Another week, and another post-cabinet press conference consisting of the Prime Minister reeling off a long list of policies being scrapped or pushed out past the election. Yes, they're dumping climate change policies in a climate emergency, while betraying young people over the voting age, and ensuring hoons can continue to endanger us all on the roads. Oh, there's a one-off benefit increase in line with inflation. Whoop di do. That's the bare fucking minimum, and something which should happen automatically to ensure those at the bottom aren't left behind - something Labour isn't offering, I might add. So its just more treading water.
Hipkins is very big on how much money this is saving, which can be "reprioritised" to pay for cyclone cleanup. Which is basicly an admission that austerity rules, and we'll be paying for the cyclone in cuts rather than by taxing the rich. He's also talking about how this will free up bandwidth for the government to focus on bread and butter issues, which is an admission that central government is so run down and underfunded that it can't provide the level of policy advice and oversight currently required, and so new programmes require old ones to be thrown overboard. Both admissions are pretty damning.
Normally governments announce what they are doing, not what they can't or won't, and the overall impression is that Labour has shifted firmly into pre-election "do nothing" mode, where Ministers will delay, defer or deny for fear of offending people who will never vote for them anyway, while collecting their full salaries for their inaction. They've gone from the party of "we can do this" to the party of "we can't". And I have no idea how they expect to get re-elected when they're no longer offering people anything.
