Election fever

The New Zealand elections are less than two weeks away. Every day one of the parties announces a new policy to give the news media something to write or talk about. Some of these policies are simply bribes. None of them will make a huge difference to resolving the issues facing New Zealand. The issues include a wage structure that does not enable a person earning anything less than an average income to live without subsidy in some form of government benefit. We import poverty from countries with low wage economies, so the state has to top up wages and subsidise employers because the country has no tolerance of extreme poverty. We also accept a measure of unemployment that would have been quite unacceptable in the past, because it is a way of the global economy to keep wages down and keep workers subdued. We subsidise property speculators and landlords by giving people housing supplements so that they could pay rents disproportionate to incomes. We accept a degree of poverty, and in particular, child poverty because this is the inevitable result of the global economy. But none of the parties advocate tackling these issues in a meaningful way. To tackle them they would have to commit to a centralised economy that puts the welfare of the people first not profits . That is quite out of favour. It smacks of Stalinist state planning. No one talks of the successful state planning of the first Labour government. So all these new policy announcements will not make a blind bit of difference to the outcome of the election. What makes the difference is traditional loyalties, which over the years had been undermined, with Labour enacting free marker policies, and National adopting welfare programs that smack of socialism. What matters even more is knowing which politicians you like as people. With Labour candidate Steven Gibson describing the Prime Minister as Shylock, with Green candidate Catherine Delahunty leading a protest about Gaza, ignoring the much greater atrocities in Syria, or the atrocities committed by Hamas, with Judith Collins and her minions undermining her own staff, with Trevor Mallard wanting to bring back dinosaurs, not to mention the absolutely weird ideas of Colin Craig and Jamie Whyte election boils down to voting for people you think you can trust.