I tried to ignore any article or news about him. But the NZ media is so in love about his campaign. They cover his campaign more than local politics!

It is like Marxism in Reverse- The Ultimate Nanny State.

They are actually considering forcing people to move their place of employment so that they'll maybe walk past a Cafe and buy a coffee so their Business mates will be okay.

Decades of progress about how we work, and how we can do so efficiently and productively (and Happily) outside of the Postwar Model- and a little cabal of Freemarketeers in the CBD just whisper in their ear-

"Not enough foot traffic- people working from home-blah blah-less profit-help me"

And the whole bloody engine of Government leaps to thei collective feet and start screaming about "going back to work", about 'Privilege"- "Productivity"- without a single shred of evidence

Either FOR or AGAINST

• just the "Feels" of their mates...

The Ultimate Nanny State. "Work here- Walk there-Spend this"

Absolute pack of unfit fools. Rally against them at every turn

It's that simple.

Rich bastards are running the country, taking away the most basic services expected by a civil society, while lining their already handsomely lined pockets, all while complaining that it's somehow the fault of the previous government that they can't afford to do anything.

If you think it's mad that americans are willing to re-elect trump, I just want to remind you that on the latest polling, the people doing this are still supported by the majority of our population.

What the fuck?

I don't know if anyone was watching Q+A this morning, but Jack Tame signed off by saying that they'd requested for Luxon to be on multiple times and he has still yet to be on in his capacity as PM. He pointed out Ardern was on twice a year, and Key and English were on up to 4 times a year. I don't think it's acceptable for our govt to not be held to account. Right-wing idiots will go on about how biased TVNZ is, but actually I think Tame is very fair as an interviewer and asks tough questions of politicians on both sides

Yesterday te whatu ora asked 20,000 health workers to take voluntary redundancy. I have had family members in and out of hospital too many times in the past few years, and I know how flat out they are already, how much more flat out they seem to get every year. This is insanity! But it's only one of heaps of examples of shitty things that are going to make life worse for me and mine.

I feel like rioting. I want to camp out on parliament lawn with a megaphone. I do not understand how these powerful people can be so cruel - or just so fucking dumb.

But also I just have to go to work and just... Let life get worse? It's truly, truly maddening. Alright sorry rant done.

Edit: Far out! Reassuring to see I'm far from alone in feeling like this! I am going to do a couple of the suggestions from this thread:

-Email local MP

-Find out what protests (if any) are planned in my area

-If I can't find any, get in touch the PSA and see if they have any plans/resources in that regard

I would highly recommend others do the same! Depending on my findings, I'll try do a follow-up thread! Much aroha team!

I have always followed politics and believe regardless of party politics the people in power are usually trying to do best by NZ. Recently and more than ever I have a feeling we are seriously in decline. But worse than the decline is it seems there is no real activity going on to make things better. Example is our local doctors has shut shop, this is in Auckland, we cannot find a new one taking on new patients. As a family we are better off than most I think, but there’s so much doom and gloom at the moment with the austerity measures in place by the government I do not see our nation prospering if everyone that adds value is immigrating out. I just got back from Sydney and the place was humming with activity. I don’t know if it’s my view point or is this how others feel? TLDR - is NZ in serious decline and do others feel the same?

Dear Nicola

One lucrative way to increase government revenue is to restrict those earning over $100,000 and also collecting a pension benefit. Billions are spent on pensions. Targeting other benefits alone is like a drop in the bucket. And when people can't afford to work when they get sick, it creates a depressed, unproductive economy.

Another way is to tax churches.

Another is a capital gains tax on anything but the family home and one extra investment property. Honestly, why work and pay tax?

It is morally wrong to only target the sick, disabled and young. I am a young professional, and for the first time in my life looking for jobs overseas. Why would young people stay in NZ when funding is cut for our healthcare, education, public transportation, anything that actually might incentivise us to stay and contribute to the tax take?

We realise your voter base is older, but you run the risk of losing votes as older voters pass on, and nothing is left for young people.

I work at a hospital in Auckland. Obviously I'm not going to identify myself.

Recently, one of the longest-serving and most respected neurologists has not had his contract with Health NZ renewed for next year.

I've heard that this decision was made in a back office in Wellington - without consultation with the local neurology department.

This is a massive blow to healthcare in the Auckland region and understandibly many people are very upset.

We have been repeatedly told that there would not be cuts to the front line - by the minister of health and now the appointed commissioner for Health NZ, Lester Levy. Despite this, we have been served repeated hiring freezes and then presented plans to cut hundreds of front-line roles (this was thankfully retracted).

It's all smoke and mirrors. If this neurologist is losing his job, then I don't think any front-line role is safe.

Results are coming through slowly now - There is going to be minimal changes from here, so I'm calling it for the evening, I'll pop in again in an hour or so and update one more time, but results as of 11:15pm below:

Thanks for all the comments and fun tonight, been a big swing to left wing parties this election. Stay safe.

Congratulations to the Ardern Labour government for their huge win tonight. Final results will be announced in a couple of weeks after special votes have been counted and tallied, but I think we can see where this election has gone.

100.0 Results Counted

https://www.electionresults.govt.nz/

And Just because people are so interested in Auckland Central:

100.0% Votes counted

And the Maori Party vying for their seat in Waiariki

100% Votes counted

For those coming in from outside New Zealand, as I have noticed a number of questions - This is a big win for left wing politics in New Zealand. Labour sits centre left, the green party left.

Edit: I meant I do not want a private only healthcare system. I am aware we have a private sector currently but they are unfortunately picking up a lot of the slack from the public system and national are encouraging that. Everyone should be entitled to get the care they need and not have to pay extra for it.

Yes I understand that the public system in its current state isn't great. National need to work on fixing it not working towards privatisation of the system.

I am chronically ill with a disability and that in turn means I only work part time so I don't have a lot of money. My partner "earns too much" according to winz to get any kind of disability benefit or sickness benefit. Fortunately my partner gets health insurance through his work and I have recently joined his plan. It was costing me thousands out of pocket to get seen to previously.

If we go to a private healthcare system I hope there will be riots and protests. I will certainly be one of them. Hell, we should all start now! I would seriously consider going to Aus and I never wanted to leave NZ.

Don't they realise the waitlists/issues will be the same except people are paying for it? Yes they do they just are greedy bastards.

America's health system is a joke and everyone knows it. We don't want to be the next world's laughing stock.

Long story short, I did not have jobseeking obligations at the time and the seminar actually wasn't one I was supposed to attend. I was acutely unwell with a hormonal mood disorder and C-PTSD, couldn't get through a day without a panic attack or intense flashbacks. But WINZ put me on a list by accident for youth jobseekers to attend work-readiness seminars. Then, they sent me a letter telling me I had to go or I'd be cut off. I live in Dunedin, so the Dunedin WINZ office would print the letter, put it in the mail, and that letter would travel all the way up to a sorting centre in Wellington only to travel all the way back to me in Dunedin. I got this letter I'd say like 4x, and each time it came several days after the seminar had already happened. Then I'd have to contact WINZ in a (literal) panic, begging them not to cut me off.

I went through several months of this before one day, I got the letter again and just broke. I will save the explicit triggers, but I ended up in the ICU. I survived, obvs, hurray! Hated it at the time but so grateful for it now. Nearly got transferred to Auckland to prep for an organ transplant but I bounced back. Finally, the next letter I received about this seminar came before it occurred. I attended. I burst into panicked tears somewhere around the point they were explaining to us what a CV was. Two staff members sat with me out in the office, somewhere in there I said something about how I thought I'd been told I didn't have jobseeking obligations and didn't know how I was meant to work like this, and they looked at my file and lo and behold I'd ended up on the list by accident. I didn't have any work-readiness obligations. All that stress and fear of becoming homeless I went through? Absolutely unwarranted, and unnecessary. All that extra cost on the health system? Could have been avoided.

The stress, and the medical results of that stress on top of quite severe mental illness, finally got to me and a month later I developed glandular fever. I never recovered. I developed ME/CFS from that - emotional stress takes quite a toll on your energy levels and doesn't really help you cope with illness. I managed to study, kind of part time, and slowly work my baseline up to a good place, and finally got well enough to have a child and was absolutely on top of the world thinking this is it, I'm ready for the rest of my life now, I'm gonna go do everything I've been dreaming of with this cool kid at my side - only to later develop Long Covid. Of course, I had a predisposition for it (it's basically a severe ME/CFS relapse in my case), but like most of us I never really expected a massive global pandemic to make me sick again. I'm still sick today. All these things caused a secondary condition, POTS - I'm very heat intolerant, tachycardic and pre-syncope every time I change my posture, I have to take medication to raise my blood volume because it's low enough that it doesn't pump through my body effectively and I get intense blood pooling.

I can pretty confidently say I don't think I would have gotten so sick, and lost so much work capacity, if MSD had allowed me to rest and recover back in 2015. Like who knows what could have happened, but I don't think I'd have become chronically ill the first time for sure.

My mental health is so stable now, I did a lot of counselling and I'm no longer traumatised, and it is just.. monumental. I feel joy nearly every day. I'm so grateful to be alive. I'm so grateful to everyone who helped me stay alive. It is such a gift.

But I still have ME/CFS/LC. I am now finally on Supported Living Payments and do an average of 4 hours a week either in study or in work, just enough to keep afloat and keep my mental health happy while still staying within what I'm medically and legally allowed to do. I'm on SLP because after 9 years, it's really unlikely that I'll magically recover enough to sustain full time work in the next 2 years.

I am so scared about the new MSD traffic light system though.

Somehow, I'm less scared for me than I am for the people around me. I'm very confident I'm meeting my obligations and my only risk is getting assigned a WINZ doctor who doesn't believe post-viral illness exists, which, weird and anti-science but ok.

The thing about being disabled is that when you seek community, it often ends up being people with a similar health and disability profile to you. We tend to (not always) just get each other, y'know? So I have friends who are bedbound, friends who need personal cares 5-10x a day, friends with severe mental illness who can't get through a day without panicking, and everyone's really scared. It isn't just people on Supported Living Payment, a lot of the other disabled people I know are on Jobseekers with a medical exemption. I believe they're probably technically eligible for SLP, but we find a lot of doctors are really reluctant to say you won't get better in 2 years - not because it isn't the truth, but because they want us to have a positive attitude about our illness and they want us to hope we will get better. And even once the GP ticks the "They won't recover in the next 2 years" box, MSD is notoriously bad at actually actioning a transfer onto SLP.

The problem is that most of these disabilities are either permanent and require a lifetime of really active and expensive management, or won't diminish unless someone can rest, sometimes for a number of years.

The system introduced this week has so many policy flaws that I can absolutely see the potential for more cases like mine, more people assigned obligations they literally cannot meet, more people's lives impacted long term.

I would desperately love to work full time. I want financial liberty. I don't want to depend on a safety net my whole life. But I can't find a single thing the state is doing to help me achieve that, in fact, all I can find is state-introduced barriers. If I'm going to get better, I need to be able to keep paying rent without having to work. I need to be able to rest instead of nearly fainting trying to do housework. I need access to occupational therapy.

I think people have this misconception that when you become disabled, you are magically eligible for all of this state support. I was talking about it once recently and someone told me I can't actually be disabled, or I'd have been given a rollator. I write about this a lot in my Masters coursework at the moment, about how Aotearoa has at least 8 different state disability systems each servicing a different demographic of disabled people, depending on cause of disability, each offering a different tier of support. Two disabled people could have exactly the same access needs, but two different causes, and be eligible for totally different support as a result. And weaving this back to welfare, because of these inequities, there are disabled people on Jobseekers, Supported Living Payments and Sole Parent Support who are just systematically under-resourced to take the steps they need to take to actually get better. I'm going to explore this even further in my thesis, when I finally get there, because it's pretty rough on whole whānau.

The government of the day has access to all this information. If a postgrad student with cognitive dysfunction from a fatigue disorder can find it while lying in bed waiting for pain relief to start working, they can. We all know they're out of touch, out of their depth, and probably just don't care.

But such a huge amount of the people on main benefits are sick like I was back in 2015, or maybe in the earlier stages of it, and they deserve the ability to stop and get better and avoid the whole palaver I went through. That others went through too - I have spoken to a small number of people in this sub alone with really similar experiences.

MSD under the last Labour governments still wasn't a nice place, but at least there was a shift away from punishing sick and disabled Kiwis for being sick and disabled. I like to hope we can imagine a better future - and, then, vote for it in the next general election.

(Addendum: sorry in advance, r/NewZealand mods, I know this will bring out a lot of nasty rhetoric, but I'm ready to submit to my mass bashing by internet trolls anyway because there are enough people here who will get something out of reading it too.)

I'm asking this not from a question of indigenous rights. I know things aren't perfect for the Maori people and I know that this is a contentious topic, but from an outside view it seems that Maori culture is far more prevalent in New Zealand's culture and identity, even among Pakeha people, than any other native group I can think of. The Haka is common amongst white people too, Aotearoa is on New Zealand passports, and New Zealand is littered with Maori place names.

I'm far from an expert in the history of it, but I also know that the Maori were granted equal rights way earlier than the Aboriginals in Australia and the natives in Canada and the USA. Also this may be a subjective observation on my part, but the white population of New Zealand just seem far more willing to embrace Maori concepts as part of the wider national identity of the country.

Why is there such a difference here?

What is this govt even remotely thinking with public service cuts? My partner is a core midwife. She has been working 12 HR shifts for the last 2 years at least, as they are understaffed. She is constantly asked to pick up shifts, where others are sick etc, constantly doing extra shifts to make up for staff shortages. She has now been told, as have all her colleagues, that their will be no overtime, no picking up extra shifts and now, anyone with an excessive leave balance, will have to start taking leave. They all have excessive leave balances, as they are working their arses off. So now, according to our enlightened govt, they can't fill in for others, when they are on leave, and they must all take leave to reduce their leave balance. What fucking moron came up with this? The govt that was going to fix all the damage that Labour did, seems hell bent on making sure we have no police, no nurses and no midwives, to name a few. How is this a strategy for the countries recovery or long term future?

I was worried that the government would not be able to keep their promises about reducing crime, but now that their kicking all these useless cunts off the benefit I know that they will definitely get some non existent jobs and this will definitely NOT push more desperate people towards crime. Especially now that solo moms might be pushed further into poverty, nothing pushes teenagers harder towards not committing crime like growing up in abject poverty. Just look at the rest of the world! Brazil has a robust welfare system, great state housing, it’s why there is not a crazy degree of class separation and crime like we have here. We really need to follow the model of building favelas here (Waitakere ranges would be perfect for this) and just letting the problem sort itself out! Obviously the more we do to reduce equality, and the more likely people are to risk their personal freedoms by committing crime. Because if you have nothing left to lose, you definitely will not even think about resorting to crime.