EDITORIAL: Mike Bain
Labour has dropped a 72‑person candidate list — a number so large it reads less like a party preparing for government and more like a roll call for a school assembly. It’s an impressive show of enthusiasm, if nothing else. But enthusiasm doesn’t pay the bills, and New Zealanders know exactly who left them with the bills in the first place.
This is the same party that presided over the worst economic deterioration in modern memory. The same party that left the country carrying a debt load so heavy we now spend $9 billion a year just on interest — money that could have gone to hospitals, police, infrastructure, or literally anything other than servicing the hangover of fiscal mismanagement.
Yet here they are, polling well again, armed with a single flagship policy: three free doctor’s visits a year. That’s it. That’s the plan. A country drowning in debt, struggling with inflation, productivity in the basement, and their big idea is a punch card for the GP.
Oh — and a suggestion of a capital gains tax. Because nothing says “we’ve learned from our mistakes” like floating the same tax they swore they’d never introduce.
Meanwhile, the adults currently running the Government are still trying to shovel the country out of the crater Labour left behind. It’s slow, it’s painful, and it’s expensive — because rebuilding always is. But rebuilding is what grown‑ups do after the kids have finished wrecking the place.
Labour’s list is being sold as “diverse”, “talented”, and “ready to deliver”. But New Zealanders have seen this movie before. The last time Labour promised transformation, we got ballooning debt, shrinking services, and a cost‑of‑living crisis that hit every household in the country.
So what does a Labour Government mean for New Zealanders?
More spending. More debt. More taxes. More slogans. More committees. More “reviews”. More “working groups”. More promises of transformation that somehow never transform anything except the size of the overdraft.
And now they want another go.
New Zealanders will decide in November whether they want to hand the keys back to the people who crashed the car — or stick with the ones trying to repair the engine.
