New Zealand Government sees Red

I don’t blame you, Linda-Joy. As one observer once said, ‘Jim Bolger is an awfully nice guy. You’d trust him to milk the cows. But you wouldn’t let him run the farm.’
H. I., in summary (and correlating to the above), here’s the legacy we have had under the Labour Government since it was elected in 1999 (on promises of social responsibility and democracy):

• abolished appeals to the Privy Council, even though this was never mentioned in any election manifesto—your equivalent would be Congress repealing appeals to the US Supreme Court;

• passed an ex post facto law on campaign finance that deemed illegal donations legal—under your constitution, no ex post facto laws can ever be passed because they are generally considered a violation of democratic principles;

• passed a law that means that anyone seen to have created an ‘advertisement’ under the Electoral Finance Act needs to meet certain criteria or be faced with investigation by the Electoral Commission, and a fine issued—so I now can’t set up a website that advised you not to vote for a certain party without meeting some requirements. Again, this would have been laughed out of any US Congress as a clear violation of the First Amendment;

• introduced rules in Parliament that prevents anyone from using the proceedings for satire—basically a violation of free speech since any humorous criticism could see you charged with contempt;

• ignored (officially) the visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with our Prime Minister casually bumping into the guy at an airport lounge instead and limiting her contact to that. It’s so she doesn’t piss off the Reds in Beijing—which also (effectively) ordered our cops to stop a journalist from covering a diplomatic function last year;

• complete economic mismanagement, higher taxes, and a total indecision on whether New Zealand is to be a net importing nation or a net exporting nation, allowing our currency to fluctuate heavily;

• the ordering of BMW limousines to replace the fleet of official Ford Fairlanes—even though at retail, the BMWs cost nearly three times as much and violate the government’s own gas mileage mandates. (The Holden Statesman would have been the same price, and the Škoda Superb, which does meet these requirements and which the Czech president himself uses, is cheaper.)

National may get elected back if the polls are correct, but they have stayed silent on a lot of the above—which makes me wonder if they can be trusted to do any better. As Linda-Joy wrote, she left New Zealand because of National in the 1990s, and I cannot say I blame her.