Two Shearer u-turns

Labour Leader David Shearer announced earlier this year a bill that would have restricted the sale of land to foreigners. It was incompetently drafted as the Herald reported. Almost every Labour bill or SOP this year has been appallingly drafted. The adoption bill, the lobbying bill sop, this bill. There’s really no excuse for using draft legislation as slogans rather than actual possible laws.

Any Shearer has very quietly dumped the bill, which was capitalising on xenophobia over the Crafar Farm sales, which Labour wanted to go to Sir Michael Fay as a discount instead. The bill was hyped as his first major policy release. Well it has been buried it seems.He’s now done a Food in Schools bill, but hasn’t handed the investment bill over to another MP.

The second u-turn is the Kapiti Expressway.

Labour has campaigned non-stop against the Kapiti Expressway. In the Mana by-election Kris Fa’afoi was out there campaigning with protesters against it.

A couple of months ago, Shearer was still firmly  against the roading upgrade.

 Labour leader David Shearer says his party still opposes building the Kāpiti Expressway and will ‘mothball it’ if it gets the chance.

Now he’s changed his mind on it.

Labour will not rule out continuing National’s Kapiti expressway all the way to Otaki, leader David Shearer said today.

That’s quite a transformation – in six weeks he went from strongly opposing the project, to we’ll see how the case stacks up!!

As it happens I support both u-turns by David Shearer, but it doesn’t help him being seen to stand for something.

UPDATE: And the policy has changed again. Shearer has now been over-ruled by Phil Twyford who now says it must be scrapped!

I for one like the current policy of a four lane corridor from the airport to Levin. It will make a huge difference to travel in the region. And giving in to some NIMBYs would be idiotic because you lose a huge amount of the value of the entire project, if you have a few kms which remain single laned – this means traffic moves at the speed of the slowest car.