There are many pundits and commentators out there, who for some unknown and unfathomable reason, get listened to as they spout utter nonsense. Mostly they are partisan hacks pushing their party’s boat or are just talking heads in love with the sound of their own voice. Mostly though they are just stupid and should be ignored.
Tina Nixon is one such person, always mouthing off and producing trite rubbish that any thinking person would dismiss as tosh immediately. Yet somehow she keeps getting the call.
Her latest rubbish is her pronouncement that there will be a snap election.
We reckon that Labour will go to the polls by calling a Snap election for the end of March early April.
We raised that possibility two weeks ago on the Platform as it looked like Labour was reinventing itself in the wake of Ardern’s very planned departure.
What do we know?
Our contacts inside the public sector say the Labour Govt started pulling down the blinds on a raft of policies that would have pissed off the public in the last quarter of 2022. So they have been plotting and planning for some time.
So that points to the start of the planning for the departure of Ardern months ago.
Ardern knew she had to sacrifice herself on the pyre of failed policies to allow the party time to reform and reinvent itself before the election.
Her old cabinet have open throated quite a few dead policy rats to ensure they get another shot at running the country.
But they have largely conned the electorate as they have clearly indicated that they will regurgitate the policies in the future. Robertson indicated today in an interview that the insurance scheme was being “reworked.”
Deceitful bastards.
Then cue the recent polls with an uplift for Labour on the back of Chippy’s ascendency to the Red Throne and Snap.
And Snap is definitely the word on the hot breeze in the Wellington beltway- with a few sweepstakes focussed on dates from the end of March to end of April.
The slightly surprising popularity of Hipkin’s, who is growing on voters by the day, must also bolster the Snap option.
She asks us “what do we know?”. The answer is three-fifths of five eights of stuff all.
This constant talk of snap elections is the fanciful wishful thinking that often infects comment sections of websites. Almost invariably the person uttering this nonsense has no knowledge of the constitutional arrangements that govern how a snap election is called.
Let’s dispel those notions now, shall we?
Firstly, the Labour Government commands a majority and therefore the confidence of the house. In order for there to be a snap election the Prime Minister would have to convince the Governor-General that he no longer commands the confidence of the house.
That would require some pretty amazing contrivances to make that happen. Labour has an outright majority. So, Chris Hipkins would have to tell the Governor-General that there is a catastrophic split in his party that means he no longer has a majority, and that that split also means there are still not enough to command a majority even if he enlists the support of the Maori Party and the Greens.
If you seriously believe that this could occur then you are drinking the same sort of Koolaid that Tina Nixon is drinking.
There really are no other reasons to create the necessary environment to legitimately call a snap election. There have been just three snap elections in New Zealand’s history. In 1951, when the Government capitalised on the 1951 waterfront dispute. In 1984 when Robert Muldoon let the booze do his thinking, when he had just a one seat majority that was under constant threat from the more independent minded members of his caucus, and in 2002 when Helen Clark contrived a situation where she claimed that an early poll was necessary due to the collapse of her junior coalition partner, the Alliance, but denied it was a snap election. Bill English was woefully unprepared and was trounced as a result.
All of those examples were foreshadowed by events that created the necessary impetus to be able to call a snap election. None of those things exists, especially when Labour has an outright majority in the house.
Sure it could happen, but the chances are really rather remote. The justification Tina Nixon uses just won’t wash. Then again this is the calibre of people used by The Platform, which tells you everything you need to know.
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