A confused Dim-Post

Poor old Danyl is confused and not sure who to vote for. Danyl is a leftie, but one with a sense of right and wrong. He describes his options:

I refuse to vote for the Labour Party on the grounds that it would be an endorsement of their (baffling) loyalty to Winston Peters, a corrupt dishonest bigot. (Think about this weeks charade with the helicopters and ask yourself what inane gibberish this drunken idiot has been telling our trading partners and allies over the last three years.

And even on the eve of the election Helen Clark is defending Winston and saying he has done nothing wrong and been the victim of a beatup. I don’t know how a single leftie could vote for Labour tomorrow and regard it as a principled act. I 100% understand voting for the Greens if you are on the left, but how can those who have spent years campaigning against money in politics be so “We don’t care” about the fact Helen has all but endorsed Winston’s behaviour.

Based on their performance in the campaign I have no confidence in the National Party to competently run the country; Key’s going to win anyway so if he proves me wrong and does a good job he can have my vote in three years time.

Ouch. But an honest opinion. I think Danyl may be surprised at how things turn out, but we’ll see in three years what he thinks.

I’d vote for the Greens – because I care about environmental issues – but their most effective MP by far is Sue Bradford who appears to have no interest in the environment whatsoever but is highly effective at promoting her far left social justice agenda – one that I largely disagree with. I also have huge problems with their basic approach to government which is to simply outlaw anything and everything they find objectionable. On top of that I suspect they’d fund their terribly worthy social justice policies by taxing me into oblivion.

The Greens seem to specialise in two things – spending as much money as possible and banning things they don’t like. If there is a hydra Government then they will be terribly upset that there is no money left for all their spending promises. Unless they massively increase taxes, they won’t be able to spend.

Hence having failed to get a spending binge, we will get a banning binge instead. Chris Trotter said a Government with such a strong Green presence in it will be the most left wing in the last 70 years. So I suspect the list of things to be banned will be truly ambitious.

I find this pretty frustrating. All I ask for is a baseline of competence and for a party to at least pretend that they are going to govern in good faith. Neither of our major parties comes close. Anyone who runs an election campaign as worthless and disgusting as Labour’s shouldn’t be allowed near pregnant women or children let alone the machinery of power, while National’s MPs have been gleefully telling any idiot who wanders up to them with a hidden microphone that they do have a secret agenda and they’re going to ratfuck the voters of this country as soon as we’re dumb enough to elect them.

I think Danyl is overly harsh here on the National MPs. I actually think almost all the secretly recorded comments are quite unexceptional – exactly what you expect from informal conversations at a social function. I do agree the Labour campaign has been very bad – they may be the only campaign in recent political history to have run 100% negative TV ads.