This Government is leaderless, out of control and a disgrace. The reason they’re out of control and a disgrace is a direct result of being leaderless. The supposed leader of this ramshackle collection of disparates couldn’t run a cake stall at a bring and buy. Her leadership skills are zilch and as a result, this so-called Government is running amok. As are some of the Ministers in it.
Julie Anne Genter is behaving as if she’s a dictator in drag. First she threatens the Wellington City Council in a letter that if they don’t play by her rules money won’t be forthcoming for transport measures. Now we find out she has the temerity to dump one thousand submissions on her car tax proposal because they disagreed with her thinking on the matter. Furthermore, as they came through a National Party website, they were regarded as spam. This is both the height of arrogance and outrageous.
Not to be outdone, Shane Jones joins the race to the bottom. He tells those attending a forestry awards ceremony they need to vote for him or miss out on the largesse from his provincial growth fund. Not content with that he told Newstalk ZB that he would be ‘checking with the Overseas Investment Office to see if (foreign investors who criticised him politically) should lose their standing in good character’. Any pot and kettle to be seen here? Like Genter, this is both arrogant and outrageous. Also stupid.
Who do the likes of Genter and Jones think they are? The answer is they’re the types who, given a bit of power, lose all sense of judgment and abuse it. They can get away with it because they know there’ll be no real ramifications. A wet bus ticket reprimand at worst. Other Ministers are behaving in the same dictatorial manner. Jones, for one, ought to know better. This is what happens when you give power to an unelected bunch of political misfits. It might give Winston some sort of perverse personal satisfaction to inflict this state of affairs on the populace, but he needs to realise the country is paying dearly for his actions.
How Winston can be happy with the disaster he’s created is beyond any sensible person’s rationale. They can’t build houses, they can’t solve poverty or homelessness, they have completely lost business confidence, they, thankfully, can’t get light rail up and running, they can’t get economic indicators pointing in the right direction, and they can’t plant trees.
Continuing in a negative vein, here’s what they can do. Wreck a child’s education by closing charter schools at the behest of their union paymasters, run a lumbering diesel locomotive from Hamilton to Auckland with next to no passengers but a huge carbon footprint, crucify landlords to the point where they leave the market, admit undesirables into the country, penalise law abiding gun owners, help all and sundry onto welfare, be a friend to criminals, and become a poor cousin to Norway by stopping oil and gas production. And, as William Felt will tell you, that’s just the start.
If Winston thinks this is all great for the country then he might be waking up with a nasty shock the morning after the night of the next election. These people are without peer as a class of politicians who are leaderless, rudderless, and therefore unable to make their own decisions. Any decisions they do make have negative consequences for the country. In some schools of thought there are two types of politicians – the tough and steely in an orange hunter’s jacket, read John Key, or the touch and feely with a Kleenex packet. Unfortunately we’ve got the Kleenex packet.
There was an interesting article in the New York Times which stated just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who have studied highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have uncovered evidence that these creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far flung social networks.
If our current lot were of the canine species they’d be lucky to recognise a tree to raise their hind leg against. Totally dysfunctional.
