What on earth was Jacinda Ardern thinking when she started channelling Ed Miliband? Quote:
New Zealand knows it has poverty issues, and an emerging class of working poor, but we’re not paying enough attention to the “squeezed middle”, Jacinda Ardern says.
On Thursday, the prime minister and her finance minister, Grant Robertson, will deliver their first Budget.
Ardern has spoken extensively about rebuilding the foundations of good health and education systems, but there are specific groups of Kiwis she hopes the Budget will help.
On Wednesday, Ardern said as well as helping those in poverty, and the working poor, the Government also needed to help those middle New Zealanders feeling the pinch.
“There is this other cohort of people who just feel like some of these services aren’t accessible, and we don’t pay enough attention to that,” she said.
Ardern was referring to people who were working, but were feeling the squeeze due to a range of factors, like high housing costs.
Other costs, like the upkeep of a car and petrol, school-related costs, and things like GP visits added to the daily struggle.
And while unemployment is at its lowest in a decade – at 4.4 per cent in March – wage growth has stagnated, meaning after costs, a growing number of households had barely any discretionary income.
Almost 50 per cent of Kiwi families say they’re just getting by day-to-day due to financial issues, according to the Salvation Army.
Ardern said the Government had changed the threshhold of Working for Families payments, to try and capture more of the country’s working poor and squeezed middle.
The payments would mean 380,000 families would have an average of $75 more in their pocket a week.
Other measures, including cheaper GP visits and improved healthcare and education systems would also help these people, she said. End quote.
Lovely slogans invented by someone else. Quote:
Miliband also returned to the theme he enunciated in his first newspaper article after he became Labour leader in 2010, which was published in the Sunday Telegraph. In that piece Miliband pledged to champion Britain’s “squeezed middle”.
The Labour leader talked of how the middle classes are facing a squeeze, though in a slight change of wording he stopped short of talking about the “squeezed middle”. He wrote: “Today, the British middle class is being squeezed by a cost-of-living crisis as never before – and people grafting to join it find that the obstacles in their way are getting bigger… No one saw this protracted squeeze on the middle coming.” End quote.
They’re done. They are so out of ideas they are now stealing UK Labour’s slogans from 2014.
Jacinda Ardern has always been the master of the bumper sticker slogan – it is as deep as she gets. But it is really sad to see her resorting to using failed UK Labour leader Ed Miliband’s failed slogans. Or, was it one of Nancy Pelosi’s failed slogans? Quote:
Former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi used the term in November 2006 to provide context to the domestic agenda of the U.S. Democratic Party. The Center for American Progress (CAP) issued a report of the same title in September 2014.However, variations on the theme have been used by politicians attempting to describe the financial challenges facing the middle class and to appeal to the middle class voter for much longer. End quote.
Poor Jacinda Ardern. She’s been reading too many leftist treatises and has loaded up her baby-brain with failed slogans from other losers.