Election 2023 – Main Issues
There are so many issues in play at the moment that it is hard to say what the priorities are for most voters but in my opinion the most important issue that affects every voter has to be the cost of living/inflation.
We all need to eat and find shelter and with the record levels of inflation and rapidly increasing costs of living our weekly food and rent/mortgage bills are steadily getting bigger all the time and wages just don’t seem to be keeping up with the increases in costs.
In pre-election advertising Labour stated that the Prime Minister has brought a laser focus on the cost
of living to his job, and they are going to do the same for their campaign.
Yet in spite of this grandiose advertising they have not only removed the subsidy on fuel but they increased the taxes on it as well which resulted in approximately a 29cents per litre increase in price, which only added to the rapidly rising costs of living which were already at record levels.
The food price index for July showed that prices were still 9.6 percent higher than a year ago, with fruit and vegetables up 6.2 percent.
We all want to feel safe so the levels of serious crime statistics are a major issue for the majority of voters.
Labour claimed that they had been focused on keeping our communities safer but ram raids and robberies are now out of control, gang memberships are at an all-time high and their answer to this crisis was to cut the Police budget from $2.528 billion this year to $2.460 billion next year!
We want to be able to receive medical attention and care when we or our dependents are ill so healthcare is an issue for all.
The worst health problem is the huge number of people who are suffering because they can’t access healthcare needed.
The reality is that the $500 million restructure of the health system, that Labour launched during the pandemic - to abolish District Health Boards, centralise services, and introduce Maori co-governance - has destabilised the entire health sector.
As a result, all health indicators have gone backwards and when the shortage of doctors, nurses, medical specialists, and GPs is factored in, New Zealand’s health system is failing to deliver critical healthcare and is costing lives.
Labour’s response to this health crisis has been to cut next year’s funding by almost $1 billion from $29.527 billion in 2023 to $28.653 billion in 2024.
Education is another issue that is a priority for all of the voters that have young families.
Approximately 50% of Kiwi kids were now wagging school.
Staff at the Ministry of Education had been strongly pressured to attend “diversity training” at huge taxpayer expense, even though many do not wish to be involved in such divisive “training”, and it was causing division and dissent in the workplace.
They were also being coerced into attending Te Reo classes in working hours instead of doing regular duties, and something called Te Arawhiti training. As part of this ideological push they were also being told that they ‘must’ use Maori language greetings and sign-offs in internal emails with threats of reprimand for failure to comply.
The changed New Zealand history curriculum now taught in schools, is deeply worrying considering the errors of fact that are contained in much of it.
The new history curriculum being introduced into schools contains commentary that is designed to expose all school students to the supposed racial biases imbued in New Zealand’s existing history curriculum. As a result the new curriculum tries to make selected facts fit the agenda rather than actually teaching the whole of the facts. It is designed to, wittingly or unwittingly, mislead and convince students that the whole of colonialism was disastrous for Maori.
When in fact a glance at history of NZ shows that prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, slavery and cannibalism were commonplace in the Maori world and the life expectancy of Maori was approximately thirty years of age. Since the signing of the Treaty slavery and cannibalism have been outlawed and Maori life expectancy has grown to approximately seventy years.
The new curriculum is heavily oriented to the history of Maori in New Zealand, with so much of that history relying on sometimes unreliable oral accounts. The themes of what is to be taught are, at best, an extremely incomplete view of our history.
It is asserted in the new curriculum that Maori chiefs did not cede sovereignty in signing the Treaty but rather entered into some kind of “partnership” with the Crown. This latter-day reinterpretation of the Treaty is simply stated as a fact, without any acknowledgement that the assertion is hotly contested, is flatly contradicted by many of the speeches recorded by Colenso in writing at the time (on 5 February 1840), and flatly contradicted also by speeches made by numerous chiefs at Kohimarama in 1860.
This is such a fundamental matter that to simply assert that a partnership was created between the Crown and Maori chiefs totally discredits any claim to objectivity which the new curriculum may have had. There are a number of assertions made as if they were uncontested and verifiable fact, when at best they are based on supposition and centuries-old oral tradition.
All of these issues are based on the Lie that the Treaty of Waitangi created a partnership between the Crown and Maori and that partnership requires a form of co-governance to be implemented.
And the overall issue that has a huge effect on all of the above is the issue of Co-Governance and the associated race based legislative changes that have been made by the current government.
The Prime Minister told Parliament, “I want to live in a New Zealand where the circumstances into which you were born do not dictate the opportunities that you have in life or hold you back”, but hypocritically on the other hand he authorised $825 million of policies that use race to determine outcomes:
$200 million to build and repair homes for Maori; $34m for two years of kapa haka so it matches the combined funding of the Symphony Orchestra and the Royal New Zealand Ballet; $18m for the Matariki holiday; $168m for the unaccountable Whanau Ora slush fund; $132m extra for Maori health providers and customary healing; $51m for Maori media; and $8m for Maori tourism ‘to help alleviate cost-of-living pressures’.
In discussing that budget allocation, the Minister for Maori Development Willie Jackson revealed, “We’ve got the by Maori, for Maori Budget, but let’s not forget most Maori are not attached to a lot of our Maori organisations.”
In other words, he’s confirmed that while the leaders of those multi-million-dollar iwi business development corporations that provide most of the Government’s race-based social services contracts give the impression they deal with all Maori, in reality, it’s only a tribal minority – most Maori prefer to be part of society’s mainstream.
The current Labour government has over the course of the last two terms seen inflation rise to record levels and the cost of living increase accordingly with most of these increases being as a result of government spending.
Last week’s Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU) – the Government accounts released by Treasury ahead of every general election, raised serious concerns about Labour’s management of the economy.
Treasury’s pre-election forecasts confirmed that Government spending exceeds revenue by more than what was forecast in the May 2023 Budget.
The forecasts are not realistic. They are too optimistic we should remember that Labour has a track record of seriously blowing their budgets as shown below:
Labour’s Fiscal Plan in 2017 proposed to increase core Crown operating spending by just $11.7 billion. Two years later Treasury put the increase at $27.7 billion. That increase made a mockery of Labour’s fiscal plan.
Government spending as a result of Covid-19 took the increase to $77.4 billion.
Spending in the year ended June 2024 was forecast to be $116 billion. This week, the forecast spending is $139 billion.”
Over the six years that Labour has been in office, Core Crown expenditure has blown out from just over 27 percent of GDP in 2018, to almost 34 percent in this current financial year.
The debt story is eye watering. From net core Crown debt of $57.5 billion when Labour took office, it is expected to be $181.6 billion by the end of this financial year, rising to an astonishing $195 billion by 2027.
Taking into account some of the almost blasé attitudes to spending public money taken by some in the public service (e.g. the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, not only wasting $40,000 on a farewell party for their Chief Executive, but also spending $52,000 promoting Labour MPs at post-budget breakfasts.) it is no wonder we are in a serious economic recession.
How much money has Labour wasted on propaganda?
The revelation that last year they paid $500,000 for climate propaganda to be reported as news is undoubtedly just the tip of a very large iceberg.
What about the $1 billion Greens Jobs for Nature scheme, or the $3 billion Provincial Growth Fund, or the $50 million spent on consultants for a bike bridge that was never built?
Then there’s the $100 million Labour spent over the last six years on consultants for Auckland’s light rail – a project originally costed at $4 billion, that Treasury has now estimated at $30 billion - that hasn’t even been started!
Then there are the billions of dollars that have been spent implementing the divisive race-based objectives of He Puapua. That, of course, includes Three Waters(now renamed Affordable Water Reforms; Yeah Right), which has already suffered a billion-dollar blowout in establishment costs - a figure that could end up being many times higher by the time this senseless policy is reversed by a new government.
Core Crown spending is averaging $1 billion every three days and that the Auditor-General has expressed grave concerns over a lack of accountability for spending by Labour.
A huge part of their spending has come as a result of legislative and constitutional changes that they have made on the basis of co-governance. With the justification for this spending being that the Treaty of Waitangi formed a partnership between the Crown and Maori and as such requires co-governance to implement that.
This whole interpretation is nothing more than an attempt by a bunch of greedy rent seekers devoid of any notion of good faith, to rewrite the Treaty.
In an article written by Anthony Willy (A Barrister and Solicitor, who served as a Judge on four Courts: District, Environment, Tax and Valuation.
He is a former Lecturer in Law at Canterbury University. He presently acts as an Arbitrator, a Commercial mediator, a Resource Management Act Commissioner, and is a Director of several companies.)
He sets out the following in relation to the so-called Treaty Partnership provisions:
There is illiterate clamour mostly from the academic community but of course egged on by the Maori tribal elites for the implementation of a “Treaty Partnership” in which current tribal chiefs supported by attention seeking academics claim that those chiefs who signed the Treaty on 6th February 1840 somehow entered into a partnership with the British Crown. As a matter of law and constitutional practice there is not and cannot be such partnership and that is plain to anybody capable of reading the terms of the document (always a good start in deciding what were the intentions of the parties were on signing a document.)
The Treaty of Waitangi only has three articles and nowhere in those articles does it mention either Partnership or Co-Governance.
A Co-Governance Partnership between the Crown and Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi is nothing more than a Lie; a dangerous, divisive attempt to gain advantage based on race, which will end in the destruction of democracy in New Zealand.
Yet this current Labour government persists in promoting the implementation of co-governance, just Apartheid by another name, which increases the cost burdens for all voters across every area of government both central and local.
The most important question that people will ask of them prior to this upcoming election is; what are they planning in regard to the existing policies around co-governance where a person’s ethnic identity as Maori is more important than Democracy for all citizens?
We can have co-governance without democracy.
We can have democracy without co-governance.
But we cannot have democracy and co-governance.
In summary it is my opinion
that the five main issues in
the voters’ minds at the
upcoming election will be:
1
Co-Governance (due to its
effect on all other issues)
2
Cost of Living/Inflation (rising
faster than wages can keep up)
3
Increases in rates of serious crime
(rapidly rising rates of serious offending)
4
Failures in the Healthcare system
(blown out waiting lists for appointments
across all areas of healthcare and race
based priority for appointments)
5
Failures in the education system (huge
increase in truancy rates and falling literacy
and numeracy standards across all age groups)
Notwithstanding that there will be concerns
about lack of performance across nearly
every area of government over and above
these main issues.