r/KiwiPolitics

Makes sense. There's no benefit to our voting laws being the weakest in the world.

It's not in the article, but another electorate to watch is Christchurch Central. Labour's held the seat continuously since 1946 except for two terms in the Key years when National won it. Duncan Webb is the Labour incumbent but won by only 1400-ish votes against National's Dale Stephens in 2023 and a minimally higher margin in 2017. Webb's retiring this year and the new Labour candidate is George Hampton who lost North Shore in 2023.

Anyone else watching particular electorates with interest?

Seems a bit at odds with unemployment data and the cost of living…. I guess for some the economy might be doing well. Will it trickle down soon? lol

I'm not adding any editorial, I'm just going to leave this totally unadulterated quote from the article here:

>“Now what you've got is a whole bunch of bike lanes up Molesworth St that made it very difficult for me getting from my apartment into the parliamentary precinct,” he said.

>Luxon hasn’t lived in that apartment since moving into Premier House as prime minister.

Did you know, during the Covid pandemic, NZ had no flu. We stopped the bugs getting here

I think we should start offshore screening for it. Let's stop the bugs before they get here.

There is a culture of silence within some government departments that makes it difficult for people to speak openly about the problems they see. Bullying, cronyism, waste, inefficiency and poor management can become entrenched, while employees who try to raise concerns can find themselves constrained by employment agreements, confidentiality clauses, legal threats or concerns about their careers. We have seen examples of people who have experienced sexual harassment or bullying and then felt unable to speak publicly about what happened, staff whose careers have been threatened for commenting on major issues, and public servants who have been warned against making comments that could be considered political. Whatever the individual circumstances of these cases, the broader question is whether we have created a public sector where people are sometimes more afraid of speaking about problems than the public is of not knowing about them.

If we want to reform government departments, reduce waste and make better use of public money, we need a system that allows people to bring problems to light without fear of retaliation. That does not mean every public servant should have an unrestricted right to publicly disclose confidential information or campaign against government policy. There are legitimate reasons for confidentiality and political neutrality. But there must be a protected and credible way for people inside government to say, “This isn't working, this is why it isn't working, and here is what would be required to fix it.”

One of the biggest structural problems is the way government departments are given a budget and a set of responsibilities, without necessarily establishing whether the two are actually compatible. When the budget isn't sufficient to perform the task properly, managers still have to produce results. They then have to find ways to reconcile an impossible situation. They can redefine the task, reduce the scope of the service, delay or ignore some of the work, claim that part of the problem has been addressed when it hasn't, or solve today's problem in a way that simply creates a larger problem for tomorrow. Sometimes one highly visible task receives additional resources by taking them from another, less visible task, allowing the government to demonstrate that the important problem has been dealt with while other responsibilities quietly deteriorate.

The problem is that we don't have a sufficiently transparent mechanism for saying publicly, “This task cannot be properly completed with the resources we have been given.” Instead, there can be an enormous incentive for departments to make the available resources appear sufficient. The government doesn't necessarily want to admit that a service requires more money, because increasing spending is politically difficult. Cutting services is unpopular, and raising taxes is unpopular, so there is an incentive to say that efficiencies can be found and that everything will be fine. But eventually the gap between what we have asked government to do and what we are prepared to fund has to show up somewhere. If it doesn't show up honestly in the budget, it will show up in the quality of services, the workload of employees, the risks being accepted, or the people who don't receive the help they need.

This becomes particularly serious when we are talking about vulnerable people. If, as a society, we decide that children being left in abusive situations is something we will not tolerate, then we have to accept that decision has a resource implication. We cannot simply tell a department that protecting children is an absolute priority and then provide whatever funding happens to be available after everything else has been accounted for. If the resources aren't sufficient to meet the obligation, the honest choices are to provide more resources, reduce the scope of the obligation, or openly acknowledge the level of risk we are prepared to accept. What we should not do is leave frontline workers and managers to quietly make those decisions for us while maintaining the appearance that the system is meeting its responsibilities.

This is why openness and protected disclosure are so important. The people working inside government departments are often the people who know first when a system isn't functioning. They know when targets are being met only because the definition of success has changed.

They know when staffing levels are inadequate, when processes are creating unnecessary work, when money is being wasted, and when a service is being quietly rationed. They also know when senior management is presenting a much more positive picture I call it happy washing than the reality experienced by people doing the work. If those people are afraid that speaking honestly will damage their careers, breach their employment agreements or result in legal action, then government loses access to some of the most important information it has.

We need a system where a public servant can say, without fear of retaliation, “We have been given responsibility for doing X, but with the resources available we can only realistically do Y, and here are the consequences.” That information should then have a pathway to independent scrutiny and, where appropriate, Parliament and the public. It should not simply become an employment dispute about whether the employee was permitted to say it.

Ultimately, this isn't just an argument for more government spending. Government departments can and should be challenged to eliminate waste, improve management and find better ways of doing things. But efficiency cannot mean pretending that an impossible workload can be completed with insufficient resources. We need to make the trade-offs visible. If a department can deliver the required service for less, excellent. If it needs more resources to do the job properly, that needs to be known. If the government deliberately decides that a lower level of service is acceptable, that should also be an explicit political decision. Key systems that our public servants use to get the job done lack proper funding, workers cannot do their jobs well. They face constant delays, high stress, and poor results. This problem hurts both staff and the people they serve. Being told to cut down on delivery times even further when you are already stretched.

What we should not accept is a system where nobody openly makes the decision, but the service quietly deteriorates anyway. A healthy democracy needs accurate information about what its public sector are actually capable of doing. If the people who understand those institutions best are prevented from telling us when something is going wrong, then we shouldn't be surprised when problems persist, money is wasted and vulnerable people fall through the gaps.

Public servants should not be punished for telling the truth about whether the government is actually capable of delivering what it has promised.

The risks were known, documented repeatedly.

The reports literally predicted where the slip would happen, and they were ignored.

But it's no one's fault. I can't imagine how the families must be feeling today.

Received my 'Check you're enrolled' letter today, and noticed that the Electoral Commission now does Easy Vote cards by email where possible.

It seems like a very obvious change, I don't need a physical card. I dont buy the idea that it's making things harder, given people have the ability to opt out.

I don’t care how mealy-mouthed you are, this proves what we all knew.

Of course the cuts being made were affecting frontline services. Health workers were telling us, patients knew it and these cowards still towed the fantasy line that front line services would have no impact.

I don't think I'd say I'm surprised, but I'm glad that Willie Jackson is showing a well measured take here.

The brinksmanship of TPM is unfortunately what I've come to expect from the current leadership. The Party is truly in shambles at the minute, with Turia, Sharples and Flavell well in the rear view mirror by now.

Bit of a nothingburger really - of course we all know he wasnt a 'lone wolf'.

It really is just insulting to all of us serfs that Luxon cant just simply say "he tried to roll me and now hes gone as a result".

From the article (emphasis mine):

>The prime minister and social development minister have offered an apology to thousands of pensioners who did not receive their Winter Energy Payment this year, after an error in a law change meant people who were supposed to get the payment missed out.

>The law change, passed under urgency last year, has meant beneficiaries receiving certain payments like the Supported Living Payment, Accommodation Supplement, and Disability Allowance have had to re-confirm their circumstances at least once every 52 weeks, to confirm whether they are still eligible.

>However, the Winter Energy Payment, which is supposed to be automatic for superannuitants, veterans, and people receiving a main benefit, were not excluded from the legislation, meaning some people who would have expected to receive the payment did not.

Oh look. A real-time example of how urgency erodes the quality and accuracy of legislation. Without or without Select Committee, putting time between readings gives officials more opportunities to work on draft legislation and recommend amendments to improve the quality of laws. When you rush the process through in a single day there's no opportunity for amendment in the process and this is what happens.

From the article:

>Across more than 50 years of polling for the news bulletin at TVNZ – polling conducted by Heylen, then Colmar Brunton and its successors, Verian and Kantar – Labour and National have each hit some high highs and low lows. But never before have both, at the same time, returned a result of 30% or lower. 

>Yet here they are: Labour on 30% and National on 29%. That 59% is the lowest combined support, or purple vote, for 30 years. Then, in 1996, that measure went as low as 50%, but that was mostly because the Labour vote collapsed to 15%. [...]

>In the election of 1996, the first to be conducted under the proportional system, the two big parties scored just 62% of the party vote combined, with 33.8% for National and 28.2% for Labour. [...] The next lowest purple election tally was 2002, at 62.2%. Then, it was the National Party vote that fell apart, winning just 20.9%. 

>If recent polling plays out in an election that is now barely 80 days away, 2026 will give us a lower level – sub-60 possibly – than either of those two elections, which would make it the lowest National-plus-Labour result since the National Party was founded in the 1930s. 

The article has a nice graph showing trends since 1975. It does feel like the major parties are disenfranchising more people than usual with their centre swing mentality. It could partly be because the likes of TOP are putting on a good show, but I think it might be that more people are a bit sick of big party samey same shit. Labour is National-Lite and National is Labour With Less Feelings. Good news for the small parties I suppose.

On the face of it this seems like a fantastic idea. Instead of a three year check by an employer, people working with children will be issued a card which follows them across employers and is monitored annually against a national standard. The full policy document is here. I have questions.

What agency will be responsible for managing this? The policy doesn't say. How will the standard be designed? The difficulty with having a national standard is that people working with children in different agencies are held to different professional standards. The core stuff stays the same, but people working for OT have more complex parameters to work with than teachers, nurses, child care workers, etc. The policy mentions professional regulators, which infers that discipline-specific professional standards will still exist. But if that's the case does this scheme run the risk of duplication? Last time I checked waste was the bane of ACT's existence. My spidey senses wonder if this is a step on ACT's crusade to consolidate regulators and disempower/de-scale professional bodies.

On the face of it this is a great idea and it seems like we should already have this. I question ACT's motives.

Health is one of government's biggest ticket items. My view is that we should have a universally free publicly funded health system across all settings - community, GP, and hospital. Some people think we should only fund free hospital care and the rest is at least co-pay. Some people think we should keep funding health through income tax as we do now, others are keen on introducing a health levy like we have for ACC. Some people think the public shouldn't pay for any of it and want the system fully private and insurance based. What do you think?

What level of public healthcare do you expect New Zealanders should have now and into the future, and how do you think we should pay for it? We have people from across the political spectrum hanging out in the sub so I'm interested to hear different perspectives.

Breaking news- giant piece of soulless shit Nick Mowbray wants national elected.

The article is right, there are some good changes in the new Employment Leave Act, but they’re overshadowed by a real blow to leave provision for people who work part-time, are shift workers, or on commission. Leave is now paid at the lowest rate of pay which means base salary for sales people, for example, or normal time for people who routinely work shifts that attract higher rates.

This change disproportionately impacts women, who make up a large part of the part-time and casual workforce. Most anti-worker, anti-woman government we’ve had in a generation.

Well, least we know where they stand. Labour is going to need Greens and OPP/TPM to govern, so it's going to be interesting coalition negotiations..