2y ago

New Zealand shifts right as voters punish ruling party

www.cnn.com

New Zealand shifts right as voters punish ruling party | CNN

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has conceded his Labour party lost Saturday’s election, as voters punished the government and took the country rightwards nine months after his predecessor Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned.

The rising cost of living dominated campaigning with voters New Zealanders ending six years of Labour Party rule, the latter half of which was dominated by the country’s strict response to the coronavirus pandemic that successfully kept infections low but battered the economy.

With 90% of votes counted on Saturday evening, the center-right National Party, led by former airline executive Christopher Luxon, had amassed around 40% of ballots, CNN affiliates RNZ and Newshub reported.

33 comments

This is a goddamned tragedy. Nothing good in history has ever come from conservatism. Nothing at all.
- Us leftists need to step tf up and hire some marketing people or something. People seem to be getting fed up with spineless liberals promising a lot and delivering nothing of substance. Conservatives keep promising them easy solutions, while leftists require you to read 10,000 pages of theory to understand the basics.
  While you can't bundle leftist ideology into the political equivalent of a get rich quick scheme like conservatives, there has to be a better way to market our concepts
  
  Conservatives are happy to spew disinformation to their advantage
  
  Marketing isn't what the left needs. It's actually doing what you say you're gonna do, so that conservatives don't get to run against our shitty records.
- It got Reagan to stop making movies.
  Was it worth it? Probably not, but it's still a small positive.
- Conservatism is resisting change, so the whole purpose of a conservative party is to resist progressive forces, provide resistance to the rapid and sometimes over reactive changes that can result from unchecked progressivism. A good example of where it went off the rails is the Chinese cultural revolution. Conservative voices were silenced, even killed by the thousands. Years of history and artifacts were destroyed along with the economy itself. There needs to be someone to speak up when things are going crazy, and a shift to the right can be a sign that things went too far.
  
  Ah yes, those famously conservative Communist Party academics who were targeted during the Cultural Revolution.
  I have no idea what you've been reading. Mao was unhappy that the existing Communist Party was doing things differently from the way he thought they should be done. He was a pure authoritarian dictator, not a social progressive, no matter what propaganda he used as an excuse for his egotism.
  "The Cultural Revolution began as a struggle between Mao Zedong and other top party leaders for dominance of the Chinese Communist Party."
  https://spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/introduction_to_the_cultural_revolution
  
  Sounds like we need an American Cultural Revolution.
voting for conservatives to lower the cost of living 🤔
- Voting conservative unless you're the 1% ...
A combination of 3 major events that were completely beyond the control of the government (pandemic, Christchurch, volcano) all of which were handled extreme well I should add. And then the nail in the coffin of the PM leaving her party during an election year.
Conservatism is dead. If we do nothing, climate change will profoundly alter the way of living. If we act, we prevent climate change, but we will profoundly alter the way of life. In both cases, there's no place for conservatism. It's just closing the eyes and covering the ears like a child.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has conceded his Labour party lost Saturday’s election, as voters punished the government and took the country rightwards nine months after his predecessor Jacinda Ardern suddenly resigned.
With 90% of votes counted on Saturday evening, the center-right National Party, led by former airline executive Christopher Luxon, had amassed around 40% of ballots, CNN affiliates RNZ and Newshub reported.
The only party to win a majority of votes and govern alone in the current political system was Labour in 2020, when Ardern won a landslide second term buoyed by her success at handling the country’s coronavirus outbreak.
But Ardern announced her shock resignation in January, saying she no longer had enough fuel in the tank to contest an election, and passed the reins of her party on to Hipkins.
The government’s “go hard and go early” approach to the pandemic saw New Zealand impose some of the world’s strictest border rules, separating families and shutting out almost all foreigners for almost two years.
It also is pledging to change the Reserve Bank’s mandate to focus on inflation, remove what it calls red tape for businesses, extend free breast cancer screenings, crack down on crime and give police greater powers to search gang members, and roll back a raft of policies implemented by Labour over the past six years.
The original article contains 967 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What they did during covid was disgusting
- You'll need to be more specific: who "they" are.
  The government at the time opted to prioritise people's lives over corporate profits with lockdown and mask mandates etc.
  The opposition at the time, now the likely government, were quite happy to sacrifice the vulnerable to prop up corporate profits.
  A gross over simplification on my part, I admit.
  Background for visitors from the rest of the world. Both our major parties are conservative, one is centre-left and slighly progressive and the other centre-right and quite regressive. The only real progress we make is driven by our minor parties.
  
  Uuh the largest corporations benefitted MASSIVELY from lockdowns, ordinary people who lost their jobs and basic freedoms suffered. Look at how Sweden handled it, very measured and successful.

33 comments