Rod Kane
I have no idea who the winner was Wednesday night but it’s fairly obvious who the losers were: us.
This wasn’t a debate, it was a badly choreographed yell fest. Hipkins came off the blocks shouting like an enraged parrot and he never really stopped until well into the piece when Luxon finally told him, in the nicest way possible, to STFU.
Hipkins was nothing short of rabid. With nothing but six years of catastrophic failure behind him and two weeks out from an election, suddenly finding answers to all the massive problems HE gave us in the first place, he should have been like a naked cooked turkey waiting for the first plunge of the debating cleaver.
But no, time after time, Luxon allowed himself to be shouted down and tried to talk himself out from underneath a ranting unstoppable mouth. Hipkins is absolutely desperate, and that had to be patently obvious. Luxon is equally desperate, fighting for his two ticks which he is not going to get because he refuses to face the hard questions and appeal to the sane, common-sense vote. Peters and Seymour are doing just that and are arguably the winners last night, and could be the big winners of the election itself if they could just wake up and STOP arguing. These two guys are doing everything to feed fuel into a desperate Labour fire, and that’s all Labour has.
Paddy Gower, basking in his own self-importance, either quite forgot why he was there or was just plain incompetent. When it came to controlling a runaway Hipkins, he did nothing at all. Instead, Luxon did that job quite well. His questions were quite good, but just why would these debate controllers not ask the questions we all want to hear? Hipkins is about to give the country on a plate to Maori interests and full tribal control, and yet there was nothing on that. On the question of ‘are we a racist country?’, both leaders had the ideal opportunity to bring up the elephant in the room, the oncoming steam train of a two-race apartheid, but Yeah Nah, they were just too timid to go anywhere near it.
This country is living a lie, a massive one. Yes, Labour has destroyed the economy and yes there are massive questions about the connections of both Hipkins and Luxon to the WEF, UN and WHO. There are also big questions as to the Covid response and the excess deaths that we are now seeing following the COVID-19 vaccine. Nobody wants to talk about that, and whatever the answers are, we need to know and the questions need to be asked and they aren’t, not even in a debate.
But the biggest lie we are facing is the one that Messrs Willie Jackson, Mahuta, Tamihere, Morgan etc are feeding this nation with regard to the revised history of the country. Maori do not exist as a ‘pure’ race anymore, we are all the result of immigration from somewhere, they were never indigenous and a treaty ‘partnership’ is nothing but a contrived fabrication. None of that was in the debate either.
Once again Hipkins went on at length about job loss numbers in the public sector and Luxon only once meekly offered that 14,000 additional staff hired by the Labour government should go. He should have been screaming it!
When Hipkins was ranting about the great education he had coming for our kids, again Luxon had a shipload of high explosive ammunition in the fact that Hipkins, who held the education portfolio for five years, was responsible for it! Luxon could have and should have leapt over the lectern and grabbed him by his scrawny treasonous throat (metaphorically). Luxon mentioned it as an afterthought and if he wanted to get the public really on his side he could have started on the diverse sexual practices being taught to our young impressionable minds at school. All there in the box of political dynamite. But…nothing.
Hipkins had nothing to offer but yelling over the top of Luxon at every opportunity while trying to hide and deflect from his party’s abysmal performance of the last six years. Gower seemed to be basking in the mess he had created, for the sake of rabid entertainment. But surely, aren’t we, the voting public, deserving of better than this? Didn’t we really want to see what each was like on subjects of national importance rather than rabbit on about playing with tax and GST?
Isn’t co-governance, the loss of our water, the beaches, lakes and rivers, our mineral resources, parks and reserves, at least as important? Aren’t we deserving of an answer to the question of why we embarked on a separate racist health system in the middle of an economic disaster of Labour’s own making? Or why do we have to have unelected race-based seats on national and local body political bodies? Or why $1.9 billion was lost in the mental health system and what has happened to the billions given to Maori during the last two years – and the hundreds of millions to consultants for stuff that will never be built? And Pike River? If Gower didn’t have the guts to bring it up, it raises the question of why Luxon didn’t.
I would have to say that at least Luxon held himself in check while Hipkins went feral with nothing but a diseased bone between his molars. At the end of the debate, I had to wonder if we wanted a timid gentleman politician or a thug for Prime Minister. And there are no surprises there.
