Political footballs -- February 2017

It must be election year, all the same political battlefields are being occupied with the opening salvoes being fired over Law and Order; every political party is promising more police. This plus health and education are the areas where politicians make bold positive promises to spend more and do more; the triennial lolly scramble.

The flipside to these traditional battlefields are the political footballs; those who can be blamed for all manner of woes in order to score political points without upsetting too much of your base. Immigration is getting a good kicking and is shaping up to be a major football this year and the Greens have dairy farmers squarely lined up.

Twitter can provide an interesting window to exchanges that would have otherwise totally passed you by, I don’t know if politicians use it as a testing ground to float their ideas or if it’s just a place where you get to see their unfiltered thoughts. A senior Labour MP recently tweeted that New Zealand was experiencing record immigration and it was “an uncomfortable fact that this was related to the recent rise in unemployment”.
He remained stonily silent when presented with the facts; the previous 3 years had seen rising immigration and falling unemployment, and got downright petulant when it was pointed out his comments were dog whistle politics bordering on racism (because when we talk of immigration nobody is talking about the English family that just moved in next door).

It took less than an hour for his premise to be totally destroyed and the MP to leave the subject alone. Had his tweet been a press release there would have be no instant discussion, it’ll be interesting to see if his framing of the subject changes closer to the election or if he chooses to double down.
Prior to that DairyNZ had been tweeting some good positive messages about dairy farmers spending $1 billion on riparian planting and fencing of waterways. A Green candidate decided to chime in and, rather than ask how much was left unfenced or what measurable effects these initiatives had had on water quality, he took DairyNZ to task over the figure of $1billion, demanding they show their working much to the delight of his supporters.
Interestingly the last NIWA summary I saw put the industry’s spending on water quality measures at closer to $3 billion, but he was so focused on being negative and scoring points that he failed to accept that the amount spent doesn’t matter; it’s the effectiveness of the program that counts.

We’ve never had so much information so readily available to us; there should be no need for politicians to be spinning the story. Until they stop the spin it’s up to us to check the facts for ourselves and hold them accountable. Social media gives us unprecedented ability to engage with our politicians and I’m thankful they do so, it gives us a voice every day rather than every 3 years.