Chippy (Chris Hipkins), after bumping into Volodymyr Zelensky in a corridor at the NATO Summit in Vilnius, needed a bit of a bump himself in the polls. The latest Taxpayers Union poll for Preferred Prime Minister showed him dropping 6 points. The recent One News poll shows Hipkins only 4% ahead of Chris Luxon now as Preferred Prime Minister with 24% to Luxon’s 20%. The yawning gap has closed.
In this poll both National and Labour dropped 2% but Act rose 1 point to 12%. The Greens are on 10% and Te Pati Maori on 3%. Commentators from the left are apprehensive about Winston Peters picking up the “Freedom Vote”. Peters even made the comment that there was an unusual number of deaths following Covid.
Hipkins was quick to react to the bad polls, including the Labour Talbot Mills one for corporate clients, which showed Labour on 31% to National’s 36%. He didn’t even wait until he got back from Lithuania to say he was disassociating himself from the Wealth Tax and the Capital Gains Tax and they wouldn’t happen while he was the leader of the Labour Party. It’s amazing what a drop in the polls will do.
As Claire Trevett puts it, Chippy is in a “Let’s not do this” mode. While he is at it he should bin “Three Waters” and Parker’s new Resource Consent Reforms, which only favour the Maori elite.
These reforms have not been put to a referendum as the Australians are doing with the “Voice to Parliament”. Kieran McAnulty, Chippy’s lieutenant and Trotsky look-alike, has stated that democracy does not apply to these apartheid reforms. This sounds like Orwell’s Big Brother or, rather, Big Sister.
Graig Greaves writing in the Australian has compared the Labour Party to the Titan, the submersible that was recently sent down to view the Titanic. The Titan itself had imperfect working parts and imploded, which Greaves likens to our present ruling coalition.
Greaves conveniently composed a list of sacked or resigned Cabinet Ministers since 2017 when Ardern came to power. So far he has come up with ten, but didn’t include Michael Wood or the Prime Minister, both of whom resigned. This would bring the numbers up to twelve: A “Dirty Dozen”.
Undoubtedly the Labour Party and its partners have hit a few icebergs in their tenure. It remains to be seen whether they can be salvaged or if Labour will sink as rapidly as the Titanic did. Will the rats leave the sinking ship? We have half a billion unused RAT tests so I doubt we need any more.
Labour’s new election slogan is “In it for You”. But can we withstand another term of “it”?
The polls seem to be saying, “We want Out”.
Psalm 107 might be one for our leaders to consider:
“They that go down to the sea in ships,
That do business in great waters,
Those are the workers of the Lord,
His wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind,
They mount up to the heaven,
They go down again to the depths,
Their soul is melted because of trouble,
They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man,
And are at their wits’ end.”
