Wednesday 15 July 2015

Now, will someone put the NZ Labour Party out of our misery?

Watching the instant-and-completely-avoidable implosion of the Labour Party over the racial profiling of Auckland home buyers is ... bloody awful, actually.

Who could have ever thought this was a good idea?

Let me be clear - I agree that there is a problem.  I support legislation/regulations that limit overseas investment in NZ property/land.  Leaving the door open for foreign property investors is lunacy.  It is impossible to even pretend you want to rectify the housing market when there is a route for off shore, non-resident speculators to pile money into the market.

There are 4 million New Zealanders.  There are tens of millions of potential investors looking for laxly regulated markets to put money into.

But that's bye-the-bye, because any rational debate on the issue has been torpedoed by Phil Twyford's dismal ploy.

Let's give the man the benefit of the doubt for the moment.  Don't worry, I'll take that benefit back in a moment.

The best gloss you can put on this is that Phil Twyford is monumentally stupid.  That it was a hopelessly useless miscalculation of how this would be received by the media, the Asian population of New Zealand, and sane people all around the country of any ethnicity.

So, if we assume the best possible intentions on Twyford's part, the only reasonable conclusion is that he's utterly, abominably useless, dimwitted to the point that he's probably only capble of earning a living opening doors for people, like one of the deliberately cultivated Epsilion minus semi-morons in Brave New World.

He shouldn't be allowed on facebook, be given a mobile phone, cups of hot liquid or anything sharp.  He certainly shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power, though thankfully he may just have ensured that will never happen.

Now, I don't think Twyford is that much of an idiot.  I do think he has shown himself to be deeply ammoral and unscrupulous.

I think this list was appalling and racist. I further also think it was deliberate.  Stupid dog whistling and pandering to the dim witted idea of what a New Zealander is, a miserable attempt to appeal tot h same democraphic [sic] of knuckle-dragging apemen that Don Brash appealed to with his brown-bashing, beni-bashing, racist sexist trolling of the 2005 election.

But that doesn't get around the fundamental massive stupidity of all this.  Twford and the Labour leadership did not see how this would play out.  They did not see the wave of revulsion - both genuine and affected - that broke upon them.

Did they learn nothing from Dirty Politics and the 2015 election? The media would never give this a fair hearing (not that it deserved one). Never mid that it faux outrage voiced by smug biased hypocrites. If Labouy didn't realise how this would play out, they are fools.

Obviously, they didn't realise how it would play out, as they wouldn't invite this sort of opprobrium on themselves.

So they are fools.

Oh well, there is always 2021.

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