Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Yeah, it was recently in the news about other countries considering adding them, then bam here’s NZ way ahead of the rest of the world suddenly deciding to reverse it.
It’s not unexpected, but I do feel like we need to streamline our thinking as a country. I know there is opposition to banning it for people born after a specific year, but the first question is whether it should be banned at all. And if not, then there’s a whole lot of other stuff that should probably be legal.
If opponents think it should be illegal but not in such a discriminatory way, then perhaps they can suggest a better way.
I just hate how its so predictably flip flop everytime the government changes on so many things. Govt X does something, next Govt Y reverses it etc.
Havent really done much deeper thinking into it, which I probably should, but its getting quite old…
I think this is just a symptom of our general move away from the larger parties. Smaller parties tend to (though don’t always) have more extreme views. Labour and National are pretty close in policy, but when you add Greens on the left, they negotiate for stronger left-leaning policies. Then perhaps it would be ok if the policies were outside National’s normal field of vision, but then you throw in Act and NZ First and they each have things that are key to them lying outside the normal box, which they negotiate for.
There is also a worldwide resurgence of further-right wing parties, that thrive on the divisiveness that instant worldwide communication encourages.
The growth in popularity of far-right ideas worldwide does concern be a bit.
I actually don’t think this has been a huge problem in NZ politics in recent times. When Key and Ardern came into power, they didn’t do massive “policy bonfires”. They kept most of the major projects currently in progress, didn’t mess with too much settled policy, and generally where they wanted to make changes, either did it through careful reviews or just made some tweaks. There were a few exceptions for headline policies (e.g. the tax cuts that Labour cancelled when they got into power), but for the most part we haven’t seen the massive reversal of a huge number of policies we’re seeing this time.
It seems like polarisation between left and right might be growing, which is likely to lead to these reversals, so the policy “ping pong” might continue and get worse as governments change.
Maybe it’s just one of those things where it “feels” like it, more so than it actually “is”?
I think it’s just that this new government is reversing a lot of the things the previous government did.
I mean, we get to be first to enact and first to repeal it, so there’s that?