NZ Politics

There is a bit much.

The highlights:

• My biggest gripe; the use of urgency to ram through unpopular legislation without the usual checks and balances. Leading to all kinds of bad laws.
  • None of the "urgent" legislation met the definition for use of urgency, but it turns out there are no protections around its use, just guidelines that haven't been breached before.
• When the new govt was formed, they came in a cancelled a bunch of stuff that the previous govt did, some was utterly moronic. It cost us a lot of money and time.
• Cancelled world leading anti-smoking legislation; which has just been made law in the UK.
• Fucked up the school lunch system for kids in need; it still isn't fully sorted 2 years later.
• Implemented austerity to such a degree that the nascent economic recovery was reversed and we are in a real-wage recession but even though there is "growth" happening
• Fucking up the education system; basically re-writing the curriculum to hearken back to the 1950-1980's style, that goes against a lot of the bet evidence; in this they ignored an open letter from the college of teachers calling to not put this in....the new curriculum is just filtering in to schools now.
• The fast track legislation; rammed through with urgency. This has been opined using "fast track to corruption"; basically it allows the minister to bypass the normal consenting process to allow "significant" projects to go ahead...now projects that had been previously blocked on environmental or other grounds are coming back and getting through.

There are a lot more smaller things; but basically NZ is limping along waiting for the election this year and hoping for change....that may not come because the other major party is fairly meh.