ACT is delivering for employees and employers alike – those who want to invest, innovate, work and get ahead. Brooke van Velden as Workplace Relations Minister will get rid of Fair Pay Agreements by Christmas and extend 90-day trials to all businesses. The simple truth is that nobody got rich from having more complicated employment law, and New Zealand needs to get richer if we’re going to stay First World.

BANKRUPT LEFTISTS

The new Government is not going far enough by ACT’s standards, but the reaction feels like the Government’s going to abolish gravity.

There’s protests, name calling, threats of mass violence; some idiots even vandalised a wall with the Treaty of Waitangi written on it, inside Te Papa. The Left are not taking the election result well, to say the least. Why?

As with Chris Hipkins’ negative election campaign, the outgoing Government still cannot point to its record. They still face the politician’s dilemma, and if they can’t say they’re good, they need to say the other team are bad.

They’ve got a bigger problem. They’re out of ideas. If you doubt that, when was the last big world-changing idea from the left of politics?

Love them or hate them, the Clark-Cullen Government had ideas that have stood the test of time. Kiwisaver is nearly twenty years old and extremely popular (whether it increases saving or just makes people pay down their other debt slower is another matter).

Working for Families may be ‘communism by stealth’, but it’s better than the alternative. At least WFF targets money based on need. The alternative of cutting the bottom tax rates (then raising the top rates much more to compensate) would have been much worse.

OK, those ideas weren’t that good, but they were followed by nine years of Labour in purgatory until Jacinda’s stardust.

By contrast, what can the Left offer today? There are about five themes.

Number One. Identity politics.

The left used to believe in universal human rights. The 20th century left fought sexism, racism, and homophobia, and won big time. They won so big it’s hard for most people to imagine what life was like before.

Now the left doesn’t just think it’s okay to discriminate – it’s compulsory. Every public service has a quota or a target for this identity or that. Treaty politics is really just a local New Zealand version of identity politics. Who you are matters more than what you do, depending on identity. It leads to a fearful, humourless, tiresome, and ultimately boring world.

Number Two. Crazy unaffordable infrastructure with no clear purpose.

The first Labour Government built things. It was committed to ensuring the working people’s living standards increased with better schools, education, houses and roads. The last Government tore up the Roads of National Significance project, breaking the pipeline in the process. It then said it would build light rail in Auckland, and a hundred thousand houses (because that’s a nice round number). None of this stuff adds up but they sure did waste a fortune.

Number Three. Centralisation.

The outgoing Government tried to centralise everything. 20 DHBs became one healthcare agency (actually two). Sixty-seven councils became four (then ten) water entities. They merged education into one big polytech. They tried to set fresh water laws for every farm in the country from out of Wellington.

Sometimes centralisation is the answer. It would not make sense for New Zealand to have two competing airforces, or two separate court systems. But often it isn’t. Imagine calling someone in Wellington about getting your rubbish collected. Labour’s obsession with centralisation wasted a lot of money, and was very odd.

Number Four. Intellectual straightjackets.

The left is all about diversity, but nothing to do with diversity of thought. Legend has it that a young person who did not support National, but needed a job, was turned away from two potluck dinner parties in Wellington Central because they worked in a National MP’s office. Imagine if they worked for ACT.

The obsession with safety has crossed over to an obsession with emotional safety, and pretty soon you have ‘hate speech laws’ where it can actually be illegal to insult someone.

Number Five. Climate irrationality.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is a trained electrical engineer. He should be vaguely rational about climate change, but saying we are experiencing ‘Global Boiling’ is scientifically meaningless – nowhere on earth is the temperature close to 100 degrees, so it is just rhetoric disconnected from reality.

So it is with the Greens in New Zealand. Policy after policy, such as the Climate Emergency Response Fund, are irrational. Billions of dollars are spent to reduce emissions from particular sources, freeing up carbon credits for others to emit. The cap on emissions doesn’t change so the billions make no difference. Meanwhile they failed to spend a cent preparing New Zealand for the likes of Cyclone Gabrielle.

If you wonder why the left are being so feral, it’s not just that they lost his election, it’s that they’ve lost their way. Spare a thought for them, while ACT in Government rolls out extensive ideas for a better tomorrow. They’re in our coalition agreement here.