I have to give Hooton his due; he can argue his corner pretty well.
Last week he was unloading once more on the sorry spectacle who remains, at this hour, our Prime Minister. He was putting the case that their leadership problem is not they don't have alternatives, it's that that they have too many good ones. He asserted that Willis, Bishop and Stanford and God save us I think he might even have said Brown, were all more than good enough for the job and had proven themselves so in their roles.
Attentive readers of this dogged little publication will recall that this not how I have been characterising those candidates or the National Party Leadership Revolving Door of Doom.
Because he had argued this corner quite well, I did ask myself if perhaps I had been blind to their capabilities. On reflection, yeahnah. Yes, granted, they're capable people, but my argument is not that; it's that they're a long way short of what you look for in a leader, namely: someone who can see where we need to go and who possesses that vanishingly rare skill of being able to convince enough of us to get on board and make our way there.
Bishop is pretty good at grasping where we need to go, but too willing to cave and compromise to noisy vested interests.
Stanford is a great communicator but seems prone, wittingly or otherwise, to reactionary capture.
Nicola Willis I thought of this Sunday as we watched the bloody excellent ATC production of Macbeth:
Full of Sounds and Ferries, signifying nothing.
In short: they could all do better than this clown but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t struggle for traction.
What to do, who to vote for?
Someone wrote this week that the whole thing turns on none of these parties doing what they were supposed to: fix the cost of living and I nearly bruised my eyes from the rolling. Yes, and also, no, no, no.
In the simplest terms, your society works when everyone has a fair share of reward and opportunity, and we have spent the past four decades piling distortion upon distortion of the fair shares of that society.
We have been so intent on honouring the false gods of individual rights and property rights and the mythical efficiencies of The Market and the right to make a buck that we have made reward and opportunity an impossibility for vast numbers of us. Meanwhile we have demonised the whole idea of tax.
A society that lionises billionaires and waits for science to fix the climate crisis and paints tax as some kind of malevolent disease was never going to do very well, and that's what we've got.
And do we know how all of that manifests itself in our daily lives? Do we know how all of that manifests itself to us as frustrated voters?
It manifests itself as the cost of living. If you're wanting things to change, you're going to need to vote for someone who gets the to fix the cost of living, you've got to fix the system, you can't just promise to fix the problem.
And here's a little clue if you're looking for someone who can do that: it's not poor Old Mate Grabaseat. And it's not any of the ones Hooton is recommending either.
