and November last year were understaffed."
TWO issued a Claytons apology today, "..apologised for "any frustration" the delay and refusal may have caused."
It's ok though, TWO is ""pro-actively strengthening its processes" to ensure it met obligations under the Official Information Act." Hollow words though as the outgoing Ombudsman chastised TWO as the "naughty child" for it's attitude to OIA, heeding neither the letter nor the spirit of the law.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/571975/health-nz-apologises-to-nurses-union-after-ombudsman-s-scolding
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/571718/union-says-health-nz-s-delay-in-releasing-data-was-politically-motivated
If only our sorted CoC MPs wanted the best public healthcare service possible in NZ.
A(t)las, they are 'governing' for the sorted – they simply do not care.
If you want to do the trea-leaves of exactly which voters switched away from Labour to other parties, this link gives the detailed flow-diagram.
The risk to Labour for this time is the same but worse occurs which is even more voters go to NZFirst:
NZ First wouldn't have returned to Parliament without Labour voters – Newsroom
The 2020 Election needs to be seen in the context of Covid. Nothing should be compared with it as the circumstances will not be seen again until there is some other global event of similar magnitude.
I think the same is true for the 2023 election – where Labour were being punished for being the government during the Covid lockdowns.
Unless there is another global pandemic, it seems unlikely there would be a similar level of reversal of popularity.
Maybe – unless we are entering a new period of volatility where many people feel that the problems that matter to them don't get solved whoever is in government. Rapid flip flops might occur – followed by either withdrawal from the process into non-voting, or by going even further right than the current government. A thought experiment: what happens if the CoC are gone by 2027 and then a Labour-led government also fails to meet expectations – who do people vote for after that?
What an absurdly naive comment.
COVID was the final wave-peak of the modernist all-powerful state and the party politics that enabled that.
2023's election was a full and final cracking of all that.
The consistent polling this term and last tells us that the minority parties are getting bigger as a proportion of the vote and will be an ever-bigger part of the next government.
This is the new state of things, and it looks remarkably like 1996, 1999, and 2003.
Project 2025?
Oligarchy fascism is full-on authoritarian.
It is the GOP concept of an end to the Great Society or social democracy.
Our version is fast track rubber stamping business/foreign investment.
No one else is investing into our economy, and we need it.
May not be a fun fact, but it's the truth.
Is investing in managed funds really investing in the economy? It might be no more than a fund that buys up government bonds or commercial property.
Or at best a high rise building near a train station.
But a local business could borrow from a bank and do that to.
Need to enable seabed mining instead of an offshore wind farm? (see below)
Data centres do not create job growth, they just buy up some of our (now would need to be greater) energy supply (and use a lot of water).
The issue is whether we have a purpose for them being here.
Why bribe foreigners to explore for oil and gas that is not there (why did they not use the licenses that they already had)?
Too early to say where foreigners invest. I can't see them investing in Government Bonds because they are already massively oversubscribed with locals.
Occam Residential are our best company for investing in high rise near rail stations, and they are a creature of the Todd family who are fully locals.
I would prefer that the super-rich from California were more directed in what they invest in, and I suspect that is what Labour will tweak should they attain power in 2026.
And NZFirst should have asked for that in the policy announcement.
Otherwise, it's a necessary policy. Because all us locals are keeping our hands in our pockets.
Two fun-facts:
Clearly you think we only have a FIRE economy when that is demonstrably wrong. For the most part local New Zealanders invest in housing, small business, and Kiwisaver. That's it.
Government expenditure is about 40% of our economy and honestly you need to figure out that for every question about the NZ economy, "The State" is not the answer.
I think you are forgetting Farms Transport Horticulture Movies and Rocket Lab.
I see this Government's marvellous management has lost us three iconic Businesses this week, and Weta has lost 59 million.
Their "Credit Squeeze" is now killing the patient, so they have rushed about with a few very tiny plasters for the copious wounds they have inflicted.
As to the Election, they think they have battered enough of us into submission, that the rest have fled or died. The money they had last time was for the promised new Messiah who has turned out to be another “Hollow Man” flanked by harpies and hungry underlings.
The problems are in National, and at 29% if that trend continues the internal wars and factions will begin.
Labour has to get tired people to register and vote, all other is speculation, graphs or not.
People now see their barefaced chicanery and feckless “Leader”
Stop talking rubbish and making up things and learn to read before replying.
I'd tend to see COVID as a sudden, unexpected revival of all-encompassing state planning at a time when everbody thought that the possibility of such a thing had been permanently buried decades before. The fact that it re-emerged, was wildly popular for a time, and was used in the public interest, alarmed those sectors whose strategy has always been to control and direct the state towards protecting private interests. As a result, many resources were deployed towards discrediting and vilifying the COVID response. The 2023 result was in part a result of this process and Seymour's Regulatory Standards Bill might be seen as a legislative attempt to prevent its recurrence and cement business as usual in place. So 2023 should be seen as an exceptional election, the brutal putting down of a brief heretical departure from the post-1984 orthodoxy.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/16-08-2022/the-side-eyes-two-new-zealands-the-table
O for the Labour-Greens government to have such nobility of purpose.
Sure Labour used the reserve powers implicit in legislated health controls from the 1950s polio outbreaks when you literally had the armed forced blocking city exits, but Ardern+Robertson's economic response was to cause the most rapid property speculation, property market price spike, and sucking of wealth to the 1% that we have seen since the privatisation of state assets in the early 1990s.
So no, 2020 was the exceptional election as it ought to have been, and 2023 was the reality that we still face today.
The government did the PGF, the RBG was delayed by the lockdown in Auckland from acting soon enough on monetary stimulus.
agree with Visub and Belladonna, but I love these flow charts and think this one is still useful in the context of 2020 and 2023.
The Brits publish these with each election. We should be doing this.
Like you Weka, I agree with Visub and Bella.
But I differ on these flow charts where I am a bit skeptical-voting intentions are so fluid these days. Opinion polls are far more use.
For instance the flow chart seems to be saying that 14.7% of Labour voters in 2020 didn't vote at all in 2023. I doubt that.
(Though if it is correct that gives hope for 2026-the 14.7 may come back into the fold.)
I suppose the respondents could have lied about who they voted for, but it still strikes me as more reliable data than intention polling.
Would be good to compare to earlier elections.
Agree that 14% is important, but it's possible they were non-voters who voted in 2020 because of the pandemic, and went back to being habitual non-voters afterwards.
Very accurate summary of this lying philistine dinosaur despotic government here from No Right Turn.
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/
[12 June 2023]
Cartoon depicts former Prime Minister John Key as a dragon curled on a pile of gold in a cave. Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson stand on a ledge overlooking the gold, holding a staff with a banner that says "wealth tax". Key says: "The only problem is that the plebs aren't ambitious enough!"
https://www.greens.org.nz/taxcalculator
https://www.greens.org.nz/ending_poverty_together
All the more remarkable that there is no revolution against them or even a poll collapse.
Instead we have just a gradual decline of core National and Labour vote towards the minor parties.
We have a good chance of Winston as PM in 2026.
Ad Labour's polling is rising in the current trend.
So in the Herald today an article (paywalled) portrays Bishop and Seymour at loggerheads over Auckland planning. This has to be the most dysfunctional coalition ever.
"Seymour said the new plan was flawed and has said he will lobby for changes – he told a public meeting last week that he and supporters must “impress” on Bishop “that this plan is not necessary, and will have negative unintended consequences“.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/deputy-pm-david-seymour-says-parts-of-auckland-plan-not-necessary-he-plans-to-lobby-council-and-housing-minister-chris-bishop-for-changes/MVDFMSNSEVBSRL2JJIGTGJ3CTE/
Of course he does. There is a big chunk of his electorate that is within the reach of Remuera and Meadowbank rail stations. Vocal constituents are already holding meetings bemoaning the thought of 15 level apartments blocks in their neighborhoods.
Seymour believes in school choice and also the Grammar zone which inflates the property values of those in Epsom.
He also pretends to believe that service to Atlas Network ideology is good for a democratic nation state, when National only allows it because it is part of (and or serves) their own class warfare agenda.
But I have no objection with local variations to the plan.
Large centres – 2 to 3 storey wider city, if there is consent for 3.
Some smaller centres might have 3 storey by their transport routes (but allow more by special consent).
Larger centres should be allowed to decide on a max of 5 or 10 storey by train lines in some areas.
The 15 storey ones do take longer to build …
We can phase in higher urban density
We're past Peak Seymour.
ACT are headed for 6% and Winston is eating their lunch.
Marvelous.
@atrupar.com
Nigel Farage looks uncomfortable as Jamie Raskin uses his opening statement to absolutely demolish him
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lxx32n7tuk2a?
Epic.