Hooton on the Hipkins smear

Matthew Hooton writes:

For five months, Hipkins has allowed the public to believe that Bellis had twice been offered government assistance to return home from Afghanistan but had turned it down – implying she was some kind of drama queen making a political point, rather than a mum-to-be wanting to give birth in her hometown of Christchurch rather than Kabul.

It was a smear, and a lie.

If more were needed to reveal the Government as a mere focus-group-driven, PR charade, five years since the Prime Minister appointed herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction and declaring her Government would build 100,000 new homes, KidsCan founder Julie Chapman reports that “poverty is the worst it’s been for families”, mainly because of housing.

  The State of Child Health Report from Cure Kids, in partnership with the Paediatric Society, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and Otago University’s Child and Youth Epidemiology Service, found that New Zealand’s rates of dental disease, respiratory conditions, skin infections, acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease are too high relative to other resource-rich countries. For dental disease and respiratory conditions, hospitalisation rates continue to worsen.

  According to the Government’s Children’s Commissioner, Frances Eivers, “On many measures, New Zealand is currently one of the worst places in the developed world to be a child.”   There comes a time when governments simply must be thrown out. It’s bad enough that the Ardern Government has proven incompetent at delivering any of the things it was elected to do. Its performance over Bellis shows it has now joined some of its most infamous predecessors in the slime.

There is a maximum of 568 days until they can be voted out.