Mike Hosking, SectionOpinion, Publish DateTuesday, 10 September 2019, 3:01PM
I was not remotely surprised to read over the weekend Audrey Young’s revelation that internal polling for Labour has fallen to pieces.
They leak the good stuff but the leaks have stopped. For the casual observer, the reasons are obvious.
The fact the Labour Party don’t appear to understand what’s gone wrong is alarming. Cabinet papers show the KiwiBuild reset was always troubled. This is yet more advice the government was receiving, that was showing what most of us could fairly easily see, that their policy was fatally flawed from day one, yet they chose to ignore it.
Similar advice was offered to Julie Anne Genter and her mad fee bate scheme for electric vehicles. Treasury told her it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t make a jot of difference, yet she’s still refusing to accept it.
The KiwiBuild reset of course is a tangible example of all that is wrong, although it’s a more realistic approach to housing. In other words, it’s a white flag. A few low deposits and next to no houses, the damage has been done in the sense they promised the world and delivered not a jot of it.
The transformational government is a hoax, and as each policy comes out, as each report is published, as each promise fails to be delivered, the transformational aspect is shattered. The year of delivery is increasingly a joke.
The year of delivery is in fact the KiwiBuild of intentions: the set up, the noise, the crickets chirping, the silence, the embarrassment.
Their health report last week, two years in the making, is only interim, without a single recommendation. It will be election year before we even see a final report. Nothing, literally nothing will happen to health in their entire first term.
What part of delivery is there in that? Even some of the so called new KiwiBuild measures have to go to cabinet and will barely be there before the end of the year. Yet again, election year and they’re still looking to resurrect their biggest individual cock up.
The cancer announcement. One, they were beaten to it by National, and two, no indication at all as to how they’re going to make cancer targets work, given they already have targets and they’re not working – and no one is being held to account.
For that apparently, according to the Prime Minister last week on this show, we have to wait for the health report – the report that had no recommendations.
You can’t get re-elected on waffle. Calling for reports, more yak ,and nothing at the end of it, is just filling time. Add to that the fact the economy is slowing at a rate of knots and lord knows how they spin this next year.
But, it’s not like the alarm bells aren’t ringing for them. The advice in front of their noses that half this stuff is ideology doomed to failure. Policies that have already tanked, and the ultimate test for any political party, the polls, means the truth is staring them in the face.
They either go down next year in righteous indignation that we just didn’t get them, or they wake up get real and set about saving themselves. I reckon they’ve got about eight months.