In a moment, good people doing good things. But first the National Party.
Poor old natural party of government! Even the diehards are left with I got nothing when talk turns to our embarrassment of a Prime Minister. Well, almost nothing. Yesterday in the Seaside Village a National party stalwart offered that Chris is a details man; he's across everything. Details?! Across things?! Bless! Fortunately I had already swallowed my coffee.
And yet, despite having a leader in an all four-engine-engines-have-failed setting, they seem to be managing to convince a chunk of voters that we’re fixing the mess Labour left, and you need to let us finish the job.
Hold that thought about finishing the job, there’s a new guffaw-worthy billboard I want to look at.
But first, the lies, damned lies and soundbites of this zombie election campaign.
So many false assertions, made so brazenly, over and over because that’s how it works; the lie gets half way around the world before the truth has its boots on.
Such as? Thanks so much for asking; Next slide please.
“Nine new taxes”
Okay, let’s knock over the bullshit in this.
Only one is Labour policy — that’s Capital Gains Tax — and Labour has ruled out five of the six that the other parties are proposing.
National will happily let you assume that Labour itself is proposing nine new taxes but if challenged they'll say Labour doesn't get its coalition without the others, therefore it's nine new taxes.
They'll also happily coat-tail on incendiary Taxpayers Union ads depicting Chris Hipkins as a smash and grab burglar. They’ll happily let voters imagine enormous chunks of money being gouged out of them= by wealth taxes when in fact NONE OF THESE TAXES INVOLVE MORE THAN A MODEST PROPORTION of anyone’s wealth and in very many circumstances WILL NOT APPLY AT ALL.
All of it rests on two bullshit axioms:
One: Tax is bad and the less we have of it, the better.
Two: The country’s broke and it needs to stop spending.
People like Nicola Willis like to assert that you can’t tax your way prosperity and deliver it with a smug so-there look that declares: I have offered a self evident truth.
But just look around the world a little and you will find this to be nonsense. Countries like Sweden have done precisely that: taxed their way to prosperity. The USA’s golden years were its highest-taxing ones.
But maybe we’d rather be more like Somalia.
What all this fearmongering is effectively obscuring is the inherent fairness of the proposals: Whatever way you come by your wealth, you’ll be paying your share of tax on it. What’s unfair about that?
Next lie please, sorry, I mean slide.
"Labour saddled Kiwis with $120 billion of debt"
What that fails to recognise is the reason for the borrowing: A $70b Covid response, which stands among the world's best, and moreover stands as one of the most modest rates of borrowing taken on by any country in that pandemic.
“Chris Hipkins is committed to scrapping the mandated hour of reading, writing and maths”
No he bloody isn’t, he says he’d scrap the mandate, not the teaching, and most teachers are already giving the full hour.
"Labour has made around $18 billion worth of spending promises"
That assumes pay equity will restored in full, counts promises Labour never made, and treats the CGT as its only revenue.
“We’ve reduced victims of violent crime by 49,000 since coming into Government"
There's nothing more prone to meaningless interpretation than police crime data more to the point their proposals for dealing with crime or punitive ideas for mending a broken system or more likely to be sneered at as woke.
“2,100 more nurses in the system than when we came to Government”
That count starts in September 2023 and treats part-timers the same as full-timers. Nearly all the growth happened in the government’s first four months, meaning this was recruitment set in motion by Labour. Of 1,252 extra full-time-equivalent nurses since December 2023, all but 54 were already on staff by March 2024. Simeon Brown conceded in Parliament that the net gain since then is 54 FTEs. Let’s also recall that in March 2024, Health NZ briefing blamed over-recruitment of nurses for its budget blowout. Hiring was reined in. National is now claiming credit for the hiring it once complained about.
“School attendance has skyrocketed” (David Seymour)
Most of what they’ve been comparing has to do with ordinary kids going through the pandemic and holidays in school time. Up or down is really neither here nor there. Meanwhile chronic absence, the hard core of the problem, doubled between 2015 and 2023, with more than 80,000 students missing over three weeks of a single term, and we have’t yet seen any meaningful updated data on that.
THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY SLIDE SHOW, LET'S NOW TURN TO THAT BILLBOARD.
Amongst the responses I got to this on BlueSky, this was my favourite:
THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY BILLBOARD SHOW
And finally, as promised, Good people doing good things.
You've probably seen it, but I want to put it here to come back to again and again. This is how you deal with the bad faith assholes who are doing their best to tear down everything decent.
This is Tommy. Tommy had a question about my allegiances. Listen to the end to hear about his.
— Abdul El-Sayed (@abdulelsayed.bsky.social) 2026-10-18T01:17:17.355Z
And nearer to home, here's a campaign conceived by friend of the newsletter Will. Love it. I've signed with much enthusiasm.
