Peter Allan Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week
peterallanwilliams.substack.com
One of my favourite political quotes comes from the great American writer and satirist Henry Louis Mencken. H.L. Mencken was an astute observer of politics and of life in the US during his working life from the early 20thcentury till his death in 1956.
He once said, “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
You would think he was writing about the New Zealand Labour Party of 2023. For some reason, despite them being well behind National in the polls and with an election barely 5 weeks away, the party has had an outbreak of Mencken’s imaginary hobgoblins.
Why else would some of their cabinet ministers, MPs, and staffers just start making stuff up when they know it can’t possibly be correct? They’re saying and writing more fiction than Lee Child.
Willie Jackson started it with his claim that National were going to do away with the minimum wage, and even worse tried to say the claim was true because National were going to cut the minimum wage – which is also wrong.
Jackson is a clown. He’s rapidly becoming one of the centre-right’s best assets.
Then Immigration Minister Andrew Little said in a Facebook post that National would sack all the teachers and flog off all the schools.
I mean, really?
Mind you with the quality of some of the teachers and some of the schools, and the results they’re producing, the idea has a bit of merit.
The Northcote MP Shanan Halbert has claimed National will reduce sick leave from 10 days to 5. Again, wrong, and never in National policy.
Duncan Webb, the Christchurch MP has said in his latest newsletter that National will abolish Matariki. Where the heck did he get that idea?
Then, the most absurd claim of all – saying that National will abolish free public transport for disabled New Zealanders when no such policy even exists.
So that’s not a bad effort from Labour.
Five incorrect claims in four days, five imaginary hobgoblins.
In one respect Mencken is correct. The entire New Zealand populace should be alarmed – by Labour’s sheer incompetence and ill-discipline.
