Pieces from John Campbell's article. Click here.
“The government you elect is the government you deserve,” said Thomas Jefferson. And this is the government we elected.
I keep returning to that photo they posted, the first time they all met together.
It was art imitating life. Everything in that photo is empty. The room. The walls. The table. The glasses (which are still upturned because Winston hasn’t yet given Chris and David permission to use them). And the men, too, as it turned out. Empty of ideas.
Dreams? Not really.
- In the New Zealand First agreement, some .. is listed under the heading “Equal Citizenship”, which seems outrageous in a country in which Māori die an average of seven years younger than non-Māori, experience persistent inequities in health, are more likely to leave school with low or no qualifications, and are over-represented in the criminal justice system to such a great extent that they make up 52 percent of the prison population.
There is a kind of re-colonising here. The net effect seems deeply regressive. “I’m really proud of the negotiations,” Chris Luxon said on Thursday afternoon. But is he proud of this? Really?
- Child poverty not a priority
Aspiration? Not for the poor. There are no poverty reduction targets (or discussion of them) in either agreement. ... Nothing in the coalition agreements suggests the plight of children in poverty is even seen.
- It may be that today’s most substantive announcements about responding to poverty come in the form of punishing the criminality that’s disproportionately likely to arise from profound childhood disadvantage. “Three strikes will be back”, David Seymour said. “Prison capacity for adult and youth offenders will be expanded.”
https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/11/25/john-campbell-i-hoped-to-be-surprised-actually-im-amazed/
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