With only 4 months to the election, it’s time to start collating the burning questions that our readers want New Zealand’s political parties to answer.
At the last election, Hawkes Bay Today put readers’ selected questions to candidates at public meetings but some felt that a lot of the questions lacked any real depth.
If there is enough interest shown, Burning Political Questions will become a regular weekly post for readers to submit their questions (with a stipulation of no more than one question per reader each week.)
The questions can then be used as a resource for those of you who attend public meetings or Virtual Public meetings on Facebook this year in the lead up to the election. The questions do not have to be targeted at any one political party. They can be questions that you want all political parties to answer.
The best of the previous week’s questions from the comment section will be published in the following week’s post.
The BEST of the questions from last week:
Questions for all political parties:
A two-part question.
a) Will they pull out or remain in the Paris Agreement?
b) If they remain will they increase or decrease the payment?
What is GDP? and is it important in any way?
If jobless numbers skyrocket, will you suspend all temporary work visa programmes to ensure kiwis get back to work?
If after a certain time locals haven’t taken the jobs , will temporary visas be reinstated?
Will you rescind the over the top firearms laws?
Will you consider amalgamating all the district boards into two entities, one North and one South?
Will you consider returning services including food back in house to all hospitals with the mandate to source locally where possible?
Will the Coalition parties be open and transparent and release the full text of their present agreement before the next election?
Would the incoming government be willing to deal with the issue of accepting refugees solely from the UNHCR camps? Or will they consider long-forgotten Christian minorities who have been – and still are – the victims of severe discrimination in over 70 nations of the earth, and yet are not safe in UN camps?
Will the no drilling oil and gas “Captains call” be removed?
Will farmers be allowed to carry on with planned irritation schemes?
Will the new landlord rental rules be scrapped?
Questions for the PM:
Is lifting children out of poverty still your sole purpose for being in parliament and if it is, how have you performed on your sole purpose? (Please don’t use Covid as an excuse, your pre Covid performance report is fine)
Questions for the National Party:
(Could expand this and address this to all National Party candidates.)
Can they say what the 9 values of the National Party are, and what they mean?
Will you go back to the policies that the National party were founded or keep using Labour ones with a bit of tweaking?
Questions for the Labour Party:
Given that WHO utterly failed to coordinate any timely response to the Coronavirus Pandemic, why are we continuing to fund them?
Can we please have all the details of the Ihumateo settlement, that you think you have successfully shoved under the carpet during the Pandemic?
Does the Labour Party have any plans to:
- Reduce Child Poverty?
- Build houses to ease the housing crisis?
- Build a high-speed electric train between Auckland-Hamilton-Tauranga?
- Build a second oil pipeline from Auckland to Whangarei?
- Create openness and transparency in government?
- Cut immigration numbers?
On the strength of past performance, how can potential voters have any faith that anything promised by the Labour Party at the next election will ever be carried out?
